Chapter 5
The Profile of the Man of Lawlessness
Every detective reaches the point where he sits down and draws up the profile.
The crime scene has been mapped. The signature has been gathered — those same five words, again and again, beneath century upon century of rubble. The pattern is fixed. And then comes the moment when you no longer merely follow the trail but try to sketch the offender himself. Not his name — that you do not yet have. But his face, his behavior, his method. How he moves. What he wants. When he strikes. You lay all the scattered observations on the table and you ask: who does such a thing? What kind of man is this?
For this profile there is one chief witness. His name is Paul, and he wrote it some twenty years after the cross to a small congregation in Thessalonica, people who had been thrown into panic by a rumor that the day of the Lord had already come. Be at peace, he says — that day does not come just like that. Something must happen first. And then, in a few dense verses that have never let go since, he sketches the prime suspect of the whole of history:
"Let no one deceive you by any means. For that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God" (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4).
With the first book in the back of your mind you feel the ground shift. For this is no new character. This is the morning star, at last made flesh. Everything that was whispered in heaven — "I will ascend," "I will make myself like the Most High" — stands here on earth, in a man, no longer whispered but staged. The signature has been given a body.
The profile is built in layers. First his face. Then his behavior. Then his method. And finally his timing — though that last will remain mostly a promise for the next chapter, for on the question of who restrains him, and when that restraint ends, there is so much to say that it deserves a file of its own.
The grasp, made flesh
Begin at verse 4, for there stands the face.
"He exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped." There stands the first verb. To exalt. It is the verb of the whole case. It is what the morning star did when he said, "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God" (Isaiah 14:13). It is the movement followed from the first chapter on — upward, by force, toward a place that is not yours to take. Here is that same movement, but now carried out by a man, and carried out to the utmost. Not above a few things. Above all that is called God. He does not want one rung higher on the ladder; he wants the whole ladder, and the throne on top of it.
And see where the staircase ends: "so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God." There it is. There he sits. On the highest place there is — not beside God, but in the place of God, and he shows himself to be what he is not. Set this beside the five "I will" sayings from chapter 1, and you see that they are exactly the same five steps, but now climbed to the summit:
"I will ascend into heaven" — he exalts himself above all that is called God. "I will sit on the mount of the congregation" — he sits in the temple of God. "I will make myself like the Most High" — he shows himself to be God.
This is no accidental echo. This is the same dream, the same spirit, the same longing — but for the first time since the fall fully realized. The morning star was cast out of heaven before he could ever sit on the mountain of God. Here, in this one man, in one brief and terrible moment, he sits there. The grasp that failed in heaven is completed on earth — for a moment, just before the end.
And see how perfectly this is the opposite pole of the first book. There, at the heart of everything, stood the song of the gift: One who "did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation" (Philippians 2:6–7). The Son descends from the place that was rightly His. This man climbs to the place that is not his. The Son says, "do not grasp, but give"; this man "shows himself to be God" — a hand grasping at precisely that which the Son willingly let go. It is the grasp and the gift, side by side, in their purest form. And this is no stray comparison: it is the backbone of this entire book. The man of lawlessness is what you get when Philippians 2 is turned inside out and poured into a man.
That is why there is no need to guess what his deepest motive is. It stands there, in one word: he wants to be God. Not to serve, not to represent, not to stand under God — to sit on the throne himself and receive the worship that belongs to the Creator alone. That is the heart of the profile. All the other traits — the lies, the signs, the violence — flow out of this. They are the means. This is the end.
The apostasy that goes before him
But Paul says something before he draws the face, and that order is no accident. "That Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed" (2:3). First the apostasy. Then the man. The one makes room for the other.
The Greek word is apostasia — literally a falling away, a defection, a leaving of a place where you first stood. It is not the word for people who never believed. It is the word for those who were inside and walk out. A defection. A mass exodus from the faith, not by outsiders but by professed believers — people who carried the name and lay it down.
And this is one of the most underestimated traits in the profile. The man of lawlessness does not arise in a world that is hostile to him. He arises in a world already prepared — a world in which faith is ebbing away, in which faithfulness has grown cold, in which the difference between the real and the counterfeit has blurred until people can no longer see it. The apostasy is the soil in which he takes root. First love dies off; then the lie stands up.
Jesus Himself described that moment, and He used almost the same words. In His great discourse on the end He says: "Then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold" (Matthew 24:10–12). Alongside Paul they describe the same thing. Lawlessness abounds — that is the word anomia, the same word that lies in the man's name. The love of many grows cold — that is the apostasy, seen from within. It is no sudden catastrophe. It is a slow cooling. A faith that was warm and grows lukewarm, and then cold, and at the last is only a form without fire.
That is the disquieting thing. We are inclined to see the evil of the end as an assault from without — a power that overruns the church. But Scripture draws it otherwise. It begins within. It begins with professed believers falling away, with love growing cold, with truth no longer being loved. The apostasy is not a disaster that befalls the man of lawlessness. It is the climate that makes him possible. He is born out of a lukewarm church.
The mystery already at work
And then comes the sentence that gives the whole book its title. Paul writes: "For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work" (2:7).
Already at work. Not: it will come someday. Not: in the distant future an evil awaits us. Now already, as Paul writes this, as you read this — beneath the surface of history the plot is running, and it has never stopped. The word here translated "mystery" is the Greek mysterion, and in the Bible that means not a riddle without a solution, but a truth kept hidden until the moment it bursts forth. Something is at work that you do not yet see — patient, underground, for centuries — and one day it comes to the surface.
This is precisely what the book has followed since the prologue. The signature that keeps returning. The five words that never change. Babylon that falls and rises again under another name. It is all the same mystery, the same spirit, the same work — busy beneath the skin of things for ages. The man of lawlessness is not the cause of that mystery; he is its climax. He is the moment when the hidden thing finally shows itself, when the underground movement breaks above ground and is given a face.
And that changes how you read the whole of history. The evil that will soon converge in one man is not new. It is old — as old as the fall. It has waited, worked, prepared for thousands of years. Every tyrant who let himself be worshiped, every tower that wanted to reach into heaven, every lie that counterfeited the truth — they were all rehearsals. The man of lawlessness is the premiere.
The lie and the strong delusion
How does he work? Paul gives the answer in the verses that follow, and the answer is disquieting, for it is not about violence. It is about deception.
"The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception" (2:9–10). Power, signs, and wonders — those are precisely the words the New Testament uses for the deeds of Jesus. The same three. This is no coincidence; it is the essence of the matter. The man of lawlessness works wonders. He perhaps heals. He astounds. He convinces with signs that seem real. But Paul adds one word that changes everything: they are wonders "of the lie." Wonders in the service of a lie. Power that feels real and is false.
And here lies the heart of what makes him so dangerous. The first book already showed the first law about this adversary: he creates nothing. He can do only one thing, and he does it masterfully — counterfeit. He is the forger of the cosmos. Against the true Son he sets a false son; against the real wonders, false wonders; against the truth, a lie that looks exactly like the truth. And a forgery that resembles nothing seduces no one. The dangerous forgery is the one you cannot tell apart from the original — until it is too late.
That is why Paul uses one more word, and it is the sharpest of all: planē, a strong delusion. "And for this reason God will send them a strong delusion, that they should believe the lie" (2:11). Planē is the delusion of someone who has lost the way, who wanders about and thinks he is making progress. It is no foolish mistake; it is a spell. A delusion so convincing that you take it for truth and stake your life on it. And the most terrible thing about verse 11 is who sends it: God Himself. Not because God wants the lie, but because there comes a point at which whoever has time and again rejected the truth is at last handed over to the lie he preferred. The judgment is that you get what you chose. Whoever did not love the truth gets the lie — and believes it with all his heart.
See how the two traits interlock. The apostasy makes people receptive; the lie makes them firm. First love grows cold, and then, in that cold, the strong delusion is believed. The man of lawlessness need force no one to believe. He comes into a world that has already let go of the truth, and he offers it precisely the lie it already wanted. That is no conquest by the sword. That is conquest by a wonder and a word.
His career has two phases
Now the profile grows more complicated, and here I must be honest about what is certain and what remains a weighed reading — for that is how this book works.
There is something strange about the way Paul speaks of the "revelation" of this man. In verse 3 he says the day does not come until the man of lawlessness "is revealed." But in verse 8 he says it again, as though it has yet to happen: "and then the lawless one will be revealed." Revealed twice. How can that be? And between the two stands something — or someone — who restrains him, "until he is taken out of the way" (2:7). As though his unveiling proceeds in two movements: a first appearance, and then, later, a full unmasking.
One reading — and I freely admit it is a minority reading — explains this beautifully, and it does so by setting Paul beside Daniel. For Daniel had drawn the same figure centuries earlier, and in Daniel his career clearly has two moments. First he appears as a prince of peace: "with overwhelming power he shall make a covenant strong for the many for one week" (Daniel 9:27). He does not come in as a monster, but as a deliverer — a man who brings peace, who makes a covenant, who solves the problem everyone was waiting for. That is phase one. And then, "in the middle of the week," everything turns: "he shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering," and the abomination is set up. That is phase two. First the benefactor, then the destroyer. First the covenant, then the abomination.
Set that beside Paul and it fits seamlessly. Phase one is the "revelation" of verse 3: he appears on the world stage, as covenant prince, before the great day. No one yet sees who he truly is — he looks like the solution, not the problem. And phase two is the "revelation" of verse 8: only later, after the removal of the one who restrained him, does he show his true face and go "to sit as God in the temple." The first revelation is his appearance; the second is his unmasking. Between the two lies his career as the man who deceived the world.
The strength of that reading is that everything falls into place: Paul's two "revelations," Daniel's two phases, and the restrainer in between, all in one timeline. Honesty requires adding that the majority of interpreters read verse 3 differently — they simply let the "revelation" coincide with the self-deification, one moment instead of two, and they do not make that fine linkage to Daniel 9. So it is no settled matter. But the two-phase reading has a strong argument on its side: it explains why Paul speaks twice of "revealing," instead of waving that off as a repetition, and it lets the text of Daniel fit exactly. It is therefore put forward as what it is: a weighed reading, with strong roots, not conclusive proof.
The son of perdition
There is one name in the profile not yet touched, and it is perhaps the most revealing of all. Paul calls him not only "the man of lawlessness," but also "the son of perdition" (2:3).
That is a heavy title, and it is exceedingly rare. In all of Scripture only two men bear this name. The first is this man of lawlessness. And the second is — Judas. Jesus prays over His twelve: "I have kept them, and none of them is lost except the son of perdition" (John 17:12). Two men, across the whole of the Bible, with the same name. That is no coincidence. That is a clue — a trail the detective must not leave lying.
For see what Judas teaches about how this works. Judas was the son of perdition already before the worst happened. He was one of the twelve, he walked along, he ate along, he seemed a disciple like the others — but he was marked from the start. And then, on the night of the betrayal, stands the chilling sentence: "Now after the piece of bread, Satan entered him" (John 13:27). First he was marked; at the end he was possessed. The name he had borne long since; the full possession came only at the last.
And it is precisely that pattern that explains the two phases of the man of lawlessness. Like Judas, he is marked from the start — marked as covenant prince, as the man with the solution, as the son of perdition whom no one yet recognizes. And as with Judas, there comes a moment, late in the story, when Satan enters him fully, and he shows who he always was. Marked at the beginning, fully possessed at the end. The revelation precedes the full possession. That is the method, and Judas is its blueprint.
It also makes him more human, and thereby more terrifying. Judas was no monster with horns. He was a man you would not have pointed out at the table. So too with this one. The man of lawlessness will not come in as a recognizable evil; he comes as the deliverer you had hoped for, and only when it is too late does the ancient serpent fully enter him and he sits on the throne of God.
And the one who restrains him
One question remains, and it is the question that occupied the Thessalonians most: if this mystery is already at work, and if this man is already marked — why is he not yet here? What restrains him?
For Paul says in so many words that there is something restraining him. "And now you know what restrains him, that he may be revealed in his own time" (2:6). There is a brake on history. A power, or a person, that holds the man of lawlessness in his place "until he is taken out of the way" (2:7). Only when that brake falls away does everything break loose. The lawless one waits, in other words, on a sign — not his own sign, but the falling away of the one who holds him in check.
Who is that? What is that restrainer, and when is he taken away? That is one of the hardest riddles of the whole New Testament — Augustine already called the passage obscure, and the interpreters have quarreled over it for centuries. And it is a question that weighs so heavily, and connects so much with the war being waged above the earth, that it does not belong in the margin of this chapter. It deserves a file of its own.
That is where it is headed. First the face of the suspect has been drawn — the grasp, made flesh; the apostasy that goes before him; the lie with which he works; the two phases of his career; the name he shares with Judas. Now, in the next part of the case, the second suspect is tracked down — the woman at his side, the counterfeit bride who rides the beast. And after that, when both faces lie on the table, the question returns that sets everything in motion: who restrains him, and what happens on the day that hand is drawn away.
In Depth — naos and hieron: there need not even be a temple standing
Paul writes that the man of lawlessness "sits in the temple of God" (2:4), and in English something is lost that in the Greek stands sharply. The Greek has two words for "temple," and they do not mean the same thing. The one is hieron: that is the whole temple complex, the courts, the colonnades, the grounds — everything that lies within the walls. The other is naos: that is the sanctuary itself, the innermost place, the holy place where God dwells, the space where no ordinary foot was allowed to come. Paul here chooses, deliberately, the second word. The lawless one does not sit somewhere on the temple grounds. He sits in the naos — in the most holy place, the throne of God Himself.
That sharpens the image to the unbearable. This is not a blasphemer who defiles the courtyard. This is a creature taking his seat on the chair of the Creator, in the one space that was for God alone. It is "I will sit on the mount of the congregation" (Isaiah 14:13), carried out literally: he sits where only God belongs.
But there is yet another turn in that word naos, and it is a turn that must make the interpreter cautious toward anyone who too quickly pictures a building of stone. For naos denotes in the first place the holy place — and that holy place need not necessarily be a temple of stone standing at that moment. The New Testament uses naos more than once for something other than the building in Jerusalem: the congregation is a naos, "a temple of the living God" (2 Corinthians 6:16); your body is a naos of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). The word points to the place where God ought to dwell — and the horror of 2 Thessalonians 2 is that the lawless one takes that place, wherever it may be. Some interpreters conclude from this that for the fulfillment there need not even be a rebuilt temple of stone standing; the self-deification can be directed at any holy place that belongs to God. Others hold to a literal temple. The text does not force the matter, and it is wise to leave it open. What the text does force is this: he does not stand on the threshold. He sits on the throne.
And one more thing belongs here honestly, because this book conceals no textual unevenness. The manuscripts of 2 Thessalonians 2:3 do not fully agree on the name of this man. Most read anomia, "lawlessness" — "the man of lawlessness." Others read hamartia, "sin" — "the man of sin." Hence older and newer translations sometimes differ here. But the variant does not touch the matter: it concerns the same figure, whether you name him after his lawlessness or after his sin. This book follows "lawlessness," because that word — anomia — runs like a thread through the whole case, from the "lawlessness that abounds" (Matthew 24:12) to the "mystery of lawlessness" (2:7) that gives this book its name.
In Depth — the two-phase career as a weighed minority reading
In the main trail I held that the career of the man of lawlessness proceeds in two phases — covenant prince at the beginning, abomination in the middle — and I admitted that this is a minority reading. Here I want to make that honesty sharper, for it is precisely with readings of this kind that a book about the end times stands or falls with its trustworthiness.
The reading rests on one observation: Paul speaks twice of the "revealing" of the lawless one, in verse 3 and in verse 8, with between them a restrainer who must vanish "out of the way." Whoever reads those two as two different moments naturally gets a career in two movements — and that career then fits seamlessly onto the two phases that Daniel 9:27 already drew: first the making strong of the covenant, then halfway the stopping of the sacrifice and the setting up of the abomination. The attraction is unmistakable: all the pieces fall into place. Paul's two "revelations," Daniel's two phases, the restrainer in between — it becomes one coherent story, one timeline, without your having to leave anything out.
And yet, honestly: the majority reads it otherwise. Many interpreters see in verse 3 and verse 8 not two moments but one — Paul naming the same fact twice, once announcing it in advance and once working it out, as a writer not infrequently does. In that reading there is only one revelation: the moment at which the lawless one unveils himself by deifying himself. No finely timed linkage to Daniel, no career in two movements. That is a respectable reading, and whoever follows it has the text on his side on the point of simplicity.
What, then, gives the two-phase reading its weight? Two things. The first is the name "son of perdition," which this man shares with Judas (see the main trail) — and with Judas two moments are unmistakably visible: first marked, then fully possessed, with the whole ministry in between. If the only other "son of perdition" has a career in two phases, it is not far-fetched to read that structure here too. The second is that this reading takes a difficult detail of Paul's seriously instead of smoothing it over: he does, after all, speak twice of "revealing," and a reading that hears two moments in that does justice to the words as they stand.
The sensible final verdict is therefore no victory but a weighing. The two-phase reading is no proof text and no majority interpretation; it is a weighed minority reading with strong roots — strong enough to carry it through this book, too weak to accuse anyone who rejects it of error. Whoever demands certainty gets here a reading, not a verdict. But whoever sees the coherence between Paul and Daniel also sees why the author of this book keeps it as his working reading.
In Depth — the counterfeit resurrection: the shadow of the beast with the deadly wound
In the two-phase reading something happens between the appearance and the full unmasking of the lawless one, and it is perhaps the darkest detail of the whole profile. Between phase one and phase two, so many read, he undergoes a kind of transformation — a turn from prince of peace to possessed one so dramatic that it astounds the world. And Scripture gives, in another place, an image that falls precisely over this: the beast with the deadly wound.
John sees in his vision a beast rising up, and he notices something strange: "And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast" (Revelation 13:3). A deadly wound — and yet healing. A death — and yet life. The earth stands amazed and worships. And further on it grows sharper still: there is mention of "the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived" (13:14). A wound of the sword. That does not befall an abstract empire; that befalls a man of flesh and blood. Here someone seems to die and return.
See now the blasphemous logic. The true Christ truly died and truly rose — that is the heart of the Gospel, the event on which everything rests. And the adversary, who can create nothing and can only counterfeit, imitates Him. A deadly wound, an apparent death, a return that looks like a resurrection. It is the counterfeit of Easter. And what would convince the world more than that? A man who brought peace, who is struck down and dies, and who rises — who then would not bow before him? This is no conquest by the sword; this is conquest by the wonder that apes the deepest wonder of God.
That is why this image fits so eerily onto the transformation between the two phases. The man of lawlessness appears as benefactor; he is mortally struck; he returns — and whoever returns is no longer who departed. For Scripture suggests that in that moment the ancient serpent fully enters him, as Satan entered Judas after the bread. What rises bears the face of the man, but the spirit of the abyss. And from that moment on he goes "to sit as God in the temple" — the counterfeit resurrection clears the way for the self-deification. First the false Easter, then the false throne.
I must here honestly mark the boundary. That the man of lawlessness of 2 Thessalonians 2 and the beast with the deadly wound of Revelation 13 are the same figure is a reading — a strong, broadly held reading, for both draw one and the same end-time tyrant who lets himself be worshiped and who is driven by superhuman power. But the two texts do not say in so many words: this is the same man. They are set side by side because their traits fit each other, not because one text pronounces the identification. And the counterfeit resurrection itself — the inner transformation — is more than the text literally describes; its form is inferred from the coherence. What stands fixed is the image that Revelation draws: a deadly wound that heals, and a world that worships in wonder. What is added here is the recognition that this is the shadow of Easter — the last, greatest forgery of the only resurrection that was real.
The face of the first suspect now lies on the table: a man who wants to be God, born out of a lukewarm church, armed with a lie that looks like the truth, and marked with the same name as the man who betrayed his Lord. But every great deceiver has an accomplice — and this one is a woman. She does not come out of nowhere; her trail runs all the way back to a garden, and all the way forward to a cup in a woman's hand. It is time to track down the second suspect.