Paul told the Thessalonians that before the Messiah returned, there would be a “ falling away” (apostasy, “departure from truth”). This departure from the truth would then open the door for something called “The man of lawlessness” to come forth. This “coming of the lawless one” would be accompanied by “all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders” which would “deceive those who are perishing.”

“They perish because they refused to love the truth and be saved,” Paul writes. “For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.” In preparation for the Return of the Messiah, God is also sending powerful revelation to graciously expose the ancient lie, so that those who love the truth can depart from error and be freed from the bewitching influence of the spirit of lawlessness.

In 1989, Ted Turner of CNN declared the Ten Commandments obsolete and offered his own “Ten Voluntary Initiatives” as an alternative to God’s outdated laws. No one should take Turner seriously, of course, but he did make one comment that deserves our attention. “Nobody around likes to be commanded,” he said. “Commandments are out.”⁸

Christians may scoff at Turner’s idea of replacing God’s Laws with human ideas, yet is this not the very thing the Church has done with some of God’s Commandments? We have replaced the 24-hour, seventh-day Sabbath with an hour or two of Sunday morning worship; we have replaced the Biblical holy days with holidays of pagan origin; we have replaced God’s dietary guidelines with our own ideas about what we should eat.

After a person has been forgiven and justified by faith, where should he look for moral instruction? Should he look to God’s Commandments to tell him how to live the Christian life, or should he ignore God’s Commandments and live according to man’s suggestions? Even Scofield, in spite of all his anti-law bias and nomophobia, concedes that the Old Testament commandments “are used in the distinctively Christian Scriptures as an instruction in righteousness.”⁹