In 1994, I became the first appointed international editor at World Magazine, an enterprising Christian news outlet with admirable ambitions to cover global events, but without a travel budget.

To blaze the trail, I asked several denominations to send me missionary letters. They arrived in large manila envelopes. There was little overseas email traffic to my AOL account until the late 1990s. But studying the photocopied letters, I began to learn ground-level life in hard-to-reach places. I found contacts I could reach at odd hours through static phone calls or exchanges sent by fax machine.

Church in Ancient Homelands

A year later, I received an invitation to an excursion through Turkey with other journalists billed as a tour of “the other Holy Land.” Turkey wanted to become a member of the European Union, it wanted acceptance in the West, and promoting church tourism apparently was a way to do it.

The organizers hoped we journalists would highlight religious sites lost to the Ottoman Turks’ conquest of Christian Constantinople in 1453. It was all eye-opening for me as our group toured from Istanbul to Bursa, then east across to Cappadocia and as far as the border with Syria.

The group was emblematic of new frontiers opening in the 1990s. A newspaper editor from South Africa was traveling abroad for the first time since apartheid ended. A reporter from East Germany was making her first foray since the Berlin Wall fell. Learning I was an American, she said, “You have so many brands of laundry detergent. My whole life I could buy only one.”

Turkey’s bid for Western clout mirrored other changes in the Middle East. Israel that year signed onto the Oslo agreements and was normalizing relations with neighbors after decades of war. For me it was a busman’s holiday, learning just how much I had yet to learn about the church in its ancient homelands.

I learned also that it was easy to confuse the new openness with genuine liberty. After the trip, I discovered that Turkey continued to jail Christians, especially converts from Islam. It refused to license new churches even as it campaigned for Western cachet.

In similar ways and at the same time, as new mission efforts spread across the former Soviet Union, Communist holdovers would meet them with authoritarian restrictions under the banner of democratic reforms.

Early the next year, I traveled to areas surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear site, covering the tenth anniversary of its explosion. I discovered how little had changed in the orange and yellow contamination zones of Belarus and Ukraine, and how desperately they needed Christian revival.

Nothing, Yet Everything

It was not in the Middle East, but in Africa, where I first glimpsed a rising threat to Christians. Sudan’s long-running civil war pitted Khartoum’s Islamic regime in the north against the south’s mostly Christian population. Government campaigns featured wholesale brutality little understood by the outside world. I witnessed forced displacement, starvation, and death.

One day with local aid workers and armed Sudanese escorts, I hiked to a burned-out mission compound destroyed years ago by government forces and only recently liberated by rebels. We walked single file under a fierce sun behind our escorts to avoid landmines.

The missionaries who opened the church and school in the 1930s had been gone for decades. Locals in those days had been slow to come to Christ, but surrounding tribes were now overwhelmingly Christian, with tens of thousands of believers. As we walked, children came out of huts to stare at me. They had never seen a white woman.

At the site, signs of battle and destruction remained. When government forces attacked, they locked some congregants inside the church and set it on fire, they raped and beat others, and they either killed or forced to flee everyone else. They laid the landmines so no one could rebuild the church, and left it a roofless, twisted maze of destruction. They tore pages from church Bibles, using them to roll cigarettes. Bible pages also turned up as food wrappers in the nearby market.

I have kept to this day a clasp from the church’s metal roof that I found on the ground, a daily reminder at my desk of the unbearable suffering and inexplicable resilience I witnessed in south Sudan.

As we left the mission compound, we discovered a gathering of Christian believers under a nearby tree. With the area in friendlier hands, they walked back from a refugee camp in Ethiopia. They were building a new church, using saplings to support a thatched roof. Under a tree, they sang as we approached, and then asked to pray with us.

“Our brothers and sisters,” the little group explained to us, “had been carried to Jesus while we were carried to exile and back again.” “This is our Jerusalem,” their pastor said, spreading his arms wide to encompass a desolate scene of rubble and weeds. “We have nothing, but we have everything.”

Resilient Joy

Overseas reporting allowed me to go deeper into unspeakable horrors Christians suffered at the hands of their enemies, and there I discovered a resilience and joy that were nearly unexplainable. In the heat of Sudan, surveying the destruction with enemy lines less than ten miles away, comprehending the impoverishment, losses, and dislocation that come with deep persecution, I also found my reporter’s feet.

It didn’t arise from a rush of adrenaline as I skirted landmines. I would return again and again to Sudan, then to other places of conflict, because of the joy that might be found, the light overcoming the darkness, the singing under the trees in the shadow of fiery furnaces.

“Stripped of earthly comfort, they found a priceless joy, the joy of being more like Christ. And with it, radical hope.”

As my work after 9/11 took me increasingly to the Middle East, I’d begin to think of these as journeys to find water in the desert. The enemies would change, the politics would tilt and shift, and the disappointment hover, everywhere. But the harder things got, the more resilient and determined became the people of God. Stripped of earthly comfort, they found a priceless joy, the joy of being more like Christ. And with it, radical hope.

Desert Water

As al-Qaeda and Islamic State terror groups gained ground in Syria and Iraq, churches were devastated. The Christian population of Iraq fell by 75 percent from the time I made my first trip there, in 2002, to the invasion of ISIS in 2014. The loss of whole communities and destruction of ancient landmarks was heartbreaking. From the new frontiers that had defined my first years of reporting, I now watched the world again fill with checkpoints and no-go zones.

Christians in Iraq formed its middle class. They were its shopkeepers, newspaper editors, schoolteachers, and symphony conductors. The devastation when terrorists targeted them with bombings and kidnappings not only leveled their communities, but also hurt the whole country. Churches that outlasted Mongol invasions now operated out of tents in sprawling camps.

Even this desert held water, the church becoming something new as it fought for survival. Members of the old ancient churches were attending evangelical Bible studies, reading Scripture on their own for the first time, and for hours, one mother explained. Muslims, shaken by atrocities done in Allah’s name, were coming to Christ.

One convert, who came from a completely Islamic area, told me he’d never thought about Christianity until terrorists forced him from his home. Then, “I was asking and asking for more information about Jesus,” he said, “because what I received from Islam is only trouble.”

It became common to see Muslim families, the mothers veiled, attending evangelical church services in Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. At one, I dropped in on a meeting where Muslim women were invited. I expected maybe a dozen women to be there, but when I opened the door, I discovered more than four hundred, a sea of head-to-toe burkas common to the Shia community.

Researcher David Garrison more formally has documented the undeniable trend: an estimated two to seven million Muslims have converted to Christianity since the start of the twenty-first century. They occur in all parts of the Muslim world, including areas most hostile to Christianity, like Afghanistan and Iran. More than 80 percent of such movements began after 9/11. “They were content to see Islam as the answer for the world, and after 9/11 they no longer could believe that,” Garrison said.

In my 2016 book about Iraq, They Say We Are Infidels, I wrote,

Christianity at its truest stretched and recast harsh realities, turning them upside down, inside out. Its people took mustard seeds and with them moved mountains, which I learned as I watched [the Iraqi Christians]. Destruction brought comfort, in the words of the prophet Nahum; impossible hardships became possible to endure, and death became life-giving. Augustine said it well: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” (296)

Light in Dark Places

For journalists, “what bleeds, leads,” and evil remains the world’s constant. But the believers I encountered overseas had something American society seemed to be losing: community-mindedness. It resides in the DNA in parts of the world we often think of as poor and unsalvageable. And to think and believe well, writer Jeffrey Bilbro has said, we must belong well.

“The believers I encountered overseas had something American society seemed to be losing: community-mindedness.”

Dislocated and distraught, the Iraqis could form new communities, teach their children to change the diapers of the new widow’s baby, launch churches in muddy camps.

I also learned how Christianity could be contextualized the world over, much like Islam, looking very different from Africa to Asia. Yet Islam largely increased by conquest, while Christianity grew by the example of love. The Islamic State fighters, the Taliban, and others seek to impose a global jihad, not unlike the armies of Muhammad in the seventh century. Christianity thrives where the weakest and most dispossessed love their neighbors in word and deed, following the example of Jesus. They seldom make headline news but can teach us just the same.

My time at World Magazine came to an end as darker forces again rose, closing borders and threatening a generation’s worth of democratic progress. The Taliban rule in Afghanistan and Russia’s war on Ukraine will change world orders and threaten not only Christian believers.

The frontiers I traveled along may shut again. My check-ins with faraway contacts happen in real time through video chats and text messaging, even from bomb shelters or tent cities. But there in the dark places we may find light enough to say with the pastor in Sudan, “We have nothing, and we have everything.”

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. Tomorrow, we come to a text in our Bible reading that should compel all of us to be driven by gospel-sized ambition in this life. The text is Acts 20:24. We’ve already looked at it — and this huge aspiration — from a couple different angles, as you can see in the APJ book on pages 69–70, in episodes looking specifically at following our heart and chasing after ambitious careers in this world. How do we do big ambition well, to glorify God in our aspirations?

This glorious text comes in Paul’s final, parting words to the beloved Ephesian elders in Acts 20:17–38, a deeply moving account that we read together tomorrow, and a text on the mind of a listener named Derek. “Pastor John, hello! I graduate from seminary this spring, and as I prepare for full-time ministry, I want to better understand Paul’s claims in Acts 20:24 when he says, ‘I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.’ For your life as a pastor, what do you take from this text? What did this Pauline conviction for the gospel over life look like — and feel like — for you?”

I love this text, Acts 20:24. And it’s one of the reasons that I love the apostle Paul. So, I’m happy to meditate on it again, as I have so often over the years.

Life Is Better Lost Than Wasted

Way back when I wrote the book Don’t Waste Your Life, over twenty years ago, this text, among others, had taken hold of me and was driving my thinking, my feeling. In fact, when I preached on this text at a university some years ago, my summary statement of the text was “better to lose your life than to waste it.” I think that’s exactly what Paul is saying in this verse: better to lose your life than to waste it.

So, let me quote the text with the two preceding verses (Acts 20:22–23) and then try to answer the question more specifically about its impact on my ministry. “And now, behold,” Paul says — and he’s speaking to the Ephesian elders as he says farewell to them, never to see them again. “And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life” — this is Acts 20:24 now — “of any value nor as precious to myself, if only” — this is the one sense in which he does value his life — “I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.” Which I paraphrase, “Better to lose your life than to waste it.”

The Power of a Precious Passage

Now, Derek is asking what I take from this text for pastoral ministry. Or, more specifically, what did it look like or feel like for me to embrace this text in my ministry?

1. Return to the Point

I felt the poignancy of this text because it is among the last words Paul speaks to his friends that he’ll never see again in this life, as far as he knows. At the end of the passage, Acts 20:37–38, it says, “There was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again.”

“Better to lose your life than to waste it.”

So, when I see a Christian pastor or missionary or a father taking leave of his family or taking leave of a church or a people for the last time, knowing they’ll never see each other again in this life, I listen. I listen because I expect something profound and moving, something that tries to sum up what’s been the point of it all. And I want to know what the point of it all is. I want to know what the point of life is, the point of ministry, the point of the universe, which is exactly what we get in this verse. That’s the first thing.

2. Escape Comfort

I have felt, as I have returned to this text again and again, an urgent desire to renounce every distraction and follow Jesus and escape the materialistic forces of the American dream, and the dangers of being rich, and the temptations of comfort and security, and the deadening effects of worldliness that strip a pastor of his power. “I do not count my life of any value nor as precious to myself,” he says, “except for one thing.” And it isn’t prosperity or comfort or ease or security in this world. “I have been given a race to run and a ministry to perform.”

It’s like a marathon. I’m on it. This is why I live. This is what my life means. Finish the race. Fulfill the ministry. Don’t stop. Don’t leave the course. Don’t get sidetracked. Don’t go backward. If you do, your life will be wasted. Paul really believed Psalm 63:3: the steadfast love of the Lord “is better than life.” There is a path of life that leads to the everlasting enjoyment of the steadfast love of God. Better to lose your life than to go off that path. That’s Acts 20:24.

3. Lean on the Spirit

This text has always felt like a miraculous work of the Spirit, not an accomplishment. Acts 20:22 says, “I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit.” Paul wasn’t a self-reliant hero. He was a walking miracle. If Acts 20:24 happens in your life, that’s what it’s like. It’s the work of the Spirit. It’s a miracle.

4. Embrace Uncertainty

This verse felt in my ministry like the thrill and the test of not knowing what the future would bring. Acts 20:22: “I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there.” If you have to know enough about tomorrow to feel safe in this world, you’re going to waste your life.

5. Expect Suffering

Acts 20:24 felt like it was a call to suffer. Acts 20:23: “. . . except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.” God has said that to all of us, not just Paul. He says to all of us, “Through many afflictions you must enter the kingdom” (see Acts 14:22). And, “If you would live a godly life in Christ Jesus, you will be persecuted” (see 2 Timothy 3:12). And, “He who would follow me,” Jesus said in Matthew 16:24, “must deny himself and take up his cross,” the instrument of death. The single-minded devotion to the call of Jesus is an expectation of suffering.

6. Run to the End

Finally, I’ll mention that now, at age 79, this verse burns in my heart with the desire not to waste my final years — not to waste them with the worldly notion that the last years of our lives on earth are for leisure and not ministry. “Come on, Paul. You’re getting old. How about a little cottage on the Aegean Sea? You’ve already done more in your ministry, Paul, than most people do in five lifetimes. It’s time to rest, Paul. Let the last twenty years of your life be for travel and golf and shuffleboard and pickleball and putzing around in the garage and digging in the garden, Paul. Let Timothy have a chance, for goodness’ sake. He’s young. You don’t have to go to Jerusalem. They’re going to bind your hands and feet and hand you over to the Gentiles. You’re an old man. Get out of your head that crazy notion of going to Spain at your age. You’re going to get yourself killed. It isn’t American. It’s not what you’re supposed to do.”

So, I love this verse. I love it. “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24).

Audio Transcript

Part of mature Bible reading is the willingness to stop and ponder the hardest realities that God reveals to us in his word. We don’t skim over hard texts. We press in with questions, seeking understanding.

So this summer we’re addressing three sobering questions inspired by serious Bible readers working through the first two chapters of 2 Thessalonians. Namely, is God present or is he absent in his eternal judgment? Second Thessalonians 1:9 seems to say he’s absent. On Monday we addressed that in APJ 1801. Next, many of you have written us asking Pastor John to identify the mysterious “man of lawlessness” in 2 Thessalonians 2. Who is he? That’s today. And then a question about God sending strong delusions into the world. Does he still do something like that today? And if so, what is that? This third question, on 2 Thessalonians 2:11, is on the table in a week — next Friday in APJ 1806.

So today, we approach this topic of the man of lawlessness. Here’s one representative email from many: “Pastor John, my name is Jared, and I live in San Jose, California. I was reading through my Bible and recently came across the section about ‘the man of lawlessness’ in 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12. At first, I assumed this man was Satan himself. But it becomes clear in verse 9 that this ‘lawless one’ is ‘by the activity of Satan.’ So, it’s not Satan. In your estimation, who is this lawless man?”

I don’t usually read twelve verses of Scripture when we do an APJ. But Jared’s question can only be answered by specifics from the text of 2 Thessalonians. So, let me read the first twelve verses of 2 Thessalonians. I think people will find it riveting, frankly. This is the sort of Scripture people hang on. They say, “Whoa! What’s that talking about?”

Hysteria in Thessalonica

The situation is that some kind of rumor is going around in Thessalonica to the effect that Paul has taught, by some letter or some revelation, that the day of the Lord has come — meaning that Jesus is going to show up in the clouds any day. People were quitting their jobs and mooching off of others, and Paul had to handle this feeling that was running through the church. And here’s how he did it. These are the first verses of 2 Thessalonians 2:

Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come unless the rebellion [apostasy or falling away] comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.

The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. (2 Thessalonians 2:1–12)

So Paul says that the day of the second coming cannot have arrived and will not arrive until the great apostasy happens and the man of lawlessness is revealed. That’s his basic answer to the hysteria in Thessalonica.

Who Is This Man?

Here’s my summary, then, from that text of what we can say about the man of lawlessness. There are questions that are left unanswered, but we can say something.

1. He’s a man — a human, not an angel, not a demon. A “man of lawlessness.”

2. He is quintessentially lawless. That is, he’s called a man of lawlessness. He considers himself absolutely above law. He is lawless in considering himself subject to no law and no lawgiver and no authority.

3. Since there’s only one person who’s above law — namely, God, who writes it — the man of lawlessness claims to be God. He says so explicitly. Verse 4: “. . . who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.”

“This man of lawlessness claims to be the final climactic antichrist.”

So, this man of lawlessness claims to be the final climactic antichrist. “I am a man. I am God. But I’m not Jesus. And I don’t believe in Jesus. I’m against Jesus.” That’s the ultimate expression of antichrist. “Many antichrists have come,” John says (1 John 2:18). And this one is the last. He’s going to be destroyed by the mouth of Jesus, and the fire of heaven, when he comes.

4. He’s born for destruction. Paul calls him “the son of destruction” in verse 3. His DNA, so to speak, is from his satanic father, so he’s going to be destroyed. That’s what his DNA is. He is going to be destroyed. He has no future. He is quintessentially lawless and doomed.

5. As a man, he is coming, nevertheless, by the power of Satan. Verse 9: “The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan.” He’s not Satan. Jared got that exactly right. He is empowered and driven by Satan, animated by Satan, serving Satan, accomplishing Satan’s purposes in vain.

6. Therefore, as a man, he will nevertheless have supernatural power. Paul calls it “all power” in verse 9. And he will work signs and wonders. And when the ESV translates verse 9 and calls them false signs and wonders, be careful. We should not read that to mean “They don’t really happen; they’re really not supernatural. This is cloak and dagger. This is the rabbit out of a hat.”

No, no, no. It’s not. It means they really do happen. Satanic power really is at work in them, but they happen in the service of falsehood. That’s what it means by calling them false signs and wonders. They serve a lie. They are signs and wonders in the service of a great lie, but the satanic supernatural power is real. That’s why it’s going to be so deceptive.

7. Therefore, the man of lawlessness will be unparalleled in his ability to deceive. Verse 10 says he comes “with all wicked deception for those who are perishing” (2 Thessalonians 2:10). Literally, it reads, “in all deception of unrighteousness,” because two verses later, we see that the way he deceives is by making unrighteousness seem pleasurable. They found “pleasure in unrighteousness” (verse 12).

Still Waiting

Now I would argue that Paul is unpacking in these words the prophecies of Jesus. Listen to what Jesus said in Matthew 24:10–13:

And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another [these are Christians; this is a great apostasy]. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

“This man of lawlessness is going to be destroyed by the final fiery second coming.”

So Jesus foresaw a great deception, betrayal — a great betrayal, a great apostasy. And he foresaw a horrible season of lawlessness in which the love of many grows cold. So no matter how many forerunners of this man of lawlessness there have been in history, we know that none of them is what Paul is talking about.

I think some people try to get around this text by saying, “Oh, there’ve been lots of men of lawlessness. They’ve cropped up in all kinds of seasons of history.” Well, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant because this man of lawlessness is going to be destroyed by the final fiery second coming. Verse 8: “Then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).

This is it. It’s over — end of the age. This is the coming of verse 1, when Christ gathers his elect from the four winds. It’s the coming of 2 Thessalonians 1:7, when he comes with his mighty angels in flaming fire. It’s the coming of 1 Thessalonians 2:19; 3:13; 4:15, when the saints will be raised from the dead to meet the Lord in the air. In other words, the great apostasy and this man of lawlessness are at the climactic end of the age. They are brought to an end by the glorious appearing of the coming of the Lord. This is what we hope for. This is what we pray for. Come, Lord Jesus.