THE ORIGIN OF THE "MAN OF SIN"
Led by our investigation thus far to look for the Evil One in the Church of God, we find all the other language of the prophecy pointing in the same direction.
The first stage in the predicted development of the wicked one is that of APOSTASY. Speaking of the return of Christ, Paul says, "For the day will not come except there come a falling away first."
The Greek word for falling away is “He apostasia” (i.e. THE apostasy).
The word is very clear in its meaning, and, as used in Scripture invariably signifies a spiritual defection (a desertion or departure from the truth). The exact noun is employed once in the New Testament, (Acts 21:21), where Paul is charged with teaching the Jews apostasy from Moses by abandoning circumcision. It would be impossible to find a word to describe more accurately the beginnings of the Papacy, which consisted in a forsaking of the simple faith and worship of primitive Christianity for Jewish rites and Pagan ceremonies.
In (1 Tim 4:1) we have the same words in its verb form: "But the Spirit saith expressly, that in later times some shall fall away from the faith" (R.V.) this refers NOT to the very last times the “end of the age,” but "to the times subsequent to those in which the Apostle was writing (the times not long after the last of the Apostles had fallen to sleep, died)." And when we note the salient features of this predicted falling away--"giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats," etc. -- it requires no stretch of ingenuity to discover in them the great outlines of the Roman apostasy, PAPACY.
And remembering that "the apostasy" is to precede the revelation of the "man of sin," preparing his way, and furnishing the condition out of which he emerges, we feel sure that we are on the right trail in finding the realization of this in the early corruption of the Apostolic faith.
No blatant infidelity assailing the Church from without, no development of Jewish Anti-Christianism, can at all answer to the language. It is evidently a spiritual defection, the germs of which were already planting in secret (as expressed in 2 Thess 2:7), and which in later times were to appear in a manifest lapse from the faith.
Thus, as a rigid verbal examination of the prophecy gives us the (Professed) Church of Christ as the seat of the "man of sin," so the same method points, we believe, unerringly, to the church of Christ as the place of his origin and development.
We will consider further the Person of the “Man of Sin” in our next post.
