For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. 2 Thessalonians 2.7

We live in a lawless age, an age in flight from God. Since the days of the Apostle Paul the world has been infused with the “mystery of lawlessness”, which is increasingly evident throughout our culture and society. We need to understand these days if we are going to be effective as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What are the characteristics of this age? And how should we as Christians respond to it?

The most outstanding feature of our age of lawlessness is its increasing secularity. In his masterful work, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes ours as a day in which “God’s presence receded” from the stage of history and events. In His place, “something other than God” has determined the standards and meanings by which everyday life must be lived. Secular men “oppose and exalt” themselves against all forms of belief, especially those, like the Christian faith, which include strong moral convictions, such as are encoded in the Ten Commandments.

Instead of God to show us how we ought to live, secular man proposes his own best ideas of how the world should work. Rejecting the Law of God, men become a law unto themselves; denying God as the object of their adoration and service, they recognize only their own minds and desires.

As we shall see, the Church is not immune from this lawless frame of mind.

Ours is an age of lawlessness, defined in the first instance by a commitment to secular, pragmatic, and relativistic values. We don’t need to wait for some speculative end-times scenario to begin to unfold; the mystery of lawlessness, dear friends, is already at work, and the evidence of it can be seen in the many ways that God and faith are pushed to the margins, set aside, and supplanted by “reason” and “science.”

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