Good morning and hello friends,
A random thought exercise and something I’ve been walking with the last couple of days.
The Heart of Rebellion
Seeing Past the Riot to the Real Lawlessness Within
It’s Wednesday morning. The news plays on in the background as I walk through the living room to make coffee. A talking head uses the word “lawless” to describe a city block after a protest. Another uses it for a cartel border crossing. My mind doesn’t go to the images on the screen. It goes to a prayer I half-whispered yesterday in a moment of quiet anger. Was that, too, a form of lawlessness?
We throw the word around. A dictionary will tell you it’s “behavior that actively defies established statutes.” It brings to mind mobs, anarchy, the collapse of order. It’s external. It’s them.
But the Bible uses this word like a surgeon’s scalpel, and it’s pointed inward first.
The Greek word is anomia. It doesn’t just mean “breaking a law.” It means being without law. It is the state of living as if no higher law exists. It is autonomy declared as ultimate reality. Rebellion not just against a rulebook, but against the very concept of the Rule-Giver.
Scripture never uses this word in a positive light. Not once. It is the anti-state to the Kingdom of God.
So who are the lawless?
1. The Spiritually Autonomous. This is the heart of it. Jesus’s warning in Matthew 7 is terrifying: “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:22-23, ESV).
The lawless can be inside the church. They can hold the microphone. They can work wonders. But their core posture is self-directed. They use Yahua’s name to accomplish their own purposes. Their disobedience isn’t to a list; it’s to the Person of the Father. “I never knew you,” He says. The relationship was never the point for them. The performance was.
2. The Love-Grows-Cold Crowd. Jesus links lawlessness directly to the temperature of our hearts. “And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” (Matthew 24:12, ESV). This is the slow fade. It’s not the riot; it’s the quiet, incremental selfishness that replaces sacrificial love. It’s the choice to protect your comfort over extending kindness. It’s the spiritual numbness that sets in when we live for ourselves. The increase of lawlessness around us is not an excuse for the coldness within us; it’s the very test of our faith.
3. The Practiced Sinner. John makes it brutally simple: “Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.” (1 John 3:4, ESV). This isn’t the one-time stumble. This is the habitual, unrepentant pattern. It is the life that has settled into rebellion as its default mode. It is the heart that has seared its own conscience, calling evil good and good evil.
4. The Final Rebel. Then there is the ultimate figure: “the man of lawlessness… 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.” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, ESV). He is not just a bad leader. He is the full, final incarnation of the spirit of anomia, the creature who declares himself his own god, the logical end of a world that says, “I will live without Your law.”
So who are the lawless in our modern Western culture?
It is not primarily the criminal, though he is one symptom. It is the culture itself that has made Self its supreme deity. It is the spirit that says:
“My body, my choice” without reference to the Creator of the body.
“Follow your heart” when the heart is deceitful above all things.
“You be you” as the highest moral imperative.
It is the pastor preaching a gospel of self-actualization. It is the politician who builds a platform on envy and calls it justice. It is the quiet neighbor who lives a morally upright life but has never bowed the knee to Yahusha, living perfectly well by man’s law while remaining in active rebellion to God’s.
Lawlessness is the air we breathe. It is the default setting of a world that rejects the Father.
My call is not to point fingers at the world out there. It is to guard my own heart. It is to ask: Where is anomia hiding in me? Where do I set up my own will as the final authority? Where has my love grown cold because I’ve absorbed the spirit of the age?
We are called to separate from this spirit (2 Corinthians 6:17). Not to hide from the world, but to be so saturated with the law of Yahua, which is love for God and love for neighbor, that the spirit of lawlessness finds no home in us.
The battle is not against flesh and blood. It is against this spirit of rebellion. And it starts in the mirror.
Father in Heaven,
Grant us eyes to see,
To discern the antichrist spirit
Taking root in me.
Strip away the veils of self,
The rebellion we defend.
By Your grace, let us rebuke it,
And our sinful nature mend.
For only when we conquer
The rebellion found within,
Will we stand unwavering
Against the external sin.
So when the deceiver comes,
With lies adorned as light,
We’ll reject him, knowing well
Our own heart’s former night.
Amen.
That is all, and thank you for reading.
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Shashue Monrauch