2 Thessalonians 2

1

2

3

¹Now we want to tell you a bit more about the way our leader, Jesus Christ, will come back to the earth, and the time when he will bring us all together to be with him.

²Friends, don’t listen to people that reckon his time has already come, and Jesus has already come back. They are wrong. We don’t want you to get upset easily or frightened by those people. They might lie and say that they heard one of God’s men say this, or that somebody wrote it in a report, or they might even reckon that we wrote it in a letter.

³Don’t listen to them. Don’t let anyone trick you like that. You see, it will be like this. There are some things that will happen first, and after that Jesus will come back. A lot of people will turn against God, and then a really bad man will get up and show himself to everyone. He will never do anything that God wants. He will be the kind of man that God wants to properly finish up.

⁴He will reckon he is better than God. He will fight against God and against everything else that people think is a god. He will fight against everything that people respect in a spiritual way. He will even go into God’s house and sit down there, and tell everyone that he is God.

⁵Do you remember me talking about this when I was with you there at your town?

⁶You already know something about this man. You know that he wants to start doing his bad things now, but somebody is holding him back. But at the right time God will let everyone see that bad man.

⁷You know, there is secret power already working in the world, stopping people from doing what God wants. But somebody is fighting against that power and stopping it from winning. And he will keep doing that till God takes him away.

⁸Then that really bad man will come and show himself to everyone. That man never does anything that God wants. But Jesus, our leader, will come and kill him. Jesus will talk, and his breath will kill that man. And Jesus will finish him up with the very bright, powerful light that shines from Jesus himself.

⁹You know, the devil, called Satan, will give some of his power to that bad man. So that bad man will come, and he will do really clever things with Satan’s power. Those things will shock people very much. They will think that he has good power and they will believe him, but they will be wrong.

¹⁰He will trick those people. They will think, “He is doing powerful things, so he is right,” but he will really be doing very bad things with Satan’s power. You know, there are some people that don’t like the true message about Jesus. They don’t believe it. They will not let God save them. These are the people that this really bad man will trick. So in the end God will finish up those people.

¹¹You see, they will not believe the true message, so God will let somebody properly trick them and they will believe that bad man’s lies.

¹²These are people that like to do bad things and will not believe the true message about Jesus. So God will judge them and say they are guilty.

¹³But friends, we thank God that you are not in that mob. Right from the start God picked you to be the ones that he will save. And he put his Holy Spirit into you to save you. We told you the true message about Jesus and you believed it. It is like God called to you at that time to come and join his mob. And now God’s spirit works in you all the time to change you into God’s special people. And in heaven you will be really great, along with our leader, Jesus Christ.

¹⁵So then, friends, you have to keep strong and keep on properly trusting Jesus. Keep on believing the things that we taught you. You see, Jesus taught us those things, and later we taught them to you. We told you those things when we were there with you, and after that we wrote letters to you to tell you more. Keep on believing those things.

¹⁶And now we pray to our leader, Jesus Christ himself, and we pray to our Father, God. He loves us and he is very good to us. He helps us to be strong and brave for ever. He tells us that we are his people, for sure.

¹⁷So we ask him to help you to be spiritually strong and brave too, so that you keep on doing good things and saying good things.