He says it will not come till the falling away, or apostasy, has come first. The Authorised Version says "_a_" falling away, but that is wrong. The falling away was something familiar to the Apostle and his readers; he was not introducing them to any new thought. But a falling away of whom? or from what? Some have suggested, of the members of the Christian Church from Christ;[26] but it is quite plain from the whole passage, and especially from ver. 12f., that the Apostle is contemplating a series of events in which the Church has no part but as a spectator. But the "apostasy" is clearly a religious defection; though the word itself does not necessarily imply as much, the description of the falling away does; and if it be not of Christians, it must be of the Jews; the Apostle could not conceive of the heathen "who know not God" as falling away from him. This apostasy reaches its height, finds its representative and hero, in the man of sin, or, as some MSS. have it, the man of lawlessness. When the Apostle says _the man_ of sin, he means the _man_,--not a principle, nor a system, nor a series of persons, but an individual human person who is identified with sin, an incarnation of evil as Christ was of good, an Antichrist. The man of sin is also the son of perdition; this name expressing his fate--he is doomed to perish--as the other his nature. This person's portrait is then drawn by the Apostle. He is the adversary _par excellence_, he who sets himself in opposition, a human Satan, the enemy of Christ. The other features in the likeness are mainly borrowed from the description of the tyrant king Antiochus Epiphanes in the Book of Daniel: they may have gained fresh meaning to the Apostle from the recent revival of them in the insane Emperor Caligula. The man of sin is filled with demoniac pride; he lifts himself on high against the true God, and all gods, and all that men adore; he seats himself in the temple of God; he would like to be taken by all men _for_ God. There has been much discussion over the temple of God in this passage. It is no doubt true that the Apostle sometimes uses the expression figuratively, of a church and its members--"The temple of God is holy, which temple ye are"--but it is surely inconceivable that a _man_ should _take his seat_ in _that_ temple; when these words were fresh, no one could have put that meaning on them. The temple of God is, therefore, the temple at Jerusalem; it was standing when Paul wrote; and he expected it to stand till all this was fulfilled. When the Jews had crowned their guilt by falling away from God; in other words, when they had finally and as a whole decided against the gospel, and God's purpose to save them by it; when the falling away had been crowned by the revelation of the man of sin, and the profanation of the temple by his impious pride, _then_, and not till then, would come the end. "Do you not remember," says the Apostle, "that when I was with you I used to tell you this?"