Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace,
3. But it is precisely here that many interpreters have gone astray. Supposing that  2 Thessalonians 2:8 prophesies the summary and final end of the man of sin as soon as he appears, the commentators declare that, as the papacy has flourished for centuries and has not yet been destroyed, no reference to the papacy is included in the prophesy.  However, the Scriptures do not assert that the Second Advent of Christ will follow immediately upon the arrival of the man of sin.  The conditions that led to the development of the man of sin were already working in Paul's day.  The interval between the arrival of the man of sin and the Second Advent is nowhere mentioned in the New Testament.  Gloag's comment on this is: