comfort your hearts and establish you in every good work and word.
(3) The course of reasoning in 2 Thessalonians 2:0 would lead to the expectation that a considerable time would elapse before the Saviour would appear. The apostles, therefore, did not believe that the end of the world was very near, and they did not teach false doctrine on the subject, as infidels have often alleged. No one, who attentively and candidly studies 2 Thessalonians 2:0, it seems to me, can suppose that Paul believed that the second coming of the Saviour would occur within a short time, or during the generation when he lived. He has described a long series of events which were to intervene before the Saviour would appear - events which, if the interpretation which has been given is correct, have been in fact in a process of development from that time to the present, and which, it must have been foreseen, even then, would require a long period before they would be completed. There was to be a great apostasy.