What is the restrainer in 2 Thessalonians 2?

Question 10083.

A restraining force is at work in the world right now, holding back the emergence of the most evil man who will ever live. That is the claim Paul makes in 2 Thessalonians 2, and it raises the obvious question: what, or who, is doing the holding? The identity of this restraining force has been debated since the second century, and I want to lay the options out honestly before telling you where I land.

My conclusion, which I hold with conviction but without contempt for those who differ, is that the restraining force is God Himself, working by the Holy Spirit through the indwelt Church. That reading fits the grammar, fits the scale of what is being restrained, and fits the wider shape of the pretribulational position. But it is a conclusion, not an axiom, and it has to be argued for.

What Paul actually says

The Thessalonians had been unsettled by a claim that the day of the Lord had already come. Paul answers by saying two things must happen first: the rebellion, and the revealing of the man of lawlessness. Then he adds, “And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time” (2 Thessalonians 2:6-7). A verse later he says the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, “only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way.

Two features of that statement govern everything else. The restraining force is described first with a neuter participle, “what is restraining”, and then with a masculine one, “he who now restrains”. And the restraining is presently effective, so this is not a prediction of something that will begin later but a description of something happening as Paul writes.

There is also the maddening phrase, “you know”. Paul had told them in person, so he saw no need to spell it out. We are reading someone else’s second letter and reconstructing the first conversation. A little humility is in order for all of us at this point.

The grammar of the restraining force

The verb is katecho, which carries the sense of holding down, holding fast, or holding back. In verse 6 the participle is neuter, to katechon, a restraining thing or power. In verse 7 it is masculine, ho katechon, a restraining person. Any serious answer has to account for both, and this is where several popular suggestions run into trouble.

The shift is not an accident of style. A restraining force described in both neuter and masculine terms points naturally to something that is both an influence and a person, or to a person exercising an influence through an institution. That combination narrows the field considerably.

The phrase “out of the way” is worth a note too. It translates a construction meaning taken out of the middle. It does not mean annihilated, and it does not necessarily mean transported elsewhere. It means removed from between two things, so that what was blocked is now free to advance.

One more grammatical point deserves attention. Both participles are in the present tense, which in Greek carries the sense of ongoing action. Paul is not describing a restraining force that acted once in the past or that will act at some future point. He is describing something happening continuously as he writes, and by implication continuing until the moment of removal. Whatever this restraining force is, it has been operating without interruption for two thousand years, which is itself a considerable clue about its identity.

Candidate one: human government

The oldest suggestion, going back to Tertullian and others, is that the restraining force is the Roman Empire and, by extension, ordered civil government. Paul does teach that governing authorities are established by God to punish evil and reward good, and the neuter and masculine forms could be handled as the empire and the emperor.

There is real weight to this. Law and order do restrain wickedness, and the collapse of civil authority produces exactly the sort of lawlessness Paul is describing. Anyone who has watched a society lose its policing knows how thin the restraint can be.

What defeats it for me is the scale. The Roman Empire fell, and the man of lawlessness did not appear. More seriously, human government is itself the vehicle through which the Beast rises to power in Revelation 13. If government were the restraining force, the very thing holding him back would be the thing carrying him in. I cannot make that work.

There is a variation of this view worth mentioning, which identifies the restraining force with law and order in the abstract rather than with any particular empire. That avoids the awkwardness of Rome’s fall, and it has some support in the way Paul speaks of governing authorities in Romans 13. Yet it still leaves the neuter and masculine pairing unexplained, and it still has to account for the fact that the final tyranny arrives through governmental structures rather than in spite of them. A restraining force that becomes the instrument of the thing it restrained is not much of a restraint.

Candidate two: an angelic being

Some propose Michael the archangel, pointing to Daniel 10 and 12, where Michael stands guard over Israel and where his standing up marks the beginning of a time of trouble. The masculine participle suits a person, and angelic conflict is certainly part of the biblical picture.

I take angelic warfare seriously, and I would not dismiss this reading as fanciful. But it struggles with the neuter form, and it struggles with the sheer magnitude of the task. Restraining a satanically empowered world ruler across the entire earth for centuries is not the kind of restraining force Scripture elsewhere attributes to a created being, however exalted.

There is also the problem that Daniel presents Michael as an active combatant on Israel’s behalf rather than as a general suppressor of lawlessness in the nations. The roles do not quite line up.

Candidate three: the preaching of the gospel

A gentler suggestion is that the restraining force is gospel proclamation, or the Church’s witness in the world. Since the gospel exposes darkness and produces converts, its presence genuinely limits how far a society can descend.

This has pastoral appeal, and it overlaps with the view I hold. But taken on its own it cannot explain the masculine participle, and it makes the restraining force something the Church does rather than someone God is. Given the power arrayed against it, I want a stronger agent than our activity.

A related suggestion identifies the restraining force with the Church herself rather than with the Spirit working through her. I have some sympathy with this, and in practice it is close to the position I hold, since the removal in view is the removal of the Church. Where it falls short is in the masculine participle, which points to a person, and in the sheer weight of what is being held back. The Church is the instrument. She is not the power.

Why I take the restraining force to be God the Holy Spirit

Only one candidate satisfies every requirement of the text. God the Holy Spirit is a person, which accounts for ho katechon. He is also spoken of in Greek with a neuter noun, pneuma, which accounts for to katechon without any strain. He is present and active now. He possesses power adequate to the task. And He works in the world through an institution, the indwelt Church, which is itself removable.

Scripture repeatedly presents God as the one who holds evil within limits. He strove with men before the flood and then declared that He would not do so indefinitely. He restrained Abimelech from sin. He sets bounds to what Satan may do to Job, and to what the sea may do to the shore. A restraining force of this order belongs to God alone.

On this reading, the restraining force is removed not by the Spirit’s departure from the planet but by the removal of the body through which He exercises that particular ministry. He is not taken out of the world at all. A restraint is taken out of the way, which is exactly what Paul’s wording says and no more.

I would add one supporting observation from the flow of Paul’s argument. He assumes his readers already know the answer, which means it must be something he taught them in a short founding visit of a few weeks. Whatever the restraining force is, it was part of basic instruction to new converts rather than an advanced secret. That fits God working through the Spirit and the Church, which any new believer would have been taught about, better than it fits a speculative identification requiring detailed knowledge of Daniel.

How the removal connects with the Rapture

If the restraining force operates through the Church, then the removal of the Church is the removal of the restraint. That places the Rapture before the revealing of the man of lawlessness, and therefore before the seven year period he dominates. This is one of the stronger structural arguments for pretribulationism, and it does not depend on any single disputed word.

Notice how Paul’s logic runs. The Thessalonians were afraid they were already in the day of the Lord. Paul comforts them by saying the man of lawlessness has not appeared, and he cannot appear while the restraining force is in place. That comfort only works if his readers expect to be gone before the restraint lifts. If the Church were destined to endure that period, the argument would offer no reassurance at all.

I want to be careful not to overclaim. This passage does not name the Rapture, and I would not build the doctrine on it alone. But it fits, and it fits without forcing, which is more than I can say for the alternatives I have tried.

Some object that this makes too much depend on a passage that never mentions the Church explicitly. That is a fair caution, and I would not want the whole pretribulational case to rest here. But notice that Paul is writing to a church, about their own expectation, in a letter whose first chapter promises them relief when Jesus is revealed from heaven. The Church is not absent from the context. She is the audience, and the removal of the restraining force is presented as something that concerns her directly.

Objections worth taking seriously

The first objection is that Paul never elsewhere calls the Holy Spirit a restrainer, so the identification is an inference. That is fair. It is an inference, and I hold it as the best available explanation rather than as a stated doctrine. Where Scripture is quieter than we would like, our language should be quieter too.

The second is that removing the restraining force appears to leave the world without the Spirit’s convicting work, which would make conversion impossible during the Tribulation. I have answered that above. The removal is of a ministry exercised through the Church, not of the divine person, and Revelation 7 shows conversions on an enormous scale afterwards.

The third objection is historical. Many in the early church favoured the Roman government view, and it is unwise to dismiss the fathers lightly. Their reading made obvious sense in the second century. But they were also reading before the empire fell, and the fall of that empire without the appearance of the Beast is itself a piece of evidence they did not have.

A fourth objection is more practical. If God is holding evil back, why does the world look as it does? Anyone reading the news could be forgiven for wondering what exactly is being held. The answer is that restraint is measured against what would otherwise happen, and we have no way of seeing the counterfactual. Paul’s point is not that the present age is mild but that it could be immeasurably worse, and that a day is coming when the difference will be obvious to everyone.

What the restraining force means for reading the news

One practical benefit of getting this right is that it changes how you read the headlines. A believer who understands that a restraining force is currently in place will not panic at every fresh outrage, because he knows the lid is still on. He will also not be naive, because he knows what is underneath it.

It also gives a sober dignity to ordinary Christian presence. Your church, unremarkable as it may feel on a wet Sunday morning, is part of the means by which God is holding back a flood. That is not sentimentality. It is Paul’s plain implication, and it is worth remembering next time you are tempted to think your congregation is achieving nothing.

It has an effect on prayer too. If God is currently restraining evil through means that include His people, then intercession for our nation is not a gesture. Paul urges prayer for those in authority so that we may lead peaceful and quiet lives, which is restraint language. The restraining force is exercised in part through the prayers of ordinary Christians who will never know what their prayers prevented. I find that both humbling and steadying, and it has kept me praying on days when it felt pointless.

So, now what?

Hold this doctrine with a firm grip and an open hand. Be clear that a restraining force exists and that God is behind it, and be gracious about the details, since godly men have differed here for eighteen centuries. If someone in your church takes the Michael view, he is not a heretic. He is a brother reading a difficult verse.

Then let it do its pastoral work. The world is not out of control. Evil is not running at full speed. There is a restraining force at work, appointed by God, and it will lift only when He decides and not a moment sooner. Meanwhile you are part of how it operates. Does your ordinary obedience feel quite so small in that light?

One last thought before you close the page. The passage was written to people who thought the worst had already begun and that they had been left in it. Paul’s answer was, in effect, look at what is still holding. That is not a bad word for a discouraged Christian in any century.

And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way.

2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 (ESV)

For Further Study

If you want to go further with this passage, the standard dispensational treatments are the fullest. Charles Ryrie handles the restraining force briefly but clearly in his systematic work, and J. Dwight Pentecost gives it extended attention in Things to Come, where the candidates are set out and weighed. John Walvoord’s writing on the Rapture question deals with the connection between the restraint and the removal of the Church, and Lewis Sperry Chafer treats the Spirit’s ministries in a way that helps you see why a functional withdrawal need not imply a personal absence. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is useful for the Jewish frame of the Tribulation that follows. Millard Erickson, writing from a different eschatological position, is worth reading precisely because he presses the objections, and it does none of us any harm to feel the weight of the other side before settling.