they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false

(source: 2 Thessalonians 2:9-17 RSVCE – The coming of the lawless one by the – Bible Gateway)

People struggle with the sense that truth is already lost to them, that there’s no way to get to the bottom, that the traces are gone.  Some struggle with the sense that inside them, in their own fault or something God has done to them, lies a final alienation from truth.

These are things that happen to us in these days. 

false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect

(source: Matthew 24:21-27 RSVCE – For then there will be great – Bible Gateway)

I think that many in the circles I grew up among–many Americans in general–are so fixated on discovering whether the times spoken of in these obviously coordinated texts (Paul’s “man of sin” discourse in 2 Thessalonians and Christ’s “tribulation” discourse in Matthew’s Gospel) that they miss the two obvious things we can learn from them:

1. In the end, even the forces of delusion are subject to divine control.  How do they work?  They provide excuses for people to do what people have chosen to do; they deceive the self-deceiving.  Those who hunger for truth will be filled.
2. If we think this text has as its ultimate reference an escalation of the historical confrontation, beyond Nero or Diocletian or Attila or Hitler or Stalin or Mao, then we have to think it also has an ultimate reference beyond the situation we find ourselves in.  In other words, whatever is true in that ultimate case is still more evidently true, a fortiori, in my life and yours.
3. Two things, yea three:  “if possible.”  IF possible.  (see the unapologetically triumphalist moment here.)

Much virtue in IF.

Really.  It’s not a lie; it’s the truth that it’s harder to believe than not to.  As the dated song has it:

Or as Flannery O’Connor wrote it down herself: