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Feast: Handwriting on the Wall (2026): Lawlessness
#FT26-00
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 25-Sep-26; 42 minutes
2026-09-25
summary: "Microlooting" has evolved from symbolic protest into a broader cultural rejection of legal authority, exemplified by groups like Take Back Power and the radicalization following Luigi Mangione's murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This trend reflects deep-seated anomie, characterized by self-appointed moral authority, destructive impulses, and the justification of ends by any means. Theologically, it mirrors the "perilous last days" of II Timothy 3, where rebellion against law signals spiritual decay. Aligning with I John 3:4's definition of sin as lawlessness, today's shift toward viewing legal structures as mere obstacles fits the prophetic profile of the "man of lawlessness." Believers are urged in II Corinthians 6:14-7:1 to separate from this spirit, contrasting worldly self-justification with divine holiness. The Feast of Tabernacles offers a pivotal moment to examine personal complicity in this lawless age, repent of worldly influences, and realign with God's righteous standard before the final confrontation between lawlessness and divine order.
transcript:
Back in April of this year, a new phenomenon hit the public consciousness. Journalists began reporting a heretofore unknown type of political protest, coined as microlooting. That was coined by New York Times editor Nadia Spiegelman. This new word describes the phenomenon of politically progressive people, that is left wingers, leftists, however you wanna say, those on the left side of the political spectrum, and they would steal small things from large corporations on a regular basis. Just steal them, whether they needed to use them or not. So every time that they would go in to shop at certain stores, they would pick up something and put it, you know, in their handbag or something where they can get it out of the store. In other words, these lefties have raised, I'll put that in scare quotes, they have raised shoplifting to the level of political protests. Now they feel extremely justified in doing this. They compare what they do - listen to this - they compare what they do to the Boston Tea Party. And they have their excuses and justifications for this. For instance, I've got about six of them right here. They tell themselves that the corporation already factors loss and waste into their budgets, so it really doesn't hurt them. Or they say that the corporation's profits are too high, and they are just helping to bring them down a little bit, pennies, penny by penny. Or the billionaire who is the CEO of the corporation makes too much money. They just make the judgment that he makes too much money, so why not steal from him? He's not going to miss it. Or they say the corporation regularly steals from its employees, so this is getting them back a little bit. Or they turn around and say the corporation overcharges its customers, so I'm just leveling the playing field a little bit. Or the final one here, the corporation or its owner has the wrong political beliefs, or he supports the wrong politician, and so he deserves to be stolen from. So they steal lemons and other produce from Whole Foods because Jeff Bezos is too rich. One supporter actually said into a microphone, where it was recorded, Jeff Bezos has too much money. He's a billionaire. So why should I have to pay for organic avocados? From other stores, they take small items without a qualm, so they can stick it to the man. That's not just in the US. In Britain there is a resistance movement called Take Back Power. And the people who belong to this Take Back Power movement steal food, whatever they can steal from supermarkets. And you know what they do with it? They give it to food banks. Activists claim that liberating, as they say, produce is, quote, non-violent action to resist the super rich, unquote. So it's OK, even moral, in their minds, to steal from alleged robber barons or corporations that make too much money, as they see it. It gets worse, because you know, these sorts of things do not end with little thefts. These microlooting incidents are a minor form of what happened in New York City in December 2024, when Luigi Mangione gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. He perpetrated his crime because he hated United Healthcare and the way they handled his chronic back pain. He was not getting enough, he thought, for the money he paid them on a monthly basis. He felt the healthcare system had failed him. So he killed the CEO in cold blood, and all you know, the cameras there in New York City, they caught him doing it. It was very clear. His manifesto - you know, these guys always have a manifesto - his manifesto criticized healthcare companies as, quote, parasites, and expressed ill will toward corporate America in general. They're all thieves. They're going to kill us all and just take the money and run. He intended the shooting, his manifesto said, to incite a national debate on healthcare reform. To him, and has been echoed by others on the left, it was justified social action. I do not know if you're aware, but immediately, I mean, minutes after it was made public that he had done this, leftist glee flooded social media because they thought that someone was finally actually doing something positive about healthcare. That's how they framed it. They declared Mangione a hero, a hero of the left. He had committed what they call now social murder, which in their eyes is a net good for society. 41% of Gen Z respondents to a poll not long afterward said the murder was justified. 41%! That that was justifiable homicide. And they agreed that private healthcare is profoundly immoral. It may be, but murdering CEOs is not justified, even if it is politically motivated. It is, in a word, lawlessness. In Church of the Great God, we have a tradition to begin each Feast of Tabernacles in the opening night service with a sermon titled The Handwriting Is on the Wall. My dad began giving this sermon and began this tradition in 1994. And in these sermons he would highlight a trend in society that illustrates that Jesus Christ's return is right on schedule. My offering this year will highlight a very visible sign of the times. You've heard the word already: lawlessness. Please go to Daniel the 5th chapter with me. We'll read the first six verses and then skip down to verse 22 and read down through verse 28. This is a well-known biblical story. So Daniel 5:1 through 6, to begin: Daniel 5:1-6 Belshazzar the king made a great feast for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in the presence of the thousand. While he tasted the wine, Belshazzar gave the command to bring the gold and silver vessels which his father [actually grandfather, I believe] Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple which had been in Jerusalem, that the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, might drink from them. Then they brought the gold vessels that had been taken from the temple of the house of God which had been in Jerusalem, and the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines drank from them. They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone. In the same hour the fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his hips were loosened and his knees knocked against each other.
He was one terrified man. I'm sure that all the drinking that they had done did not help him very much. Now down to verse 22. This is in the middle of Daniel's response to find out what was going on here. Everybody thought that Daniel was the only one that could give the right answer. He'd been speaking about Nebuchadnezzar and his time that he was crazed for seven years. OK, verse 22: Daniel 5:22-28 But you, his son Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, although you knew all this, and you have lifted yourself up against the Lord of heaven. They have brought the vessels of His house before you, and you and your lords, your wives and your concubines have drunk wine from them. And you have praised the gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone, which do not see or hear or know. And the God who holds your breath in His hand and owns all your ways, you have not glorified. Then the fingers of the hand were sent from Him, and this writing was written. And this is the inscription that was written: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of each word: Mene - God has numbered your kingdom and finished it. Tekel - you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Peres - your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.
All right, here we have this story in which a hand suddenly appeared, and in the light of the brazier, the lamp that was there, started writing into the plaster of the wall, giving this prophecy. So that was a literal hand in those days that wrote on the wall. But these days, the phrase handwriting on the wall is a metaphor that we use to suggest that some sort of situation has reached a point in which the outcome, usually a negative outcome, is obvious to everyone. They can read it like they read those words that were written on the wall of the palace. I'll give you a few examples. Here's a sentence that might appear in the newspaper - OK, appear on a blog or somewhere on the internet: Once the US-Iran war reignited, the handwriting was on the wall. Gasoline prices would rise again. And they are still way too expensive - that's not part of the quote, but just my opinion. Here's another one. I always try to put a sports one in here for those of you who think about sports 24/7: The handwriting was on the wall for the Panthers when they could not stop the Bears' offense in the third quarter. That's a dig at Jared. Not that I'm a Bears fan like that, but uh... In Daniel's day, the hand that wrote on the wall was a sure sign of Babylon's defeat, and in fact, it was defeated that very night by the Medes and the Persians. OK, let's go to Luke 12. This is not the only place where this type of thing is mentioned. There is a New Testament equivalent. Luke 12:54 through 56. Luke writes, verse 54: Luke 12:54-56 Then He also said to the multitudes, 'When you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, A shower is coming, and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, There will be hot weather, and there is. Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?'
Why are you so blind to what's happening right now? Discerning the signs of the time is just like the handwriting on the wall. Here He castigates the crowds that were following Him, which represent all of mankind, and He castigates them for being so self-absorbed and distracted that they had missed the whole point of His work and His message. He had done all these things and said all these things right before their eyes in plain sight. They, these Jews, most of them, they knew the prophecies. They knew that the Messiah was going to come in a short time. But when He came, they did not recognize Him. They could not see it, because He was outside of what they expected. But they should have known. They should have been able to say, Ah, He's fulfilled this, or, you know, this other thing. He was born in Bethlehem - well, that's one thing that Messiah is supposed to do. He's supposed to be from Nazareth, He'll be called a Nazarene - well, He was from Nazareth. And on and on it goes with the many Old Testament prophecies that were there for them to read and understand and apply to the person who fulfilled them. But they did not. They missed it totally. In Matthew 16:1 through 3 - we will not go there - but He directs His ire at the Pharisees in the same way. They should have known better. They were students of the law. They understood the Bible backwards and forwards. Many of them, like the apostle Paul, probably could quote most of the Old Testament. But they failed. They were blind to the fact that this One who is preaching what Jesus preached, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, it was the Messiah that they'd been waiting for. You could not see it. So whether laymen or leaders, without the right perspective and ability to judge righteously, we too are as good as blind, unless we have, one, our minds opened by God to see these things, and two, that we are looking, that we are aware. So as the elect of God, we should be eager to avoid the examples of the Jews in Jesus' day. God wants us to be vigilant and aware of the world's zeitgeist. That's a great German word, means time ghost, spirit of the times. He wants us to be looking out there and seeing how the world is, what it's doing, how it's thinking, especially about the direction and ramifications of the events and trends and philosophies that are swirling about, cause they ultimately lead to people doing something based on those philosophies and those trends. Most of all, He wants us to resist being carried along in the world's wake on these matters. And usually we do that because we are not thinking things through. We're not trying to figure out where is this idea going to lead. And if we cling to Christ and His teachings, to develop His mind and live His way, we have a greater chance of catching on to these trends and philosophies that are going to go haywire in the last days. So His people are supposed to be like guards on duty, our heads on a swivel, light on our feet, ready to react to whatever danger may come. And the dangers are usually not physical, they're spiritual. They're like this lawlessness problem, social murder. So let's go to II Timothy 3, verses 1 through 5. These are attitudes and actions of people in the last times. It's good to go through them every once in a while. Paul gives us a list to help us to watch these things. Verse 1: II Timothy 3:1-5 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away.
Avoid them. You do not wanna have any of these traits and actions on your resume, on your spiritual resume. Now last year, after some very horrendous murders that we all heard about, we zeroed in on brutality in verse 3, a characteristic of the last days. Tonight's focus, as I mentioned already, is on lawlessness, which is a term that is not here in Paul's list, because instead it's an umbrella term for all of these traits. Lawlessness undergirds every one of those that we saw between verses 2 through 4. Lawlessness is the overall attitude of the perilous characteristics of the people in the last days. Let's begin to search this out a little bit in I John 3:4. Bill, that's a memory verse - haven't said that in a while. I John 3:4: I John 3:4 Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness.
Now here, this is what I call a definition scripture, where it says this is that, and it's very easy to memorize these sorts of things and have a basic understanding of what we mean, or what the writer means. But the apostle John here equates sin, or iniquity, or the transgression of God's law, with lawlessness. Now the word underlying, the Greek word underlying lawlessness is anomia, A-N-O-M-I-A. Anomia, Strong's number 458. And it means simply a violation of law. It's made up of a negative particle, the a at the beginning of the term, and then nomia, which means law. So it's anti-law, or against law, not no law. Now, in the New Testament, it often implies contempt for law, especially man's contempt for God's law. In this way, more often than not, anomia emphasizes being against the law rather than without law, like anarchy - you know, without a government, without a lord, without a master. This means without a law. So let me just say that again: anomia emphasizes being against the law, or as we might say, anti-law. So what John is saying here is that when one commits sin - in that first, uh, the third word there in the verse, sin, underlying it is hamartia, which is a missing the mark, just doing something wrong one way or another. So when one commits sin, one is also showing contempt for law or for the lawgiver. So in other words, we could actually translate this as: committing sin is also rebellion against God. I mean, that's basically what it is when you have contempt for the law and the lawgiver. OK, let's go on a little bit. II Thessalonians 2. This is in the section of the prophecy where the man of sin is mentioned. We are not going to focus on the future beast, but just the fact that he is the ultimate lawless human being. So let's start in verses 3 and 4, and we will drop down to verse 7. Paul warns: II Thessalonians 2:3-4 Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin [just wanna pause there, emphasize that the man of sin is revealed] the son of perdition [that's also very important for us] who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.
Down to verse 7: II Thessalonians 2:7-10 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
OK, I mentioned that the future beast, the man of sin here, is the ultimate lawless human being. He is called directly the lawless one there in verse 8. And in verse 3, when we had that list of titles, the man of sin is actually mistranslated - that's not the man of hamartia, it is the man of anomia. He's the man of lawlessness. Now from Revelation 13, if we would go there - we will not - but we know that this person, whoever he happens to be, is Satan's ultimate proxy among men. He comes in and basically possesses him. And we know for sure that lawlessness is certainly among the devil's primary traits. I mean, that's what he leads with. What did he do? He broke God's law, left and right, in rebellion. Now we can distill from this description of the man of sin, the man of anomia, a few details about lawless people, because they follow the same trail, they follow the same path. So we can get a few, or I should say we can glean a few things from this passage about the people who are living among us. OK, I have three of these. A lawless person is a son or a child of destruction. That's what it means there at the end of verse 3, where this man of lawlessness is called the son of perdition. This is a Hebrew idiom that indicates a characteristic of a person. In the Old Testament, and in some places in the New Testament, this is the son of Belial. And Belial is - I mean, it eventually got to the point where this person, a son of Belial, was like the son of the devil, um, a son of a devil. But actually the word underneath Belial means worthless - worthless children. And the idea here was that they were worthless because they were wicked and corrupt. And so what we have here is Paul describing these lawless people as both destroyers - cause their perdition, the idea of destruction here - they are both destroyers and will come to destruction. That's their path. Their path is to destroy, and it's going to rear up and bite them, and they will go down in their destruction. Now, because lawless people do not have a moral or ethical code to fall back on, well, nothing is sacred to them. They hold nothing of great worth. So they find it easier and expedient to destroy what they oppose rather than change it. They do not like the slow way of trying to change a law. Oh, they hate this country because we have made a system and used it fairly well for 250 years, in which our founders made it very hard to change anything, with all the checks and balances and such. So they do not like the system, and so what they do is just go around the system and take direct action, and it's usually very destructive. So just a few years ago, while we were suffering COVID - and many of us have suffered COVID during the Feast in '21 - but we saw cities go up in flames and rampant looting and other destructive behavior in the riots that were right about that same time. Those were lawless people. OK, let's go on to the next one. What we saw as we came through here was that a lawless person exalts himself. He becomes the arbiter, the judge of everything. Because as we see with the man of lawlessness, he thinks he's God. He becomes his own god. His mind and the things that he wants become decrees of the God that he serves - himself. And of course, what he believes is right, is it not? That's what he thinks, and all other beliefs and opinions are wrong. And with no ultimate authority over him, he will rarely, if ever, back down or admit his wrong. These are the kind of people who go down fighting rather than admit any kind of fault. His attitude is: I know I'm right, and because I'm right, I can do whatever I want. You can't tell me no. We know from other places that the beast, this man of anomia, the man of lawlessness, will seek to change times and laws, thinking himself superior to God Himself. And this says he'll sit down in the temple of God and declare himself God. OK, let's go on to the third one. Because he has no honorable principles, a lawless person will use any means necessary to achieve his ends. He's not squeamish at all, or hesitant about doing unlawful things, because he doesn't see any authority in the law, or in those behind the laws. He will leverage every means of power at his disposal - using people, weapons, deceitful rhetoric, treachery, subterfuge, or loopholes in the law. They really liked loopholes in the law. But they will use anything in order to get what they want. He's just being authentic, he's being himself. And those who microloot and commit crimes like social murder - we are seeing a glimpse of the lawlessness prophesied to explode in the end time. In these things, little right now - well, not so little when you kill the CEO of a major healthcare company - but in them we can see the attitudes of destruction, unyielding self-righteousness, and winning, as they see it, by any means necessary to get what they want. These are the kind of people who want to see the world burn, and they do not mind if they get burned while they are doing it. At least they are succeeding in their goals. The beast will be of the same mind, just amped up to eleven. What a horrible time that will be. Let's finish in II Corinthians, the sixth chapter. Let's see the other side of this a bit. II Corinthians 6, starting with verse 14. Because I do not need to preach to you about lawlessness - that's not necessary - what I do need to preach to you is that you need to be the very opposite of the lawless. Verse 14: II Corinthians 6:14-18 Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, 'I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people.' Therefore, 'Come out from among them and be separate,' says the Lord. 'Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.' 'I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters,' says the Lord Almighty.
Chapter 7, verse 1, therefore, a concluding statement: II Corinthians 7:1 Having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
So, this is a good time to sit down and think about what we believe, what we represent, who we are, who God wants us to be. And if we harbor any of these attitudes, the bad attitudes that I spoke about earlier, the attitudes of the lawless, if we have somehow allowed them to seep in from the world, we need to repent of them immediately and get on board with God and His teachings about what true Christians should be like, believe, act, behave. For Jesus warns us in Matthew 7:23, in Matthew 13:41-42, that He will not allow those who despise law into His Kingdom. He says to those in Matthew 7:23, I never knew you. We were never on the same wavelength. They are darkness, such people, not light. They are sons of Belial, not Christians. So instead, Paul urges us to cleanse ourselves and seek holiness in the presence of God. We'll be in the presence of God for the next eight days. We have an opportunity to do that in this concentrated time of learning at this Feast. Please take advantage of it. THE END.
RTR/aws+/
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