lawlessness: conduct or a condition set against God's law and rightful order
The word joins "not" to "law," but it never means simply living where no law exists. From its earliest Greek use it named a breakdown of order in a city or a soul, and the Greek Old Testament then made it the routine word for offense against God, using it to translate a whole family of Hebrew terms for sin, guilt, and rebellion. So it always means acting against a standard that is fully in force, not the absence of any standard.
In the New Testament this one word carries three overlapping weights, sorted out by context rather than by any change in the word itself.
- Most often it is a broad term for iniquity or sin, close in force to the ordinary word for sin (ἁμαρτία).
- In a handful of charged passages it names something far larger: a cosmic revolt against God that comes to a head at the close of the age, embodied in a satanic figure.
- And in Matthew it becomes a pointed word for failing to live out God's will as Jesus teaches it.
What holds these together is a single core: measuring a life against God's order and finding it in defiance of that order. Which shade is in view has to be read from the passage, which is why the same word can sit quietly beside "sin" in one verse and carry the whole drama of the last days in another.
Nuances
What the word means in 1 John 3:4, where it is equated with sin in a letter that never once mentions the Law.
- majorityThe definite article marks it as a technical term for the end-time, Satan-inspired rebellion already named in the letter's talk of the "last hour" and the "antichrist," so the writer is branding his opponents' conduct as that eschatological lawlessness itself.; I. de la Potterie, "Le péché, c'est l'iniquité (1 Jn 3, 4)," Nouvelle Revue Théologique 78 (1956): 785-97; R. Schnackenburg, The Johannine Epistles (Crossroad, 1992), 172-75; R. E. Brown, The Epistles of John (Anchor Bible 30, 1982), 399-401; Haas, de Jonge, and Swellengrebel, A Handbook on the Letters of John (UBS, 1972), on 3:4
- minorityThe word is essentially a synonym of sin here, broad moral opposition to God's will in line with the wide use of the term in the Greek Old Testament, not a technical end-time label.; I. H. Marshall, The Epistles of John (NICNT, 1978), 176-78
- minorityA middle reading: not rebellion against the Law of Moses and not a strictly technical end-time term, but opposition to and rebellion against God akin to Satan's own rebellion.; C. Kruse, The Letters of John (Pillar, 2nd ed. 2020), 117-19; K. Jobes, 1, 2, and 3 John (ZECNT, 2014), 143
Whom Matthew targets with the word in 7:23 and 13:41: a specific group or general moral failure.
- minorityMatthew is combating Law-lax Christians, in a sharper form the apostle Paul and his Law-free converts, whose loose lifestyle the word names.; G. Barth, in Bornkamm, Barth, and Held, Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew (SCM, 1963), 58-164; D. C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism (T&T Clark, 1998), 188-213
- majorityThe word carries no built-in sense of doctrinal opposition to the Law; Matthew condemns general moral laxity, failure to do God's will as Jesus interprets it, within a community braced for imminent judgment, not a specific opponent.; J. E. Davison, "ANOMIA and the Question of an Antinomian Polemic in Matthew," JBL 104 (1985): 617-35; U. Luz, Matthew 1-7 (Hermeneia, rev. ed. 2007), 375-77; G. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People (T&T Clark, 1992)