Jesus told the nation of Israel that the Kingdom of God would be taken away from them in Matthew 21v43 and given to a nation that would bear the fruit of the Kingdom.
In this rather 'Out of the box' discussion, we look at the idea of the Restainer in 2 Thessalonians 2v5-8 in relation to the 'man of lawlessness'. Why did the Apostle Paul not tell us who the restrainer was? Did he hide the identity of the restrainer as the Roman empire because he would have been prosecuted for sedition/insurrection because he said that the 'restrainer' would be taken out of the way?

It opened up the question of 'When did the Roman Empire actually finish? Constantinople the 2nd Rome fell in 1053 followed by the Ottoman empire. Then the Roman empire was moved to Moscow, and finally the Roman empire fell in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution and the Romanov family.
These are some 'out of the box' musings to consider the Byzantine empire in relation to Romans 13 and if Paul saw that the Roman empire as the restrainer of 2 Thessalonians 2v5-8 would convert to Christ. However, Western culture came out of the Western Roman empire (Rome) in the context of 'Christendom' and today the West has politically, morally and spiritually returned to the Greco-Roman pagan culture it came out of. What does submission look like to a pagan humanist Government then?