1 Thessalonians 5

1 Thessalonians 5:12-28

Division 4. (1 Thessalonians 5:12-28.)Ways accordant. The epistle closes, according to the general manner, with exhortation to practical conduct suited to the place of blessing they enjoyed as partakers of this blessed hope. The doctrine which is according to godliness, as the apostle reminds Titus, must be given practical manifestation in the lives of its professors. And while the Thessalonians were in reality shining examples of the power of Christianity, yet no one of us was ever beyond the need of exhortation. Where the heart is right with God, the details of the life may yet need to be set right. Things may not be in due proportion and balance; and thus one truth may be bulking so large as to interfere with the right appreciation of other truth. Individuality may be stiffened into a false independence, or corporate responsibilities be made to crowd out individuality.

And, moreover, while it is true that we are instructed as to principles, rather than governed by a code of laws, yet the plain single precept has its own value and importance, -the principle being thus exemplified in its application, the abstract prevented from becoming merely an abstraction, and brought into the sphere of every-day practice. The exhortation here is brief, and in brief sentences; and much of it requires no exposition, little comment such as suits our purpose now.

1. The apostle begins with urging them to recognize the Lord’s working in those who, in the activity of love, were laboring among them. Leaders there surely were and are: those in whom might be discerned, not mere human energy but divine; who were to be followed, therefore, because, and as, they followed Christ. He has no idea of any blind or servile following, -of any recognition of unspiritual men in spiritual place, or invested with power by man where man had none, and God had bestowed none. The responsibility pressed upon them was one which, by the terms expressed, appealed to them as free, spiritual, and responsible, subject to Christ alone, although He may and does have those through whom He works, and whom, so far as they are this, the saints are gladly to recognize, and submit to them. It is the very opposite of a clergy constituted by man.

Laboring and taking the lead in the Lord, their responsibility is to Him, and their authority is of Him wholly; and thus their admonitions have true spiritual weight. As with the word of God itself, admonition will of necessity have large place in their appeals, -leading in a path so unique and separate from all that the natural man craves and follows, and in which the weakness and folly that still cling to us become so painfully apparent. Admonition is thus in an eminent way a service of love; all the more because of the pain that must be in it, when truly this. As Paul says to the Ephesians, that he “ceased not night and day to admonish each one of them with tears” (Acts 20:31). What need is implied here! and what earnestness to meet it! Well may he exhort the Thessalonians now to esteem such very highly in love for their works, sake.

No fitting response could be but love to love. 2. There follow general moral exhortations; at the head of which comes that to peace. It is true that sometimes one must contend: we are to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3); but the apostle is here contemplating no such case; and alas, the strife of self-interest is that which too commonly disturbs the people of God; the sure sign of the allowance of lusts which show that Christ is not the present satisfaction of the soul. Real contention for the faith will be because Christ is before it, as surely as the other betrays His absence. The atmosphere of His presence is indeed peace; but conflict may be needed that that peace may be enjoyed; if it be rebellion that has launched us into it, it is not we who have broken the peace, but those who have made it impossible to retain it without treason to our Lord. But the peace which is the result of communion will be that which maintains divine order, which is alone consistent with it. Obedience to the will of God is harmony with all around, as sin is discord, none the less but more because of the multitude that swell it. When the concord of human wills against the divine shall seem to be great enough to have conquered a harmony without God and in defiance of Him, then judgment will be at hand, complete and final, and peace will be the effect of established righteousness. But while the disorderly are to be admonished, it is of importance also to remember those who languish in the strife continually going on between the evil and the good, a strife from which it is impossible to deliver them. The difficulties of life perplex and dismay them. They maintain a feeble and spiritless testimony, which may lapse into more or less compliance with that against which it seems vain to struggle. Here it needs much discernment often to distinguish between weakness and wilfulness; and indeed no strict line can be drawn between conditions of this kind. Weakness is often the cover and excuse for wilfulness; and admonition has constantly more or less to be blended with comfort. For with the abundant provision God has made for us, the wealth of promises, the fulfilment of which is secured by all the unchangeablenesss of Him who has made them, -drafts on heaven’s treasury certain to be honored whenever presented, -nothing but unbelief can leave us poverty-stricken as we too often are; and what does unbelief mean but in fact a struggle between our wills and God?

Yet the order -“grace and truth" -must be carefully remembered in dealing with cases of this nature. Where there is faint-heartedness, the soul must be revived and steadied by divine grace, in order to be able to act in accordance with divine principles. Yet here also no separation between these two can be maintained: grace is no grace apart from truth, and will never consent to separation; while, God being what He is, truth without grace could not be even truth, in any proper presentation of it. “Comfort the faint-hearted, sustain the weak,” implies, therefore, a difference between these which is quite intelligible. Real weakness there may be, where there is not faint-heartedness. There may be no tendency to give way to the pressure of circumstances or of evil, and yet weakness which claims the ministry of sympathetic love. “Be patient towards all” reminds us of how we all are (alas, how much!) the cause of trial to one another. All the more because we are brought so closely together, and the spiritual tie that unites us for eternity gives a seriousness to everything that forgets and ignores it. Yet, failing as we all are, how should the apprehension of this make us tender as to the faults of another; especially when we realize, as we are often made to do, how prone we are to misjudge, -how easily we find the mote in our brother’s eye, while in fact a distorting “beam” is in our own. The exercise of patience is thus as much in our own interest as in our brother’s; and patience becomes a matter of justice quite as much as of mercy. Even if there be plain evil, good is that which alone will overcome it; in any case we are not to return evil for it, but to pursue always what is good; and that not only towards one another, but towards all. We are not permitted in such things to have one rule of conduct towards those inside and another towards those outside the Christian circle. We are not to have one face in the Church and another in the world. The love of God goes out to the world; and with the reflection of that divine love we are to love it too; all the more because we know the real and immense distance which the grace of God has made between us, and the certainty that as to those who remain in it, eternity will only confirm and increase that distance. Of that love of God from which they must break away to share the portion of the devil and his angels, we have the happiness and the responsibility of being representatives. But for all this we need strength; and the “joy of the Lord is strength.” It being the joy of the Lord, and Christ being always that, the result must be that we are privileged and under obligation to rejoice always. There is not a moment in which He is not Master, and in which all circumstances are not perfectly under His control. We, as it were, uncrown Him therefore, if we do not rejoice. That we are completely dependent on Him is nothing to be deducted from the blessedness of this, whatever it imply as to weakness on our own part. The unceasing prayer to which the apostle here enjoins us is, of course, the confession of this; but if the expression of need, it is no less the expression of faith in Him, the incense of whose acceptability is in our prayers; so that in everything we can be bidden to give thanks also, as what is the will of God in Christ Jesus regarding us. The abundant provision that we have in Him -the perfect assurance of omnipotent love -shows indeed what He would have, who has given Christ for us.

Can there be in this sunshine a fleck of inconsistency or mutability at all? There can be but one answer; and in this sense also we are “filled into all the fulness of God.” Thus joy and thanksgiving are the fitting accompaniments with which the apostle connects that prayer by which we draw out of the infinite fulness, -the exhortation in which we hear Christ’s own voice appealing to us: “Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.” The apostle closes this exhortation with one which on the one hand exemplifies the abundance of the provision God has made for us, while on the other, it reminds us, how sadly, of the folly to which we are prone; and that, alas! most of all with regard to His choicest gifts: “Quench not the Spirit,” he says, “despise not prophecies.” The thought of quenching the Spirit manifestly contemplates the Spirit under the figure of fire; and we cannot but think of Pentecost with its divided tongues of fire, the manifestation in the individual of the heavenly power which had come amongst men, and come to speak with a divine message to all the families of men, divided by sin, and by the judgment upon it. The Gift, and the free giving of God were thus to be manifested by means of gifts bestowed upon those who were themselves recipients of it. But this enlightening of others was in this way a matter of responsibility on the part of those thus gifted: not in fact a limited class among Christians, except indeed as they themselves create the limit, as so many do. Here in fact is one form of quenching the Spirit, when instead of ministering one to another each according to the gift he has received (1 Peter 4:10) that which the Spirit has given is ignored, the ministry that love urges to is suppressed, and the Church suffers, deprived of how much of the blessing which might be hers, and of the ability to testify of the grace that she has learned. Certainly there are special gifts, -“evangelists, pastors and teachers,” as the Word declares; but this not to restrain the manifestation of the same Spirit in others; and especially as to prophecy, of which the apostle speaks in this connection here; his own injunction is, “Covet to prophesy;” and his encouragement to it, that “ye may all prophesy” (1 Corinthians 14:1; 1 Corinthians 14:4-5; 1 Corinthians 14:24; 1 Corinthians 14:30; 1 Corinthians 14:39). This was not necessarily the utterance of predictions, as is too commonly imagined, but that speaking out of the fulness of the Spirit what would be thus the word of God Himself, the “oracle” for His people (1 Peter 4:11). This involved, not so much what is ordinarily called “gift,” as spirituality -that nearness to God which makes the “man of God,” and one to whom He can therefore communicate His mind. But this might be done in the simple quotation of a text of Scripture, or in “five words,” -perhaps more likely so than in a long discourse, but whose testimony would be felt in heart and conscience. The effect on “one that believeth not, or one unlearned,” entering in among those so engaged is that “he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: and thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so, falling down on his face, he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth” (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). But this overflow of the divine fulness which is in all the saints today as much as in apostolic times, is not limited as to time and place, as Philip’s daughters who were prophetesses show, who certainly did not prophesy in the assembly.

How blessed to know that such fulness is really in us all, and that the apostle urges that it should overflow, the hindrances to this being always in ourselves, the blocking of outlet to an illimitable spring, of which we may be quite or very little conscious. In how many ways may this be done! but if out of the belly there flows not the living water, it is certain that there must be some hindrance for which we are responsible, if the Lord’s words be the simple, always verifiable words they must be (John 7:38). The figure here is not of water, but of fire; and we may quench it in one another or in ourselves. The burning words which seek for utterance may consume us inwardly as finding none; or on another’s lips may merely irritate the conscience which is not duly exercised. Prophesying may in either way be despised and the Spirit quenched. What would our assemblies be, if we were delivered from these resistant forces, or even duly exercised about them! if the lethargy too often oppressing us were treated as our common responsibility, and we heard in our souls the Voice: “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from among the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” But there is responsibility upon another side; and so the apostle continues: “but prove all things, hold fast the right.” Not everything that assumes divine authority for itself can be received as such. The Word must for us try everything, -the written communication be held superior to the prophet’s voice: for here, alas, man’s frailty and fallibility are to be remembered; while, moreover, we are to take heed, because “many false prophets are gone out into the world.” Thus the Christian as a possessor of the truth is held to his responsibility to know and to maintain the truth. He cannot be deceived, except as he permits himself to be deceived; for he is not a child of darkness, but of the light: he has but to maintain his place as such, and be subject to that Spirit which has come to be in him the Witness for his absent Lord. To Him the various forms of evil, however specious and alluring, are known fully. “The wise” (with that fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom) -“the wise shall understand.” Apart from such fear, which is not always to be found, alas, in the true Christian, we walk exposed to the enemy. Satan may assume the form of an angel of light; but we are not to be ignorant of his devices. Yet the whole armor of God is needed, that we may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 3. Having thus exhorted his beloved Thessalonians, he closes with a prayer for them that they might be, completely sanctified, or set apart to God in every faculty, whether of mind or body. Nothing less than this could he desire for them. Nothing less than this are we to tolerate in ourselves. What other can the presence of the indwelling Spirit imply? Is the house in which He dwells to be other than all His own?

Power, too, certainly is His to accomplish in us all the will of God, whatever may be our own infirmity, or the opposition (always maintained in Scripture) between the Spirit and the flesh. Thus alone are we made to realize our full responsibility in every failure. So provided, we can never plead the power of that which is against us, nor even the presence in us (true as that may be) of inherited sinfulness, -of a nature still adverse to divine things. We have still such a nature, -instincts that would betray us to the enemy, and lead us indefinitely far away from all that is of God and good; and whoever does not know this does not know himself. But to suppose, on the other hand, that nature compels to obedience to it, is to ignore that which makes man what he is. We may act contrary to our nature, as well as follow it; and in the case of our fallen nature are responsible to do so; he who excuses his sins by his nature cannot justify himself in the court of his own conscience as to one thing that he has ever done.

The Spirit is not, in fact, hindered by our nature; and he who walks in the Spirit shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. But what then? Does not this lead to a doctrine of perfection such as in various forms is held by so many Christians in our day? It does indeed set perfection before us; as does the apostle here. It allows no toleration of any practice short of this, even though explicit in its acknowledgment of an evil nature in us. Nor are there two levels permitted to us as Christians; so that, as some put it, to an imperfect man, of damaged moral powers, the law of Christ, in contrast with the law of Moses, requires no faultlessness, but only “perfect,” that is, pure “love to God through Christ.” No, Christ Himself, the highest and most perfect standard possible, is the one only standard for every Christian: “He who saith that he abideth in Him ought himself also to walk even as He walked” (1 John 2:6). Yet who is there then who has attained this? Let Christian perfection be put only as Scripture puts it, as the full, perfect walk of Christ Himself, who will step forth and claim to have attained this? Could we find one that did so, how would the common consent of Christians regard such a claim? Rightly as we judge ourselves for all shortcoming, yet, alas, we do come short; and we must neither lower the standard, nor plead a damaged moral nature to excuse ourselves. The sanctification of which the apostle speaks here is, of course, that practical devotedness of life and walk to God which continually develops with the expansion of spiritual intelligence in the things of God. There is another that underlies it as the blood underlay the oil in the priestly anointing. Of this the epistle to the Hebrews speaks. We are set apart to God by the blood of Christ, as those made His by that which has purged us from our sins to serve the living God. Only on the basis of this can we be set apart, then, for this service. Besides this we must have a new nature as in new birth, and the indwelling of the Spirit of God, that there may be freedom and power.

Of this last the epistle to the Romans speaks (Romans 7:1-25; Romans 8:1-39). Here it is the setting apart in detail of the whole man, in all his practical life, that the apostle prays for in behalf of the Thessalonians. It is the God of peace whom he prays to sanctify them wholly, -the God to whom peace essentially belongs, as absolutely supreme, -incapable of being disturbed by that which, while it may even rage against Him, is yet entirely under His control, and made to serve and carry out His everlasting purpose. But He is the God of peace also as the Maker of it; to be with whom is to have all things thus at peace with us, -nay, working together for good: “if God be for us, who can be against us?” -which may indeed seem almost the opposite of the truth in a hostile world, and with the Cross the banner under which we are gathered. Faith, however, is in the invisible, and waits for its full and glorious justification at a future time; patience must have its perfect work, though in having this we are made perfect and entire, lacking in nothing (James 1:4). The Cross is the token of the world’s enmity, but of God for us, and revealed as the God of peace, through Him who has made peace for us by the blood of His cross. In this way we are at once reconciled and sanctified: the God of peace sanctifies us through the peace that He has made for us through the work of His Son. That peace, accepted and enjoyed, makes us His in the inmost depths of our being; and becomes thus in result a peace with Him which is the reconciliation to Him of all our faculties. Yet there are hindrances in us, and in the world around us, which call for the rousing of all our energies to overcome them. From these we need to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, while it is God who worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. It is a conflict in which the help of the might of God is needed, even against ourselves. So the apostle mingles together prayer and exhortation here. The prayer in its first part is that God would sanctify them wholly; the last word being one which refers to final condition, -holoteleis, all-perfectly, or all-maturely. He adds to this, “and may your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The word for “whole” here is holokleron, and is expressive of quantity, as the former word of quality. Every faculty of spirit, soul and body comes into the idea: no part is omitted in his desire for them. Spirit and soul and body make up the man. All that pertains to these -every faculty -he prays may be kept blameless (here the quality of the keeping is expressed) in the power of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. A suited word with which to close an epistle which has been so much occupied with the thought of this coming, the goal of Christian hope.

It is hope that encourages endurance; while we must remember the solemn reality of account to be given in His presence of what has been the course here. A slavish fear would be indeed an unsuitable accompaniment of the thought of His coming who will at that very time manifest for us the fulness of His salvation in bringing us into full likeness to Himself; but the thought of account given at such a time to such a Saviour can have nothing but sanctifying power for the soul. Spirit and soul and body are His alike: we owe Him all; and Paul names them all to claim them all for Him. They are the constituent parts that make up man; and it should be clear, as it is consistent also with all other scripture, that man is thus defined as a tri-unity which proclaims his link with all creation, and himself the uniting centre of all. The vegetable takes up the dust of the earth, to inspire it with a living principle which raises it above itself, and becomes in it a principle of organization, -a prophecy of what various forms to come! The animal follows the vegetable; and here there is not only life, but a living soul; and with this, organization is carried further; sensation appears, and voluntary motion; the vegetable functions are retained, but developed further, and perfected; with the type also of bodily structure, though the bodily form may still receive further development. And now the crown is put upon the arch: the union of all lower existences with the higher nature of the angel is accomplished in man; in whom spirit is added to soul, and the image of God is in this way reached. I may repeat here what I have said elsewhere, that — “Here an evolution there is, and a true one, not what has usurped its name; an ‘unfolding’ of a divine plan, in which there is, of course, progress and development, upon principles which are uniform throughout. Looking at organic being, we have three stages of progress clearly marked off from one another; the vegetable; the animal, which (in Genesis 1:1-31) is marked off as a new ‘creation;’ man, just as distinctly from the mere animal, as a creation also. “Each of these contains what has preceded it, with an addition . . . There is economy of design, which at the same time gives unity to the whole; while there is advance on the part of that also in which this unity is shown. The mineral absorbed into the vegetable can scarcely be recognized any more as mineral; and it is worked up into still higher forms as the ‘flesh’ of animal and of man. The life of the vegetable is in the animal so characterized by the soul with which it is now united, that ‘soul’ and life become, in one aspect of soul, but equivalent terms. While the animal soul becomes again in man possessed of higher faculties than it ever had in the animal, and thus the fit companion and help-meet of the spirit. “Not only so: we can go even beyond this as led of the blessed book which God has given us, and after the present life see a similar advance made still. For, as soon as he leaves the body, the saint, though still having soul, is now spoken of (as never while in the body) as a ‘spirit;’ and when he takes up the body again, this is now no longer a ’natural’ -which is, literally, a ‘psychical’ body (a body characterized by the soul, or psyche) -but a spiritual body, (a body characterized by the governing spirit,) the body of the resurrection. “Here is development, then, all along the line: of that there can be no question. God evolves (or unfolds) in this way the wondrous possibilities which lie wrapped up in what He has first produced. Here is true evolution, not the false thing of the evolutionist; but how is it accomplished? Is the soul developed out of the life of the plant? or the spirit developed out of the soul of the animal? Not so according to Scripture: at each step God must come in, and does; soul and spirit are separate creations. And how does the mineral rise into the plant structure? or this into the body of the animal? or the soul develop in man spiritual characters unknown in the animal?

The answer of Scripture is, they do not raise themselves; they are raised: the development is in each case accomplished by the descent (if we may say so,) of a higher principle to unite itself to the lower. The lower is raised by the humbling of the higher to it, and the shadow of Christ is here already unmistakably seen in nature: the seal is set upon this method as divine. “We need not wonder: ‘all things were created by Him, and for Him,’ and this is His stamp on what He would approve to us as current money in the realm of thought. Why should not the figure of the King appear on what is His? So is all nature, in fact, a witness for Him, a glorious interweaving of spiritual parables, which, if we had more ability to read them, would indeed transfigure the visible with the brightness of the unseen.” Scripture distinctly teaches in spirit, soul, and body a tri-unity of man. Spirit is that which makes him what an angel is, a son of God, and in his Father’s image: for God is the Father of spirits (Hebrews 12:9). To have said, “Father of souls” would have made Him Father of the beasts: for the beast is, as well as man, a “living soul,” and that because a living soul is in it (Genesis 1:30). The common version of our Bible obscures the last passage by rendering “life” instead of “living soul,” which it puts, however, in the margin; of course, a “living life” would have no sense. In other passages the word is uniformly translated “creature” (or once, “thing,”) when applied to the beast: a meaning which does not belong to it. Yet the corresponding Greek word (psuche) is rightly rendered “souls,” (in Revelation 8:9; Revelation 16:3,) where certainly animals are spoken of. On the other hand, “spirit” is never ascribed to the beast in Scripture, except it be once in Ecclesiastes 3:21, where the Septuagint and Targums are against it, and where, at any rate, we have the mere questioning of one seeking by human reasoning to penetrate where revelation alone is competent to lead, the result being that he is left in utter perplexity. This is the very theme of Ecclesiastes, the insufficiency of human reason, as in Job the failure of human righteousness. The spirit of man, as we are told by the apostle, is that by which alone human things are known; and thus it is the essential characteristic of man in the terrestrial creation. It is identified in Scripture with mind or understanding, and thus with moral as well as mental judgment; which certainly the beast has not. The attempt of the materialist therefore to make it only the breath of life which is in the nostrils, founded as it is upon the identity of the word for breath and spirit in both Greek and Hebrew, may be dismissed as the uttermost folly of a puerile imagination; which indeed we need but the passage before us to set aside: for what could be meant by the sanctification of the “breath of life?” The soul, on the other hand, is, according to the same word of inspiration, the seat of the emotions, affections, desires, appetites, the link between the spirit and the body, and so practically at least the life of the body. In man it links itself with his higher nature, and is permeated with the light of human intelligence, sharing with the spirit immortality. Yet apart from this it characterizes, as is evident, the instinctive, appetite-governed life of the beast; to which indeed fallen man may in measure sink down: the natural man is just the “psychic” or sensual, “soul-governed” man. with an awful shadow over him as that, which the beast has not: that, for him, being degradation, which in the beast is its unfallen nature (1 Corinthians 2:14, Gk.).*
The devotion (as we ordinarily say) of the whole man to God is thus the measure of practical sanctification. Nor is this asceticism, or real self-denial even; except as there is indeed in us still an old self, which for the true Christian has lost its authority. A life to God is what is really life, with all the power and joy of spiritual vigor in it; and to seek to hold back any part of our being from this, is to prefer death to life, mutilation to complete, all-round capacity. Who that can be called Christian can deny this? Asceticism is an affront to God, -is itself a crippling of powers that belong to Him; to live to God is to live in no convent gloom, but in the full brightness of unhindered glory, -in His light to see light. It is in the joy of the Lord alone that strength is found to serve Him in whose presence is fulness of joy, and at whose right hand are pleasures for evermore. The coming of the Lord Jesus is that which will introduce us into the perfect blessedness of this; and so in the power of this hope shall we be preserved blameless on the way to this consummation of eternal happiness. Yet the apostle’s hope is in Him whose purpose as to His people cannot fail. “Faithful is He who calleth you, who also will do it.” We are upon the shoulders of the Good Shepherd; and if there were final failure, it would be His strength that failed. That would be as impossible for Him, as for us without Him success would be impossible. The apostle speaks in the consciousness of his own need. He, so much above us all in knowledge and in devotedness, is nevertheless conscious of the help derived from the prayers of his brethren. He would have them also greet one another with the warm and open expression of Christian love. He is earnest that all should hear the epistle he had written to them (assured as he was of who was, in fact, the Writer of it) and not simply to leaders as the depositories of truth, the comfort and responsibility of which belonged to all alike. Nor, where inspired Scripture was in question, were the mass called to “hear the Church,” but the Church rather to hear the apostles. Thus he adjures them by the Lord that all should hear. He closes with the usual valediction, that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ might be with them.