2 Thessalonians 1

2 Thessalonians 1:1-12

Division 1. (2 Thessalonians 1:1-12.)In the midst of persecution, the ground of peace for the saints in the righteousness of God. The present time is characterized by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church: this the closing discourses of the Lord before His death, as John has given them to us, with the opening of the Acts, make manifest. But the presence of the Spirit convicts the world of sin, because they have not believed in Him (John 16:9): “They have both seen and hated both Me and My Father,” is His own declaration (John 15:24). On the other hand, as to the Spirit Himself, sent to represent the One whom they have driven out of it, He says again, “Whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him” (John 14:17). Thus the Spirit is not only the Witness of the rejected Christ, but Himself also rejected; and this double rejection is for opposite reasons: for infidelity is from the heart, and so all arguments suffice for it. But thus it is plain that from the beginning it was a foregone conclusion that the world was not, as still the dream is, to be converted by Christianity, and that for the Christian it would be ever a place of rejection, as for his Master, -a place of darkness, as from the absence of the Sun. So Scripture consistently treats it ever. God is now calling out of it a people for His Name, and that is all we are to expect until Christ comes again and brings the day. It is plain indeed, that the opposition of the world is not always felt to the same extent, or in the same way. On the one hand, the providence of God may avert the open assault of the enemy; on the other, the enemy has found by large experience that, according to the proverb, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church;” and that the lure is in general more successful than the open attack. Attack he will still, in disguise; and has learned how in the name of Christ, and in zeal for Him, to destroy His followers. A time, too, is at hand in which he will persuade himself that the rule no longer holds; or, rather, being moved by ungovernable fury in the knowledge that he has but a short time, he will again, and more defiantly than ever, make war upon God and upon the Lamb. But this will be the time of his complete overthrow in that day of the Lord which the apostle here assures the Thessalonians is not yet come, and the character of which he unfolds to us in this epistle. In the meanwhile the world is nevertheless in steadfast opposition to the life of faith; and in whatever form it may be, “all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Timothy 3:12). The Thessalonians were suffering manifestly for Christ; and yet the enemy would persuade them, and by means of professing Christians themselves, that these very sufferings showed that they were in those times of divine judgment upon the earth which, being in righteous recompense for iniquity, could not be upon the saints, but on their adversaries. They might be at peace, therefore, and rejoice in being witnesses for their Lord, in sufferings which but demonstrated their worthiness of the Kingdom of God, for which they suffered.

1. The apostle, associating Silas and Timothy with him as before, greets them in the same manner as in the former epistle. As children of the Father, and owning Christ their Lord, he wishes and hails them with grace and peace from the Father and the Lord. Their sufferings altered nothing as to this, -only brought in the inexpressible comfort of it for the need in which they were.
2. The apostle then testifies his thankfulness for the increase of their faith and love. Faith grew in them exceedingly, love abounded. How good it is when we have not to look back to the happier times of a first love, but the vision brightens with the days that pass, under the beams of an unchanging sun that is ever rising into a more excellent glory! “From glory to glory:” that is the apostolic summary of progress, -the heart responding to the light that more and more shines in and gladdens it. “God who made the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, for the shining forth of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:18; 2 Corinthians 4:6). This is no temporary or partial or interrupted display, as Paul speaks of it: “We all . . . are changed,” he says. It is not of a few specially favored and exalted ones that he declares such things.

He refuses to allow that of God’s will any there are among Christians who are not partakers of so great a blessing as the beginning in his soul of an eternal day. He does not, as it were, allow for retrogression, or alternation of light and darkness, of even cyclical changes of this kind. The typical Christian is he who goes on from glory to glory. If there be darkness with him, or aught but steady progress, this is the abnormal condition to be accounted for, when the path of the righteous is as the shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. But, thank God, Scripture in its description of the Christian refuses to mingle the abnormal with the normal; and thus to make, as it were, the abnormal condition a thing of course. The Thessalonians were making evident progress; and the trials through which they were passing did not hinder this: did they not rather help it? For when in Corinthians the apostle has shown us how “this treasure” of the light is in an earthen vessel, he immediately goes on to speak of trials and persecutions, and the bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus; this, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body (2 Corinthians 4:7-10). Indeed, what can there be more helpful to the soul, than to be so openly and wholly identified with Him whom the world crucified that it may still ordain for us, (as it will ordain) His cross, and throw us upon the might of His arm, and the sweet consolations of His sympathy, who was Himself despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief"? This was the case with the Thessalonians: all people knew of them that they had “another king” than the man the Roman world adored: “One, Jesus;” One whose sway was more absolute than Caesar’s, and which reached where Caesar’s could not, -to the inmost recesses of the heart; in which it yielded a delight, to those who knew it not, all but incredible. Insanity it might be, but the hold it had upon His followers was quite unmistakable; a people whose emblem was a cross, and for whom “crucified with Jesus” was a sufficient answer to the suggestion of every opposing interest. Thus they suffered; not amid plaudits, but reproach and obloquy; yet in which there was no sting to rankle, no bitterness to harden or inflame the spirit: they rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for His Name, and found in it all a fellowship with one another which sprang out of that first fellowship which was the bud enfolding every other. The apostle assures them that their sufferings for the King were but a manifest token, in the patience and faith sustaining them all through, of the righteous judgment of God, which counted them worthy of the Kingdom of God, for which also they were suffering. In Philippians 1:28, he argues similarly that the fearlessness of the disciples in view of their adversaries was an evident token of the perdition of the latter, and of their own final salvation. He who was already thus with them by the way would be found in corresponding attitude at the end of the way, both towards friends and enemies, whom His righteous judgment, as the apostle puts it here, could not possibly confound. He does not mean or say -it would be indeed out of the question for such as Paul to say -that suffering, any more than working, could give any title to acceptance on the part of the Righteous God. It was grace (as he says again to the Philippians,) that gave them even to stiffer for Christ’s sake.

But grace had righteous title to count them worthy; and what it had wrought in them it was righteousness also to acknowledge. For the Kingdom of God they were already suffering, identifying themselves and identified too with it; and the result would show that it was no deception. 3. Paul goes on to the final recompense of that day in which God’s righteous judgment will be fully displayed. He puts in the strongest way, by making a question of it, that surely for them there could be no question as to the future: for those for whom God had already shown Himself, in the support He had given them through all their afflictions at the hands of men. There is no change in the Unchangeable; and with Him whose righteousness had so manifested itself toward them in the past there could be no failure ever to distinguish between friends and enemies. It would be righteous still to recompense affliction in the day of recompense, to those who had afflicted them; while to His suffering ones there would be rest, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of His power, -the messengers who execute His will upon the ungodly, and upon those disobedient to the gospel of His grace. Whether there are two classes here, or one in two aspects, has been much disputed. Hall men are included in the judgment spoken of, then it is evident that all have not had the gospel preached to them. The judgment of the dead, as the book of Revelation exhibits it, is certainly not intended; but only that of the living when the Lord appears. Whether this also is a judgment strictly universal may he questioned; and the question cannot be answered here without a long digression. Even so. it need not be that the apostle meant to bring in all into a statement manifestly designed as consolation for the persecuted Thessalonians. Their persecutors had certainly this double character: -they knew not God, and obeyed not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The apostle speaks of some even of the Corinthian disciples as not having the knowledge of God (1 Corinthians 15:34); and when the Son of God was in the world -before men’s eyes, and preached of in their ears -“the world knew Him not.” It was an ignorance with opportunity of knowledge; though this is, in fact, the condition of all the heathen. God could not hide Himself from men that sought Him, and all ignorance is, in its essence, of the heart rather than the mind. Man proves it, when the light comes, by his rejection of it. God’s vengeance, as the text before us declares it, could not fall upon mere helpless babes: that were impossible to His nature. But here plainly their ignorance is that which makes them culpable, not such as would even palliate their condition. But the gospel! the sweet glad tidings of God, so divinely suited to all man’s need, and with its revelation of the incomparable God of our Lord Jesus Christ, made known in the depths of His nature by the love-gift of His Son -what must be the consequence, answering to the revelation of the depths of man’s own heart in it, of his disobedience to the gospel? Men, says the apostle, who shall suffer the judgment of everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might. It is not any materialistic annihilation that is declared or implied in this. Banishment from the presence of that glory which he has turned his back upon and despised, -hardening himself into a final, awful incapacity for it, -what is it but the “destruction” of one made at the first in the image of God, -and for communion with Him? Just then, on the other hand, the saints shine out in glory -their inheritance for evermore. It is the time of which we hear in Romans as “the manifestation of the sons of God.” Such by creation, but redeemed and immeasurably exalted by new creation, they now are seen as the fruit of Christ’s work, their glory His glory: He is glorified in them, and marvelled at in all who have believed; -and believed the same testimony which had been given to the Thessalonians. These poor persecuted followers of Christ, who now need faith so much amid the trials surrounding them, will then be the marvel of the inhabitants of earth, and make men marvel at the grace bestowed on them. The apostle closes with a prayer that they may now in the present time exhibit a character which shall answer to such a calling as is here shown to be theirs. He prays that God may count them worthy of it: that is, that He in the day of account may adjudge them to have walked as those governed by it; for this end, therefore, that God might accomplish in them all that was in His heart to do; which faith indeed would effect, as His instrument, but with a power, therefore, more than human. So would the name of Christ be glorified in them already; and they too in Him, for whom it was the highest glory to live, to suffer, and to die. It was the grace of God, and of the Lord Jesus bestowed upon them.