The Expositor's Bible: The Epistles to the Thessalonians

The very existence of such questions, however, warns us against mistaken estimates of Scripture. People sometimes say, if there be one point uncertain, our Bible is gone. Well, there are points uncertain; there are points, too, in regard to which an ordinary Christian can only have a kind of second-hand assurance; and this of the genuineness of the pastoral Epistles is one. There is no doubt a very good case to be made out for them by a scholar; but not a case which makes doubt impossible. Yet our Bible is not taken away. The uncertainty touches, at most, the merest fringe of apostolic teaching; nothing that Paul thought of any consequence, or that is of any consequence to us, but is abundantly unfolded in documents which are beyond the reach of doubt. It is not the letter, even of the New Testament, which quickens, but the Spirit; and the Spirit exerts its power through these Christian documents as a whole, as it does through no other documents in the world. When we are perplexed as to whether an apostle wrote this or that, let us consider that the most important books in the Bible – the Gospels and the Psalms – do not name their authors at all. What in the Old Testament can compare with the Psalter? Yet these sweet songs are practically anonymous. What can be more certain than that the Gospels bring us into contact with a real character – the Son of Man, the Saviour of sinners? Yet we know their authors only through a tradition, a tradition indeed of weight and unanimity that can hardly be over-estimated; but simply a tradition, and not an inward mark such as Paul here sets on his letter for the Thessalonians. "The Church's one Foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord;" as long as we are actually brought into connection with Him through Scripture, we must be content to put up with the minor uncertainties which are inseparable from a religion which has had a birth and a history.

But to return to the text. The Epistle closes, as the Apostle's custom is, with a benediction: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all." Grace is pre-eminently a Pauline word; it is found alike in the salutations with which Paul addresses his churches, and in the benedictions with which he bids them farewell; it is the beginning and the end of his gospel; the element in which Christians live, and move, and have their being. He excludes no one from his blessing; not even those who had been walking disorderly, and setting at nought the tradition they had received from him; their need is the greatest of all. If we had imagination enough to bring vividly before us the condition of one of these early churches, we would see how much is involved in a blessing like this, and what sublime confidence it displays in the goodness and faithfulness of our Lord. The Thessalonians, a few months ago, had been heathens; they had known nothing of God and His Son; they were living still in the midst of a heathen population, under the pressure of heathen influences both on thought and conduct, beset by numberless temptations; and if they were mindful of the country from which they had come forth, not without opportunity to return. Paul would willingly have stayed with them to be their pastor and teacher, their guide and their defender, but his missionary calling made this impossible. After the merest introduction to the gospel, and to the new life to which it calls those who receive it, they had to be left to themselves. Who should keep them from falling? Who should open their eyes to understand the ideal which the Christian is summoned to work out in his life? Amid their many enemies, where could they look for a sufficient and ever-present ally? The Apostle answers these questions when he writes, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all." Although he has left them, they are not really alone. The free love of God, which visited them at first uncalled, will be with them still, to perfect the work it has begun. It will beset them behind and before; it will be a sun and a shield to them, a light and a defence. In all their temptations, in all their sufferings, in all their moral perplexities, in all their despondencies, it will be sufficient for them. There is not any kind of succour which a Christian needs which is not to be found in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Here, then, we bring to a close our study of the two earliest Epistles of St. Paul. They have given us a picture of the primitive apostolic preaching, and of the primitive Christian Church. That preaching embodied revelations, and it was the acceptance of these revelations that created the new society. The Apostle and his fellow-evangelists came to Thessalonica telling of Jesus, who had died and risen again, and who was about to return to judge the living and the dead. They told of the impending wrath of God, that wrath which was revealed already against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and was to be revealed in all its terrors when the Lord came. They preached Jesus as the Deliverer from the coming wrath, and gathered, through faith in Him, a Church living in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ. To an uninterested spectator, the work of Paul and his companions would have seemed a very little thing; he would not have discovered its originality and promise; he would hardly have counted upon its permanence. In reality, it was the greatest and most original thing ever seen in the world. That handful of men and women in Thessalonica was a new phenomenon in history; life had attained to new dimensions in them; it had heights and depths in it, a glory and a gloom, of which the world had never dreamed before; all moral ideas were magnified, as it were, a thousandfold; an intensity of moral life was called into being, an ardent passion for goodness, a spiritual fear and hope, which made them capable of all things. The immediate effects, indeed, were not unmixed; in some minds not only was the centre of gravity shifted, but the balance utterly upset; the future and unseen became so real to them, or were asserted to be so real, that the present and its duties were totally neglected. But with all misapprehensions and moral disorders, there was a new experience; a change so complete and profound that it can only be described as a new creation. Possessed by Christian faith, the soul discovered new powers and capacities; it could combine "much affliction" with "joy of the Holy Ghost"; it could believe in inexorable judgment and in infinite mercy; it could see into the depths of death and life; it could endure suffering for Christ's sake with brave patience; it had been lost, but had found itself again. The life that had once been low, dull, vile, hopeless, uninteresting, became lofty, vast, intense. Old things had passed away; behold, all things had become new.

The Church is much older now than when this Epistle was written; time has taught her many things; Christian men have learned to compose their minds and to curb their imaginations; we do not lose our heads nowadays, and neglect our common duties, in dreaming on the world to come. Let us say that this is gain; and can we say further that we have lost nothing which goes some way to counterbalance it? Are the new things of the gospel as real to us, and as commanding in their originality, as they were at the first? Do the revelations which are the sum and substance of the gospel message, the warp and woof of apostolic preaching, bulk in our minds as they bulk in this letter? Do they enlarge our thoughts, widen our spiritual horizon, lift to their own high level, and expand to their own scale, our ideas about God and man, life and death, sin and holiness, things visible and invisible? Are we deeply impressed by the coming wrath and by the glory of Christ? Have we entered into the liberty of those whom the revelation of the world to come enabled to emancipate themselves from this? These are the questions that rise in our minds as we try to reproduce the experience of an early Christian church. In those days, everything was of inspiration; now, so much is of routine. The words that thrilled the soul then have become trite and inexpressive; the ideas that gave new life to thought appear worn and commonplace. But that is only because we dwell on the surface of them, and keep their real import at a distance from the mind. Let us accept the apostolic message in all its simplicity and compass; let us believe, and not merely say or imagine we believe, that there is a life beyond death, revealed in the Resurrection, a judgment to come, a wrath of God, a heavenly glory; let us believe in the infinite significance, and in the infinite difference, of right and wrong, of holiness and sin; let us realise the love of Christ, who died for our sins, who calls us to fellowship with God, who is our Deliverer from the coming wrath; let these truths fill, inspire, and dominate our minds, and for us, too, faith in Christ will be a passing from death unto life.

1

The date cannot be precisely assigned, but it is not later than 54 A.D., and cannot be so early as 52. Most scholars say 54. It was written in Corinth.

2

With Godet and P. Schmidt; against Ellicott.

3

Life of Bishop Hannington.

4

The present participle here is simply equivalent to a substantive.

5

Much has been made, by writers who wish to trace the spiritual development of St. Paul, of the absence from his earliest epistles of explicit teaching on the atonement and on justification by faith. But we have to remember that the Epistles to the Thessalonians, like most of his writings, were incidental; their topics were provided, and limited, by special circumstances. The doctrinal matter in 1 Thessalonians was not even the principal thing; the λοιπὸν in iv. 1 shows that by the end of chapter iii. the Apostle has done what he intended to do when he began; even the paragraphs on the Parousia are casual and supplementary. But if we consider that Paul had now been preaching for perhaps seventeen years, and that within a few months he delivered to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xv. 1-4) the one gospel known alike to him and to the twelve, – the gospel which had for its fundamental article "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures," – we shall see how unreal it is to exclude this doctrine from his evangelistic work at Thessalonica. No doubt there, as at Corinth, he delivered this "first of all." – See also chap. v. 10.

6

So Alford renders δυνάμενοι ἐν βάρει εἶναι.

7

νήπιος always includes the idea of being undeveloped, unripe, and has often a shade of censure in Paul.

8

Weiss renders εἰς τέλος "im höchsten Masse."

9

Observe the aorist ἔφθασεν.

10

Τίς γὰρ … ἢ οὐχὶ καὶ ὑμεῖς;

11

Ἄρτι is naturally taken with ἐλθόντος: as by Ellicott.

12

Yet see Jude 14, quoting from Enoch.

13

Still I do not feel quite certain (in spite of 2 Cor. ii. 11) that πλεονεκτεῖν and πλεονεξία in St. Paul can refer to anything but covetousness. This is the view taken by Schmidt, who refers to the combination, in 1 Cor. v. 10, vi. 10, of πλεονέκτης with ἅρπαξ and κλέπτης. If it is correct, ἐν τῷ πράγματι must be translated "in business"; "dass in geschäftlichen Dingen Keiner ausschreite und seinen Bruder ausbeute." Certainly the combination of sensuality and avarice as the cardinal vices of heathendom is characteristic of the Apostle.

14

See 1 Cor. xii. 24; vii. 35; Acts xiii. 50; xvii. 12.

15

There is a certain difficulty about the connection of the words in the last clause; it would probably be more correct to render them: Even so them also that are fallen asleep will God through Jesus bring with Him.

16

It is easy to state the inference too strongly. Paul tell us expressly that he did not know when Christ would come; he could not therefore know that he himself would have died long before the Advent; and it was inevitable, therefore, that he should include himself here in the category of such as might live to see it.

17

On this subject see Bruce's Kingdom of God, chap. xii.

18

"The times (χρόνοι) are, in Augustine's words, 'ipsa spatia temporum,' and these contemplated merely under the aspect of their duration, over which the Church's history should extend; but the seasons (καιροὶ) are the joints or articulations in these times, the critical epoch-making periods foreordained of God (καιροὶ προτεταγμένοι, Acts xvii. 26; cf. Augustine, Conf., xi., 13: 'Deus operator temporum'); when all that has been slowly, and often without observation, ripening through long ages is mature and comes to the birth in grand decisive events, which constitute at once the close of one period and the commencement of another." – Trench, Synonyms, p. 211.

19

Rev. xvi. 15.

20

Those "who toil among you and preside over you and admonish you" are identified by Wight (Composition of the Four Gospels, p. 12) as "the catechists, the presbyters, and evangelists." The third case is certainly doubtful; and the fact that the article is used only once makes the whole attempt at such a discrimination of officials illegitimate.

21

The contrast drawn by Dr. Hatch in his Hibbert Lectures between the early Christian prophet and the modern Christian preacher – the "rhetorical religionist," as he calls him – is, like every other contrast in that notable book, strained till it becomes utterly false. It would not be true to say that there was no difference between the prophet and the preacher; but it would be far truer than to say that there was no likeness. The prophet was one who spoke, as Paul tells us, edification, exhortation, and comfort; and as that, we may hope, is what most preachers try to do, the ideal of the callings is identical. And it is only by their ideals that they ought to be compared or criticised.

22

Is it a fair inference from these words that the Epistle was to be delivered to the elders or ruling body in the church? In other places the Apostle writes, "Greet one another."

23

"It seems hopeless to find an intelligible meaning for ἐφ' ὑμᾶς in connection with ἐπιστεύθη. Apparently, as conjectured by Markland, ἐπιστεύθη is a primitive corruption of ἐπιστώθη, suggested by the preceding πιστεύσασιν, as well as by the familiarity of πιστεύω and its prima-facie appropriateness to μαρτύριον. The reference is probably to vv. 4, 5: the Christian testimony of suffering for the faith had been confirmed and sealed upon the Thessalonians. Cf. 1 Cor. i. 6: Καθὼς τὸ μαρτύριον τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐβεβαιώθη ἐν ὑμῖν; also Ps. xciii. (xcii.) 4, 5: Θαυμαστὸς ἐν ὑπσηλοῖς ὁ Κύριος· τὰ μαρτύριά σου ἐπιστώθησαν σφόδρα; and for an analogous use of πιστοῦσθαι followed by ἐπὶ with the accusative, 1 Chr. xvii. 23; 2 Chr. i. 9." – F.J.A. Hort.

24

For an excellent and instructive study of the relations of Jewish and Christian eschatology, see Stanton's Jewish and Christian Messiah.

25

The quotations are from Cox's Salvator Mundi, 13th Edition, pp. 128-9. When the time import of ἀιώνιος is in view, many writers render it, like Dr. Cox, age-long, intending thereby to signify that æonian time has an end; its finitude, in fact, is the one thing of which Dr. Cox consents to think. But the very point of the meaning is that no end is visible. Æonian time is time that fills the mind and imagination to the furthest horizon and beyond it; there is no ulterior prospect.

26

There are indications of such a thing in various words of Jesus. "Many false prophets shall arise, and shall lead many astray. And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold." – Matt. xxiv. 11f. "There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect." – Matt. xxiv. 24. "When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" – Luke xviii. 8. What answers to these in St. Paul's writings we see in Acts xx. 29f.; Eph. iv. 14; 1 Tim. iv. 1. But these passages belong to the very latest years in his life, and they are not connected with any such anticipations as are characteristic of the Thessalonian Apocalypse. The history of the Church, as Paul foresaw it, did not include in itself a phenomenon which could be described as ἡ ἀποστασία.

27

A conspectus of the historical interpretations, most of which are really applications, of this passage, is given in most commentaries. The fullest is Lünemann's, which is followed by Alford. Farrar's Appendix is briefer.

28

For the verb in the singular, and its import, compare 1st Epistle iii. 11.

29

Cf. 1 Tim. v. 13: "And withal they learn also to be idle, going about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not."