MEDITATION 4
1 Thessalonians 2: 13 – 16
Good morning and welcome to our fourth lockdown meditation on 1st Thessalonians. Today we look at 1 Thessalonians 2: 13 – 16
1 Thessalonians 2:13-16 New Living Translation (NLT)
13 Therefore, we never stop thanking God that when you received his message from us, you didn’t think of our words as mere human ideas. You accepted what we said as the very word of God—which, of course, it is. And this word continues to work in you who believe.
14 And then, dear brothers and sisters, you suffered persecution from your own countrymen. In this way, you imitated the believers in God’s churches in Judea who, because of their belief in Christ Jesus, suffered from their own people, the Jews. 15 For some of the Jews killed the prophets, and some even killed the Lord Jesus. Now they have persecuted us, too. They fail to please God and work against all humanity 16 as they try to keep us from preaching the Good News of salvation to the Gentiles. By doing this, they continue to pile up their sins. But the anger of God has caught up with them at last.
This is a passage of Paul that causes much consternation because of its seemingly anti-semitic overtones which since the holocaust obviously causes concern. However as my commentaries point out relentlessly the directive is not against all Jews but against those who participated in the death of Jesus and who opposed the church in its early years. Paul often faced opposition because his method of evangelism involved seeking out the Jewish communities in the towns he visited and often the leaders of the synagogues did not appreciate it. However, being Jewish himself he was not against Judaism but against those who in his mind opposed the promised Messiah and those who insisted he had come in the person of Jesus Christ. In these days I would liken it to those who make blanket statements about Muslims but whose real concern is with the Jihadist movement within Islam.
The opposition was not a surprise either. For when you are a minority living under the occupation of a more powerful force you will always be trying to keep a check on any seemingly rebellious forces within your ranks so as to avoid trouble with the authorities. Much of Thessalonica’s wealth came about because of a good relationship with the Roman authorities and the Jewish and Greek leaders would not want anything to upset that and thus harm the relative freedom that they enjoyed. A freedom that was allowing them to become a very wealthy city.
The sad part is that because so much attention is focused on the three verses at the end of this section there is nothing said about the first verse, which is actually for us probably the most significant verse. Let me remind you of Paul’s words:-
13 Therefore, we never stop thanking God that when you received his message from us, you didn’t think of our words as mere human ideas. You accepted what we said as the very word of God—which, of course, it is. And this word continues to work in you who believe.
This idea in Paul of the word continuing to work within us is a crucial idea which sadly has become diminished in the modern protestant church. Paul writes repeatedly in his letters of the need for salvation followed by a process. A process which in the older translations of scripture we read as sanctification. Now because of what protestants see as being erroneous theology regarding saints within the Roman tradition we have sadly downplayed this idea of sanctification, particularly within Scotland as we have a more than healthy distrust of anyone who seems to be getting above their station. Thankfully however the more modern translations of the Bible tend to use phrases like, growing into the likeness of Christ, growing in faith and maturing in our faith. This is very much the idea of the word of God working within us. It is the process that we all should be undergoing in order to develop as men and women in Christ and we should not shy away from it but embrace it and develop it. Any time we participate in Bible Study, an online meditation or listen to a sermon we should come away with something which deepens our understanding or changes our lives in some way. When Paul later wrote to Timothy he said this:-
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
I am afraid that so often we have taken verse 16 on its own and not read the second half of the sentence. We have seen teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness as being our aim in the church. Yet these are simply tools in order that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. In other words the Word of God working inside us teaches rebukes, corrects and train us so that we might mature in our faith, become more like Jesus and therefore fulfil the purposes God has for us in our lives doing the good works that he has planned for us from the beginning of time.
We all need to eat something every day. That food goes to replace cells that break down and build new ones, the food works inside us to do all of that. In the same way we need to ingest the word of God, daily that the Word can work within us, building us up, making us stronger, making us mature, equipping us to do what the Lord requires of us, each and every day. May the Lord bless you in this time of lockdown and use this time to reflect a little more on the Word of God within you.