Do take a Bible in your hands once again and turn to the New Testament, page 986 if you’re using a church Bible, as we continue our exposition of the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians. Last time if you were with us, you will remember we looked at the opening twelve verses of chapter 2 and Paul’s defense of his own conduct in ministry when he had visited them and planted a church in Thessalonica. And as we examined Paul’s defense, we saw there the marks of a faithful minister. What should a minister of the Gospel be like? That was last week.
This week, verses 11 through 16, Paul returns to the theme of thanksgiving that had really been his preoccupation in chapter 1. So verses 13 and 14, notice, “We also thank God constantly for this…” So he gave thanks in chapter 1 and he moved on in chapter 2 and here at the end of chapter 2 or the second half of chapter 2 he stops, as if to say, “Oh, I almost forgot, I’m also thankful for these things…” Specifically, he celebrates the way the Thessalonians originally received the Gospel. And so he begins, verses 13 and 14, with thanksgiving. But that’s not all he’s doing in these verses. There’s another theme in the last two verses, 15 and 16, where he issues really what amounts to a sober warning. A sober warning. He reflects on the consequences of refusing and rejecting the Gospel. So there is a thankful reminder of the positive example of the Thessalonians themselves in verses 13 and 14. And as Paul gives thanks for them he is encouraging them, the Thessalonians, to remember how they first received the Gospel that they might continue to receive the Word of God in that same manner. But the negative example of the unbelieving Jews in verses 15 and 16 is meant to warn the Thessalonians and meant to warn us about the dangers of rejecting and turning aside from the Gospel.
And so those are the two emphases of the passage; I hope you can see them. And we’re simply going to look at each in turn. First of all, we’ll consider the positive example of the Thessalonians’ initial reception of the Gospel, and then we’ll look at the negative example of the Jewish rejection of the Gospel. Before we do, let’s bow our heads and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us all pray.
Lord our God, we pray now for grace as we hear Your Word to receive it as it really is, not the Word of men but the very Word of God. Grant that it may now, today, be at work in us as we believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, for we ask it all in His holy name, amen.
First Thessalonians chapter 2 at verse 13. This is the Word of God:
“And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy and inerrant Word.
In his memoir of his father, D.A. Carson reminisces about the effect, the impact, of his father’s devotional life had upon him and his brother. “Dad’s practice in private prayer was to kneel before the big chair he used and pray loudly enough to vocalize so as to keep his mind from wandering. Outside the door, we could hear him praying even if we could not hear what he was saying. I can remember countless days when he prayed for forty-five minutes or more. Strange to tell at this juncture I cannot recall days when he didn’t. Jim,” that’s Caron’s brother, recalls barging in on dad’s study unannounced, finding him on his knees praying, and quietly backing out. Jim wrote, “But the images always remained with me, especially during my later rebellious teen years. While walking away from God, I could not get away from the image of my father on his knees praying for me. It is the one of the things that eventually brought me back.” Now one lesson from that story is that examples have enormous power to shape us for good or for ill. Years after wandering away from the Lord, it was in part the memory of his father’s example of faithfulness that brought Jim Carson back to Christ. Examples really matter.
And in verses 13 and 14, the apostle Paul sets before us the positive example of the Thessalonians themselves. Clearly, his intention in writing these words was to highlight for the Thessalonians their own earlier behavior so as to remind them of how they ought now to continue and to go on. And if you look at the passage, you’ll see Paul commends three things about the Thessalonians’ initial response to Pual’s preaching in particular. He gives thanks continually, he says, first, for the way they “received the Word,” verse 13, and secondly for the way they resembled other churches, the first part of verse 14, and finally for the way they responded to suffering in the second part of verse 14.
Think first of all about the way they received the Word. Verse 13, “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” Notice first they heard the Word of God. Paul is talking about a heard Word. That is to say, he is talking about a preached Word. And when they heard the Word preached by the apostle Paul, they accepted it. And notice this next phrase carefully because it’s so important. They accepted it “not as the word of men but as what it really is, the Word of God.” Paul’s preaching of the Word they saw was not Paul’s private opinion. It wasn’t his own lately invented religious ideas. Contrary to the thought of some modern, liberal scholars, perhaps even contrary to some of the accusations of some of Paul’s opponents at the time he was writing, the apostle Paul did not invent Christianity. Paul’s preaching was not the word of men; it was the Word of God.
In 1564, Heinrich Bullinger, who was John Calvin’s younger colleague from Zurich in Switzerland, penned what is called the Second Helvetic Confession. It’s a faithful summary of Biblical doctrine. It was widely adopted by reformed churches not only in Switzerland but in Scotland, in Hungary, in France and in Poland. Like the later Westminster Confession, to which our own denomination, The Presbyterian Church in America subscribes, the first chapter of the Second Helvetic Confession begins with the doctrine of Scripture and it echoes Paul’s point here perfectly when it says this – “When this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is preached and received of the faithful.” And then some additions of the Second Helvetic Confession at opening chapter had a Latin title – “Praedicatio verbi Dei est verbum Dei” – “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”
Now neither Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2:14 nor Heinrich Bullinger in the Second Helvetic Confession intend to say that everything and anything that falls from the preacher’s lips in the pulpit is as authoritative as the Bible. That’s not their point. In fact, they mean quite the opposite. Their point is that it’s not the preacher who is authoritative but the Word the preacher expounds, so that when the text of holy Scripture has been faithfully, accurately explained and the implications of what is really there in the Word have been teased out and applied to the way we live today in a manner that is consistent with the total teaching of the Bible, when a minister does that, then what he says has all the authority of the Word of God itself behind it. When the preacher says what God says, God says it. “Praedicatio verbi Dei est verbum Dei – The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”
Now that has some huge implications for all of us, doesn’t it? On the one hand it puts an enormous responsibility on the preacher to be sure that he only delivers what God has said in His Word and nothing else. He might have practical wisdom for you. He might have political commentary for you. He might have jokes and stories and anecdotes to inspire and move you. But he is only authorized to say what God has said and nothing further. And on the other hand, it also places a great responsibility on all of us who listen to a faithful exposition of the text of holy Scripture not to become mere connoisseurs of pulpit oratory, sitting in judgment on the rhetorical effectiveness of a particular sermon or on the style and flair of a preacher. No, if the Word of God is being preached, faithfully, then God is talking. God is talking and we must receive it, as did the Thessalonians, not as the word of men over which we may sit in judgment, but as it really is the Word of God that judges us all.
And don’t miss the last clause of verse 13. Paul says this Word “is at work in you who believe.” Do you see that phrase? I love how Paul personifies the Bible here, doesn’t he? He means God is at work by His Word in you who believe but he says, “the Word is at work in you who believe.” Like a slow release drug, you know, you take the medication and it’s doing its work unseen at the molecular level, strengthening your immune system, killing your diseases, restoring your health. The Word is at work like that, Paul is saying. But look at the text. The Word is at work only “in you who believe.” The Word is at work in you who believe. Believe what? He doesn’t mean merely that they believe in some general sense in the broad reliability and truthfulness of Scripture, as important as that is. No, he means the Word is at work in you who believe in the Christ of the Bible. There is no blessing, there is no lasting fruit, there is no benefit to your soul, there is no spiritual reformation of your life, there is no death to sin, no conformity to the likeness of Jesus Christ, no fellowship with your Savior, no hope of heaven – there is nothing, nothing without this. Like the Thessalonians, we must receive the Word, accept the Word. We must believe the message of God’s Word that points us on every page to the Lord Jesus Christ, the only Savior of sinners. The Word is at work in you who believe.
Do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ alone for your salvation? Do you? That’s the crucial question. Are you today actively entrusting yourself to Him, resting your hope on Him, looking only to Him for peace and pardon and protection and provision? If you are not, you will never get any lasting profit from the preaching of the Word. You will miss the blessing. You’ll fail to receive the grace. You might know the truth in your head well enough, but you will never experience it’s power in your heart. For the Word to work, you need faith in the One whose Word it is, who speaks in it and who is its central focus. You need to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. You may come to church, have been coming to church all your days every Sunday, whenever the doors are open, and you’ve heard countless sermons from countless preachers and you know the story and can tell all the great doctrines of Scripture off by heart and find your way around God’s book with ease, but the truth is, it washes over you and you look at others around you who are captured by God’s Word, wrapped up, enthralled by its exposition, longing to hear from the living God, nourished and strengthened and given fresh hope and joy and they are a puzzle to you. You look at them and you are left wondering, “What are they getting out of this that I am missing?” If that’s your experience, maybe the cause lies here. The difference is not the sermon, it’s not the preacher, it’s not a difference of intellect or understanding; it’s this – they trust in Christ to save them and you have yet to surrender to Him. You will not yet bend your knee to Him. Bend your knee to Christ and the Word will do its mighty work.
For the first part of the positive example for which Paul gives thanks in the life of the Thessalonians has to do with the way they received the Word of God. The second part has to do with the way they came to resemble other churches. Look at verse 14. “For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea.” The evidence that the Thessalonians really have received the Word that Paul has preached as the very Word of God, the proof that it is now at work in their lives is that the Thessalonian church, despite its distance in geography and in culture and in heritage and in style and in language from the churches in Judea, the Thessalonian church and the Judean churches actually look an awful lot alike. They look an awful lot alike. They became imitators of the churches in Judea.
Now does Paul mean that the Thessalonians, once they became followers of Jesus, set out to copy the Judean churches’ ways of doing things? When the Word begins to work in your heart does it make you into a copycat? Is that what he is saying? You know sometimes here when we plan a new initiative or we need to make changes to our organizational structure or we want to revise our policies, we’ll reach out to sister churches of similar size and demographics like Park Cities in Dallas or Briarwood in Birmingham or Second Pres in Memphis and we’ll say, “Send us your stuff. Show us how you do it so we can learn from you.” Is that what Paul is talking about here? The Thessalonian churches studied the example of how the Judeans went about their policy manuals and their staff structure? Is that what he is talking about? No, what he means is that God’s Word did its work in their lives, even though there was no doubt dramatic cultural and linguistic differences between the Thessalonians and the Jewish churches in Judea. The really remarkable thing was how alike they were in their driving passion for God’s glory and their longing for the salvation of their lost friends and family and neighbors, in their rejection of worldliness and their desire, their deep desire to please the Lord, in their commitment to worship according to Scripture and life on God’s own terms. What Paul really means is, “You guys in Thessalonica share the same spiritual DNA as your brothers in sisters in Judea.”
Once you get past the superficial differences of place and culture and style, you will find that faithful Word-centered churches actually look remarkably alike. Of course they do. Of course they do. How could it be otherwise? We have the same Father, after all. The same Spirit dwells within us. We are being conformed to the likeness of the same Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. The same Word is at work in all of us who believe. It works in us as it works in them. We share the same spiritual genetic code. We are family. We are family. That’s why when you travel you can go to faithful, Bible preaching churches. I was talking to Wiley Lowry this morning. He just got back from guess where? Thessalonica, Thessaloniki, and worship in a Gospel church in Thessaloniki. You can go to churches all over the world and you can know no one in that congregation, have no contacts in their fellowship, and nevertheless feel immediately at home. Isn’t that a remarkable thing? You have this profound sense – these are your people, because they are; they really are.
So the first part of the positive example of the Thessalonians is the way they receive the Word. The second part is the way they resembled other churches. And the third is the way they responded to suffering. Look again at verse 14. “For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For” – so here’s the particular way in which they were like their sister churches – “For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews.” It is virtually a mark of a true church in the New Testament that faithfulness to Christ involves suffering from the world. The Judean churches endured persecution from the unbelieving Jewish authorities. Paul himself, do you remember, Paul himself had been one of the persecutors. He was, he said, “a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church,” Philippians 3:5. And now the Thessalonians have begun to endure a parallel persecution, this time from among their own unbelieving Gentile neighbors. And Paul says as he watches them suffer he can see the evidence of the Word of God at work in their lives because of the way they respond, just like the way their brothers and sisters in Judea have responded in faithfulness to Christ, in submission to the hard hand of providence in looking to God for help and grace to remain faithful no matter what trials may come.
It’s a sobering fact that the Christian life is marked by a growth in grace often provoked by suffering; that the marks of authentic Christianity are often seen most clearly against the dark backdrop of suffering. And while we still live in something of a Christian bubble here in Jackson, Mississippi, and being a Christian here really isn’t all that terribly costly, I think you would agree with me that bubble is bursting. It is bursting and we had better get ready. And we had better prepare our children and our young people, especially for the negativity and the cynicism and the hostility and the prejudice they will likely have to bear if they are resolved to live a life of radical discipleship in faithfulness to Christ. It is a mark of the Word at work in us that we may have to suffer like God’s people everywhere and in every age as we trust the Savior to keep us no matter what.
So there is the positive example of the Thessalonians first of all. They responded to the preaching of the Word by accepting it as the Word of God. They came to resemble other churches as the Word did its work. They share the same spiritual DNA in Greek speaking Macedonia as the Aramaic and Hebrew speaking churches in Judea. And that resemblance shown especially brightly in the way they endured opposition and suffering for their faith. That’s the positive example.
Then secondly notice – we’re only on the second point now, by the way! Secondly notice verses 15 and 16 and the negative example that Paul puts before us by way of warning. The story is told of a farmer who used to go out to his field with a shotgun to shoot the crows. The farmer had a pet parrot that he kept in the house because whenever it escaped it would fly with the crows and he was afraid that one day the pet parrot would get hurt. So on one occasion he went out to the field to shoot the crows and then rushing forward to see how many he had killed he found his pet parrot among the fallen birds, having somehow managed to escape its cage. Stooping down to talk to his dying pet he said, “What bad company you got into Polly! Whatever brought you to this sad state?” to which the parrot squawked and replied, “Bad company! Bad company!”
Bad examples can have deadly consequences. As we look at the unbelieving Jews in verses 15 and 16 we are meant to hear the dire warnings of the apostle Paul about what can happen if we take the wrong path, if we follow the wrong models, imitate the wrong examples and fall into bad company. The bad example of the Jews here progresses into three steps. Step one, they reject the Christ. Step two, they resist His Word. Step three, they receive His judgment. They reject the Christ, resist His Word, receive His judgment.
They reject Christ first of all. Verse 15, Paul reminds the Thessalonians of the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus. And he means that quite literally, of course. He’s writing only about twenty years after the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus and many of those who were present and complicit in the crucifixion would still have been alive. But his point isn’t merely historical. He’s saying something more. He’s saying that to reject the Word of God is not to stand in a neutral place. You can’t say, “Oh, I’m not opposed, I’m just not for the Christian Gospel.” You can’t say that. No, you see, if Christ calls you as He is doing today as His Word is preached, if Christ calls you to come to Him and you will not come, that’s not neutral. You are taking your place among those who drove the nails into His hands and feet and hung Him on the cross. Listen, the crucifixion is the hope of the world but it is also the epitome of the human rejection of the claims of the living God to rule over us by His Son, Jesus Christ. And either you come to the crucified Christ to receive the pardon that His death secures for sinners or you come to Him to take your place among those who refuse and reject and condemn Him. Those are the only options open to us.
And naturally, since they reject the Christ Paul says, step two, they also refused His Word. Look again at verse 15 and the first half of verse 16. They not only killed Christ they killed the prophets, “and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved.” They killed the prophets and drove out the apostles. They are the agents, the instruments in the hand of the Holy Spirit in bringing the Word of God to the world and they are brutalized and exiled and martyred. And they did all of that because, Paul says, they were driven by deep, heart resistance to the truth of God. Which is why verse 16, they hindered Paul from speaking to the nations, to the Gentiles, that they might be saved. The Jews who rejected Christ resented the possibility that anyone else might ever accept Him.
You see, unbelief is rarely content to remain private and personal. It is generally aggressive and infectious. It resents faith in Christ wherever it meets it and it is hostile to its spread. And we see that with increasing clarity, I think, today in the public square in our own country. Don’t we? It’s not okay to believe in Jesus and to seek to live according to His Word. It’s not okay. Life in the public square today increasingly requires that you join in with the positive embrace of much that the Bible condemns. Your silence on these issues is now unacceptable. You must conform and even affirm the values of the world. Unbelief is never content to be private and personal. It’s aggressive and infectious.
And the result of all of that is step three. The destination toward which all of this long-twisted road is leading is summed up in the grave words at the end of verse 16. Would you look there please? Verse 16, they do all this, Paul says, “so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!” They reject the Christ, they refuse the Word, and now Paul says they will receive the judgment. Look at that phrase – they are “filling up the measure of their sins.” Paul is likely echoing the language of Genesis 15:16 where God told Abram that his descendants would one day return and take possession of the land of Canaan but not for four generations because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. God was allowing the Amorite wickedness to run its full course, handing them over to their own sinful ways that their final judgment might be all the more deserved when at last it fell.
And that, Paul says, is what God will do for all who refuse His Gospel and reject His Son. He hands us over to fill up the measure of our sins until our iniquity is complete. And then, verse 16, then judgment will come. And Paul says, by the way, when he says “wrath has come upon them,” he doesn’t mean that already, right now, final judgment has arrived – he said back in chapter 1 verse 10 that God’s wrath is still to come in the future. What he means is, John Stott suggests, is that the wrath of God is over their heads. It’s hanging like the sword of Damocles from a single hair above their heads, ready to fall. The stakes are enormously high when it comes to how we respond to the word of the Gospel, aren’t they? Enormously high. If you accept it for what it really is, the Word of God, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for your salvation, well then Paul says the Word will begin to do its wonderful work in you as it did in the Thessalonians. But if you refuse that Word, you need to know that your rejection is piling up your sin while the wrath of God hangs precipitately over your head, poised and ready to fall.
But it has not fallen yet, it has not fallen yet. Time is coming when God’s judgment will be swift and inescapable and eternal, but that is not yet. This is the time to flee the wrath to come. This is the time to give up your resistance and your refusal and your rejection of the Gospel. This is the moment to accept it as it really is at last – the very Word of God to you. Today is the day to find in the cross of Jesus Christ not the emblem and symbol of your rejection of Christ but the source of your only hope. Think about it there in that torn, emulated figure – the Son of God bore, He bore the wrath of God. The wrath of God fell on Him. It has not yet fallen on the world but it fell on Him in the room and place of sinners. He bore the wrath so that people like me and you who have long rejected Him might still yet find peace and pardon and be reconciled to God before it is too late. And so let me ask you, “Which will the cross be to you?” Will it be the badge of your refusal to bend the knee to Christ, a symbol of human defiance, crucifying God’s own Son? Or will it be your only refuge from the wrath that is coming? Jesus died that sinners, any sinner, even you might not perish but have eternal life. That’s what the cross offers you. Come to the Lord Jesus Christ, right now, right now. Won’t you? Come, confess your sin, stop justifying it, excusing it, blame shifting. Confess and cry to Him for mercy. Ask that His cross might be your salvation, His wounds your pardon. “This is the Word of God to you,” Paul says. May God enable you at last to accept it as it really is and believe the good news. Let us pray.
O Lord, as we bow before You we tremble to think as Your Word was read and in so far as Your Word was faithfully explained You Yourself have been addressing us. We have had an audience sitting to listen to the great King. O God, give us grace, all of us grace, meekly to receive then Your Word not as the word of men but as it really is, the Word of God. And grant that saving faith in Jesus to all our hearts that Your holy Word might do its wonderful work in us all to the praise and glory of Your name. For Jesus’ sake, amen.