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Today in our journey along Route 66 we come to Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians...
Author
2 Thessalonians was received as a genuine letter of Paul by the early church fathers.[1] However, Pauline authorship is questioned by quite a few modern scholars. Some modern scholars who doubt Pauline authorship believe that 2 Thessalonians was written in conscious imitation of 1 Thessalonians by an author writing in Paul’s name. However, I find the arguments of those who doubt Pauline authorship unconvincing. I agree with Tom Wright who has written that such arguments against Pauline authorship are “over-clever and unnecessary”.[2]
Paul always dictated his letters to a secretary, and this may help to explain the differences in vocabulary in this letter. While it is possible that Paul did not write this letter (anything is possible) doubting Pauline authorship of this letter seems to me to make a mockery of what the author says at the end of this brief correspondence…
I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand, which is the distinguishing mark in all my letters. This is how I write.
Date
If Paul is indeed the author of this letter, as I believe he is, then it was written shortly after 1 Thessalonians in 50 or 51 CE. If Paul is not the author, then it may have been written as late as 100 CE.
Themes
Paul’s purpose in writing 2 Thessalonians seems to be very much the same as his purpose in writing 1 Thessalonians. He writes to encourage these new believers amidst persecution, to encourage them to steadfast work, and to correct any possible misunderstandings about Christ’s second coming.
Structure
The structure of 2 Thessalonians works out like this…
- Greeting (1:1-2)
- Thanksgiving (1:3-4)
- The Judgment of God (1:5-10)
- Prayer (1:11-12)
- The Second Coming (2:1-12)
- Further Thanksgiving and Prayer (2:13-17)
- Encouragements (3:1-15)
- Conclusion (3:16-18)
Key Concept—Vital Signs
It is tempting to focus on one of the most distinctive teachings of 2 Thessalonians, namely what Paul has to say in chapter 2 about the “Man of Lawlessness” or what other passages of Scripture call the antichrist. But I am purposely choosing not to focus on that passage. My reason is twofold. First, because 2 Thessalonians 2 is one of the most difficult passages in the New Testament to interpret. Second, if I were to talk about this passage today, then the rest of this message would be focused totally on the negative, totally on evil. Rather than do that, I invite you to focus with me for the rest of our time together today on the antidote to the antichrist, namely the task of becoming an alive follower of Jesus Christ.
Let me ask you a question… If you were to come upon a traffic accident and you were to step in to help someone who was hurt, what would be the first thing that you might do? You might first check the person’s vital signs. Heartbeat, breathing rate, temperature, and blood pressure are all signs that tell us whether a person is physically alive or not. But how can you tell whether a person is spiritually alive? And how can you tell whether a whole church is spiritually alive or not?
Well, just as there are physical vital signs, so also there are spiritual vital signs. And Paul tells us about three of them in 2 Thessalonians 1. Listen for God’s word to you…
Paul, Silas and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love all of you have for one another is increasing. Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.
I believe Paul identifies at least 3 vital signs of the Christian life and the Christian Church in this passage. I owe this insight to William Barclay who wrote this about 2 Thessalonians 1…
There is all the wisdom of the wise leader in this opening passage. It seems that the Thessalonians had written, or sent a message, to Paul, which had been full of self-doubtings and self-distrustings. They had been timorously afraid that they were not good enough, that their faith was not going to stand the test, that—in the expressive modern phrase—they were not going to make the grade. Paul’s answer was not to push them further into the slough of despond by pessimistically agreeing with them; it was to pick out their virtues and their achievements, in such a way, that these despondent, frightened Christians would square their shoulders and fling back their heads and say, “Well, if Paul thinks that of us, we’ll make a fight of it yet.” “Blessed are those,” said Mark Rutherford, “who heal us of our self-despisings,” and Paul did just that for the Thessalonian Church.[3]
Growing Faith
The first vital sign that Paul identifies is a faith that is growing. He says to the Thessalonians “your faith is growing more and more”.
Paul is famous for his triptychs. He has one very much like this in 1 Thessalonians 1:3 where he says…
We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Faith, love, and hope came to be known as the three theological virtues. Another place where Paul talks about them is in his famous “love chapter”, 1 Corinthians 13, where he says, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
So, whether you call these three things “theological virtues”, or “vital signs of the Christian life”, does not really matter. My point is that you can check your own life to see if you have these three marks and if you have them then you can be sure you are an alive Christian.
The word that Paul uses for “growing” is an interesting one. It is ὑπεραυξάνει (hyperauxenai). This is the only place this word is used in the New Testament and it means “to grow or increase exceedingly, beyond measure”. Bishop Lightfoot explains that the word implies “an internal, organic growth, as of a tree”.[4]
John Stott says,
This idea of spiritual growth is foreign to many people… We tend to speak of faith in static terms as something we either have or have not. ‘I wish I had your faith’, we say, like ‘I wish I had your complexion’, as if it were a genetic endowment. Or we complain ‘I’ve lost my faith’ like ‘I’ve lost my spectacles’, as if it were a commodity. But faith is a relationship of trust in God, and like all relationships is a living, dynamic, growing thing.[5]
Now, if we can grow in faith, that’s a good thing. It means we do not have to remain where we are. We do not have to remain spiritually stagnant. But the question is: how do we grow in faith?
Thankfully, God has given us what are called “the means of grace”. When we use these means in our everyday life, we will grow in faith. It is guaranteed. We may not see immediate, overnight results. But we will see sustained growth over time if we use the means that God gives us.
What are those means? One of the means of grace is the Bible. But the Bible is not a magic book. The Bible simply sitting on one’s shelf does not do any good. We need to take the Bible into our minds and hearts through hearing, reading, studying, memorizing, meditating, and applying it. In Romans 10:17 Paul says, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” The Bible is a means of grace that helps us grow when we make proper use of it.
Other means of grace include prayer and worship and the fellowship of God’s people. The more we engage in spiritual disciplines, the more our faith grows.
Increasing Love
The second vital sign of the Christian life is increasing love. Paul says, “the love all of you have for one another is increasing.” The New English Bible translates this as, “the love you have, each for all and all for each, grows ever greater.”
William Barclay says,
A growing Church is a Church which grows greater and greater in service. That is well-nigh inevitable. A man may begin serving his fellow men as a duty which his Christian faith lays upon him; he will end by doing it because in it he finds his greatest joy. The selfish life is never the happy life. The life of service opens up the great discovery that unselfishness and happiness go hand in hand.[6]
Paul had prayed for the Thessalonians in his first letter that their love might “increase and abound” (1 Thessalonians 3:12). And in 1 Thessalonians 4:9-10, Paul says,
Now on the topic of brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another. And indeed you are practicing it toward all the brothers and sisters…
These verses suggest two ways that we can increase in love for others. One way is through making it a matter of prayer. The other is through simple practice. We increase in love not by waiting for a certain feeling to hit us. We increase in love through doing good for others. This is something I have learned both from experience and from reading C. S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity he writes…
The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools; they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.[7]
Persevering through Persecution
The third vital sign Paul mentions is persevering through persecution. He says, “Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.”
Do you remember how the Thessalonian Church got started? It began amidst persecution. We read the story in Acts 17. Paul began his mission in Thessalonica by preaching in the Jewish synagogue. Some of the Jews were persuaded and became believers in Jesus as their Messiah. But others were jealous of Paul’s missionary success. They formed a mob and started a riot in the city. They dragged some of the believers, including a man called Jason, before the city officials shouting…
These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.
Literally, the Jews who wanted to persecute Paul called him a “world upside-down turner”. That’s what Christians are called to be. But when we go against the flow of this world, we must remember that it is going to upset those who want to go with the flow.
In Paul’s case he had to escape to the next city on his missionary journey, Berea. But some of the Jews of Thessalonica chased after Paul and tried to stir up the crowds in Berea too. Sometimes you just can’t win!
The bottom line is this: there will be persecution and there will be suffering in the Christian life. The question is: how will we handle it when the suffering comes along? Will we give up, or will we persevere through it?
William Barclay explains that the word Paul uses for perseverance is a magnificent one…
It is the word hupomone; it is usually translated endurance; but it does not mean the ability passively to bear anything that may descend upon us… It describes the spirit which does not only patiently endure the circumstances in which it finds itself; but which masters them and uses them to strengthen its own nerve and sinew. It accepts the blows of life, but in accepting them it transforms them into stepping stones to new achievement.
My friend Tim Hansel, who lived with chronic pain for most of his life, used to call perseverance “courage stretched out”.
Winston Churchill was another great example of perseverance. He spoke these words on October 29, 1941, during a speech at Harrow School…
Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.
When I was a young man and I would come to my father with a problem over which I was despairing and ready to give up, he would often quote to me from Jeremiah 12:5…
If you have raced with men on foot
and they have worn you out,
how can you compete with horses?
If you stumble in safe country,
how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?
That was my father’s way of saying, “Life is only going to get tougher, but as a follower of Jesus Christ, it is always too soon to quit.”
“Persevere to conquer” could almost be a motto of the Christian life. It is certainly a vital sign of the Church. But that perseverance, while being a vital sign, is also a gift. It is a gift of grace. Faith and love are also gifts of grace. So, if you feel like you are running low on faith, love, and perseverance today, ask God to give you an increasing measure of each through Christ and he will.
[1] Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1970, p. 570.
[2] Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians & Thessalonians, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004, p. 161.
[3] William Barclay, The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians and Thessalonians, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959, pp. 242-243.
[4] John Stott, The Message of 1 & 2 Thessalonians, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1991, p.143.
[5] Ibid., p. 144.
[6] Barclay, p. 243.
[7] Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity (pp. 130-131). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
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