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King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

1 Thessalonians, Chapter 2, verses 14-16

¹ In what manner the gospel was brought and preached to the Thessalonians, and in what sort also they received it

¹⁴For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews:

¹⁵Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men:

¹⁶Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.

Read more:1 Thessalonians, Chapter 2

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2:14 Ye suffered the same things - The same fruit, the same afflictions, and the same experience, at all times, and in all places, are an excellent criterion of evangelical truth. As they from the Jews - Their countrymen.

2:15 Us - Apostles and preachers of the gospel. They please not God - Nor are they even careful to please him, notwithstanding their fair professions. And are contrary to all men - Are common enemies of mankind; not only by their continual seditions and insurrections, and by their utter contempt of all other nations; but in particular, by their endeavouring to hinder their hearing or receiving the gospel.

2:16 To fill up - The measure of their sins always, as they have ever done. But the vengeance of God is come upon them - Hath overtaken them unawares, whilst they were seeking todestroy others, and will speedily complete their destruction.

NOTES

Addressing the Thessalonian Christians, Paul says that they received the witness of him and his companions as the word of God, and not simply as the ordinary preaching of ordinary preachers...

Addressing the Thessalonian Christians, Paul says that they received the witness of him and his companions as the word of God, and not simply as the ordinary preaching of ordinary preachers. Of course, any religious preacher speaks of his preaching as the word of God. Sometimes this means the preaching of true teaching, coming from God and established by God; at other times the preacher lays claim to direct revelation, which, according to his own words, he receives from God immediately. Among religious preachers both one and the other do in fact occur. But a Christian's witness to Christ and to the Kingdom is not religious preaching.

First of all, it is a witness to that new life, the life with Christ in His Kingdom, which has opened itself to the witness. In some ways, of course, such witness resembles that form of religious preaching in which the preacher receives some revelation directly from God and tells others about it, as, for example, the prophets of Israel did when they testified to what God revealed to them.

Such preaching can also move beyond properly religious boundaries, beyond the framework of religious teaching: living revelation often does not fit into any religious framework. But even such witness presupposes only the need to tell the hearers about something, to convey to them something important that can change their spiritual life if they take what is said into account and draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Yet the conclusions themselves and the change of life are wholly and completely the responsibility of the one who heard.

As God said to one of Israel's great prophets, Ezekiel: testify to everyone, because if you do not testify to a sinner that he is sinning before God, I will require from you the sin he has committed; but if you do testify, then I will require it from him himself. Witness is absolutely important, but each person decides for himself how to respond to it. With Christ and the Kingdom it is not like that. Here "knowledge about," theoretical knowledge, knowledge "in principle" and "in general," gives nothing. Witness to Christ and to the Kingdom has meaning only when a person treats what is said precisely as God's revelation, requiring an immediate answer here and now.

This is understandable: true Christian witness always places a person before God, opening God's presence to him. A presence to which one can either open oneself or which one can reject. The prophet tells what God wants to communicate through him to others; Christ's witness merely brings a person to Christ, as though introducing him to Him, and then leaves the person who has been introduced face to face with the One to whom he has been introduced.

Then the main thing begins: a person's direct communion with Christ, without mediators and without interpreters. The experience of such communion is the experience of Christian life itself, opening the Kingdom to a person and giving him the possibility, in turn, of becoming a witness for others. A witness who will bring someone else to Christ and then step aside in the same way, giving that person the possibility of the same personal meeting with Christ that was given to him.

The main theme of today's reading is the essence of apostolic tradition. First the Word of God is proclaimed and must be heard...

Speaking of the conflict that arose, on the one hand, between the Church and the Synagogue, and on the other...

Speaking of the conflict that arose, on the one hand, between the Church and the Synagogue, and on the other between the Church and the pagans, Paul considers that, despite outward differences, the essence of the matter in both cases is the same, so that he even likens them to each other. At first glance such a comparison of two outwardly very different situations looks somewhat artificial, for the Palestinian situation was indeed unique in many respects, even compared with the situation that took shape in the communities of the Jewish diaspora. But the apostle himself points to the common element uniting these two very different cases: both the Jews of Palestine who opposed the apostolic preaching and the pagans who persecuted newly converted Christians from their own environment opposed the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world.

As we can see, opposition united both pagans and such deeply religious people as the Jews of Palestine. This is all the more remarkable if one remembers that practically nothing connected the two groups, so that in ordinary life they had almost no points of contact, while reasons and occasions for conflict were, on the contrary, more than enough. But opposition to the Kingdom, as can be seen, united two groups of people completely unlike each other. This could become possible only because the opposition was not political, not ideological, and not even religious, but spiritual. The manifestation of the Kingdom in the world equally threatened both the traditional pagan and the traditional religious order of life. The pagan order was simply destroyed by the Kingdom entering the world: it proved incompatible with its norms and laws and aimed to change them completely so that the world might be transfigured and become part of the Kingdom, submitting to its laws.

But religion as such could enter the Kingdom only by ceasing to be what it is: it had to be freed from external ceremonial and ritual forms, and most importantly, religious people had to renounce the absolutizing of their own religiosity. In practice this meant the destruction of religious consciousness in the form characteristic of the overwhelming majority of religious people, regardless of what religion they profess. As we can see, in both cases the issue is a choice between the Kingdom and the familiar order of things that neither a pagan nor a religious person wants to renounce. It is a choice that determines each person's path and his fate in eternity.

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