NOTES for Th1 4:10-12

It is usually very difficult for someone to reach the equilibrium point in his personal life. Either, it seems that it is necessary to drop everything and to go to preach till the ends of the earth. Either needs to sit down calmly, without distinguishing oneself from road dust. Either spends time in churches and services. Each will find, towards which direction to distort the fragile building of His Christian life. It would seem that our radical rockings from extreme to extreme are confirmed by the fact, that the apostles were fascinated and devoted people. But, nevertheless, Paul asks us to follow completely another way.

His call for each to mind his own business, not vacillate, to be witness for people that are outside and to feed oneself, is similar to a request to be self-confident, if faith is alive in us. The outer extremes appear where there is no spiritual health, where behind sharpness hides the diffidence. By following the way, that God gives us, we learn not to experience fellowship with Him at a superficial level of emotions. The only thing that becomes to us radical and, to an external view an insane choice, is life with Christ.

Paul reminds the Thessalonian Christians that Christian life must certainly include what today we would call an ascetic component. This is not about mortifying the flesh, as asceticism is often understood today, but about consciously governing one's spiritual states and thereby determining the course and quality of one's life. It is in this sense that the apostle speaks of the need to "keep one's vessel in holiness and honor," not defiling it with "sexual immorality," which Paul most likely understands as broadly as the ancient prophets understood it.

Indeed, what is life from the Bible's point of view? It is a stream that comes from God and flows through a person, while the person in some mysterious way also abides in it, determining its quality and direction. In the language of the Bible it is called the "soul," although the corresponding Hebrew word, like its Greek equivalent, is often rendered by translators simply as "life," which matches the original meaning. But in this case the point is not life as a flow of events external to a person, but life as something that permeates a person from within, filling him with the dynamic without which the person does not exist.

This inner dynamic is called the "soul," or simply life, and it includes both spirit, including all those movements of the soul that we call higher, and nature, down to such "lowly" things as breathing or blood circulation. But the overall quality of this stream and the predominance in it of the spiritual or natural component are determined by the person himself at the level of his spiritual "I," what the Bible calls the "heart." It is there that a person's spiritual self-determination takes place through his will; there are born the intentions that govern his spiritual life and life in general.

And there, in the heart, the door opens, or, on the contrary, slams shut, through which God's breath of life enters the stream of a person's life, his inner space, and, if we are speaking of Christians, the breath of the Kingdom as well. A person contains this breath insofar as his own life is consciously directed by him, through those same intentions, along the path of the commandments given by God, along the path of the inner Torah. The inner Torah is precisely the vessel that allows God's breath of life and the breath of the Kingdom to abide in a person.

Otherwise, even after sensing this breath and sharing in it, a person will not be able to keep it. The spiritual influence will end, the ecstasy will cease, and the person will return again to his former life, becoming the same as he was before the influence he experienced. A person can change only with his own active participation in the process, when he strives to keep what he receives from God by creating in his inner space a corresponding receptacle, that very "vessel." This is what Paul reminds the Thessalonian Christians of in his letter.

Continuing the conversation about the life of the Kingdom, Paul draws attention to its most important feature: those called to such a life must always preserve a state of sanctification (v. 7; in the Synodal translation sanctification is usually called "holiness"). Here the apostle is obviously continuing the tradition formed back in the times when the second part of the Book of Leviticus was written (Lev 19-27): it is precisely here that the call first sounded not simply to purity, which had sounded before, but to a sanctified life (Lev 1-2).

Paul also calls the addressees of his letter to a sanctified life (vv. 3-7). In such a case, it would seem, there is nothing fundamentally new in the apostle's appeals. But the matter is still not quite so simple: the appeal really has remained the same, but the circumstances have changed fundamentally. Before, the call to a sanctified life sounded precisely as a call and a wish; now it sounds like a requirement. There is nothing surprising in such a change, for before the issue was righteousness in this present, still untransformed world; now the issue is the Kingdom, to which Paul calls his listeners and readers. In the untransformed world, the question of a sanctified life is above all a question of righteousness in all its fullness: sanctification presupposes the transformation of human nature, without which it is not capable of righteous life, if, of course, righteousness is understood not as formal adherence to some moral code, but as the acquisition of the inner Torah.

However, the Torah never demanded such righteousness from a person; it only offered it as an ideal toward which it called people to strive. But the ideal and the exceptional cases of our still untransformed world are, as we can see, the norm for the Kingdom, so that the apostle, following the Savior Himself, calls the faithful to a sanctified life not as to something exceptional, but as to the norm without which it is impossible to become a resident of the Kingdom. And that means it is impossible to be a Christian.