These Epistles stand last among Paul’s church Epistles in our arrangement, but are commonly thought to have been written first. I have not tried to fix the chronology of the other Epistles, and I will not go into the proofs offered for this view of these. The reason for placing them where they stand was probably doctrinal: the letters to the Thessalonians speak more plainly of a judgment than any before them, so, though they may be early writings, for purposes of theology and church-history they were put after the rest.
The account of this Church’s founding, in Acts seventeen, helps us read the Epistles. Paul seems to have passed quickly through other Macedonian cities because they had no synagogues. Thessalonica had one, and there for three sabbaths he reasoned from the Scriptures. His subject suited the Jewish frame of mind: he did not have to prove there was a Christ, but that the Christ had to suffer and rise, and that Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified Man, was this Christ. A few Jews believed and joined Paul and Silas, but most of the converts were devout Greeks—apparently proselytes who attended the synagogue. Then came fiercer opposition from the circumcised party than they had yet met. First they stirred up the mob, which attacked the house of Paul’s host. Then, in person or through worthless rabble, they tried to alarm the empire’s officers with the old charge: these men who have turned the world upside down say there is another king, Jesus, against Caesar’s decrees. I call it an old argument because it had been used against our Lord before Pilate. But it was new in Paul’s experience: his sharpest quarrels with his countrymen had turned on whether Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God—they had not yet used the one plea that really weighed with their rulers. Here it worked. The rulers were troubled, took security of Jason and the others, and Paul and Silas were sent away by night to Berœa.
So this Church was founded amid unusual persecution, and the manner of its birth foretold storms in its early life. There was no doubt where the opposition would come from or what shape it would take. A violent Jewish faction would denounce the idea that Jesus was their expected King, would use the help of the rulers they most hated to oppose Him, would set up an idea of the Christ as unlike Him as possible, and would welcome anyone who embodied that idea. To Paul these signs plainly foreshadowed his nation’s ruin, the events our Lord said would come before that generation passed. So the thoughts of an Antichrist and of a judgment were pressed on Paul by the Thessalonians’ situation more sharply than by any other Church. He could not help seeing a hint that Gentile and Jewish maxims might strangely blend in the coming time—the new Christ might wear the purple, yet might also appear in some form satisfying those who wanted an heir of David. The vision was ominous either way. The Jew must deny the God of Abraham more openly than before to bow to an image opposite to that of a King reigning in righteousness. The tyranny of the Caesars must grow yet more brutal and godless. And Christ’s dreadful saying—that love would grow cold, that false Christs might nearly deceive the very elect—suggested, even apart from the Churches’ own perils, that Christians would share the world’s temptations, and that many would fall into an abyss deeper than that of Jews or Gentiles, since their height had been greater. Add to this the tender, motherly affection Paul felt for this Church, like a mother’s for a child in the crisis of a disease, and we have most of what we need to interpret the Epistle.
Persecution seems so common to all Churches that the reader may hardly expect it singled out for the Thessalonians. But after going through so many of Paul’s Epistles, I can say boldly that persecution is a leading topic in none of them except that to the other Macedonian Church, Philippi—and there its effects differed from what Paul found here. The Thessalonians were not cast down or overwhelmed by their sufferings; despondency was not their chief failing. The opposition they met led Paul, while with them, to speak much of the coming day of the Lord, urging the hope of it as encouragement to patience. Such words were easily perverted. Why toil for bread if some great event was near, which might take them from earthly things or give them command over them as never before? With such indifference to the present often grows an indifference to ordinary morality, not full-blown but showing itself now and then. Speculation about how near or far these events were would fill their minds. With all brightness in the future and only gloom behind, the world before Christ’s appearing looked blank and dreary—how sad to have lived and died then! Mixed with these tendencies, which persecution readily breeds, were the graces God uses persecution to call out—courage, endurance, brotherly affection—not wholly free of those bad habits, yet strengthened by having enemies, and often joined with a reckless defiance and proud contempt of the enemies’ opinion.
The harmful influences at work in this Church appear only gradually amid Paul’s earnest thanks to God for their work of faith, labor of love, and patience of hope. He rejoices that they know their election; that his Gospel came not in word only but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and in full assurance; that they imitated him and the Lord by receiving the word amid tribulation with joy of the Spirit; that they were examples to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia; that their faith was known everywhere; and that from them the word had sounded far and wide. Again and again he recalls the depth of their conversion in those memorable words—that they had turned from idols to serve a living and true God—and again and again he ties that service to waiting for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the coming wrath.
These words show Paul had no intention of explaining away his preaching, or of changing the teaching that first proved so effective, once he found it perverted. This is never his method: he does not qualify truths he had thought necessary before, or swap them for others, but works to bring out their full meaning, since that is the right cure for any partial grasp of them. First he dwells with unusual detail on how he and his fellow-missionaries lived among them—not, as at Corinth, because his aims had been misrepresented or rivals set up, for the Thessalonians returned his love and had been moved from the first by his life as much as his words. That is why he is the more eager to remind them what they saw in him that they knew came from God and that reached their hearts. Was it not his watchful, tender behavior toward them while they were still Gentiles, a gentleness free of flattery and of any greed? Was it not the labor and hardship, working with his own hands so as not to burden them, by which he proved how dear they were? Was it not his holy, blameless conduct among the believers, and the warnings by which he showed them how much care they needed to keep what they had won, and to walk worthy of the God calling them into His kingdom and glory?
Paul could use such language of himself freely when it served a purpose. Any edge of self-praise is taken off in the next sentence, where he thanks God that they received the word from him and Silas not as the word of man but as it truly is, the word of God, which works powerfully in those who believe. That same word worked in the Thessalonians, for they became imitators of the Churches of God in Judea. He mentions those Churches for the reason he gives at once: the Thessalonians’ sufferings came from the same kind of people who caused theirs. Jews in Macedonia showed their kinship with Jews in Palestine, who had persecuted the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and the Apostles too, forbidding them to speak to the Gentiles for their salvation, thus filling up their sins—for the wrath had come upon them to the uttermost.
Both his references to his own life and to the Thessalonians’ Jewish enemies bear on the weaknesses he saw in them as well as on their hopes. Without directly telling them they were not working with their hands, not walking wisely toward their heathen neighbors, not careful to keep the light burning within and shining without, the memory of what their first teachers were, and the impression that made, was the most effective rebuke he could give. And the hint about the Jews did more than remind them Paul suffered more than they from the same foes: it told them the cause of Jewish hostility—a godless, inhuman refusal to let others share their privileges. It reminded them that the redemption they awaited, and rightly awaited, would also be a day of wrath, not accomplished until God’s chosen people had suffered that terrible downfall which, as he told the Romans, he would himself have been accursed from Christ to prevent.
The appearing of Christ, then, which Paul had taught them to expect, was bound up with sorrow and tribulation both for themselves and for the world. It was not something he or they could look to as the fulfilment of selfish dreams. He tells them he had longed to come to them, it seems, for the very purpose of saying this: “Are you not our joy and hope and crown of rejoicing before our Lord Jesus at His appearing?” The phrase seems thrown in by the way, bursting from the fulness of his heart with no bearing on his argument. But an inspired man’s words, however little they seem to fit a dry argument, must unfold the thought governing him. In telling them his feeling toward them, he has taught them a whole lesson about the day they both await: it is a day he desires for their sakes and the Church’s, because Christ will be glorified in them and shown to be Lord of both Jew and Gentile.
Unable to come himself, he says he sent Timothy to comfort and strengthen them, so their tribulations might not give the tempter an opening but be received as their appointed discipline. Timothy’s report cheered him and called out fresh thanks to God, making him pray the more earnestly to see them. He trusted God and the Lord Jesus would direct his way to them; but he trusted still more that God would make them overflow in love to one another and to all, so as to establish their hearts blameless in holiness before God at the appearing of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.
Everyone must see, from how Paul keeps returning to it, that “the appearing” is the key phrase of this letter. We have already noticed how frequent it is in all his epistles, but nowhere does it stand out so plainly, for nowhere else does he so set himself to clear up the perplexities bound up with it and to tie the Church’s life to it. The next passage, which we all know as a standalone exhortation, should never be cut off from what comes before it. The way to prepare for Christ’s appearing was to remember those ordinary, plain precepts he had given them and which, in their eager anxiety about the future, they were forgetting. For though such moral rules may look merely hard and external, they rest on the deepest theology. The command “abstain from fornication” rested on the truth that God’s will is your sanctification. The rule not to overreach a brother rested on the truth that the Lord is the Judge. Both would be kept if they remembered God had given them the Holy Spirit. Paul was glad they excelled in love to the brethren throughout Macedonia; but he would have them remember their duty also to those outside—that quietness, minding their own business, and working with their own hands were spiritual duties, part of their divine calling.
Let it always be remembered that such lessons were prompted precisely by Paul’s belief, which he wished them to share, that the day of the Lord was at hand. The deeper that impression settled in them, the freer they would be from restlessness, the more quiet amid strife, attentive to common duties, and considerate of others. But there was one anxiety that was not selfish, and that grew from the very hope he encouraged: what had become of friends who had died before the Lord’s appearing? Was it a calamity to have died before it? The thought was very natural—more natural than we, with our theories of the departed and of ourselves that have little to do with any appearing of Christ, quite realize. Their minds, formed in the Apostolic school, could imagine no blessedness apart from His appearing. Paul’s answer gave them his clearest account yet of the nature of that appearing. They were not to limit it by their notions of time or place. If they believed Christ died and rose, they believed in a union of both worlds, a breaking down of the barrier between the state before and after death—the seen and the unseen. If they truly believed this, they would be sure that those they called dead had only fallen asleep, that Christ was as much with them as with Jairus’s daughter or Lazarus, that they could hear His voice as those had; and that, being members of Christ’s body and drawing their life from Him, God would bring them with Him.
And so he tells them, by the word of the Lord, that “we, the living ones, we that are left over unto the appearing of the Lord, shall not anticipate those that have been put to sleep. Because the Lord Himself with a cry, with the voice of an archangel and with the trump of God, shall descend from Heaven; and then we, the living, shall together with them be caught up in clouds to meet the Lord in air; and so shall we be ever with the Lord.” These are among the most musical sentences of Scripture, to which most hearts strangely respond, yet they trouble the understanding as much as any we know. May I suggest that if we followed our hearts, took the words as they stand, and tried less to measure them by our own notions, some of the difficulty might vanish? The first question we ask is: Was Paul then alive at the appearing of the Lord, even granting that appearing was some event of that generation? This question touches a subject we have often dwelt on before; reconsidering it may help us trace the unity of the New Testament books, and would be the best key to the link between the history of the Church and the prophecies of both Testaments.
All the hopes of the old prophets pointed to an appearing of a King of Israel and Son of God. They interpreted the longings, conscious or not, of all men, and said what kind of person “the desire of all nations” must be. I have tried to show the Gospels present such a person. They say: This Jesus is the Son of God and the King of Israel. We tell how, while on earth, the friend of fishermen, the carpenter’s son, He showed He held both characters. His crucifixion was the most necessary part of that manifestation and of His work; His resurrection was the final earthly proof that He was what the Sanhedrim and the governor denied; but that resurrection meant He would not remain on earth—it was completed in His ascension to God’s right hand, so He was declared Lord and Christ; and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost showed the ascension meant no separation from His witnesses, enabling them to be real witnesses that He is the risen and victorious Lord and Redeemer of man. Was nothing more involved in the ascension and the gift of the Spirit than this? The more spiritual light the Apostles received, the more certain they were that there was. If Christ had died, risen, and ascended, if He was Lord and Christ, if their testimony was true, there would be an appearing of Him in that character—as real as His appearing as a servant, carrying that appearing to its result as the crucifixion carried out the incarnation, the resurrection the crucifixion, and the ascension and Pentecost the resurrection. All these, strictly, were parts of one appearing, acts of one drama leading to a catastrophe that was inevitable if its great Hero, who had governed the world since its creation, had really come to claim His right over it. It was fully in the prophets’ manner to treat all the events of a given generation as parts of one appearing or day of the Lord, though the first might be years from the last, though the events might differ utterly—some bright, some gloomy—though a plague of locusts might lead to an outpouring of the Spirit, and that to some battle in the valley of Jehoshaphat. The link between them all was that they proved God present and at work to put down evil and set up righteousness. John the Baptist, the King’s herald, had proclaimed the coming wrath as the great result of His coming, the sign that the kingdom he announced had truly been revealed. And all our Lord’s discourses, most of all the one before the last Passover, agree with this.
How then could Paul, steeped in the old teachers’ lessons and believing the revelations made to himself, doubt that he was living in a day of the Lord—that day toward which all others had led? Whether or not he would still be on earth at its close—at the appearing which, on his Lord’s own word, he fully believed would come in that generation—he was already one of those “alive and remaining” unto that appearing, since he had witnessed the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension, since Christ had been revealed to him on the road to Damascus and had been revealed in him, and since he had preached that Son as the Desire of all nations to Greeks and barbarians. This was no play on words. By it he met the Thessalonians’ perplexity, removed their fear about their dead, enlarged their sense of the Lord’s revelation, and gave them fresh assurance of the revelation still to come—so near—by treating it as one of a series of events, many already fulfilled.
If we have got past this first difficulty, the rest of the passage will not trouble us; indeed, if we accept it, it will be as full of comfort as Paul told the Thessalonians it was. He certainly affirms the Lord would descend from heaven with the archangel’s voice and the trump of God. If we believe our Lord’s own words about the earthquakes and the distress of nations in that generation, we may well believe a trumpet did sound and an archangel’s voice was heard by mortal ears. It does not matter, for Paul’s statement, whether many or any of those bound in “the muddy vesture of decay” recognized it or knew it meant the Lord’s descent. What he declares is that those who had fallen asleep before Christ’s earthly appearing would hear His voice and rise, as those did who heard it in the days of His humiliation—not, like them, to return and walk again among men, but to be with Him and share His glory. And he says that he and the Thessalonians who had not fallen asleep before Christ’s appearing, having survived to that great day, would share the same blessing, since none higher was possible. Only there would be this difference: since Christ died and rose, the grave could no longer be seen as receiving those He had redeemed. Even the word sleep would no longer fit. The departure of those in Christ would truly be a translation—they would not sink but rise, not go down to meet the worms but ascend to meet Christ. The phrase “meeting the Lord in the air” seems deliberately used to discourage the carnal notion of His coming down as an earthly king to reign visibly. This translation was an object of faith, not sight. The Thessalonians were not to imagine Him robed in the purple of mockery, but coming in the glory of His ascension, the glory of the Father and the holy angels, that those who shared His sufferings might share it.
I said this very literal reading—the most literal I can conceive, and the most in keeping with the rest of the New Testament—must have brought great comfort to the Thessalonians, and may to us. If events soon to occur showed them that the Lord who died and rose was truly present and reigning over the universe, then, however terrible in themselves, those events would fulfil the hopes of one dispensation and open a higher one. They would mark a crisis in the history of the universe that affected not chiefly its visible conditions but the relations between the living and the dead, and set a wholly new meaning on earthly life and death. And if we had courage to believe that what Paul said actually happened, and that we live in that better age he looked toward, we might claim as ours now many privileges we suppose may be ours in some distant future; we might see that far more has been done for us and for mankind than we ever dreamed; and we might look with far greater confidence to what will be done when the mists clear and we walk in the full light of God’s face.
But to gain that comfort we must attend, as the Thessalonians had to, to the words that follow: “But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that it should be written to you. For you yourselves perfectly know that a day of the Lord as a thief at night so cometh. When they say, Peace and safety, then a sudden destruction is standing over them… But you, brethren, are not in darkness that the day should come upon you as a thief. For ye are all sons of light and sons of day… let us not sleep, as the rest, but watch and be sober… having put upon us the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. Because God hath not appointed us to wrath, but unto the procuring of salvation, through that Lord of us, Jesus Christ… that whether we wake or whether we sleep, we may live together with Him.” (Lachmann reads “thieves,” a tempting change one would adopt if the previous verse did not seem to forbid it, and if it were not too obvious a substitute for the usual reading.) Here lay the great correction of both their irregular conduct and their confused belief. The day of the Lord had presented itself to them as a date to be worked out by calculations which, though drawn from the prophets, followed the very methods of the astrologers and soothsayers the prophets denounced. Paul did not want to make them doubt the day was near—that they were on its eve, indeed in it, though its sun had not yet climbed high—but such restless reckoning about particular events and supposed predictions hindered rather than helped their confidence and diligence. By “a day” he meant not twenty-four hours but day as opposed to night, light as opposed to darkness—as he explains to the Romans and Corinthians, and here with more detail because of their particular errors. The more we watch his language, the more we see with what divine skill he opens their minds to a deeper grasp of the truth while giving it a practical force and awe they were likely to lose, and how all his corrections encourage rather than dampen their faith and hope. They had not thought too highly of their present standing; they had only made the future an excuse for belittling it. They were sons of light and of day now, not to become so later. Yet they were to expect blessings not yet received, a full salvation from all that crushed them. That hope was a helmet, the best guard against the deadliest assaults; keeping it, they stayed awake; losing it, they would sleep.
The exhortations that follow, though fit for any Church, suit this one’s temper especially. One can easily see how restless speculation about the coming time, and the advantage it gave clever diviners over homelier teachers, would keep them from knowing and valuing their appointed guides and their quiet labors of love. Though Paul witnessed to their brotherly love, the Church’s peace must often have been broken by rival predictors. An impatience of government, matched by a loss of the gift of governing, may have bred unruly spirits needing admonition. The despondent would be left uncomforted by those busy about times and seasons. There would be intolerance of the weak and that pride of half-knowledge most opposed to sympathy and long-suffering. Some instance of revenge or bitterness toward outsiders may have prompted the warning against returning evil for evil. The other exhortation—to pursue good toward one another and toward all—reminded them they were a Church, a body of witnesses whose conduct to each other testified to the world. “Rejoice always” and “pray without ceasing,” like the like commands to the Philippians, gain new force from the tribulations both faced. “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus unto you” reminded them of the truth that persecuted men, and men expecting a judgment on others, easily forget—that God’s will is a will to all good, and they were right only when rejoicing in it and yielding to it. The Thessalonians seemed less likely than others to quench the Spirit or despise prophesyings; but the Spirit of God is not the spirit of divination, and prophecies, in the Apostolic sense, are not predictions. Our interpretations have cruelly mangled the beautiful precepts that follow: “Prove all things. Hold on to the good. Hold off from every form of evil.” For we have taught a doctrine well suited to our cowardice, but wholly against Christ and His Apostles—that we must abstain from all that appears evil in men’s eyes. He had told them to test everything to see its worth, and yet we make him tell them to shrink from whatever looks bad to those who judge by appearance and not righteously! Had he preached so at the close of a letter all about Christ’s day and judgment, the contradiction would be flagrant. But he is guilty of no such thing. He ends his exhortations with a prayer—not that they abstain from what seems evil to evil men, but that the God of peace would make them wholly holy, and preserve their whole spirit, soul, and body blameless to the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
No one, I think, has ever doubted the connection between the two Thessalonian Epistles. It is closer than that between the two to the Corinthians: the subject is the same in both, and the second is commonly, and perhaps rightly, thought to have arisen from mistakes about the first. From its opening it is clear the Thessalonians’ tribulations had continued and grown, while Paul says their faith, patience, and love grew too. This, he says, is “an evidence of the righteous judgment of God, to the end that ye may be made worthy of the kingdom of God; for which also ye are suffering: seeing that it is a righteous thing with God to recompense to those who trouble you, tribulation, and to you the troubled, rest with us in the unveiling of the Lord Jesus from heaven, with the angels of his power, in the flame of fire, giving out recompense to them who know not God, and to them who do not obey the Gospel… Who shall receive the judgment of eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints…” I quote this partly to show how much Paul is occupied here, as in the first letter, with a coming judgment, and partly so the reader may weigh the words he uses for its nature and compare them with like expressions elsewhere. No passage would be so readily taken as a classic and central one on the whole question of judgment and punishment. Let us examine it, to get some light on subjects that so deeply concern all men in all ages.
The Thessalonians’ faith, patience, and love were, Paul believed, means to their being made (or counted) worthy of the kingdom of God. If that kingdom is one of righteousness, peace, and joy, then patience, hope, and love are the instruments by which it is enjoyed, as a clear eye is the instrument by which a landscape is enjoyed. So our Lord taught in the Sermon on the Mount: the poor in spirit would have the kingdom, the pure in heart would see God—not paid for these qualities by future gifts, but, being poor in spirit, not craving to rule themselves but glad to have the true Lord rule their hearts; and, being pure in heart, able to know Him in whom they live. The righteous judgment Paul awaits is that which declares who are living as children of God’s kingdom; and the righteous judgment on the persecutors is its opposite—the trouble and confusion belonging to those who exalt themselves and trample others. In the revelation of Jesus Christ with His angels—that great daylight of the universe showing all things as they are—there will be recompense to those who have not known God and do not obey the Gospel. This recompense he calls eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and the glory of His power. The wicked man’s recompense corresponds exactly to the righteous man’s: God’s true judgment settles the condition of both, and each gets what he sought. As knowing God and being like Him is the one’s reward, not knowing Him and being without Him is the other’s punishment. This is called eternal destruction, the most terrible state a spiritual being can reach. We are not told how long it lasts. Time enters as little here as in our Lord’s discourse in Matthew twenty-five; in both, the language describes a moral condition, and in both the revelation of Christ, which shows each person for what he is, separates those on the right from those on the left. Nor must we forget this judgment, like that in Matthew twenty-five, was the one that would close that age of the world. Those who had called Jesus a blasphemer for saying He was the Son of God would find out what Being they had worshipped under God’s name, and what Being they had rejected when they said the crucified Man was not His true image. What better blessing could a faithful man want than to see in that crucified Man the real King of the universe, the full glory of the Father? So Paul, while cherishing the Thessalonians’ hope in this judgment of Christ, shows plainly what was to be feared and hoped in it. It was to be earnestly desired because it was true, not because it favored Christians, Jews, or Gentiles—because it would bring out the true image of God and confound all false images set up by anyone, Jew, heathen, or Christian.
And now, on the strength of Christ’s appearing and that blessed gathering into Him which fulfils their life as members of a Church, he begs them not to be quickly shaken or agitated—by spirit, word, or letter claiming to be from him—into thinking the day of the Lord was coming instantly. “Let no one deceive you in any wise,” he says, “because it will not come unless the apostasy come first, and there be revealed the man of sin, the adversary, that lifts himself above every one called a god, and above every form of worship, so as to set himself in the temple of God, showing that he is God.” I could spend volumes on this if I ranged over eighteen centuries asking which famous name best fits and fulfils the description. But since reverence for Paul’s words and the harmony of Scripture have forced us to suppose he speaks of events in his own day, I set such questions aside and only try to learn from the passage itself what kind of manifestation is meant. Then we shall better judge any historical facts that answered to the words at that time, and may afterward deal fairly with all the alleged later fulfilments.
There is no doubt, then—few have doubted—that this describes the appearing of an Antichrist, anticipating the appearing of the Christ Paul has spoken of so much. Whatever is opposed to the lowliness of the Son of Man—to the King who came meek on an ass, to Him who ministered instead of being ministered to, who gave Himself for the world—is gathered and concentrated here. The man of sin is set against the Lord our Righteousness; the son of perdition against the Saviour; he who exalts himself above all called God against Him who made Himself of no reputation; he who sits in God’s temple showing himself as God against Him who said, “Father, not my will but Thine.” Clearly a power is described that claims rule over both the Gentile and the Jewish world, exalting itself above every Gentile worship and proclaiming its superiority to the one Jehovah. The word apostasy seems to mean that reverence was paid to this power not only by Jews and heathen but by professed disciples of Jesus. Now, since the deified Emperor always strove to set himself above all called God and to claim all the empire’s gods and worships as his own, since much in the old Roman law and faith resisted this, since the temple at Jerusalem was the one abiding witness against it, and every holy man upholding its true worship was a personal check on this final brute-worship, I take it that the whole period from Augustus onward was an approach to this antichristian idea, but that it was never embodied even in Nero. It is no new theory of mine—biblical scholars have often suggested it—that Vitellius shows all the marks presented here. That is better considered when we examine the Apocalypse. I do not ask anyone to accept it, nor pledge myself to it. I feel the uncertainty of even the best such identifications the more strongly as I feel the truth and certainty of Paul’s assertion that such a power did exist, and had not yet reached its worst development.
He asks whether they remember he told them these things while with him. Their special opposition from the Jews made such teaching more needful for them than for others. He could not tell them Jesus was, or would be shown to be, the Christ without telling them what a different, opposite idea of a Christ was abroad, and how the world in all its parts would at last find a representative of that idea. He says they also knew what the restraining influence was that kept this mystery of iniquity from breaking out fully at once. Later he seems to make this restraint a person: “He that lets will let till he be taken out of the way.” Since Paul must have looked for the great divine center of resistance to the antichristian principle in Jerusalem, and must have felt its Pharisees and Sadducees more possessed by that principle than any worshipper of Jupiter, it is a not unreasonable supposition, held by many, that he located the restraining power in the church at Jerusalem, and especially in the Apostle James. The effect of his “being taken out of the way,” on the city that revered his righteousness, and still more on the Church, would answer strikingly to the words of the brother-Apostle so often called his rival. When that great obstacle was removed, the mystery of iniquity long at work seemed to burst forth most mightily where least expected, and nothing but the destruction of the city and temple—so nearly contemporary with the fall of the Capitol, the downfall of Vitellius, and the beginning of a better era—could have kept that hideous, godless tyranny, upheld by all lying wonders and the tricks of diviners, from fixing itself permanently over the world. To the old prophets the overthrow of such a power would have seemed a day of the Lord indeed, far more wonderful and pregnant than the fall of Sennacherib or Belshazzar. But linked with the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of Man, it could be seen as nothing but His appearing to claim the kingdom He had proved to be His Father’s, which the power of evil sought to wrest from Him.
On this firm ground Paul can raise thanksgivings and arguments as earnest as in the first letter. He thanks God for choosing them as a first-fruit unto salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth. He prays God would comfort their hearts and strengthen them in every good word and work. He entreats, as he might command, that they keep the rules he gave and separate from every brother who walks disorderly. He explains this by bringing out more plainly a charge he had hinted at before: some were not workers but overworkers—busybodies. “If a man will not work, neither let him eat” is his rule, first shown in his own example. He will have no trifling here—no dainty saints so busy with their spirits they neglect their manual callings, no waiters for the Lord who will not do what the Lord commands. There must be discipline with such people, only they must be warned as brothers, not treated as enemies. Then he asks the Lord of peace to give them peace always in every place, and prays that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ might be with them all.