In England, it would be very easy to think that most Christians don’t suffer for their faith. After all, most English Christians don’t have to suffer for their faith. It doesn’t seem normal for your faith to cause you suffering and hardship, and therefore if the climate were to change, we could easily be thrown if we were to start to suffer for our faith in this country. In fact, it’s actually normal to suffer for your faith, and the relative comfort we have in the affluent West is actually what is weird and unusual. So we have to get our thinking straight, otherwise we will be thrown — we might even give up — if we have to suffer for our faith.
Remember, the Christians in Thessalonica have only been Christians for a few months, and they’ve already in that short time had to suffer intensely. Paul has been reassuring them: they heard the genuine gospel from a genuine minister of the gospel, and they made a genuine response. And today, in the short passage that Jean read, he’s still trying to reassure them. He wants to reassure them that their suffering is normal. He wants to reassure them that their response is spot on. His concern for them comes in the passage that comes up next week, chapter 3, verses 2 and 3. Paul says, “We sent Timothy, who is our brother and co-worker in God’s service in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith, so that no one would be unsettled by these trials.” He doesn’t want them to be unsettled by the trials that they’re going through.
So let’s look together at the response that Paul says is normal and healthy, so that we can be encouraged that we are on the right track and we can be spurred on and encouraged to keep responding in the right way. And then let’s look at the suffering that Paul says is normal, so that our thinking and expectations are clear and so that we can be spurred on to keep following Jesus even if things get tough.
1. Normal Response: Receive the Word
So firstly, the normal response, as shown by the Thessalonian Christians, is to receive the word. Let me read again verse 13:
“We also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.”
Note there are three people involved in that sentence. There is Paul — “the word of God which you heard from us.” There’s God — they received it as the word of God. And then there’s the Thessalonian Christians — that word is at work in them. So Paul spoke words that are actually words of God, and those words are then at work in the Thessalonian Christians.
Now, remember from last week — most recently, as Paul has been defending his own ministry — what he’s been wanting to stress, just in the previous few verses, was that his ministry was not setting out to please people. He wasn’t driven by the desire to be popular; he was instead seeking to be faithful to God and to pass on the message that’s been entrusted to him. And therefore he brings God’s word. If Paul had been focused on what other people think, then his message would just have been a message of a human teacher. But his aim is to be faithful to God.
Now, in part, the reason why the words Paul speaks are the words of God is because he is an apostle. In the New Testament, the apostles — that’s the eleven disciples who were left, Paul, James, and a couple of others — they were the equivalent of the prophets in the Old Testament. What they spoke were God’s authoritative words for the churches of all time. That’s why we still today read their letters as part of our Bible. But it’s not just that, because insofar as Paul is faithful, the message he brings is indeed God’s own words.
Now this has big implications for what we do on a Sunday morning. It matters enormously that the preachers we have faithfully open up the Bible. If I just give you my views on a subject, then what you’re hearing is just that — my views. If, on the other hand, I faithfully enable us to hear the voice of the Bible speaking into our own day, we are hearing the voice of God himself.
So let me picture for you three different kinds of sermon or talk. In one, the speaker simply gives their own views on some stuff they read in the newspaper, some things from current affairs, and things they’ve done that week — just some thoughts that struck them. Well, that’s fairly obviously just their views. They may be interesting, they may not be interesting, but it’s all it is — their views. In another talk, the speaker has got something that they think the rest of us would do well to hear, and so we’re getting their message. They bring some Bible verses into play to help explain that message, but at the end of the day it’s their message, not the Bible’s. As it were, the Bible is in the passenger seat — the preacher is driving the car, determining where the sermon goes, and the Bible is just brought in as supporting evidence when it’s useful. We’re still, at the end of the day, hearing the human speaker — their views, the thing they thought we ought to hear today. The kind of talk I always aim to bring is the third kind, where what we do is put the Bible not in the passenger seat but in the driving seat. We open it up and ask, “What is this saying, and how do we hear that message in our own day?” And then we let that shape the content and the tone of the talk, so the Bible is being allowed to speak for itself. And to the extent that that is successful, we are hearing the voice of God in our own day.
It doesn’t just affect how those who minister to us preach — it affects the way we listen as well. It’s so easy to treat the sermon slot of a service as just somebody else’s ideas that we can tune into or out of as we choose. And some sermons would be that. But when we preach faithfully, when the Bible is unfolded, we are hearing God speak — we are hearing God’s voice. Indeed, more than that, God himself is at work. He says, “as it actually is, the word of God, which is” — present tense — “indeed at work in you who believe.” God is not just speaking; he’s working.
So it’s a little bit like when you go and have your Covid jab, and they inject the vaccine into your arm, and then for the next few weeks that vaccine is going around your body and is at work — it’s doing its thing. And as we listen attentively to the voice of God through the Bible, God is at work. For the rest of the week, for the rest of our lives, we pray that word from God is going round our bodies doing its thing. God is at work when the Bible is preached, God’s voice is heard, and when God’s voice is heard, God works in our lives. God’s word is the Bible, the Bible is God’s word — it’s living and active in us today, sharper than a two-edged sword.
So there’s the normal response to God, as exemplified by the Thessalonians: to receive the word.
2. Normal Suffering: Hated by the World
Second, the normal suffering that they experienced is to be hated by the world. And Paul says three things about the suffering these Christians experience.
The first thing he says is that it’s normal for Christians — it’s normal to suffer. So verse 14:
“You, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus. You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered.”
So the Thessalonian Christians were surrounded by different people from the Christians in Judea, but the reaction was the same. Now — I want to go to verse 15 before I get to that — verse 15 says that “you suffered the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus.” This is how Jesus was treated. “And the prophets” — it’s how the prophets were treated. “And also drove us out” — it’s how Paul, Timothy, and Silas were treated. Jesus was treated that way. The prophets were treated that way. Paul and his co-workers were treated that way. The Christians in Judea were treated that way. The Thessalonians were treated that way. This is normal — there’s a common thread: different churches, different places, different cultures, all experiencing the same thing. As Jesus said in John chapter 15, verse 18: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” So this is normal for Christians.
Not only that, though — it’s to be expected from the unbelieving world. This is just an extension of the previous point. These Thessalonian Christians were surrounded by different people, but the reaction they got was the same. Now, why would the unbelieving world oppose Christians? Why would it bother them? Well, verse 16: “in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles, so that they may be saved.” So when someone hears the Christian message, one person hears it as good news — the best news in the world — at which point they become a Christian. Somebody else hears it and decides that it’s not true and therefore not good news either, and so they don’t become a Christian. And the people in that second category are going to think that other people should be prevented from hearing this message that they think is false, dangerous, and harmful — and so they will oppose it. It is to be expected.
Some people worry that this passage from 1 Thessalonians is very antisemitic in its tone, that it speaks very poorly of the Jewish people and could encourage people to hate and mistreat the Jews. I mean, let me just read again some of this:
“You suffered the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and also drove us out. They displeased God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.”
Doesn’t sound very kindly towards the Jews, does it? But actually, if we look at what we’ve just been saying, we’ll see that that is not Paul’s point at all — in fact, it’s the opposite. They did do all of those things: the Jews of Jesus’s day did indeed kill the Lord Jesus, Jews of previous generations did indeed kill the prophets, and this behaviour did indeed displease God. But Paul’s point is that this is typical — it’s to be expected of the unbelieving world, of every race and in every place. The Thessalonians were on the receiving end of identical treatment from the Gentiles that other people had received from the Jews. So what the Jews of Jerusalem did was wicked, and this wicked behaviour is then repeated wherever you find Christians, in any culture in the world, whoever they happen to be living amongst.
Paul is not at all against the Jews — he tells us elsewhere in Romans that the Jews are his fellow countrymen, his heart beats for them, he longs for them to hear about Jesus and be saved. Paul is not against the Jews, but he is saying that God is against those people — of whatever race — who oppose the Lord Jesus and his people.
So the suffering these Christians experience is normal for Christians, it’s expected from the unbelieving world, and thirdly, it’s dealt with by God. This is actually the material we were straying into just now:
“They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.”
So it’s bad enough to reject God’s word, to reject God’s Son, but the most serious sin of all is to seek to stop other people from hearing God’s word about his Son. And this reminds me of Paul’s first missionary journey, where he went to the island of Cyprus. Let me just read from Acts 13, beginning at verse 6:
“They travelled through the whole island until they came to Paphos. There they met a Jewish sorcerer and false prophet named Bar-Jesus, who was an attendant of the proconsul, Sergius Paulus. The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. But Elymas the sorcerer — for that is what his name means — opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas and said, ‘You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right. You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind for a time, not even able to see the light of the sun.’ Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about, seeking someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord.”
There was Elymas the magician, seeking to stop the proconsul from hearing about the Lord Jesus and responding — and he got very harsh treatment for it. This displeases God.
And you can easily see how the Thessalonians could just assume that the side they’re on will lose — the opposition just keeps coming. And Paul reassures them: God has got this. And it’s been true in history: whenever the authorities have sought to squash Christianity, it has emerged stronger than ever. The most famous recent example is when all the foreign missionaries were expelled from Communist China, and after many decades with no one being allowed in to find out whether the church had survived the persecution, we finally discovered that the church had grown enormously.
God has noticed what’s happening. The opponents are just adding to the catalogue of sins for which God will judge them. And so certain is the future day of God’s anger against those who oppose the Christian church that Paul speaks of it as being in the past: “The wrath of God has come upon them at last.” It’s already been written into God’s calendar — when God will deal with this problem.
Be Reassured: You’re Normal!
So Paul reassures the Thessalonians: their response to the gospel is normal, and their suffering is normal. And if they’re asking themselves, “If we’ve got this right, why are we suffering?” — here’s the answer. And actually, in our day, we ought to be asking the question: “If we’ve got this right, why are we not suffering?”
Well, this passage is designed to reassure — to reassure them and us. It reassures Christians that we are responding rightly to the gospel: keep on receiving the Bible as the word of God, keep letting it work in you. And it reassures us that suffering for Jesus is normal. The world hated Jesus, the world hated Paul, the world hated the Thessalonians, and it will hate us if we follow Jesus wholeheartedly. But keep going, because God has got this situation. Jesus will return, and we just need to persevere so that we meet him on the last day not as our judge, but as our rescuer.