Introduction
We’ve been looking into why the Apostolic team of Paul, Silas and Timothy were so over-joyed by the reports Timothy had brought to Corinth of the firm and genuine faith of the very new church in Thessalonica … a church born in a climate of opposition to the Gospel and which the apostles had needed to flee from far sooner than they would have wished for the protection of the new believers there.
The report led the apostles to conclude that God had graciously brought these new believers into genuine faith, and the evidence they found for that lay in:
• their genuine faith, vv. 2-3
• their genuine conversion, vv. 4-5
• their genuine discipleship, vv. 5b-8
• their Genuine Repentance, v. 9, and now
• their patient faith, v. 10
“you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead – Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.”
They turned from idols to serve the Lord and to WAIT for Him to bring their salvation to completion … in the face of current severe pressure to turn back from the persecution and the privations their faith brought down on them.
To serve is one thing.
A call to action is often somehow easier to embrace.
But the command to wait?
That is often more difficult and speaks more surely of a SETTLED and deep-seated conviction.
So …
Await!
Patience.
Waiting.
While the clock is ticking.
“to wait for his Son from heaven”
The key to this waiting lies in the Thessalonians self-awareness as the ‘servants of God’ … Paul has explained that they turned from their idols to SERVE the One True Living God and the verb used is δουλεω , the word used for the household slave.
And the thing about a slave is that they are not ‘on their own time’.
A slave is not on their own time anymore because their time belongs to someone else!
How are you with that?
I was at the feed mill yesterday getting cow food and of the small group of men there you could tell which were small farmers on their own time and which was the other guy, the one being paid by someone else to be there … the one much happier to stand around and chat rather than get loaded up and get out of there!
If you are being paid by someone else to be there, it is HIS clock that is ticking, not yours, so it’s much easier to wait patiently.
The Christian waits patiently when He consciously considers himself to be the SERVANT of the One True Living God Who owns and arranges that Christian’s life and time.
Now, I think many of us feel more at home with the surge that follows the wait.
But Faith waits.
Why?
Faith waits because it considers its’ time to be His time and because faith truly trusts Him to take care of it.
Now, no doubt we are more comfortable with those Biblical texts that speak of acts of faith …
So, when we go to that famous passage in Ephesians 2:8-10 we read:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
Grace hurts human pride because it tells us we aren’t good enough, can’t sort our situation out for ourselves and need to rely on the costly, substitutionary death of Christ for us to sort out the mess we have made of things.
But it is by grace you have been saved.
That sounds reasonably easy to accept but then Paul goes on to stress explicitly that this is NOT by your works, and to account for that by saying it prevents you feeding your human pride ‘so that no-one can boast’.
You see, Paul is exposing our idols there … the idols of self-worship, which preach their false Gospel that says: ‘you are a good person’.
He is testing whether we are easy about trusting completely to Christ for our eternal destiny … not a minor thing, not an easy thing to trust someone else with.
And THEN Paul goes on to talk about the Christian being GOD’s workmanship not our own, created in Christ Jesus ‘to do good works’ … aha!
Human pride begins to take encouragement again … and Paul jumps straight back in to say that even our good works are to be conceived of as things God has prepared for us to walk in. He has GIVEN these to us!
God has prepared certain good works that He wants us to do. They may not come in rapid succession. We might need to trust Him with that and WAIT!
There is this oscillation in many believers’ daily battles to live by grace through faith alone, but it is that insistence on living by grace through faith alone which drives the search for doing the things that God has prepared for us to walk in not those we will feel good about taking upon ourselves and trusting Him in THAT is what makes people who have truly trusted in Christ ready to WAIT for the next thing He’s prepared for us to do to come along.
We rush to DO ... but the things we have to do are given us by Him, so we can wait for them as necessary because we can trust Him to sort it out!
Well, patience as a characteristic, therefore, flows directly from firm adherence to the doctrines of grace and from the life of the Spirit which daily leans on the Lord and looks for His leading …
It is therefore a fruit of living in the Spirit, Who is the One Who now (since the Lord’s ascension back to Heaven) brings the presence of the Holy Trinity – God Himself – into our lives.
What is the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5?
Love, joy, peace, PATIENCE, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control … ‘for such there is no Law’.
Of COURSE not … because these flow not from Law but from Grace.
Patience , we’re saying, is the characteristic of faith and the fruit of the indwelling Holy Spirit Who comes into our life by grace through FAITH alone.
No wonder the Apostles were so assured by the genuineness of these Thessalonians’ faith when they heard wide-spread accounts from all the churches in the surrounding areas of the Thessalonians PATIENCE!
But look, it is a specific sort of patience these apostles are hearing about.
Awaiting His Son’s coming back
Nijay Gupta comments that while there is a kind of passive element in the verb ‘to wait’
ἀναμένω
1) to wait for one, with the added notion of patience and trust) there is likely to be a transformative element in the use of this verb in this context: “They live their lives in eager anticipation of Jesus’ return; they have re-orientated their lives around His arrival.”
And he goes on:
“To wait for, or anticipate, Jesus’ return means living according to an alternative vision of power and value that is unseen, but is surely to come. The Thessalonians have shown signs of aligning with this not-yet Kingdom even under pressure and affliction.”
This is the only place in the Thessalonian letters that Jesus is referred to as ‘the Son of God’.
To his largely Jewish audience the author of the Book of Hebrews writes “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” (Heb. 1:1-2)
The situation these Apostles are writing to is now largely a Gentile situation so there is not such a need to emphasise this aspect of Christology … it’s referred to and moved on from which is interesting, because unlike many preachers I confess I’ve heard, the Apostle doesn’t feel the need to GIVE his hearers a problem before setting about trying to cleverly solve it for them!
To wait patiently for this Jesus Who is …
Coming from Heaven
Jesus has been raised.
He has been seen raised, and then He has been seen ASCENDING back to Heaven, from where He came.
So Jesus is expected, coming from Heaven before or at least just as Heaven comes here.
The implication is that we shall (like the ten wise rather than the ten foolish virgins) need to be living in PREPARED anticipation of Him … which these Thessalonian believers were clearly perceived to be.
The RAISED One
Who are they waiting for?
“His Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead”
Jesus the RAISED One …
Now, look … you have got to remember what these Thessalonian Christians were up against.
Thessalonica hadn’t historically been terribly loyal to the Roman Empire and hadn’t always backed the right side in its inner turmoils.
In more recent times, though, it had persuaded the Empire of its’ loyalty and life had been made much better for the place.
Given its fairly recent and pretty turbulent history, Thessalonica had to be pretty keen to keep on good terms with the Emperor and both riots and preaching one Lord … Jesus Christ … was going to be perceived as a really threatening thing by the powerful forces at work in Thessalonian politics, business and society.
The threat to the Thessalonian believers was therefore intense.
But they were taking that risk by being faithful to the Lord.
Why?
Because God was the One Who had demonstrated it lay in His power not simply to pull in cash for a city and its tradesmen but also to raise the dead.
So - if THIS God is for us, who can be against us?!
They were living faithfully at Thessalonica in spite of the threat to their lives because in their minds they genuinely were the servants of the God Who fixed the problem of the worst thing their opponents could do to them when Christ crucified was raised from the dead … defeating the last enemy and sealing the certainty of their eternal life.
And that changes everything.
They were waiting for the Raised One, Who was raised by the One they also served and Who promised eternal life to faith in His Name.
The One Who GOD raised from the dead
That’s a God for you.
The Roman deities didn’t raise the dead!
The Roman deities were all myths and legends!
This is the One, True, LIVING (that is, real) God.
And they are sticking with HIM.
From the Dead
You see, the apostles writing this keep referring to life’s actual hard realities.
Jesus was raised by God ἐκ [τῶν] νεκρῶν – from the dead.
1) properly 1a) one that has breathed his last, lifeless 1b) deceased, departed, one whose soul is in heaven or hell 1c) destitute of life, without life, inanimate
There is this class of people … dead ones.
Here is life’s big bogey man!
Jesus was REALLY there … physically dead.
And from that real, physical condition … God raised Jesus.
Now, I’m sure the realities of the hostility and the threats encountered in their families and in their society … as well as in their relationship to the state … looked pretty real to these Thessalonians.
I’m sure the reality of death was pretty much on their minds too … the Apostles go on in 4:13 ff to absolutely clarify what looks like being the only shaky point Timothy had reported back on in the Thessalonians’ faith.
Were they wobbling at this point under the very hard realities of their persecution?
“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15 According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord for ever.”
Then Paul returns to the need to encourage one another about their own resurrection in v. 18 “Therefore encourage one another with these words.”
But, you see, that all rests on this reality in 1:10, that God raised the Lord Jesus from the dead.
You believed it and you have been patiently waiting for the Lord Jesus to return based on the reality that God raised Him from the dead so that you shall be raised too … don’t worry that those who have lost their lives already in this world won’t be raised from the dead in the same way that Christ was.
They will, because they (like you) waited patiently for the REALLY risen Lord’s return.
We KNOW Him, the Risen One, Who is coming back for us.
The NAMED One
Waiting for the Son, waiting for the raised One, waiting for the NAMED One … what a Name!
Jesus.
Why Jesus?
Well, this identifies what the Thessalonians have lived in hope of with the real, historical person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Roman myths did not have and did not claim historically verifiable personalities.
In fact, proto-Gnosticism was beginning to emerge out of Platonic ideas which tended to devalue the physical and corporeal … but
Here Paul & co are powerfully reinforcing Christianity’s historical, corporeal roots in reality.
There was a real Jesus, and there still is due to His real bodily resurrection!
Not only a specific tangible real person though, but one named in Matthew 1:21 to reflect the reality of His significance.
Joseph discovered Mary was pregnant BEFORE they’d been married and was inclined to quietly break it off, but …
“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.’”
And Matthew tells us that this all happened to fulfil Isaiah’s prophecy (Matt. 1:23) “ ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).”
Now that there, quite obviously, is huge!
The evidence that the Thessalonians’ faith is genuine is that they are waiting for this resurrected, Saviour, God in the flesh to return and that waiting faith keeps them following in His Way in spite of ALL of the things they have to put up with as a result.
And it’s worth it because of this ONE great big thing that He does for us (worth it for MANY reasons, but the letter is about to pick out the BIG one …)
Our RESCUER
Jesus is fundamentally our RESCUER.
I LOVE the way that old hymn of William Gadsby (1773-1844) moves from the sublime to the nitty gritty broken human needs we have met for us in Christ:
“Immortal honours rest on Jesus’ head
My God, my portion, and my Living Bread;
In Him I Iive, upon Him cast my care,
He saves from death, destruction and despair.”
Our rescuer from the coming wrath
Jesus, named the Saviour, God come in the flesh is the One Who SAVES us from the coming wrath.
Now, turning from sin to follow Christ in Thessalonica brought down a significant measure of wrath on the individual.
Human wrath.
But that’s not the sort of wrath that’s in view here at all.
It is GOD’s wrath that is in view here.
And THAT is a different kettle of fish.
Now, you can argue with the wrath of humanity … but not with God’s wrath.
Human wrath is almost always to some extent or other wrong.
Human nature is sinful, so that human actions are tainted with some measure or other of wrong and injustice.
Human anger does not bring about the righteousness God requires, for sure!
But anger – wrath – in a perfect being is never like that.
It is unspoiled, not marred by sin or by injustice and is always as righteous as the unchanging character of the holy One Who is being wrath.
It is just.
You can’t argue with it.
Mercifully though, you can be rescued from it by Another Who bears its’ justice for you.
THAT is the rescue from wrath we need.
Those persecuting you won’t see that.
But waiting patiently … the essence of faith … for His Son from Heaven, Jesus Whom He raised from the dead, these Thessalonians rest safe in their trust in the One Who rescues us from the COMING wrath.
Conclusion
The Apostles' salient points in this passage are these
• Faith in the Risen Son
• Results in PATIENT waiting for Christ to return, while
• Trusting to Jesus to rescue from the coming wrath
Now, their current experience as followers of Jesus dealt out by the rest of humanity in the current evil age was ROUGH.
But faith … actually trusting yourself … to the Risen son results in patient waiting throughout the experience of the pressure, pain and persecution which are the Christian’s authentic experience of this present evil age … waiting for Jesus (the conqueror of death) to rescue us.
NOT to rescue us necessarily from the consequences of following Him, that is from the wrath of mankind, in this present evil age.
Not NECESSARILY.
But DEFINITELY to rescue us from the wrath to come.
Here is confidence-building assurance of saving faith in the Thessalonians and in any one of us wherever we see it:
Faith in the Risen Son, which
Results in PATIENT waiting through trial, temptation and tempest because of a fundamental, forward-looking
Trust placed in Jesus to rescue us from the coming wrath.
God grant us, also, to LIVE these reassuring realities.
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