Easter celebrations frequently focus on the fact that we will continue to live after we die. As true as that is, it’s important to realize that most people believed that before Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that humans continue to live in some form (as ghosts or spirits or as some amalgamation of life forces) after they die. The resurrection of Jesus signaled something more radical and far-reaching than that.
This introduction to 1 Thessalonians (the series is titled, Hopeful) goes back to Acts 17, where Luke narrates the exciting story of Paul’s arrival in – and hasty departure from – Thessalonica. We will look at the background of the First Letter to the Thessalonians, its structure, and its themes.
Viewing time: 24 minutes (approx.)
Today, we begin a series on Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians that I’ve titled “Hopeful.” We will have more teaching than preaching today, as we get an overview and introduction to the letter. We’ll look at the letter’s background, structure, and themes -what it’s all about and why it makes a difference to 21st century Christians.
We’ll begin with a little background, which will be helpful when we delve into the letter itself, which we will do next week. Paul is on the second of his three missionary journeys. His partnership with Barnabas has come to an end – a Martin and Lewis, Sonny and Cher, Simon and Garfunkel sad kind of an end – yet the reach of their ministry has effectively doubled. Barnabas and John Mark take the gospel to Cyprus, while Paul enlists Silas to go with him on a tour up the coast, revisiting churches Paul already knew and loved.
Silas was a ministry veteran from the Jerusalem church. He had considerable gifts, a strong character, and a great reputation. Silas is also an excellent writer with a large vocabulary and an impressive style. When it came time for St. Peter to write his first letter, he went to Silas for help (1 Peter 5:12).
When they reached Lystra, where Paul and Barnabas had once planted a church, they met a young disciple named Timothy. Paul knew his mother and grandmother – sterling people – and was so impressed with Timothy that he invited him to join the team. Timothy was young and inexperienced, but he had a great heart, considerable gifts, and was quick to learn. He was also only half-Jewish. His father was a Gentile.
Not too long after Timothy joined the team, Paul had a vision at night, perhaps in a dream, of a man from the Roman province of Macedonia begging for help. The next day, Paul and the team decided that this was a sign from God and booked passage on a freighter headed for Macedonia.
They eventually came to Philippi, which was a Roman colony. The city did not have a Jewish synagogue, so Paul went down to the river on the Sabbath. He wasn’t going fishing – not exactly, at least. He knew that if there were any Jews in Philippi, this would be a likely place for them to come for Sabbath prayers—and he was right. Among them was a businesswoman named Lydia and, as they talked about Christ, she became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. She became the first convert in the province of Macedonia.
In Philippi, Timothy got to witness the birth of a church and its nurture by Paul and Silas. He was able to see how seasoned veterans plant a church; watched them teach, coach, and pray. It was an amazing experience.
Paul and his companions spent some time in Philippi, teaching the inexperienced converts what it means to be disciples of Jesus and helping the new church get established. The team and the church people became fast friends, and they maintained that friendship throughout Paul’s life.
Everything was going great until Paul and Silas – but mostly Paul, came between a greedy business and its profits. The businesspeople had Paul and Silas arrested. They probably didn’t even know about Timothy, who was still a wet-behind-the-ears junior partner, but Paul and Silas were dragged off by the authorities and beaten. In Roman criminal law, a suspect could be beaten before he was tried. They thought it made him more likely to tell the truth.
The next day, when the two men were released – Acts 16 tells the very interesting story – they reconnected with the team and, glad to be done with all the drama, headed west on the famous road known as the Egnation Way.
That brings us to our text, which is Acts 17:1-9. Let me read it and you can follow along on the screen. “When they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue. As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ,” he said. Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and not a few prominent women. But the Jews were jealous; so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob” – a lynch mob – “and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd. But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other brothers before the city officials, shouting: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil. Then they made Jason and the others post bond and let them go.”
Paul, Silas, Timothy, Luke, and whoever else was on the team traveled the Egnation Way through Amphipolis and Apollonia, which were both fairly large cities. Why didn’t they stop there? There were thousands of people in these cities that needed to know about Jesus.
I think the simple answer is they did not have synagogues. Paul was strategic in his approach. The synagogue was his bridgehead into a new community. He was a highly trained Jewish rabbi. Silas was a prophet and a teacher. The presence of a synagogue was to Paul what a landing strip is to a pilot. There were people at the synagogue who were interested in what he had to say. And because many of them were God-fearing Gentiles – Gentiles who worshiped Israel’s God but had not become Jews – he also had a bridge into the Gentile community.
Thessalonica had a synagogue and a sizeable Jewish community. So, Paul passed by Amphipolis and Apollonia knowing that if people came to Christ in Thessalonica, they would take the gospel to these other cities, which is exactly what happened. A wise strategist can be guided by the Spirit and a Spirit-guided person can be strategic. But strategy without the Spirit soon degenerates into selfish ambition.
What this means is that we can be strategic in talking to our friends, family members, and co-workers about Christ and we can depend on the Spirit at the same time. In fact, the Spirit leads most effectively those who think most clearly. Have you thought about – strategized – how best to tells friends and family about Christ?
Paul spoke in the Thessalonian synagogue on three Sabbaths. Since there were also meetings at the synagogue on Mondays and Thursdays, Paul and Silar might have been giving addresses and holding question and answer sessions nine or more times. Some of the Jews were convinced that Jesus was their Messiah. So were a large number – “a great many” would be a quite literal rendering of the Greek – of the God-worshiping Gentiles who attended synagogue, along with quite a few of the city’s prominent women – probably moneyed folk.
Things were going great in Thessalonica … until they weren’t. Luke writes that some Jews who were jealous of Paul’s success (and troubled by the effect it was having on the synagogue), rounded up some bad characters, who started a riot by claiming that Paul and Silas were violating imperial law.
To understand what is going on, you need to know that Thessalonica was a “free city.” That means that the Thessalonians were allowed to rule themselves without any interference from Rome. No imperial troops were stationed there. Free cities enjoyed unparalleled freedoms. For a city that might have been as large as Grand Rapids, this was extraordinary.
But the people knew that if imperial law was being flagrantly violated, all those freedoms could go away in a matter of days. And fomenting revolution by declaring someone other than Caesar king – this Jesus that Paul and Silas proclaimed – was a clear violation of imperial law. That’s what the “bad characters” claimed Paul and Silas were doing (verse 7). So, the mob went to Paul’s and Silas’s last know whereabouts with murderous intent, but in God’s sovereign wisdom, they weren’t there.
But their host was: an almost new believer named Jason. So, they dragged him and his friends before the court. Verse 9 says that they were made to post bond. In other words, Jason and his friends had to give the court money – possibly quite a lot of money – with the idea that if they were caught associating with Paul and Silas again, their bond would be forfeited, and they would be jailed. What this did was force Paul to stay away from Thessalonica to protect Jason and the other Christians. The whole thing was ingeniously diabolic, and in chapter 2 Paul attributes his inability to return to Thessalonica to Satan.
Notice that nothing has been said about Timothy. It’s possible he wasn’t there, but I think it is more likely that he flew under the radar. He was young, for one thing. He was half-Gentile for another. He was not a principal speaker, like Paul or Silas. So, his name was not included in the charges. That meant that while Paul and Silas could not return to Thessalonica without causing trouble for the Christians there, Timothy could come and go as he pleased.
Two more things about the background to the letter. Paul and Silas were forced to leave in a hurry. They had more to say to the church, but no time to say it. They were leaving brand new Christians behind, men and women who were being oppressed and threatened. And that worried Paul. He says in his letter that he reached a point where he could no longer stand it.
And so, he sent Timothy back to find out how the church was doing and, to his joy, found they were doing great. They were going through some rough times, but their faith held. He also learned from Timothy that there were some pretty big gaps left in their understanding of Christian living and Christian doctrine, which was understandable given the short time they had with Paul and Silas.
There were also some gaps regarding Paul’s sudden departure. Friends and family who were hostile to the faith were saying things like, “Those guys came in here, sold you a bill of goods, then left under the cover of night. How much money did they squeeze out of you before the skedaddled?” The Thessalonians didn’t know where Paul and Silas were when the riot started and didn’t see them before they left. So, they lacked a clear answer to these accusations.
Hence the need for a letter. In it, Paul celebrates the Thessalonians’ faith, gently corrects their misunderstandings, and encourages them to stay true to Jesus during the difficult times ahead.
Now to the structure of the letter. Like many of Paul’s letters, it falls into two main parts. It is an oversimplification, but we could say that the first part is doctrine, and the second part is application. Or we could say that the first part is a description of what God has done while the second part is instruction on how people ought to respond. Or the first part, which covers the first three chapters, looks back, while the second part, which covers chapters 4 and 5, looks forward.
Paul constructed the letter to the Thessalonians so that its two main sections are buttressed by three supporting prayers, one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end, like a building braced by support pillars. The first prayer (1:2-3) is a thanksgiving prayer for what God had done in the Thessalonians lives through Paul, Silas, and Timothy.
The center prayer (3:11-13) supports Paul’s instruction in the second half of the letter. He prays that the Thessalonians will love each other well, that they will live counterculturally as God’s holy people, and that they will endure with hope until Jesus returns. Love, holiness, and hope are the focus of Paul’s instruction in chapters four and five.
Paul ends the letter with a final pillar prayer in 5:23-24, a hopeful request for God to keep the Thessalonians blameless until Christ returns. I have found these to be some of the most reassuring verses in the Bible. I have meditated on these verses often, sometimes in the middle of the night, and have been deeply encouraged. They are great verses to memorize.
So, what can 21st century Christians get out of this ancient letter that will help navigate life in our complicated world? For one thing, we will see what it means to live counterculturally and get some pointers on how to do it. We are like people dancing an Irish reel at a rave. We are in everyone else’s way, and they are in ours. Our dance is going somewhere, theirs is not. That can make for opposition and temptation.
Paul gives attention to these stress points. The Thessalonian Christians had turned away from their culture’s gods – the things people sacrificed for and considered necessary. I say, “their culture’s,” but understand that meant their parents, their friends, and their coworkers. This led to misunderstandings and conflicts. We in our day face the same kind of thing.
Most people raised in Thessalonica didn’t understand the Christians’ thinking about sex. Christians believed that sex was a wonderful gift within the bounds of marriage, like a fire is a wonderful thing in a fireplace. Thessalonian culture believed that sex was an enjoyable diversion and placed no bounds on it.
That sharp distinction between what Christians and culture believe about sex is present today. Our culture has removed nearly all the protective limits to sex – the fire has escaped the fireplace – and they cannot understand why Christians think that is a mistake. When we say that sex should be reserved for a man and a woman within marriage, they say calls us bigots and haters. It is hard to stand by your convictions when people think you are a bad person. Many American Christians have forsaken their convictions. 1st Thessalonians can help us to stand firm.
Another important, time-transcending theme in this letter is the emphasis Paul places on hope. When people endure unremitting difficulty, like the Thessalonians (and like some of us), they can lose hope. This letter is full of hope. I don’t know how it ever escaped me, but it wasn’t until this time through that I realized that every chapter of Thessalonians ends on a hopeful note about Christ’s return. Paul ties the believer’s hope to the savior’s coming.
But that raised a question for the Thessalonians, a question which apparently had not been answered before Paul and Silas were forced to leave town. If our hope is that Christ will return and set everything right, where does that leave people who die?
It seems that during the interim between Paul’s hasty departure and the arrival of Timothy, there were deaths in the Thessalonian church. Some scholars believe those deaths were the result of persecution. How unfair it seemed that these people – brothers, sisters, friends – would die for Jesus before they had the chance to be rescued by Jesus. It was a cause of great grief.
In chapter four, Paul responds to this concern. He says, “Your friends won’t miss out. They’ll be with Jesus when he returns.” Nothing, as Paul says in Romans 8, will separate Jesus from the people who love him, not even death. Death is not a problem for God.
Another relevant theme for us from this letter is love. Lockwood has been working for years to create a culture of caring and a climate of love. The Thessalonians had such a culture. In that center pillar prayer, Paul says: “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.” In chapter 4 he wrote, “…about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other… Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more.” We can learn about a culture of caring from the Letter to the Thessalonians.
It is not easy to pull out application points from an introduction to a new series, so I am only going to give you one thing to do: read the Letter to the Thessalonians – it will only take the average reader about 7 or 8 minutes. If you are able, read it two or three times over the next few weeks. You will be amazed at the difference that makes in what you get out of this series. You won’t just hear Shayne teach. You will hear God speak. And that is what is important.
My dad taught me a lot of things, some intentionally, but most inadvertently. In the intentional column were things like how to tie an improved cinch knot, how to change a tire, and how to bowl. He taught me how to fight, how to ride a bike, and how to use a circular saw.
In the inadvertent column there are some good things, like standing up for people who are being bullied, but also things that were unhelpful and even untrue. He did not do this intentionally – he would have cut his hand off rather than harm me – but he did it nonetheless.
For example, he taught me early on that the world is unsafe. One way he did this was by offering vague, unexplained warnings: “Watch yourself when you are at the YMCA. There are bad men who live there.” Who these bad men were and what they might do was left a mystery. Or “If a stranger wants you to get in his car, run away from him.” Not bad advice, but it added to my sense that the world was out to get me.
When I was in elementary school, my dad made a body-sized punching bag from a sailor’s duffle filled with sawdust and taught my older brother and me how to fight. Of some future opponent, I remember him saying something like, “Don’t turn your back on him until you’ve made sure he can’t get up and hurt you.”
My dad was not wrong to teach me to defend myself or to teach me to be alert to potential dangers, but he taught me a view of the world that left God entirely out of the picture. My dad knew little about God in those days. He believed he was sending me into the world to make it on my own and was convinced I needed a distrustful spirit to succeed.
It wasn’t just the world “out there” that was unsafe; home was too. My dad could grow angry in a moment and for reasons that were not always clear. So, I learned to be guarded and to keep my own counsel. Without intending to, my dad taught me to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, which has proved a relational handicap throughout life.
In families that believe in God – as most did in those days – parents, especially dads, are the model on which a child constructs his idea of God. The God I believed in was distant, like my dad. Though he occasionally played catch with us, threw the football around, or took us fishing, dad rarely showed much interest in what we were doing—except when report cards came home. He was determined that his sons would measure up.
Another thing my dad taught, both intentionally and not, was that in this life you cannot depend on anyone for anything. You’re on your own in this world. Everyone is out for themselves. Learning this has made trusting others, even God, more difficult.
Dad began to change when my brother was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. He could not fix it – at that time, the mortality rate for this kind of leukemia was about 95 percent – and so was forced to depend on someone else. He turned to God.
My brother died, and it looked like God was no more dependable than anyone else. Yet out of the ashes of that catastrophe a spark of faith flared up in my dad and grew stronger throughout his life. Very slowly, he began to unlearn some of the things he had believed and taught me.
Our relationship, which had been tense since my teen years, improved. I began again to listen to my dad and to learn from him. He showed me that a tough man can develop gentleness. He modeled generosity with his time and money. He demonstrated kindness to his wife, my mother. He developed a love for the Bible. He taught me how a brave man dies with confidence in God.
On this Father’s Day, I remember my dad with gratitude. I am who I am in large part because of him, and because of him I know that I can become more than I’ve been.
In America, work is sometimes an idol and sometimes a bane. In the final session of this class, we look at what the Bible has to say about work, and we compare that to American ideas regarding work.
In 1788, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend: “I have sometimes wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence. For invention and improvement are prolific, and beget more of their kind. The present progress is rapid.”
Franklin expected that people in our day would be living as long as the antediluvian patriarchs, nearer to a millennium than a century. He could expect such a thing because he had a firm belief in progress. But the idea of universal, inevitable progress was fairly new in Franklin’s time.
The theory of progress didn’t enter secular society as a culture-shaping idea until the 18th century. With science delving ever deeper into the physical nature of the universe, and scientific hypotheses proving true, the thought that humans could understand and progressively take control of the world took hold.
Ben Franklin was a contemporary of the Scottish philosopher David Hume who, in 1742 wrote an influential paper titled, Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences. The lectures of another Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, widely regarded as the father of economics and capitalism, were framed by a conviction of the inevitability of progress.
During the late 1700s, two influential works by the French philosophers Jaques Turgot and Nicolas de Condorcet laid out theories of progress that argued that humanity is evolving, the world is getting better, and that this improvement can be expected to continue. de Condorcet argued that religion was an obstacle to progress that must be cast aside.
That idea was taken up in the French Revolution. Influenced by Voltaire, who claimed that “Every sensible man, every honorable man must hold the Christian religion in horror,” and d’Holbach who said, “It is only by dispelling these clouds and phantoms of religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason and Morality,” the revolutionaries outlawed religious practice and set out to destroy the Church.
Prior to the 18th century and outside Europe and America, most people did not believe in universal and inevitable progress. The vast majority of people who have lived on earth have not thought of history as going somewhere. The farmer made progress in plowing the field (though next Spring he would need to plow it again), but humanity itself had no all-encompassing goal toward which to make progress.
There is, however, a minority people group who have always believed the world was headed somewhere: the Jews. In Jewish thought, all humanity is moving toward a goal, which they called, “the day of the Lord.” This is a day of reckoning and of restoration, a day when justice would be established, and God’s rule would commence.
Christians, who inherited many of Judaism’s fundamental beliefs, also saw history moving toward one great goal. They believed in progress, but unlike many 18th century philosophers, they did not think it could be attained by humanity’s rational faculties, but only by God’s actions.
This is a profoundly important distinction. Progress, according to Christian thought, is not measured by humanity’s achievements and goals. It is gauged by humanity’s proximity to God’s goal. But what is God’s goal?
It can be put in different ways. The goal, as originally stated in Genesis, is for his image-bearing humans to govern creation wisely and lovingly. It is, as the book of Revelation puts it, for humans to live with God once again, as they had done before the rebellion. It is for the creation of a new humanity that is conformed to the image of God’s Son—people who think and act like Jesus Christ, who love like he loves and value what he values.
In a sweeping statement, St. Paul puts the goal this way: “to head up all things in Christ—the things in heaven and the things on earth.” This is the goal to which all things are inevitably progressing.
We can ignore this goal, or we can adopt it, but we cannot escape it. Earth is a ship on turbulent seas, but the Captain is at the helm. We can go where we choose while onboard, but the ship will go where the captain chooses and this is the port to which he steers.
Some ideas influence our actions and emotions, and we are not even aware of it. The powerful idea of progress is one. Christians don’t reject the idea of progress, but they understand it differently than does the prevailing culture. This session is from the class, What the Bible Has to Say to American Culture.
Is there a difference between rest and distraction? Is it possible that we need rest but don’t need distraction? Might we be distracting ourselves to death? This class looks at what the Bible says about distraction, careful thinking, and rest.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), only 16 percent of Americans surveyed say that religion is the most important thing in their lives. This marks a 4 percent drop in one decade. Melissa Deckman of PPRI says that Americans are “increasingly likely to become religiously unaffiliated.”
With the decline of religious affiliation there is a corresponding rise in unbelief. 18 percent of Generation Z identifies as agnostic or atheist – the highest in U.S. history. There have also been significant changes among the religiously affiliated. 21 percent claim to have undergone a change in religious belief, which is a 50 percent increase from just a couple of years ago.
According to the Pew Research group, Christians in the U.S will be a minority within a few decades if the current decline continues. Religion News Service reports that approximately 4,500 churches close each year while only 3,000 new churches launch. Don Feder, writing in the Washington Times, says that these statistics “should set off alarm bells in our heads.”
The alarm bells have been going off around the Christian community for years now. Dire warnings of apostasy have been issued. After a 2,000 year run, a weary Christianity appears to have collapsed onto its death bed to await the end.
But we’ve heard that before. It looked like Christianity’s downfall was at hand in the fourth century under the Emperor Julian. It wasn’t. At the end of the 18th century in France, and in the early and middle years of the twentieth century in Russia and China, leaders attempted to de-Christianize their countries. They closed churches and persecuted believers, but Christianity survived. In fact, there are now more Christians in China than in any other country.
In the years immediately following the Second World War, C. S. Lewis wrote about the so-called “religious predicament” in England. He claimed that among young, educated adults “Plenty of evidence can be produced that religion is in its last decline.” Similarly, plenty of evidence can be, and has been, produced that religion in America is in its last decline.
Lewis, however, believed that people were misinterpreting the evidence. He was not denying the facts – there really were fewer people attending chapels and churches – but he was questioning the interpretation of those facts and the assumptions behind it.
Lewis acknowledged that “In every class and every part of the country the visible practice of Christianity has grown very much less…” Yet Lewis believed that “the religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague theism with a strong …ethical code.”
The great twentieth century thinker Malcolm Muggeridge agreed. In the early 1970s, Muggeridge was predicting “the end of Christendom.” Though he was a devout Christian, he anticipated the end of Christendom as a good thing for Christianity. He, like Lewis, considered Christendom’s “vague theism with ethical code” to be a rival to the true faith and wished it good riddance.
Lewis attributed the decline in the visible practice of Christianity to a change in cultural standards rather than to a change in people’s hearts. He believed that the number of committed Christians – one might call them disciples of Jesus – had remained roughly the same. For example, as soon as society dropped the expectation that “good Christians” would attend chapel services, people who were merely conforming to society’s expectations stopped attending. It is not that they stopped believing; they never really had believed in anything but society’s expectations.
We are seeing something similar in today’s America. In the 1950s and 1960s, society expected good, vaguely theistic people with a strong ethical code to go to church. That expectation has faded, which accounts for much of the decline in the visible practice of Christianity. Yet, committed Christians are still in church, just as they always were.
The good news is that people who are not and never have been committed Christians are waking up to the fact. When they thought they were Christians, they were essentially unreachable. If they are now realizing that they are not, they may prove more open to Christ than ever before.
The Way Home 