1 Thessalonians

Paul’s thanks turn on how the gospel was received. It came “not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost” (1:5), and the Thessalonians took it “not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe” (2:13). The proof was a turning: from idols to “the living and true God” (1:9), and from them the word sounded out through Macedonia and Achaia (1:8). So Paul sets the messengers beside the message. They used no “flattering words” and no “cloke of covetousness” (2:5), and spoke “not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts” (2:4).

“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication” (4:3). Sanctification here is concrete: it concerns the body, and the brother who must not be wronged (4:6). Each is to “possess his vessel in sanctification and honour” (4:4). Chrysostom took the vessel as a man’s own body: we possess our vessel, when it is pure; when it is impure, sin possesses it. Others have read it as his wife, whom Peter calls “the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7). Either way the call is the same: “God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness” (4:7), and he who sets it aside despises God, who has given his holy Spirit (4:8). The letter closes by asking God to do it himself: “sanctify you wholly” (5:23).

Paul calls the believing dead “them which are asleep” (4:13): “if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (4:14). The dead rise first, and the living are “caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). Christians have differed on when this falls. Some place it before the day of wrath, since God “hath not appointed us to wrath” (5:9). Others place it at his one coming in glory, when the elect are gathered with a trumpet (Matthew 24:30–31), and Tertullian named the Lord met in the air as the Son of man, who shall come in the clouds, according to Daniel. Both readings end where Paul does: “so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

The day of the Lord comes “as a thief in the night” (5:2), and on those who say “Peace and safety” it brings sudden destruction, “as travail upon a woman with child” (5:3). Paul gives no date; the Thessalonians already know that it cannot be known. Instead he tells them what they already are: “Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day” (5:5). So they watch and are sober, armed with “the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation” (5:8), the same three graces Paul gave thanks for at the start (1:3). Their safety is not their watching but Christ, “who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him” (5:10).