1 Thessalonians 5:24

Paul wrote this letter around AD 50–51, among the earliest of his letters, to a young church that had suffered for its faith from the start (1 Thessalonians 2:14–16). He has just given them a quick run of commands: to rejoice evermore, to pray without ceasing, in every thing to give thanks, to test what they hear and hold fast what is good, and to keep away from every form of evil (1 Thessalonians 5:12–22). Now he turns from what they are to do to what God will do in them, and he asks God for the very holiness he has been urging. The strength to live as he has described comes from God, and so the letter’s last word of teaching is a prayer.

He calls on “the very God of peace”. Peace belongs to who God is. He is the source of the order, the reconciliation and the quiet heart his people need, and a church under pressure needed all three. That peace was made for us at great cost, because Christ reconciled us to God through his blood (Colossians 1:20). Hebrews puts the same two things side by side when it calls believers to follow peace and holiness (Hebrews 12:14).

To sanctify, hagiázō, is to make holy, to consecrate or hallow. God sets his people apart for himself, and he makes them holy in fact as well as in name. Believers are made holy once for all through the offering of Christ’s body (Hebrews 10:10), and they grow in holiness as the Holy Spirit, whom Christ sent, teaches them and guides them into all truth (John 14:26, John 16:13). The word behind “wholly”, holotelḗs, means complete to the end, absolutely perfect. Paul prays for a holiness that reaches every part of them and leaves no corner of their lives untouched.

Verse 24 answers the prayer of verse 23 with a promise. The “it” that God will do is everything Paul has just asked for: to sanctify them wholly and to keep them blameless until Christ comes. The prayer rests on this promise, and the promise rests on who God is.

Faithful, pistós, describes someone who can be trusted and depended on. Strong’s traces it to the verb “to persuade”, and said of God it means that he keeps his word and is always true to himself. The one who “calleth” (kaléō) is God, who took the first step and called these people to himself. Jesus said that no one can come to him unless the Father who sent him draws him (John 6:44). Paul tells the Corinthians that God is faithful, who called them into the fellowship of his Son (1 Corinthians 1:9), and Hebrews urges us to hold fast our hope, because he who promised is faithful (Hebrews 10:23).

“Who also will do it” joins the calling to the finishing. The “also” is kaí, the common word for “and, also, even”, and it ties the two together: the God who called them is the God who will do this as well. The verb, poiéō, is the ordinary word for making or doing anything at all. The certainty lies in the one who does it and in the plain future of “will do”.

All of this comes to us through Christ. He is made unto us sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:30), and God has reconciled us in the body of his flesh through death to present us holy and unblameable in his sight (Colossians 1:22). Christ intercedes for us at the right hand of God (Romans 8:34), and on the night before he died he asked the Father to keep those the Father had given him (John 17:11–12).

This promise meant a great deal to the Thessalonians. Paul had founded their church on his second missionary journey and had been driven out of the city (Acts 17:1–10). They had received the word in much affliction (1 Thessalonians 1:6), suffering from their own countrymen as the churches of Judea had (1 Thessalonians 2:14), and they had questions about the future. In all of that, the steadiness of their faith was anchored in God’s faithfulness to them.

Having prayed for the church, Paul asks the church to pray for him. “Us” is Paul and the two men who wrote with him, Silas and Timothy. Brethren, adelphós, means a brother, and Strong’s traces it to a word for the womb, so it speaks of those born of one family. Paul uses it of fellow believers, and the request comes from one member of God’s family to the rest.

The verb is proseúchomai, the usual New Testament word for prayer to God, meaning to pray, to make supplication, to worship. Here it stands as a command, proseúchesthe, “pray”. “For us” is perí hēmōn, where perí with this form means “concerning” or “on behalf of”, and hēmōn is “us”. Paul asks them to bring him and his companions, their safety and their work, before God.

The request comes only a few lines after Paul told them to pray without ceasing, and now he gives them a place to start. He asked the same of other churches. He begged the Romans to strive together with him in their prayers (Romans 15:30–32), asked the Ephesians to pray that he might speak the gospel boldly (Ephesians 6:18–20), asked the Colossians to pray for an open door for the word (Colossians 4:3), and asked the Thessalonians again in his second letter to pray that the word of the Lord would have free course (2 Thessalonians 3:1–2). The writer of Hebrews makes the same request (Hebrews 13:18), and James says that the prayer of a righteous man avails much (James 5:16). Members of one body care for one another (1 Corinthians 12:12–27), and prayer is one of the chief ways they do it.

The verb greet, aspázomai, is traced by Strong’s to a particle of union and a form of the verb “to draw”. Its sense is to enfold in the arms, and so to salute or welcome. Paul has in mind a warm and personal welcome. The kiss, phílēma, is simply a kiss, and holy, hágios, means sacred, pure, set apart for God. “All” (pâs) means that every member is to be greeted and no one passed over.

Among the Jews, Greeks and Romans of that day, a kiss was an everyday greeting. It passed between relatives and close friends and was a sign of respect, and among Jews it was often given on the cheek or the hand. The church took up the custom, and the word “holy” marked it as the greeting of God’s family, an expression of pure love and unity among believers. In time it came to be called the kiss of peace or the kiss of charity, and it was often given in the church’s gatherings before the Lord’s Supper as a sign of believers reconciled to one another.

Paul gives the same instruction in other letters (Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:20, 2 Corinthians 13:12), and Peter tells his readers to greet one another with a kiss of charity (1 Peter 5:14). In this letter the greeting gathers up much of what Paul has taught since 1 Thessalonians 4:1. He has told them that they were taught of God to love one another (1 Thessalonians 4:9–10), that God’s will for them is their sanctification and purity (1 Thessalonians 4:3–7), and that they should comfort and build one another up (1 Thessalonians 5:11). The holy kiss puts that love and that purity into a single act at the door.

Believers are brethren because God adopted them as his children through Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:5). Jesus gave them a new commandment to love one another as he loved them, so that all would know they are his disciples (John 13:34–35), and he prayed that they would be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:20–23). The holy kiss is a small, visible sign of that oneness.

Paul ends his instructions with the strongest words in the passage. To charge, horkízō, is to put someone on oath, and by extension to command them solemnly. He does it “by the Lord”, kýrios, so the command binds them as before Christ himself. The epistle, epistolḗ, is a written message or letter, this letter that Paul has just sent them. It is to be read to “all” (pâs) the “holy brethren”, using the same words for holy and brethren that Paul has just used in verses 25 and 26.

In the first century books were rare and costly, and many people could not read. A church had one copy of a letter, if that, and letters from apostles were copied and passed from church to church, as Paul asks the Colossians to pass on their letter to Laodicea (Colossians 4:16). The way a whole congregation received such a letter was to hear it read aloud when they gathered. Paul makes sure that every believer hears it, slave and free, men and women, leaders and the newest believer alike.

This follows an old pattern. Moses commanded that the law be read before all Israel, men, women, children and strangers, so that they might hear and learn to fear the LORD (Deuteronomy 31:11–12), and in Nehemiah’s day the law was read distinctly and its sense given so that the people understood (Nehemiah 8:8). Paul’s solemn charge shows that he knew his message came from Christ, as he tells the Galatians that his gospel came by the revelation of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:11–12). All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for teaching and for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16–17), and Christ gave teachers to his church so that all might come to the unity of the faith (Ephesians 4:11–13).

The reading of Scripture in church today stands in this line. When the whole congregation hears God’s word together, all are taught the same truth and grow together in it. Behind Paul’s charge stands the risen Christ, who has all authority in heaven and in earth and sent his apostles to teach all nations (Matthew 28:18–20) and to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15). The letter leads its hearers to Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), and builds them together as fellowcitizens with the saints and of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19–22).

The letter ends where it began. It opened with “Grace be unto you, and peace” (1 Thessalonians 1:1), and it closes with grace, so that grace frames everything in between. Grace, cháris, is God’s undeserved favour and goodwill, and also his work upon the heart that shows in the life. It is both his kindness toward us and the strength he gives us. This grace belongs to “our Lord Jesus Christ”. Kýrios, Lord, speaks of his supreme authority, Jesus is the name of the Saviour, and Christ means the Anointed One, the Messiah. All the blessing comes from him and through him. As John says, “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).

The KJV prints “be” in italics, because the Greek leaves it to be understood. The line is Paul’s prayer that the favour and strengthening presence of Christ would stay with them in their daily lives and their troubles. Grace has run all through the letter, from God’s choosing of them (1 Thessalonians 1:4–5) to his strengthening of them in affliction (1 Thessalonians 3:2–3), and it rests on the Jesus who died and rose again (1 Thessalonians 4:14) and will descend from heaven (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17).

Paul closes his other letters in much the same way (Romans 16:20, Philippians 4:23), and once more fully: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen” (2 Corinthians 13:14). We are saved by this grace, as Paul writes elsewhere: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). It keeps us too, for we are told, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

The last word is amḗn, a Hebrew word carried over into Greek and then into English. It means “verily” or “so be it”, and it was said in the synagogue and in the gatherings of the early church to show agreement with a prayer. At the end of this blessing it is Paul’s own heartfelt assent to what he has prayed.

These six verses gather the whole letter into a few lines. We are given a God of peace who wants every part of us, spirit, soul and body, for himself, and who has promised to keep us blameless until his Son comes. The certainty of that promise lies in his faithfulness, so the one who called us is the one who will finish the work. Paul prays for this with confidence, and he asks for the prayers of his brethren just as plainly, because God’s people need one another all the way home.

The passage also shows the shape of life in God’s family. Believers pray for one another, greet one another with pure and open love, and gather to hear God’s word together, every one of them included. Over all of it stands the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, which began the letter, ended it, and holds his people from their calling to the day he comes.