“We give thanks to God always for you all,… knowing, brethren beloved of God, your election… For God appointed us not unto wrath, but unto the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that… we should live together with Him… Faithful is He that calleth you, who will also do it.”’—1 THES. i. 2, 4; v. 9,24. (R. V.)
I HAVE put together here passages from the beginning and the end of the First Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians, because, when taken together, these passages afford a succinct statement of the gospel which Paul preached to the Thessalonians, and on the basis of which that apostolic church was built up. It may be of special interest to note Paul’s gospel to the Thessalonians because it gives what we may call his primitive gospel. In observing it we are contemplating the teaching of Paul at the beginning of his career.
This first letter to the Thessalonians is the earliest writing that has come down to us from Paul’s pen. Is it perhaps also, we may possibly ask, a little crude and unformed in its presentation of Paul’s gospel? A glance at the text is enough to reassure us. The gospel Paul preached to the Thessalonians is the same gospel that he preached to the Romans, and the same gospel that he laid upon the hearts of his helpers, Timothy and Titus, to preach when he should no longer be with them. There is no lack of firmness in the lines of it as they are drawn here; no faltering in the expression of the details. We cannot, then, approach its consideration in a purely historical spirit. The gospel Paul preached in those early days to the Thessalonians is the gospel which he preached ever after and is still preaching to-day to the world. It is the gospel that he commends to us as well as to the Thessalonians, and we may without hesitation take it to ourselves as the very gospel of God.
The external history of the carrying of the gospel to the Thessalonians is soon told. Paul had come among them filled with a very vivid sense of his divine mission, in response to the cry of the Macedonian man to come over and help the Greek peoples. He was, more immediately, fresh from the persecution at Philippi, and was pressed in spirit from his experience there (ii. 2). Waxing bold in God he had proclaimed, perhaps with unusual fervor—certainly not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Ghost and in much assurance (i. 5)—the pure gospel of God’s grace; and had not only adorned the doctrine he preached by a life of self-denial for its sake (ii. 9), but also commended it by a loving eagerness and tender pertinacity in enforcing it on the attention of his hearers. Looking back on it all, he describes his yearning after their souls in the beautiful similes of a nursing mother cherishing her children (ii. 7), and of a watchful father consoling and encouraging and testifying to his sons (ii. 11). The Thessalonians had received this gospel, pressed upon them with such affectionate assiduity, with exceptional readiness and exceptional zeal (i. 6, 9; ii. 15). They had recognized the word of the message as what it really was, not the word of man, but the word of God, and had set themselves to obey its commands. As fruitage of their faith the apostle perceives with joy the Christian graces their lives had from the first exhibited—their work of faith and labor of love and patience of hope (i. 3, 8; iv. 9).
In writing back to them to strengthen them in face of the persecution which had meanwhile fallen upon them, and to exhort them to a continuous advance in their Christian life, Paul naturally makes much of the gospel which had wrought so powerfully among them. He calls it affectionately his gospel (i. 4), and reverentially God’s gospel (ii. 2), which was his therefore only because, as God’s minister in the gospel of Christ (v. 2), he had been approved to be intrusted with it (ii. 4). Itis not to himself—his eloquence, the winningness of his appeal, the force of his argumentation, the clearness of his presentation in preaching it—but to the gospel itself with which he was armed, that he ascribes the revolution that had been wrought in the lives of the Thessalonians. He was God’s minister in the gospel of Christ indeed, but the gospel was itself God’s own word, and it was it that energized, as the word of God, in them that believed (ii. 13). The whole value of his mission, he gives us to understand over and over again, resided just in the gospel he preached—the glad tidings which he was the instrument in bringing to men.
Now, in the words which we have culled out of this epistle for our text, we have this blessed gospel succinctly summarized. The core of it consisted, it is plain, in one and only one simple proclamation; a proclamation, however, which when duly apprehended is not less tremendous in its import and implications than it is simple in its form
—the proclamation, to wit, of “salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us that we should live together with Him”; or, as in another passage (i. 10) it is even more concisely summed up, the proclamation of “Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath.” Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath!” Let us lay that sentence well to mind, for in that one sentence is contained the whole essence of Paul’s gospel to the Thessalonians, and the whole essence of his gospel to us. The whole essence, we say, though not, of course, the entire structure of it. For, as we have hinted, there are tremendous implications involved in this simple proclamation. And these implications Paul did not leave to the inferences of his disciples to work out, but made them rather the subject of explicit instruction. There is, for example, a whole doctrine of sin implied, and a whole doctrine of redemption, and a whole doctrine of the application of redemption to sinful men, and of the relation of God’s activities to the activities of man in the saving process. For, be it observed, to say that the core of Paul’s gospel consisted in the simple proclamation of Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath—of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us that we should live with Him—is not the same as to say that he preached Jesus simnpliciter. He did not preach Jesus simpliciter. He preached, as he elsewhere puts it, Jesus as crucified (1 Cor. ii. 2). And the very essence of his proclamation as a gospel consists in just this, that it was not Jesus as man or even as God-man merely that he held up to men’s adoring gaze, but Jesus “our deliverer from the coming wrath,” Jesus “who died for us that we should live with Him,” that he offered to their trusting faith. And this mode of presenting Jesus has, as we say, its tremendous implications—implications of such import that without them the proclamation would be vain, and therefore of such importance as to be made by Paul the subject of explicit and eager teaching.