The First Letter He Ever Sent

Paul spoke in the meeting house at Thessalonica three Sabbath days running, and then a mob came looking for him. They could not find him, so they dragged a man named Jason in front of the city rulers instead. That night the brothers walked Paul and Silas out of the gate in the dark. Three weeks. That was all the time he had with those people.

He could not stop thinking about them. They were new, and they were being hurt for what they believed, and he was not there. So he stayed at Athens by himself and sent Timothy back up the road to see whether they were still standing. Then he went down the coast to Corinth and waited. Timothy came back with good news, and Paul had a letter written. It was the first one he ever sent. A man was writing to friends he was worried about; somebody else held the pen while he talked, and the sheet was rolled up and carried by hand for weeks and then read out loud to people who knew his voice.

It began the way letters began then, with the names of the men sending it. “Paul and Silvanus and Timothy, to the gathering of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Favor to you, and peace.” Then, instead of getting down to business, he spent a long while being glad. “We thank God for all of you, all the time, and we say your names in our prayers. We remember the work that comes out of your trusting, the labor that comes out of your love, and the way you hold on because you are hoping in our Lord Jesus Christ. “When we brought you the good news it did not come in words only. It came with power, and with the Holy Spirit. You took the word in gladly at the very time people were making you suffer for it, and now everybody who trusts God in Macedonia and Achaia looks at you to see how it is done. People tell us how you turned around from your idols to serve a God who is alive and true, and to wait for his Son from the heavens — Jesus, whom he raised from the dead.”

They remembered how he had come to them. So did he. “You know our coming to you was not an empty thing. We had already been badly used at Philippi before we reached your town, and we came and spoke anyway. We never flattered anybody, and never used a smooth word to cover up wanting your money. We could have thrown our weight about, being apostles of Christ, and we did not. We were gentle with you, the way a nurse warms her own children. “You remember how hard we worked, night and day, at our trade, so as not to be a weight on any of you. And we went at you one at a time, like a father with his own children, telling you to walk in a way worthy of God, who is calling you into his own kingdom. You suffered the same things from your own countrymen that God’s gatherings in Judea suffered from theirs.”

He had tried to come back. Twice. “We wanted to come to you — I, Paul, once, and then again — and Satan cut us off. What is our hope, or our joy, or the crown we boast about, when we stand in front of our Lord Jesus? It is you. “In the end we could not bear it, and we were willing to be left at Athens alone, and we sent Timothy to steady you. When we were with you we told you beforehand that trouble was coming, and it came. I sent because I was afraid the tester had got at you and all our labor had come to nothing.”

Then he wrote: “But now Timothy has come back from you with good news of your faith and your love, and he says you long to see us as we long to see you. Brothers, in all our own distress, you are the thing that has comforted us. Now we live — if you are standing firm in the Lord. “May our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, make the road to you straight; and may the Lord make you spill over with love, toward one another and toward everybody, and hold your hearts steady and clean before our God when our Lord Jesus comes.”

Then came the part that told them what to do. “So then, brothers. You learned from us how you must walk and please God, and you are walking that way. Do it more. This is what God wants: that you be holy. Keep away from sleeping with people you are not married to. Every one of you is to know how to keep his own body in holiness and honor, not in the heat of wanting, like the nations who do not know God. Nobody is to step over the line and take what belongs to his brother in this. God did not call us to be dirty; he called us to be holy. So the man who brushes that aside is not brushing aside a man, but God.” “About loving each other like brothers, nobody needs to write to you: God himself has taught you to love one another, and you are doing it to every brother in the whole of Macedonia. Only do it more. And make it your ambition to be quiet, and to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that people outside can see you living decently and you need nothing from anybody.”

Then he answered their question, and it was a question that was breaking their hearts. Since Paul left, people in that small gathering had died. Ordinary deaths. And the ones left behind were afraid their friends had missed the whole thing. “Brothers, we do not want you in the dark about the ones who are falling asleep, so that you do not grieve the way the rest do, who have no hope. If we trust that Jesus died and rose again, then God will bring with him, through Jesus, the ones who have fallen asleep. We who are still here when the Lord comes will not get in front of the ones who have fallen asleep. The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shouted command, with the voice of the chief messenger, with God’s trumpet — and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive will be snatched up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord. “Comfort one another with these words.”

When? He would not give them a date. He gave them a picture instead. “About the times and the seasons, brothers, you need nothing written to you. You know that the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. When people are saying, ‘Peace, and everything is safe,’ that is when ruin comes down on them all at once, the way the pain comes on a woman about to have her baby, and they will not get away. “But you, brothers, are not in the dark, for the day to catch you like a thief. You are all sons of light and sons of day. So let us not sleep like the rest. Let us stay awake, and keep our heads. People who sleep sleep at night, and people who get drunk are drunk at night. We belong to the day: so keep your head, with trusting and love strapped on your chest like armor, and the hope of being rescued on your head like a helmet. God did not set us down for anger, but to gain rescue through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we will live together with him. So keep saying this to one another, and building each other up, as you are already doing.

At the end came short lines, one after another. “Know the ones who work hard among you and stand out in front of you in the Lord and warn you, and think the world of them, because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. “Warn the ones who will not keep in step. Comfort the ones who are losing heart. Hold on to the weak. Be patient with everybody. See that nobody pays anybody back evil for evil, but always chase after what is good, for each other and for everyone. “Be glad always. Pray without stopping. Give thanks whatever happens; this is what God wants of you in Christ Jesus. “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire. Do not treat prophecies as nothing. Test everything; hold on to what is good. Keep away from every kind of evil.”

And then the end of it. “May the God of peace himself make you holy all the way through, and may your spirit and soul and body be kept whole and blameless when our Lord Jesus Christ comes. The one who calls you is faithful. He will do it. “Brothers, pray for us. Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss. I put you under oath by the Lord: have this letter read out loud to every one of them. The favor of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”

It was read out loud, probably in Jason’s house, to the people who had walked Paul to the gate in the dark. And it did not settle everything. Word came back that some of them had taken what he said about the day of the Lord and got it upside down: they had decided the day was already here. Some had put down their tools and were living off everybody else. So he wrote a second letter.

“Paul and Silvanus and Timothy, to the gathering of the Thessalonians: favor to you and peace. “We ought to thank God for you always, because the trust you have is growing beyond measure and the love every one of you has for one another is getting bigger. We boast about you in God’s gatherings — about how you hold up under everything people do to you. “It will not always be this way. God judges rightly. He will pay trouble back to the ones who trouble you, and give rest to you who are troubled, when the Lord Jesus is uncovered from heaven with the messengers of his power, in a flame of fire. Those who do not know God and will not listen to the good news of our Lord Jesus will pay for it, shut out from the face of the Lord.”

Then he went straight at what had gone wrong. “Now about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our being gathered together to him: do not let anybody knock you off your feet or frighten you — not a spirit, not a word, not a letter that looks as if it came from us — into thinking the day of the Lord is already here. First the falling away has to come, and the man of lawlessness has to be uncovered, the son of destruction, who sets himself against everything anybody calls a god, and sits down in God’s own sanctuary and puts himself on show as God. “Do you not remember me telling you this while I was still with you? You know what is holding him back now. The secret of lawlessness is already at work; only there is one holding it back, until he is out of the way. Then the lawless one will be uncovered, and the Lord Jesus will destroy him with the breath of his mouth. “So stand where you are, brothers, and hold on to what you were handed, whether we said it or wrote it.”

Then the working end of the letter, the reason he had picked up the pen. “Pray for us, brothers, that the word of the Lord may run and be given its glory, and that we may be pulled out of the hands of wicked people. The Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. “Now this is our charge, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: keep clear of any brother who will not keep in step, who will not live by what he was handed from us. You know how you ought to copy us. We never ate anybody’s bread as a gift; we worked, night and day, so as not to be a weight on any of you — not because we had no right to be fed, but so that we would be a pattern you could copy. “Even when we were with you, this is the rule we gave you: if a man will not work, he should not eat. “We hear that some of you are walking out of step — not working at anything, but working all around everybody else’s business. People like that we charge, and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ, to settle down, work quietly, and eat their own bread. And you others, do not get tired of doing what is fine. “If anybody will not do what this letter says, take note of that man, and do not mix in with him, so that he feels the shame of it. Do not count him an enemy. Warn him like a brother.”

At the end the pen changed hands, and the writing went from a scribe’s neat hand to his own. “May the Lord of peace himself give you peace, all the time, every way there is. The greeting is in my own hand — Paul’s. That is the mark on every letter of mine. This is how I write.”

Two letters, to one small frightened town, from a man chased out of it in three weeks. They kept them, and somebody copied them, and carried the copy to the next town.