God will someday send relief!
By John Earp
1 Thessalonians 1:1 NIV To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: 2 Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3 We ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love all of you have for one another is increasing. 4 Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. 5 All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. 6 God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you 7 and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might 10 on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.
As believers, we are not exempt from suffering, trials, difficulty, and persecution. The early Christians who lived in Thessalonica endured much suffering for their faith. He addressed them first by verbally blessing them with grace and peace, two things that are surely foundational in the Christian life. Paul thanked God because their faith and love one for another was growing and increasing.
Back when I was in high school football in the 1980s, we used to have a saying, “No pain, no gain.” Anyone who’s ever been on a sports team knows the basic truth that there is always a struggle, always discipline, always hard work to be done before one can hope to ever achieve a greater degree of expertise, much less, a victory over one’s opponents. Muscles must be stressed before they will grow stronger, lungs and limbs must be regularly pushed and trained before an increase in cardiovascular capacity is achieved. And in the Christian life, hardship endured through faith in God is one of the chief ways our strength in God grows.
The inspired Apostle Paul goes on in this passage to assure these Christians that God will in fact someday relieve all their suffering. In our day, we often think of this relief as coming when a faithful Christian dies and goes to Heaven, and that certainly is a blessed promise the apostle gave us in 2 Corinthians 5:8, that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, that when our physical bodies die, if we are saved, our spirit and soul, our personality, does not die, but goes to be with the Lord until the Day that Jesus comes back and resurrects those who have died in Christ into glorified bodies that shall never get sick, grow old, or be capable of dying again.
But in this particular passage, 2 Thess. 1, Paul instead refers to the relief that God will send when Jesus comes back to the earth, righteously judges the wicked in flaming fire, taking vengeance upon the ungodly. In verse 7, He says, “…This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels.” Quite interestingly, the inspired apostle does not say they will be given relief through a secret rapture of the church, but instead says explicitly that this will happen on the same day when Jesus is revealed from Heaven and deals out everlasting destruction on those who obey not the gospel, and “comes to be glorified in his saints,” as v.10 says. Surely, if the secret rapture theory were true to Scripture, the inspired Apostle Paul would no doubt have mentioned it here.
All the New Testament writers who refer to the second coming, like Paul in this passage, speak of it as an event they personally looked forward to in their day. As far as we know, they did not realize how big the world was, and didn’t know about the people living in many places of the earth such as the Americas, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific, but they knew that Jesus had said in Matthew 24:14 that “…this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
Our task as Christians is to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in all the world until He returns to earth, whether we personally are missionaries to a foreign country, or are called to live out our lives in our hometown. Such witnessing may involve personal suffering and even persecution, but it is all for the glory of Jesus Christ.
Some glorious day, Jesus will return to earth. On that day, may He find us faithfully working for his kingdom, sharing the good news with all.