“A Blessed Reception and a Cursed Rejection”

1 Thessalonians 2.13-16

            Look through the corridors of history and you will find that the most important decision facing mankind has always been the acceptance or rejection of the word of God.  Because of what God’s word is, it must be reckoned with.  God has spoken!  He has entered into time and space; He has revealed Himself, and that revelation demands a response. 

            When Cain first “brought an offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground” (Gen 4.3) and “Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock,” (v. 4) “the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering; but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard” (vv.4b-5).  “So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell.  Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry?  And why has your countenance fallen?  If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up?  And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it’” (vv.5b-7).  That was God’s word to Cain, the first child of mankind.  He had a choice: would he accept or reject the word of God?  Well, we know what he did.  He rejected God’s word and in the gall of anger and bitterness he killed his brother and so the curse of God rested upon him (v. 11). 

            And that is always how God has related to mankind—those who receive His word are blessed and those who reject it are cursed.  When He first gave the Law to the children of Israel at Mt. Sinai, that Law was a covenant that came with conditions—blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.  To receive the word of God was to obey it and to reject it was to disobey it.  That was the decision set before the children of Israel.  Would they accept it or reject it?  After they had settled in the Promised Land and toward the end of Joshua’s life, he set this choice before them again: “Choose for yourselves today whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Josh 24.15). 

            When Christ first came on the scene preaching to the Jewish people He declared, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 4.17).  He was declaring the word of God to them and setting a choice before them.  The condition for entrance into the kingdom of God had always been repentance, and that repentance would express itself in a total acceptance of the message of the King.  To reject the gospel that Christ proclaimed was to seal off any opportunity for entrance into the kingdom.  It was to invite God’s curse to rest upon you.

            The same is true today during this era of the church.  When Paul spoke to the Gentiles of Athens in Acts 17, he set a choice before them.  He said, “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent” (v. 30).  That is the gospel call.  The eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God who created the universe has spoken, and His word demands a response.  That response is the most important decision any person will ever make.

            The Thessalonian believers made the right choice; they embraced the gospel.  And in the text before us, Paul sets them in marked contrast to the Jews, who by and large rejected that message.  The results could not be more pronounced.  

I.  The Thessalonians’ Reception of God’s Word 

            Let’s look first at the Thessalonians’ reception of God’s word.  Paul says, “For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it” (1 Thess 2.13).  We can’t miss the connection here with what Paul has just been saying in verses 1-12.  He has been defending himself against the attacks of his opponents, and in so doing he has set forth his life as an example of true spiritual leadership.  He has called on the Thessalonians’ first hand knowledge of how he and Timothy and Silvanus conducted themselves while among the Thessalonians.  They boldly proclaimed the gospel amid fierce opposition (v. 2), working night and day to support themselves so that they could preach it (v. 9), behaving devoutly, uprightly and blamelessly (v. 10) and pouring their lives into the Thessalonians, exhorting, encouraging and imploring each one of them (v. 11).  Why?  Paul says, “So that you would walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory” (v. 12).

            “We did all of this,” Paul says in essence, “so that you would come to a place of spiritual maturity wherein your daily conduct is consistent with the nature of God.  That was our goal!  So it is fitting—for this reason—that we are constantly thanking God for your reception of His word and the obvious results that have come from that.”  Paul was rightly elated because the Thessalonians’ reception of the word was the key ingredient for seeing them to a place of spiritual maturity. 

And by the way, notice that he is again giving thanks not to the Thessalonians but to God.  They received the word, but Paul thanks God because he sees His sovereign and enabling grace all over their embrace of the message.  And notice too that the thanksgiving was constant.  The word means incessant or without intermission.  In chapter one, Paul had said, “We give thanks to God always . . . making mention of you in our prayers; constantly bearing in mind . . .” (v. 2-3), and in chapter five he gave the command, “Pray without ceasing” (v. 17), followed by the injunction, “In everything give thanks” (v. 18).  This presents the combined picture of an informal attitude of thankful prayer to God that is never interrupted by a failure to thank Him or a severance of communion with Him.  Any attitude of ungratefulness or thought or action that would break communion with God should be seen as an interruption in what should be a constant line of communication and thankfulness between man and God.  “Amen” means only to affirm what was said, not to close communication with God until further notice.                  

            A. Its Nature

            Paul was continually thanking God for the Thessalonians’ reception of the word.  Notice first that he describes the nature of that reception.  It was a holistic reception of the word.  He says, “When you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it.”  They first “received” the word.  This speaks of the objective, outward reception of a message or tradition that is handed down from one to another.  It describes an intellectual acceptance of the message.  That’s good, but it’s not enough.  The second word describes the total embrace of the message.  After they had received the message as orally delivered by Paul, they “accepted” it.  This is an internal welcoming—to accept with approval, to welcome—it denotes a subjective reception that includes an evaluation of the message followed by its complete acceptance.  It was used for welcoming someone into your home (cf. Luke 16.4).

            With their intellect, emotions, and will the Thessalonians holistically embraced the word of God.  This is of critical importance!  You can’t just sort of receive the word of God at arms length.  You can’t say, “Yah I believe the Bible is a holy book; after all it’s written by the ‘Man upstairs.’”  You can’t portray a kind of feigned allegiance to it like some country music star who sort of tips his hat to God by putting out an album with Christmas carols on it.  You’ve got to welcome the word of God down into the very depths of your being so that it finds a home there.  The word needs to “abide” in you; it needs to be part of the very fabric of your being.  It was once said of a famous preacher that if you poked him, he would bleed the Bible.  His blood was “bibline.”  The word of God should find a resting place deep within our souls.  That’s what it is to truly accept it. 

            The Thessalonians accepted the word holistically, and they accepted it for what it truly is.  Paul says, “You accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God.”  It reads literally, “You accepted not a word of men, but just as it is truly, a word of God.”  Paul is comparing the qualitative nature of a word from men to that of a word from God.  The character of this word is in view, and he is thanking God that when the Thessalonians fully embraced the message that he preached, they accepted it not as a mere word from men but for what it is in truth—in reality—a word from God. 

            And this is of great importance as well.  Not only does a person need to welcome the word into the very depths of his being, but he’s got to take it for what it is.  Has God spoken or has He not?  In 1799 a young theologian by the name of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (how do you like that for the name of your next kid?!?) wrote a book entitled, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers.  Because of that book and more of his subsequent writings, he became known as the father of theological liberalism.  But in the book he was trying to make religion more palatable to the people of his day.  The Enlightenment constituted a severe attack on the origin of the Bible, and Schleiermacher was trying to convince such Enlightenment thinkers that Christianity was not irrelevant.   His motives were presumably good, but the results were staggeringly negative.  He said that religion is “an immediate relation to the living God, as distinct from submission to doctrinal or creedal propositions about God.”[1]  This was appealing to the upstart movement of Romanticism, but it opened the door for an attack on the word of God.  It relegated religion to the realm of subjective experience and paved the way to liberalism’s dissecting of the Bible into what was or was not spoken by God.  But if you don’t take the Bible as the complete word of God, true in all of its teachings, you have nothing left.  If Genesis 1-3 is not true, then what reason does a person have to believe any of the Bible?  You’ve got to take it for what it is, the word of God.  That’s what the Thessalonians did, and that holistic and believing reception came with powerful results. 

            B.  It’s Result

            Let’s look at the results of their reception of God’s word.  Paul says, “…the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.”  This speaks of active operation or effective work.  It is the Greek energeo from whence the English energize comes, and that is the idea.  The word of God was actually performing a continuous energizing, effective and productive work in the believing Thessalonians.  And notice that Paul says, “in you.”  That’s the realm in which God’s word effectively works; it’s on the inside at the very heart level.  “The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4.12).  Nothing can go as deep as the word of God and nothing is more effective than Scripture in bringing about dynamic change from the inside out.  Jesus said, “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness.  All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man” (Mark 7.21-23).  These are the greatest issues facing mankind, and they come from within.  God’s word is the only thing that is sufficient to deal with them and to work change at that level.  Everything else is just behavior modification; it’s sticking a band-aid on a bullet wound.  Romans 12.2 says that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, and nothing is more vital to that kind of mind renewal than a constant intake of Scripture.  God’s word renews the mind and brings real transformation on the inside that shows itself forth in the life of the true believer. 

            Now I don’t want you to miss this point.  Some people look at the Bible as a religious or holy book, a book that you pull out and read on occasion when you’re looking for a mystical or quasi-spiritual experience.  But it stays in that realm for them.  When they face significant challenges in their lives, they forget the Bible exists.  They don’t think for a moment that God’s word might have a more significant answer than the prevailing wisdom of the day.  If there’s one thing you come to understand after you study Scripture, it is that the battle is a battle for the mind; it all goes to the level of the thinking.  The Bible says, “As [a man] thinks within himself, so he is” (Prov 23.7).  What we think; what we believe defines who we are; it drives our course of action.

            Let me give you a simple example.  If you’re going to go down here to highway 238 and cross the road, you’re probably going to look both ways before you do it.  Why?  Because you believe that if a truck hits you, it’s going to hurt!  That’s what you believe; that’s how you think on the matter.  Listen, if you truly believe something, your actions will reflect that belief; you will act in accord with what you believe.  It is of the utmost importance, then, that we are constantly feeding ourselves on a diet of the word of God.  Jesus said, “I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment” (Matt 12.36).  Paul said, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad” (2 Cor 5.10).  Do you believe that?  If you do, it will change your life; you will live in accord with what you believe. 

            The word of God had this kind of powerful effect on the Thessalonians, and look what it did in them: “For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you also endured the same sufferings at the hands of your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews” (2.14).  Because of the work that God was doing in the Thessalonians through His word, they had the fortitude to stand in the face of persecution.  Here it says that they suffered at the hands of their own “countrymen,” probably a reference to the pagan residents of Thessalonica.  We know from Acts 17 that this persecution was first instigated by the Jews, who stirred up an angry mob, which no doubt consisted of many non-Jewish Thessalonians as well.  And it was by enduring this suffering that the believers there became imitators of God’s churches in Christ Jesus, the ones that were in the region of Judea.  The Jewish Christian congregations in Judea had long been experiencing persecution from those Jews who had rejected Christ, and as they had endured, so had the Thessalonians. 

            This was evidence that the word of God, which had been holistically embraced by the Thessalonians for what it really is, was doing its powerful work in them.  And Paul said that he was constantly thanking God for this.  Theirs was a blessed reception of the word and it was doing an exciting work in them.  But the Jews, who had rejected the word, could not be set in more stark contrast.  Let’s look at the Jews’ rejection of God’s word. 

II. The Jews’ Rejection of God’s Word 

            As Paul thought of the suffering that the churches in Judea experienced at the hand of the Jews, it apparently occasioned a bit of a digression in his mind about just how hostile the Jews had been toward the gospel.  Verses 15-16 contain probably the most impassioned outburst of the apostle Paul against the Jews that we ever find in Scripture.  By the end of verse 16, you can feel the heat coming from his pen.  This has led some to suggest that Paul was anti-Semitic, and others have wrongly used this passage through history as an excuse for persecuting the Jews.  But that is not what Paul had in mind here.  This is not just generalized racial bigotry against the Jews.  After all, Paul was a Jew and he said in Romans 9, “I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites” (vv. 3-4a).  He loved the Jewish people and had a great longing to see them come to the knowledge of the truth.  But he nevertheless understood as he said in Romans 11.28, “From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies”—not all the Jews, but in particular the ones of whom he is speaking here.

            At the end of verse 14, he mentioned “the Jews.”  He then goes on to define the particular Jews of whom he speaks, and the grammar is structured like this: “…the Jews, the ones who killed the Lord Jesus, …the ones who drove us out, …the ones who are not pleasing to God, …the ones who are hostile to all men.”  These are the generically represented Jews who throughout their history had been opposed to the word of God.  They had constantly rejected God’s messengers and that was tantamount to rejecting His word.  That was the nature of their rejection. 

            A.  It’s Nature

            Jesus chronicled that history for us in a parable:

"Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who PLANTED A VINEYARD AND PUT A WALL AROUND IT AND DUG A WINE PRESS IN IT, AND BUILT A TOWER, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey.  ³⁴ "When the harvest time approached, he sent his slaves to the vine-growers to receive his produce.  ³⁵ "The vine-growers took his slaves and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third.  ³⁶ "Again he sent another group of slaves larger than the first; and they did the same thing to them.  ³⁷ "But afterward he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'  ³⁸ "But when the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.'  ³⁹ "They took him, and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him (Matt 21.33-39).           

The vine-growers are the rebellious Jews.  The landowner is God, and the slaves are His prophets.  Time and time again the LORD sent His word to the Jewish people through His prophets, and they always had in essence the same message: “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.”  God’s word always calls for a response, and the Jewish people repeatedly chose to reject His word.  So they abused His messengers; they mocked them and even killed them.  Finally God sent His own Son, and they killed Him too.

            To the Jewish leaders in Luke 11, Jesus said,

"Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and it was your fathers who killed them.  ⁴⁸ "So you are witnesses and approve the deeds of your fathers; because it was they who killed them, and you build their tombs.  ⁴⁹ "For this reason also the wisdom of God said, 'I will send to them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and some they will persecute,  ⁵⁰ so that the blood of all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation,  ⁵¹ from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God; yes, I tell you, it shall be charged against this generation” (Luke 11.47-51).

That was the nature of the Jewish rejection of God and His prophets throughout their history.  And the most heinous act of all—Paul says literally, “The Lord you killed, Jesus” (1 Thess 2.15).  They handed Him over to the Gentiles who “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2.8).  To the Jews in Acts 3, Peter said, “You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, but put to death the Prince of life” (Acts 3.14-15).  And Stephen, another messenger of God sent to the Jewish people, said this, “You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did.  Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?  They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murders you have now become” (Acts 7.51-52).  And what did they do to Stephen?  They killed him too—“Now when they heard this, they were cut to the quick, and they began gnashing their teeth at him. . .  When they had driven him out of the city, they began stoning him” (vv. 54, 58).

            That persecution at the hand of the Jews just kept coming.  Paul said that they “both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out” (1 Thess 2.15).  He speaks specifically of the time when the Jews drove Paul and his teammates out of Thessalonica (Acts 17.5-10), but that wasn’t the only place that happened.  The same Jews followed Paul to Berea and drove him from there as well (vv. 13-14), and Paul found Jewish opposition virtually everywhere he went.  And as he thinks of this, he gets a little hot under the color and says, “They are not pleasing to God!”  Far from it, they are “hostile to all men.”  This speaks of being in opposition, opposed or contrary to all men.

            That opposition or hostility is defined in verse 16: “hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved.”  What is more contrary to the best interest of mankind than the hindering of Christ’s messengers from bringing His message to them so that they might be saved?  The most damning opposition comes from those who stand in the way of a saving message.  The point of Paul’s preaching was that people might hear and believe and be saved (notice that it is not “save themselves,” or “save others,” but “be saved”—a divine passive; God does the saving). 

            This was more than a passive rejection of God’s word.  The nature of this rejection was in fact an active and violent opposition to the word of God.  It was an incessant, ongoing, carefully planned attack against His messengers.  And the result of this is frightening! 

            B. It’s Result

Paul says, “With the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins.”  In rejecting God’s message and His messengers through the years the Jewish people were cyclically filling up the measure of their sins.  One writer says, “He intends to say that at every division of time the conduct of the Jews was of such a nature that the general tendency of this continued sinful conduct was the filling up of the measure of their sins. . . The Jews before Christ, at the time of Christ, and after Christ, have opposed themselves to the divine truth, and thus have been always engaged in filling up the measure of their iniquities.”[2]

So Paul says, “But wrath has come upon them to the utmost”—literally “the wrath came upon them to the end.”  Paul’s fervor is now at the boiling point as he considers the extreme nature of the Jewish opposition.  So certainly will the final, uttermost, “to the end” wrath of God come upon them that Paul actually presents it as a past tense reality—it’s already come upon them. 

This is true for everyone.  What will you do with the word of God?  What will you do with Jesus Christ?—Accept or reject?  John said it like this: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.  For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.  He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3.16-18). That is the choice.  What will you do with Jesus Christ?  “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (v. 36).  If you have rejected the word of God; if you have rejected Jesus Christ, I can tell you that as surely as God’s wrath abides on the Jewish people who murdered Jesus, it remains on you! 

He cried to the Jews, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling” (Matt 23.37).  What’s the result of that; what’s the result of rejecting the word of God, rejecting the messengers of God, and rejecting the Son of God?  “Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!  For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord’” (vv. 38-39)!  Just a few days earlier, on this day—Palm Sunday—nearly two thousand years ago, as Christ rode into town on a Donkey, these same people laid their coats and branches down before Him and shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matt 21.9).  But it was a feigned allegiance, and in a few short days they turned on Him.  They rejected His message; they rejected Him, and they killed Him.  So “the wrath of God has come upon them to the utmost.”