2 Thessalonians 1:1-7

2 Thessalonians 1:1

I. This Epistle opens with the mention of the same Apostolic group as does the first. Paul was not alone: Silvanus and Timotheus were still with him in closest fellowship of toil and suffering. The Church, too, is described in the same way. Still further, the Apostle gives expression, as before, so again, to his devout thankfulness to God for the graces of the new life which his converts exhibit. So far from there being any decline in these graces, there was conspicuous progress. In the Christian life it ought always to be so. True steadfastness is a standing fast, but it can never be a standing still. Continuance in all the elements of prosperity of soul, as regards both the individual and the community, is insured only by advancement in them. While the Apostle contemplates the increase of these Divine graces in his friends, he also recognises it as a special token of Divine goodness to himself. The exhibition of these graces on the dark background of suffering was not merely an example it was not only a spectacle which the heathen had never seen before (for theiracts of heroic endurance had no root in patience and faith); it was distinctly a setting forth, an exhibition to all who had the eyes of their understanding enlightened, of the rectitude of God's dealings.

II. "Rest with us." By the word "rest" Paul directs the thoughts of his reader forward and upward, "All but opening heaven already by his word." There is, indeed, a power in the word to comfort and sustain those in whose hearts burns "the hot fever of unrest." It is a word of promise to all faithful but weary workers in every noble cause. Erasmus once wrote "No one will believe how anxiously, for a long time, I have wished to retire from these labours into a scene of tranquillity, and for the rest of my life (dwindled, it is true, to the shortest space) to converse only with Him who once cried and who still cries, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' In this turbulent, and I may say, raging world, amid so many cares, which the state of the times heaps upon me in public, or which declining years or infirmities cause me in private, nothing do I find on which my mind can more comfortably repose than on this sweet communion with God." The pathetic longing of these words for a repose that comes not at man's call is yet to attain to satisfaction. When earth and time be passed away, "there remaineth a rest to the people of God."

J. Hutchison, Lectures on Thessalonians,p. 252.

References: 2 Thessalonians 1:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. iv., No. 205; vol. xxxi., No. 1857.