2 Thessalonians 1:6

seeingit is a righteousthing with God Lit., if verily (if, as all will admit) it is righteous with God.

The Apostle has just spoken (2 Thessalonians 1:5) of "God's righteous judgement" as manifest in the unshaken faith and courage of His servants. That visible token points to their future and unrevealed reward on the admitted assumption, on which he now dilates, that the retribution awaiting the persecutors and the persecuted from His hand is in truth a righteous thing.

Now the justice of the award is self-evident; since it is affliction to them that afflict you, and to you the afflicted ease. Once besides St Paul speaks of the future suffering of the wicked as "affliction," in Romans 2:9 "affliction and distress upon every soul of man that doeth evil." The term represents this suffering as of the nature of a personal infliction. It indicates the reversal that will take place in the other world between the position of the sufferers and inflicters of wrong; comp. our Lord's picture of Dives and Lazarus in Hades: "Now he (Lazarus) is comforted, and thou (Dives) art tormented," Luke 16:25. Similarly in Colossians 3:25, "He that doeth wrong shall receive back the wrong that he did." In Revelation 13:10; Matthew 26:52, the same principle of retribution in kindis illustrated. This is "just with God:" He must count it so; for it is a common rule of justice, and of all true justice He is the Fountain.

If this law demands that the inflicters of wrongful suffering shall suffer and smart for it, so it requires that faithful endurance shall win "relief." The Greek word denotes relaxation, abatement, as of a tightly strung bow, or the paroxysms of fever. So the Apostle designates his own "relief" from anxiety in 2 Corinthians 2:13; 2 Corinthians 7:5; it is contrasted with "affliction" again in 2 Corinthians 8:13.

"Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,

Ease after war, death after life does greatly please."

Job 3:17 is a striking parallel to the phrase to you the afflicted rest: "There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest." But the rendering of the LXX in this passage is so different, that it is scarcely likely that these words were in the Apostle's mind. Nor is he thinking, like Job and Edmund Spenser, of rest in death.