Sabbath: Promise to the Persecuted
Read for This Week’s Study: 2 Thess. 1:1-12, John 1:18, Rom. 2:5, 12:19, Rev. 16:4-7, 20:1-6, John 14:1-3.
Memory Text: “To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power” (2 Thessalonians 1:11, ESV).
Key Thought: The second coming of Jesus is the culmination of all Christian hope.
Because written correspondence could be slow, a church that wanted to talk to Paul had to track him down and get a message to him, not always an easy process, to be sure. Once contact was finally made, the apostle would then dictate a response and have it hand-delivered back to the church. The process might take months. In the meantime false beliefs would have time to develop and spread.
This seems to have happened in Thessalonica, where new problems arose in the church. These problems may even have become worse due to the misapplication of what Paul wrote in the first letter. Second Thessalonians was Paul’s attempt to further correct the situation.
Paul’s words in this week’s lesson come down to this: at the Second Coming, believers will be rescued by God’s spectacular intervention in Christ. This passage provides further information about the nature of His return.
Study this week’s lesson to prepare for Sabbath, September 15.
I thought that the Holy Spirit was in charge of the Church and that he has established different ministries in the church to combat the enemy and his host of errors. Why was it necessary for the church to depend on Paul rather than the Spirit of God to debunk error?
Because the Spirit of God uses mankind to accomplish his will. For instance God could have revealed himself to the whole world himself but he he gave the commission that we (humans) are supposed to spread the gospel to the whole world. Ultimately the Holy Spirit could do all the work but he wants to use us to do his will.
You bring up a good point but I think, as you mentioned, parallel to the work of the Holy Spirit is the enemy working against it and Paul, as a trusted leader and servant of God, was as an encourager and faith-builder to God’s people in the midst of being assailed from every side. God, through the Holy Spirit, uses people like Paul to good effect in this manner and in fact equipped him with gifts for that very purpose.
God is Good.
Hard to smile in persecution especially when you have no Christ.
It was also important that the Thesalonians keep in touch in with Paul all the time since they were still “babies in Christ”. So it was a commendable attempt by those that made the effort to get Paul’s input all the time there was a conflict of their beliefs. and I think they also wanted to be seen to be ready for Jesus’s Second Coming.
Paul wrote the second letter to the Thessalonian less than a year after the first letter. the Thessalonians continued to grow in new faith, but Paul needed to correct the misunderstanding that resulted from the teaching on Christ’s second coming. Paul expressed his gratitude to God for the Thessalonian spiritual growth and he also urged them to perserver though persecution while they awaited for Jesus return.
It is interesting to note that every time the word of God is preached, false theories pop up and dilute the message.
Why was the Thessalonians depending on only Paul’s word, were they not believing in God?
They didn’t know God, until Paul spent much time with them telling them about God.
Was it that Paul had inadvertently mislead the Thessalonians in his first letter about the coming of the Lord so that less than a year later, he had to rush back there to make corrections?