Scripture Daily

Context No. 576 of 4322 · 1 Thessalonians

Context · Reflection

1 Thessalonians 2:13-20: in context

13For this cause we also thank God without ceasing that when you received from us the word of the message of God, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, God’s word, which also works in you who believe. 14For you, brothers, became imitators of the assemblies of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus; for you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews 15who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and drove us out, and don’t please God, and are contrary to all men, 16forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, to fill up their sins always. But wrath has come on them to the uttermost. 17But we, brothers, being bereaved of you for a short season in presence, not in heart, tried even harder to see your face with great desire, 18because we wanted to come to you—indeed, I, Paul, once and again—but Satan hindered us. 19For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Isn’t it even you, before our Lord Jesus at his coming? 20For you are our glory and our joy.

Paul thanks God for something specific about the Thessalonians, and it is worth slowing down on, because it names a choice each of us makes about Scripture. We thank God constantly, he writes, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe. Notice the two ways the same message could have been received. It could have been taken as the word of men, one more human opinion, a set of interesting ideas from a traveling teacher, to be weighed and sampled and set alongside all the other views on offer. The Thessalonians instead received it as the word of God, and Paul says that reception is why it went to work in them.

That distinction is the whole thing. The very same words land completely differently depending on how I receive them. If I treat Scripture as human words, essentially wise human opinion, then I sit over it as the judge, taking the parts I like, discounting the parts I do not, keeping it at the safe distance appropriate to any human perspective I might agree with or not. But if I receive it as what Paul says it truly is, the word of God, then it sits over me, with authority to search and correct and change me, and Paul adds that it is precisely then that it works, actually operating in the believer to do something. The word at arm's length does nothing; the word received as God's own goes to work.

That examines the posture I bring to Scripture. Too often I read it as material to evaluate, agreeing where it suits me and quietly filing away what does not, holding it at the distance I would hold any human writer. The Thessalonians received it as God speaking, and it changed them. Do I receive God's word as one more human opinion to weigh and pick from, keeping myself as its judge, or as God's actual word with the authority to work on me, and would I let it do that work if I truly received it that way?

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