CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
1 Thessalonians 2:15. Who both killed.—The New Testament form of the verb is always compound—as we should say, “killed off.” A tragic contrast to what might have been expected is set forth in our Lord’s parable. “It may be they will reverence My Son.” … They cast Him out and killed Him off (Luke 20:13-15). Have persecuted us.—A.V. margin, “chased us out.” R.V. text, “drave.” How deeply humbling was the thought to St. Paul, that he had at one time taken part in this hounding! The A.V. margin gives us a most vivid picture. They please not God.—This expression is thought by some to be a meiosis, a softening down of the hard reality by the negative form of the language. Is not the best comment found in John 16:2, “Whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God”? The sophistry that makes “killing no murder” and sanctions an auto da fé is something quite other than pleasing to God. Are contrary to all men.—“The sense of God’s displeasure often shows itself in sourness and ill temper towards one’s fellows. Unbelief and cynicism go together. The rancour of the Jews against other nations at this time was notorious.… The quarrel between Judaism and the world, alas, still continues, as the Judenhasse of Germany and Russia testifies” (Findlay).
1 Thessalonians 2:16. Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles.—The very spirit of the dog in the manger! They would not even have left the “uncovenanted mercies” to the Gentiles. To fill up their sins alway.—The phrase signifies ripeness for judgment, and is used in Genesis 15:16 of the Amorites in Abraham’s time—an ominous parallel (Ibid.). For the wrath.—R.V, “but the wrath.” As though he said, “But the end comes at last; they have always been sowing this harvest; now it has to be reaped” (Ibid.).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16
The Fury of the Old Religion against the New.
It is the natural order of things that the old must give place to the new. The inexorable operation of the law of progress is seen in a thousand different forms. In the world of vegetation the old life is continually yielding supremacy to the new. The leaves, buds, and blossoms of the tree, as they force their way to the light, fling their shadows on the grave where their predecessors lie decayed and buried—life blooming amid the ghastly emblems of death. And, in the world of religious thought and opinion, while divine truth remains in its essence unchangeably the same, old forms and old definitions are ever giving place to the new. The transition from the old to a new order of things in the progress of religion is not always accomplished without opposition. Age is naturally and increasingly tenacious; and the old religion looks upon the new with suspicion, with jealousy, with fear, with anger. The Jews had resisted the attempts of their own divinely commissioned prophets to rouse the nation to a purer faith and more vigorous religious life; but their fury reached its climax in their blind, unreasonable, and fiendish opposition to Christianity. The text describes the fury of the old religion against the new.
I. The fury of the Jews is seen in their inhuman treatment of the great leaders of religious thought.—“Who both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us” (1 Thessalonians 2:15).
1. They plotted against the life of the world’s Redeemer; and in spite of insufficient evidence to convict, and the endeavours of the Roman procurator to release, they clamoured for the immediate crucifixion of their innocent Victim, exclaiming in the wild intoxication of malignant passion, “His blood be on us and on our children”—a self-invoked imprecation that fell on them with terrible and desolating vengeance.
2. The sin of murder already darkly stained their race.—The best and noblest of their prophets were unoffending victims: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Zechariah, met with violent deaths. The charge of the proto-martyr Stephen was unanswerable (Acts 7:52).
3. The apostles were subjected to similar treatment.—“And have persecuted us”—have chased and driven us out. They drove them out of Thessalonica, afterwards out of Berœa, and were at that moment engaged in instigating an insurrection to drive the apostle out of Corinth. The spirit of persecution is unchanged. Wherever the attempt is made to raise the Church from the grave of spiritual death and reanimate her creed and ritual with intenser reality and life, it is met with a jealous, angry opposition. What a wretched, short-sighted policy does persecution reveal! It is the idolised weapon of the tyrant and the coward, the sport of the brutal, the sanguinary carnival of demons!
II. The fury of the Jews was displeasing to God.—“They please not God” (1 Thessalonians 2:15). They fondly imagined they were the favourites of heaven, and that all others were excluded from the divine complacency. They had the words of the law carefully committed to memory, and could quote them with the utmost facility to serve their own purpose. They would support their proud assumption of superiority and exclusiveness by quoting Deuteronomy 14:2, wilfully shutting their eyes to the vital difference between the holy intention of Jehovah and their miserably defective realisation of that intention. In their opposition to Christianity they thought they were doing God service; yet all the time they were displeasing to Him. How fatally blinding is sin, goading the soul to the commission of the most horrible crimes under the sacred guise of virtue!
III. The fury of the Jews was hostile to man.—
1. Their hostility was directed against the world of mankind. “Are contrary to all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15). The Jews of that period delighted in hatching all kinds of “sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion.” They were the adversaries of all, the despisers of all. Tacitus, the Roman historian, brands them as “the enemies of all men”; and Apion, the Egyptian, according to the admission of Josephus, calls them “atheists and misanthropes—in fact, the most witless and dullest of barbarians.”
2. Their hostility was embittered by a despicable religious jealousy.—“Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles, that they might be saved” (1 Thessalonians 2:16). Here the fury of the old religion against the new reached its climax. It is the perfection of bigotry and cruelty to deny to our fellow-men the only means of salvation. Into what monsters of barbarity will persecution turn men! Pharaoh persisted to such a degree of unreasonableness as to chastise the Hebrews for not accomplishing impossibilities! Julian, the apostate from Christianity, carried his vengeful spirit to his deathbed, and died cursing the Nazarene!
IV. The fury of the Jews hurried them into irretrievable ruin.—
1. Their wickedness was wilfully persistent. “To fill up their sins always” (1 Thessalonians 2:16)—at all times, now as much as ever. So much so, the time is now come when the cup of their iniquity is filled to the brim, and nothing can prevent the consequent punishment. The desire to sin grows with its commission. “Sinners,” says St. Gregory, “would live for ever that they might sin for ever”—a powerful argument for the endlessness of future punishment. The desire to sin is endless.
2. Their punishment was inevitable and complete.—“For the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thessalonians 2:16)—is even now upon them. The process has begun; their fury to destroy others will accelerate their own destruction. Punishment fell upon the wicked, unbelieving, and resisting Jews, and utter destruction upon their national status and religious supremacy (vide Josephus, Wars, Books v., vi.).
Lessons.—
1. There is a fearful possibility of sinking into a lifeless formality, and blind, infatuate opposition to the good.
2. The rage of man against the truth defeats its own ends, and recoils in vengeance on himself.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
1 Thessalonians 2:15-16. The Persecuting Jews—
I. Often misled by professed zeal for truth.
II. Tortured and murdered the noblest men of their own race.
III. Opposed the gospel with violent and unreasoning severity.
IV. Have themselves been persecuted by all the nations among whom they sojourned.
V. Furnish an unanswerable argument for the truth of Christianity.