2 Thess 1:5-10, Let God Take Care of His World; Shine His Glory.
length: 87:18 - taught on Jul, 16 2023
Class Outline:
Sunday July 16, 2023
We see the suffering of the people of God and the cruelty, power, and arrogance of evil people and we see a world filled with injustice.
For this, many protest against God. “Why doesn’t He do something?” He is doing something.
Good does not need evil. In fact, it is the other way around. Evil gives good the opportunity to shine like a filament.
This is a plain indication of God's righteous judgment so that (to this purpose) you will be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which indeed you are suffering.
2TH 1:5 “Here is evidence …”
- You will suffer in a world that hates Christ if your faith and love and endurance increase.
- The life of faith, love, and endurance will shine with the glory of Christ.
That glory is unmistakable to those who know it. You will see it in yourself and it will be the grandest thing to behold.
This is the meaning of “worthy.”
For you recall, brethren, our labor and hardship, how working night and day so as not to be a burden to any of you, we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. 10 You are witnesses, and so is God, how devoutly and uprightly and blamelessly we behaved toward you believers; 11 just as you know how we were exhorting and encouraging and imploring each one of you as a father would his own children, 12 so that you would walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory.
We are to walk in this manner (EPH 4:1; COL 1:10), conduct ourselves in this manner (Php 1:27); dwell on them (Php 4:8); be this manner (2TH 1:11).
The Scripture states that present suffering will bring future glory. In our passage, as in several others, there is a reversal of fortunes. Roles are reversed.
In vv. 6-7, God will repay and give relieve. In vv. 9-10 they will pay the penalty of eternal destruction while we behold the glory and the marvelous nature of Christ.
For after all it is only just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, 7 and to give relief to you who are afflicted and to us as well when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, 8 dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, 10 when He comes to be glorified in His saints on that day, and to be marveled at among all who have believed — for our testimony to you was believed.
To the faithful who endure, the present suffering increases their faith, love, and endurance. To the prosecutors, their hearts get harder. We must do good to them and pray for them and love them, for their destruction is the worst imaginable.
God has chosen to shine His glory in a fallen, evil world.
He did not make the sin or evil. But He made it so. Sovereign God has made the world the way it is and the people the way they are without performing one act of sin nor tempting anyone with sin.
God has chosen to shine His glory in this way - in a fallen, evil world.
God has certainly allowed the wicked to triumph temporarily but judgment will fall on them in the end.
But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God [same phrase as 2TH 1:5], 6 who will render to every man according to his deeds: 7 to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life; 8 but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation. 9 There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek, 10 but glory and honor and peace to every man who does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 11 For there is no partiality with God.
God has purposed this path since before the world was. There is no use complaining about the fact that the world is full of the selfishly ambitious and disobedient and unrighteous.
We need spiritual discernment and godly perspective in order to navigate our way through this world and shine forth the glory that Christ gave us.
God gives us a promise. One that only believers will look to and believe. God will vindicate His justice and redress the present imbalance.
When? When the Lord returns. And not before then.
For after all it is only just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, 7 and to give relief to you who are afflicted and to us as well when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire,
“will be revealed” - apokalupsis - an uncovering.
It is a noun, not a verb. “When at the uncovering of the Lord Jesus.”
His first coming was in weakness and obscurity. His second coming is in power and public magnificence.
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God.
The blazing fire is the same language used to describe the burning bush. So, we have the return of God, the King, the Messiah, full of judgment and with a full retinue. In 1TH 4:14 He returns with the Christian dead and here with His mighty angels. In 1TH 3:13, it could mean both - He returns with His “holy ones” (hagion).
Now may our God and Father Himself and Jesus our Lord direct our way to you; 12 and may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all people, just as we also do for you; 13 so that He may establish your hearts without blame in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints.
Who are the judged? The unbelievers.
dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
“Those who do not know God” is another way of describing the unbeliever.
But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again?
All die. We’ve made up good and bad deaths and forgot that it was death itself that was bad.
from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die."
1 Cor 15:22
in Adam all die
sin reigned in death
Paul’s emphasis is not on the manner of their death but their separation from God. And we must remember, as impossible as it is to understand, that it is not what God wants.
The preposition apo means from or away from and is used both times in reference to the face of God and the glory of His power.
These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,
Eternal destruction is not his final word.
The same light and power blinds one and illumes the other.
Christ will not only judge those who reject the gospel but He will also be glorified “in” His saints and be marveled at “in” all those who believed. And it will happen in that day - the Day of the Lord.
Both glorified and marveled are passive in voice. Christ is glorified and marveled at.
These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, 10 when He comes to be glorified in His saints on that day, and to be marveled at among all who have believed — for our testimony to you was believed.
He is not glorified and marveled among us as if we’re just spectators, or through us as if we were the vehicles or the mirrors that reflect Him. He is glorified and we marvel “in” us.
When Christ returns He will be glorified “in” us. And we will see this. And I would imagine we would see it, as we have been longing to see it for many years, but now it shines purely in us - His resurrected saints.
We will see it. For we marvel at it, His glory, but not among all who have believed, rather “in” all who have believed.
Perhaps this is the reward and crown of heaven. For those who have longed for it on earth, this shining forth in them will be more enjoyed. Like walking along and stumbling on an item in the ground that you do not know all that well and another person stumbling on the same item and it was a pearl of great price that they had been searching for their whole lives. What would be the experience of each one?
In Him, we are the filament through which He passes His glory.
Spectators and mirrors are not changed but the filament is. And in our case, the power never goes off.
Now, in light of this truth, what is your perspective of the world, the sin and evil of it, mankind, unbeliever and believer, of the Church, and how would you like to experience the second coming? As one who has longed to know Him or one who hardly did?
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