IV.

_CONVERSION._

"For they themselves report concerning us what manner of entering in

we had unto you; and how ye turned unto God from idols, to serve a

living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He

raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivereth us from the wrath

to come."--1 THESS. i. 9, 10 (R.V.).

These verses show what an impression had been made in other places by

the success of the gospel at Thessalonica. Wherever Paul went, he

heard it spoken about. In every place men were familiar with all its

circumstances; they had heard of the power and assurance of the

missionaries, and of the conversion of their hearers from heathenism

to Christianity. It is this conversion which is the subject before us.

It has two parts or stages. There is first, the conversion from idols

to the one living and true God; and then the distinctively Christian

stage of waiting for the Son of God from heaven. Let us look at these

in order.

The Apostle, so far as we can make out, judged the religions of

heathenism with great severity. He knew that God never left Himself

without a witness in the world, but God's testimony to Himself had

been perverted or ignored. Ever since the creation of the world, His

everlasting power and divinity might be seen by the things He had

made; His law was written on conscience; rain from heaven and

fruitful seasons proved His good and faithful providence; yet men were

practically ignorant of Him. They were not willing, in fact, to retain

Him in their knowledge; they were not obedient; they were not

thankful; when they professed religion at all, they made gods after

their own image, and worshipped them. They bowed before idols; and an

idol, says Paul, is nothing in the world. In the whole system of pagan

religion the Apostle saw nothing but ignorance and sin; it was the

outcome, in part, of man's enmity to God; in part, of God's judicial

abandonment of men; in part, of the activity of evil spirits; it was a

path on which no progress could be made; instead of pursuing it

farther, those who wished really to make spiritual advance must

abandon it altogether.

It is possible to state a better case than this for the religion of

the ancient world; but the Apostle was in close and continuous contact

with the facts, and it will take a great deal of theorising to reverse

the verdict of a conscience like his on the whole question. Those who

wish to put the best face upon the matter, and to rate the spiritual

worth of paganism as high as may be, lay stress on the ideal character

of the so-called idols, and ask whether the mere conception of Zeus,

or Apollo, or Athene, is not a spiritual achievement of a high order.

Let it be ever so high, and still, from the Apostle's ground, Zeus,

Apollo, and Athene are dead idols. They have no life but that which

is conferred upon them by their worshippers. They can never assert

themselves in action, bestowing life or salvation on those who honour

them. They can never be what the Living God was to every man of Jewish

birth--Creator, Judge, King, and Saviour; a personal and moral power

to whom men are accountable at every moment, for every free act.

"Ye turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God." We

cannot over-estimate the greatness of this change. Until we understand

the unity of God, we can have no true idea of His character, and

therefore no true idea of our own relation to Him. It was the

plurality of deities, as much as anything, which made heathenism

morally worthless. Where there is a multitude of gods, the real power

in the world, the final reality, is not found in any of them; but in a

fate of some sort which lies behind them all. There can be no moral

relation of man to this blank necessity; nor, while it exists, any

stable relation of man to his so-called gods. No Greek or Roman could

take in the idea of "serving" a God. The attendants or priests in a

temple were in an official sense the deity's ministers; but the

thought which is expressed in this passage, of serving a living and

true God by a life of obedience to His will, a thought which is so

natural and inevitable to either a Jew or a Christian, that without

it we could not so much as conceive religion--that thought was quite

beyond a pagan's comprehension. There was no room for it in his

religion; his conception of the gods did not admit of it. If life was

to be a moral service rendered to God, it must be to a God quite

different from any to whom he was introduced by his ancestral worship.

That is the final condemnation of heathenism; the final proof of its

falsehood as a religion.

There is something as deep and strong as it is simple in the words, to

serve the living and true God. Philosophers have defined God as the

_ens realissimum_, the most real of beings, the absolute reality; and

it is this, with the added idea of personality, that is conveyed by

the description "living and true." But does God sustain this character

in the minds even of those who habitually worship Him? Is it not the

case that the things which are nearest to our hand seem to be

possessed of most life and reality, while God is by comparison very

unreal, a remote inference from something which is immediately

certain? If that is so, it will be very difficult for us to serve Him.

The law of our life will not be found in His will, but in our own

desires, or in the customs of our society; our motive will not be His

praise, but some end which is fully attained apart from Him. "My

meat," said Jesus, "is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to

finish His work"; and He could say so because God who sent Him was to

Him the living and true God, the first and last and sole reality,

whose will embraced and covered all His life. Do we think of God so?

Are the existence of God and the claim of God upon our obedience the

permanent element in our minds, the unchanging background of all our

thoughts and purposes? This is the fundamental thing in a truly

religious life.

But the Apostle goes on from what is merely theistic, to what is

distinctively Christian. "Ye turned to God from idols ... to wait for

His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead."

This is a very summary description of the issue of Christian

conversion. Judging by the analogy of other places, especially in St.

Paul, we should have expected some mention of faith. In Acts xx.,

_e.g._, where he characterises his preaching, he names as its main

elements, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus

Christ. But here faith has been displaced by hope; the Thessalonians

are represented not as trusting in Christ, but as waiting for Him. Of

course, such hope implies faith. They only waited for Him because they

believed He had redeemed them, and would save them at the great day.

If faith and hope differ in that the one seems to look mainly to the

past and the other to the future, they agree in that both are

concerned with the revelation of the unseen.

Everything in this revelation goes back to the resurrection and rests

upon it. It is mentioned here, in the first instance, exactly as in

Rom. i. 4, as the _argumentum palmarium_ for the Divine Sonship of

Jesus. There are many proofs of that essential doctrine, but not all

can be brought forward in all circumstances. Perhaps the most

convincing at the present time is that which is drawn from the

solitary perfection of Christ's character; the more truly and fully we

get the impression of that character, as it is reflected in the

Gospels, the surer we are that it is not a fancy picture, but drawn

from life; and that He whose likeness it is, stands alone among the

sons of men. But this kind of argument it takes years, not perhaps of

study, but of obedience and devotion, to appreciate; and when the

apostles went forth to preach the gospel they needed a more summary

process of conviction. This they found in Christ's resurrection; that

was an event standing alone in the world's history. There had been

nothing like it before; there has been nothing like it since. But the

men who were assured of it by many infallible proofs, did not presume

to disbelieve it because of its singularity; amazing as it was, they

could not but feel that it became one so unique in goodness and

greatness as Jesus; it was not possible, they saw after the event,

that He should be holden by the power of death; the resurrection only

exhibited Him in His true dignity; it declared Him the Son of God,

and set Him on His throne. Accordingly in all their preaching they put

the resurrection in the forefront. It was a revelation of life. It

extended the horizon of man's existence. It brought into view realms

of being that had hitherto been hidden in darkness. It magnified to

infinity the significance of everything in our short life in this

world, because it connected everything immediately with an endless

life beyond. And as this life in the unseen had been revealed in

Christ, all the apostles had to tell about it centred in Him. The

risen Christ was King, Judge, and Saviour; the Christian's present

duty was to love, trust, obey, and wait for Him.

This waiting includes everything. "Ye come behind in no gift," Paul

says to the Corinthians, "waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus

Christ." That attitude of expectation is the bloom, as it were, of the

Christian character. Without it, there is something lacking; the

Christian who does not look upward and onward wants one mark of

perfection. This is, in all probability, the point on which we should

find ourselves most from home, in the atmosphere of the primitive

Church. Not unbelievers only, but disciples as well, have practically

ceased to think of the Second Advent. The society which devotes itself

to reviving interest in the truth uses Scripture in a fashion which

makes it impossible to take much interest in its proceedings; yet a

truth so clearly a part of Scripture teaching cannot be neglected

without loss. The door of the unseen world closed behind Christ as He

ascended from Olivet, but not for ever. It will open again; and this

same Jesus shall so come in like manner as the apostles beheld Him go.

He has gone to prepare a place for those who love Him and keep His

word; but "if I go," He says, "and prepare a place for you, I will

come again, and take you to Myself; that where I am, there ye may be

also." That is the final hope of the Christian faith. It is for the

fulfilment of this promise that the Church waits. The Second Coming of

Christ and His Resurrection stand and fall together; and it will not

long be possible for those who look askance at His return to receive

in all its fulness the revelation of life which He made when He rose

again from the dead. This world is too much with us; and it needs not

languor, but strenuous effort on the part of faith and hope, to make

the unseen world as real. Let us see that we come not behind in a

grace so essential to the very being of Christianity.

The last words of the verse describe the character in which the Son of

God is expected by Christians to appear--Jesus, our deliverer[4] from

the wrath to come (τῆς ὀργῆς τῆς ἐρχομένης). There is, then,

according to apostolic teaching, a coming wrath--a wrath impending

over the world, and actually on its way towards it. It is called the

wrath to come, in distinction from anything of the same nature of

which we have experience here. We all know the penal consequences

which sin brings in its train even in this world. Remorse, unavailing

sorrow, shame, fear, the sight of injury which we have done to those

we love and which we cannot undo, incapacity for service,--all these

are part and parcel of the fruit which sin bears. But they are not the

wrath to come. They do not exhaust the judgment of God upon evil.

Instead of discrediting it, they bear witness to it; they are, so to

speak, its forerunners; the lurid clouds that appear here and there in

the sky, but are finally lost in the dense mass of the thunderstorm.

When the Apostle preached the gospel, he preached the wrath to come;

without it, there would have been a missing link in the circle of

Christian ideas. "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ," he says.

Why? Because in it the righteousness of God is revealed, a

righteousness which is God's gift and acceptable in God's sight. But

why is such a revelation of righteousness necessary? Because the wrath

of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and

unrighteousness of men. The gospel is a revelation made to the world

in view of a given situation, and the most prominent and threatening

element in that situation is the impending wrath of God. The apostles

do not prove it; they declare it. The proof of it is left to conscience,

and to the Spirit of God reinforcing and quickening conscience; if

anything can be added to this, it is the gospel itself; for if there

were no such thing as the wrath of God, the gospel would be

gratuitous. We may, if we please, evade the truth; we may pick and

choose for ourselves among the elements of New Testament teaching, and

reject all that is distasteful; we may take our stand upon pride, and

decline to be threatened even by God; but we cannot be honest, and at

the same time deny that Christ and His apostles warn us of wrath to

come.

Of course we must not misconceive the character of this wrath. We must

not import into our thoughts of it all that we can borrow from our

experience of man's anger--hastiness, unreason, intemperate rage. The

wrath of God is no arbitrary, passionate outburst; it is not, as wrath

so often is with us, a fury of selfish resentment. "Evil shall not

dwell with Thee," says the Psalmist; and in that simple word we have

the root of the matter. The wrath of God is, as it were, the instinct

of self-preservation in the Divine nature; it is the eternal

repulsion, by the Holy One, of all evil. Evil shall _not_ dwell with

Him. That may be doubted or denied while the day of grace lasts, and

God's forbearance is giving space to the sinful for repentance; but a

day is coming when it will no more be possible to doubt it--the day

which the Apostle calls the day of wrath. It will then be plain to all

the world that God's wrath is no empty name, but the most terrible of

all powers--a consuming fire in which everything opposed to His

holiness is burnt up. And while we take care not to think of this

wrath after the pattern of our own sinful passions, let us take care,

on the other hand, not to make it an unreal thing, without analogy in

human life. If we go upon the ground of Scripture and of our own

experience, it has the same degree and the same kind of reality as the

love of God, or His compassion, or His forbearance. In whatever way we

lawfully think of one side of the Divine nature, we must at the same

time think of the other. If there is a passion of Divine love, there

is a passion of Divine wrath as well. Nothing is meant in either case

unworthy of the Divine nature; what is conveyed by the word passion is

the truth that God's repulsion of evil is as intense as the ardour

with which He delights in good. To deny that is to deny that He is

good.

The apostolic preacher, who had announced the wrath to come, and

awakened guilty consciences to see their danger, preached Jesus as the

deliverer from it. This is the real meaning of the words in the text;

and neither "Jesus which delivered," as in the Authorised Version,

nor, in any rigorous sense, "Jesus which delivereth," as in the

Revised. It is the character of Jesus that is in view, and neither the

past nor the present of His action. Every one who reads the words must

feel, How brief! how much remains to be explained! how much Paul must

have had to say about how the deliverance is effected! As the passage

stands, it recalls vividly the end of the second Psalm: "Kiss the Son,

lest He be angry, and ye perish in the way, for His wrath will soon be

kindled. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him." To have

the Son a friend, to be identified with Jesus--so much we see at

once--secures deliverance in the day of wrath. Other Scriptures supply

the missing links. The atonement for sin made by Christ's death; faith

which unites the soul to the Saviour, and brings into it the virtue of

His cross and resurrection; the Holy Spirit who dwells in believers,

sanctifying them, and making them fit to dwell with God in the

light,--all these come into view elsewhere, and in spite of the brevity

of this notice had their place, beyond doubt, in Paul's teaching at

Thessalonica.[5] Not that all could be explained at once: that was

unnecessary. But from imminent danger there must be an instantaneous

escape; and it is sufficient to say that it is found in Jesus Christ.

"Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him." The risen Son is

enthroned in power; He is Judge of all; He died for all; He is able to

save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him. To commit

everything definitely to Him; to leave Him to undertake for us; to put

on Him the responsibility of our past and our future, as He invites us

to do; to put ourselves for good and all at His side,--this is to find

deliverance from the wrath to come. It leaves much unexplained that we

may come to understand afterwards, and much, perhaps, that we shall

never understand; but it guarantees itself, adventure though it be;

Christ never disappoints any who thus put their trust in Him.

This description in outline of conversion from paganism to the gospel

should revive the elementary Christian virtues in our hearts. Have we

seen how high a thing it is to serve a living and true God? Or is it

not so, that even among Christians, a _godly_ man--one who lives in

the presence of God, and is conscious of his responsibility to Him--is

the rarest of all types? Are we waiting for His Son from heaven, whom

He raised from the dead? Or are there not many who hardly so much as

form the idea of His return, and to whom the attitude of waiting for

Him would seem strained and unnatural? In plain words, what the New

Testament calls Hope is in many Christians dead: the world to come and

all that is involved in it--the searching judgment, the impending

wrath, the glory of Christ--have slipped from our grasp. Yet it was

this hope which more than anything gave its peculiar colour to the

primitive Christianity, its unworldliness, its moral intensity, its

command of the future even in this life. If there were nothing else to

establish it, would not its spiritual fruits be sufficient?

[4] The present participle here is simply equivalent to a substantive.

[5] Much has been made, by writers who wish to trace the spiritual

development of St. Paul, of the absence from his earliest epistles of

explicit teaching on the atonement and on justification by faith. But

we have to remember that the Epistles to the Thessalonians, like most

of his writings, were incidental; their topics were provided, and

limited, by special circumstances. The doctrinal matter in 1

Thessalonians was not even the principal thing; the λοιπὸν in iv. 1

shows that by the end of chapter iii. the Apostle has done what he

intended to do when he began; even the paragraphs on the Parousia are

casual and supplementary. But if we consider that Paul had now been

preaching for perhaps seventeen years, and that within a few months he

delivered to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xv. 1-4) the one gospel known

alike to him and to the twelve,--the gospel which had for its

fundamental article "that Christ died for our sins according to the

Scriptures,"--we shall see how unreal it is to exclude this doctrine

from his evangelistic work at Thessalonica. No doubt there, as at

Corinth, he delivered this "first of all."--See also chap. v. 10.