_IMPEACHMENT OF THE JEWS._
"And for this cause we also thank God without ceasing, that, when ye
received from us the word of the message, _even the word_ of
God, ye accepted _it_ not _as_ the word of men, but, as it is in
truth, the word of God, which also worketh in you that believe. For
ye, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in
Judæa in Christ Jesus; for ye also suffered the same things of your
own countrymen, even as they did of the Jews; who both killed the
Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drave out us, and please not God,
and are contrary to all men; forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles
that they may be saved; to fill up their sins alway: but the wrath is
come upon them to the uttermost."--1 THESS. ii. 13-16 (R.V.).
These verses complete the treatment of the subject with which this
chapter opens. The Apostle has drawn a moving picture of his life and
labours in Thessalonica; he has pointed to it as his sufficient
vindication from all the charges laid against him. Before carrying the
war into the enemies' camp, and depicting the traditions and the
spirit of his traducers, he lingers again for a moment on the happy
results of his work. In spite of persecution and calumny, he has cause
to thank God without ceasing when he remembers the reception of the
gospel by the Thessalonians.
When the message was brought to them, they accepted it, he says, not
as the word of men, but as what it was in truth, the word of God. It
is in this character that the gospel always presents itself. A word of
men cannot address men with authority; it must submit itself to
criticism; it must vindicate itself on grounds which man's understanding
approves. Now, the gospel is not irrational; it is its own demand that
the Christian shall be ready to answer every one who demands a
rational account of the hope that is in him. But neither does it, on
the other hand, come to us soliciting our approval; submitting itself,
as a system of ideas, to our scrutiny, and courting approbation. It
speaks with authority. It _commands_ repentance; it preaches
forgiveness on the ground of Christ's death--a supreme gift of God
which may be accepted or rejected, but is not proposed for discussion;
it exhibits the law of Christ's life as the law which is binding upon
every human being, and calls upon all men to follow him. Its decisive
appeal is made to the conscience and the will; and to respond to it is
to give up will and conscience to God. When the Apostle says, "Ye
received it as, what it is in truth, the word of God," he betrays, if
one may use the word, the consciousness of his own inspiration.
Nothing is commoner now than to speak of the theology of Paul as if it
were a private possession of the Apostle, a scheme of thought that he
had framed for himself, to explain his own experience. Such a scheme
of thought, we are told, has no right whatever to impose itself on us;
it has only a historical and biographical interest; it has no
necessary connexion with truth. The first result of this line of
thought, in almost every case, is the rejection of the very heart of
the apostolic gospel; the doctrine of the atonement is no longer the
greatest truth of revelation, but a rickety bridge on which Paul
imagined he had crossed from Pharisaism to Christianity. Certainly
this modern analysis of the epistles does not reflect the Apostle's
own way of looking at what he called "My gospel." To him it was no
device of man, but unequivocally Divine; in very truth, the word of
God. His theology certainly came to him in the way of his experience;
his mind had been engaged with it, and was engaged with it continually;
but he was conscious that, with all this freedom, it rested at bottom
on the truth of God; and when he preached it--for his theology was the
sum of the Divine truth he held, and he _did_ preach it--he did not
submit it to men as a theme for discussion. He put it above discussion.
He pronounced a solemn and reiterated anathema on either man or angel
who should put anything else in its stead. He published it, not for
criticism, as though it had been his own device; but, as the word of
God, for the obedience of faith. The tone of this passage recalls the
word of our Lord, "Whoso shall not receive the kingdom of God as a
little child shall in no wise enter therein." There are difficulties
enough connected with the gospel, but they are not of a kind that
disappear while we stand and look at them, or even stand and think
about them; unquestioning surrender solves many, and introduces us to
experiences which enable us to bear the rest with patience.
The word of God, in other words the gospel, proved its Divine
character in the Thessalonians _after_ it was received. "It also
worketh," says Paul, "in you that believe." The last words are not
superfluous. The word preached, we read of an earlier generation, did
not profit, not being mixed with faith in them that heard. Faith
conditions its efficacy. Gospel truth is an active force when it is
within the heart; but it can do nothing for us while doubt, pride, or
unacknowledged reserve, keep it outside. If we have really welcomed
the Divine message, it will not be inoperative; it will work within us
all that is characteristic of New Testament life--love, joy, peace,
hope, patience. These are the proofs of its truth. Here, then, is the
source of all graces: if the word of Christ dwell in us richly; if the
truth of the gospel, deep, manifold, inexhaustible, yet ever the same,
possess our hearts,--the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.
The particular gospel grace which the Apostle has here in view is
patience. He proves that the word of God is at work in the
Thessalonians by pointing to the fact that they have suffered for His
sake. "Had you been still of the world, the world would have loved its
own; but as it is, you have become imitators of the Christian churches
in Judæa, and have suffered the same things at the hands of your
countrymen as they from theirs." Of all places in the world, Judæa was
that in which the gospel and its adherents had suffered most
severely. Jerusalem itself was the focus of hostility. No one knew
better than Paul, the zealous persecutor of heresy, what it had cost
from the very beginning to be true to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
Scourging, imprisonment, exile, death by the sword or by stoning, had
rewarded such fidelity. We do not know to what extremity the enemies
of the gospel had gone in Thessalonica; but the distress of the
Christians must have been great when the Apostle could make this
comparison even in passing. He has already told them (ch. i. 6) that
much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost, is the very badge of
God's elect; and here he combines the same stern necessity with the
operation of the Divine word in their hearts. Do not let us overlook
this. The work of God's word (or if you prefer it, the effect of
receiving the gospel), is in the first instance to produce a new
character, a character not only distinct from that of the unconverted,
but antagonistic to it, and more directly and inevitably antagonistic,
the more thoroughly it is wrought out; so that in proportion as God's
word is operative in us, we come into collision with the world which
rejects it. To suffer, therefore, is to the Apostle the seal of faith;
it warrants the genuineness of a Christian profession. It is not a
sign that God has forgotten His people, but a sign that He is with
them; and that they are being brought by Him into fellowship with
primitive churches, with apostles and prophets, with the Incarnate Son
Himself. And hence the whole situation of the Thessalonians, suffering
included, comes under that heartfelt expression of thanks to God with
which the passage opens. It is not a subject for condolence, but for
gratitude, that they have been counted worthy to suffer shame for the
Name.
And now the Apostle turns from the persecuted to the persecutors.
There is nothing in his epistles elsewhere that can be compared with
this passionate outburst. Paul was proud with no common pride of his
Jewish descent; it was better in his eyes than any patent of nobility.
His heart swelled as he thought of the nation to which the adoption
pertained, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the
law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose were the fathers,
and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came. Apostle of the
Gentiles though he was, he had great sorrow and unceasing pain in his
heart, when he remembered the antagonism of the Jews to the gospel; he
could have wished himself anathema from Christ for their sakes. He was
confident, too, that in some glorious future they would yet submit to
the Messiah, so that all Israel should be saved. The turning of the
heathen to God would provoke them to jealousy; and the Divine calling
with which the nation had been called in Abraham would reach its
predestined goal. Such is the tone, and such the anticipation, with
which, not very long afterwards, Paul writes in the epistle to the
Romans. Here he looks at his countrymen with other eyes. They are
identified, in his experience, with a fierce resistance to the gospel,
and with cruel persecutions of the Church of Christ. Only in the
character of bitter enemies has he been in contact with them in recent
years. They have hunted him from city to city in Asia and in Europe;
they have raised the populace against his converts; they have sought
to poison the minds of his disciples against him. He knows that this
policy is that with which his countrymen as a whole have identified
themselves; and as he looks steadily at it, he sees that in doing so
they have only acted in consistency with all their past history. The
messengers whom God sends to demand the fruit of His vineyard have
always been treated with violence and despite. The crowning sin of the
race is put in the forefront; they slew the Lord, Jesus; but before
the Lord came, they had slain His prophets; and after He had gone,
they expelled His apostles. God had put them in a position of
privilege, but only for a time; they were the depositaries, or
trustees, of the knowledge of God as the Saviour of men; and now, when
the time had come for that knowledge to be diffused throughout all the
world, they clung proudly and stubbornly to the old position. They
pleased not God and were contrary to all men, in forbidding the
apostles to preach salvation to the heathen. There is an echo, all
through this passage, of the words of Stephen: "Ye stiffnecked and
uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost."
There are sentences in heathen authors, who repaid the contempt and
hatred of the Jews with haughty disdain, that have been compared with
this terrible impeachment by the Apostle; but in reality, they are
quite unlike. What we have here is not a burst of temper, though there
is undoubtedly strong feeling in it; it is the vehement condemnation,
by a man in thorough sympathy with the mind and spirit of God, of the
principles on which the Jews as a nation had acted at every period of
their history.
What is the relation of God to such a situation as is here described?
The Jews, Paul says, did all this "to fill up their sins at all
times." He does not mean that that was their intention; neither does
he speak ironically; but speaking as he often does from that Divine
standpoint at which all results are intended and purposed results, not
outside of, but within, the counsel of God, he signifies that this
Divine end was being secured by their wickedness. The cup of their
iniquity was filling all the time. Every generation did something to
raise the level within. The men who bade Amos begone, and eat his
bread at home, raised it a little; the men who sought Hosea's life in
the sanctuary, raised it further; so did those who put Jeremiah in the
dungeon, and those who murdered Zechariah between the temple and the
altar. When Jesus was nailed to the cross, the cup was full to the
brim. When those whom He left behind to be His witnesses, and to
preach repentance and remission of sins to an men, beginning at
Jerusalem, were expelled or put to death, it ran over. God could bear
no more. Side by side with the cup of iniquity the cup of judgment had
been filling also; and they overflowed together. Even when Paul wrote
he could say, "The wrath is come upon them to the very end."[8]
It is not easy to explain the precise force of these words. They seem
to point definitely[9] to some event, or some act of God, in which His
wrath had been unmistakably made manifest. To suppose that the fall of
Jerusalem is meant is to deny that Paul wrote the words. All that is
certain is that the Apostle saw in the signs of the times some
infallible token that the nation's day of grace had come to an end.
Perhaps some excess of a Roman procurator, now forgotten; perhaps one
of those famines that desolated Judæa in that unhappy age; perhaps the
recent edict of Claudius, expelling all Jews from Rome, and betraying
the temper of the supreme power; perhaps the coming shadow of an awful
doom, obscure in outline, but none the less inevitable, gave shape to
the expression. The Jews had failed, in their day, to recognise the
things that belonged to their peace; and now they were hid from their
eyes. They had disregarded every presage of the coming storm; and at
length the clouds that could not be charmed away had accumulated over
their heads, and the fire of God was ready to leap out.
This striking passage embodies certain truths to which we do well to
give heed. It shows us that there is such a thing as a national
character. In the providential government of God a nation is not an
aggregate of individuals, each one of whom stands apart from the rest;
it is a corporation with a unity, life and spirit of its own. Within
that unity there may be a conflict of forces, a struggle of good with
evil, of higher with lower tendencies, just as there is in the
individual soul; but there will be a preponderance on one side or the
other; and that side to which the balance leans will prevail more and
more. In the vast spirit of the nation, as in the spirit of each man
or woman, through the slow succession of generations as in the swift
succession of years, character gradually assumes more fixed and
definite form. There is a process of development, interrupted perhaps
and retarded by such conflicts as I have referred to, but bringing
out all the more decisively and irreversibly the inmost spirit of the
whole. There is nothing which the proud and the weak more dread than
inconsistency; there is nothing, therefore, which is so fatally
certain to happen as what has happened already. The Jews resented from
the first the intrusion of God's word into their lives; they had
ambitions and ideas of their own, and in its corporate action the
nation was uniformly hostile to the prophets. It beat one and killed
another and stoned a third; it was of a different spirit from them,
and from Him who sent them; and the longer it lived, the more like
itself, the more unlike God, it became. It was the climax of its sin,
yet only the climax--for it had previously taken every step that led
to that eminence in evil--when it slew the Lord Jesus. And when it was
ripe for judgment, judgment fell upon it as a whole.
It is not easy to speak impartially about our own country and its
character; yet such a character there undoubtedly is, just as there is
such a unity as the British nation. Many observers tell us that the
character has degenerated into a mere instinct for trade; and that it
has begotten a vast unscrupulousness in dealing with the weak. Nobody
will deny that there is a protesting conscience in the nation, a voice
which pleads in God's name for justice, as the prophets pled in
Israel; but the question is not whether such a voice is audible, but
whether in the corporate acts of the nation it is obeyed. The state
ought to be a Christian state. The nation ought to be conscious of a
spiritual vocation, and to be animated with the spirit of Christ. In
its dealings with other powers, in its relations to savage or
half-civilised peoples, in its care for the weak among its own
citizens, it should acknowledge the laws of justice and of mercy. We
have reason to thank God that in all these matters Christian sentiment
is beginning to tell. The opium trade with China, the liquor trade
with the natives of Africa, the labour trade in the South Seas, the
dwellings of the poor, the public-house system with its deliberate
fostering of drunkenness, all these are matters in regard to which the
nation was in danger of settling into permanent hostility to God, and
in which there is now hope of better things. The wrath which is the
due and inevitable accompaniment of such hostility, when persisted in,
has not come on us to the very end; God has given us opportunity to
rectify what is amiss, and to deal with all our interests in the
spirit of the New Testament. Let no one be backward or indifferent
when so great a work is in hand. The heritage of sin accumulates if it
is not put away by well doing; and with sin, judgment. It is for us to
learn by the word of God and the examples of history that the nation
and kingdom that will not serve Him shall perish.
Finally, this passage shows us the last and worst form which sin can
assume, in the words "forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they
should be saved." Nothing is so completely ungodly, so utterly unlike
God and opposed to Him, as that spirit which grudges others the good
things which it prizes for itself. When the Jewish nation set itself
relentlessly to prohibit the extension of the gospel to the
Gentiles--when the word was passed round the synagogues from head
quarters that this renegade Paul, who was summoning the pagans to
become the people of God, was to be thwarted by fraud or violence--God's
patience was exhausted. Such selfish pride was the very negation of
His love; the _ne plus ultra_ of evil. Yet nothing is more easy and
natural than for men who have occupied a position of privilege to
indulge this temper. An imperial nation, which boasts of its freedom,
grudges such freedom to others; it seems to lose the very consciousness
of being free, unless there is a subject people over which it can
tyrannise. In many relations of minor consequence, political and
social, we have cause to make this reflection. Do not think that what
is good for you, is anything else than good for your neighbour. If you
are a better man because you have a comfortable home, leisure,
education, interest in public affairs, a place in the church, so would
he be. Above all, if the gospel of Christ is to you the pearl above
all price, take care how you grudge that to any human soul. This is
not an unnecessary caution. The criticism of missionary methods, which
may be legitimate enough, is interrupted too often by the suggestion
that such and such a race is not fit for the gospel. Nobody who knows
what the gospel is will ever make such a suggestion; but we have all
heard it made, and we see from this passage what it means. It is the
mark of a heart which is deeply estranged from God, and ignorant of
the Golden Rule which embodies both gospel and law. Let us rather be
imitators of the great man who first entered into the spirit of
Christ, and discovered the open secret of His life and death,--the
mystery of redemption--that the heathen should be heirs with God's
ancient people, and of the same body, and partakers of the same
promises. "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even
so to them."
[8] Weiss renders εἰς τέλος "im höchsten Masse."
[9] Observe the aorist ἔφθασεν.