2. Prayer of thanksgiving (1:2–3)
2. Prayer of thanksgiving (1:2–3)
We should not take Paul’s thanksgiving as merely conventional; he omits it where it does not apply (e.g. Galatians; cf. Schlier).
2. The writers always thank God for these converts, and do so for all of them; apparently there were no disaffected members. Like the Philippians, the Thessalonians seem to have been a continual joy to Paul.
3. Paul gives thanks for the faith, hope and love manifest among the Thessalonians, three qualities that are linked a number of times by early Christians (Rom. 5:2–5; 1 Cor. 13:13; Gal. 5:5–6; Col. 1:4–5; Heb. 6:10–12; 10:22–24; 1 Pet. 1:21–22).
The first point is your work produced by faith. When Paul is emphasizing that salvation comes from faith and not at all from works, he can set faith and works in sharp contrast; thus we are ‘justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no-one will be justified’ (Gal. 2:16). But while Paul insists that salvation is all of God, he also insists that faith is busy. Elsewhere he speaks of ‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6, RSV), and here of faith leading to work. When he speaks of their labour prompted by love Paul means more than small deeds of kindness done without hope of reward. The word kopos denotes laborious toil, unceasing hardship borne for love’s sake.
Love is our translation of agapē, a word not used much before the Christians took it up and made it their characteristic word for love. They had not only a new word but a new idea, an idea we see in the love shown in Christ’s death for sinners (John 3:16; Rom. 5:8; 1 John 4:10, etc.). ‘Perhaps as good a way as any of grasping the new idea of love the Christians had is to contrast it with the idea conveyed by erōs … erōs has two principal characteristics: it is a love of the worthy and it is a love that desires to possess. Agapē is in contrast at both points: it is not a love of the worthy, and it is not a love that desires to possess. On the contrary, it is a love given quite irrespective of merit, and it is a love that seeks to give’.2 God loves, not because people are worthy of that love, but because he is that kind of God; it is his nature to love, he is love (1 John 4:8, 16).
When this love comes to us we are faced with a challenge we cannot ignore. Once we see that God is like that, that God loves as part of his very nature, that God loves in a way that means Calvary, we must make a decision. Either we yield to the divine agapē to be transformed by it, to be remade in the divine image, to see people in a measure as God sees them, or we do not. And if we do not, in that lies our condemnation. We have shut ourselves up to lovelessness. But those who yield themselves to God are transformed by the power of the divine agapē, so that they rejoice to give themselves in the service of others. Paul thanks God that this is what the Thessalonians have done.
The third cause for thanksgiving is their endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, and again this must be understood carefully. Hypomonē, rendered endurance, means not a negative, passive acquiescence, but an active, manly endurance: ‘not the resignation of the passive sufferer, so much as the fortitude of the stout-hearted soldier’ (CBSC; see also 2 Thess. 3:5). Hope, in a Christian context, always has an air of certainty about it. It is a confident expectation, not the unfounded optimism we often mean by the word. More particularly, the Christian hope is directed towards the second advent which seems to be in mind here (so Findlay, Milligan, Masson, etc.). Alternatively it is grammatically possible to take the words in our Lord Jesus Christ to refer to all the preceding part of the verse, in which case the whole of the Christian life is said to be lived in Christ (so Neil, JB).
The addition before our God and Father (these words come last in the Greek) draws attention to Fatherhood as the essence of the Christian view of God. It also links the Father and the Son in the most intimate way.