I. The suffering of the Thessalonians had a common origin.—“For ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews.” Just as the Jews who embraced Christianity met with the maddest violence from their own unbelieving countrymen, so the Gentiles found their fiercest foes among their fellow-countrymen, who blindly clung to the worship of the gods. It is the unkindest cut of all that comes from the sword of our own people—people with whom we have lived in amity and concord, but from whom conscience compels us to differ. Who can fathom the deep anguish of the Psalmist sounding in that sharp, bitter cry of startled surprise, “For it was not an enemy that reproached me, then I could have borne it; but it was thou, a man, mine equal, my guide and mine acquaintance”! (Ps. lv. 12, 13). It was a horrible discovery of nature engaged in a terrible suicidal war with itself! Nature grown monstrously unnatural and savagely retaliating on its own; natural love turned into unnatural enmity! What a revelation, too, is this of the desperate nature of all persecution! Its insensate malice rudely sunders all bonds of fatherland, friendship, and kindred. The close affinity between Cain and Abel does not arrest the murderer’s hand; the tender ties between Saul and David, woven with much reciprocal kindness and affection, avail not to curb the mad cruelty of the infuriate king. Ah! how deep and changeless is the truth, “All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Tim. iii. 12). The suffering that tests is still from the same source, “A man’s foes are they of his own household” (Matt. x. 36).
II. The suffering of the Thessalonians was borne with exemplary Christian fortitude.—“For ye, brethren, became followers of the Churches of God, which in Judea are in Christ Jesus.” The same thought is expressed in the first chapter, where the apostle says, “Ye became followers of us and of the Lord.” For at the head of the long line is Jesus, the Captain of salvation; and all whom He leads to glory walk in His steps, imitate His example, and so become followers one of another. It is not, however, suffering in itself that purifies and exalts Christian character, so much as the spirit in which it is borne. The hardest point of obedience is to obey in suffering. It was enough to cool the fiery ambition of the aspiring disciples when Jesus said, “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?” (Matt. xx. 22). And yet the following of Christ in suffering is the true test of discipleship. “He that taketh not his cross and followeth me is not worthy of Me” (Matt. x. 38). It is a grand proof of the supernatural efficacy of Gospel truth that it inspires so intense a love of it as to make us willing to endure the most exquisite suffering for its sake. The love of truth becomes supreme. John Huss, lamenting the rupture of an old and valued friendship, said: “Paletz is my friend; truth is my friend; and both being my friends, it is my sacred duty to give the first honour to truth.” The soul, penetrated with this sublime devotion to truth, will pass unscathed the fiery test of suffering. On the destruction by fire of the London Alexandra Palace a few years ago, it was found that, while many specimens of old English porcelain exhibited there were reduced to a black, shapeless mass, the true porcelain of Bristol, though broken into fragments, still retained its whiteness, and even its most delicate shades of colour, uninjured by the fire. So the truly good, though wounded and maimed, shall survive the fiercest trial, and retain intact all that specially distinguishes and beautifies the Christian character.
Lessons.—1. Our love of the Gospel is tested by what we suffer for it. 2. The similarity of experience in all times and places is a strong evidence of the truth of the Christian religion. 3. Suffering does not destroy, but builds up and perfects.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 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 on 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” (ver. 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” (Matt. xxvii. 25)—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 vii. 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!