II. Look at the troublers and their portion.—“It is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you.” Sorrow of the acutest kind without comfort or alleviation.
III. Look at the portion of the troubled.—“Rest.” A heaven of quietness and repose, and yet of ceaseless and tireless activity in praising God.
IV. The righteousness of the Divine conduct.—“It is a righteous thing with God.” The Lord’s second coming is not on an errand of mercy; His main business is to dispense justice.—C. Bradley.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 7–10.
The Day of Judgment.
The apostle sought to comfort the persecuted and suffering Church at Thessalonica by assuring them of a coming day of recompense, in which the Divine righteousness would be satisfactorily cleared, His enemies punished, and His people rewarded. He now proceeds to depict the startling scenes of that promised day—“that day for which all other days were made”—and to indicate the twofold aspect of severity and mercy which will characterise the awards of the great Judge. In dealing with a subject of such overwhelming import, and which affords such scope for the play of the most powerful imagination, special care should be taken to keep within the limits of the revealed Word. These verses suggest:—
I. That the day of judgment will be ushered in with awful splendour.—1. The person of the Judge will be clothed with dazzling brightness. “The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven in flaming fire” (vers. 7, 8). The career of Christ on earth was one of obscurity, humiliation, and suffering, relieved now and then with outbursts of Divine glory; but when He comes the second time, He will appear in all the unveiled charms of His peerless majesty, clad with heavenly splendour and brilliant as a fiery flame. The revelation of Jehovah is often referred to in the Old Testament under the emblem of fire (Exod. xiii. 21; Num. ix. 15; Deut. iv. 24; Isa. x. 16, 17, etc.). The glimpse caught by the seer of Patmos of the ineffable beauty and glory of the God-man bowed him with astonishment and awe (Rev. i. 13–17). And who shall stand before the flashing splendours of the great and holy Judge! Heaven is too narrow for the full display of the Divine majesty; it glances on every globe; it irradiates the universe.
2. The Judge will be attended by an angelic retinue.—“With His mighty angels” (ver. 7). The pomp and state of the earthly judge, the gaily decked chariot, the sounding trumpets, the accompanying officers of justice, are but a feeble representation of the pomp and state of the heavenly Judge, “who maketh the clouds His chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind” (Ps. civ. 3), and whose gorgeous train is composed of hosts of mighty angels, who attend to execute His will, to punish the wicked, and to assist at the final consummation (Matt. xiii. 41, 42). These angels of might are ministers of His power, and by their agency He will make His power felt. We have an illustration of the colossal mightiness of these angelic messengers in the apparent ease with which one angel in a few hours laid thousands of the Assyrians low (2 Kings xix. 35).
II. That the day of judgment will be a time of punishment to the disobedient.—1. The objects of punishment. “Them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (ver. 8). Not that ample opportunity has not been given to all to acquire a knowledge of God. To punish for not knowing what we cannot know would be an injustice and a cruelty. God has given to all the double light of His works and Word. He has also given the eyes of sense and reason, and the help of His Holy Spirit to guide all to the knowledge of Himself and of “the glorious gospel of the blessed God” (1 Tim. i. 11). It is not the involuntary ignorance of the uninstructed that is meant, but the wilful ignorance of the determined adversary, who not only rejected the Gospel himself, but barbarously persecuted those who received and obeyed it. Knowledge of God is of little value if it does not lead to obedience. Confused, indistinct, inoperative knowledge is no knowledge. To know and not to obey the Gospel involves a heavier condemnation.
2. The character of the punishment.—“Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (ver. 9). Awful words! Who can fully explain what they really involve? If destruction means annihilation, how can it be everlasting? Besides, the notion of the absolute extinction of anything God has made—the reduction to nothingness of either a reasonable soul or a material atom—has as little support from the teachings of revelation as of science. Again, it is urged that “everlasting” does not always in Scripture mean what lasts for ever, but sometimes what lasts only for a long period. But the utmost this argument could prove would be that the present possibly may be, not that it is, one of these peculiar cases. Were it the only fact in the case, there would still be the terrible uncertainty. “But then remember,” says Dr. Lillie, “that if it had really been intended to teach the eternity of future punishment, no stronger words, phrases, and images could have been found for the purpose than those actually employed.” Whatever the punishment may be in itself, is it not punishment enough to be for ever excluded “from the presence of the Lord,” driven, a moral wreck, “from the glory of His power”? Let the words of this ninth verse be seriously weighed in private meditation, and some sense of their awful signification cannot fail to be realised.