AP

1 Thessalonians 1:9b 10  They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead – Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.

What mixed emotions this statement of Paul to the believers in Thessalonica has on us as we read it today.  When I first came to know and trust Jesus as my own Saviour in my late teens in 1957, it was a time when the Gospel of Christ had a reasonable credibility in Australian culture, even among the majority who didn’t really embrace it personally.

But now, our culture is much more akin to what it was in the first century Roman world:- the general feeling is one of hostility towards anyone who would have the arrogance and audacity to contend that Jesus is the only Saviour, and that “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).  Such a belief is offensive and ‘un-Australian’ in the multiculturalism with which we have been indoctrinated.  The godly Apostle is praising the Thessalonians for their courageous stand in the face of militant opposition and persecution, and for the amazing impact their standing firm is having on their world.

In this I too rejoice, but my mixed emotion is this:  On the one hand I long for and look forward to the promised time when my Jesus will come again in power as God’s rightful King to usher in peace as the Prince of Peace, in our unstable, messed up, war-torn world, where we all long for peace!  In this respect my emotion is dominated by hope and joy.

But the other emotion I feel is that, when he does this, it will be accompanied by the outpouring of God’s wrath on all those, among whom I have many close acquaintances and friends, who have not been rescued from this wrath by fleeing to the Risen Lord Jesus Christ for refuge.  Their conscientious commitment to a philosophy that ‘all roads lead to Rome’, that all that is required is ‘to be true to myself’, to rest on the credit I’ve earned by my own perfomance, to find comfort in the fact that, like Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way’, only to find out too late that Jesus was serious when he said in his famous ‘Sermon on the Mount’, “Enter through the narrow gate.  For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13-14), backed up by his later dogmatic, uncompromising, offensive claims, “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved” (John 10:9a) and “I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).  So I am filled with joy that one day Jesus will ‘make all things new’, but I am filled with sadness that his doing this will involve the pouring out of the wrath of a holy God on all who persist in the sin of rejecting his gracios provsion of a Saviour.

Like the Thessalonians, let us stand firm and not modify our message to accommodate our culture: there is strong evidence that God again, as he did in the world of the Thessalonians, is moving in the hearts of (young) people to “turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God.”  May he be pleased to use us as his faithful servants in this process, even if only as prayer warriors.

– Bruce Christian