AP

2 Thessalonians 2:16-17 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

To get the full thrust of this word of benediction from the Apostle Paul to the band of believers who were struggling against vicious persecution in Thessalonica we need to see it in the light of the fifteen verses that go before.

We don’t need to try and postulate particular dates and historical figures associated with Paul’s predictions about what the Church will face before the Lord returns in order to see the relevance of this chapter to our own day.  We are seeing the gospel of truth under attack from people at an intellectual level, a spiritual level, and at a moral and ethical level.  Satan is not particularly concerned about how he achieves his purposes, as long as he achieves them.  There are those who arrogantly oppose a worldview based on God as Creator and the Canon of Scripture as his revealed truth and replace it with humanism that makes Man and his ‘science’ the benchmark of truth; but there are also those – often even more effective – who lead people astray by counterfeit ‘miracles, signs and wonders’ (cf 2 Corinthians 11:13-15).

In addition to this, there is the mileage Satan tries to make out of the moral and ethical failure of those who profess Christ outwardly but deceive with false doctrine and the ungodly living that usually goes with it.

In the light of all this it is good to be reminded that all things are in the control of our loving Father, that Satan is already conquered because Jesus Christ is Lord, and that it is by God’s grace alone that we are saved.  It is comforting to know that, in the face of the opposition we are up against today, he gives us ‘eternal encouragement’ and ‘good hope’ as the Holy Spirit (the ‘comforter/encourager/mentor/guide’ – ‘parakletos’) does his divinely appointed work in our hearts, enabling us to do and say the things that will silence and debilitate them.

As Paul reminded the Corinthians: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5)  Let us ‘stand firm’ and not ‘shrink back’!  In Christ, we have a ‘good hope’ which we long to share with our ‘hope-less’ world, and whereas our every ‘good work and word’ can’t be the basis of our possessing this hope, which can only be ours through grace alone, our works and words can go a long way towards pointing our friends and neighbours to the source of this ‘good hope through grace’ we enjoy so much!  Let us take every opportunity to do such bearing witness to Christ’s finished work.

– Bruce Christian