The Hope of the Gospel (Introduction)

We are living in a time of uncertainty and pessimism. Auden referred to his time as "the age of anxiety" and we are still living in it. Despite the many good things of our world, people are increasingly nervous and uncertain as they look to the future.

This is true of both the world and the church. But the church is in a privileged position. We have inside information about the future. Though much is still unknown to us, we have the most important information. We do not know everything that may happen before the end, but we do know something about the end.

The theological term for this is eschatology, the study of end times, of last things, of final events. The Bible gives insight into the end of this world from the perspective of the One who brings the end. And when you go to study eschatology in the Bible, there is one place you would naturally start, one part of the New Testament that gives us the most knowledge and insight into the future: 1 and 2 Thessalonians.

I realize that might sound strange. The book in the New Testament that is most closely associated with this subject to many people is Revelation. Revelation is (seemingly) focused almost entirely on the future, on the end of the world. This connection is so strong, that the Greek word for Revelation—apocalypse—has come to be used as a term for a world-ending event.

However, 1 and 2 Thessalonians are also very focused on end-time events; one of the main reasons Paul wrote these books was to clarify and inform the Thessalonians concerning eschatology. Some of the central facts of Christian eschatology are laid out most clearly and comprehensibly in the Thessalonian letters. So that is why, in this study, I want to look at these letters. We'll be looking at these letters in their entirety but particularly with an emphasis on their teachings about Eschatology.

And if there was one word I wanted to use to sort of summarize or title this study, the word I would use is hope. Though the word 'hope' is only found five times throughout these letters, the idea of hope is one main threads running through them.

When I was thinking of this subject of eschatology, I was thinking of how this is a subject that is very important to the church. There are countless books and sermons and conversations within the Christian community regarding this. Over the last 50 years, it has been almost an obsession with the subject. But it is also something the world is interested in. There is a lot of interest outside the church about the future, about speculating or imagining what the future might hold. There are whole genres of fiction in the world dealing with the future. And nearly all of that pictures a very dark or disturbing future for the world. Whether in fiction or in fact, a lot of people do not see a very bright future for the world. I think the most optimistic view for many people would be things remaining exactly as they are, which isn't exactly the most exciting prospect.

But for the Christian—even though we do know of terrible and catastrophic events to come in the future—the foundation, the driving force of both our view of the future and our life in the present—is hope. 1 and 2 Thessalonians especially were largely written to give Christians hope. These letters us tell us the object of our hope, but they also help define the nature of hope. Hope, in a Biblical sense, is not a drugged dream or a defiant denial. It is a concrete, powerful thing. 1 Thessalonians 5:8 can be taken as one of the key verses of these letters and notice how it describes hope: “But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation.” Paul saw hope as something strong, something militant like the armor of a soldier, something to be used in the hard warfare of life. Hope looks to the future but it works in the present.

Because if hope is one of the key themes of these letters, the other would be Christian Conduct. I said these are important books about eschatology, but if you look at the length of the letters, more time is spent on this subject of conduct than on anything relating to the future. Even Paul's discussion about eschatology is largely practical—he didn't want to merely inform the Thessalonians about future events—he wanted them to act a certain way in light of that information. 

Usually, when I do these studies, I start by going over background information about the church that received the letter and Paul's history with them. I'm not going to do that this time, because this is actually covered within the letters themselves. Briefly, though, we can note that Paul probably wrote both these letters from Corinth during his lengthy stay there on his second missionary journey (making them the second and third of Paul's recorded letters.) We know that while Paul was in Corinth, Gallio was proconsul, and we have extra-Biblical evidence that dates Gallio's term as AD 51-52, meaning it was somewhere around that time when the Thessalonian letters were written.

The two letters were probably written within a short time of each other; they deal with many of the same issues and ideas and can almost be considered as a single unit. I do want to mention that some believe 2 Thessalonians was written first. For our purposes, we will consider 1 Thessalonians to be the first, but the order doesn't make very much difference.