3, Howley Place, December 10th, 1866.
My Dear Brother,-My mind has been running much upon the epistle to the Thessalonians. As has oft been remarked, the first epistle gives the use of the coming, and the second guards against the abuse of it. In the first it is remarkable how permanent a place persons in their individuality get assigned to them. 1st, to wait for His Son from heaven, gives us the group of Thessalonian believers-each one bound to Christ, and drawn to Him in the hope of His coming, and so all drawn together by the same hope, even as, if we look more closely to the context, we shall see they were by their faith in what He had done for them, and by the works which flowed out of them through the spiritual communion which they had with Him as a living person now in heaven. In chap. 2 we see them all toiling in rowing against the tide of this world, and at the close the same company of individuals on the other shore gathered round Paul as his joy, and crown, and glory (v. 10); for what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing, are not even ye, in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at His coming; and the same people (chap. iii. 13) were to have their hearts established unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints.
Paul's mind particularizes these very Thessalonians standing round him in the midst of all the saints that the Lord would bring; standing round him, people he had labored among, toiled and prayed for, and with-they, individually, as people he knew, the scene shifted from Thessalonica to the cloud, or the Father's house, and time lost in eternity -they should stand around him there; and feelings of one kind to-day should give way to feelings of another kind then, in himself and in them. And he would meet them there when they would be without blame, without the possibility of blame-nor spot, nor wrinkle, nor any such thing, should then remain. Still, it is he, Paul, an individual person, knowing what that individual person, God's Son, from heaven meant to do, and would do for His own people everywhere, these Thessalonian individual persons among the rest. Just so in chap. iv., the sorrow he refers to, be it that it circled round all the Thessalonians, had commenced in some few, From one house a brother, a sister, had been taken, leaving the couch and the chamber without its usual tenant, and the word which follows verses 15-17 was drawn forth by those particular afflictions, perhaps in but ten or twelve individual cases, though the sorrow that disturbed their hearts through ignorance disturbed the hearts of all the Thessalonians around too. The answer to their grief was the presenting of the coming display of the One whom God delights to honor. He Himself would appear, and use the deep necessity of the state of His saints as the occasion in which to show forth the glories of His own person as the resurrection 'and the life. But here, too, not only will the folly of the Thessalonians' fear be proven. They thought, though He had begun with them in spite of their state and circumstances, that the final realization of the blessing hung upon the circumstance of being alive when He came, as though the quickening of the soul and the quickening of the body were not both alike displays of Himself. When He does come (as John 5 tells us) He will act with discrimination, leaving those whom He had not known, and who had not known Him when alive in the body, still in the grave, and only bringing forth those who, when alive in the body, had heard His voice and lived to God. He, and Himself alone, the worker in that day, and working according to His Father's mind; but He will work upon, only those who had known Himself, and each and all of them alike, whether the body had been in the dust ever since Stephen's, or whether they were alive, and awaiting His return. The individuality and the personality are marked most strongly. Each one and all who had heard his voice, and known and been known of Him, will be there, and none else; though whether their needs in that day will want the virtues of His resurrection power, or of His power to fill up with life, so excluding death, is but a circumstance. Circumstances, as chaps. 2 and 3 show us, are not all forgotten there. -Those, at least, which down here have been the channels of His grace, as Paul preaching to and caring for His Thessalonians, will have their answer there.- I should think none others; for in God's eternal presence it must be something about His own only-begotten Son which can live and be spoken of, and shine there. Chap. 5:23 gives us the same sort of thing: " And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Doctrine surely which may mold and test our ways, and cheer us in every way unto the end of time is here; but it was the individual prayer of the person called Paul, and for the particular persons to whom he wrote.
I have been laid aside for a day, and so cut off from going last night to Colchester, where there is a table. I can say, " It is well; ".yet I find the thanking God for hindrances is harder work than it is even for sickness and pain of body. But it is well to be under infirmities; and we may glory in them (2 Cor. 12) so far as we are concerned; but an impediment in work, and saints disappointed, are matters of the other world perhaps: the racking pain and the burning fever are of God in this world. Yours, G. V. W.