{"id":4686,"date":"2024-10-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/handstotheplow.org\/reading-plan\/october-2\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T05:52:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T10:52:28","slug":"october-2","status":"publish","type":"reading-plan","link":"https:\/\/handstotheplow.org\/am\/reading-plan\/october-2\/","title":{"rendered":"October 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Insight from 2 Thessalonians 2:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paul is still talking about the coming of Jesus (also known as the day of the Lord). He is not doing this because he wants to write a treatise on this specific topic. Rather, he is focusing so heavily on this topic because of something that had happened in the church in Thessalonica.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.<\/span><\/i> 2 Thessalonians 2:1-2<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It appears that someone\u2014either personally or through a (false) word of prophecy or through a letter supposedly written by Paul or through some combination of these things\u2014had told the church that the day of the Lord had already come. Those who have read 1 Thessalonians should know why this news would have alarmed the church.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They were alarmed, because, if it was true that the day of the Lord had already come, it was also true that they had not experienced any of the glorious things that Paul had taught them would happen on the day of the Lord. Christ had not come down \u201cwith a cry of command\u201d and \u201cwith the voice of an archangel\u201d and \u201cwith the sound of the trumpet of God\u201d. They had not been \u201ccaught up together\u201d with the saints who had died before them. And, worst of all, they had not met Jesus \u201cin the air\u201d\u2014which was to mark the beginning of the time when they would \u201calways be with the Lord\u201d. In other words, if the day of the Lord had already come, these saints could no longer believe that the glorious events that were to take place on the day of the Lord would happen to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What did they believe? It\u2019s not entirely certain. Perhaps someone was teaching them that the spiritual rebirth they had experienced was the only resurrection they would ever experience. If so, this news would have been more than just alarming. It would have been downright depressing.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

True, their sins had been forgiven, but they would never live in a sinless body. They would be stuck with the corruptible bodies they currently had. They would never fellowship with the Lord face-to-face. It seems this would have opened up, once again, the question about what happens to the dead saints. Beyond this, the saints in Thessalonica were experiencing terrible persecution. What had happened to the relief they had been promised\u2014relief they were to physically experience on the day of the Lord?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The false teaching in Thessalonica seems vaguely similar to the teaching Paul refuted in his first letter to the church in Corinth. There, the saints were being taught (it\u2019s not clear by whom) that \u201cthere is no resurrection of the dead\u201d (1 Corinthians 15:12). Paul, in a letter written perhaps four years after his letters to the Thessalonians, vigorously refutes that false teaching by connecting Jesus\u2019 physical resurrection with the Christian\u2019s physical resurrection and Jesus\u2019 physical resurrection with the Christian\u2019s freedom from sin. But Paul does not use these same arguments with the church in Thessalonica. This seems to indicate that there were noteworthy differences between the false teaching in Corinth and the false teaching in Thessalonica. It is not entirely clear what all those differences might have been.<\/span><\/p>\n


But while we don\u2019t have all the details about the false teaching, we do have the true teaching (and if you\u2019re going to have just one side of things, it\u2019s far better to have the true teaching than just the false!).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_crdt_document":""},"class_list":["post-4686","reading-plan","type-reading-plan","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/handstotheplow.org\/am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/reading-plan\/4686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/handstotheplow.org\/am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/reading-plan"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/handstotheplow.org\/am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/reading-plan"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/handstotheplow.org\/am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}