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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 18. Paul's Letters
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Paul's Letters
Paul's letters are written, in each case, to meet some pressing need among the people whom he knew personally, and had largely won to Christ. The exception is the Epistle to the Romans which was written to those whom he had not met, but whom he hoped to be able to meet. It is probable that as he wrote these letters he had no thought at all of their being preserved and becoming a part of the sacred Canon. They were not written by a man in a well-appointed study, carefully balancing and polishing up sentences. Rather they bear the impress of being written by one absorbed in his other work, and as these crying needs come, stopping long enough, or catching time in between times, a bit later at night, or in an unusually early morning hour, to write. They come out of a hot heart, in intense burning sentences, which run into and climb over each other in their eager intensity, but which have a rare clearness, and power of logic.
He mingles tender pleading, careful instruction, stern rebuke, and solemn warning. He speaks freely of his experience, as he writes to these his dear spiritual children, whom he has begotten in the Lord with much hard labour and birth pangs. These letters must be read with the Acts to get the full grasp of Paul's missionary work. The Acts reveals his intense active campaigning from place to place; these Epistles give the teaching side of his work. They give us not only glimpses into the life of these primitive missionary Churches, but reveal the sort of a preacher and teacher and pastor Paul was, and reveal, too, the Gospel he preached and lived. Unconsciously, he was being used by the Holy Spirit, not only to that generation, but to the Church of every generation since, and until our Lord shall come.
Of the thirteen letters which we know are from his pen, only two make no allusion to the subject of the Coming; i.e., Galatians, written to meet the sore situation developing among the Christian groups of Galatia, and the exquisite little personal note to Philemon, the owner of Onesimus, the runaway, but now converted and returning, slave. We will take these up briefly in the order in which they were written.
The first letter to the group at Thessalonica was written when Silas and Timothy came from there to Paul at Corinth with their report of how matters were going. It contains four incidentally woven-in allusions [Note: 1Th_1:10; 1Th_2:19; 1Th_3:13; 1Th_5:23.] to the Coming, which indicate how much it ran through all his teaching, and was held up constantly as an incentive, and as the one bright thing to look forward to. Then there occurs a teaching paragraph. [Note: 1Th_4:13 to 1Th_5:10.] There was deep sorrow in some Thessalonian Christian homes over believing loved ones who had died. And the personal sorrow was a bit sorer because they had been expecting all to be caught away instead of some dying. And they were in doubt as to just what was the future of these who had slipped from their clinging grasp.
Paul assures them that their natural sorrow over the personal absence for the time need not be increased by ignorance as to the happy provision made for these. They would be not only included at the Return, but be given the courteous distinction of precedence at that time. Then he gives a little order of events in reference to this. The Lord would descend from heaven openly, before all, with a shout, the voice of Michael the archangel, and with the trump of God,—a threefold openness and publicity. In response to that call, and as if drawn up out of their graves by the spirit attraction of Jesus' presence in the air, the bodies of the believing dead would at once, under the touch of their Lord's life-giving power, rise, inhabited once more by their old-time tenants, up into the Lord's presence in the air; then by the same power would come the transforming touch upon the bodies of living believers, and they, too, would answer the upward pull of the new gravitation, and rise into the presence not only of the Lord, but of their dear ones as well.
What a wondrous double meeting that would be! meeting Him, and meeting these loved ones, so tenderly loved, and lost, but only for awhile. Then there would be no further separation either from Him or from them. This full knowledge of the Lord's loving plan for our loved ones as for ourselves would be a comfort to them in their hour of sorrow.
Then he goes on at once to remind them that they need no special teaching about the great fact of the Lord's return. They had been carefully taught about this, and the wickedness by which they were surrounded was a constant reminder that it would be in just such a time that the Lord would come. To the unbelieving world that coming would be as unexpected and as disagreeable as a thief stealing into one's house in the dead of night. In the midst of the self-complacence that says "things are moving along all right; there is no need to be disturbed by "these religious alarmists," would suddenly come the awful experience of the tribulation time preceding the coming of the Lord Himself. There is the earnest pleading to be watchful against the subtle temptations to laxness in love and in life which surrounded them. The intense expectancy that characterizes Paul, and all these Scripture teachings, comes out in verse ten;—whether we are caught up while yet alive, or are overtaken by death before He comes, as our loved ones have been, we shall in either case be with Him, and that is the one longing of our souls.