Is the Bible written to you? – 1st Thessalonians 2:13–3:13, Part 2

This week I once again welcome guest blogger, Kirk Marks. Kirk is a retired pastor of 35 years who now works in international fair trade.

I’m thankful for the upbringing and the Christian education that I received in the church I grew up in. Very good, very well-intentioned Sunday school teachers and pastors told me that the Bible is written to you. When you read the Bible, they said, God is talking to you. You need to hear what God is saying to you when you read the Bible.

While I don’t disagree with that, I eventually discovered that I had to unlearn that lesson. In the previous post, I talked about the difficulty of unlearning. In this post, as we begin to study 1 Thessalonians 2:13–3:13, the first verse reminded me about the unlearning I had to do.

In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, Paul writes “We also thank God continually because when you received the word of God which you heard from us you accepted it.” If you haven’t read previous posts in this series, or if you just happened to begin reading at this place in the Bible, or if this was your devotional passage for the day to read, you might ask the question, “Who’s the ‘we’ and who’s the ‘you’? Who’s talking and who are they talking about?”

The very beginning of this letter says “Paul, Timothy, and Silas” are writing this letter. It might sound a little weird to you that three people are writing a letter. This is not unusual for Paul. When we know it’s Paul talking, it’s Paul’s voice, but Paul often had help writing letters.

We’re not sure why that was. Later in his ministry he’s going to be in prison and needed help getting his letters out. Bible scholars believe that Paul had some health issues, perhaps some eye problems that made it difficult for him to write, so he often had help getting his letters together.

But it’s very clear Paul, Timothy, and Silas are writing the letter, so they’re the “we”.

And who’s the “you”? Who are Paul, Timothy, and Silas writing to? The answer is at the beginning and end of the letter: they are writing to the Christians living in the city of Thessalonica.

We read that story in Acts chapter 17. Paul in his travels went to Thessalonica, ended up being there just three weeks, preached the message of Jesus, people heard it, people believed in Jesus, and a church was formed there. Those are the people he’s writing to. So Paul, Timothy, and Silas are the “we,” and the Thessalonian Christians are the “you”.

These are real people who wrote the letter, real people receiving the letter, and real situations they’re talking about. This happened 2,000 years ago. We are reading someone else’s mail.

We are overhearing a conversation that took place a long time ago. That’s actually how all of the Bible works. No matter where you are in the Bible, no matter what you’re reading, you’re overhearing a conversation. Think about how this applies to the previous blog series about the life of David.  We studied in the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel a history that was written long ago for a particular people telling them particular things about David because of a particular situation. All those particulars are called context. 

Learning about the context of the Bible was very, very difficult for me as a Christian because I was taught at a very young age that the Bible was God speaking to me.

I took that lesson to heart very seriously, so much so that every time I read a “you” in the Bible, just like Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 2:13, I thought that “you” was referring to me, Kirk Marks. When Paul writes, “when you received the word of God,” I thought the “you” was me. I tried so hard to see myself in all of those Bible passages I read as a kid.

So as a young Christian, I did not pay any attention to the context or who the actual “yous” and “wes” are. This became problematic for me when I got into more sophisticated Bible studies in high school and college. My Bible study leaders talked about understanding the context of passages and books of the Bible, knowing something about authorship, audience, culture, historical situation, and the like. That contextual study seemed wrong to me because the Bible’s written to me.

God’s talking to me in what I’m reading. I thought that other contextual stuff sounds like something I shouldn’t think about, or is not important. Shouldn’t I put it aside so that I can hear what God’s saying to me? It was a long road to unlearn that lesson and to learn that while God is speaking to us in the Bible, it’s precisely through understanding the conversation you’re overhearing that God speaks.

By understanding Paul, the Thessalonians, and the original context, we can begin to understand what God is saying, and what his Holy Spirit is leading us to do. All of that was a long road for me; I had to do a lot of unlearning. My Sunday school teachers and pastors were trying to teach me a very important lesson, God is speaking. But I had to unlearn how we hear God speak through his Word.

As we continue studying the passage, we bump into something else I had the wrong idea about that I had to unlearn, and we’ll talk about that in the next post.

Photo by Aaron Owens on Unsplash