One For Israel

Dr. Erez Soref: Shalom and welcome to Word from Israel. I'm Erez Soref and we're starting today the study of 1 Thessalonians. We hope and believe this will be a blessing to your life as you study the scripture and following the Messiah on your daily life.

One of the interesting things is that one of the places that had a flourishing ongoing Jewish community is the city of Thessalonica. This carried on from the times of the Romans, really from even before the time of the Romans from the first temple diaspora all through the Second World War. Unfortunately, in the Second World War, the Nazi regime destroyed the Jewish community, but throughout this 2,000 years plus, in some of those years, the Jewish population was even a majority in the city, sometimes even up to 70% of the population there. And so Thessalonica was an important Jewish center throughout history.

Pretty early in the history of the city of Thessalonica, an important guest arrived in the city from Jerusalem. Read about it in Acts chapter 16 when the important rabbi that by then was a disciple of the Messiah and an apostle, Saul of Tarsus, the apostle Paul, arrives to the city and visits the synagogue. We're going to read about that just a little bit.

I want to tell you a little about the city of Thessalonica. It is in northern Greece and 300 years before the time of Christ it was called Therma because of the thermal baths in the city. One of the generals of Alexander the Great built it and he called it on the name of his wife who was Alexander the Great's half-sister. So the city enjoys a status of a Roman city, which is a big privilege in the Roman world, in the Roman Empire. It's on the sea, it has a port, there's very active commerce life going on, and it enumerates 200,000 people. So it was a major city in the Roman world.

Acts chapter 16, which we're going to read about in just a second, takes place in the second missionary journey of Paul. He has with him Silas or Silvanus and also a young man that he meets in the city of Lystra and Derbe and takes with him named Timotheus, who is a son of a Jewish mother who is a believer in Yeshua and a Greek father. So Saul Paul the Apostle is his spiritual father and they travel together.

Something important, something I think we can learn for our own life and walk with the Messiah. When they reach the area of Troas, Saul wants to go right or east towards today's Turkey to an area called Bithynia. But the Spirit of Jesus we read, the Spirit of Yeshua does not let them do that. Something is wrong. They just can't seem to do that. That was their logic because God has a different plan.

That night, Paul has a vision where he sees a Macedonian soldier that tells him to come over and he understands that God is leading him to go west. Now this is a very important decision. If Paul would have acted in his logic, the gospel would have remained in the Middle East. But the fact that they obeyed, that Paul and the other evangelists obeyed God and obeyed the Holy Spirit meant that the gospel began what has since then become the greatest movement of the gospel, the greatest missionary movement where the gospel moved from the Middle East, from Jerusalem up to Syria and Turkey, goes westbound.

And that set the direction of the gospel around the globe westbound to Europe, later on to the new world in the Americas, later on from there on to Asia, and now the circle is completed when it's coming back again to the Middle East. I think what we can take for our daily life is if the Holy Spirit gives us a check in our spirit, we feel that something is stopping us from making a move, then we need to stop and ask God, "What are you telling me?" That may not be as dramatic of a junction as it was as we see in Acts 16, but definitely something to remember in our own life.

In terms of time when it was written, it was probably written around 51 AD, one of the very first epistles ever written. And Paul is actually in Corinth when he's writing 1 Thessalonians towards the end of his second missionary journey. He's waiting there for Timothy and Silvanus to hear how the Thessalonians are faring. As we will see, they are a young church, young believers, both Jewish and Gentile believers, under persecution. And Paul is about 45 years old at that time and he's walking after the Messiah for approximately 16 years. So that's the general background and idea.

I do want to read together the Book of Acts chapter 17 and verses 1 to 5. That's really when they arrived to Thessalonica. "Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in as was his custom and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the scriptures." I want to stop here for a second. So two things very interesting to notice. When they get to a new territory, and we see that six or seven times in the Book of Acts, Paul the apostle that was called to the Gentiles goes first and foremost to the synagogue to search for the Jewish community to share the gospel with them.

And I'm not going to go into it in depth, but I believe there's something really important here that has to do with God's covenantal order. And that is that when we are in mission for the world, for different nations around the world, investing in the Jewish community is super important. Investing the gospel is what I mean. And this is why Paul is writing in Romans 1:16, "I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation for all who believe." And that's where most churches stop around the world. But the verse continues and it says, "to the Jew first and also to the Greek or the non-Jew."

The point is it's not about value. We all have the same value, the same access to God, Jews and Gentiles, but because of God's covenant with the forefathers, that's what I mean by covenantal commitment of God also in missiology and that is something that it's often overlooked. But this is what Paul is doing and he's not doing it because the Jews were more accepting, he wasn't doing it because the Jews were kinder to him. In fact, we see it's quite the contrary in the Book of Acts.

And Paul, as an important rabbi from Jerusalem, is invited to the podium and he shares from scripture, probably from the weekly portions that were read from the Torah and the prophets, he reasoned from the Bible that Yeshua is the Messiah. Verse 3: explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead and saying, "This Jesus whom I proclaim to you, he is the Messiah, he is the Christ." And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.

At that time there were many that were not yet converted to Judaism, but they wanted to follow the God of Israel. They were tired of the many idols that were very common in the Greek society. And so many of them including some Jewish people were, God opened their hearts and they listened and they believed in what Paul was sharing with them.

But that was not everyone. Not everyone liked it because essentially this is a, because it's a spiritual message, it create a spiritual resistance of those that are not followers of Yeshua and maybe not being aware, but they're serving the enemy of God, the fallen age-old angel called Satan. And so we read in verse 5, "But the Jews or some of the Jews were jealous and taking some wicked man of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason seeking to bring them out to the crowd."

So a persecution begins. They go to the house of Jason, they search for Paul and the other apostles, they can't find them and read in verse 6: "And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities shouting, 'These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.'" Is that what people say about us? Is that what people say? They say, "Oh those people they are turning the world upside down." They obviously meant it in a derogatory way, but I hope that some of it can be said about us. Not because we're trying to break the law, we always operate within the bounds of law, we respect authority.

However, we are called as followers of Yeshua to share the message of the gospel and the message of the gospel is always transformative both in our personal life, but also on a societal level. And it's especially true when it breaks new ground or ground that hasn't been broken in a long, long time. We certainly see this here in Israel, but I think it's true almost anywhere around the world now that when we live out our faith in the Messiah, when we share the gospel, then it creates those kinds of reactions. May it be said about us that we are people that are bringing a message that turns the world upside down. They meant it as something not pleasant, but obviously it's a form of a compliment.

Verse 7: We continue with the accusations and these are the accusers speaking. "And Jason had received them and they are all acting against the decree of Caesar saying that there is another king, Jesus." Now this is getting very serious because any king, any ruler, what he hates the most and certainly the Roman Caesars, they would not allow any form of rebellion or any form of questioning their authority. So saying that these people that turned the world upside down are proclaiming another king, Jesus, instead of Caesar is a crafty way of really rattling the Roman authorities.

Verse 8: "And the people in the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things and when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go." Verse 10 we read: "The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue." So again, not because they were welcome, because it was a deep conviction that in order for the mission to the Gentiles to succeed, they needed to go first to the Jewish people.

So that's the background of how the gospel even got into Thessalonica. So we see that the entire time that Paul spent in Thessalonica was three Sabbaths. And that was enough for a young group of believers, a young church to be formed, some Jewish believers, some Gentile believers, some of the important women of the city. But because of the persecution, the apostles had to leave and they were very concerned how are these young believers holding on.

What's interesting is that this epistle that was written to very young believers, I mean they only had maybe a copy of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and some of the teaching that Paul was teaching throughout those three Sabbaths. But in this epistle, Paul is speaking in each and every chapter about the end times, about the return of the Messiah, and the things that are about to happen, and the return of Yeshua of Jesus to Earth and what it means for the young believer, how to live within that reality.

So I think many times we say, "Well, the end times and prophetic teaching is something to keep for when we are more mature in the Lord." Now we see here that Paul is teaching very young believers right from the start about the return of the Messiah and what's going to happen because this reality is encouraging and important to keep a balance in our life.

So in this first short episode, we wanted to give you a background of the context in which 1 Thessalonians was written. We see that persecution is not necessarily something that is bad for one's faith. And in fact, it keeps us on our toes, it keeps us committed to live our lives with the Messiah, with Yeshua in the center and again, if we are faithful to carry His name forward, not in a combative manner, but it will always create friction and we shouldn't be surprised about that.

And may it be said about us, these disciples of the Messiah are people that are turning their world, they're turning the city upside down. May we have that enthusiasm and may that characterize our life. In the next episode, we're going to talk about 1 Thessalonians chapter 1.