“The Word Received, and the Word Forbidden”

Paul is recalling how the Thessalonians first received his preaching, and the memory turns to thanksgiving — and then to grief over those working to stop that preaching reaching anyone else. The saving verb comes at the bitter end of the passage.

The Word Received as God’s Word

For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.

1 Thessalonians 2:13

This is the heart Paul is thankful for. The Thessalonians heard a man — Paul — speaking, and received what he said not as the word of men, but as … the word of God. They discerned the true source behind the human voice, and because they did, the word went to work in them: it effectually worketh … in you that believe.

That phrase describes how the saving word operates everywhere in this corpus. It comes through human speech; it is received as divine; and once believed, it is not inert but active, doing its work in the believer. The Thessalonians are Paul’s example of the reception the word is meant to have.

The Cost of Receiving It

Paul immediately notes what that reception cost them. They became imitators of the churches in Judaea, for they suffered like things of their own countrymen as those churches had of the Jews. Receiving the word as God’s word made them, at once, a persecuted people.

This is worth holding beside the thanksgiving. The word that saves does not always bring ease with it; here it brought the Thessalonians into the fellowship of the suffering. Paul does not present this as a failure of their faith but as evidence of its genuineness — they received the word truly, and paid for it, as the Judaean churches had.

Those Who Forbid the Word

Then Paul’s tone darkens, and the saving verb appears inside a lament over those actively hindering the mission:

Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.

1 Thessalonians 2:16

Hina sōthōsin — that they might be saved. The Gentiles could be saved if the word reached them; and there were those working to prevent it reaching them. Paul names this as a filling-up of sin — an accumulating guilt — under a wrath that has come to the uttermost.

A study must handle this passage with care, because its history has been misused. Paul is not indicting a people by blood; he is speaking of specific opponents who were, in his own experience, obstructing the gospel’s passage to the Gentiles. His grief is precisely that salvation was available and being blocked — that the word which effectually worketh in them that believe was being kept from ears that might have believed. The sin he names is the sin of standing in the door: hindering the saving word from reaching those it could save.

The severity of the language matches the severity of the offense as Paul saw it. To keep the gospel from the perishing is, in his reckoning, to fill up a measure of guilt. It is the dark negative of the instrumental theme running through these studies: if human ministry can be a real means of others’ salvation, then human opposition can be a real means of hindering it, and Paul does not treat that lightly.

What the Word Means Here

The full sense — salvation from unbelief, through the word received as God’s word — seen from two sides in one short passage. On the one hand, the Thessalonians who received the word as divine and were saved, the word working effectually in them. On the other, the Gentiles who might be saved if only the word reached them, and those laboring to keep it from reaching them.

Its contribution to the gateway is that contrast. The passage shows the saving word doing exactly what it is meant to do in those who receive it as God’s, and it shows the gravity of hindering that word from others. Salvation comes by the word heard and believed; and to forbid the speaking of it that they might be saved is, for Paul, among the gravest of sins.

This study is part of What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, an examination of every New Testament use of saving language in context, within Resource Cluster 3: Life in Christ. 91 of 91 passage studies are complete — see every occurrence.