Week 48 2 Thessalonians
People in the church in Thessalonica discovered that believing in the Lord included getting bashed by some of the people around them. So Paul started his letter by consoling them. He also told them: God will use this persecution to show his justice. For he will make you worthy of his kingdom…and in his justice he will punish those who persecute you.
It looks to me like there are two things going on. The first is that persecutees will in some way be made more worthy by going through hardships. But I leave that idea and move on to the second thing – that persecutors will be punished.
That gets my attention because Paul says that persecutors: will be punished with everlasting destruction, forever separated from the Lord.
Which seems to me like an awful outcome. I wonder how I would feel being in a lonesome, changeless state of isolation, of being cut off, and of remaining exactly and perpetually who-I-am-right-now from now on. Doesn’t seem so good to me.
On the other hand maybe that’s just my way of thinking. Maybe a person who currently thinks of the Lord as a kind of gargoylian monstrosity will in future get to go on thinking the same thing forever – a sort of continuity-of-belief. Maybe the afterlife just locks in and kind of petrifies what I think and am now. A rigor mortis of the soul.
Note: quotes from 2 Thessalonians 1:5-6, 9 (NLT)