Lectures

on

The Epistles of paul

to the

Thessalonians

by

John lillie, d. d.,

pastor of the first presbyterian church, kingston, n. y.

New York:

Robert carter and brothers,

No. 580 broadway.

1860.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by

robert carter and brothers.

In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern

District of New York.

Introduction

Thessalonica, now Saloniki, appears to have been, from the earliest period of its history, a place of interest and importance. Situated on the great thoroughfare of empire1 that connected Rome with her eastern dependencies, and at the north-western head of the Ægean, or Grecian Archipelago, it soon acquired, what it has ever since retained, high rank as a commercial emporium. In the apostolic age it flourished as the acknowledged metropolis of the province of Macedonia; and it is said to be even now the second city of European Turkey, having a population of some 70,000 inhabitants, of whom nearly one half are Jews. It is not at all strange, therefore, that in the ‘manifold wisdom of God,’ which so directly guided and controlled the first planting of the Church in the wilds of heathenism, Thessalonica should have been selected as one of the primary centres of Christianity.

About the year 51, Paul attended by Silas, and perhaps also by Timothy,1 reached this city, in the course of his second missionary journey. In Philippi, where he had last laboured, and which lay a hundred miles to the north-east, he had been honoured as the instrument of founding the second, if not the very first,2 church of our Lord in Europe—a church ever afterward peculiarly attached to the Apostle, and very dear to him, as we learn from that most affectionate Epistle which he addressed to it some ten years later, when a prisoner at Rome. His ministry in that place had, indeed, been brought to a sudden and violent end by an outburst of Gentile animosity, aroused by the crafty and malignant representations of an offended and resentful avarice. But, so far was the zeal of the preacher from being at all abated by this recent experience of shame and suffering for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s, that he no sooner arrived at Thessalonica, the capital, and seat of the proconsul, ‘where was a synagogue,’—or rather, ‘the synagogue;’3 the chief, if not the only, synagogue—‘of the Jews’ in those parts, than ‘Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging, that the Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this is the Christ Jesus whom I preach unto you.’1 Paul’s own statement, as given in the second chapter of the Epistle now before us, is still more significant as regards the spirit and power of these scriptural demonstrations: ‘For yourselves, brethren, know our entrance in unto you, that it was not in vain: but even after that we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, ...