Blameless in holiness

Paul alludes to Zechariah 14:5 in 1 Thessalonians 3:13.  Both passages speak of the coming of the Lord with “holy ones.”

There may also be another allusion. Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to establish their hearts in love and faith, so that they will be “umblameable in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints.”  Earl J. Richard ( Sacra Pagina commentary) argues that the rare word “holiness” ( hagiosyne ) refers not to personal conduct but to a “sphere of holiness.”  It is another way of speaking of the holy presence of God who comes with His holy ones.  That coming establishes a sphere of holiness, and the Thessalonians will be able to stand within that sphere if they “increase and abound in love for one another, and for all men” (3:12).

Zechariah 14 ends with a description of this “sphere of holiness,” a renewal holy city where the bells on the horses are inscribed like the crown of the high priest and where every cooking pot is as holy as the cooking pots of the temple.  That city is the sphere of holiness in which the Thessalonians must be found blameless at the coming of the Lord.  Paul is referring, I think, to the coming of the Son of Man that Jesus predicts within the first generation.  ”Coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints” in 1 Thessalonians 3:13 echoes Jesus’ own words (Matthew 25:31 and, beyond that, Matthew 16:27-28, the latter explicitly a first-generation event).  When the Lord Jesus comes, the Thessalonians must be found abounding in love, resisting the tempter (v. 5), enduring affliction (v. 3), and doing all this in the “sphere of holiness” that is the church.

The afflictions and temptation described in 1 Thessalonians 3 might well be taken as temptation and affliction coming from persecution.  Paul is explicit about his own afflictions at the hands of the Jews in 2:14-15, and he implies that there is a parallel with the experience of the Thessalonians: Just as Paul suffers at the hands of his own people, so do the Thessalonians from their own “countrymen.”  When a Thessalonian converts, he stops worshiping the city gods, stops living by the norms of civic religion, stops valuing what other Thessalonians value.

This might be taken as a fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah 14: Jerusalem – the church, the holy city and sphere of holiness – is under siege from the nations, both Jews and Gentiles.  When the Lord Jesus comes, he will make a way of escape for those who have endured persecution and stood fast; He will stand on the mount of Olives and make a valley through the mountains, so that those who are in “Jerusalem” can flee.  That is the coming of the Lord Jesus Paul describes; those who have lived blamelessly in the sphere of holiness will be delivered in that day.

This has a couple of corollaries: First, if this is an accurate description of Paul’s mentality, then the international dimension of AD 70 becomes more prominent.  Jesus comes to avenge Himself against the city of Jerusalem as the hub of Jewish persecution, but He also comes to deliver believers in Gentile cities from persecution at the hands of their own “countrymen.”  Second, if this is an accurate description of Paul’s teaching, then the judgment of AD 70 is as much a judgment on the church as it is on Jerusalem.  The Thessalonians will have to pass muster when Jesus comes with His holy ones.