1 Thessalonians 2:14 Commentary and Bible Study

In this passage, beginning in chapter 2 and verse 14, there are three particular things that stand out before us. And the first is the readiness of those Thessalonian converts to suffer in their witness to Jesus Christ. They did not hesitate. They went ahead, and the apostle commends them: ‘For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus.’ At the first sight, that is a rather curious thing to say. Why could the apostle not have commended them for following other Gentiles churches close at hand? But he goes right back to Jerusalem and Judaea, to the very beginning of the church. Well the Thessalonians had suffered notable persecutions already, and there had been persecution elsewhere, but particularly in Judaea. Their Jewish families rejected them, and their cities rejected them, and there were hounded out of Jerusalem and Judaea and dispersed around the empire. Well this was obviously well-known to the Thessalonian converts. You became imitators, literally mimics, of the Jewish converts in the Holy Land, not necessarily consciously but by their conduct, doing the same thing as the converts there – witnessing far and wide and withstanding the persecution which arose as a result.Notice that the word churches is in the plural. Today we speak very loosely when we use that term ‘the church’ to refer to all the professing church, false churches, and Christendom generally. Paul does not use the term like that. He very deliberately says, ‘the churches of God’, because in the sight of God each congregation is a church. There are no denominations in the New Testament. There are no national churches. There is just ‘the churches’. Each church is individual, autonomous, independent, sovereign, directly under the guidance of God.Those Judean churches were in Christ. They were in Judaea, but even more important they are in Christ. They draw their power and their strength and their salvation from him. They are connected and linked to him. Significantly, the apostle Paul gives no recognition whatsoever to the Jewish synagogues. The church is the churches of Christ. There is a new order now. The Jewish order has finished. The Jewish flag has been run down, and the flag of the international church of Jesus Christ run up: converted Jews, converted Gentiles, all brought into one, and the middle wall of partition broken down.