Eternal Comfort; Wonderful Hope

Two results of grace listed in 2 Thess 2.16: "Now may our Lord Jesus himself and God our father, who loved us and through his grace gave us eternal comfort and a wonderful hope, comfort you and strengthen you in every good thing you do and say."

Grace gives us eternal comfort through its promise of an eternal rest into which we enter. This is the hope that sustains us as we labor.

Toil in Hope

Thus speaks Paul in 1 Timothy 4.10. The end to which Paul and his companions toiled was the hope that they had in the living God. Admittedly, Paul's life was not easy, it involved toil and struggle (ἀγωνιζόμεθα). He could bear up in the toil and struggle because his hope was fixed, not on earthly reward, or fame, or money; not on retirement in the golden years when he could get a villa on the beach and collect seashells. His hope was eternal. It rested in the living God.

Like Paul, we do not work for retirement. Our end is hope in the living God, it is to this end, that with Paul, we too toil and struggle in the work that God has given us to do. May we endure in the work sustained by hope in the living God.

Eternal Comfort and Good Hope

Thinking about 2 Thess 2.16,17, this morning. Paul says that the Godhead (God and Christ, thereby pointing out the divinity of Christ) gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace. I'm thinking Paul is using grace in the by grace you have been saved sense here. Thomas Constable quotes a commentator saying that secular writers at the time used the term good hope to refer to life after death, which makes sense from the context. It is grace that gives us hope of life after death in heaven with Christ.

The same eternal comfort and good hope is available to us that was available to the believers at Thessalonica. It comes to us in the same way also—through grace.