In a previous study I established that the church at Thessalonica received the Gospel preached by Paul through much affliction (1Thessalonians 1:6), and I related Paul’s text to Jesus’ Olivet Prophecy, where he says: “They will deliver you up to be afflicted (Matthew 24:9), showing there was a pattern or a theme of suffering that would follow the Gospel. In chapter two of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonian believers it says that, in enduring persecution, they became followers of the Judean believers who suffered many things at the hands of their Judean non-believing countrymen (1Thessalonians 2:14). In other words, just as their Jewish brethren at Thessalonica rose up against them and convinced their gentile neighbors that believers in Christ were a threat to their peace, so had the Jewish authorities in Judea convinced believers’ non-believing Jewish countrymen that they were a threat to their peace.
But, notice how Paul described what occurred in Judea:
For you, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for you also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins always: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16; emphasis mine)
What Paul seems to be doing is pointing to a pattern in the events that occurred in Thessalonica to what Jesus claimed in Matthew, chapters 21 to 23. In the Parable of the Tenants a landowner planted a vineyard and leased it out to tenants. When the harvest season came he sent his servants to collect his fee, but the tenants refused to pay, beating some of the landowner’s servants and killing others. Ultimately, they killed the landowner’s son (Matthew 21:33-40). The parable expresses exactly what Paul describes in 1Thessalonians 2:14-16). There Paul claimed the Jewish authorities in Judea slew Jesus and the prophets of old and were persecuting Jesus’ own disciples.
Some of the same things were mentioned by Jesus in the Parable of the Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1-14), but notice what Jesus said in the next chapter:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell? Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city, so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.” (Matthew 23:29-36; emphasis mine)
Notice Paul’s agreement in 1Thessalonians 2:14-16 to with what Jesus says above. The first century Judean authorities were the sons of those who slew the prophets, They would **fill up** the full measure of their guilt by persecuting and slaying those Jesus would send to them. Notice also what Paul said in 1Thessalonians 2:14: “…wrath (orge – G3709) is come upon them to the uttermost,” which corresponds to Jesus’ words: “so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (Matthew 23:35). In other words, judgment was to come upon the Jewish authorities and those who believed them in Judea. This was the wrath (G3709), of which Paul spoke.
Finally, Jesus said that all these things would come upon them of that generation (Matthew 23:36), i.e. the folks living in the first century AD! Paul claimed that wrath, which believers would escape (1Thessalonians 1:10), had already begun to come upon the Jews of Judea (1Thessalonians 2:16), and would culminate in the Great Tribulation just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple at the coming of the Lord in 70 AD.
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