1 Thessalonians 5:4-11 - Live on the Battlefield

4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.

Target Date: Sunday, 2 April 2023

NOTES:

Word Study/ Translation Notes:

Darkness - σκότος skŏtŏs – darkness

Greek epistemology starts with the process of illumination, i.e., the movement from darkness to light. Darkness has no great conceptual significance; it serves only as a foil to light. There is no direct line from what is said about illumination to later dualism.

The darkness is vacuous, even an absence of light. It is NOT material or the “opposite” of light – a duality. It is where light has not invaded or conquered.

Darkness is empty, devoid of light.

The people who walk in darkness Will see a great light; Those who live in a dark land, The light will shine on them. – Isaiah 9:2

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. – John 1:5

This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. – John 3:19

While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world. – John 9:5

He then answered, “Whether He is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” – John 9:25

being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; - Ephesians 4:18

Surprise - καταλαμβάνω katalambanō – literally “to take down”, to seize, to overcome, to overtake, overpower.

Of a demon possessing a child: and whenever it seizes him - Mark 9:18

Of the supremacy of light: the darkness has not overcome it. - John 1:5

Of a woman overtaken in the act of adultery: the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery - John 8:3

Thief – same as in prior passage.

Children - υἱός huiŏs – literally “sons”, although in this usage, it indicates “sons and daughters”.

Light

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; 15 nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. – Matthew 5:14-16

For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” – John 3:20-21

“For a little while longer the Light is among you. Walk while you have the Light, so that darkness will not overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. 36 While you have the Light, believe in the Light, so that you may become sons of Light.” – John 12:35-36

so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world - Philippians 2:15

Day - ἡμέρα hēmĕra – the same word used for “Day of the Lord”

Night

Sleep – different from the word in chapter 4. The former verb had the idea of falling asleep. This one is the picture of deep slumber, insensate to the events happening around.

Others

Awake - γρηγορεύω grēgŏrĕuō – be vigilant, watchful

From the idea to shake yourself awake, gather your faculties.

Drunk

They were not sensible of their danger, therefore they slept; they were not sensible of their duty, therefore they were drunk: but it ill becomes Christians to do thus.

Be on guard, so that your hearts will not be weighted down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of life, and that day will not come on you suddenly like a trap; 35 for it will come upon all those who dwell on the face of all the earth. 36 But keep on the alert at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are about to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” – Luke 21:34-36

Sober - νήφω nēphō – literally – un-drunk. Used in this place to mean discreet, serious – another aspect of watchful.

The thought behind nḗphō is a negative one, i.e., the opposite of intoxication.

When the word is used figuratively the subject is a person or the human logismós and what is meant is the opposite of every kind of fuzziness. Sober judgment is highly valued in both individual and public life.

Breastplate

Helmet

Hope of Salvation

Thoughts on the Passage:

In Romans, Paul makes essentially the same case there as in this passage:

The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts. – Romans 13:12-14

The exhortations in this passage also give understanding to v.11 here: encourage one another and build one another up.

4 – In Darkness/ 5 – of the darkness

This noun for “darkness” is in the dative case, indicating it is the state or location of the subject. Thus, in darkness indicates the state the believer is NOT in – that the believer in Jesus Christ is not IN darkness, contained in it, dwelling in it.

In verse 5, however, the case is genitive, indicating the NATURE or ORIGIN of the subject. Thus he is saying we do not PROCEED out of night or darkness in our nature, that we do not belong to darkness.

The difference is between someone who is circumstantially in a state and one who is nativ to that state.

To belong to darkness is more than to be in darkness.

4 – That day – speaking specifically of the Day of the Lord due to the definite article “that” or “the”.

It is an interpretive question whether the remaining uses of the word “day” (v.5, 8) are likewise pointing to the Day of the Lord or to “day” in general.

In v.5, there is no article there to indicate a specific day, but leaves the interpretation as “children of day”.

Likewise, in v.8, there is no article, leading to the same conclusion.

It is that the day of the Lord divides humanity into two distinct camps—those who are ready and destined for salvation and those who are not ready and are destined for wrath

5 – Children of Light

Includes everyone: you are ALL children of light…

Light arises in the darkness for the upright; He is gracious and compassionate and righteous. – Psalm 112:4

Come, house of Jacob, and let us walk in the light of the Lord. – Isaiah 2:5

No longer will you have the sun for light by day, Nor for brightness will the moon give you light; But you will have the Lord for an everlasting light, And your God for your glory. 20 “Your sun will no longer set, Nor will your moon wane; For you will have the Lord for an everlasting light, And the days of your mourning will be over. – Isaiah 60:19-20

Children of light are true children of God. They have undergone a transformation that makes a new life (a life in the light) inevitable, not just preferable. Godliness for true sons of the light is not just a matter of appropriate actions; it is an outgrowth of their essential nature, their relationship to God

5 – Children of the day

To be a “son of the day” is to be one who awaits with expectancy the day of the Lord

5 – of the night, of darkness

These all have one point in common. They depict people who are blind. They cannot or will not see clearly and are therefore unprepared for what lies ahead

Those in darkness would include those who are corrupt, who have actively rejected God’s offer of salvation.

Those would be the ones who loved the darkness over the light because their deeds were evil.

It would also be those who grope in darkness, unable to find their way to God.

you will grope at noon, as the blind man gropes in darkness, and you will not prosper in your ways; but you shall only be oppressed and robbed continually, with none to save you. – Deuteronomy 28:29

This is not a separate group, but a separate understanding of some people in these groups.

To be totally corrupt does not mean we are as bad as we can be – only that we can in no way reach God’s holy standard.

This would also include that group upon God will have mercy and enlighten them to His grace.

Those who God rescues: For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. – Colossians 1:13-14

I am the Lord, I have called You in righteousness, I will also hold You by the hand and watch over You, And I will appoint You as a covenant to the people, As a light to the nations, 7 To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the dungeon And those who dwell in darkness from the prison. – Isaiah 42:6-7

Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. – 1 Corinthians 6:11

While it is impossible for the day of the Lord to catch Christians unprepared, it is possible for them to adopt the same life style as those who will be caught unawares. Paul urges his readers not to let this happen

I am not so sure if I agree with this or not, at least with the terms undefined. Those who will be caught unawares, whether they name the name of Christ or not, could be seen to be those who did not persevere until the end, those who cry Lord, Lord, but did not do the things He commanded.

Certainly the grace of God is independent of our worthiness, but the Scriptures declare that it is correlated to our conduct.

Good fruit comes from a good tree.

The one who loves Jesus will keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome.

Otherwise, what is to distinguish between the persevering believer and the false one who sprouts quickly, but has no root and withers with the application of heat and trial?

7 – sleep and drunk – these may well have been sins the Thessalonians were particularly tempted toward. In the parallel Romans 13:12ff, several more sin types are listed there. The narrowness of the sin list to the Thessalonians should not be seen as a failure to be comprehensive, but Paul pastorally addressing the most pressing sins of the congregation.

It could also be mercy that he mentioned only those sins that were causing the most struggle in the church, leaving to their current pastors to make other corrections the apostles felt would be in their strength.

In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. – Hebrews 12:4

John Calvin notes that Paul therefore understands that “the life of Christians is like a perpetual warfare.… He would have us, therefore, be diligently prepared and on the alert for resistance.”

Sermon Text:

We look again this morning at the grand themes Paul and Silas remind us believers of in their discussion of the Return of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

We have proceeded carefully through these verses primarily because the theological implications they bring up are so densely packed in this single paragraph.

For every theme here, we can find a longer and fuller treatment of something akin to it in a later epistle sent by the apostle Paul.

We have looked, so far, at the themes:

The suddenness of the Return of Jesus Christ, like a thief in the night.

The explanation of what it means to be children of the light and to live in the light.

The urgency to keep awake in regard to our anticipation and preparation of our Lord’s return.

And the exhortation to live soberly, serious in our commitment and devotion to Jesus Christ.

Each of these has been presented in this passage as interlocking links on a chain, one theme leading understandably and inevitably to the next.

Our Lord will return without warning, so we must live as children of the day.

And because we live in the day, we must not slumber in our preparations as we watch for His return.

And as we watch, we must be serious about our commitment to Him until His return.

And that leads us to the theme we will look at today:

Because we watch no longer as victims to be rescued but as soldiers on a mission for our Lord.

Since we began looking a few weeks ago at this discipline of watchfulness, we have seen this conclusion forming:

We watch in the same way soldiers on guard duty watch,

Keeping watch over our own souls and lives

And the lives of our beloved brothers and sisters.

And in verse 8, the apostles make the final step in their explanation of this great truth,

Describing the armor a soldier puts on as he is going out to fight the king’s battles.

having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

I mentioned earlier that there are longer and more detailed treatments of the individual themes here in the later epistles:

For example, many of us will be familiar with the passage on the armor of God found in Ephesians 6:13-18:

Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14 Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit

You will notice that in addition to being more detailed, the Ephesians passage has a slightly different analogy for the pieces of armor:

The helmet was made to help weapons to glance off of it, protecting the soldier’s head from many damages.

The breastplate, also, was a solid bronze or iron plate that covered a soldier’s chest and abdomen.

With both of these pieces in place, most of the soldier’s vital organs were covered with some protection from the attacks of the enemy.

In our passage today, though, we see the breastplate of faith and love, whereas in the Ephesians passage, we see the breastplate of righteousness and the separate shield of faith.

Now, a case could be made that these amount to much the same thing:

That our righteousness is through faith in Jesus Christ, and is fulfilled through love.

So the breastplate of righteousness is the same as the breastplate of faith and love.

And in writing this expanded analogy to the Ephesians, Paul simply went back to the passage we read this morning from Isaiah 59:17:

He put on righteousness like a breastplate, And a helmet of salvation on His head;

And in expanded in the analogy, he placed into our hands the shield of faith,

An item that protects the same area of the body and then some, but is held out more actively and less passively than the breastplate.

This explanation would be entirely understandable as he expanded on the teaching that he here summarizes for the Thessalonians.

And I consider this comparison to be completely adequate to explain the difference in the analogies Paul uses.

Because they both come down to a single point: you are a soldier in a spiritual war, and you dare not find yourself unarmed or unprepared.

That is why the apostles here equate being equipped with being SOBER, being serious in your devotion to our Lord.

since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate…

Peter says the same thing in his first epistle – 1 Peter 1:13:

gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ

This is a powerful metaphor because the life of a soldier is radically different from the life of a civilian.

As Paul told Timothy in the last letter we have from him,

Suffer hardship [together] with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier. – 2 Timothy 2:3-4

This metaphor helps us to understand so many things:

Why are we not to love this world or the things of the world?

Because they ENTANGLE us, cause us to stumble and fall.

Why do we deny ourselves?

So we may please the One who enlisted us, who called us – our Lord.

If we have been called by Him, we are no longer victims to be rescued but soldiers on a mission to rescue others.

How do we do that?

1. Soldiers train for battle.

No one who is expected to succeed is brought into an army without training.

In the armies of the world, this means they are taught how to fight, how to shoot, how to survive hardship on the battlefield.

For the church, which is another name for the army of God, we are taught:

How to fight sin.

How to watch ourselves lest we be overtaken.

How to endure trouble in hope.

We learn how to apply the word of God to ourselves in our situations to grow in strength toward righteousness.

At the risk of adding another metaphor here, the writer of Hebrews describes that training and growth as someone who progresses from infancy to maturity:

For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. – Hebrews 5:13-14

That is what training is:

Practice in discerning good and evil based on the word of God.

Not in simply seeing it on our own, but in identifying sin based on the Scriptures.

Not just getting better at spotting evil, but in spotting it within ourselves.

Constantly practicing to get better at identifying good and evil and putting away sin and opportunities for temptation.

Without this vital training, accomplished through worship, teaching, and fellowship in the church with other believers, the soldier of Christ cannot hope to stand long or strong.

That is the purpose of the preparation, the armor of God:

be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. 11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. – Ephesians 6:10-11

2. Soldiers fight the real enemy.

In every earthly war, there are atrocities committed.

This usually occurs when people the soldiers are supposed to protect or rescue are attacked or otherwise abused.

These tragedies harm the reputation of the soldier and the commander to whom he owes allegiance.

There are generally two reasons these occur:

1. The soldier forgets who the enemy is.

2. The soldier ignores the rules of engagement.

For the Christian soldier, we are told explicitly who our enemy is:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. – Ephesians 6:12

Now, I have heard some who would point out the “rulers” and “powers” here and identify them with rulers or leaders of nations, states, or companies.

But these are still flesh and blood people, so this cannot be the case.

Our struggle is not AGAINST flesh and blood…

They are the ones we contend against the devil for.

They are the ones for whom we pray fervently that our Lord would awaken them in His grace.

They are the ones we will risk our livelihood, comfort, ease, or, God-willing, even our lives, to see come to the saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

And just to be clear, it is all those things we learned in training against sin in our own lives that will serve us when we are helping rescue someone else from the mire of sin.

We take the log out of [our] own eye, and then [we] will see clearly to take the speck out of [our] brother’s eye. – Matthew 7:5

Every word we say in the defense of the gospel must be redemptive.

That means it should be kind, gentle, firm, fully truthful, and based entirely on Scripture.

The world has enough opinions, and one more does no one any good.

The gospel is, at its core, not a battle of ideas, but is in fact the supremacy of life in Christ over life in this fallen world.

It is God’s declaration of the ONLY way to have life.

It is not about making pagans into better people; it is about making them ALIVE in Christ.

A better, more well-behaved pagan will, at best, simply burn at a slightly lower temperature in hell for eternity.

And I assure you they will not thank you for that insignificant service.

We do our fellow man no service at all if we do not give them the life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ in full.

We do our Lord no service at all if we don’t proclaim that gospel.

3. Soldiers discipline themselves.

It is never the goal of a good soldier while in the enemy’s country to find the best place to take it easy.

Complete rest is something that happens when the war is won and over, and they return to their home.

In fact, many of the soldiers I have known in my life continue to run, lift weights, and keep fit even after they have been discharged or have retired.

Because for a good soldier, discipline, particularly self-discipline, is trained into them.

be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints, - Ephesians 6:18

Be watchful, be diligent with all perseverance.

Paul instructed Timothy in his first letter – 1 Timothy 4:7-8:

discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; 8 for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

An effective soldier is one who does not stop training while the war goes on;

He or she is the one who will deny themselves in order to make themselves more fit for service.

And in being more fit for service, they will be more pleasing to the one who enlisted them.