1 Thessalonians 4: Paul Says They Don't Need a Letter

Four chapters into a five-chapter letter, Paul tells the Thessalonians they don't need one. Verse 9 reads, "But as touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you: for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another." Verse 10 then asks them for more of it.

I know that move from the other side, having once reviewed a pull request that was fine and left four comments on it anyway and called it thoroughness. Paul does it twice in two chapters, as it turns out, because chapter 5 opens with "ye have no need that I write unto you" about times and seasons, and then he writes about them for a good while. So this chapter is a decent place to ask what Paul thinks his readers already have, since the list is long and there's exactly one subject where he says the reverse.

What does Paul say they already know?

Verse 1 asks them to "abound more and more" in what they received from him about how to walk and please God, which is a request to do the same thing at greater volume. Verse 2 says "ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus." Verse 9 says God has taught them to love. Verse 10 says they already do it "toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia," and the ask there is the same as verse 1, that they "increase more and more." So the first ten verses have nothing new in them. Paul is standing in front of people who are already doing the job and asking them to keep at it.

The section on holiness sits inside that, and verse 3 says that "this is the will of God, even your sanctification" and names the thing to abstain from, and verse 4 gives the instruction a phrase I keep going back to: "That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour." Know how. He's talking about the body, and he talks about it as something you can be good or bad at handling, closer to a skill than a prohibition. Verse 6 widens it from the body to how a man deals with his brother "in any matter," and verse 7 sums up in one line, "For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness." Paul gives it six verses and moves on to something he thinks they're better at.

Why does he tell them to be quiet and work with their hands?

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you;

1 Thessalonians 4:11

"Study" in 1611 English means to aim at something and to make it your business, and the odd thing about the verse is that what's being aimed at is quiet. You'd expect ambition to be pointed at something louder. Paul tells a young church to make its ambition the minding of its own work.

The reason comes in verse 12: "That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing." Two reasons, really. Outsiders are watching how they live, and nobody should be depending on anybody else for the bread. In 1 Thessalonians 2:9 he'd reminded them of how he went about it, "labouring night and day, because we would not be chargeable unto any of you," and I wrote about the way he keeps asking them to check his own account of that in Paul keeps telling them to check. Here he turns it from his example into their instruction, "as we commanded you." It's the same word as the commandments of verse 2, just in its verb form. He'd said it to their faces already and he's saying it again on paper.

Three instructions, then, and a person can do all three without anyone's permission or attention. Nobody would notice a man keeping them, which seems to be part of the point.

What is the one thing they don't know?

Verse 13 is where it turns, and it's the only place he says they lack anything: "But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope."

Everywhere else it's "ye know" or "ye need not," and on this subject his manner changes. Verse 15 opens, "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord," and it's the one place in the chapter he puts that phrase on what he's saying. Verses 1 and 2 lean on "the Lord Jesus" too, but those are reminders. This is news.

The subject is grief. Timothy had come back from Thessalonica with news (chapter 3 covers the report), and the news seems to have included believers who had died, though chapter 3 itself doesn't say so. The worry underneath looks to have been that the dead would miss it. Verse 14 answers with the resurrection of Jesus, "even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him," and verse 15 puts the order plainly. Those who are alive "shall not prevent them which are asleep." I'll leave what "prevent" means to the FAQ below, but the short version is that the living don't go first.

Then verse 16, which is the loudest sentence in the letter so far: "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first." It comes five verses after "study to be quiet." A shout, a voice, a trumpet. The chapter goes from hands at work to the sky opening, and nothing in between eases the shift.

What he says to do about it isn't loud at all, and it's the last verse of the chapter. Verse 18: "Wherefore comfort one another with these words." With these words, meaning say them, to each other, to whoever is sitting there grieving.

The same instruction comes back in the next chapter. Verse 11 of chapter 5 (1 Thessalonians 5:11) reads, "Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do." Even as ye do. That's verse 10 of this chapter again, "indeed ye do it." He keeps assuming they're already doing it, and then asking for more of it.

For the order of events, Doctrine and Covenants 88:96 to 98 has its own account, and it has the saints who are alive and those in their graves both caught up to meet him. I'm not going to try to line up the two texts verse by verse here. They agree on the thing the Thessalonians needed to hear, which is that nobody gets left behind in the ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "prevent" mean in 1 Thessalonians 4:15?

It means "go before," which is what the word meant in 1611. Read with the modern meaning, the verse sounds like the living won't stop the dead from something. What it says is that the living won't get there ahead of them. The dead in Christ rise first, per verse 16.

What does Paul mean by "his vessel" in verse 4?

Most readers take it as your own body, and that's how I read it. A few have argued it means a wife, and that argument has been around a long time. The word is a plain household one for a container, and Paul uses it for something you carry around and answer for.

Is "asleep" in this chapter a teaching about what the dead are doing?

I wouldn't push it that far, since Paul uses "asleep" in verse 13 and "sleep in Jesus" in verse 14 to talk about the dead, and what he's emphasizing is that they wake, not what they're aware of in the meantime. If someone wants a doctrine of the intermediate state, I'd send them to other places first.

Does "study to be quiet" mean Christians shouldn't talk about their faith?

No, and I'd be careful with that reading, because the quiet in verse 11 is attached to "do your own business" and "work with your own hands," so it's about not being a busybody and not living on other people's work. It's a statement about how you carry yourself, and it doesn't say anything on whether you speak up when somebody asks.

Sunday I'll call my parents in Bountiful, which I do most Sundays anyway, and ask my dad how he's doing before I say anything about me. Monday I'll read chapter 5 starting at verse 11.

— D.