Does Paul Really Promise I’ll Suffer?

Suffering shapes the life of every person to varying degrees. I’ve experienced chronic illness for most of my life, and although I’ve prayed many desperate prayers, the Lord hasn’t taken this suffering away.

My experience of unrelenting suffering led me to examine Scripture’s truths regarding suffering and hope, and I eventually realized that Paul expects all Christians to suffer. But Paul also teaches there’s great hope amid our pain. Second Thessalonians 1:3–12 repeatedly alludes to Isaiah 66, with Paul intertwining suffering and hope to provide great comfort to an afflicted believer.

Suffering and the Hope of God’s Kingdom

In 2 Thessalonians 1:3–4, Paul boasts about the Thessalonians’ perseverance and faith amid persecutions and afflictions. These afflictions serve as the “evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that [the believers] may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which [they] are also suffering” (v. 5).

These persecutions and afflictions don’t evidence divine judgment on the Thessalonians, as we may expect, but serve as the “evidence” of God’s righteous judgment on their persecutors and that the believers are living rightly before the Lord. Jouette M. Bassler comments on this chapter, “Temporal suffering is no longer a sign of rejection by God. . . . It is viewed somewhat paradoxically as a sign of acceptance by God.”

The Thessalonian believers suffer for the kingdom and thereby experience persecution, but their suffering indicates they’re counted worthy of the kingdom. It also serves as a sign and source of eschatological hope that they’ll experience the promises related to the kingdom, such as vindication and rest from suffering.

Their suffering indicates they’re counted worthy of the kingdom.

Their vindication occurs due to their afflicters being justly punished (vv. 6–12). Christians who suffer will experience rest and relief from their affliction (v. 7). This relief ultimately comes through the unveiling of the Lord Jesus from heaven at his second coming. Though Jesus is hidden or veiled during believers’ suffering, he becomes their ultimate form of deliverance and relief from affliction. Paul isn’t promising the physical deliverance of righteous sufferers in this lifetime. However, when someone is living rightly before the Lord, his or her suffering becomes a source of present hope since it points forward to future deliverance by Jesus.

Relief by Fire

The allusions to Isaiah 66 contextualize Paul’s discussion of suffering and hope along a redemptive-historical plane. Those who reject the gospel will be punished by Jesus when he’s “revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance” (vv. 7–8). This phrase alludes to Isaiah’s pronouncement that those who don’t obey God’s Word will be judged (Isa. 66:4, 15–16). Isaiah promises that “the LORD will come in fire . . . and his rebuke with flames of fire” (v. 15) and that “by fire will the LORD enter into judgment” of those who rejected him (v. 16).

Thus, the persecutors in Thessalonica will experience judgment similarly to the persecutors in Isaiah 66, resulting in vindication for the believers, but their experience of judgment also fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy regarding the Lord’s judgment of those who reject him and his Word.

Additional lexical parallels arise due to the phrases translated as “Let the LORD be glorified” (Isa. 66:5) and “So that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you” (2 Thess. 1:12). Thematic parallels also arise since God’s people in both these passages experience suffering from their own countrymen due to following the Lord. Thus, it’s possible Paul aligns the suffering believers with those suffering in Isaiah, just as he aligns the Thessalonians’ persecutors with the persecutors in Isaiah.

Gene Green suggests that Isaiah 66:5 is a “word directed at those faithful people of God who are despised by the rest.” Perhaps Paul intends for it to be a word of hope for the righteous sufferers who are despised by others and are promised rest in his own day and even today.

You’re a Hope-Filled Sufferer Too

By alluding to Isaiah 66, Paul may imply that, like Isaiah and the Israelites (who were righteous sufferers and would experience deliverance and vindication), he and other believers will experience eschatological deliverance and vindication since they’re suffering faithfully before the Lord. Ultimately, in Isaiah’s day, Paul’s day, and today, those who follow the Lord will suffer. However, Paul is clear that righteous sufferers have hope for future deliverance precisely because of their suffering.

Righteous sufferers have hope for future deliverance precisely because of their suffering.

This passage has major implications for those facing persecution due to proclaiming the Lord’s name, since those in Isaiah’s day and Paul’s day faced persecution for the same reason.

A believer’s suffering, however, doesn’t have to take the form of intense persecution for these promises to be applicable. Paul himself experienced various forms of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual suffering—including illness, pain, anxiety, and shipwrecks—and he doesn’t seem to distinguish between these forms within his wider theology of suffering and hope. Gordon Fee even acknowledges that Paul includes both a specific term for “persecutions” and a more general term for “afflictions of various kinds” in 2 Thessalonians 1:4, applying the truths of the passage to numerous forms of suffering.

Furthermore, as Ann Jervis suggests, since Paul doesn’t outline the ways each Christian will suffer in the Thessalonian letters, the cost of living faithfully before the Lord will presumably be “different for each believer and each group of believers” and may include afflictions that arise both “when the enemy’s lines are drawn” and “when disease or loss has had the last word.” Therefore, no matter what form of suffering you or I face, Jesus provides hope that one day we’ll receive relief.