Deeper Daily Podcast- March 8, 2026

0:00Hello, my friends. Welcome to the Deeper Daily podcast. I am Paul and it is the eighth day of March. It is the Lord's Day. And I am praying that you are able to find community today. Be blessed, grow in grace, enjoy the presence of other believers as you take this journey of serving the Lord Jesus Christ as sons and daughters of our loving Father. And as we go live this out today with one another, I'm praying that you are encouraged in your own walk. I'm hoping that we are encouraging you in Bible study. We are in First Thessalonians chapter 2 working our way through Paul's first letter, the first one that we, the oldest that we know that Paul wrote to his churches. And it's simple. It is not deep theologically, but that doesn't mean there aren't valuable things. And that's what we're discovering as we work through it here on the DDP. Today we arrive at the 15th verse,

1:00but it's the middle of a sentence. So I'm going to reread 14. We'll jump right into 15. For you brothers and sisters became imitators of the churches of God and Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out. They displeased God and oppose everyone. I'll stop there just to describe that we're still in the middle of a sentence. And without staying on it too long, Paul's simply describing the Jews of Jerusalem as the ones who oversaw the death of the Lord Jesus and oversaw the death of other prophets. This is a major theme of Jesus as eschatological warnings that because they reject the sun and because they killed the prophets that came before him, Jesus declared in Matthew that the blood of all of those generations would fall upon that generation. So that is a message that is beginning to stir. We are less than 20 years from the resurrection, which puts us less than 20 years

2:02from the fall of Jerusalem. And nobody knows that really that the fall of Jerusalem is going to be in less than 20 years, but they do know that Jesus said that a certain set of things would happen within that generation. So part of the reason why is because they killed Jesus in the prophets. This is a statement Paul makes that is sort of prescient for us as an audience to know why he's about to make a statement about God's wrath, which is coming up. They drove us out. They displeased God. They oppose everyone. That leads to 16 by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Period, not the end of the verse, but I'll comment on it that Paul essentially accuses his Jewish brethren of having thrown him out, hindering him from speaking to Gentiles so that they may be saved. This is a fact according to the book of Acts, but why it happens might be arguable. In the book of Acts, we're told that Paul sort of wreak and havoc with his gospel.

3:09There's a lot of things being stirred up against the early church. So the church comes together and sends Paul home, sends him to Tarsus. Sort of as a, hey, we need you to get out of here and calm down for a little bit. He does, and he does eventually come back. When he comes back, he has a little more braced version of himself. He's calmed down a little bit. He's grown up a little bit. He's grown in the faith a little bit. And so that's the version of Paul that we get in Thessalonians, but it's not as if he's forgotten that. It's not as if he's forgotten from being removed. He also could be referencing the fact that the Jews of Jerusalem don't want to hear the evangelism of this new sect called the way that keep talking about Jesus. And so they're not just forbidding him to preach to Gentiles, but forbidding him to preach the Lord Jesus at all. That's the end of that sentence. And then that this standalone sentence concludes the 16th verse. And this is the one I

4:13want to focus on for a minute or two. Thus, they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but God's wrath has overtaken them at last. Let's talk about this. If we don't finish today, we'll work on a little bit tomorrow talking about this idea that God's wrath has come upon them at last. You could say it can be translated that God's wrath has come upon them at the end. That's the same phrase in the Greek that God's wrath has come upon them at the end. And this could be some things, some several things happening here. One that to me seems more the most obvious based on what I just told you is this is a prophecy of the catastrophe that's going to happen in Jerusalem in 1870. Starting in about 1867 and moving on up into the summer of 1870, when the Jewish revolt is going to prompt a Roman response, and it'll be more than just a few soldiers in and around Jerusalem. It will be legions that would descend upon Jerusalem,

5:17thousands of Roman troops, who would eventually surround Jerusalem with armies and then take the city by force. They would choke it out for over six months, shut it up, nothing comes out, goes out, nothing goes in. Eventually they starve it to death, and then they will ransack it by going through the gates over the walls. They'll burn a temple. Everything comes down. The end of an era, the end of the world as they know it. This is also referred to as the wrath of God because it's wrath that we always hear the word wrath and we think angry. I have to talk to with you about this on the podcast before, but it's worth re-mentioning. Don't always think of the word wrath as angry. It is the culmination of a judgment pending. It's what has to happen next. It was often called wrath because that was a word used to describe a final judgment. So I believe Paul's talking about the wrath at the end, the judgment at the end of this

6:21Mosaic economy. We could also talk about the fact that there's a sequence of things that have already begun and they don't reach their end until 8070. And so Paul seeing it as the culmination will be later, but the beginning of that judgment has begun now. You could also say that it's sort of the punitive hardening of a large segment of people because they've rejected Christ, a hardening that came as a result of rejecting Christ, but that had been prophesied. That Isaiah talked about the Matthew talked about. Paul talks about that in Romans 1, when he talks about the outworking of God's wrath upon Gentiles in Rome and then he tells why there's in these all these sexually perverted things happening. And Paul's basically saying this sums it up. They've given over. They've rejected God enough. And that's the sum up of a

7:25judgment that was set to come against them. So that allows for us to see this as a prophetic statement that the wrath is about to happen. That's 8070, but also as something that is more like you have hardened yourself against Christ, you've sinned up to the sum and then there are consequences that are going to happen. And he would refer to those as wrath. We'll move into verse 17 tomorrow. God bless.