1 Thessalonians 2:16

One of the sins that will draw out the last judgments on the Jews is not merely their deep ingratitude toward God. It is also their hatred of the grace He is showing to the poor Gentiles in their wretchedness and sin. Paul puts this strongly. They fill up the measure of their sins "by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved," and "wrath has come upon them at last!" They cannot bear that others should hear the gospel of grace. Their pride in the law led them to despise it for themselves.

Their intense sectarian hatred also shows in their forbidding the apostles to speak to Gentiles. We may ask, what did this have to do with them? They had themselves rejected Jesus as an impostor. If the Gentiles they despised received Him, why did they not gloat that Gentiles were falling for what they considered gross deception? Were they afraid, though they hated Christ, that this might not be deception after all? Were they really fighting their own badly troubled conscience?

The preaching of grace drives those who have the law into fury. Grace makes little of any earthly privileges at all. It insists on the ruin of the Jew as much as of the Gentile. So the Jew's hatred of the gospel never dies. It was bad enough to hear a message as far above the law, and as much deeper, as Christ is greater than Moses. But this message went further. It proclaimed matchless blessings in Christ that wipe out every distinction. It brings the believer, Jew or Gentile alike, into a new place of heavenly relationship and everlasting favour. That is intolerable.

Wrath from God does rest in a special way on blinded and unrepentant Israel. Luke 21:23 speaks of it in connection with the siege of Jerusalem under Titus. In 1 Thessalonians 2:16 Paul speaks of wrath having come upon them to the uttermost. He wrote that twenty years or more before Jerusalem fell. He plainly meant that the wrath was not yet carried out, but that God had settled it beyond recall. That wrath, we believe, will reach its climax in the great tribulation.

"Wrath is come upon them to the uttermost" — upon the Jews. God had visited unbelieving Israel several times with partial punishments. But now they had rejected Christ and the gospel. So God subjects them to the full extent of His judgment. That judgment still continues, and will only be carried out in the future trouble of Jacob.

The Jews were the objects of the promises, and the Gentiles the objects of pure mercy. Jesus came to fulfil the promises made to the fathers, and the Jews rejected Him. They also refused and rejected the mercy God revealed to the Gentiles. In this way they filled up the measure of their sins, so that the wrath of God "is come upon them to the uttermost." So they too, shut up in unbelief, become objects of pure mercy, like the Gentiles — even though by natural descent they had been heirs of the promises. This is what brings out the riches of the wisdom of God in a way that surprises our hearts.

He may represent the Jew, of whom Paul wrote that they "displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved." But he also represents those self-righteous people who will not have the grace of God, and they are many.