1 Thessalonians 4:9

2. Exhortation to brotherly love and quietness, 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12.

9. But… ye need How was there need to write so fully and severely in regard to lust and fraud as in the last paragraph, and nothing in regard to brotherly love? Not, we may reply, because here, as in the Corinthian Church, there had been any flagrant outbreak of lust or any fornicator to excommunicate. So far as public notoriety was concerned, it was in this respect a blameless Church. But, 1. The paragraph upon these two vices is preventive rather than corrective. It seeks by the most solemn warnings to forestall future vice rather than to rebuke the past. 2. The law of chastity, according to the new life, needed to be laid down with the awfulness of the penalty on transgression. Heathenism had made the crime trivial, jocular, rather smart, and even religious and right. All this must Christianity reverse, and place it among the most heinous sins, and subject it to the most fearful penalties. But as to brotherly love, the Christians were taught of God, or, in a single Greek compound, God-taught. The first inspiration of spiritual life was love to Christ and love to the image of Christ in the Christian brother. It was the God-given instinct of the Christian being, and they needed no formal law or prescribed penalty.