Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. And may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5:23)
“Blameless” is an intimidating word. If you are a Christian, you know that you are not blameless – not in the past and not in the present. So why is Paul telling the Thessalonians – most of whom are pagan converts to Christianity – that God will “keep” them blameless. When did they become blameless? When did we become blameless?
There are certain methods of understanding Scripture. The most basic one is to use Scripture to understand Scripture. It’s kind of like saying that you can’t understand an elephant by simply studying an elephant’s tail. The message of the Bible is both simple and vast so we need to look at every part of it by looking at the whole of it at the same time.
The message of the Bible is that God – the Creator of everything – is bringing everything to perfection. Teachers of the gospel throughout the centuries have spoken of three enemies of the believer that seek to keep us from perfection: the world, the flesh and the devil. Let’s all acknowledge that we live in the world (a system of ungodly values and institutions), we live in the flesh (we all have bodies of flesh and blood subject to both needs and desires) and we have an enemy who hates us because we are image bearers of the One who cast Satan out of heaven and the Son who defeated Satan on the Cross.
Is that the end of Satan’s activities? Not at all. Revelation 12:10 tells us the “ . . . the accuser of the brethren has been thrown down who accuses them night and day before God.” Satan is perpetually pointing at our imperfections and sins, trying to convince God to give up on us because we are to blame for so much of what is wrong with the current Creation. But if Satan is like a prosecuting attorney in a criminal trial, the Holy Spirit, the Helper, is our defense attorney who stands before the Righteous judge and holds up the list of charges against us and points out that every one of them has been paid for by the sacrifice made by Jesus on the Cross.
Satan knows that God cannot be swayed in His judgment, but he also knows that his accusations can be extremely destructive to our walk with Christ, if we listen to the prosecutor instead of our own defense attorney. Guilt keeps us in bondage even when the chains have been loosed. When we stumble into sin while trying to walk with Christ, the Holy Spirit will convict us of sin not condemn us with guilt. Conviction is the Holy Spirit allowing us to see ourselves as God sees us – sinners, guilty, defiled and totally unable to save ourselves but also totally forgiven and totally and eternally saved by the work of Christ on the Cross.
So Paul is saying that “the God of peace himself” is purifying us to maintain Christ’s blameless status in us. Just as we are not blameless by our own efforts, we are also not the ones who can keep ourselves without sin. It is God Himself who does both. That’s what Jesus meant on the Cross when He said, “It is finished.” So pray with humility, but also pray with hope and faith. “He who calls you is faithful, he will surely do it.”