The Structure of 2 Thessalonians for Preaching

I recently finished preaching through Ecclesiastes at Kenwood, and I knew that a sermon series through the Song of Songs was on the immediate horizon (we are in it at the time of this writing). I wanted to take a short foray into the New Testament, preferably into a smaller Pauline Epistle, between Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. I chose 2 Thessalonians, initially thinking I might complete the three-chapter letter in three Sunday sermons. 

As I read the Greek text of the letter closely and repeatedly in preparation, however, I began to suspect that Paul was using the term “brothers” at or near the beginning of each new section. I tracked down all the instances of “brothers” and used this key term to delimit the thought-units in the letter, finding that this tracked pretty well with the paragraphing in both the Greek text and in English translations. As I began to meditate on the relationships between the thought-units in the text, I began to suspect that Paul had structured the whole letter as a chiasm. 

Rather than go with the chapter divisions that have been foisted on the text by later students of the letter, I was compelled to try to exposit the thought-units the author of the letter, Paul, had built into it and signaled in various ways. The corresponding thought units of the letter fall out as follows (beginning matches end, second section stands across from second to last, third corresponds to third to last, and then the central turning point): 

The grace and peace in the opening of the letter (2 Thess 1:1–2) is matched by an inverted peace and grace in its closing (3:16–18). The thanksgiving that Paul opens the body of the letter with in 1:3–11 really focuses on the second coming, and that teaching on the second coming is applied in the command not to tolerate undisciplined, disorderly, unruly idleness in 3:6–15. Paul’s teaching on the man of lawlessness whose rebellion will precede the second coming in 2:1–12 is matched by his request that the Thessalonians pray that he will be delivered from wicked men in 3:1–5. These sections frame the central statement in 2:13–17, on how Paul thanks and praises God for choosing the Thessalonians and calling them to himself in the Gospel. 

Often the central piece of a chiastic structure will reach back to the beginning as it also anticipates the end. In this case, the language of 2:13 exactly matches the language of 1:3, and the reference to “good work” in 2:17 anticipates the final section on not tolerating idleness in 3:6–15. 

The literary structure provides the medium through which the message gets communicated. The divisions of the text that the author himself built into the text provide any preacher with natural thought-units to exposit. 

In the rest of this short piece, I provide summaries of the chiastic structure of 2 Thessalonians, and then in the appendix I provide the full text of the letter in the ESV, broken down into the individual chiastic structures that work together to build the overarching chiasm, with key terms and phrases highlighted in corresponding colors. Hopefully this will help you not only in your study of 2 Thessalonians but in your own examination of the rest of the Bible.¹ 

1. In a book set to appear in July of 2025, I seek to demonstrate the chiastic structure of John’s Gospel, which like 2 Thessalonians is an overarching chiasm built out of smaller chiasms. See James M. Hamilton Jr., In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Meaning in the Literary Structure of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2025).  ↩︎