<p>3:6 <i>Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw yourselves from every brother that walks disorderly-</i> &quot;Disorderly&quot; is the same word translated &quot;unruly&quot; concerning those who ought to be &quot;warned&quot; at the time the first letter was written (1 Thess. 5:14). If the warning hadn't worked, then the Thessalonians were to withdraw themselves from these individuals who were demanding financial support from the church whilst refusing to work (:11). The &quot;tradition&quot; received from Paul may have been a verbal or written statement directly from the Lord, to the effect that there were not to be handouts for those who refused to work and who saw church membership just as a means of income, confirming them in their laziness. In every age and society, there are those who wish to join the church in the hope of material benefit. Paul here does not advocate a totally non-judgmental approach; he is quite insistent that this should not be allowed. And his motive was clearly because he wanted to see human salvation in Christ; and going through the motions of joining Christ simply in order to attain some secular advantage was not going to help the people concerned. 'Withdrawing' means more to keep away from, rather than religious excommunication; in this context it could simply mean that the church was not to give them financial support. But &quot;withdraw yourselves&quot; is also translated &quot;avoid&quot;, literally meaning 'to arrange around' (as in 2 Cor. 8:20). The idea may not be formal excommunication, but some other form of church discipline- or simply, an exclusion from the list or &quot;number&quot; of those who received support as in 1 Tim. 5:9. Verse 10 is translated in some Bibles as &quot;don't give them food&quot;, supporting this idea; but the force of &quot;withdraw yourselves&quot; seems to suggest that Paul wasn't merely warning the ecclesia not to give food as welfare support to these people, but to not associate with them, and therefore, not to eat with them in a religious sense.</p><p>The whole passage in 2 Thess. 3:6-12 seems to criticize sloth and sponging off others in remarkably strong language, insisting that those who are think they can get an easy ticket through life at others' expense must be separated from. But the language is <i>so </i>strong, that we wonder whether this really is all that in view. We recall that the feeding miracles of Jesus and His general attitude to assisting the sick and needy never incorporated any kind of &quot;means test&quot;, a checking out of whether actually every single person in the crowd of 5000 males was in fact genuinely in need of food. Rather does He give, so superabundant in His grace that there were large carrier baskets full of the crumbs afterwards. When we encounter human need, it could probably often be argued that the need could have been avoided by harder work by someone somewhere; but surely the need is the call, to action on their behalf. For any hard hearted &quot;God helps those who help themselves&quot; attitude seems to me at variance with the gracious giving of the Lord to us. We from our distance are unaware of exactly what was going on in the ecclesia to which Paul wrote, and we don't fully know the false teaching and exact forms of misbehaviour which he was up against. But the evidence above is surely enough to conclude that whatever the details, Paul wasn't arguing so strongly for the utter exclusion of lazy spongers. There seems to have been far more to this group of people than simply that. I suggest on :10,11 and :14 that these who refused to work and demanded support were in fact Judaizers, who in line with Paul's dire warning against them in chapter 2, needed to be excluded from the church.</p><p><i>And not after the tradition which they received from us</i>- It seems from 2:14,15 that Paul taught them the Gospel, and then gave them &ldquo;traditions&rdquo;, &lsquo;that which is passed on&rsquo;, i.e. from Christ, concerning practical Christian living; exactly in accord with how the great commission requires us to preach the basic good news of a risen Christ, baptize people, and then teach them further all things He commanded and passed on to us (Mt. 28:19,20). But the context goes on to say that they were to follow Paul's example; as if his personal example was the tradition he had set for them to follow. He repeatedly states that he had consciously lived as he had in order to set them an example, and he is now declaring this as the &quot;tradition&quot; they are bound to follow.</p>