The Righteous Judgment of God
5 This is an obvious sign of the righteous judgment of God, to the end that you may be counted worthy of God’s Kingdom, for which you also suffer. 6 For it is a righteous thing with God to repay affliction to those who afflict you, 7 and to give relief to you who are afflicted with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire,
Their suffering is not evidence that God has lost control; it is evidence that a judgment is coming which will set the account straight.
This is an obvious sign of the righteous judgment of God. The claim is startling, and its logic is the point: the fact that the wrong people are suffering is itself the demonstration that a reckoning must exist. A world where affliction fell on the faithful and nothing followed would not be a righteous world.
Verse 6 states the principle plainly — it is a righteous thing with God to repay affliction to those who afflict you. Vengeance is God's to repay Romans 12:19, and naming it as his is what frees the sufferer from having to manage it. Verse 7 completes the pair with relief for the afflicted, and both halves arrive at the same moment: when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire. The word is an unveiling. What is now hidden is not absent; it is covered, and the covering comes off on a day.
settled What this mark means