Writers have used lots of ink and preachers have spoken millions of words to talk about “the rapture.” This is the passage behind all that teaching. Paul did not write this to satisfy people’s curiosity about what will happen in the future, but to encourage people in the present.
Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words.
Back in the ’90s, a computer support tech had the following phone conversation that was recorded, so I can give it to you verbatim.
Tech: “How may I help you?”
Caller: “The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting it fixed?”
Tech: “I’m sorry, but did you say a cup holder?”
Caller: “Yes, it’s attached to the front of my computer.”
Tech: “Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped. Did you receive this as part of a promotional? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?”
The conversation continued for a couple of more minutes before the support person realized that the caller had been using his CD-ROM drive as a cup holder.[1]
People say that ignorance is bliss, but they’re wrong. Ignorance is usually just ignorance. It leads to broken computers, broken relationships, and broken hearts.
And yet everyone is ignorant – our ignorance always greatly exceeds our knowledge. That is not because we are stupid but because we are limited. Human beings have occupied a tiny recess in our universe for a fleeting moment of eternity, so our ignorance is understandable. It is not a sin, but there are times when it is a shame. That is especially true when it regards God and his plans for us.
The Thessalonians were ignorant about God’s plans for people who die. That wasn’t their fault. Paul, Silas, and Timothy had been run out of town in the middle of the night and simply hadn’t had time to teach them everything they needed to know.
When people lack accurate information, it is natural for them to fill in the blanks with their own ideas. The Thessalonians had apparently been doing that. The missionary team had taught them that Jesus was going to come again and that it was going to be a glorious and wonderful day. His people would be vindicated. Everything would be set right. They were eagerly looking forward to it and they expected that it would happen soon.
And then one of their fellow church members, perhaps more than one, died. Some biblical scholars think they might have died in some kind of anti-Christian persecution. And the church realized that they didn’t know what happens to people who die before Christ comes back. So, they did what people do when they are ignorant about a subject: they filled in the blanks.
They had learned from Paul and Silas that the day of Christ’s return would be a great day for Christians, a day of vindication, glory, and joy. Think of Christmas, the Cubs winning the world series, and Victory over Japan Day all rolled into one – and then some. But what about those who had the misfortune of dying beforehand, or of being martyred by their enemies? Would they miss out on that day? Maybe they would still take part in the resurrection, but what about the celebration, the victory?
And perhaps some wondered if those who died before Christ’s return were just gone for good. Until they had become Christians a few months earlier, the Thessalonians almost certainly shared their society’s understanding of death: it is the ultimate tragedy, the irredeemable loss, the end of everything that is good.
Before Paul’s time, the Greek poet Homer wrote of a dreamlike meeting between the hero Achilles and the ghost of his great friend Patroclus. In the dream Achilles reaches out to embrace his friend, but he vanishes in a puff of smoke and goes gibbering off like a madman to the underworld. Achilles awakes and says, “Then, it is true that something of us does survive even in … Hades, but with no intellect at all, only the ghost and semblance of a man.” Theocritus said that “hopes are for the living; the dead are without hope.”[2] Death was disaster and there was nothing anyone could do about it except face it with courage – and even that made no difference.
When Timothy returned from his emergency trip to Thessalonica, he reported that the church members were confused about all this. The unexpected deaths of their friends had thrown them into turmoil. So, Paul writes (verse 13) to supply the information they lacked and to save them from unnecessary grief.
Christians, unlike their neighbors and friends, have a reason to hope even in the face of death, a reason (verse 14) grounded in the good news about Jesus: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again.” The rest of the world believes no such thing. They agree with Aeschylus’s Apollo: “Once a man is dead, and the dust has soaked up his blood, you will not resurrect him.”
But the Christians could point to a time and place and, more importantly, to a real person who had died and rose again: Jesus. It was not only theoretically possible; it had happened. There were witnesses, hundreds of them. Hades’ impassable gates had been blown off their hinges. In Paul’s words elsewhere, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead,” – and not only that, he is – “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). In other words, Jesus was the first to rise, but he will not be the last. Those who belong to him will do the same.
Verse 14 again: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” That is why we do not grieve like the rest of mankind. We know something they don’t know. Death is not the end. When Christ and Hades met, it was Hades who flinched. Hades cracked, cracked wide open. Jesus knows the way – is the way – out of death.
But that brings us back to what was worrying the Thessalonians. They would be relieved to know that their friends would be resurrected, but wouldn’t that happen later? They’d still be in the ground on the great day, Victory Day, the day of Jesus’s triumph.
Not at all, Paul assures them. “God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” When Jesus arrives for that great day, our loved ones who have died will be with him. They get to be a part of it! In fact, as he will say in just a moment, they will be right in the middle of it!
But we need to go carefully here. It is not everyone who has died that God will bring with Jesus; it is only the ones who have fallen asleep in him. Or to be still more precise, those who have fallen asleep through him, as the Greek preposition is literally translated. But what could Paul mean by “fall asleep through Jesus”?
We need to think this through. First, it is important to know that when someone who was committed to Christ passed away, the early Christians would say that he or she had fallen asleep. They picked that up from Jesus himself who, when his friend Lazarus had succumbed to illness, told his disciples: “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep” (John 11:11). The rest of the world feared death as the ultimate tragedy – and death is an ugly thing – but Jesus talked about it differently: it was like falling asleep.
Next, we need to know that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus’s death ever described as falling asleep. Jesus did not fall asleep; he died. According to the author of Hebrews, “Jesus … for a little while was made lower than the angels, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone…” (Hebrews 2:9 Mounce).
Jesus experienced the horrors of death, which is the ultimate consequence of human rebellion against God, without any mitigation. Unlike us, his faculties were undiminished by sin’s rot, his emotions unblunted by alienation from God. Jesus felt death like no man since Adam has felt it. When Scripture says that Christ died for us, this is what it means. Because he died, we need only sleep, for our deaths have been swallowed up in his. By faith we have been, Paul says elsewhere, “united with Christ in the likeness of his death” (Romans 6:5). But again, this is not true of everyone, only of those who have been joined to Christ by faith.
In verse 15, Paul deals specifically with the Thessalonians’ concern that their deceased friends would miss out on the glory and celebration of the great day of Jesus’s return. He writes, “According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.” They are not only not going to miss out; they’re going to be there before us, according to the Lord’s own word.
We don’t know to what word Paul is referring. It may have been a special revelation to Paul or some other New Testament era prophet. Remember how in the Old Testament we frequently read that “the word of the Lord came to” this or that prophet. This might be that kind of thing. On the other hand, it might also be a word we already have in Scripture, but the closest parallel is Matthew 24:30-31, and it is not very exact. Or it might be a word the Lord spoke when he was on earth that was not written down. Surely, Jesus said many things, just as he did many deeds, that the Gospel writers did not record but that his followers remembered. For example, none of the Gospels mention that Jesus said, “It is better to give than to receive.” We only learn of that from the Apostle Paul who mentions it in a letter he wrote twenty years after Jesus’s resurrection.
According to Paul, we have Jesus’s own word that our Christian friends who have gone before us will be first in line for the party. Or perhaps for the fight, for the language of verse 16 is militaristic. The word for “loud command” is routinely used to describe military orders. The trumpet was often used in battle.
However, the trumpet was also used to gather God’s people for assemblies, for festivals, and for the Day of Atonement. The day Jesus returns will feature an assembly the likes of which no one has seen before. And this time it will be “the Lord himself” who calls the assembly and leads it.
Paul says that when the assembly is called, “the dead in Christ” will rise (that’s the verbal form of the word meaning resurrection) first. They have pride of place. The dead in Christ “rise,” while the living in Christ are “caught up.” This particular word has given rise to volumes of teaching about “the rapture.”
We get the word “rapture” from the latinized form of this verb, which means to “snatch away,” to “grasp,” or to “catch something up.” This same verb was used of Philip the Evangelist whom the Spirit of the Lord “suddenly took away.” You could say that Philip was raptured from the Gaza Road to Azotus. It’s the same word that is used in Jesus’s Parable of the Sower. The birds snatch away the seed that falls on the path. The birds rapture the seed. When Paul was rescued by soldiers and carried away from a murderous crowd, this is the word that was used. The soldiers raptured him.
For many of us, this word has come to refer exclusively to the rapid, perhaps imperceptible removal (disappearance?) of Christians at the beginning of a period of tribulation that will bring this age to an end, but as we’ve just seen, the word did not have this technical meaning in the first century. In fact, that didn’t develop until the 1830s.
Paul says that all this will happen – the Lord will descend, the dead in Christ will rise, and the living in Christ will be caught up – at “the coming of the Lord.” The Greek word here, which has entered the vernacular of the American church, is “parousia.” It is commonly translated as “coming” but that is a secondary and derived meaning. It’s primary meaning is “presence,” as in Philippians 2:12: “[D]ear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence…” Not only in my parousia.
The word did have a technical meaning in the first century Mediterranean. It referred to the arrival of some famous person, like a king or even the Emperor. The emperor’s “parousia” was a pull-out-all-the-stops, pageant or gala that happened when the exalted ruler made a royal visit to one of the great cities in his empire.
Here’s how it worked. When the emperor’s cavalcade, which included governing officials and military troops, neared the city, the city’s luminaries would lead a parade of citizens, peasants, slaves – just about everybody – outside the city to meet the emperor. There was cheering and exuberant celebration, and then everyone would return with the emperor to the city – his city. This is certainly what the Thessalonians would have thought of when Paul mentioned Jesus’s parousia. Jesus’s cavalcade will include military troops – angels and perhaps the blessed dead, and we will go to meet them. This was what the Thessalonians worried their deceased friends would miss, but Paul assures them that they will be right in the middle of the action.
Notice (verse 17) that the living (Paul was expecting to be among them, though a few years later when he wrote the Corinthians, he thought he might be among those who had fallen asleep) will be together with the dead in Christ. This is the Great Reunion. In Greek, Paul could have used one preposition to convey that we will be together, but he used two, “together with,” to emphatically make his point.
This is reminiscent of Isaiah’s great prophecy: “But your dead” – he is speaking to God – “your dead will live, their bodies will rise.” Then he addresses the dead: “You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy! Earth will give birth to her dead” (Isaiah 26:19). When that happens, we will be together with our loved one who have died.
But even more importantly, we will be together with Christ. “And so we will be with the Lord forever.” We are not going to join the dead in the grave; we are joining them in the clouds. A literal translation could go, “caught up in clouds to the Lord’s meeting.”
As so often with Paul, the language he is using comes from the Old Testament. Clouds serve as a prophetic image of the day of God’s judgment in the Palms and in Ezekiel. In Daniel, the Son of Man come for his coronation with the clouds. To meet the Lord in the clouds is to be present when, in the words of Daniel, Christ will be “given authority, glory and sovereign power; [and] all peoples, nations and men of every language [will worship] him.” Victory Day.
We, whether we die in the Lord or live in him, will be there. And whether we die in the Lord or live in him, we will be together. No wonder Paul says (verse 18), “Therefore encourage each other with these words.”
There are a couple of things here that stand out. To “die through the Lord” guarantees that we will not miss out. But how terrible it will be to die outside the Lord. Who else knows the way out of Hades? He alone has turned the grave into an exit and not only an entrance. We need Jesus.
The Lord’s Meeting. The Great Reunion. The Day of Victory and Coronation. We are all invited. The way to accept the invitation is by entrusting yourself – that’s faith – to God by joining with Jesus. If you have not done that, or don’t know how to do that, I am going to invite you to do it today. We who have already done it can show you the way. If you have doubts but would like to explore this further, I or any of the pastors would enjoy meeting with you to answer questions and proved resources.
Finally, if you have Christian friends and family members who have died, do not grieve as those who have no hope. Our friends are fine! Better than fine. We have Jesus’s own word for it. And we will see them again. The Pauline phrases here are some of his most uplifting: “together with them … to meet the Lord …And so we will be with the Lord forever.”
Be encouraged by those words.
[1] “Strange World,” Campus Life, Vol. 56, no. 6.
[2] David J. Williams, New International Biblical Commentary: 1 & 2 Thessalonians, p. 81, citing Bruce.
The Way Home 