1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 - The Rapture and The Resurrection

Well, I hope you're ready to fly away today to Tabernacle Talk. And we are in the Book of First Thessalonians.

And in this portion of scripture today, the Apostle Paul is letting this young church of new believers, he's letting them know about something so important. They had some questions about Jesus' return.

And it's a topic that many of us, even to this day, ask a lot of questions about. And so we're going to look at what Paul says. We'll also probably take a look at some of the bigger picture items.

As we've mentioned before, as I've mentioned before, this book to the Thessalonians, they were brand new church. They had just had a few weeks with Paul, Silas and Timothy before they were run out of town. And then Paul had sent Timothy back.

Timothy encouraged them, let them know some things. And then he came back, reported to Paul. But one of the things that Timothy had reported to Paul about was a question that these believers had had about the return of Jesus.

One of the most essential elements of the Christian faith is the belief that Jesus will return one day for his church. That he's not just staying in heaven, and when we die, we're not just with him, but that he will return one day.

We will be reunited with him, and then we will reign and rule with him for eternity. And incredibly excited for that time. But here we are in 1 Thessalonians 4 and verse number 13.

Here's what Paul says. We do not want you to be uninformed brothers and sisters concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest who have no hope.

Here, when he talks about those that are asleep, he says, there are people that you know that have believed in Jesus and they have died. And he says, I want you to realize that you have hope even in their passing, even in their death.

You don't have to grieve like the unbelievers. You don't have to grieve like those worshipping idols all around you who believe that there is no reunion for them at any point.

Verse 14, he says, for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, in the same way through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. He says, okay, you guys believe Jesus died and rose again. That's the gospel.

You guys believe that. And if Jesus rose from the dead, then, because Jesus is alive, even though he died, so those that have died believing in Jesus, God will bring those people with him when he returns.

Just as certain as Jesus' resurrection is your resurrection today. Just as certain of the fact that Jesus' grave is empty, the graves of your loved ones that have believed in Jesus, they will one day be empty as well.

He says this in verse 15, for we say this to you by a word from the Lord. He says, we've heard this directly from Jesus.

Paul doesn't always say this about every portion of scripture, though we know that even from 2 Peter chapter 1, that all scripture is inspired by God, that the Holy Spirit moved people to write it.

But here, especially, there are sometimes where Paul says, hey, I'm saying this, 1 Corinthians 7 is one of those, where he says, I'm telling you guys this, just because this is my advice. This isn't the Lord that is saying this.

This is just my advice as a person. But here, Paul makes it emphatically clear. He says, this isn't just my opinion, this isn't my thoughts.

This is directly from the Lord. He says, we who are still alive at the Lord's coming will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.

So there was a fear with these young believers that those that had died would not experience the new life and kingdom that Jesus was going to bring.

They knew Jesus was coming back, but they didn't quite understand how the whole resurrection thing worked. They knew Jesus was returning, but they didn't realize that the dead were going to be raised, and they too would enjoy God's kingdom.

I want to mention one thing here. Paul, in all of this conversation, does not tell the believers to wait for some super far-off thing to take place.

He does not say, I want you to wait or I want you guys to understand, Jesus isn't coming back until the end of a thousand years.

About a thousand years after Jesus had been on the earth, there were some Christians that thought that the millennial reign of Christ was like from when Jesus died. And so they waited, if you will, a thousand years.

And then once that time came, they were like, oh man, okay, Jesus didn't come back. Paul doesn't say wait a thousand years. He doesn't say when the whole world is Christian, then Jesus is going to come back.

So don't even worry about it. He doesn't say there is not a saved person from every nation or every language yet. So don't even worry about it, not even a thing.

What he does say, however, is that the Lord's coming is eminent. And we'll get into that in one second. And he says, I want you guys to understand the dead are coming first.

They are going to be raised first. They are reunited with Jesus first. As we would look at 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, we would see that to be absent from the body is to be present.

With the Lord, if you die and you believe in Jesus, you don't go to purgatory, you don't just have maybe a soul sleep, you are with the Lord. Jesus told the thief dying on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise.

We were aware of all of that. So he says, we who are still alive at the Lord's coming will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. We're not going to enjoy God's kingdom before the dead.

Verse 16, for the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the archangel's voice, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Okay, God's going to descend from heaven, and there's going to be an announcing of his coming. It's a shout of the angels there with the archangel's voice. That would be Michael.

There also might be a few other archangels as well that aren't specifically listed in Scripture. At least not named in Scripture. So he says, Jesus will come down.

He'll descend from heaven with the trumpet of God. And it says, and the dead in Christ will rise first, that they will receive their new glorified bodies. Your dead loved ones right now have died in Jesus.

They are in his presence, but they do not currently have a physical body. They don't have hands. They don't have eyes.

They don't have maybe a mouth. They are spiritual beings right now, even as our God is a spiritual being. But when the resurrection happens, they will receive their physical bodies.

But it will be a physical body like Jesus's. And 1 Corinthians 15, Paul deals a lot with the questions about that. So he says, the dead in Christ will rise first.

So if you will, their spirits are reunited with a physical body. Verse number 17, Then we who are still alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.

So he says, first the dead are raised, and then we go up, we will meet them in the air. And so we will ever be with the Lord. Now, I do want to mention maybe one thing.

For most of church history, there's been two kind of main lines of thought in regards to the specific event listed here. Those positions have normally been labeled as pre-tribulation rapture and post-tribulation rapture.

The position that I currently hold is to a pre-tribulation rapture for reasons that I might be able to get into today very briefly. Just took a peek at the time.

So there's a pre-tribulation rapture, which would say that this event would refer to before the seven years of tribulation, the time of Jacob's trouble, as Daniel describes it.

Seven years of unique occurrences that God outlines the things that take place during that time in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, I believe, if I remember correctly.

He outlines it in several of the major and minor prophets, and most notably in the Book of revelation. That's kind of the one that everyone really knows about. So Jesus returns for his church.

He raises the dead. He takes those living of his bride. We go to heaven.

We enjoy what's termed as the marriage supper of the lamb. We enjoy heaven, the promise that Jesus gave in John 14, that in his father's house are many dwelling places, older translations, many mansions.

He says, if it were not so, I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

So what Jesus is currently preparing in heaven is for his bride, the church. And so he's going to take his bride, he's going to take them to heaven, where we will enjoy time with our heavenly groom for that seven-year time period.

During that same time on earth, God is going to restore Israel. He is going to give them their land. They are actually going to have a rebuilt temple in the location where it ought to be.

They are going to be betrayed by a world leader, and that world leader will accomplish the same types of defiling actions in the temple as the kinds of things done by antiochus Epiphanes back in the intertestamental period between when Malachi was

written and when the events of the New Testament took place. So all of that will happen. The Jews will realize that Jesus really was the Messiah.

They're going to recognize, oh, we're in this time period that was spoken about by the prophets, and this book of revelation from the New Testament that interacts with all of the things that have to do with the prophecies of the Old Testament.

The Christians, they knew that Jesus was the Messiah. So they're going to accept him. There's going to be 144,000 Jewish evangelists that are going to go around the world preaching the gospel, preaching about Jesus.

There's going to be incredible signs and wonders, unlike anything that has ever been or will ever be again, even as we read about in Mark chapter 13, maybe Mark 12 actually, I can't remember. So all of that's going to happen.

And then at the end of that seven year time period, there's going to be the Battle of Armageddon, where the nations of the world under the world leader, they're going to come against Israel to try and destroy all of the people of God.

And when they come to do that, then Jesus and all of his saints and all of his angels, we are going to descend from heaven.

And Jesus is going to, with the words of his mouth, dismantle and destroy the armies of this world that are trying to destroy his people.

And as that happens, if there was a ring and my brother FaceTimed me, so if you hear that and you wonder, oh, what in the world is going on? You're not receiving a call. It's me.

So then Jesus will come and he will save his people. He will throw Satan and all of the evildoers into, I forget if it's labeled as hell or the lake of fire.

At that point where evil is dealt with with justice, Jesus will set up his thousand year reign on the earth. We will reign as kings and priests on the earth with Jesus and we will enjoy a thousand years of Jesus's earthly reign.

There will still be people that lived through the tribulation that don't have glorified bodies like we do.

So those people, they will have kids and each of those people that are born, they will make a decision on whether or not they want to follow God, if they want to worship Jesus, if they want to be one of God's people.

At the end of that thousand year time period, Satan will be loosed one last time from the lake of fire and he will convince people that do not want to worship Jesus, even though he can be actually seen and visited and interacted with.

They will still refuse to believe in Jesus. And so there will be an army that tries to come against Jerusalem, the capital of the world once again, and Jesus will reign victorious. He will put down evil for all time.

And we will always be with the Lord. So that's kind of the time period. So a pre-tribulation Rapture would follow that same thing that I just said, that the church is raptured.

It is taken up. Jesus returns for his bride, and he takes his bride to heaven, to his father's house. And we enjoy that seven years with him before coming down to earth and reigning for a thousand years with our savior.

The post-tribulation Rapture worldview would say that we do not experience the rapture before the tribulation, and all of God's people, the church, we go through the tribulation time period, all the same things happen with the Jewish people, that

they recognize Jesus as their Messiah, and they turn to him, all of that. Then at the end of that seven years, when the Battle of Armageddon is happening, and the world's armies, they come to destroy Jerusalem and all of God's people, then Jesus will

return, and as he comes down from the skies, then the dead are resurrected, they're given new bodies, they go up with Jesus as he's coming down, and same for those that would be alive at that time period, they would be raptured up with Jesus, and so

basically, he comes down and, if you will, we meet him halfway, that he comes down from heaven, we meet him in the air, and then we come down to earth. From my understanding of the prophetic passages, the pre-tribulational rapture fits better with

the totality of the scriptural evidence that we have, and so one of these days, I know we're going to be going through the book of Daniel, specifically chapters 7-12 next year, and that's going to be a very, very helpful study, going through some of

these things in more detail. And whenever I go through the book of revelation, that'll also deal with that. So we are meeting the Lord in the air, and verse 18, Paul says this to the church. He says, therefore, encourage one another with these words.

Comfort each other with this truth. The fact that Jesus is coming again isn't something that we have to be fearful of. We don't have to be fearful of, if you will, we don't have to fear the Antichrist.

We don't have to fear the one world government. We don't have to fear the lack of currency and the worship of this false God that will be instituted during that time.

Since we don't have to fear those things, it's a comfort to one another that Jesus is returning again. And for frankly, those that hold the pre-tribulation rapture position, we won't undergo those difficulties. We will be reunited with Jesus.

We will be enjoying that marriage supper with our heavenly groom. And so as a result of that, we have hope that the people that have died we know they are with the Lord. If we die, we will be reunited with them.

If Jesus comes back and we are raptured, we will be with them and they will have their bodies again. Like all of that is wonderful, amazing news. There is no downside to the child of God.

Death has completely lost its sting. That our corruptible bodies will put on incorruptibility. Our mortal bodies will put on immortality.

That we will always be with Jesus. That we will never know a moment without God's actual, man, his physical presence with us in the person of Jesus. We will have sin gone forever.

All of our sicknesses, all of our diseases, all of our sorrows will be taken away and we will only have joy with him forever. We will enjoy the life that he made us to have. His good design in Eden will finally be realized.

What a comfort that is to us. Can I encourage you today, live like it could be the day that Jesus comes back. Jesus doesn't necessarily want you to go out to a street corner and to just yell at everyone, Hey, Jesus is coming back.

But he does want you to communicate to your family, Hey, do you know Jesus?

If people wouldn't believe you in a regular conversation, that Jesus is coming back, I promise you, they're not going to believe you if you dress really weird and have like an A-frame thing and you're shouting, the world is ending.

If they don't believe you regularly, they're not going to believe you if you're going extra.

What Jesus says in his account of the rich man in Lazarus of Abraham telling the rich man who is in hell, he says, if they're not going to listen to the prophets, they're not going to believe even if someone came back from the dead.

Those that will believe what God has said, they don't need more miracles, they don't need more signs, they don't need the impossible, they need to believe the word that God has said, belief in God's word is kind of the thing that gives us a

relationship with God. It's in the garden. God said, hey, you can have everything. Just don't eat this one thing.

It's Jesus says, I have paid it all. All I'm asking for you is to repent of your way and believe in what I've said. And so make sure that you are evangelizing others.

Realize that those that have died in the Lord, that are your family, that are your friends, that you've known, realize they're not gone forever and you will see them again.

Whether Jesus returns and you get to see them in the flesh again, or if you pass, that you will see them in glory. You will know them and they will know you.

And what a comfort it is that death has completely been robbed of all of its power because of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. And just as sure as he rose, we will rise as well.

So I want to encourage you with a few of those thoughts from the end of 1st Thessalonians 4, that if Jesus rose from the dead, then there's only hope. There's only good times coming.

All of eternity is yours, bought with what Jesus did for you on Calvary. If you don't know him today, message me, comment. I would love to talk with you more about Jesus.

Thanks for tuning in. We'll begin Chapter 5 tomorrow.