1 Thessalonians 4:13
Today, listening friend, we are going to consider what verse 13 tells us, of this chapter 4, of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians that we are studying. In our previous section (3:1-4:12) the title was “The Coming of Christ Is a Purifying Hope.” That section was centered on the Sanctification of the believer. In that section the apostle Paul urged the Thessalonians to continue to grow in faith, and entered into an eminently practical issue: how believers should walk, that is, live, in light of that hope of Christ’s return.
Now this 13th verse begins a new section that extends to the 18th verse of this same chapter 4. In this outstanding part of St. Paul’s letter we are to see what death means to the Christian, and what the rapture means to the Christian. church. Let us therefore consider this section, which we have entitled
The coming of Christ is a consoling hope
We have come to the next section of the epistle to the Thessalonians, a section that has been singled out as one of the most important prophetic passages in the Bible, extending from verse 13 to verse 18. It teaches of the imminent coming of Christ for his Church. Now, that does not mean that this coming is immediate, nor that it is going to take place soon. Paul never used such an expression. He never wanted people to assume that the coming would occur during his lifetime or shortly thereafter. More than 2,000 years have passed since then. But when we say that the coming of Christ is imminent, we mean that it is drawing near, or that it is the next event on God’s agenda.
Paul made it clear that he believed in an imminent return of Christ. In verse 15 of this chapter he spoke of those of us who live, who will be left until the coming of the Lord. Paul believed that the Lord Jesus could come in his lifetime. He did not say, nor did he believe, that Christ would come in his lifetime, but he did say that he could come. This was his attitude when he wrote to Titus in 2:13, as we await the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.
There are those who accused Paul of having changed his position on the imminent coming of Christ as he grew older. Let us remember that the epistle to the Thessalonians was his first letter. Did Paul change his theology? When he wrote to the Philippians he was an old man, a prisoner of Rome, and so he said, in Philippians 3:20, 20 But our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also await the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. At the end of his life, Paul was still waiting on the Lord. In other words, he considered the coming of the Lord imminent.
Now, the coming of Christ for His Church, when we are caught up to meet the Lord in the air, Paul called it the “caught up of the Church.” There are people today, who have a different point of view on this matter. They say that the Bible does not teach the Rapture and that word is not found in the New Testament. We insist that it is mentioned, and it is found in this passage of Scripture, in verse 17, of this First Epistle to the Thessalonians, chapter 4, where it says: Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up. together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we will always be with the Lord. Now in this verse we have the word caught up, and that’s a very interesting thing. The Greek word used here for “snatched up” is harpazo, and it means “to snatch up,” “to lift up,” “to seize hastily,” “to carry.” It’s a matter of semantics, but whatever word one uses, the fact was that Paul taught that believers will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. So the apostle taught the rapture of the Church. The point is that the rapture of the Church can happen at any moment; it is the next event in God’s program.
Let us now make a statement that may be surprising regarding this passage of Holy Scripture. Actually the main consideration here is not the rapture. The exact question Paul was answering was; What can we say about believers who die before the rapture of the Church takes place?
We need to review the background of this epistle to understand why this question was so important to the Thessalonian believers. Paul went to Thessalonica on his second missionary journey; he was there for three Sabbaths and argued with them, declaring and exposing by means of the Scriptures. This was Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17, verse 2. This indicates that he was there less than a month. In that brief period, Paul arrived in that city and performed a Herculean task. He carried out the task of a missionary. He preached the gospel, there were converts, and he established a church. And then he taught these new believers the great truths of the Christian faith. And the interesting thing is that he taught them about the rapture of the Church.
In certain past ages, not much was taught about prophecy. Even teachers and preachers avoided the subject; They said that they were very profound truths, that they should be taught to Christians of a certain level of maturity, and not to those who are recent converts. However, we see that in this letter Paul did just the opposite. He had not been with the new Thessalonian believers for even a full month, and he had taught them prophecy. Actually, when we get to the second epistle, we will see that the apostle taught them about the great tribulation and the so-called Man of Sin, that is, the antichrist who will come. Paul ran the gamut of prophecy for the Thessalonian believers. It makes no sense then to say that prophecy should not be taught to newly converted believers. On the contrary, it must be taught to them, as Paul’s own example indicated.
It is clear that Paul taught those Christians that the rapture of the Church could happen at any moment: that it was imminent. Then Paul departed from Thessalonica; he went to Berea, established a church there, and stayed for a while. Then he embarked and headed for Athens. We also don’t know how long he stayed there. He was waiting for Timothy and Silas who would bring him news from Thessalonica. Well, they didn’t come, so Paul headed to Corinth. After they had been there for a while, Timothy and Titus arrived and gave him reports regarding this church in Thessalonica, along with questions that the Thessalonians had for Paul. So, Paul writes this First Epistle to the Thessalonians to encourage them, and to answer their specific questions about the rapture of the Church. During that unknown period of time since Paul had left them, some of the believers in that church had died. Then the question had arisen if they had not missed the rapture of the church.
Obviously Paul taught the imminent coming of Christ; otherwise this question would not have been relevant. Paul had told them that the Lord Jesus could come at any moment. Some of those believers had died and the Lord had not come: would they have missed the rapture? What would happen to them? Paul gave them the answer to that question in this letter that we are studying.
For us the question of the Thessalonians is not as significant as it was for them. And this is so; you and I live more than 2,000 years after the Thessalonians, and literally millions of believers have crossed the threshold of death. Therefore, most of the Church has already gone ahead of us and there is only a small minority left in the world.
Paul had taught the Thessalonians that the coming of Christ was imminent, and this is what we still believe today. Between where we are right now and the coming of Christ for the Church there is a very short time, which means that it could happen at any moment, even before we finished this program or, on the other hand, the coming of Christ could be still distant in the future.
The serious thing today would be to set dates for the coming of the Lord. Some are doing it, and it’s dangerous because they don’t know when he’s coming back. They could hardly, even by chance, correctly guess the season or the year, but surely they could not guess the time. When some try to set dates, they are depriving believers of waiting for him.
Now the Thessalonians were concerned about the believers who had died before the rapture had taken place. We need to remember this as we go through the rest of this chapter. So let’s read verse 13 of this fourth chapter of Thessalonians:
“Neither do we want, brothers, that you ignore about those who sleep, so that you do not be sad like the others who have no hope.”
We like this phrase of Paul: we do not want you to be ignorant either. We have seen this expression before in the letters to the Corinthians. When Paul said I do not want you to be ignorant, one can be sure that those brothers were really ignorant of a subject. Paul did not tell him in a resolute or rude way, for he was courteous and diplomatic. We could say that he spoke to them with a Christian attitude.
And he spoke to them, as verse 13 says, about those who sleep. Paul was referring to the death of the body. This expression never refers to the soul or spirit of man, because the spirit of man does not die. We will take note of this as we go along, but first I would like to mention 4 reasons why the death of the body is described as being “asleep.”
1. There is a similarity between sleep and death; a dead body and a sleeping body are really very much alike. Sometimes we have surely observed a friend or loved one in their coffin and someone has surely made the observation that they seemed to be asleep. In a way it is true. The body of a believer is asleep. Someone who sleeps does not cease to exist, simply because the body is sleeping. Sleep is temporary; death is also temporary. The dream has its awakening; death has its resurrection; it is not that life is existence and death is non-existence.
2. The word that is translated “asleep” has its root in the Greek word “keimai”, which means “to lie down, lie down”. And the really interesting thing is that the word resurrection is a word that refers only to the body. It is “anastasis” and comes from two Greek words; “histemi” which together with the preposition “ana” means “get up, stand up”. And only one body can stand up in the resurrection.
CS Lewis in his book Screwtape Letters uses a bit of sarcasm to ridicule those who believe that the resurrection is a resurrection of the…