Sorry, no results.
Please try another keyword
I have to share a quick story before we start. My little boy, Warren, wandered into the office when I was trying to finish up the sermon. And so I read the text to him. And we read through these verses. And then he sat and he thought about it for maybe five seconds in his little seven-year-old brain. And he said, okay, see you later. And he left. But a couple hours later, as I was still sort of struggling through some of the details, Warren had one of those little toys that you can draw on, and then, you just, and the whole thing gets erased, you know what I’m talking about? What are they called? I can’t remember. Etch A Sketch, right? And so he’s like, dad. I was thinking about those verses. He’s like, here’s what it’s like. And he said that it was blank. And he said, this is the good stuff – the white stuff. It’s all good stuff. And then he drew the whole thing. And he said, this is all the bad stuff. And then he’s like, this is what God’s going to do. And he went, shh… I mean just erased the whole thing and I said, “Warren, you don’t know it, but that was genius. You should be a Bible teacher.”
Anyway, let’s jump in. Last week we learned from Gary and we were in chapter 4 of 1 Thessalonians, that Paul wants to after he has thanked God profusely for the Thessalonians’ faithfulness in the first three chapters. In chapter 4 he turns to challenging them, he wants the Thessalonians to gain more and more holiness and love in 4.1-12. Paul challenges them and us to become more and more, conformed to the person and character of God. We learned a few things in those verses. Unlike the world around us, we’re not to view ourselves or other humans as objects for sexual pleasure. We live our lives to please God. And in so doing, we find our true and chief delight in turn brings glory to him. Rather than letting our desires control us, we control our bodies and desires and we steward them and conform them and shape them them around the God who loved us and created us. And at the very end of that passage, we learned that we are supposed to love one another more and more, persistently and patiently and humbly. And we also then work hard alongside and with each other, so that we become known as generous and productive human beings, kind of like people who would keep a garden really well, Edenic Gardeners, maybe.
So this brings us to our text, 4:13-18. Here Paul begins a new thought, he’s moving us now from a more general call to holiness and love into a specific issue that may have been troubling the Thessalonians. The reason we think here Paul is shifting into a more specific issue or question that they might have is the language that he uses. “We do not want you to be uninformed” he says. The Thessalonians have been believers now long enough to have had people they loved very much die as followers of Jesus. When Paul came and preached the Gospel to them and they were saved there was so much joy. There was power in the Spirit. There was rescue, redemption. They had been loved and accepted by Christ. But now time has passed a bit. They have been in persecution, in pressure there had been sickness and suffering and death! And the Thessalonians are now struggling with how to deal with this issue. What about our lost loved ones in Christ? So He’s moving into something more specific. But I also want you to see that it’s not completely unrelated to the holiness and love in 4:1-12. How so?
Because quite simply the way Christians deal with and think about and react to death is going to be part and parcel of living holy lives that unbelievers see and then give glory to God for. Hopefully. And in other words, there is hope in us. Even in death, that unbelievers don’t have.
So in these verses Paul’s goal, his aim is not, is not, to give us a detailed map or minute by minute itinerary of the end times or of the second coming This text is about giving us hope and comfort and encouragement in the gospel as we deal with death in this in-between time between Jesus’ First and Second Coming The main point of this text is very simple. It can be found right up front in verse 13. What I want, Paul says, is for you to be informed so that you do not grieve like the rest who have no hope. That’s the main point of the text. Don’t grieve in death like the rest who have no hope. Verses 14 through 17 will then give us a few reasons why we can have this hope and not grieve like they do. Don’t grieve like they do verses 14 through 17 will say because we have something they don’t. We have hope that the one who rose from the dead and defeated death is coming soon to finish the job and wipe the Etch A Sketch clean.
And then like any good teacher or preacher Paul ends the passage in verse 18 saying you got it? You got the message? Good! Now encourage each other constantly with this teaching. So that’s the map of the passage. Let’s have a closer look at some of the details. Paul begins very simply and directly. He doesn’t want his fellow-believers to mourn death in the same way that unbelievers do because they have no hope. Primarily what Paul has in mind here are Gentile beliefs about life after death in his day. Now views in the ancient world and Greece and in Rome about life after death were actually quite varied but exactly none of them anticipated a literal physical resurrection from the dead. That idea would have been very strange to them. It’s kind of hard to wrap our heads around that because we grew up with it. We will rise from the dead. The Lord will come back and raise us up and give us new bodies and we breathe that air. But in Thessalonica that idea would have been completely and totally foreign to them.
Now they did believe in a life after death, but even here it was something like your disembodied soul ends up in a shadowy, dreary, half existence in the underworld. In the Iliad, in Homer’s Iliad, we read, “the souls of the dead have no strength nor any sense of the joy or pain they felt when they were alive for the dead are like shadows, pale and insubstantial”. One scholar talking about death in Greece and Rome put it this way, “The existence of the dead is undifferentiated. All share the same joyless shadowy gloom”. And most of the Thessalonians would have been raised with this idea, with this belief. When your loved one dies there is grief and pain and bereavement and loss and that’s it.
You might honour them, pour out a meal or a libation offering to remember them… they were gone! And so would they one day. It’s actually not that dissimilar to Western culture. What’s the most popular option in Western culture? Atheism… nothingness… You die and you’re gone. That’s that.
I’ve never actually been to the funeral of an unbeliever. But I’ve heard about them from others. I’ve read about them. I’ve watched them depicted. And there seems to be a few approaches to an unbelieving funeral that has all the same goal. Numb the pain and pretend that this thing isn’t happening.
Neither the person… for example one approach to be neither the person who died nor the people at the funeral ever believed in God ever and yet you’ll hear something at the funeral that politely pretends that it’s true now, “He’s probably up there right now having a cold one with the big guy.”
The other approach is usually something like comedy or humour. Have a celebration, have a joke. My wife really loves the movie Love Actually, and in there, someone dies, an unbeliever, and, they play Bye Bye Baby by the Bay City Rollers, because it’s sort of inappropriate and humorous. It’s out of place. It’s meant to get you to laugh, so it’s a party, it’s a celebration. Why? Because that’s what they would have wanted, they tell themselves. The approach is different, but the goal is the same. Numb the pain of the permanent, irreversible loss of the one you loved and will never ever see again. That’s what unbelievers do. They’re trying to desperately escape and ignore what the famous atheist Bertrand Russell was brave enough to admit. Here’s what Bertrand Russell wrote about the life of human beings:
The life of man is a long march through the night surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain toward a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. One by one as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death… Brief and powerless is man’s life. On him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls, pitiless and dark, blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.
That’s the unbeliever who has no hope. And that is not, Paul says, how believers are to think and feel and react to death. Notice Paul does not say that we are not to grieve at all. He doesn’t say don’t grieve, don’t be sad, don’t mourn He just says don’t grieve as they do. For the Christian grief will be real, and it will be there, but it always must be mingled with hope. Our sorrow is real and deep but it is not final. Despair and death does not have the last word, and it’s not our way as Christians.
When Alexa and I got married we had one more year left at Moody Bible Institute and we lived in the apartment complex in down-town Chicago that was reserved for married students end some of the employees that worked at Moody. I had met this guy named Cyril a few years before Lex and I got married He’d been the supervisor of the dorm I was on and it turns out that he ended up living in the same building that Lex and I did two few floors down. He was this wonderfully quirky fellow. He was really short and kind of fat. He was Filipino And he had this weird laugh and funny sense of humour. What I’ll always remember about Cyril is that he was hospitable. He defined hospitality. He always had some amazing food. He was great cook: pork fried rice cookies. He used to take cookies and he’d put like instant coffee in him and they were amazing. I can’t explain it. He always had a board game or a DVD collection when those were still around. His door was always open, he was always coming to visit us, he always had a car to borrow. Cyril defined hospitality and I think there’s something about extreme hospitality that is just Christlike; it’s the essence of being Christlike. If generosity and hospitality are the essence of Christlikeness, Cyril was not perfect but he was Christlike. He was always looking for ways to serve others. After Moody we moved an hour down the road to Wheaton college to go to graduate school and still nearly every weekend Cyril would drive out to Wheaton just to hang out with us and of course he brought with him cookies and food and board games and DVDs; he was the most unlikely friend for a young married couple to have but at the end our time at Chicago he was like family an uncle or big brother.
Years later Cyril had taken a job actually just a few hours away from where we were doing doctoral studies in the Philadelphia area. I called him up one day to see how he was doing. He said he was okay but he had a headache for several days.
It turns out that Cyril had a blood clot in the back of his brain. A few days later he was in the hospital and a few days after that his family got a hold of me and they said I should come see him.
I knew that it was serious, but when I got there, it was kind of surreal. I struggled to know what to say. He definitely didn’t look good, but I didn’t want to believe that he was dying I’d never been around death before. So I tried humour, and I was just stumbling with my words. I didn’t know what to do. Now for Cyril though it was a struggle for him to speak, his speech was laboured and slurred, but I remember at one point. He he looked at me and he said to me it’s okay, “The Lord is good, and I’m ready.”
I didn’t realise it at the time but I think that was for me, Cyril’s final act of extreme hospitality.
Cyril was comforting me on his own death bed.
And he was able to do it because he was full of hope, he was full of confidence and trust in his God who had walked with him his whole life and he was calling him home.
I miss Cyril. I miss his funny laugh and his quirky sense of humour. I miss his pork fried rice. I miss his frustration at my then immaturity.
But I also know that not only he is present with the Lord but that I will see him again. My missing Cyril is full of the eager expectation of the verses 14 to 17.
So let’s look at verses 14-17. Here Paul tells us why we don’t grieve like they do. Whether it’s tomorrow or a thousand years from now Jesus himself will come down from heaven with a shout of victory with a heavenly honour guard of archangels and he will bring Cyril with him.
And then, Cyril, and you and I will be with the Lord always. On that day, if I’m alive when it comes, I’ll be looking for Cyril. I’ll have eyes for my Saviour, but I think I’ll also be wondering where Cyril is. Somewhere in the back of the heavenly archangel ceremony thing happening.
And I’m sure many of you will be looking for others as well. So, in verse 14 Paul gives us our first reason why we don’t grieve as they do. We don’t grieve as they do because we believe that Jesus died and rose again. There it is. The extent to which you are convinced in your soul, in the deepest part of your being, in the marrow of your bones that Jesus lived, and died, and rose again, and is the very Son of God, sent to rescue you from sin and death. That is the extent that you can be sure that your death is not the end, but merely, as Paul says, sleep.
Sleep would have been a quite common euphemism for death, a polite way to speak about it back then. But I actually think Paul takes it and uses it sort of tongue-in-cheek; for unbelievers death is the void; it is nothingness or a shadowy existence in the underworld: the loss of all that makes you yourself forever. But Paul almost makes light of death. It’s no more concerning than a Sunday afternoon nap in the end. Now sleep here doesn’t mean that we’re unconscious until Christ comes back and in Philippians 1 Paul says that “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord”. He says that he longs to depart and be with Christ. The point here when Paul discusses death as sleep is that because of Christ’s costly sacrifice to reverse death through death, death now for us becomes no more difficult for God to reverse than waking up a child from a nap.
So that’s our first reason why we can hope. Our second reason in verse 15 is also at the same time Paul giving us more details about what this is going to look like for our loved ones who have died. Paul assures us in verse 15 that he’s not making this up. Even by his own divinely given apostolic authority this teaching doesn’t derive from him it is the word of the Lord. These are the very words of Jesus himself. Paul says we tell you this by the word of the Lord. Paul is likely paraphrasing Jesus’ own teaching here: something like Matthew 24 verses 30 to 31, “and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great authority and he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call and they will gather his elect from the four winds”. This promise comes from Christ.
Now in verses 15, 16, and 17 it’s at this point when we start dealing with riding on clouds and flying around like Superman, it’s at this point in our text that many scholars start to make guesses about exactly what the Thessalonians were confused about or were wondering about but I think guessing about what some people thought 2000 years ago based on one side of a conversation is often hazardous to faith.
Kind of funny, too, when they start making these guesses, the more of a guess it is, the more sure they are that they’re right. But anyway, I think what Paul is doing here is that he just wants to make it very clear that both, the Thessalonians who are alive, and their loved ones who have died will be fully part of Christ’s victory over any evil and death on that day. That’s what Paul is doing. We don’t have to guess about what’s going on here. He’s just saying, for those of you who are still alive, you need not worry for your loved ones who have died. They will not miss out. They’re not going to miss out on anything on that great day. They will be fully included. Look what he says, “We who are alive will by no means go ahead of those who have fallen asleep.” He’s assuring them that their loved ones are fully included in that great and glorious day of the resurrection. Paul is giving us comfort. He’s giving comfort to the living over the fate of their loved ones, who have died. So it’s the word of the Lord, the dead who you love in Christ will not miss out on anything.
And in verse 16 we get a third reason why. We can grieve but with hope. The reason comes in the form of what I like to call an ancient version of a movie trailer. I think verses 16 and 17 are basically Paul… Paul knows that sometimes what we need is not a theological teaching. We don’t need more dry propositions. But what we need is a scene, an image, a movie trailer. Paul’s trying to give a sneak peek into that day in order to encourage us. To get us excited for the full cinematic release of the second coming of the Lord. He is trying to whet our spiritual appetites, for the return of our saviour Who will come in triumph, in victory. We will shout of command. With a heavenly host. The trumpet of God. Look what he says, “The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a shout of command, with the voice of the archangel and with the Trumpet of God.”
Paul wants us to get lost in the sights and the sounds of this, to actually imagine it. The imagery is likely drawn here from the Old Testament. Texts like Exodus 19:16, where lightning and clouds and trumpet blasts accompany Yahweh himself as he descends on the mountain temple of Sinai to be with his people and give them his revelation. Is probably drawn from the Greco-Roman background of an emperor returning from war and victory, or the visit of a king or a high official, and all their pomp and ceremony. Celebration and joy the people would stream out of the city to meet the emperor miles down the road and welcome him back as they gave him praise and adulation for defeating chaos and keeping them safe. Now it’s certainly possible because of this imagery both in the Old Testament and the Greco-Roman background, I think that it’s at least possible that this imagery is figurative.
And it’s also certainly possible that on that day, it will literally look like this in every single detail, but it’s also possible that what Paul is doing is simply trying to paint a picture of what that day will look like using experiences and examples his audience would have been familiar with. The point is that it’s going to be awesome, going to be glorious, and I think we don’t understand exactly what it will look like until it happens, and we get to experience. Wether or not Jesus literally floats down from the sky and there’s a literal trumpet blast, the point is that this present physical reality with all of its imperfections is going to be torn away, and as one author puts it, “the formally hidden heavenly dimension of the new eternal reality which God has prepared for us will appear, along with our Savior.” It will be literal, and physical, and visible. And it will end all tears and suffering and death.
So in verse 17 Paul turns the scene back to us, back to the living and the resurrected dead who are caught up to meet the Lord in the air. Notice again the continual emphasis on the full inclusion of the dead along with the living, nobody misses out. The text says we who are alive, together with them, all of us will be caught up to meet the Lord. This is an interesting word, caught up to meet the Lord. It’s a very strong and sudden word, and I mean that literally. To be caught up as used in texts like Matthew 13, 19 in the parable of the sower and here it goes: “When anyone hears the message about the Kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown”: catches it away. John 20:28, “I will give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand” or in Acts 23:10 we see that the soldiers come and snatch up Paul and take him to safety before a mob could tear him to pieces. We are caught up, snatched away into the air, it’s sudden and almost violent. Why does Paul use this word? I think he uses this word continuing the imagery because sometimes I think it can feel like grief and sorrow and pain in this world have no end, it’s just one long endless night. We’ve all been there. I think here using language like being caught up or snatched away is Paul’s way of saying the dawn when it comes will be swift and sure or as the Psalmist says, “weeping may tarry for the night but joy comes with the morning.” Hang on, hang on for just a little longer, He’s coming.
And then the text says we will meet him in the clouds. This has also caused a great deal of debate. What does it mean that we’ll meet him in the clouds? For me, I think Seyun Kim (?) is both humorous and correct when he says, “This reference to clouds is not because clouds suggested themselves as convenient vehicles for transportation.” This is because clouds are what? A regular feature of biblical theophanies. How many times in the Old Testament when you read about Yahweh coming to visit his people are there clouds. He’s referring to the cloud over Sinai. The cloud over the tabernacle or the temple when God comes to meet with his people. Of course he’s referring to the cloud rider Himself. The Son of Man in Daniel 7 who rides on a cloud to meet the ancient of days, and receive an eternal indestructible kingdom for his people. Paul wants this movie trailer, this sneak peek of Jesus’ return to be interwoven with the amazing story of Yahweh in the Old Testament for that’s who Jesus is, Paul is implying. So when we meet Jesus will it literally be in the air? Well, the little boy in me who’s always loved Superman and the Green Lantern, hopes so. But I’m not sure; I don’t know. At least what Paul is doing is he’s telling us on that great and joyous day, we will be lifted above the earth. I think this is a figurative way of saying we will be lifted above the brokenness and sorrow and the mundane reality of life as both the earth and we are remade.
Again, many point out here to that meeting the Lord in the air also has behind it this picture of Caesar returning victorious from battling enemies on behalf of his people. They stream out to meet him, offering him praise as they all go back together in the city. In fact, when we go look at this phrase “to meet” in the rest of the New Testament, we find that exact image in Matthew 25 verses 6 through 10. In Matthew 25 we have the parable of the virgins who go out to meet the bridegroom. The ones who are ready go out to meet that bridegroom and in then, in Matthew 25:10, the bridegroom arrives and they all go in together to the marriage feast. They come out to meet him and then they go back in to have a party.
And so here in verse 17 our scene ends, just as we hope it will. What does the text say? “We will be together with the Lord always.”
So, remember what Paul is doing here: he’s giving us encouragement, giving us comfort. He’s making a movie trailer for us, something to get excited about. I think he wants us to actually imagine it, to get lost in it. The point of verses 14 through 17 is at the very end there of verses 17, so that we will be with the Lord forever or always. This goal, as Beale puts it, is the ultimate goal of God’s work of resurrection and new creation. God’s loyal love for me and for you is so deep and so profound that he not only sends his one and only Son to die in my place, he is also by His power remaking the entire universe so that we can be with Him and with each other always. That is the depth of His love for us. That is what Paul wants them to grasp and to feel and to imagine and to think about. And for all the times that Paul can be be hard to understand, really tricky, really difficult, Peter says so, here he keeps it short, and simple, and very direct. He ends the passage saying, you got it? Good! Now encourage each other with these words.
Almost as if he’s giving them a formula for how to do funerals here.
He is saying, wonder about the new creation. Imagine a world without sickness and grief and death where it is full of the potential and the life and the possibility of Eden and more. It is coming, he says, it is on the way. Use this image to fuel the flames of your hope even in death, so that together we can take one more step go one more mile, and as Paul says, finish the race well.
Christians throughout the ages, since Paul wrote, have been trying to imagine this reality. So I’ll end here with one of my favourite authors who does his best to describe this hope in, as we all have, as we eagerly await the day when death will be no more forever.
And as he spoke, he no longer looked to them like a lion. But the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories. And we can most truly say that they all live happily ever after. But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world, and all their adventures in Narnia, had only been the cover and the title picture.
Now, at last, they were beginning Chapter 1 of the Great Story, which no one on Earth has read, which goes on and on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Morning Church: Sunday, 8:30am & 10:30am
Kids Church: 8:30am & 10:30am
Playgroup: Friday, 9:30am
Youth: Sunday, 3:30pm
Evening Church: 5:00pm
WATCH LIVE: from 8:30am
© 2022 Mitchelton Presbyterian Church.
Website By Leids Digital