What will happen to people who are still alive when Jesus returns? Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4, verse 15, “According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.”
Paul is talking about Christians who are in two different stations of life. First, there are Christians who have died the sleeping kind of death (see post explaining the “sleeping” kind of death here). And second, there are Christians who are alive. No surprise there.
Then Paul mentions two things that will affect Christians who are dead and those who are alive. He mentions “the coming of the Lord,” and he writes that Christians who are alive at the coming the Lord will not precede those who died the sleeping kind of death.
I find this to be a somewhat mysterious passage. What is the coming of the Lord? And why is there an order of meeting the Lord when he comes? Alive people have to wait to meet Jesus? Christians who are alive meet the Lord after the dead Christians wake up and meet the Lord first?
As we continue reading in verses 16–17, Paul explains it for us, “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.”
Paul’s word have resonance with what Jesus himself taught in Matthew 25:30–31, “Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”
A few verses later in Matthew 25, Jesus depicts this in verses 39–41, “That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
Is this a description of what some have called the rapture? What is the rapture? The rapture is the idea that when Jesus returns, Christians will meet Jesus in the air, while the nonChristians will be left behind to face suffering for seven years. That teaching is a relatively new one when you take in the scope of 2000 years of Christian history. It started in the mid-1800s and became extremely popular in America in the 1900s.
Have you ever heard of the book The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, or the movie A Thief in the Night, or Larry Norman’s song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”? Those were all very popular in the 1960s and 70s. In the last 20+ years, the Left Behind series of books and films are a recent example of this teaching. Those books, songs and films are all based on a rapture way of understanding and interpreting the Bible.
But something happened about 30 years ago. In academic biblical circles, this teaching was scrutinized stringently by scholars, and those scholars largely found the teaching of the rapture didn’t hold up. In other words, those scholars said that the biblical passages that seem to describe the rapture are not actually describing a rapture. Today what you are much more likely to find are biblical scholars talking about the idea of the rapture as an artifact of evangelical theological history, or as just one potential interpretational option among others. There are clearly still pockets of teaching out there that strongly emphasize rapture teaching.
Is Paul teaching a rapture? Is he saying that Jesus is going come back, but not to earth, only to the sky, and angels will blow a trumpet, and first all the dead Christians will wake up and fly up to Jesus, and then after them, the alive Christians will fly up to Jesus, and they will all be in heaven?
Maybe. Maybe not. When I read verses 16–17, I see why some people read Paul as teaching the rapture. But then again, I grew up hearing about the rapture in school (I went to a private Christian school through 8th grade), in church, and in college (I went to an evangelical Bible college), all of which believed in the rapture viewpoint. If you’ve been taught the idea of the rapture, it is very hard for to read this passage any other way.
But there are other ways. In fact, many scholars interpret these passages other ways.
One way to interpret this passage and others like it is to ask, “How did the original audience interpret it?” Remember that when we study 1st Thessalonians, we are reading other people’s mail. This letter was not written to us. So it had meaning to the original audience.
Here is a brief review of the historical/cultural context of the Christians living in the city of Thessalonica at the time Paul wrote the letter. The original audience had an expectation that Jesus would return in their lifetime. They were struggling with persecution. The original audience of Christians were a tiny minority when it came to world religions; in fact, they were a minority among religions in their local area.
Think about how significantly different we are from them. We contemporary Christians have the privilege of reviewing and learning from 2000 years of Church history. Many contemporary Christians are not persecuted (while some are). In some places, like the USA, Christians are in the religious majority.
In other words, we contemporary Christians would do well to try to open our eyes to another culture, that of the persecuted Christians in Thessalonica. For the believers in Thessalonica, therefore, this is a passage about hope. That’s why Paul writes in 4:18, “encourage one another with these words.” That’s why Paul is saying that there is not just a dying kind of death, but also a sleeping kind of death from which we can wake up to meet Jesus. No matter if you are a genuine Christian who passes away before Jesus returns, or if you are a genuine Christian who is alive when he returns, there’s hope! Jesus is coming again.
When you are facing persecution, imagine how encouraging it could be to have hope. I think you and I can take great courage and comfort in this teaching too. We are people with hope, we carry hope, and we deliver hope to the people around us.
The culture of the Kingdom of Jesus is a culture of hope. How are you expressing hope to the people around you? How are you oozing hope? How are you encouraging one another?
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
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