Well, just imagine for a moment that you paid a great price for something, only for it all to fall through, and so the result is you paid an expensive price for nothing. Perhaps at work you work for many years, very long hours, in a junior role that is really quite tough, because you’ve been promised that there is a promotion for you after, say, five years, and as four and a half years is up the company becomes bankrupt and you are made redundant. All those long years seemingly for nothing. The thing that you gave up all of that effort for never materialised. What a waste. Or perhaps you’ve decided that you as a family need to afford a better house than the one you currently live in, so you go without holidays for three years, you go without any new clothes, and you live entirely on beans on toast for three years. You spend expensive money on surveys, on mortgage applications, and all of those processes, only at the last minute for the house that you’ve been working towards all that time to be taken off the market. All those sacrifices made for no gain to you.
We’ve seen that the Apostle Paul’s teaching included the second coming, that as he only had three weeks in the city of Thessalonica to teach them the essentials of the Christian faith, the truths surrounding the return of the Lord Jesus were something that he regarded as essential. It wasn’t something that he intended to return to at a later date. It’s something that is part and parcel of the essential gospel, the good news of the Lord Jesus. And so it is that the Thessalonians are Christians, and their hope is all tied up in Jesus’s return.
Well, just imagine then that something happened that proved that that wasn’t going to happen. Jesus wasn’t going to return. The whole thing has been called off. They would be absolutely devastated. We’ve heard, haven’t we, how the church at the Thessalonians has suffered a great deal. Paul had to leave in such a hurry because he was persecuted, and after he’s gone the Thessalonian Christians have been persecuted as well. They’ve made heavy sacrifices for being a Christian, and the main event they were looking forward to was the return of Jesus. So if that is called off and cancelled, they’ve made all of those sacrifices for nothing. They would be absolutely devastated.
You’ll remember in the opening verses of 1 Thessalonians, the first three verses, as Paul thanks God for them and for their Christian faith, he thanks God that they show the three core qualities of faith, love, and hope. And then you’ll remember at the middle of the letter Paul echoes his opening thanksgiving and then prays a prayer that the Thessalonians will continue to grow as young Christians. And again he wants them to grow in the outworking of their faith, to grow in their love for one another, that that would overflow and increase, but also that their hope in the return of the Lord Jesus would work itself out in practice.
Well, I said just imagine if something happened that told them the return of Jesus had been called off — wouldn’t that be devastating? Actually, this isn’t theoretical. It seems that the Thessalonians have misunderstood what Paul taught, and they were expecting Jesus to come back really very soon indeed. Jesus and Paul never said that. In fact, as we will see, Paul himself teaches even in this letter that nobody knows the day or the hour of Jesus’s return. It could be soon, it could be a long time. And Jesus taught the same thing. But the Thessalonians have misunderstood. They thought Jesus was due back imminently. Paul’s only been gone a few months, and in that short time some people in the church family have died, and as a result their world has just fallen apart. Jesus hasn’t come back. He’s left it too late. He’s taken too long. And now some of the precious members of their church family will miss the big event because they died before it could happen.
Sometimes we have to face long queues for things. I can remember the long queues that could take you half an hour to an hour to get into a supermarket when they restricted the numbers who could come in, in the earlier stages of the pandemic. Maybe you’ve been to a theme park and had to queue for what seems like half of your day to get on a ride. And sometimes you wonder, what happens if I die before I get to the front of the queue? It’s taking so long. Well, that’s how the Thessalonians were feeling about the return of Jesus. They were waiting in line for him to come, and some of them were dying in the queue.
And as I say, the pandemic has exposed the fact that we as a society do not know what to do with death. And so the hope that Paul holds out here, which is real, is hope that we in our day as Christians, and the people who live around us, urgently need to hear.
There are four things in this passage that Paul wants them and us to be, and those four kind of flow from each other, a bit like a cascade, a waterfall, a chocolate fountain if you prefer that picture — each flowing on from the one before. As we become the first thing Paul wants us to be, that will cascade over and make us into the second thing, and so on.
1. Be Informed
So the first thing then that Paul wants us to be is informed. He wants us to be informed about what happens when a Christian dies, and he wants us to be informed about the return of Jesus. Our destiny is all tied up with him. There’s this language we get in the New Testament about the Christian life as being “in him,” in Jesus, and we get that language in these verses we’re looking at this morning. So our destiny is all tied up with him. Our present and our future, our well-being, our standing — they’re all identical with his. Jesus’s future becomes our future. Jesus’s present is our present. Jesus’s standing with God is our standing with God. We are in him. We are part and parcel with the Lord Jesus. We come as a pair now with him. And therefore these two belong together: what happens when a Christian dies, and what happens when Jesus returns, are different ways of looking at the same question.
And so it is in this passage, as Paul wants to inform the Thessalonians and us, that he speaks of three different resurrections, three different times when people are raised up.
Jesus Rose
The first is that Jesus died and rose. This means that our faith and our hope is grounded not just on wishful thinking but on the facts of history. The fact is that Jesus rose, and therefore it’s a certain fact that Jesus will return. Back in chapter 1, verse 10, Paul tied these two together — he tied together the idea that because Jesus rose we can be certain of his return — and he does the same thing here.
And Paul speaks of Jesus’s return in verse 16, where it is that on the day Jesus comes back to this world, three things will happen all at the same time. Let me read verse 16: “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.”
(a) A Loud Command
So, three things. First of all, there’s a loud command. Most people who comment on this passage seem to think that this is Jesus commanding the dead to rise. You remember when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” and the dead man came out of the tomb from which the stone had been rolled away. People writing on that passage make the observation that if Jesus had forgotten to say the word “Lazarus” and simply said “come out,” the dead from any tomb within earshot would have all been raised — because when Jesus speaks to the dead and tells them to rise and come out of their tombs, they do. And there will be a loud command on the day when Jesus returns.
(b) The Voice of the Archangel
And then, secondly, there will be the voice of the archangel. Back in chapter 3, verse 13, Paul spoke of Jesus’s final return being accompanied by all his angels. Jesus himself taught this in a number of his parables and a number of his explicit teachings to his disciples, that when he finally comes back he will come in all his glory with all his holy angels.
(c) God’s Trumpet
And then the third thing that happens when Jesus returns is the trumpet, the trumpet call of God. There will be a great fanfare. You know how it is when a dignitary or a member of the royalty enters the room in great state pageant — sometimes you have trumpeters sounding a trumpet call to tell everyone to stand to their feet and welcome the most important person into the room. Well, when the Lord Jesus returns there will be the most impressive trumpet fanfare that you have ever heard.
And so with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and all the other angels in attendance, and with a loud trumpet fanfare, Jesus will return to this world. It will be a global event and it will be an unmissable event.
The Dead in Christ will Rise
The second resurrection in this passage is that those who have died in Christ will be raised. So let’s have another look at verse 16: “The Lord himself will come down from heaven” — loud command, voice of the archangel, the trumpet call — “and the dead in Christ will rise first.” This is because they are the dead in Christ; his resurrection guarantees their resurrection. But Paul’s point is they will rise first, that the people who are still alive at the time certainly won’t beat them to it and pip them across the finish line.
We Will be Raised
So: Jesus died and rose; those who died in Christ will be raised; and thirdly, we will be raised — that is, we who are still alive at the time. Whoever that is — now, at Paul’s time of writing, that could have included him and the Thessalonians. He didn’t know when Jesus would come back. We’ll see that explicitly in next week’s passage. It turned out it wouldn’t include Paul and the Thessalonian Christians to whom he writes, because they have all long since died and we’re still waiting. It might include some of us. Maybe some of us here this morning — Jesus will return during our lifetime. It might not. The point is, though, there will be people alive when it happens. There will be people who at that day can say, “We were still alive at that time.” Here’s verse 17: “After that,” says Paul, “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 all be together” — us with them, the Christians who have already died — “and all of us together with Jesus. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”
So Paul says, let’s be informed. There are three resurrections: Jesus died and rose; those who have died in Christ will be raised; and then we who are left will be raised. And so we will all be together.
But being informed is not an end in itself. That’s just the first waterfall in the line of four, the first lock in the ladder, the first layer of the chocolate fountain. We’re to be informed so that we can be hopeful.
2. Be Hopeful
Now, I hesitate to use the heading, because we today think of hope as wishful thinking. Well, let’s use Bible words with Bible meanings. In the Bible, hope means a certain future based on what God has promised. So here’s verse 13: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death… so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.”
So that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind who have no hope. You see, if we’re properly informed we will still grieve, but we will grieve with hope. Death still hurts. Grief is still real. Of course we still grieve. But there is a big difference in the way that a Christian grieves the loss of a fellow Christian. We still grieve, but we do so with hope, anchored in the future that God has promised. Whereas Paul says the rest of mankind grieves without hope.
I once found myself taking a funeral at a crematorium — I forget when or where — and the funeral before me finished well before the end of its slot, so I found myself talking in the vestry room, where we who take the funerals get to prepare and get ready, talking to the person who had just taken the previous funeral. It wasn’t an Anglican clergyman or clergywoman; it was a humanist officiant. So I asked the question that was on my mind. I said, “Tell me, when you take a funeral, what hope do you hold out to those who are grieving?” And she said, “I simply tell them that the person who has died lives on in their memories.” Grieving without hope.
Or the child who’s been told that grandad is now one of the stars that they see when they look up at the night sky — the person who told them that knows it isn’t true. They know that when we die we don’t turn into a star, but they didn’t know what else to say, so they just said the only thing they thought that might help. Grieving without hope.
But we do have hope, and we have hope in two places. The first is the language that we get in this passage of death as sleep: “Brothers and sisters, we don’t want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death,” and then Paul says, “God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him,” and “we will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.” The point of the language of sleep is very simple: we wake up again. You probably didn’t know where the English word “cemetery” comes from. It comes from repronouncing slightly a Latin word, which itself comes from repronouncing slightly a Greek word, and it’s the same root as the word we get here for sleep. It’s the ancient Greek word for a dormitory — for us, a room, a place in which people sleep. And that is what a churchyard is. Churchyards are dormitories. They are simply places where a large number of people are currently sleeping until it’s time for them to wake up again.
There is the language of sleep. And then the second place where we find hope is the ultimate good that is offered out here, the ultimate goal, the thing that we most get excited about, and that is the idea that we will be with the Lord forever. It’s easy to think of Jesus, when it comes to talking about heaven, as the sort of bus driver who takes you to heaven — well, he is that, he’s “the way, the truth, and the life” — but he’s also the destination. Ultimately, the most wonderful thing about heaven, about glory, about the future life, is that we get to be with Jesus.
I don’t know about you, but that challenges me quite profoundly. What do you most look forward to as a Christian about the life to come? Is it the idea that there will be no suffering? Is it the idea that there’ll be the most fantastic food and drink? Is it the idea that you’ll be reunited with those that you’ve loved and lost? Those are all true, and they are all wonderful. But actually the most wonderful thing for us should be the thought that we will get to be with Jesus, and be with him forever.
3. Be Persevering
Well, being full of hope is not an end in itself either. Paul wants us to be informed so that we can be hopeful, so that we can be persevering. Now, remember the backdrop to this letter: this is a young church that has been heavily persecuted. The whole letter is to urge them to keep going. And having a proper hope in the face of death helps us to keep going in two ways.
It puts a limit on things. The first limit it puts is: the worst that they can do, as they persecute you, the worst they can do is this — they can kill you. Now just think about that for a moment. What happens if they kill you? Have they just destroyed your life, destroyed your hope, destroyed your Christian faith? No. They’ve taken you straight to victory. So that if they kill you, it’s a little bit like landing on the ladder in Snakes and Ladders that leads you straight up to square 100. It is your short circuit to victory. It is — this is the fastest way to the future that you’ve been waiting for. The worst they can do to hurt you actually is to accelerate that.
But the second limit it applies is a limit as to the longest it can last. So if the Christian life is a call to persevere, to keep going — how long do we have to put up with these hard times? Forever? The answer is no, because Jesus’s return is in the calendar, and it sets a closing date. There is a finishing line for this call to persevere. There is a finishing tape through which we will run, and then the race is over. So stand firm, says Paul. Keep going.
4. Be Encouraging
Let’s be informed, so that we can be hopeful, so that we can be persevering, so that we can be encouraging. Verse 18 is the reason why Paul wrote all of this: “Therefore,” he says, “encourage one another with these words.”
Hope news like this is just too good to keep to yourself. Life is tough, but we’re a family, and if there are people who are struggling — that is, struggling to keep going — encourage them. Remind others in our church family of the wonderful hope that we have. We have a wonderful future with Jesus. Death is only sleep. Suffering, including persecution, won’t go on forever. If we’re in Jesus we will be reunited with those we love who are also in Jesus. All of this is not make-believe. It’s grounded and secured in the fact of history that Jesus died and rose. So pray for, look for, opportunities to encourage each other with these truths this week.
Well, that’s what Paul wants for us. He wants us to be informed so that we can be hopeful, so that we can be persevering, so that we can be encouraging. Be informed. Be full of hope. Persevere. Encourage each other.
And let me just say before we close, if you’re here this morning as someone who is not yet a Christian, who is still looking into this — isn’t this wonderful? Don’t you at least want this to be true? Jesus died and rose, and therefore he holds out certain hope in the face of death itself, and hope in the face of grief.