Christ’s Coming: 1 Thessalonians vs. ‘Left Behind’

First Thessalonians 4: The Coming of the Lord

¹³ But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. ¹⁴ For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. ¹⁵ For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. ¹⁶ For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. ¹⁷ Then we who are 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. ¹⁸ Therefore encourage one another with these words. (English Standard Version)

Thessalonians is one of the earliest books of the New Testament. (Some think the earliest. F.F. Bruce suggested the possibility that Galations preceded it. But overall, James was probably the first.) Understandably, these new Christians in this new church had questions and misunderstandings that needed answers.

As v. 15 shows, this section answers questions about the coming of the Lord, the Parousia.[With reference to those who remain alive at that time.]

It begins in v. 13 with Paul addressing their concern about fellow Christians who have already died. Were these who had died now at some disadvantage? What hope did those who still live have for them when Christ returns?

Verse 14 points to Jesus’ death and resurrection, the central theme of Christian hope concerning those who have died.

See 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul addresses the question of the resurrection. Christ’s resurrection was the first fruits, and the resurrection of Christians is the final harvest, v.23 “at His coming (parousia)” when “we shall all be changed—in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (verse 52).

Verse 15 gives the key point of this passage (addressing the concerns of the Thessalonians) that, when Christ returns,  the living Christians have no advantage over those who have died.

Verse 16 describes, in familiar terms (for us who have the NT), Christ’s return (parousia). This is no secret event.

This Coming is described in the same terms as other passages about the Lord’s coming:

“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God….in the clouds…”

Acts 1 “…a cloud took him out of their sight….’This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’”

Dan 7 “…with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man”

Rev 1 “…Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him…”

Mark 13 “…then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. 27And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven…”

Verse 17 pictures the “we” who are still alive as following those who have died “to meet the Lord in the air…”

To meet [apantasin] the Lord… “When a dignitary paid an official visit (parousia) to a city in Hellenistic times, the action of the leading citizens in going out to meet him and escort him back on the final stage of his journey [to that city] was called the apantesis.” (F.F. Bruce,I &2 Thessalonians, WBC)

See N.T. Wright speak of this, here.

Verse 18  (This is no gnostic revelation of some new doctrine of a secret ‘rapture’.) The whole point of this passage is to encourage each other in the hope given to us regarding death through Christ’s death and resurrection.

The Saving Dawn of Christ's Crucifixion

Reblogged from Fr. Ted's Blog:

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TODAY CHRIST'S HOLY PASSION DAWNS UPON THE WORLD AS A SAVING LIGHT, FOR HE COMES OF HIS GOODNESS TO SUFFER:
HE WHO HOLDS ALL THINGS IN HIS HAND
CONSENTS TO BE HUNG UPON THE WOOD
IN ORDER TO SAVE MANKIND.

Read more… 6 more words

Today, 5 May, is Pascha (Easter) in the East. Blessing upon all who celebrate our Risen Lord, Christ Jesus.

The Easter Message and John 3:16

Reblogged from TextsInContext:

John 3:16...Keeping the Easter Message

Many Christians have lost their grade school grammar and so have lost the focus of this verse.  A few weeks ago, I heard a pastor, using this text, emphasizing that God sooooooo loved the world.  The main focus of the verse was not even acknowledged.

So: ‘in a manner or way indicated,’ hence, “God thus loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…”

Read more… 81 more words

Holy Week--Hosanna!

Reblogged from TextsInContext:

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Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your King is coming to you;
He is just and having salvation,
Lowly and riding on a donkey,
A colt, the foal of a donkey.
--Zechariah 9

Jerusalem and The Passover Feast

The ISBE sets the scene:

Pilgrimage was made annually to Jerusalem for the Passover sacrifice…
Passover in NT temple days was a spectacle of excitement and devotion.

Read more… 422 more words

7 Ways to Do a Bad Word Study.

Reblogged from Scribblepreach:

This week has been a fascinating walk through the world of “Word-Studies”. My guess is, you’ve encountered some sort of word story in the last couple of months: a Bible study, a sermon, a commentary, a quip about agape love or a defense of a biblical viewpoint you’re not sure of. But sometimes it’s hard to wade through the muck and know when you’re being short changed.

Read more… 931 more words

[Reblog, Article is Not by Michael Snow] For further reading on this topic, see Chapter One of

Exegetical Fallacies by D.A. Carson

What is the Bible?

Reblogged from Already Not Yet:

J.I. Packer:

Most people in churches nowadays have never read through the Bible even once; the older Christian habit of reading it from start to finish as a devotional discipline has virtually vanished. So in describing the Bible we start from scratch, assuming no prior knowledge.

The Bible consists of 66 separate pieces of writing, composed over something like a millennium and a half.

Read more… 431 more words

I John: “God Is Love” vis-a-vis Heresy

“God is love”—A most familiar phrase in

1 John 4

Leon Morris, the noted New Testament scholar, asks, “How do we harmonize the assurance that ‘God is love’ with the assertion that ‘our God is a consuming fire’? Most of us never think about such problems, and in the end our idea of love is indistinguishable from that of the world around us.”1   (Testaments of Love, emphasis added)

As we have noted in the two previous posts, in First John [as in all Scripture], context is an essential key to right understanding.

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God thus loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

First, we see that “God is love” is not only an incomplete verse, and an incomplete sentence, but even an incomplete phrase.

First John presents a few key tests so that those to whom he is writing can be assured that theirs is the true faith in contrast to those who broke fellowship with them and claimed a new knowledge and spiritual superiority.

In the first post, we noted the test of affirming the Incarnation, which was denied by those with their new knowledge.  That is also affirmed here in verse 9, which parallels John 3:16—“For God thus loved the world…he sent his only begotten Son…”   And now, the test of obedience to Jesus’ command to them to “love one another” receives strong attention.  If we do not love our fellow Christians, we do not know God who first loved us.

John drives this point home, using “love” over 40 times in this little letter.  John’s first  use of “love” [But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him….(2:5)] gives us the test of obedience: keeping God’s word, keeping his commandments.  In his commentary, F. F. Bruce writes, “Love and obedience are inextricably interwoven because all the commandments of God are summed up in the law of love.”

[And where there is disobedience, love requires discipline.]

It is the same test and warning which Jesus gives to us in John chapter fourteen.

In our day, many false teachers use “God is love” as a mantra to encourage disobedience to God’s word, to his commands.  For decades “love” has been used to promote abortion and acceptance of unbiblical divorces and marriages in churches.  And, today, the branches from this seed include whole denominations that embrace and promote sodomy.

Unless those who still believe God’s word become salt and light in our day, there is no hope that God, the consuming fire, will lift his judgment on our dying culture.  We must reclaim the basics from the world’s distortions which we, many times, have blindly accepted.  We must get back to the Word.

“For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?”—1Peter 4:17

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Will we have the courage to draw a line, and to do it publicly, between those who take a full view of Scripture and those who have been infiltrated theologically and culturally? If we do not have the courage, we will cut the ground out from under the feet of our children, and we will destroy any hope of being the redeeming salt and light of our dying culture.

–Francis A. Schaeffer

The Great Evangelical Disaster

I John: Who Are “They”?

 But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you…(2:27).

 The First Epistle of John vividly illustrates the key role that context commands as we seek to understand the text.  Those Christians to whom John wrote knew, first hand, that context.  For us, understanding requires a little homework.

Our first step, in the study of any of the epistles, should be to read the whole letter through.  As we do that in 1 John, we come to the key clue, which clarifies the context, “They went out from us…”(2:19).

 Now, we need to seek some understanding of the spirit of those times.  Cerinthus, a contemporary of John at Ephesus, shows us the ideas that were in the air.  His dualistic world view [spirit=good/superior; matter=evil/inferior, i.e. that which was created, e.g. flesh, body] led to his docetic** (dokeo—to seem) view of Jesus—Jesus was a holy man but not divine.  He only ‘seemed’ to be Christ, but Christ, who descended on him at his baptism, departed from Jesus before his suffering and death. [Suffering is of the created/inferior world. The superior, uncreated spirit cannot suffer.]

This ‘Christianized’ spirit of the times, which developed into a more formal Christian Gnosticism by the mid-second century, emphasized an intuitive, special knowledge (gnosis) of mysteries, which separated out the true believers and gave them true salvation.

 Thus, as we read John’s letter, note his emphasis, starting in the first two verses, on the original, apostolic teaching “from the beginning” which his fellow Christians have received. John stresses the physical reality, e.g. “…our hands have handled.”  This stands in contrast to the new claims and new ways of those who “went out” from them.

Note the key verses, which test the doctrine of this new teaching:

Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?…(2:22).

By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, (4:2).

Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God,…(5:1).

 The ‘liars’ denial led to new ways.  Denial of the Incarnation, results in denial that “…the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin”(1:7). For those with this ‘new’ knowledge, sin is no longer of consequence.  This is merely a concern of the inferior, created order. So, as you read through John, note his repeated emphasis on sin.

   And as you read, underline all the times he uses “know” and “Jesus” to help you see his emphasis.  Then, see if you understand the opening verse (2:27) at the top of this post. We will look at that in the next post.

**Correction:

In summarizing for this article, I conflated two ideas. Here is an accurate note on Docetism:

“The Gnostics denied Christ’s humanity in two ways. Some, called Docetists, claimed that Jesus had only the appearance of flesh, without substance or reality (like a phantom). (“Docetism” comes from a Greek word, dokeo, meaning “to seem” or “to appear.”) Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, they said, was not real, for the body was not real.
Other Gnostics, following the lead of Cerinthus, believed the spiritual Christ entered into a human (physical) Jesus at the time of his baptism (in the form of a dove) and left the human Jesus before the crucifixion. History reveals that Cerinthus lived in Ephesus toward the end of the first century, which was also where the aged apostle John lived. Irenaeus (AD 130–200) tells us that John specifically directed his Gospel against Cerinthus (e.g., John 1:14; 20:19–31).2″

http://www.equip.org/PDF/JAJ210.pdf

Homosexuality, False Contexts, and Perverting Scripture

LEVITICUS 18

6  “‘No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord…..
22 You  shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Today, many Christians try to defend sodomy by attempting to place the condemnation of Scripture in a false context.  The prime example is Leviticus 18.  A pastor, from one of those denominations that endorses sodomy, explained to college students that the prohibition in Leviticus, chapter 18, was no different from the prohibition against eating pork or frog legs in Leviticus, chapter 11.
Of course, this is absurd. The clear divisions in Leviticus begin with, “And the Lord spoke…,” as in chapter 11 where the context is dietary laws and in chapter 18 which condemns sexual immorality: incest, adultery, and sodomy.
To be consistent with his argument, the pastor would have, also, had to defend these other sexual sins and child sacrifice (v.21).

The clear warning to God’s people at the beginning of chapter 18 is not to accept the sins of the nations around them.

The answer to God’s prohibitions against sin is not to defend sin but to acknowledge it and repent.  That is the call to all. We are all sinners. Christ died to deliver us from sin, not to enable us to make excuses for it.
The sad state of our society today is, to a large degree, due to the salt losing its savor. Another sin which is condemned in Leviticus is the failure to give faithful witness by remaining silent.
[See Ch. 4, Sin and Silence, in Love, Prayer, and Forgiveness: When Basics Become Heresies]

Luke 2: The Shepherds’ Faithfulness

“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you, who is Christ the Lord.  This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

 “Glory to God in the highest,
    and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.  When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.  But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.  The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

It will be wonderful to be glorifying and praising God in our gatherings this Christmas week. In this very familiar passage of Scripture, there is one line that seems unfamiliar, at least if we judge by our actions.

“…They made known what had been told them about this child…”

How many have heard us during this Holy Season?

We have many wonderful works of art depicting the Angels and the Shepherds, and of the Shepherds at The Manger Scene. But how hard it is to find just one that depicts the shepherds sharing the Good News of  our Saviour’s birth.