1 Thess. Lesson 7, Jesus Is Coming Back; Let’s Get to Work :: By Sean Gooding

Published on: October 28, 2021 by RR7

Chapter 4: 13-18

¹³ “But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. ¹⁴ For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.

¹⁵ ^“For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. ¹⁶ For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. ¹⁷ Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus, we shall always be with the Lord. ¹⁸ Therefore comfort one another with these words.”

All of us face the trials of life in different ways. Some are overthinkers or worriers; others tend to go numb; some sleep, some can’t; others get busy, and on and on we can go. The last 20 months for a lot of us have been eye-opening. We have seen the very systems that the Bible talks about come to life right before our eyes. For some that are saved, this has been eye-opening; it has reassured us that the Bible is real, the words are true, and the promises are secure.

It has also answered a lot of questions for us. We can see, maybe for the first time, how the world system will get the vast majority of the world left after the Rapture to take a mark that allows them to buy and sell goods. We can see how the powers that be will know who has and does not have the mark. We see the apps coming to life that gives us permission to live, to go out to eat, and to buy and sell in some cases right now. We can see how they will be able to track purchases as they move us to more and more online purchases with digital monies and/or currencies. We can see how a global event like the Rapture can unite the governments of the world. People from all walks of life, all religious backgrounds, all political spheres and financial circles can come together around a common ‘enemy.’

Paul lived in a time when death was rampant. The sanctity of human life outside of Christianity simply did not exist. The Roman government used death and death by torture to quell uprisings and to enslave millions. They made death into a sport. The Roman coliseum was built to entertain the masses with death. All around them, these Christians in Thessalonica could see their friends, their brothers and sisters in the Lord, dying, and they wondered if the promises were true.

How could the world get any worse? Surely, Jesus is coming soon.

The Hope we have in Jesus, verses 13-14

According to Guzik’s commentary, there were prevailing ideas that death was the end for all people. Ancient writers like Aeschylus, Catullus and Theocritus all taught that death was the end. But Paul talks about those that have fallen ‘asleep’; they are just sleeping. Remember that Jesus, as he went to heal Jarius’ daughter, told the mourners that she was just asleep. The word ‘cemetery’ was actually coined by early Christians; the word means ‘dormitory’ or ‘sleeping place.’

We need to be careful how far we take these analogies; the Bible does not teach ‘soul sleep.’ Our bodies go into the ground and decay, and they will be resurrected one day. But ALL people live forever. When we were created, we were created as living souls. We will live eternally somewhere; heaven or hell are the two options offered by God. The choice of where we live is up to us. Those of us that die in Jesus are immediately in His presence, and we are there forever. The idea of ‘falling asleep’ is a reference to the body only.

While we mourn the loss of loved ones – mothers, fathers, children, grandparents and friends – we who know Jesus do not mourn as though we will never see them again. As well, we also know that those who died with an illness are ill no longer. They are whole and happy in Jesus. My mom has Alzheimer’s; she will be 88 next week if the Lord spares her life, but one day she will remember us all. No PSWs or nurses will be needed to care for her; she will be whole. I have a father, a brother, countless friends, and acquaintances that have died in Jesus; they and I will all be reunited one day, maybe sooner than we all think. But this is the hope we have. This is what carries us through the grief and the loss. Hope is one of the remaining supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 13:13).

We are confident in the empty tomb of Jesus, the proof that there is life, a good life after death for the saved. We can even see the events like Jesus’ transfiguration in Matthew 17 and see Moses and Elijah, men who had been dead for millennia physically, but yet they walked and talked with Jesus. The witch at Endor knew she was talking to Samuel that night; for the very first time, she was actually speaking to the dead, and it shook her. Paul tells of his ‘life after death’ experience, and he does so in the third person: “I know a man.” Well, he was the man. This man died and saw things that he simply could not put into words. Yet here he was, that man, talking about the resurrection and about life after death.

Jesus will bring the saved dead back with him, and we will see them again. Paul uses the term ‘we’ in these verses (see verse 15, “we who are alive”). He expected the Lord to return in his lifetime. He lived each day longing and expecting the Lord’s return. Later as we read, Paul starts to use “you.” He understood that Jesus would not return in his lifetime, and it changed his writings.

But I can say that we have a very good chance of seeing Jesus return in our generation. I will not set dates nor times; that is forbidden. But we can surely see more and more that framework for the power and rise of the Man of Sin. We can see the mechanisms that will help him dominate the world. We can see the forming of the One-World Religion as the Muslims, Catholics and Jews begin the building of a worship facility in Berlin, Germany. China is fast becoming the military superpower; Russia continues to encroach unabated into Europe, and the US military is being depleted both of arms and people.

The Job we have in Jesus, 2 Peter 3:9

While we are excited about the return of Jesus, we need to be aware that His return, though good news for us in Jesus, is a damning event in the lives of those that don’t know Him. Shortly after His coming for us in the Rapture, the world will be plunged into chaos, disease, food shortages, natural disasters, and the breakdown of law and order. Death will be rampant, and the Gospel will be scarce. Most of the people that don’t know Jesus before the Rapture will never get to know Him after. They will die in their sins and spend an eternity in Hell. What are we to do about that? Tell others about Jesus. We need to be about the business of the Kingdom.

We can see that the people in charge already understand that a vast majority of the people will do what they are told. When the Mark of the Man of Sin comes into play midway through the Tribulation, the vast majority of people will simply line up to get it; they will not question nor challenge the order. ALL of these will go to Hell; none can be saved. Once you take the Mark, you are sealed for eternity. There will be those that understand what is happening; either they are saved, or many of the Jews will realize that this Mark is evil as it requires you to worship a man and not God. These rebels will be hunted down and executed.

Take the time to read Revelation 11-13. I am sure you will not be able to put it down once you begin. The point is that all of our friends, family, co-workers and neighbors who don’t know Jesus as Savior will not have a great life after the Rapture. Theirs will be hell on earth and then hell for real without Jesus. We need to be about the work of sharing the Gospel. Jesus is the only way.

Like Paul here in this letter, ‘we’ should expect to meet the Lord in the air. ‘We’ should expect to hear the Trumpet. ‘We’ should expect to see the dead in Christ raised. ‘We’ should expect to see the dormitories open and the sleeping bodies of our loved ones in Jesus awake. ‘We’ should expect to fly in the air to meet Jesus. Sadly, not many of us, myself included at times, live this way. Maybe some of us have become the end-time scoffers, not by our words, but by the way we live. We do not take hell seriously, and just maybe we don’t truly believe that actual people that we know are there and others are on their way simply because they don’t know Jesus as Saviour.

If you and I truly believed that Hell was real and that the people we sit and work with every day, the people we eat lunch with and joke with and host football pools with every day, are going to die without Jesus and spend eternity in Hell, how would that change the way we share the Gospel? Jesus is coming to get us; this is a fact. How many of us will there be to go, and how many will we help be in that group? God wants ALL to be saved, and He is giving mankind as much time as He can.

“The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding

Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

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I Still Believe in Jesus’ Imminent Appearing :: By Jonathan Brentner

Published on: October 28, 2021 by RR7

I feel like I have awakened in the midst of a dystopian nightmare. The horror movies that I have avoided in the past have suddenly become reality.

I have read or listened to at least a hundred and fifty accounts of death or serious injuries brought about by the so-called COVID “vaccines.” I have reached the point of not wanting any more of the grief that I feel as a result of hearing these tragic stories. The mandating of these injections that kill and disable people for life is pure evil; there’s no other way to describe it.

The nation I love teeters on the brink of an economic ruin unlike anything in our history. It’s difficult to know if America will fall as the result of an internal implosion or an external attack, but one or the other seems likely in the coming years, if not much sooner, apart from a major change of direction away from the murder of innocents, the LBGTQ movement that destroys the lives of so many children, and the rampant lawlessness at the highest levels of our government that obstructs justice for so many and rewards the guilty.

It’s more than a little easy these days to fall into despair and wonder if Jesus is really coming for us anytime soon. Are there not days when it seems as though we are already experiencing Tribulation conditions?

At a time of great discouragement and much heartache in my distant past, I focused on biblical promises and wrote several reasons in my journal of why I still believed in the Lord in spite of my awful circumstances. Perhaps it’s time for another declaration of faith, this time concerning why I still believe that Jesus will come for us before the start of the Tribulation.

So here goes. I still believe in a pretribulation Rapture!! I say this because of these biblical truths:

Premillennialism is a Biblical Certainty

Any case for a pretribulation Rapture must begin with the biblical certainty of premillennialism, which includes beliefs in a literal seven-year Tribulation, the return of Jesus to set up His thousand-year reign on the earth, and the glorious future restoration of a kingdom for Israel. One cannot get to a pretribulation Rapture if one begins by denying these basic scriptural truths.

Those who reject such truths utilize allegory, which retrofits biblical prophecy with interpretations foreign to the purpose of the authors at the time they wrote. Because belief in Jesus’ imminent appearing depends on interpreting passages according to their meaning at the time the Lord inspired them, coding passages with symbolic meanings blocks all paths to convictions regarding this hope.

I wrote about my conviction regarding this in another blog post, 7 Reasons Why Premillennialism is a Biblical Necessity.

The Church and Israel Are Separate Entities

Another fundamental error made by amillennial pastors (those who deny the glorious restoration of Israel) is that of equating Israel with the Church. If one starts with the assumption that Israel and the Church are the same entity, it again washes out the road to a pretribulation Rapture.

If one errs in confusing the two, then the seventieth week of Daniel 9:24-27 becomes a moot point. However, since there’s coming a time when God is going to deal with Israel to bring about the repentance that the prophet Zechariah wrote about in 12:10-13:1, then it makes perfect sense for the Lord to remove His Church before this time begins and turn His attention to bringing the Israelites to salvation.

There are still many more reasons why I still believe in a pretribulation rapture!

The Rapture Cannot be the Same Event as the Second Coming

Once we establish premillennialism and reject the misleading allegorical interpretations of biblical prophecy that confuse the Church with Israel, it becomes clear that the Rapture and Second Coming are distinct, separate events. They cannot occur at the same time.

With the Rapture, the resurrection of the dead in Christ happens first; but when Jesus returns to the earth, the resurrection of Tribulation saints happens after a series of many time-consuming events; it may not even occur on the same day as the Second Coming. This is just one of many key differences.

Since there is a millennium, which we established as essential to even begin making a case for a pretribulation Rapture, this necessitates that a separation of time must exist between the two events so that tribulation believers can enter the Lord’s kingdom in their natural bodies. If the Rapture and Second Coming are the same, then all believers would receive resurrected glorified bodies. If this is the case, then who does Jesus rule over with a rod of iron (Psalm 2)?

Jesus’ Promise to the Church at Philadelphia

During the past several months, Jesus’ promise to the Church at Philadelphia in Revelation 3:10-11a has risen in importance regarding my conviction that the Lord is coming for us before the Tribulation begins.

“Because you have kept my word about patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell on the earth. I am coming soon.”

Please notice that the “trial” Jesus refers to is not a persecution of the Church; it’s something that comes upon “the whole world.” Because most of the following chapters in Revelation describe a time of God’s wrath on the earth, I believe they depict the “trial” that will someday impact the entire planet (chapter 6-18).

The next phrase, “those who dwell on the earth,” also emphasizes that this time of tribulation is not for the New Testament church. John uses this phrase eight other times in the book of Revelation (6:10; 8:13; 11:10; 13:8–12, 14; 14:6; and 17:8), and in each and every occurrence after Revelation 3:10, it refers to either people impacted by the Tribulation or to those refusing to repent of their sins during it.

John never refers to the Church as being on the earth during this time but instead uses this phrase to identify people living during the Tribulation.

Jesus’ words, “I am coming soon,” depict the quickness of his appearing rather than nearness in the sense of time. Jesus will deliver us from this global time of wrath by taking us to heaven (John 14:2-3). Why would He refer to His coming in this context if not to keep His Church out of the “trial” that will impact the entire planet, the Tribulation?

The New Testament Posture of Imminency

New Testament passages that refer to Jesus’ return for His Church have one prominent theme in common: They characterize it as the eager anticipation of the saints. In other words, they regarded Jesus’ appearing as something imminent that could happen at any time.

In Philippians 3:20–21, Paul wrote:

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself.”

The Greek word for “await” in verse 20 points to an “intense anticipation” or an “excited expectation” of a future event. [i]

In 1 Corinthians 1:7, Paul used the same Greek word for “wait” as he did in Philippians 3:20 to indicate his readers’ heartfelt longing for Jesus’ appearing, “so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Despite the immaturity of the saints in Corinth, they excitedly awaited Jesus’ return for them.

In 1 Corinthians 16:22, Paul prayed, “Our Lord, come.” The word for this phrase in the original text is the Aramaic maranatha. This signifies “a petition to Christ that He should return now—at any moment. Paul used it in this letter to Greek-speaking (mostly Gentile) Christians in Corinth because it expressed an idea that had become universal in the early Church. Christ could come at any moment, and Christians called upon him to do so.” [ii]

The early church belief in imminency became a prayer for Jesus to appear in the immediate future.

The Grief of the Thessalonians

A close look at 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17 reveals that the recipients of Paul’s letter not only believed that the Rapture could happen in their lifetime but mistakenly assumed that it would happen before they died.

We see this in the way that Paul addresses the unnecessary grieving of the new converts in Thessalonica over the deaths of some in their midst.

If their grief had stemmed from a lack of belief in the future resurrection of their loved ones, Paul would have responded in much the same way that he addressed this issue with those in Corinth (see 1 Corinthians chapter 15). Instead, he attributes their sorrow to a lack of information about the Rapture rather than an absence of faith in the promise of a future resurrection.

The apostle answers their lingering sadness by giving them further revelation regarding the Rapture, emphasizing the role of the “dead in Christ” during Jesus’ appearing (1 Thessalonians 4:13–16). Not only would their departed loved ones not miss the Rapture, but they would also be the first participants in it.

Paul’s emphasis in these verses reveals the source of the problem: The Thessalonians mistakenly thought that the dead in Christ would miss out on the joy of the Rapture.

“God has Not Destined Us for Wrath”

In 1 Thessalonians 5:2–3, Paul tells his readers that the start of the Day of the Lord will surprise people on the earth “like a thief in the night” with its “sudden destruction” from which “they will not escape.” The day of Lord, a primarily Old Testament term, refers to an extended time of the Lord’s wrath on the earth leading up to and including Jesus’ return and His reign over the nations.

If the day of the Lord began at any time after the seal judgments of Revelation 6 commence, this day wouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. No one will be saying “peace and security” (v. 3) after the pestilences, famines, pandemics, and wars of the seal judgments kill one-fourth of the earth’s population, perhaps as many as two billion people.

Furthermore, in 1 Thessalonians 5:9, the apostle assures his readers, and us, that we will not experience this time of God’s judgment upon the earth: “For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Since the seal judgments are a part of God’s wrath, the Lord must come for us before they begin.

This promise seals the deal for me, but there’s much more behind why I still believe in Jesus’ appearing before the seven-year Tribulation.

The Need for Witnesses During the Tribulation

If the Church remains on the earth during the Tribulation, why is there a need for other witnesses to the saving message of the gospel?

In a radio interview with Jan Markell on November 7, 2020, Amir Tsarfati questioned the need for the two witnesses of Revelation 11:1–13 if the Church is present on earth at the start of the Tribulation. Isn’t it the job of the Church to bear witness to the good news during this current age?

In Revelation 14:6–7, John adds this:

“Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.'”

Why does the Lord need to send an angel to proclaim the gospel to people on the earth during the Tribulation if the Church is present on the earth? This only makes sense with the absence of the Church during this time. Otherwise, it would remain the task of believers to fulfill the Great Commission.

What about the 144,000 Jews that God will seal during the Tribulation (Revelation 7:1–8), whom many believe will act as evangelists during that time? And, if the Church is still present on the earth during the Tribulation period, there could be no distinction between believing Jews and other New Testament saints (Colossians 3:11).

The sealing of the 144,000 witnesses tells us the Church cannot be present on the earth during the time in which they serve the Lord. Otherwise, they would be a part of the Church that is already sealed by the Holy Spirit in Christ (Ephesians 1:13-14).

The Encouragement

I could mention many other reasons why I still believe that all who know Jesus as their Savior will miss the entire seven-year Tribulation, but perhaps the above items are sufficient for now.

I realize that since the majority of my readers are aware of the nearness of the new world order along with the events paving the way to it, I do not have to write anything more about the precarious times in which we live. You, like me, already see the grave dangers that underlie the headlines of our day and do not fall for the lies of the mainstream media, although many Christians do and remain unaware of the times in which they live.

I find tremendous reassurance and comfort in the fact that Jesus could snatch me out of this world at any moment and change my body into one that’s imperishable and glorious (Philippians 3:20-21). Yes, I may experience difficult times and great persecution in my remaining time on earth, but I know that I will miss the terrors of the Tribulation.

Can there be any greater hope or encouragement as we face a lawless and violent world? I don’t think so! Paul did not instruct the Thessalonians to “encourage one another” with the truths of Jesus’ appearing because they would have to endure the ‘day of the Lord’ wrath, but he did so because they would miss the terror of that coming time.

Yes, I still believe in a pretribulation Rapture of the Church. I feel much better already! Difficult days may lie ahead for me, but I will not face God’s outpouring of wrath in the coming Tribulation period.

Jonathan Brentner

Website: Our Journey Home

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E-mail: Jonathanbrentner@yahoo.com

[i] Colin Brown, ed., Dictionary of New Testament Theology Vol. 2, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1969) p. 244.

[ii] Wayne A. Brindle, “Imminence,” The Popular Encyclopedia of Bible Prophecy, eds. Tim LaHaye and Ed Hindson (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004), p. 145.