google image of ancient Thessalonica
Many
of us are interested in what is going to happen at the very end. The apostle
Paul was informed by God what would happen! These happenings are recorded in 1
Thessalonians 4:13-5:11. To my surprise, this passage is all about encouraging
one another and hope. Disciples of Jesus also need to give encouragement and
hope and not leave people without hope. Yet today many of us are fearful
and hopeless. Paul repeats his point twice, at the beginning of our reading and
at the end of it:
4:18
“Encourage one another with these words” and in 5:11 “Encourage one
another and build up one another, just as also you are doing.”
I.The
first explanation in 4:13-17 is in response to a question the Thessalonians
had: What happens to Christians who die before the Lord returns?
The
second explanation in 5:1-10 is a reminder of what Paul already taught them
about the day of the Lord.
As
you know, Paul and Silas visited the major city of Thessalonica on their second
missionary journey, around AD 52, recorded in Acts 17:1-9,. For three weeks
they taught in the synagogue there. Some Jews and many Greeks became believers.
The non-Messianic Jews became jealous of the positive response Paul and Silas
had and they got angry at them and dragged some believers to the city
officials, shouting that Christians believed in another king, Jesus, and not
the Roman emperor, who was Claudius at that time (Acts 17:7; 18:2). Because of
the danger to their lives, the believers at Thessalonica sent Paul and Silas to
a neighboring city for safety—Berea.
The
Thessalonians are like many of us: they were loving, but they could love even
more (4:9-10).
I’m
not sure how much teaching you’ve received on Jesus’s second coming, but in a
month or so time, Paul and Silas made sure to let the Thessalonians know the
basics.
Illus. I didn’t know about Jesus’s
return until my late teens after many years of attending church. I remember
when it happened. I was at a college Intervarsity retreat out at Hudson House
in New York, where the guest preacher mentioned several times about Jesus
coming back. At the question-and-answer period after his talk, I raised my
hand, and asked: “Just to be clear, are you saying that Jesus is returning?” He
affirmed: “Yes!”
“Well,”
I thought, “I didn’t know that!”
Paul
begins by saying: in verse 13: “But we do not
want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so
that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”[1]
Illus. A few of you may remember Bill’s mother, Helen
Spencer. She lived in New Jersey before we brought her up to MA to live when
she developed Alzheimer’s. She lived in Hamilton safely many years. Even with
her memory loss, she never forgot that she was a disciple of Jesus.
When she was dying, the nursing home called us to
be there so Bill and I came. Bill was with her at the very end. She no longer
spoke but she lay there quietly, holding onto Bill’s hand for hours. When she
finally stopped breathing, her African nurse asked Bill:
“Was this a Christian woman?”
Bill answered, “She was very devout and loved
Jesus.”
The nurse responded, “You can tell.”
Bill asked, “How can you tell?”
She replied, “The peace, you can feel it all
around.”
Bill questioned her: “Isn’t it the same with everyone?”
She insisted: “Oh, no, sometimes it is terrible,
even I hear screaming.”
Both of them
paused and looked around because they could feel the peace in the room.
Why is it Christians have hope?
Paul explains in
verse 14: “If we believe that Jesus died and rose, in
a similar way, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
And in verse 17,
he adds that believers will always be with the Lord, now, when we are alive,
and, in the future, when Jesus returns.
Paul describes the dead as “sleeping,” using a
metaphor to describe that the death of believers is temporary. In the same way,
Jesus described the death of Jairus’s 12-year-old daughter as “sleep” although
both Jesus and the family and friends knew she was indeed dead. Nevertheless,
Jesus commanded her to live again by saying in a loud voice: “Child, rise!”
And she stood up immediately (Luke 8:40-42, 49-56).
How will the end happen?
Paul’s answer is not one that he and Silas made
up (4:15). The Lord told them of the 4 steps involved:
First, The Lord himself
will descend from heaven with a signal, the loud voice of the archangel
(Michael), and with God’s trumpet sound (4:16).
Jesus’s return
will be loud and self-evident! (vs. Acts 1:9-11)
Second, The dead in Christ will rise.
We get a preview of this in Matthew 27:52-53:
When Jesus died,
there was an earthquake, many tombs broke open and believers were raised to
life, entered Jerusalem and appeared to many.
The apologist
Quadratus around 75 years later mentioned that the deeds of Jesus “were always
there to see, for they were true: those who were cured or those who rose from
the dead were seen not only when they were cured or raised but were constantly
there to see, not only while the Savior was living among us, but also for some
time after his departure. Some of them, in fact, survived right up to our own
time.”—Quadratus’s time (Eusebius, Church History 4.3)
Third, Those who are
alive at that time, together with the resurrected dead, will be taken
forcefully into the clouds in order to meet the Lord in the air. (arpazō)
At that point,
there is no hemming or hawing or hiding or being forgotten. We will suddenly be
snatched up or seized, just like Philip was snatched away by the Spirit from
the Ethiopian eunuch and taken to Azotus in Acts 8:39-40 and Paul was caught up
to Paradise in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4.
In 1 Corinthians
15:51-53, Paul adds that in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, we
will be changed, our bodies will become imperishable.
Fourth, We will always be with the Lord.
This is
encouraging news!! Use it to encourage one another, Paul writes.
II.The second explanation begins in ch. 5,
the Thessalonians
had been told that the day of the Lord comes, like a “a thief in the night”
(5:2).
Illus. When Bill and I lived in downtown Newark, NJ, in
the last month several times thieves broke into our house. Our building had
been hidden by the neighboring ones, but they were knocked down and only our
narrow townhouse was left. We lived in community with a few students, but on
the weekends they all left for their homes.
I had planted some grass seeds in our little
backyard, which was enclosed inside a wall. On one Friday I saw footprints in
the new grass. I showed them to Bill and one of the students. The student got
very scared, so we told him not to worry, and we did nothing.
What we should have done was
reinforce the windows that did not close tightly. God gave us a warning, but we
didn’t act on it. Exactly one week later, Friday, the thief broke into our house
late at night. Only Bill and I were present. We were sleeping. A mosquito woke
me up and then I heard sounds. Our bedroom doors were all closed, but I could
hear noises in our small office next door. I woke up Bill. By then the only
sounds were downstairs. I called the police. Then, Bill grabbed a vacuum metal pipe
and made all this racket on the stairway as he went down, while he called to
the nonexistent boys to come:
“Hey, Chuck, Joe,
Paul, come down!,” in his low voice. Meanwhile, I jumped up and down at the
head of the stairs, trying to sound like a bunch of guys coming down the stairs
from the third floor. Suddenly, downstairs we heard the kitchen back door burst
open. The thief had been packing all our musical equipment into a bag, but left
it all behind as he kicked over the back door and leaped over our back fence.
He was way gone when the police finally arrived 45 minutes later from the
nearby station.
Jesus tells his disciples: in Matthew 24:42-44: “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
We had not figured
out that the thief was coming back in one week and we did not prepare, but in
our case, we were awakened (I think God sent us that little mosquito!) and
prevented the thief from taking all our musical equipment: record player and
receiver! He dropped a calculator he had picked up as he dashed out!
In a similar way,
at Jesus’s return, the day of the Lord is unexpected, and sudden, and can’t be
avoided.
The Lord’s day is
also like labor pains.
Illus. When
I was expecting Steve, the medical staff told me to pack my overnight suitcase
and keep it in our closet ready because we could not know exactly when I would
go into labor.
One night, my
water broke, and we had to go quickly to the hospital. We could not escape
going. ﺃI was sure glad
that I had that suitcase all set to go!
What does it mean
to be caught by surprise?
We will not know
the day the Lord will return. Jesus told his disciples that they would not know
the day just before he ascended to heaven:
“It is not for you to know the times or periods
that the Father has set by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7)
Jesus repeated many times at many
different occasions that his return will be unexpected, for example,
Matthew 25:13: at the end of the parable of the
10 bridesmaids, who took their lamps, some brought oil and some did not, Jesus
warned: “Keep awake, therefore, for you know
neither the day nor the hour.”
In Mark 13:34-37 Jesus further explained: “It is like a person going on a journey, when he
leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the
doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake, for you do not know
when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight or when
the rooster crows or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes
suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”[3]
We also have Luke 12:35-38: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps
lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the
wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and
knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he
comes;
truly I
tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will
come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night or near
dawn and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.”
“And to the angel of the church in Sardis the Spirit told John to write
in Rev. 3:3: These are the words of him who has the seven spirits of God and
the seven stars: “I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you
are dead. Wake up and strengthen what remains and is on the point of
death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my
God. Remember, then, what you received and heard; obey it and repent. If
you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what
hour I will come to you.”
Even in the last
book of the Bible, In Rev. 16:15, Jesus reminds John:
“See, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is the
one who stays awake and is clothed, not going about naked and exposed to
shame.”
That’s a lot of
references to Jesus’s unexpected return.
In the meantime,
we’re supposed to be alert and self-controlled, according to 1 Thess 4:6.
“Alive” and “awake” and “alert” are
different ways to translate the same Greek word: grēgoreō, to be roused
from sleep and be now awake.[4] The
Thessalonians who are alive were worried about those who were sleeping, or
dead, but Paul’s question is—were they themselves literally alive but not metaphorically
alive or awake and alert, clothed and ready for the daylight?
How do we stay awake?
We stay awake by the way we live. We are
to live like children of the light and children of the day, not children of the
night nor of the darkness. Paul writes about 2 kinds of “sleep”:
1.A temporary
death—that’s good and can’t be avoided;
2.living like we
are “dead”- Doing actions that you try to hide from God and from others at
night in the darkness.
For example, when
you’re drunk, you lose self-control and are not filled with the Holy Spirit,
according to 1 Thessalonians 5:7. That’s also the message in Ephesians 5:18: “Do not get yourself drunk or intoxicated, in
which is wild living, but be filled with the Spirit.”
Earlier in 1
Thessalonians 4:8 we read that God gives us the Holy Spirit to help us have
self-control in order that we can live holy lives.
Paul writes a mini version in 1 Thessalonians 5:8
of what he will develop in Ephesians 6:10-18: Put on or wear protection,
defense against assault, a breastplate and a helmet, which are faith and love
and hope of salvation (5:8).
What is our hope?
God does not want
you to perish but wants you to be saved through Jesus Christ our Lord. “Our”
means we’re not alone (5:9). We have a community to help us and stand with us. Christ
died so that you can be holy before God (5:8), but we need to make that
holiness an actuality. Paul summarizes in 1 Thessalonians 5:10: whether you are
alive or you are dead when Christ returns, “together with Jesus we will
live.”
What can we do now? I would like to
suggest 3 options:
1. Continue
to share this good news about the Lord’s return to others, especially to
other Christians, to encourage them;
2. Ask
the Lord if you are doing anything now that is not pleasing to God, “hidden,”
and seek help to stop this behavior of darkness. Of course, if it is
more than 1 behavior, pick one thing to work on at a time.
3. Ask
God that your faith in Jesus, love for Jesus and
others, and hope may increase this coming week.
Colossians 4:2 is good advice: “Devote
yourself to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving” and also 1 Peter
5:8: “Be self-controlled, alert.” Why? Our adversary the devil is
looking for someone to devour.
Illus. When Bill’s mom, Helen, came up to Hamilton, at
first she stayed at the senior housing downtown. We figured she was safe. We
brought her to Pilgrim church with us and she participated in all the church
activities. But one day when we were in her apartment, the phone rang, and we
discovered that a group that did not believe Jesus was God had been calling her
and asking her if she wanted a Bible study in her apartment. With her mind
unclear, she was almost ready to do so, but we told them that she was not
interested! After a lifetime of devotion to Christ, we sure did not want her to
end up not believing in the true Jesus, incarnate God! You can never feel
secure about yourself or your loved ones, but we must always be vigilant.
So in summary,
BE ALIVE AND
ALERT.
BE CLOTHED WITH
FAITH AND LOVE AND HOPE.
And LIVE IN THE DAYLIGHT!
Amen!
May God himself, the God of
peace, sanctify all of you wholly and completely.
may he guard your spirit and soul
and body [so that you may be] without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ. The one calling you is faithful, who also will act! The grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you (1 Thess 5:23-24, 28).[5]
Aída
