Now let's direct our attention to the Word of God to Paul's letter to the church at Thessalonica in chapter 4. But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others who do not have hope. For since we believe that Jesus died in rows again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by word from the Lord that we who are alive and who are left until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command and the voice of an archangel with the sound of the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise first. And 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 always will be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words, the word of the Lord. Oh man, you may be seated. These apparently are words of encouragement. Paul says, encourage one another with these words, not frighten one another, not confuse one another, not dishearten one another, and certainly not terrorize one another. And yet these words have been used so often to do just that in the church. And Paul also says that the word He's given us is a word from the Lord. These words of encouragement, these words of comfort come from the Lord. And it could be in the sense that the Lord spoke these words and taught this to His disciple and it was part of the apostolic teaching that was known from the very first. John says that not everything that Jesus said and did was recorded in the gospels. This teaching certainly was not recorded in the gospels. It could be that Paul got his word from the Lord from the apostolic witness. Could be that Paul got his word directly from the Lord. Paul insisted from time to time that he received revelation, not from men, but from the Lord himself. And so this would be Paul functioning in the New Testament prophetic role as a prophet getting a fresh word from the Lord concerning the detail of an event. And the event that he is describing that we are to receive comfort that came from the Lord himself is the event of the great last day. It is the event of the coming of the Lord, the day of the Lord, the return of Christ to earth. The day when time will end and eternity will begin, it's the day when God wraps everything up. And he puts it in very personal terms. Apparently, the immediate need in the church was some comfort concerning those that had died. Three times in the passage, Paul uses the phrase, fallen asleep. And then once he just flat out says they've died. And that's of course a euphemism falling asleep for dying. The concern was apparently that since Paul had been there a few months earlier and had preached and taught and gathered that church and planted that church. And now had moved on along in his missionary journey, writing back, he had heard from Timothy who had visited them recently, that there were some concerns of people that had died. What happens to them? Because the teaching of the apostolic church was always that Christ had ascended as we saw last week into heaven. And the angels, the men in bright apparel, said to the men of the Lord, the disciples of the Lord, this same Jesus will return. He will so come in like manners you've seen him go. So they had seen him ascended in the clouds of glory and they knew according to his promise that he would return in clouds of glory. And this of course is the event that Paul gives a little bit more detail. He said, I do not want you to be uninformed. He says this about a dozen, half a dozen times in the New Testament. I don't want you to be ignorant or uninformed about something. Let me tell you, and he always gives us some very specific detail in those instances as he does here. And he gives us the detail concerning the descent of the Lord, the return of the Lord to the earth. And as we look at this, there's so much here to see, but I'm going to follow a brief outline that's given by Dr. John Stott in his commentary on this passage. And it's easy to remember because the passage speaks in sequence of the return of Christ, the resurrection, the rapture, and the reunion. Let's look at each of those for just a moment. First, the return of Christ, all the way back even in the Old Testament, several times in the Old Testament. In the book of Isaiah, Jeremiah, again, in Ezekiel, and in Zachariah, there is a promise of the Lord coming and bringing His people together to Himself in a great gathering, in a great re-gathering from the four winds of the earth. As I said, it's recorded about a half a dozen places. Let me read one of the passages from Isaiah 11. In that day, the root of Jesse, who is that class, that is Christ, he is the root of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David. Jesus is the descendant from that line, the root of Jesse, who shall stand, oh man, if we had time to preach, we'd preach right there. Standing is resurrection, on a stasis, standing up. He resurrected Christ is what Isaiah is preaching. Do you know Isaiah preached the gospel just as thoroughly as Paul? In fact, Paul wouldn't have been able to preach the gospel if it hadn't been for Isaiah. He quoted him over and over and over. Don't tell me there's no gospel in the Old Testament. The gospel is throughout the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the gospel of Christ. The root of Jesse shall stand as a signal, hang on to that word, as a signal for the peoples of him, shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious. In that day, the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathoros, from Cushion, from Elim and from Shainar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea. And if we were just to run a little geography lesson there, that's the four winds. That's the four quarters of the earth. That's all of the planet. But listen to the poetry now. That's the prose that kind of sets it up. Listen to the poetry. He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. He's going to regather Israel. He's going to bring Israel back from the four corners of the earth on a second deliverance. The first great deliverance was, of course, from Egypt. And then following that was the deliverance he gave them from Babylon, but this is an eschatological deliverance. This is the deliverance of the last day. When I teach just for a moment, when I teach Israel, referred here in the book of Isaiah, is a reference to all the people of God. It is specifically and categorically a direct reference to what we know today as the church and here's how. Christ is the seed of Abraham, the only true Jew that ever lived. He is the seed singular and from Jesus Christ we have descended a whole nation. He is all that Israel is. He is the yes to all the promises. He is the fulfillment of all the prophecies. And he came as the Messiah of Israel, the true Israelite. And in Him, all Israel, that is the descendants of Abraham, are saved. There's no other name under heaven given among men, Peter said, to the Jewish people, to the sad hate. He drew in all the others. If you don't believe in Jesus, you are not a child of God. You're not a descendent of Abraham. You are not a true member of God's people. Then the teaching is that in Christ, all of Israel is to be saved. There's no way for a Jew to be saved other than coming to Christ. And then in Christ, the door is opened. The middle wall of partition is broken down. There's neither Jew nor Greek. The gospel goes to the Gentiles who come the same way the Jews come. By the grace of God, faith in a crucified and risen Savior Jesus Christ. And now every person who was not descended from Abraham has available to them the common wealth of Israel, because they come to the Messiah of Israel, the true seed of Abraham, the root of David, Christ himself, and all who belong to Christ, are Abraham's seed according to the original promise God made Abraham. Are you a seed of Abraham? If you're in Christ, you are. If you're not in Christ, you're not. I don't care who your granddaddy was. Israel is God's people in Christ. That's us. We, the people of God. Jew and Gentile, male and female, bond and free, rich and poor, ancient and modern, before Christ, appearance on earth, and since Christ, appearance on earth, we are all in Christ and therefore we are Israel, where the true Israel of God, with a new Jerusalem, and maybe all the teaching. I can teach it, maybe all you can stand so let's, let's cease from the teaching for just a moment get to our text quickly. The return, the return of Christ, Christ promised it himself in fact in several times when Christ was preaching to his disciples and teaching them, especially toward the very end of his ministry. He talked about that return. Here's a complete text out of Matthew, the words of Jesus entirely, immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, the moon will give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heaven will be shaken. The sun will appear in heaven the sign, the signal of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory, and he will send out his angels with loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to another. That's the direct words of Christ, in fact, Mark records it as well, it's very similar. And in those days, after the tribulation, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will be falling from heaven. Great cosmic collapse, de-creation as it were, it all started in creation, and now it's being consummated and ended. God threw the stars in the heavens, and now the stars are coming down, the curtains coming down, it's over, this is the last day, this is the eschaton, the last day. This is the great return of Christ, and then you'll see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather, remember, it's an archangel that's mentioned, some kind of command given from the archangel according to Paul's revelation. He will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, and from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. There is a return, Christ will come, and some of the details are spelled out. There will be great signal noise, there will be a shout, all three of these phrases in our text are military terms, there's a shout, a voice, a trumpet, a shout is giving a command, a voice is that of direction, and the trumpet is the time to move. The trumpet in the Old Testament, we had time to talk about it a little bit, it would tell us that two kinds of trumpets are mentioned in the Old Testament. One is the shofar of the realms horn. It was used very early in Israel's life, and it was to assemble the people, it was to gather the people, it was a blast of the trumpet that gathered the people, it's time went along and they became more refined there in the bronze age. They began to make trumpets of brass, and they would sound, they were like herald trumpets, they were used in the temple service, Moses even used them. And even the voice of God in the book of Revelation and other places is pictured as a trumpet blast and the peel of a thundering, shrieking trumpet, an awful sound but yet a sound that signals battle another occasion of the New Testament, the return of Christ, as mentioned, Christ returning with his angels in flaming fire, taking vengeance on those that know not Christ nor obey his gospel. That's another sermon for another day, that part of the return of Christ. Here we're talking about the part of Christ's return that's often called the blessed hope and glorious appearing. This is where these are words of encouragement. The return of Christ when Christ comes in power and in glory. And mentioned here then is the resurrection. It says those that have fallen asleep, those that are dead, and then those that are alive, those that are alive at the coming of Christ, and Jesus said there will be people alive at his coming. He said it will be suddenly, it will be unexpectedly, but like a thief in the night. It will be extremely noticeable, it won't be secret in any sense of the word. It will be triumphant and powerful, and it will be a return that it will mark the dominance and the dominion of God's rule and reign over his creation. And in this there will be a resurrection. And those that are alive that are admonished to be watchful will not, the text says, preceded, but the word really means, will not have priority, neither does it mean that they will go ahead of the old King James used the word prevent, which means to go ahead of or to come ahead of. In other words, those who are alive remain will not have any priority over those that are dead. Here's the comfort. Those that are dead in Christ are going to rise out of their graves first. And the reason he states in the text is that Jesus was brought forth from the dead by the voice and by the spirit and the power of God. And so the resurrection of Christ Paul extensively tells us in the book of 1 Corinthians is the basis in that whole 15th chapter is the basis, the resurrection of Christ is the basis for the resurrection of the believer. And finally he gets down to the very end as he's talking about the body and the resurrection of the body and dying and being raised again of tremendously informative passage. He finally gets down to the end of the text there in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye. Some people say in the blink of an eye, no, that's entirely too slow in the twinkling of an eye, we'll be changed. Listen to the language. At the last trump, for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishable and this mortal body must put on immortality. And Paul had been talking about that extensively earlier in the passage. Paul tells us he's got this word from the Lord and this is what will happen. And there'll be a resurrection, the graves will open. Those that are dead in Christ will be raised from the dead as Christ himself was raised from the dead. Corruption put on incorruption, mortality put on immortality, perishable becomes imperishable and whatever condition they're raised into, those that are alive and remain will be changed into. We will be like them, we'll have the same resurrected body. And then this passage speaks of the rapture, it comes from that word right there, it says, we shall not, we who are alive and remain, those who are left that are coming in Lord will not precede, those who are fallen asleep, but the Lord himself will descend from heaven with the crying of command and the dead in Christ will rise first. And we who are alive who are left, there's your left behind people right there, those that are Christians that are there after the resurrection. Then we who are alive who are left will be caught up, that's the word rapture. It comes from the Latin rapio which translates the actual root word of the Latin which means to be cut, it literally is another military term, it means to be snatched away. We all hear the stories of how our special forces will go in and try to take someone and they go in with force and quickly and unexpectedly with the element of surprise and they snatch someone and they bring them out. That's what the Lord's going to do to us, he's going to snatch us out of this world. And where's he going to take us into the air which is the domain of the demonic satan is called the prince of the power of the air, you talk about a victory, you talk about a commando action by our Lord, read it in Revelation, Christ coming on the great steed with thousands of His angels and coming back in might and in power and bringing us right through the very domain of satan, crashing once again, taking over His earth and His people, it's the return of Christ and He says, we'll be caught up, we'll be snatched up. Sometime with some of the folks that don't see things exactly the way we do in our Christian community they make a lot about the rapture, I've always noticed the people that make a big deal about a doctrine usually have the doctrine wrong. People that talk most about charismatic and gifts of the spirit, they generally have some error, our dear brothers, beloved brothers, the Baptist, Baptist, Baptist, baptism, baptism, they got it wrong, they don't really understand it the way the whole biblical evidence is. And those who talk about the rapture, the rapture, the rapture, they got it wrong. Sometimes the people that talk the most about a doctrine get it wrong. The rapture is the coming of Christ, it is the caught upness of those that are alive to meet those that have been raised from the dead to meet the Lord in the air. Do you believe in the rapture? Yes you believe in the rapture. You just don't believe in a pre-tribulation, secret rapture of the church alone. You don't believe in that, I don't think, for biblical you don't, but you do believe in the rapture. You believe that there'll be a moment when you'll be caught up to meet the Lord in the air. There is a rapture of the saints and it's part of the great second coming of the Lord. After the tribulation in those days, he speaks about, in the end of time there will be any millennium after or anything else, it'll be over, it'll be an absolute reign of Christ on the earth. And then finally a reunion following Dr. Stott's return, resurrection, rapture and now reunion. It says we will be caught up together with him in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. The word meet is once again a very official military term. It's the term that's used when a people go out to meet a dignitary, a conquering general or a head of state or some dignitary that's own his way back to a town and the people of the town will go out to meet that person and rendezvous with them out some ways from the town and then escort them back to the town. In fact, it's the same word, the exact same word that's used with what happened to Paul. Paul and his traveling party, which was quite small at this point, made it to the shore of Italy on their way to Rome, once they land there on the shore and start their trip over to the city of Rome, this happens in Acts 28. And so we came to Rome. And the brothers there, when they heard about us, came as far as the Forum of Appius and three taverns to meet us. You see what happened? The Christians in Rome got the word that Paul was coming and they went out there as far as the Forum on the Appian way. They met Paul rendezvoused with him, united with him, and then escorted him back to the city of Rome. He says there, on seeing them, Paul thanked God and took courage. And when he came from Rome, Paul was allowed to stay by himself with the soldier that guardian. Paul came back to Rome. Notice the interesting thing it says, in Paul thanked God and took courage. He was encouraged. There's something encouraging about a reunion. I love reunions. I love seeing old classmates, I love seeing old family members, I love seeing old friends. I even love meeting people I've never met before. When I find out that maybe we had a common thread, you know, we went to a church together, they didn't know each other at the time. I met a guy this week, I went to high school with, I didn't know him at the time. And we had such wonderful fellowship talking about that, which was over 40 years ago. And there is something about a reunion, a meeting in the air, a meeting together, a meeting with the Lord. It says, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. I just don't miss that, with the Lord. That's really what it's all about. It's not really all about the trumpet blast, it's not really all about the being caught up in the snatched away and all of that. Those are wonderful things, and the Bible teaches us those events will happen. There's so many wonderful, saving events of God have taken place in human history. That's a great one, and that's the last one. But it will be the fact that we're with Christ. It's always been the comfort, ye, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me. That's the real comfort in death. Paul's talking about those who fall asleep. He's, let me tell you, he talks about trumpets, and he talks about resurrection, he talks about wonderful things in the shout of the descent and all of that. But it gets right down, so let me tell you about those people. They'll be with the Lord, and let me tell you, you'll be with the Lord. And together we'll meet the Lord, and we'll be together for how long we always will be with the Lord. I don't think I know to conclude this, but therefore encourage one another with these words.