Therefore encourage one another with these words.
The good news of forgiveness, new life, and the resurrection to eternal life changes everything in the life, mind, goals, and activities of God’s faithful people in Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote two surviving letters to the Christians in Thessalonica. In them he commends their firm faith lived amid suffering and persecution. He encourages then to learn and embrace sound biblical doctrine as it will help them find hope and endurance in their trials. He sent Timothy to them as a model and teacher of faith. And he instructed them about the last days. In our reading today, the Apostle emphasizes the great hope we have in the coming resurrection. Today’s sermon verse is the connector between this week’s reading and next.
1 Thessalonians 4:18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.
You may have heard of this inscription from a tombstone in England. “Pause my friend, as you walk by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now so you will be. Prepare my friend, to follow me.” To this, a visitor added: “To follow you is not my intent, until I know which way you went!”
While I suspect the tombstone memorialized a faithful man who wanted others to consider their own souls, the visitor also made a good point. It matters a great deal which way we go when we die. The Bible describes only two destinations. Everlasting life and joy in heaven, or everlasting death and anguish in hell. Jesus is the only way, truth, and life. He is the one whose sacrifice opens for us the way to heaven.
Like us, the Thessalonian believers were surrounded by many opinions about an afterlife. Some philosophers denied one. The cult of Mithra was especially popular with Roman soldiers stationed there. They had a complex system of seven levels of initiation and tests, eating communal meals, and meeting in underground temples. A bit like modern scientology, the Mirthra cultists believed they had lost former celestial glory and were temporarily shackled to human flesh. Through their religious progress they hoped that in death they could re-ascend to the stars. Many other cults viewed this life as inferior to the next and that only after death could true life be attained. Others believed that the dead became something like disembodied, shadowy ghosts, sometimes called shades. Bacchus, a god of wine and excess was honored by ritual drunkenness and depraved sexual expression. Initiations involved horrific portrayals of various demon-like underworld creatures. Their afterlife was to be even more powerful ways to express base desires and experience intoxication. In short, the religious world of Thessalonica was similar with ours. Same sins, slightly different packages.
Then and now, the Apostle Paul calls believers to live in ways that are countercultural. To love others instead of just themselves. To live moral, based, deliberate lives of discipleship that will show others the goodness of Jesus and the stability of life he gives now and forever. It wasn’t easy to live for Jesus then, it won’t be easy now.
After reminding the believers at Thessalonica to avoid sexual immorality by learning to control their sinful passions and lusts so that they no longer lived for them as their unbelieving neighbors did, and that they should learn to live quiet and productive lives in Christ, the Apostle Paul next gives words of comfort regarding their loved ones who had died in faith. (v. 13-14) 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. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
As others do who have no hope. Clearly, most who followed the false religions around them thought they had some kind of life after death. They weren’t without a hope, it was just an empty, false hope. Believe what they want, their gods could not give them the reward they expected. Our hope is different since our God truly exists and offers us this life in Jesus. We know we don’t earn it by our behavior, worship, or gifts to the church. Our faith, life, and eternal joys are gifts. Any good deeds flow from our faith. We have hope, not in ourselves, but in God’s loving nature, his Son who saves us, and his Word and Sacraments that uphold us in faith.
In his first letter (1:3-9), The apostle Peter echoes our verses today. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
Unlike the pagan religions which always required something from the worshipper to gain the attention and favor of their gods, the God of the Bible seeks and saves us, causing us to be born again. And now, we have a living hope because is it centered in the living God who guards and keeps us in his salvation.
Back to 1 Thessalonians 1:14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. We get the English word cemetery from the Greek word for sleeping place, koimwterion. This word arose entirely from early Christian and Jewish use, already common by the latter 100’s. Before then, both Latin and Greek speaking non-Christians called a graveyard a necropolis (city of the dead). Christians, whose faith is a taste of the resurrection to come understand that the body will one day rise, just as a sleeper awakes in the morning. This is also why churches have often placed the cemeteries next to the chapels. We keep our dead close, for they ultimately will live with us forever. In many places, the dead are buried well away from the living. The difference in what death means changes how death is handled by a culture.
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. Who is the “we”? It seems most likely to refer to the apostles. Perhaps Jesus told the eleven before his ascension. Perhaps he came to them at another time. Jesus did teach about both his resurrection and ours, but the gospels don’t specify this order of rising. Regardless, this promise of the dead rising first came from Jesus himself. God is a God of order, and he is deliberate and fair in his actions. It seems that those who experience death will be first to experience the glory of eternal life. I like this. And any who are yet alive when Jesus returns will quickly join with the heavenly host. If I didn’t know Jesus, the resurrection would seem too wonderful to be true. But knowing Jesus and the power of his resurrection gave me new life by the Holy Spirit lets me realize it is true even if otherwise seems unbelievable. It also helps me understand how those who have not been renewed by Jesus are yet unable to believe the joyous news of eternal life. Flesh and mind cannot grasp the power of God until God begins his work in the flesh and mind of a soul.
(v. 16-17) 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. 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.
This event occurs at the very end of the age. While some churches believe these and certain other verses teach of a partial resurrection, a rapture of believers that happens 7 years before the return of Jesus, they have gravely misused and misunderstood the Word of God. Most still believe the saving gospel, but their beliefs about the end of the age are distorted. If the bible did teach such an event, I’d be happy to know it. I’d been wrongly taught about it for the first half of my Christian faith. Thankfully, extensive reading of the Bible, more careful ways to read its words, and depth study in the Greek language removed that error from me. Yes, I can read the Greek verb arpazw in verse 17 which is very important to the belief in a rapture. This word, translated as raptura in Medieval Latin, means to snatch away or carry off. However, the verb and passage describes Jesus returning in glory at the very end of the age, not earlier. The concept of a rapture came into the church from outside the bible, was forced upon various verses in the bible, and cannot be found by reading the bible unless you assume it is found in verses that do not teach it. A bit more on this next week. If you have questions, please contact me.
1 Thessalonians 4:18 Therefore encourage one another with these words. We are instructed that our proclamation of Jesus’ return is to comfort or encourage others. Not cause fear. Not replace repentance of sin as our primary motive to turn to Jesus. Those who teach a rapture often use their teaching to cause a fear of being “left behind” at the rapture and having to suffer terrible things and likely die in the following seven years. Sort of a purgatory time on earth. This is precisely opposite of the apostle’s specific direction to the church. Instead, we are to realize that death has lost its sting. The grave has no victory over us because Jesus has conquered both death and the grave. He gives us a taste of his life now as he brings us from spiritual death into a living faith. And by his word and dwelling in us, we have a confident hope of joyous life after death. And when we suffer trials or persecution, just like the faithful Thessalonians did, we can know that these sorrows will one day pass and that but Jesus’ kingdom is forever. Yes, death is a terrible thing to experience. At times, life can be even worse. Yet in all these things, we are more than conquerors through Jesus, who loves us, saves us, keeps us, and one day will resurrect us to share in his perfect, eternal glory. Death and the grave look different when we live in the light of Jesus.
Since our current educational curriculums tend to be anemic in early American history, I should first mention that Benjamin Franklin was a major player in building support for the Revolutionary War that made us an independent nation instead of British colonies. He also lightly edited and signed the Declaration of Independence and was the youngest delegate to the constitutional convention that establishes our nation’s laws.
Sadly, in later life, he strayed far from the Christian faith. But while a young man, Benjamin Franklin wrote his own epitaph and printed it in one of his newspapers. It seems that he had been influenced by Paul’s teaching of the resurrection of the body. Being a printer of books, he used the idea of a book to describe his body and its future.
“The Body of B. Franklin, Printer: Like the Cover of an old Book, its contents torn out, and striped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the Author.”
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