“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

Today is the last in our series of talks on 1 Thessalonians.

The Good Life (1 Thessalonians 5:12-28)

On reading the closing lines of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, if we didn’t know better, we might think that it consisted of a rag-bag of all the stuff the apostle wanted to railroad the Thessalonians into doing. If we didn’t know better, we might think that Paul was giving the church of Thessalonica a list of dos and don’ts which they could use to conduct a tick-box exercise:

• we’re good at respecting our leaders – let’s give ourselves a tick for that one,
• we have some experience of encouraging the timid – another tick,
• we’re really good at being patient with everyone – two ticks for that one,

and so on. If we didn’t know better, we might think that the reason the apostle Paul wrote his letters was simply to tell people exactly what they had to do to live better Christian lives, or else.

It is in fact part and parcel of our human nature not to know any better than this. The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther once wrote that “in our hearts there is always the desire not to be nothing and not to accept that Christ has accomplished everything himself. Rather”, writes Luther, “we always want to be involved in action, doing as much as possible in the service of God, in order to make God see what we are doing so that he will forgive us our sins and be gracious to us on account of what we have done”. And here comes Luther’s warning: “This should not be! This cannot be! For if this were to happen, then Faith and Christ himself would [be unnecessary and] perish”.¹

But we do know better than to think that it’s all down to us to live morally praiseworthy lives, and this is thanks in no small part to Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, which tells us about the utter indispensability of faith, and of Christ, from the beginning to the end. At the start of its first chapter, we read that the Thessalonians’ work was produced by faith, their labour was prompted by love, and their endurance was inspired by hope in the Lord Jesus Christ (1:3) – in other words, that it wasn’t the result of any superhuman effort on their part. And here in the last chapter, we have, not a checklist to use to score ourselves, hoping that we will measure up but fearing that we might not. Rather, we have a beautiful description of the Good Life, the life which it is open to us to live as a result of the superhuman effort which was made on our behalf by Jesus Christ. ‘He died for us’, Paul writes in verse 10, ‘so that … we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up’, on this solid foundation.

Here in the closing lines of the first letter to the Thessalonians, there are at least three things to note about the Good Life: firstly, who is it for? Second, what does it look like? And third, what is its source and destination?

If we read carefully, we will see that this Good Life is for everyone in the Christian family. The apostle Paul uses the household terminology of ‘brothers’, but of course this is not meant in a gender-exclusive way, which is why our modern Bible translations correctly render this as ‘brothers and sisters’.

It’s interesting to note the different ways in which Paul uses this word. We can see examples of this at the end of the reading, in I Thessalonians, chapter 5, verses 25 to 27. ‘Brothers, pray for us. Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss … Have this letter read to all the brothers.’ So here brothers and sisters are asked to greet fellow brothers and sisters in the way members of a family would, and some brothers and sisters are asked to ensure that Paul’s letter gets read to all the brothers and sisters, presumably because there were some in the congregation were literate and could read, and there were others who could not read, and who had to rely on hearing what Paul had written. And then if we look back to the start of our reading, to chapter 5, verses 12 to 14, we see that the word ‘brothers’ is used there in two different ways. First in verses 12 and 13 the ‘brothers’ are asked to respect their church leaders and hold them in high regard because of their work. And then in verse 14, the church leaders themselves, also described as ‘brothers’, are told what their work is to consist of: warning the idle, encouraging the weak and so on.

The use of this family language, even when describing distinctive roles and responsibilities within the congregation, is built on the assumption made by Paul of a mutual and radical equality between leaders and followers in the Thessalonian church. The language is not of father and son, or master and servant, but of brother and sister. It reminds me of the words of Jesus recorded in Matthew chapter 23, verse 9: ‘Do not call anyone on earth ‘father’, for you have one Father, and he is in heaven’. The use of this language also suggests the deep and sometimes complicated intimacy, respect and affection not so much of friendship, but actually of family. And, finally, the use of this language is broad and inclusive. The Good Life which is described in this passage is for everyone in the Christian family, everyone who has been invited by Christ to call God their Father.

So what does the Good Life look like? So many aspects to this are described in this passage that it will take me most of the rest of my time to talk about them. However, I can’t do complete justice to any of these aspects in what I say now. The Good Life is for living, rather than for being spoken about. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say.

So here are some of the ingredients that help make up the Good Life recipe, here are nine words or phrases to describe what the Good Life is like: respectful, hardworking, peaceful, forgiving, encouraging and supportive, patient, joyful and thankful, prayerful, and discerning.

1. The respect that the Thessalonian brothers and sisters are asked to show their church leaders in verse 12 does not amount to a blind attribution of status, putting leaders on a pedestal and considering them above criticism. That would be unhealthy and dangerous. It would tend to bring out the worst in people, and would open the way to ugly coercion and abuse. Rather, respect consists of a recognition of the vital function of leaders within a community. Respect them, Paul writes, because of their work. Respect is a two-way street. “Service should be rendered, and … those who render it should receive affectionate recognition and gratitude”.²

2. The Good Life is also hardworking. In chapter 5, verse 12, leaders are to “work hard”, and according to verse 14 anyone who is “idle” is to be warned. Of course, there is a balance to be struck here. We all know that it can be soul-destroying to be over-worked, but we are also aware that time passes more quickly when we are busy, and that it is damaging to one’s sense of self to be under-employed. What Paul tells us in verses 12 and 14 is that every member of the church has a role in it, and that everyone is diminished when anyone is unwilling to play their part.

3. The Good Life is peaceful. “Live at peace with each other”, we are told in chapter 5, verse 13. What we are talking about here is an active commitment to peace-making in the church. Anyone with the slightest experience of church communities knows what an essential requirement this commitment is. Despite appearances, we are not always on our best behaviour in church. In Thessalonica, it is likely that “the leaders in the church had not been sufficiently highly regarded, and their authority had been resisted. Also, in all probability, they had not exercised that authority as tactfully as they might have done.”³ They, all of them, needed a reminder to “live at peace with one another”. Christians today need the same encouragement to peace-making, because they too live in a communities whose imperfections are on show, not always in outright hostility, but sometimes in simple pettiness, self-absorption, and thoughtlessness.

4. The Good Life is forgiving. “Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong”, we are told in chapter 5, verse 15. Paul’s teaching here is a mirror of that of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:44-48) and the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:27-36). Being gracious, forgiving, and non-retaliatory follows logically on, of course, from being peace-making. It is a costly way of living, make no mistake, because it requires a person to surrender a sense of their own rights. But it is part and parcel of the Good Life not to have to keep and hold on to a record of wrongs, which would be exhausting, and would leave a person bitter and twisted.

5. The Good Life is encouraging and supportive. ‘Encourage the timid, help the weak’, we read in chapter 5, verse 14. The timid, “for all [their] conscious inadequacy and diffidence, [are] to be encouraged and made to feel [that they] count”.⁴ Reasonable adjustments must be made for those who are weak. In the absence of such gentle encouragement and support, those who regard themselves as marginal or even worthless to the Christian community are likely to melt away from it, and the only thing left would be an unattractive rump of the strong and the strident.

6. The Good Life is patient. ‘Be patient with everyone’, we read at the end of verse 14. Our fellow Christians are not going to have their sharp corners rubbed off according to any schedule we may impose on them. Thinking about it, our own personal sharp corners must surely place a great strain on others, as well as on God himself, on whom we rely to be ‘compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love’ towards us (Psalm 103:8). So to be constantly demanding perfection of others would be to commit to a life of misery, but to exercise patience is to live gladly and well.

7. The Good Life isjoyful and thankful. ‘Be joyful always’, we have in chapter 5, verse 16, and in verse 18, ‘give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus’. This is not an unthinking thanksgiving and joy, that denies the reality of suffering and flies in the face of sorrow. We are told to give thanks in all circumstances, not for all circumstances, just as we are told elsewhere, not that everything that happens is good, but that in everything, God works for the good of those that love him and are called according to his purpose. It is a joy and thanksgiving secure in the knowledge that though we fear our faith will fail, Christ will hold us fast.

8. The Good Life is prayerful.‘Pray continually’, Paul writes in chapter 5, verse 17. For a sense of what this means, I am going to refer back to Martin Luther, who wrote that “wherever there is a Christian, there too it, in reality, the Holy Spirit, whose only activity is to pray constantly. For even if the Christian is not always moving his lips or producing words, his heart and his arteries are constantly active in his body, giving out sighs: ‘O dear Father, let your name be hallowed, let your kingdom come and your will be done in us and in everyone …’ And if temptations and tribulations increase their pressure, there is a corresponding increase in sighs and entreaties of this kind so that it is impossible to come across a Christian who does not pray as it is to encounter a living person whose heart does not beat…”⁵

9. Lastly, the Good Life is discerning. “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt”, we read in chapter 5, verses 19 and 20 – and then in the verses that follow: “Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.” Discernment was a gift the Thessalonian church really needed. They were possessed by the Holy Spirit, but they themselves did not possess any of the Gospels, or any of the rest of the New Testament, because none of it had yet been written. All they had to guide them into the truths of the Christian faith were the Scriptures of the Old Testament, the memory of the teaching of the apostles who founded the Thessalonian church, and the prophetic utterances of the leaders of the church of Thessalonica. And they needed more.

In response to this situation, the apostle Paul did something which was at that time completely without precedent. For the first time in history, he put apostolic teaching into writing and sent it to them. His first letter to the Thessalonians is by common consent the earliest book of the New Testament. And in time the New Testament itself was recognised by Christians as the repository of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, a measuring rod by which good and evil, truth and error could be distinguished. And here we are two thousand years later, still reading it, and gaining from it an understanding of what makes for the Good Life: who it is for, and what it looks like.

And finally, we consider what is the source and destination of the Good Life: where does it come from, and where will it take us? Here at the end of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, we learn that the Good Life did not originate with us, or come about by the dint of our effort. None of the nine aspects I have outlined are the product of our moral striving, any more than we can take the credit for nurturing and harvesting the ninefold fruit of the Spirit famously listed by the apostle Paul in Galatians chapter 5. In Galatians chapter 5, the clue is in the name: love, joy, peace, patience and so on are the fruit, of the Spirit. And here in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 we read, in verse 23: ‘May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through’.

God himself, by the power of the same mighty strength he exerted to raise Jesus Christ from the dead, is at work in us, and he himself is the source of all the constituent elements of the Good Life. Likewise, he is the destination towards which it heads. ‘May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ This moral endeavour is not down to us. We have not been left alone. ‘The one who called you is faithful’, verse 24 assures us, ‘and he will do it’. He will sanctify; he will keep blameless. That is why Paul ends the entire letter by invoking the greatest and most needed of all God’s gifts to us: ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you’.

In this way, far from being unnecessary, both Faith and Christ himself stand in for what we are utterly unable to do. “Faith”, to return one last time to the words of Martin Luther, “is a confidence of the heart, living, serious, comforting and … so glorious that we become one with Christ and, through him, one with the Father. … There is something busy, active and powerful about Faith, so that it is impossible for it not to do Good Works without ceasing. Faith does not ask if Good Works need to be done. It has already done them, and is still doing them before even being asked.”⁶

This is indeed the Good Life, both for the Thessalonians two thousand years ago, and for us here today: work produced by faith, labour prompted by love, and endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in which hope we will never be disappointed.

1 Luther Brevier: Worte für jeden Tag (Wartburg Verlag, Weimar, 2007), p. 123.

2 F.F. Bruce, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, page 119.

3 Leon Morris, The Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians, pp. 99-100.

4 Bruce, ibid., p. 123.

5 Luther Brevier: Worte für jeden Tag, p. 121.

6 Luther Brevier: Worte für jeden Tag, p. 122.

“He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him.” (1 Thessalonians 5:10)

Ready for the Day

Wouldn’t it be nice to know the future?  It’s what I call the ‘almanac factor’, taken from that series of films “Back to the future”.  Biff, who’s a total air-head, has nevertheless managed to procure from his future self an almanac which gives all the sports results for his own time.  It doesn’t take too many bets for him to accumulate an absolute fortune.

History has thrown up its prophets, or more precisely its seers.  People like Nostradamus, a French doctor who published a book of predictions in the 1550s  –  credited for foreseeing the Great Fire of London (1666), the French Revolution (1789), the atomic bomb, as well as the lives of people like Louis Pasteur, Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle and Mikhail Gorbachev.  Some early Christians were convinced that Jesus would return in the year 1000, and thereafter many tried to put a date on it.  The Methodist John Wesley plumped for the year 1836, Joseph Smith of the Mormons 1861 and Herbert Armstrong of the Worldwide Church of God 1975.  It’s funny that Christians should think they know better than Jesus!  Jesus said that His return would come suddenly and unexpectedly: No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).  And Paul, doubtless reflecting on those words of Jesus, said it would come like a thief in the night (verse 2)  –  suddenly, unexpectedly, like labour pains on a pregnant woman (verse 3).

Jesus’ return triggers two thoughts for Paul relating to the idea of day and night, light and darkness.

• Firstly, a lot of bad stuff goes on at night as darkness provides a good cover  …  crime, drinking, partying, prostitution, murder.  And he goes down a path of contrasting the people of the night with the people of the day.  Christians are supposed to be people of the day, so our task is to bring light into the darkness.
• But then the other feature of night-time is sleep, and Paul sees that as a metaphor for the Christian life.  Following Jesus is not something you switch on and off.  We need to be alert at all times, not just avoiding evil but positively doing good.  He writes: We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.  So then, let’s not be like others who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober  …  putting on faith and love as a breastplate and the hope of salvation as a helmet (verses 5-8).

Paul lived his whole life in the Roman Empire.  The emperor was in total control.  Successive emperors had built the empire through brute force and repression  –  a significant percentage were slaves.  And yet ironically one of Rome’s favourite slogans was ‘Peace and Safety’ (verse 3).  Rome was an autocracy and it was hot on law and order.  It offered a sophisticated, state of the art experience.  There were roads and sanitation systems and entertainment and very lax morals, where citizens were encouraged to satisfy their appetites and cravings, no matter how perverse, invariably by abusing their slaves.

Such is empire through the ages!

Communism was very popular among intellectuals during the years between the two world wars.  Much of what had happened in Russia was somehow kept under wraps  e.g. the fact that there was a six-year civil war following the 1917 revolution in which 10million died, the appalling government-inflicted famine on the people of Ukraine during the early 1930s in which a further 3million perished.  When the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941 they were applauded in by the Ukrainians as liberators, but the Nazis rapidly set about executing Ukrainian Jews.

All empires, it seems, repeat the cycle of initial butchery, later artistry and eventual collapse.

1^st Century Rome was no different.  If you ever stepped out of line and challenged the ‘Pax Romana’ (Roman Peace!!!), you would be crushed.  The lucky few who had Roman citizenship drifted through life thinking ‘this is as good as it gets’.  They were not about to jeopardise their own good fortune by standing up for the victims of Roman butchery!

And yet that’s exactly what Jesus calls us to do  –  to step out of line, to live by His rules, to live in the expectation of His imminent return.  And if Christ is going to return, then we must not drift through life.  We must be alert, prepared for the challenge of what following Jesus means.  We are called to be children of the day, to live in the light, to see life differently, to live by a narrative which draws Christ-like actions and reactions from us.

We are all called to be purveyors of a better world.  We can all see what’s going on outside our windows, but does how we speak and act promote a better way?  I once came across some words that I subsequently used to read before communion  –  they explored the thought of re-membering, of putting the broken members of Jesus’ body back together again.

We come to re-member Jesus  …

the hands that touched the untouchable, healed the hurting and did no violence;

the feet that got dusty along city streets and at the lake’s shore;

the arms that welcomed the stranger and embraced the outcast;

the legs that entered homes and synagogues and danced at celebrations;

the eyes that blazed against injustice, knew how to cry and saw the potential in everyone;

the belly that shared table with unexpected people and shook with laughter;

the lips that wove stories and painted pictures of a new community and a better world.

This blessèd body that was broken, abused and rejected, we come to re-member.

Is this the person that inspires you and shapes the way you think and live?   Are you a child of the night or a child of the day?  Have you bought into the consumerist values of this age, or are you driven by the hope of the age to come?  Has Jesus radically changed the way you think and the way you behave?  I still remember the evening I first turned my life over to Jesus  –  there have been ups and downs, and no end of regrets and recommitments, but the perspective of Jesus has always made sense to me.

Jesus said He is the way, the truth and the life.  There are plenty of competing claims, but His is worth your full consideration.  Christians look forward to His return when God will establish a better empire of justice and joy.

A dying Christian once dictated a final letter to a loved one.

I am still in the land of the living, he began, but then paused and began again.

I am still in the land of the dying, but soon I will be in the land of the living!

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.  This is our faith and hope.  This is our compass through life.

“For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:14)

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 Colin Gale 17 August 2025

Last week our reading from St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians was full of simple, practical advice for Christian living. ‘Lead a quiet life, mind your own business, and work with your hands, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders’ (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12), that kind of thing.

This week by contrast, the reading throws into the deep end of the frustration the Thessalonian Christians were having at the long delay they were experiencing in waiting for the Lord Jesus to return imminently to wrap up all of human history and gather his faithful people together. They had thought it was all over, bar the shouting, but contrary to their expectation, human history was continuing to roll on, so long that some in the congregation had died of old age waiting. This was a serious problem as far as the Thessalonians were concerned. Since the Lord had delayed his return, how could he gather together those who had already died waiting for him?

Two thousand years later, the Thessalonians’ problem is a difficult one for us to relate to. Many Christians have lost the anticipation of the imminent end of the world as we know it, and regard those who retain such an expectation with a healthy dose of suspicion. A person might be forgiven for wanting to get back to the shallow end of the pool, and just hear some simple, practical advice for Christian living. But the passage we have heard read this morning encourages us first to grapple with the Thessalonians’ problem, second to consider a different paradigm, or point of view, for the solution of the problem, and third to get through to the wonderful promise that forms the basis for all Christian living.

The reason this is important is that no-one can learn to swim in the shallow end of the pool. We need a deeper basis for Christian life than simply to be told to ‘lead a quiet life, and mind your own business’. In fact, there is nothing specifically Christian about this, or any other moral advice, considered in isolation. But in grappling with the Thessalonians’ problem, in shifting the paradigm we use to understand it, and in hearing the promise of the Lord, we can find a secure footing and deep foundations that are located outside of ourselves for living our lives.

The Thessalonians’ problem was as I have already begun to describe it. They lived in the expectation that the Lord would return and wrap up human history in their lifetime. They were unprepared for the fact that some of their number, all of whom they knew and loved, would die waiting, and they had given no thought to their fate.

The resources they had to draw on in trying to understand the situation were more limited than the ones we have available today. We know from Mark 13 verse 27 and Matthew 24 verse 31 of Jesus’ teaching that he would gather the elect from the four winds, and we know from Luke chapter 14 verse 14 and John chapter 5 verses 28 and 29 that he promised a resurrection of the just and the unjust. But the Thessalonians didn’t possess any of the Gospels, or any of the rest of the New Testament, because none of it had yet been written. All they had to go on were the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and the memory of the teaching of the apostles who founded the Thessalonian church, and the teaching of the leaders of the church of Thessalonica. All this was not enough to reassure them about the fate of their loved ones who they feared had been lost forever.

The response of the apostle Paul was to do something which was at that time completely without precedent. For the first time in history, he put the apostolic teaching on this question – and others – into writing and sent it to them. His first letter to the Thessalonians is by common consent the earliest book of the New Testament. In this letter, he told them (in chapter 4, verse 15) that ‘according to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep’ – presumably relying on the reports of Jesus’ teaching that later found their way into Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as I have already mentioned. In this letter, he drew a connection (in chapter 4 verse 14) between what the Thessalonians already knew to what they needed to know to dispel the fears they had for their loved ones. “We believe that Jesus died and rose again,” he wrote, “and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him”.

It is difficult for us, as I say, to completely relate to the issue the Thessalonians had. On the positive side, we have been given all the assurance we need of the resurrection of the dead by the gospels and the letters of the New Testament. On the minus side, 2000 years further along we are somewhat in danger of losing the expectation of the Lord’s return entirely. Nevertheless, the death of our loved ones still poses a problem for us. We still speak of having ‘lost’ relatives who have died. ‘Sorry for your loss’, we rightly say to those who are grieving; because in the death of loved ones we do suffer grievous loss. The problem we share with the Thessalonians has to do with the appropriate maintenance of hope in the face of death. We too need reassurance that our loss is not irreversible. With the Thessalonians, we need to hear and receive the apostolic teaching that because Jesus died and rose again, God will also bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.

We also need to understand that the phrase ‘fallen asleep’ is not another euphemism for death, of which there are many such euphemisms. Contained within that phrase is, instead, the essence of Christian hope, linked inextricably with the death and resurrection of Jesus. He died a death which was “the wages of sin; and because he endured the full horror implied in that death, he has transformed death for his followers into sleep”,¹ and his resurrection is the guarantee of ours. In the final analysis, this is the answer to the problem of death that has faced humanity in every generation. “We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him”.

Earlier I said that those Christians who maintain an expectation of the imminent return of the Lord to earth are often regarded with suspicion by others. I don’t know when you last saw a street preacher with a sandwich board reading ‘the end of the world is nigh’, but you know the kind of thing I mean. When I was a teenager, I heard someone insist that although they did not know the day or the hour of the return of Christ, they could make an informed guess at the month and the year – which was June 2007, in case you were wondering. These kind of preachers, sandwich boards, and actually ill-informed guesses operate within a paradigm, or model of thinking, which is completely foreign and false to the New Testament. When the New Testament speaks, as it often does, of us living in the last days, or even in the last hour, it is operating within a completely different paradigm, or frame of reference.

The best way I can think of to explain this is by saying something about Francis Fukuyama’s concept of ‘the end of history’. In 1989, the same year as the Berlin Wall came down, an American academic called Francis Fukuyama wrote an article, which was later published as a book, called The End of History and the Last Man. In it he reflected on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War”, he wrote, not just “the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such”. In speaking of the end of history, Fukuyama did not mean the end of time, or the actual cessation of events. Instead, he had in mind “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution”. He believed the ultimate result of this evolution to be “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final [and most perfect] form of human government”. It was not that he thought that the human society was about to come to an end, or that things would stop happening entirely. Instead he thought that the triumph of liberal democratic, free-market capitalism over communism, which he was living through at the time of writing the article and the book, would be the final significant political and economic development of human society, the conclusion of that development. Even if liberal democracy suffered setbacks in the future – from a return to totalitarianism, for example – eventually he thought it would prevail, and that capitalism liberal democracy could not and would not be improved upon. Stuff would still keep happening in the future, but Fukuyama thought that nothing more could take place that was significantly new in terms of the way human society is organized.

There is a parallel here with the New Testament’s concept of ‘the last days’ or ‘the last hour’. Given that the authors of the various books of the New Testament lived the best part of two thousand years ago, what can it mean for them to say that their times were the last times, their days were the last days, their hours were the last hours? Were they perhaps being a little extreme, or a bit bonkers? Were they simply mistaken? And if Christians today affirm, as part of their faith, that they believe themselves to be living at the end of the ages, in the last days, or in the last hour, are they being too extreme? Is this an idea that is just too out-there, too dangerous even, for people to seriously take on board?

No, it’s not, not if we think about the ‘end of the age’ and the ‘last hour’ in the same way as Francis Fukuyama thought about ‘the end of history’. Remember that Fukuyama wasn’t predicting the imminent end of the world back in the late 1980s, or the complete cessation of events. What he was saying was that, in the wake of the triumph of liberal democracy over communism, human society had reached the pinnacle of its political and economic development. Stuff would still keep happening, but he thought there would be nothing significant enough to make us revisit and revise that conclusion. Behind that conclusion lies a secular faith in representative democracy and free markets, a paradigm – or way of thinking – in which they reign supreme. But there is a rival to this secular faith, which is Christian faith in the coming kingdom of God, and Christian faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus as the true pivot upon which the entirety of human history turns.

In speaking of the ‘last days’, the authors of the New Testament were not saying that after Jesus, the world would soon wind itself down. They weren’t saying that events wouldn’t continue to take place. What they claimed was that his triumph over sin and death by his cross and resurrection had ushered in a paradigm shift. They claimed that there would be no events that could take place in the remainder of human history, no matter how significant the events could otherwise be regarded, no matter long or short human history turns out to be, that could force a re-evaluation of this claim about the centrality of what Christ has done for fallen humanity. If on the day of crucifixion, they thought it was all over, on the day of resurrection they would have to say: ‘It is now!” The writer to the Hebrews gives a one-sentence summary of human history in chapter 9, verse 28, by saying: “Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people, and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him”. We have been living between those two times for the past two millennia, and that is how we may understand what it means to be living in the last days, or the last hour. Whether it is a long time, or a short time, until all human history is wrapped up, this is the paradigm within which we may live in expectation of the imminent return of Christ, who is truly the ‘Lord of history’.

And now we approach the wonderful promise of this passage in reading verses 16 and 17 of chapter 4. “The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”

Please note well: Paul is not here saying that those who have died in the Lord, together with those Christians still living, are going to be snatched from the earth in advance of its total destruction. The day of the Lord’s return will be about his arrival to reign upon the earth, rather than the final turning of his back upon it. It will be about the renewal, rather than the destruction, of the world.

This image of Christ’s followers, both living and departed, being caught up in the clouds to meet him in the air, mirrors the Gospel parable of the ten virgins, whose job it was to look out for the approach of the bridegroom, and to come out, meet him on his way, and accompany him in joyful procession to meet his bride.² Or think of the football fans who invaded the pitch at Wembley Stadium in 1966 at the precise moment they thought the World Cup Final was all over. Bobby Moore was hoisted up on his team-mates’ shoulders, and the crowd formed a victory escort for the whole team.

This kind of welcome would have been very familiar to the citizens of Thessalonica, because in the classical world it was the custom for the leading citizens of a city to assemble outside the city walls and form a welcoming party when they were expecting visits from conquerors returning from battles and dignitaries on diplomatic missions. The honoured visitor would then be escorted back into the city in pomp and circumstance, just as in 1966 Bobby Moore and the England team was accompanied by cheering crowds off the pitch.

F.F. Bruce, the biblical scholar, tells us that the Greek word used in classical literature for these meetings with returning conquerors is used by Paul in verse 17 of chapter 4 to describe our meeting with the Lord.³ We will be caught up in the clouds to meet him in the air. But our heads won’t stay in the clouds on that day, any more than the crowds remained on the pitch once the team had departed. Still less will the Lord depart the earth, having only just returned. Rather, on that day we will welcome our King to the earth which is rightfully his, and which will be renewed to be a fit dwelling-place for him, just as in the parable, the virgins escorted the bridegroom to his bride, and as in 1966 the crowds escorted their champions. “And so”, Paul says at the end of chapter 4, verse 17, “we will be with the Lord forever”. That is the essence of the promise, and that will be heaven for us, more than we have ever hoped for, far more than we are even able to conceive. That was the hope of my mother, and it was the hope of my father. It was the hope of all our forefathers and foremothers in faith. It is my only hope; and it’s yours as well. “We will be with the Lord forever”.

And this promise, we read in the final verse of our passage, is where we find a solid foundation for true encouragement. “Encourage each other with these words”, it says in verse 18. There is no encouragement to be gained, really, from mere moral advice, not least because we find ourselves incapable before long of abiding by the most basic guidance. Moral advice is the shallow end of the pool. Once we make our way through to the deep end, we will discover that the Lord is there, the risen and exalted one, and that he will carry us through life, and death, and the fear of death.

1 Leon Morris, The Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians, p. 85.

2 Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Index Volume with Aids for the Preacher (T&T Clark, 1977), p. 536.

3 F.F. Bruce, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, pages 102-103.

“And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13)