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in view of the hope of salvation. This exhortation arises naturally out of the earlier verses
as written, but it has no meaning if this church expected to be taken away before that day
had come.
There is an intimate connection which may be easily seen between the close of
I Thess. 4: and the opening of I Thess. 5: I Thess. 4: 13 opens with the words "I
would not have you ignorant", and in 5: 2 the apostle continues, "You yourselves know
perfectly". Both sections deal with "sleep" and both end with the thought of "comfort".
In I Thess. 4: 14 we read:--
"For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that sleep in Jesus
will God bring with Him."
If we interpret this to mean, that when the Lord Jesus returns He will bring the saints
who have fallen asleep with Him from heaven, what can be the meaning of the next
verses, which distinctly teach that the living shall take no precedence over the saints who
have died, but that together they shall meet the Lord in the air, and "thus" and thus only
be for ever "with the Lord"? The passage refers to the resurrection: "We believe that
God will bring--ago--(from the dead) with Him" (Who was also brought from the
dead--anago--Heb. 13: 20). The apostle was ministering the comfort of the Scriptures
to those who were sorrowing for the dead in Christ, and his comfort is resurrection at the
Lord's coming. The actual return of the Lord is described in I Thess. 4: 16:--
"The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the
archangel, and with the trump of God."
We see no reason to teach that the "Lord Himself" is the "archangel" here. We have
already seen, in considering the teaching of Jude, that "Michael the archangel" is closely
linked with the Lord's coming. Moreover, Dan. 12: 1, 2 is a passage which must not be
lightly set aside:--
"And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the
children of thy people, and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there
was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every
one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of
the earth shall awake."
Now if the archangel of I Thess. 4: be the Michael of Dan. 12:, we have a strong
link established between the hope of Israel and the hope of the church during the Acts.
Further links come to light in II Thess., but our space is limited, and we may be able to
look back to this epistle when dealing with the second letter to the same church.
If it should be asked how it has come about that so many errors have been introduced
into the teaching of these epistles, we can only put it down to the fact that as a result of
confusing the two dispensations divided by Acts 28:, truth gathered from Paul's later
ministry has been brought back into this earlier period.