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Updated: June 29, 2025
In addition to texts already quoted, we find John declaring, "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, ... and the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them"; and Paul writes to the Thessalonians, "We that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep ... and the dead in Christ shall rise first."
When He descends from heaven with the shout and the dead in Christ are raised and we are changed, then "we shall be caught up together with them in clouds to meet the Lord in the air." It will be the blessed time of reunion with the loved ones who have gone before. What joy and comfort it must have brought to the sorrowing Thessalonians when they read these blessed words for the first time!
Jerome, and of the author of the work De Consummatione Mundi, ascribed to St. Hippolytus, and of a writer of a Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, ascribed to St. Ambrose, of many others, who said that he will be of the tribe of Dan: as, for instance, St. Gregory the Great, Theodoret, Aretas of Caesarea, and many more. Such also is the opinion of Bellarmine, who calls it certain.
In his defence he told the judges, that he had always shown himself in his public life the friend, not, like other men, of rich Ionians and Thessalonians, to be courted, and to receive presents, but of the Lacedaemonians; for as he admired, so he wished to imitate, the plainness of their habits, their temperance, and simplicity of living, which he preferred to any sort of riches; but that he always had been, and still was proud to enrich his country with the spoils of her enemies.
In the epistle to Timothy he invokes the Lord 'who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearance and his kingdom. In the second epistle to the Thessalonians he writes, 'And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. Now, he declares that the Antichrist is not yet, so the coming which he prophesies is not that already realized by the birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem.
'Let us put on the armour of light. ROMANS xiii. 12. It is interesting to notice that the metaphor of the Christian armour occurs in Paul's letters throughout his whole course. It first appears, in a very rudimentary form, in the earliest of the Epistles, that to the Thessalonians.
The representations of a wrathful God, of an avenging Christ, of a hell of horrors, are found in such epistles as Second Thessalonians, whose authorship is uncertain; as Jude or Second Peter, about whose authorship and date we have only the probability that no apostle wrote them, and that they were written after the first, fresh inspiration had passed from the church.
Paul in his second epistle to the Thessalonians, after rectifying the mistake of those who thought the day of judgment then at hand, proceeded to inform them that there would be great declensions in the church before the end of the world.
In order to understand their position we must remember that the words and acts of the Lord Jesus Christ had not as yet been written down, and all that the Thessalonians knew about Him was from Paul's preaching and teaching. They could not turn to their Bibles as you can when you long to know just what the Saviour would have you do.
Under the influence of false teachers, this expectation gave rise to unhealthy excitement and consequent disorder in the Church. In his second Epistle to the Thessalonians Paul set himself earnestly to counteract their teaching.
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