1 Thess. 4:13-18; job 19;25-27, Death and Dying

As you read this passage for today you might have thought, “Oh, that’s right, this is the rapture passage.”  True, it is.  But you may have forgotten the context of the passage: lest you sorrow as others who have no hope.


The sorrow of those with no hope was made very apparent to me the first time I came across the poem Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878).  He addressed his poem To him who in the love of nature…, meaning it was a view of death for one who knows ONLY nature.  He referred to death as being a brother to the insensible rock and as mixing forever with the elements.  He acknowledged that we are dust and that in death we return to dust.  His comfort was derived, as is the case in Ecclesiastes 9:1ff, in the fact that all that breathe will share thy destiny.


With that in mind Bryant longs for something positive to say: So live that when thy summons comes to join the innumerable caravan, which moves to that mysterious realm, where each shall take his chair in the silent halls of death, thou go not as a quarry slave ... but sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust (in whom? of what?) approach thy grave, like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams.

All this is sad, tragic, experience when compared to the powerful and positive attitude of believers in the face of death.  Take, for example, these words from Lightfoot’s commentary on 1 Thessalonians:

...we cannot fail to observe how the very objects in nature, which Christian philosophers ... have adduced as types and analogies of the resurrection of man, as for instance the rising and setting of the sun, and the annual resuscitation of plants, presented to the heathen only a painful contrast, enforcing the inferiority of man to the inanimate creation. This triumphal application of natural phenomena by Christian writers to support the doctrine of immortality begins at once.


Several years ago there was an Alaska Airlines plane that crashed killing all on board.  On the news there was a replay of the recording of the sounds in the main cabin.  I have never heard anything like it and I am sure you would never hear something like that today; it would not be permitted.  What you heard were many people crying out in fear, of course.  But in the background you could hear a woman strongly proclaiming the good news of hope in Christ and how, even at those final moments, one could have that hope.  It was amazing!


We who believe the Bible to be the word of the Creator for mankind operate out of some basic assumptions.  1) There is life after death, for everyone.  2) There is a judgment after death, for everyone.  That judgment is based on this life.  3) Christ has been there before us, experiencing death full and complete; and He has returned victoriously.  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who sleep in Jesus.  Like Job, our hearts have a strange but definite yearning for that hope!