Sleeping, Then Waking Up Together

Years before Paul wrote letters as a prisoner in Rome, his friends had to hurry him out of a city in the middle of the night.

The city was Thessalonica, a busy port. Paul and Silas had spent only a few weeks there, telling people that Jesus had died and risen. Some believed. Others got angry. A mob went hunting for Paul, and when they couldn't find him, they dragged his friend Jason in front of the city rulers instead.

"These men have turned the world upside down!" the crowd yelled. "They say there is another king, called Jesus!"

(They meant it as a complaint. Paul would have taken it as a compliment.)

That night the believers sent Paul and Silas away in the dark. Paul went on to Berea, then Athens, but he kept worrying about the friends he had left behind.

"I can't stand it any longer!" he said at last, and he sent young Timothy to check on them.

Timothy came back smiling. "They still trust Jesus," he said, "and they miss you as much as you miss them."

But since Paul left, some of the believers had died. The ones left behind cried at their graves, and they were frightened too.

"Jesus is coming back," they said to each other. "But what about the ones who died before he came? Will they miss it? Are they gone for good?"

So Paul wrote them a letter.

"Brothers and sisters," he wrote, "we want you to know the truth about the believers who have died, so that you won't grieve like people who have no hope."

He did not tell them to stop crying. He wanted their tears to have hope in them.

"We believe that Jesus died and rose again," Paul wrote. "So God will bring back, with Jesus, the ones who have fallen asleep in him."

Paul called them asleep. They really had died and been buried. But sleep is something a person wakes up from.

"The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout," Paul wrote, "with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God."

(God's own trumpet. Nobody is going to sleep through that.)

"The ones who died believing in Jesus will rise first. Then we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever."

In those days, when a king came to visit a city, nobody sat at home and waited. They poured out through the gates to meet him on the road and walked him back in, cheering. Every believer would be there to meet the King. The ones who had died would be at the very front of the crowd.

"So comfort each other with these words," Paul finished.

The Thessalonians dried their eyes, but the graves stayed shut. Paul himself would die one day, and so would everyone who first heard his letter. The letter was copied and read beside sickbeds and gravesides for two thousand years, while God's people listened for a shout and a trumpet.

And one grave had already been opened from the inside. A man who was killed on a Friday got up on the third day and walked out, the first to wake from death and never die again. He was the King the mob in Thessalonica had shouted about. Already, everyone who trusts him belongs to him, the living and the ones who have died.

One day the King will come down with a shout. His people will pour out to meet him, every sleeper awake and nobody left at home, and they will be with Jesus forever.