We Who Are Alive and Remain

Before looking at 1 Thessalonians, I want to share an announcement for which I am thankful:

                      Inmillennialism is available at Amazon, Books-A-Million, and Barnes & Noble.

We Who Are Alive and Remain

Our last three posts on First Thessalonians have established the following points about Paul’s “rapture” passage (i.e., 1 Thess 4:13–5:11): (1) The Apostle’s aim was to assure the Thessalonians that their dead brothers and sisters would be at no disadvantage during the messianic-age parousia (presence¹) of the Lord Jesus with his people.² (2) The basis of his comfort is “the word of the Lord” (1 Thess 4:15) found in Jesus’ Olivet Discourse.³ (3) The dead saints would also take part in the messianic-age gathering Jesus mentioned in the Olivet Discourse.⁴

In this short post, I want to focus on a class of people Paul mentions in this context. He says: 

This we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming (Gk. parousia) of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. (1 Thess 4:15)

Robert L. Thomas makes an important admission about the words in italics: “When Paul uses ‘we,’ he apparently places this event [i.e., the parousia, or ‘coming’] within his own lifetime.”⁵ 

But, putting the parousia of Christ within the lifetime of the Apostle Paul and his readers creates a problem. All the existing prophetic models,⁶ including the one Thomas holds, place the parousia—which they call “the coming”—at the end of the church age. These systems require commentators to solve this problem as best they can. 

Thomas lists several proposals regarding how we might understand Paul’s words. (1) Paul was mistaken—neither he nor any of his readers lived to see the Lord return. (2) Paul was speaking hypothetically; he meant “if we live, if we remain.” (3) Paul was being deceptive; he knew the Lord might not return for centuries but pretended otherwise to motivate the Thessalonians. (4) Paul was using two categories, the living and the dead, and simply placed himself and his readers among the former. Thomas rejects all these possibilities in favor of a fifth: it is “the solution that sees Paul setting an example of expectancy for the church of all ages. Proper Christian anticipation includes the imminent return of Christ.”⁷ 

Inmillennialism agrees with Thomas’ rejection of the first four options, but it also rejects his “solution” for the following three reasons. First, again, Paul is reasoning from Jesus’ Olivet Discourse (Matt 24:1–25:46; Mark 13:1–37; Luke 21:5–36). There, Jesus and his disciples referred to his parousia four times (Matt 24:3, 27, 37, 39). The Lord placed it within the generation alive at that time: “Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place” (Matt 24:34). The passage from which Paul draws his comforting words asserts more than “the imminent return of Christ”—it asserts that he would return in the generation then living.

Second, inmillennialism rejects all these proposed “solutions” to 1 Thessalonians 4:15 because of Jesus’ explicit teaching elsewhere. He said, for example, 

The Son of Man will come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He will reward each according to his works. Assuredly, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” (Matt 16:27–28)

These words are almost identical to Paul’s: those “who shall not taste death” (Matt 16:28) are precisely the same as those “who are alive and remain” (1 Thess 4:15)! Jesus (and Paul) said some in this group of living persons would see the parousia, or “coming,” of Christ.

Third, inmillennialism rejects all such options because Paul elsewhere shows he is following the Lord’s timetable for his parousia. He says “the time is short … and the form of this world is passing away.… The end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 7:29, 31; 10:11). He says—assuming his authorship of Hebrews—“For yet in a very little while, the Coming One will come and not delay” (Heb 10:37 HCSB). Again, these statements do not mean these events might take place soon; they mean they will happen soon from the Apostle’s perspective.⁸

 For these reasons, we should accept Paul’s words at face value. He was saying what Jesus had said—some of his contemporaries would live to see the prophetic events associated with the parousia of Christ. This acceptance will require us to rethink the prophetic frameworks that make us grope for solutions to a problem of their own making. The prophetic model I document in Inmillennialism: Redefining the Last Days⁹ avoids this dilemma; it places the parousia of Christ in Paul’s generation but keeps the bodily resurrection and last judgment at the end of history.

Let us “comfort one another with these words” (1 Thess 4:18).

1. For more on this definition of parousia, see here.
2. See the post, What Concerned the Thessalonians About Their Dead?
3. See the post, What “Word of the Lord”?
4. See the post, Where Does God Bring Dead Saints?
5. Robert L. Thomas, “1 Thessalonians,” in Ephesians–Philemon, vol. 11 of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 277.
6. I provide a summary of these models here.
7. Thomas, “1 Thessalonians,” 277–78.
8. The image in this post is Blessed Be the Host of the King of Heaven by an anonymous artist in the mid-16th century. This file (here) is in the public domain (PD-US).
9. Michael A. Rogers, Inmillennialism: Redefining the Last Days (Tullahoma, TN: McGahan Publishing House, 2020). It is available here. For a summary, see the free PDF here.