1 Thessalonians 4:13–18

Original Meaning

The Topic (4:13)

IN VERSE 13, Paul introduces the topic. It concerns “those who fall asleep,” that is, Christian brothers or sisters who have died before the Parousia of Jesus. He writes to inform (“we do not want you to be ignorant”) the Thessalonians,5 “so that” (hina, an expression of purpose, which the NIV’s “or” misses completely) they will not “grieve like the rest” (i.e., those “who have no hope”). Paul does not say that the Thessalonians should not grieve, but that they should not grieve in the same way or to the same extent as those without hope grieve. The hope that is characteristic of a believer (cf. 1:3; 2:19; 5:8; 2 Thess. 2:16; also Rom. 5:2; 8:24) must, Paul believes, affect the way one deals with death: “Grief at a friend’s death (Phil. 2:27) is normal, but a grief of despair, one that sees only helplessness, is a denial of hope itself.”6

“Sleep” was widely and frequently used as a euphemism for death both by pagans and by Jews and Christians. There were, however, significant differences in how the reality (death) behind the euphemism was understood. “In contemporary paganism it was too often viewed as a sleep from which there would be no awaking; cf. Catullus (5.4–6): ‘The sun can set and rise again / But once our brief light sets / There is one unending night to be slept through.’ ”7 People who viewed death in this perspective were accurately characterized by Paul as those “who have no hope” (4:13);8 see, for example, Theocritus (Idyll, 4.42): “Hopes are for the living; the dead are without hope.” For Jews and Christians, death was no less real, but the hope of resurrection meant that death was viewed not as a permanent state but as a temporary condition, one that might interrupt but could not terminate life as part of God’s people.

Bridging Contexts

THIS PASSAGE IS the first of several in the Thessalonian letters that deal with what are often termed “things to come”—that is, experiences or events in the future such as death, resurrection, the return of Jesus, and judgment. Because these passages deal with events that have not yet happened (on both the individual and the global level), they have, for obvious reasons, long fascinated people, particularly in times of distress or great turmoil. Unfortunately, these texts also have a long history of being misunderstood, misused, and fiercely debated.

For this reason, it is important to keep several things clearly in mind regarding this section as we attempt to bring it to our day and age. (1) In this passage Paul is dealing with a fairly narrow question: the fate of believers who die before Christ returns. To this question he gives a clear and unambiguous answer: The ultimate fate of all believers, regardless of when or if they die, is to “be with the Lord forever” (4:17). This is the final word of his answer and the central point of the passage.

(2) Paul’s expectations of what God and Jesus will do in the future are grounded in his convictions about what God and Jesus have already done in the past. What Paul says here is not a matter of optimistic speculation but of a confident hope: The future resurrection of those who are “dead in Christ” (4:16) is an unavoidable corollary of God’s past resurrection of Christ himself.19

(3) Paul writes about the dead for the sake of the living. That is, while his main topic is the future fate of the believing dead, his primary focus is the present conduct of the living. If 2:1–12 offered a portrait of Paul the missionary, here we catch a glimpse of Paul the pastor as he clarifies how the affirmation about what the Thessalonians believe (4:14) ought to shape and influence how they live, even in the face of what he terms elsewhere “the last enemy,” death itself (1 Cor. 15:26). He expects that what he says about deceased brothers and sisters will shape the attitudes and behavior of the brothers and sisters still living in Thessalonica.

(4) This means that Paul’s fundamental purpose in this section is not to answer any and all questions that his readers (then or now) may have about their future, but to equip the Thessalonian believers to encourage one another (4:18). Whatever he says by way of instruction is in the service of his exhortation.

(5) Finally, it is important to note the differing assumptions underlying the question and its answer. Those asking the question apparently assumed that death was the ultimate end of human existence, whereas for Paul the ultimate end for believers is life.

The pitfall of a literal interpretation of metaphoric language. If we keep these points in mind, it may be possible to navigate successfully around two major pitfalls that one encounters in this passage (and others like it), pitfalls that have the potential to bog down or sidetrack application of the passage. The first potential pitfall has to do with the nature of the events the passage describes. Resurrection and the return of Jesus, for example, are events that are beyond the range of present human experience and which strain the ability of language to describe them. In order to communicate the truth about these future events that transcend the boundaries of human experience and the limits of language, Paul follows the example (and often borrows from the language) of the Old Testament prophets.

The prophets sometimes used figurative language or metaphors to alert their audience to the significance of predicted events in human history. For instance, in Isaiah 13 the prophet utilized images of cosmic disaster (e.g., the stars, sun, and moon not giving light, and the heavens trembling; see vv. 10, 13) to describe the historical event of God’s judgment of Babylon. The prophet Joel associated similar language (“I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood,” Joel 2:30–31) with his prophecy of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the last days (2:28–32). According to Peter, who quotes Joel 2:28–32, this prophecy was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost (see Acts 2:16–21). Examples like this indicate that the biblical writers made use of at least some degree of metaphor or figurative language in speaking of future events.

Like the prophets, Paul also occasionally used figurative or metaphorical language, as his use of “sleep” as a metaphor for death in 4:13 demonstrates. But this has not always been recognized, and metaphorical language in Paul’s letters has sometimes been (mis-)interpreted too literally.20 Two quite different outcomes have resulted from this literalistic misreading of Paul’s teachings about future events. (1) Some have rejected Paul’s message. Shaped by an Enlightenment perspective that draws a sharp distinction between the supernatural and the natural and understands that the world as a closed continuum of natural cause and effect, these interpreters have either rejected Paul’s statements as “mythical” and/or irrelevant to a modern scientific worldview, or they have decided that they must be radically reinterpreted or “demythologized” in order to make sense today.21 Such approaches, which essentially see Paul as only a “child of his times” and ignore the divine inspiration of Scripture, have been unanimously rejected by evangelical scholars.22

(2) Other interpreters, taking Paul’s metaphorical language too literally, read into his letters meanings or ideas he never intended to communicate. For example, the idea of “soul sleep” (the erroneous idea that believers are unconscious between the time of death and the coming of Christ), taught by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists, is based on a misunderstanding of Paul’s use of sleep as a metaphor for death.23

Those who reject the Pauline message basically deny any reality behind Paul’s figurative language or metaphors, while those who read extraneous ideas into Paul’s message confuse the metaphor with the reality it represents. How can we avoid these two outcomes? While both approaches misunderstand too literally the symbolic language that Paul uses to speak of future events, at least the second approach recognizes that Paul is speaking of historical realities. This is an important point to emphasize: The New Testament in general, and Paul in particular, places the future events of resurrection, judgment, and the return of Christ on the same historical level as his ministry, death, and resurrection. In fact, Paul’s belief in what God will yet do is grounded in his convictions about what God has already done. The future is shaped by the past. While this perspective may be viewed with skepticism by an Enlightenment worldview, in reality it calls into question the Enlightenment’s radical separation between natural and supernatural, a distinction that seems odd to much of the non-Western world.

But at the same time that we affirm the historical realities of which Paul speaks, we must acknowledge that he sometimes utilizes symbolic or metaphoric language to express them. This means that in interpreting passages in which Paul speaks about the future, there may well be some degree of uncertainty or disagreement about some of what he says, especially with regard to details. As a consequence, we do well to follow John R. W. Stott’s guideline:

We will be wise to combine affirmation (we are eagerly expecting a cosmic event which will include the personal, visible appearing of Jesus Christ and the gathering to him of all his people, whether dead or alive at the time) with agnosticism about the full reality behind the imagery.24

That is, we must affirm the central elements of what Paul teaches (Jesus is coming again) while acknowledging the possibility of uncertainty about some of the details (will Jesus and his followers descend to earth or return to heaven after the “meeting in the air”?).

The pitfall of unanswered questions. A second pitfall arises out of the circumstance that in answering one specific question, Paul raises (but does not answer) several other questions. These include the nature of the resurrection body, whether any change takes place to the bodies of those who are caught up, the state of the Christian dead between death and resurrection, the resurrection of unbelievers, judgment and the Judgment Day, and so forth.25

Some of these questions can be answered on the basis of other Pauline passages. The apostle, for example, discusses the nature of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15:35–49 and indicates in 15:50–53 that while not all believers will die (and consequently be resurrected), “we all will be changed” or transformed. Similarly, 2 Corinthians 5:1–10 and Philippians 1:23 indicate that between death and resurrection, deceased believers are aware of “being with Christ.” In many instances when one is preaching or teaching on 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, it will be advisable and legitimate to answer these other questions by looking at other passages of Scripture. The challenge is to deal with them in a way that meets the needs or interests of the audience without distracting attention from the main points Paul makes here.

But some of the questions cannot even be answered, simply because the New Testament does not address them. In such instances, the challenge is to avoid becoming distracted by or dogmatic about points concerning which there are grounds for legitimate differences of opinion. One example of a question like this is the matter of the timing and direction of the “rapture” mentioned in 4:17. Some interpreters insist that this “catching up” of believers to be with the Lord is a separate event from the Parousia (the second coming) of Jesus, and that after being “caught up,” the gathered assembly returns to heaven. But in view of the close correlation between 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 and 1 Corinthians 15:51–52, and the way in which the events of 1 Corinthians are associated with Christ’s return, many scholars (myself included) conclude that the events described in the present passage take place at the same time as the Parousia and that the gathered assembly of believers accompanies the Lord Jesus in a triumphal procession to earth.26 In view of such differences, it seems unwise to become dogmatic about a particular interpretation of this passage or to make it a test of faith or fellowship.

Contemporary Significance

ONE OF MY all-time favorite Peanuts cartoons involves a conversation between Lucy and Linus. Looking out a window, Lucy wonders: “Boy, look at it rain … what if it floods the whole world?” “It will never do that,” says Linus. “In the ninth chapter of Genesis, God promised Noah that would never happen again, and the sign of the promise is the rainbow.” “You’ve taken a great load off my mind,” replies Lucy, to which Linus responds: “Sound theology has a way of doing that!” The cartoon captures the essence of what Paul was doing in this passage in 1 Thessalonians: Offering “sound theology” as a comfort and encouragement to friends trying to make sense of that universal human experience, death.

Death is a “hot” topic in contemporary American culture. Since the publication of Kübler-Ross’s accounts of near-death experiences,27 a steadily increasing number of books have appeared that deal with dying, death, and the afterlife, and mainstream media (both print and visual) now regularly deal with the topic. But if the more popular-level media offer any indication, the real point of interest is not simply death itself as much as what happens after death. Books that claim to offer a glimpse of what happens after death or that describe “walking towards a light” fill the shelves of retail outlets; major movies visualize fictitious stories of people who die, yet are still able to interact with the living; supermarket tabloids scream for attention with headlines like “What Really Happens After You Die.”

Personal concerns regarding death. Behind all this intense general interest in death and its aftermath lies, I suspect, an even more intense personal concern: What will happen to me at death? It should come as no surprise that our culture’s general interest in death turns out to be intensely personal, for as I noted above, death is one of the few things universal to human experience. Even the Thessalonians’ question to Paul fits this pattern. Their general concern—“What about those who have died before Jesus comes?”—hides a more personal question: What will happen to me if I die before Jesus comes? In short, the underlying question back then is essentially the same as the one being asked today.

This means, in turn, that Paul’s answer to their question is also an answer to ours. Keeping in mind that he is speaking specifically about believers (not humans in general), there are at least three specific aspects of his answer that probably need to be emphasized today.

(1) The future of believers is not so much a place as a relationship. To believers who, like people around us, wonder about what happens or “where we go” when we die, Paul says: “We will be with the Lord forever” (4:17). Compared to the detailed answers available from other sources (e.g., the Muslim portrayal of Paradise or those propounded by the New Age movement), this seems almost too basic, hardly sufficient to satisfy our intense curiosity. Yet this answer seems “basic” only if we fail to sense the substance of what Paul’s affirmation implies. As Paul develops the point elsewhere,28 resurrection (or rapture, as the case may be) to “be with the Lord forever” includes (a) the acquisition of a transformed resurrection body that is glorious and imperishable, and (b) the enjoyment of a relationship with Christ that is closer, richer, and fuller than the relationship we currently experience—in sum, a state of existence that Paul himself considers to be “better by far” (Phil. 1:23). Our present experience of Christ, in other words, is only a foretaste of what lies before us.

If Paul’s answer about the future seems somewhat basic in comparison to other answers, it nonetheless has something they do not: a solid historical foundation. What Paul says about our future as believers is not a matter of baseless speculation, but is grounded in God’s resurrection and exaltation of Jesus the Messiah. Our confident outlook towards the future is grounded in our knowledge of the past. What God has already done—rather than human speculation, unfounded optimism, or sheer wishful thinking—is the foundation on which our genuine hope for the future rests.

(2) For believers, death is not an end but a transition. The questions the Thessalonians raised reflect at least in part an assumption on their part that death was the final reality of human existence, an end point or barrier that even the return of Jesus could not cross or affect. Similar views of death are not uncommon today; even some Christian theologians argue that on an individual level there is nothing beyond death.29 Against any materialistic philosophy or viewpoint that asserts such a view of death, Paul clearly declares that there is a reality beyond even death.

In contrast to the cynicism expressed in much of Ecclesiastes, whose author, after surveying everything that happened “under the sun,” found only meaninglessness, frustration, and despair, Paul affirms that there is more to life than can be known only on the basis of human experience. In view of God’s resurrection of Jesus, the death of a believer must be viewed not as an end to life, but as a transition to an even better experience of life: life in the presence of Jesus the Lord. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed this with characteristic eloquence in a sermon at the funeral of the four young girls killed by a racist’s bomb in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963:

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.30

To affirm with Paul that death is not an end but a transition is not at all to deny or minimize the destructive effects of death, which include the disruption of valued and significant human relationships. As John R. W. Stott observes, “However firm our Christian faith may be, the loss of a close relative or friend causes a profound emotional shock. To lose a loved one is to lose a part of oneself. It calls for radical and painful adjustments, which can take many months” or even years.31 In such circumstances, mourning is a natural, even necessary, response; as D. A. Carson observes, “The Bible everywhere assumes that those who are bereaved will grieve, and their grief is never belittled.”32

But even in the midst of our mourning and sorrow, Paul reminds us not to lose sight of God’s resurrection of Jesus, that decisive victory over death in which all departed believers will participate eventually when God also raises them (4:14). For this reason the way in which we mourn ought to be qualitatively different from those “who have no hope” (4:13). “What Paul prohibits is not grief but hopeless grief.”33 In seasons of loss, testifying to the hope we have in Christ may not be easy. “The struggle,” as Leighton Ford, the noted evangelist and mission leader, whose oldest son died at age twenty-one, notes, “is to bring our faith and our emotions together.”34 That is precisely the challenge that death presents to Christians: to live out their beliefs when it is most difficult to do so.

(3) What we know and believe about the future ought to shape how we live in the present. While Paul’s subject was the fate of believers who had died, his audience was believers who were alive, and his last word is to them: “Therefore encourage each other with these words” (4:18). Paul clearly expects the information he has imparted to the Thessalonians to affect their attitudes and behavior. If the assumption of some of them (namely, that death is the end) were true, then an Epicurean approach to life—“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”—would be appropriate, as Paul himself recognizes (1 Cor. 15:32). But precisely because that view of life is not true, because we do look forward to the resurrection of the dead, we live not for the moment but with an eye to the future. More important, how we live now ought to be shaped in fundamental ways by that future.

Suicide bombers, tragically convinced that they will enter Paradise when they die, willingly give their lives for political or religious causes. Jehovah’s Witnesses labor in hope that they might be found among the 144,000 who qualify for heaven, and Mormons strive toward extraterrestrial rewards. If mistaken beliefs such as these can have such an impact on those who hold them, should the beliefs of Christians, grounded as they are in the resurrection of Jesus, have any less impact? Yet it often appears that many Christians are indistinguishable from their neighbors in critical respects. Risk-averse and security-conscious, we seem unwilling to risk much of anything, let alone our lives, for the sake of the gospel. Yet it is in fact risk-taking living in this world to which the gospel calls us (“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it,” Mark 8:35).

The early church understood this. For example, when an epidemic broke out in a city and the inhabitants fled to the countryside in fear, many Christians stayed to minister to the sick (Christian and non-Christian alike) in the spirit of Matthew 25:35–40, secure in the knowledge that dying in the service of the gospel meant life with Christ forever. Moreover, their ministry became a powerful means of evangelism that contributed significantly to the long-term expansion of Christianity.35 If an Ebola-like epidemic were to break out in our city today and a call for volunteers to serve and minister went out, how would we respond? This is the kind of question with which this passage confronts us.

Confronting our own mortality. More generally (and less hypothetically), the passage challenges us to confront our own mortality. It invites us to ask about the extent to which our thinking about and behavior regarding death is motivated by either fear or denial of it. It offers an opportunity to decide if we really believe, with Paul, that for believers “to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21, 23). None of these questions is easy to deal with, since they force us to confront death. The good news is that we do not need to confront death only on the basis of our own resources, but on the basis of faith in the God who has already conquered death in the resurrection of his Son, our Lord. The refrain to a familiar hymn captures well Paul’s basic point in this passage:

Because He lives I can face tomorrow,

Because He lives all fear is gone;

Because I know He holds the future.

And life is worth the living just because He lives.36

I read recently about a woman who described how, when her mother’s death had become inevitable, she nonetheless wanted the doctors to do everything they could to keep her mother alive because, as she only later realized, she did not want to be the “next in line.” This kind of denial is not uncommon; as Martin Marty points out, “a strong majority of Americans share that belief [in eternal life], yet they live in terror of death.”37 How different, however, was the attitude exemplified by the late Archbishop of Chicago, John Cardinal Bernardin. The faith, grace, and courage with which he faced, very publicly, his death from cancer won him wide and genuine respect from people across the nation, indeed around the world. In the manner in which he lived his life in the face of his own imminent death, he modeled a genuinely Christian attitude toward death. For the archbishop, death may have been, in Paul’s words, the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26); but it was not the final victor, for the ultimate victory belongs to God, who “gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (15:57). And therein lies our hope.

Original Meaning

A Theological Affirmation (4:14)

INDEED, IT IS precisely the resurrection of Jesus that provides—as the gar, “for” (omitted by NIV), with which 4:14 begins indicates—the foundation on which Paul bases his encouragement (4:13; cf. 4:18) and the rest of this section. “Since9 we believe,” Paul writes, “that Jesus died and rose again,” then we must also believe (a phrase not in the Greek, but clearly implied by the sentence construction) “that God”—whom Paul elsewhere consistently describes as the God who raised Jesus from the dead (e.g., 1:10; Rom. 4:24; 6:9; 8:11; 10:9; 1 Cor. 15:4, 15, 20; Gal. 1:1)—“will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (cf. 2 Cor. 4:14; also Rom. 6:4; 8:11; 1 Cor. 15:22). That is, for Paul so close is the connection between Jesus and those who believe in him that belief in his resurrection carries with it, as a necessary corollary, belief in the resurrection of his followers (cf. 1 Cor. 15:20, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”).

In other words, there is a fundamental and decisive difference between a typical pagan and a Christian attitude toward death. Whereas for the former it meant a permanent end to life, for the latter it was a transition to an even better mode of existence, life in the presence of Jesus (cf. Phil. 1:21–23). Thus Paul took it for granted that Christians should face death not with despair but with hope—a hope in what God will do, grounded in what he has already done.