NOTES for Th1 4:13-18

Speaking about the Kingdom and Christian life, Paul also touches in passing on the question of those who have died, which, as is clear, puzzled the Thessalonian Christians, and perhaps not only them. This was apparently connected with the fact that the first generation of Christians expected the Savior's return literally from day to day. So when some of its members began to die without having waited for the second coming, their death threw those who remained into confusion: they had been sure that death had been conquered by the risen Christ, so that the faithful would never again have to meet it, especially since this was not the death of witnesses of Christ, but a natural death, ordinary for our still untransformed world. Paul points his readers to the obvious fact that victory over death does not mean that death can be avoided. Christ Himself did not avoid death; He conquered it. And from the faithful He clearly expects the same victory, which will become possible for them with His help (vv. 13-14).

But this victory is inseparable from the history of the Kingdom, which is being revealed in our still untransformed world, bringing it ever closer to the fullness of transformation. Every faithful person will receive the fullness of life regardless of when God has judged that he should pass through his earthly path. The Kingdom is always greater than history and higher than time; that is why those who have to live in the days of the Savior's return will not precede those who by that time have already completed their earthly path. When it is revealed in all its fullness, time, which determines the sequence of events in our still untransformed world, will simply cease to be relevant, and with it such concepts as past, present, and future will cease to be relevant, at least in the form in which we know them now. And then in the fullness of the Kingdom, where there is no place for death, those whose earthly path, by the measure of the departing world, ended long ago in the past, and those who are destined to live in its last days, will stand together before God (vv. 15-17). Thus the triumph of the Kingdom becomes the triumph and victory over death for all who share in it.