A Different Grief

Introduction

Love for books - all sorts of books in my library. Most odd is books on funerals. Do a lot of them. Meeting with different families - all kinds of families.

The biggest difference is the faith of the deceased. When they were and the family is, there is a spirit of hope and peace. When they aren’t it is just the opposite. Gloom.

Faith changes how we view things. Especially when we understand what the Bible teaches about faith. What we would call our theology.

Peanuts Cartoon

Parousia = Second Coming of Christ

- a belief that we hold dear that changes how we view life and death. It gives us encouragements.

What about the dead?

4:13-18

Those who are asleep...

Euphemism (good speech) about death. For the pagans in Greece, it was a permanent condition. You didn’t wake up.

1 & 2 Thessalonians The Topic (4:13)

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.’

But, for the Christian, this sleep was a temporary condition. Death was a temporary condition.

This created a concern among the believers in Thessalonica. What about people who died? This question was based upon their concern for the Parousia, the second coming of Christ. Did they miss heaven because they died before Jesus came back?

Acts 1:11 ESV

and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Expectation that it would happen any day.

So, Paul answers this question. And he does it with authority (v. 15).

Jesus Himself taught about the expectation of resurrection:

John 5:29 ESV

and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

Saints who have passed are with the Lord.

But, we still wait for this resurrection to happen and Paul addresses what about Christians who are still alive?

Jesus will return visibly.

v. 16

So, encourage one another!

Encouragement is a result of salvation.

Faith in Jesus changes our perspective on death.

Three years into his marriage with Helen, who went by Joy, died of cancer. A disease they already knew she had and knew it would soon lead to her death. 1960.

“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

As believers, we have hope and peace when we think about our own death and about those who have already died.

What about the day?

5:1-11

TV preachers with their charts and formulas. Harold Camping, who predicted the end of time to occur in 1994, leased billboards to warn of coming judgment on May 21, 2011. Using a formula based upon random events in the Bible. He was certain he was right because of the rise of earthquakes in South America, Haiti, and Japan. He even pinned it down to 6:00 PM. Well, as you can tell, he wasn’t right.

My philosophy was that every day I would just say, “I know that today is the day.” And then God couldn’t come back that day.

Clearly, what we find in v. 2 is that we simply won’t know the day.

The date of the coming of Jesus is unknown and unlikely.

v. 3.

So, what do we do?

Live in expectation.

Live in sanctification.

Live towards glorification.

Encouragement is a result of salvation.

vv. 9-10.

Conclusion

Reading in college. Small print. Headaches. Mom started telling me I probably needed glasses. I refused. Finally, I went to an optometrist. I needed glasses.

Changed my vision! I was able to see the words on the page!

The lenses I had before my eyes changed how I saw things.

Our understanding of the Parousia, the second coming of Christ, changed how I viewed my own mortality.

Also how I thought about the mortality of other believers.

Grief and encouragement changes when we look at it through faith in Jesus.

Jesus gives hope.

Comes with salvation. You must be saved.