other, shall be eternal.

That great hope helps us to bridge the dark gorge of present separation.
It leaves unanswered a host of questions which our lonely hearts would
fain have cleared up; but it is enough for hope to hold by, and for
sorrow to be changed into submission and anticipation. As to the many
obscurities that still cling to the future, the meaning and the nature
of the accompaniments, the shout, the trumpet, and the like, the way of
harmonising the thought that the departed saints attend the descending
Lord, with whom they dwell now, with the declaration here that they rise
from the earth to meet Him, the question whether these who are thus
caught up from earth to meet the Lord in the air come back again with
Him to earth,--all these points of curious speculation we may leave. We
know enough for comfort, for assurance of the perfect reunion of the
saints who sleep in Jesus and of the living, and of the perfect
blessedness of both wings of the great army. We may be content with what
is clearly revealed, and be sure that, if what is unrevealed would have
been helpful to us, He would have told us. We are to use the revelation
for comfort and for stimulus, and we are to remember that 'times and
seasons' are not told us, nor would the knowledge of them profit us.

Paul took for granted that the Thessalonians remembered the Lord's word,
which he had, no doubt, told them, that He would come 'as a thief in the
night.' So he discourages a profitless curiosity, and exhorts to a
continual vigilance. When He comes, it will be suddenly, and will wake
some who live from a sinful sleep with a shock of terror, and the dead
from a sweet sleep in Him with a rush of gladness, as in body and spirit
they are filled with His life, and raised to share in His triumph.

SLEEPING THROUGH JESUS

' . . . Them also which sleep in Jesus . . .'--1
THESS. iv. 14.

That expression is not unusual, in various forms, in the Apostle's
writings. It suggests a very tender and wonderful thought of closeness
and union between our Lord and the living dead, so close as that He is,
as it were, the atmosphere in which they move, or the house in which
they dwell. But, tender and wonderful as the thought is, it is not
exactly the Apostle's idea here. For, accurately rendered--and accuracy
in regard to Scripture language is not pedantry--the words run, 'Them
which sleep _through_ Jesus.'

Now, that is a strange phrase,