1 Thessalonians 4:14

REUNION IN ETERNITY

‘If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with Him.’

1 Thessalonians 4:14

The text discloses to us two blessed and consolatory truths, each containing in regard of those that die in Christ the holiest and deepest consolation.

I. Those who have loved the Lord, and have departed hence in His faith and fear, pass into a union with Him that becomes ever closer and closer, and in special cases may even be crowned with that first Resurrection of which, in one well-known passage in the last book of Holy Scripture, there is such precise and definite mention. To those who have loved the Lord on earth and have loved Him to the last, this text plainly tells us we may confidently believe there will be this closer union—the degree of closeness depending on the depth and reality of the love.… And this, let it be remembered, is no isolated text; this is by no means the only passage in which we have the same great consolatory truth, that by the Lord’s Resurrection death has verily been swallowed up in victory, and is to the believer no longer the curse, but the blessed mode of entry into a truer union with the Lord.

II. But the deeper heart-question still remains: Can there be, will there be, reunion hereafter with those we have loved here on earth? Yea, verily, who can doubt it, for those that die in Christ. If the text tells us that to the faithful death bears with it a closer union with Christ, and that to die is gain, it assuredly also tells us that there will be a true, real, and blessed reunion hereafter with all that we have loved on earth, and who have died in the faith of the Lord. When Christ returns, God Himself—such are the plain words of the text—will bring with the Redeemer, all in one blessed and united company, the redeemed; and, as another passage still more precisely declares, will Himself—Himself, the God of the spirits of all flesh—wipe away every tear in the limitless joy of that last and indissoluble reunion. In Him everything that ministers to the fulness of holy joy will be vouchsafed to us, every pure sympathy will be responded to, every longing of holy love will be tenderly satisfied. If we are truly His, that communion of saints which, in the Apostles’ Creed, we profess as one of the fundamental articles of our faith, will attain its fullest perfection and development.

III. Could communion be perfect if souls that had been united by the closest bond here on earth were to lose all consciousness of that bond in the world beyond, and all that constituted personality were to be forgotten or obliterated? No, though it be right for us to say, with the Apostle, ‘that it is not yet made manifest what we shall be,’ and that many things connected with personal identity here may, by the very assumption of the glorified body, become modified hereafter, still of this we may feel the most abiding assurance that whatever has constituted the truest communion of souls on this side the grave will continue when at last all are united—and continue not only unimpaired but enhanced. Yea, verily, if personal recognition and knowledge be an inseparable element of the truest communion here on earth, so must it be for ever. If God, who is love, brings again all who have been laid to sleep in Jesus, will He withhold from them that knowledge and recognition without which personal love could never be complete and perfected?

—Bishop Ellicott.

Illustration

‘The inability to be comforted, the unresigned state of soul that cannot wipe away its tears of bitterness, will ever be found a certain index that true faith in the fact of the Lord’s Resurrection has not yet been vouchsafed to the soul. Of this there are often very sad illustrations. In many of the public comments that are made on the death of public men, there is a distinct pagan element in thought, epithet, and expression that reveal the utterly imperfect recognition of the truth and reality of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ which, I fear, is now very unmistakably to be traced in current literature of the day. The Lord’s Resurrection is not exactly denied except by the professed opponents of Christianity; but it is left as something which lies outside the sphere of historical investigation, and can never be soberly regarded as ministering any real consolation on the bitterness of human sorrows and bereavement. In a word, the power of the Resurrection in its holiest application to the individual soul is deemed to be nothing more than an innocent illusion; and a distinct statement is put aside as belonging only to the poetry of religion.’