1 Thessalonians 4:17

then we which are alive and remain Better, we that are alive, that remain (or survive). The phrase of 1 Thessalonians 4:15 repeated; see note. The Apostle distinguishes, as in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52, between those "living" and those "dead in Christ" at the time of His advent, marking the different position in which these two divisions of the saints will then be found.

shall be caught up together with them in the clouds In the Greek order: together with them will be caught up in the clouds, emphasis being thrown on the precedence of the dead: "we the living shall join their company, who are already with the Lord." Together withimplies full association.

"Caught" in the original implies a sudden, irresistible force, seized, snatched up! In Matthew 11:12 it is rendered, "The violent takeit by force;" in 2 Corinthians 12:2; 2 Corinthians 12:4 St Paul applies it to his raptureinto the third heaven.

"In" signifies not into, but "amidclouds," surrounding and upbearing us "like a triumphal chariot" (Grotius). So Christ Himself, and the angels at His Ascension, promised He should come (Matthew 26:68; Acts 1:9-11); comp. the "bright overshadowing cloud" at the Transfiguration, and the "voice out of the cloud" (Matthew 17:5). There is something wonderful and mystical about the clouds, half of heaven and half of earth, that fits them to be the medium of such events. They lend their ethereal drapery to form the curtain and canopy of this glorious meeting. "What belongs to cloudland is no less real than if set down on the solid ground."

Such a raising of the living bodies of the saints, along with the risen dead, implies the physical transformation of the former to which the Apostle afterwards alludes in 1 Corinthians 15:51: "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed" (comp. 2 Corinthians 5:1-4; Philippians 3:21). Some change had taken place in the sacred body of Jesus after His resurrection, for it was emancipated from the ordinary laws of matter. And this transformation the Apostle conceived to be possible without dissolution.

to meet the Lord in the air Lit., into (raised into) the air. "The air," like the "clouds," belongs to the interspace between the heaven from which Christ comes and the earth to which He returns. Here He will meet His Church. She will not need to wait until He sets foot on earth; but those who are ready, "looking for their Lord when He shall return" (Luke 12:35-40), will hear His trumpet call and "go forth to meetthe Bridegroom" (Matthew 25:1; Matthew 25:6). St Paul employs the same, somewhat rare Hebraistic idiom which is found in this passage of St Matthew, as though the words of Christ lingered in his ear.

and so shall we ever be with the Lord Wherethe Apostle does not say; whether still on earth for some longer space, or in heaven. The one and all-sufficing comfort is in the thought of being always with the Lord. This, too, was the promise of Christ, "Where I am, there shall also My servant be" (John 12:26; John 14:3). Those living in the flesh cannot be so in any complete sense; "at home in the body," we are "absent from the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:6).