Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Thessalonians 4:16

1 Thessalonians 4:16. For. Things shall not happen as you fear, because the following is the order in which the last things are to take place.

The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven. The emphatic ‘Himself' seems intended to dismiss from the minds of the Thessalonians the idea that the living could of themselves make any use of their apparent superiority to the dead, and so, while yet their friends slept, enter the joy of the Lord. On the contrary, it is not they who are to hasten to the Lord, but the Lord Himself who is to come to them; and, as he goes on to say, the first intimation of His coming shall be the signals given not to the living but to the dead. The shout which the dead hear shall be the first note of warning to the living. The wider meaning is, however, not to be overlooked. ‘It shall not be a mere amelioration, gradual or sudden, of the condition of the Church or of the world; not a mere displacement of evil or triumph of good, not a mere crisis of human affairs, issuing in times of universal blessing and happiness; it shall be a personal coming' (Vaughan).

With a shout, with voice of archangel, and with trumpet of God. The word here rendered ‘shout' is literally ‘word of command,' being the common and technical term for the military word of command, or for the loud cry of the boatswain giving time to the rowers. The word of command here referred to is to be given by the archangel, summoning, in a form of words which it is idle to conjecture, the dead to awake out of sleep and to arise; or rather, the expression ‘with the trumpet of God,' seems to indicate that the summons or signal is to be given not in a form of words but as by a military bugle, the various calls of which are understood by the army. The whole representation, the angelic host with their archangelic leader, the trumpet ‘sounding louder and louder,' the descent of the Lord Himself, finds its original in the descent of God upon Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:16).

The dead in Christ, i.e. those who died believing in Christ, and thus in true spiritual union with Him.

Shall rise first. Before anything else transpires, and especially before the living are gathered to the Lord. ‘The first act of the last drama is the resurrection of the dead, who are to meet Christ; the second, the gathering to them of the inhabitants of the earth' (Jowett).

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Thessalonians 4:16

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