No man took Christ's life from Him. Although He was slain at the hands of wicked men, in actuality He laid His body down and took it up again.

Now Christ is permitting His saints, the soldiers of His army, to go down to earth in spiritual form to their bodies sleeping in the ground and to take them up again.

The term rise, as used in I Thessalonians 4:16, does not mean ascend. It means to rise in resurrection life, as the Lord Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. This is the point at which the dead bodies of the saints come forth from the grave and stand on the surface of the earth.

The Lord Jesus did not ascend into Heaven until forty days after He rose from the dead.

There is a great difference between resurrection and ascension. Resurrection is the climactic act of the Divine redemption, the restoring of that which was lost in Eden. The immortalizing of the body of the Christian saint is the destruction of the last enemy—physical death (I Corinthians 15:26).

Resurrection, the redemption of our mortal body, marks our adoption as sons of God. We are declared to be the sons of God by the resurrection from the dead (Romans 8:23).

Ascension from the surface of the earth into the clouds of the sky is a comparatively insignificant event. After we have been raised from the dead, all such movement is possible.

It is not true, as some have supposed, that we ascend from the earth in order to escape Antichrist or to avoid tribulation. There simply is no evidence in the Scriptures for this concept. Once we have been raised from the dead we have conquered Antichrist and all other power that the world has to harm us. There is no need for a resurrected saint to leave the earth in order to escape Antichrist. After our resurrection no further victory is necessary for us personally.

God lifts us from the earth into the clouds in order to be with Christ, not in order to escape tribulation or Antichrist.

Ordinarily, escape from the sufferings of this present world comes to the saint by means of physical death (although the Scriptures do not stress this—it is our assumption). There may be some who will escape pain by being made immortal at the moment of the Lord's appearing. This is suggested by the following passage:

And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, (II Thessalonians 1:7)

There is no indication in the Scriptures that the Lord God will deliver people from trouble by means of plucking them from the earth.

It is true, rather, that it is the Lord Jesus who delivers His saints from trouble; and He does so in the most unlikely circumstances and ways. He delivers us while we still are in the den of lions. He sets a table before us in the very presence of our enemies.

Since there was an interval of forty days between the resurrection and the ascension of Christ it seems not unlikely that the saints also will enjoy a period of time after they have been raised from the dead and before they are lifted from the earth to meet the Lord in the air.

To be continued.