1 Thessalonians 4:16

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first;

Descend from heaven ... This is not to be understood in a spatial sense at all. Paul's words here are still the best way to declare the sudden manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ at the cataclysmic end of this age. The manifestation will be upon the whole earth, and not merely upon some part of it; and there simply are no words which can adequately convey to finite understanding any meaningful description of it. As Kelcy said, "These words are not to be taken, necessarily, in a literal sense ú . . they are figures of speech";[31] but this is not to deny the historical certainty of the great event here prophesied.

A shout ... Jesus cried "with a loud voice" over the grave of Lazarus (John 11:43); and, in the light of the passage before us, there must be some significance in it. The shout is here identified with the voice of the archangel and the sound of a trumpet; and evidently some fantastically penetrating sound will signal the onset of the Second Advent. Such sounds attended the giving of the Law of Moses on Mt. Sinai; but it is idle to speculate as to the meaning of such things. The Second Advent will also be with the clouds of heaven (1 Thessalonians 4:17), the same having been mentioned at the time of the Ascension (Acts 1:9-11), with the metaphor being changed to "flaming fire" in 2 Thessalonians 1:7, and with the Saviour himself having stressed the same thing (Luke 21:27).

THE NEED OF THE SECOND ADVENT

If the human race is to survive the known and postulated fate of the terrestrial earth, it can only be by the supernatural intervention of the Creator through the Lord Jesus Christ. In a film, The Universe, shown repeatedly in May and June, 1977, at the Johnson Space Center, Clear Lake, Texas, top space scientists theorized that there are only three possible fates for any star, including our sun. These are: (1) it might become a great red giant with a new mass so gigantic as to envelop the earth;[32] (2) it could become a super-nova flaming to a million times its present size, and (3) it could conceivably collapse altogether with a gravitational field strong enough to draw all the solar satellites into a very small and exceedingly dense core with a magnetic field so powerful that not even light could escape from it, in which case a so-called "black hole" would be the result. Significantly, any of the projected methods of demise that scientists confidently predict, would involve the total "burning" of our earth and everything in it (2 Peter 3:10ff); and no imagination is strong enough to envision the kind of "cloud" that would follow the instantaneous conversion of all the waters on earth into steam! Some such cloud, some such noise (who knows?) will signal the moment when the Son of God shall appear and save the redeemed; and it may be postulated that a new heaven and a new earth will by that time have been prepared. Significantly, the scientific community is as totally unaware of "when" such an event may occur as were our Lord and the holy apostles. It is most amazing that the old passages long known to refer to the end of the world, at which time, presumably, the Second Advent will be, have at last found the scientific world catching up with revelation that was given nearly two millenniums ago!

[31] Raymond C. Kelcy, op. cit., p. 101.

[32] Kenneth F. Weaver, "The Incredible Universe," National Geographic Magazine, May, 1974 (Washington, D.C.: The National Geographic Society, 1974), Vol. 145, No. 5, p. 607.