May 22, 2011
When thinking about the second coming, Alistair Begg teaches, we need to start with what God has made plain, not what He has hidden. The Gospel is clear: Jesus died, rose again, and is coming back. In light of this rock-solid foundation, we can take heart. Even if we don’t know every little detail of the second coming, we can rest in what we do know: that He will return for us.
Sermon Transcript: Print
First Thessalonians 4:13:
“Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words.”
Amen.
Gracious God, help us now to look into the Bible. Help us to be like the people of Berea, who, after Paul had preached, they examined these things to see if they were so.[1] Save us from cluelessness and aimlessness and vagueness. Grant to us clarity in our understanding, conviction in our faith, and a willingness to be unashamed in telling this good news to all and to any. Help us to this end, we ask you, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I must confess, I think of myself as being fairly up on things, but clearly, I’m not as up on things as I think I am. This came home to me last Sunday morning, when I walked out of the church in which I’d been preaching in New York on West 57th Street and walked out into the street to be confronted by a cavalcade of vans, all of these vans announcing the judgment day and confronting me with the fact that I was not going to be preaching this Sunday at Parkside, because the end of the world was taking place on the twenty-first of May. I must confess I had mixed thoughts about this. I thought, “Well, that saves me my preparation,” and a number of other things, none of which were particularly godly.
But I was struck by it. The back of the seven vans all said, “Judgment Day, May 21, 2011.” And then, underneath, it said this: “The Bible guarantees it.” “The Bible guarantees it.” So it wasn’t simply somebody saying, “I’ve got a peculiar notion that is my own alone. No, I’m telling you what this is.” This morning, after the first service, somebody brought me more up to date by letting me know that the USA Today, which I seldom see, had this full-page advertisement from the thirteenth of May, making sure everybody had a good run at things: “Judgment day begins with a worldwide earthquake on May 21, 2011,” and “No man knows the day or the hour?”—question mark. No man apart from this man, who is basically up to his tricks again. This same gentleman predicted that this would be happening in 1994. He decided he had to wait a little while before he had another run at it and could help us to forget that he was a false prophet the first time he tried it. And then we discover he is all over again.
He’s not alone in this. Some of us who’ve been around for a while here in the States will remember the book that came out: 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. We had a whole ton of these books delivered to us at the church office, and we had a terrific amount of fun with them right up through the end of 1988 and into 1989. In 1989, the author of that particular book revised his position not by climbing down from it but actually by upping the ante. He chose another date in 1989, and he got even more categorical in his predictions. So, for example, he says, “At sunset, September 22, 1989, a Syrian invasion of Israel will start World War III.” You’re encouraged to look into Isaiah 17, which apparently covers all of this material. “But before sunrise Moses and Elijah will have destroyed his forces. Chapters 38 and 39 of Ezekiel foretell at length the events leading to World War III. With the Syrians destroyed, the Magog”—that is, the Russian army, apparently—“led by Gog”—that is, apparently, Gorbachev, although it’s a kind of moving thing, Gog (I’ve lived now for quite a while, and Gog has had many incarnations in my lifetime; but anyway, he’s Gorbachev)—“now attacks Israel at sunrise, September 23, with airplanes and paratroopers …, but again Israel’s enemies are vanquished by the two witnesses. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia destroy each other in simultaneous nuclear attacks.”[2] And so it goes on.
The most distressing thing about this to me is the number of apparently sensible, Bible-taught Christians who either pay undue attention to it or, worse still, are unsettled by it. To be unsettled by these things is to indicate that we do not have a solid grasp of what the Bible has to teach concerning the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t know whether this man whose most recent predictions have now gone away for a while—I don’t know whether he is malevolent. Let’s assume that he is misguided. I hope he isn’t mad. But he has added tremendous fuel to the fire for the scoffers whom we know are around. Peter tells us that the scoffers will always be present, saying, “See, I told you. Nothing ever changes. Everything remains the same.”[3] And suddenly, out of the blue, they have an opportunity to once again pour scorn on the central, foundational, unequivocal, biblical Christian claim that the Lord Jesus Christ will return in power and in great glory personally, visibly, and every eye will see this. Material such as this makes it easy for those who are unsure of their Christian convictions to be unsettled and easy for those who love to scoff at the Bible itself to find extra ammunition.
Now, we have tried to say to one another over the years that the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things. And if we take what is not main and plain and use that as the starting point for our investigations of the Bible, we will very quickly go wrong.
Calvin, in his day, urged his readers to make sure that they avoided being guilty “of excessive curiosity”—that’s the phrase that he used—guilty “of excessive curiosity” by “investigat[ing] what the Lord has … hidden.”[4] And there is a perversity about this. And Christian believers are not immune to this. In fact, as pastors, we spend a tremendous amount of time batting back “excessive curiosity” on the part of those who want to investigate the things that God has chosen not to disclose. It is not a cop-out for us to say, “Why don’t we all pay attention to the things that he has chosen to disclose so that we are not guilty of neglecting what he has made obvious and clear by an excessive curiosity regarding what he has chosen not to make obvious and clear?” But you can guarantee when you do a Q and A—as we will do this coming week in Washington, DC, with Truth For Life—you can guarantee that when the questions and the hands go up and everything starts, it will all be about the stuff that God has chosen not to make clear.
So I thought that what we ought to do is spend the day making sure that we are clear about the second coming of Jesus Christ—that we would spend this morning and the evening not dealing with this thematically but dealing with it from the context of Paul responding to these Thessalonian believers. So if you have your Bible open, you will be able to look, and that way you’ll be able to check, and we will look at this passage and correlative passages.
A little background on Thessalonica: Thessalonica was some fifty miles from Mount Olympus. Mount Olympus was the dwelling place of the gods—so many of the gods. The Thessalonian believers were marked out, now, as those who had turned from all these false gods to the living and the true God that they had found in Jesus, the one who was the Savior and the Lord and the King. And so their fame was spreading throughout the world. They had become something of a model, Paul says when he writes to them.
But the fact that they had convictions concerning the truth of Jesus did not mean that they didn’t have questions. And they had questions that were related to this matter of the death of a believer and how things would end and to the issue of the day of the Lord or of the coming of the Lord. And they were seeking from Paul reassurance concerning their loved ones. And that makes perfect sense, does it not? Those of us who have buried our family members, our believing family members, when we reflect upon that, when we drive past the cemetery, when we think about the nature of what has taken place, we inevitably say to ourselves, “On what basis do I believe that I will ever be caught up together with what has now been laid into the ground?”—or cast into the sea, or whatever it might be. And the Thessalonians were asking these questions.
In 2 Thessalonians, you will notice, if you turn just one page in your Bible, they were particularly concerned because there were people coming around the Thessalonian church who were saying things concerning the coming of Jesus. They were actually saying that the day of the Lord had already taken place, if you look at 2:1. Two Thessalonians 2: “Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers”—notice—“not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way.” And then he goes on to articulate that. And then, at the end of the chapter, you will see from verse 13, his pastoral approach is so wonderful. Here are these people who are concerned about this express issue. There are folks who are sewing seeds of uncertainty and discord. Paul tackles it in some measure, but if you like, his grand finale is a tremendous encouragement and guide to us in pastoral ministry.
Now, when you get a little book like this: The Rapture Report 1989, 1991, 1992, and so on... And people give me these things all the time, but what they want to do is they want to take me out for coffee (which is very nice; I enjoy coffee), but then they want me to go through a book like this with them and answer, “Well, why did he say that? And do you think Gog and Magog and Diddly-Gog and every other Gog—well, what are we going to do with that?”
I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with it. What I would do with it, if I didn’t need it for my file, is something entirely other. But nevertheless, what we’re going to do is this: we’re not going to worry about it! That’s number one. “Well then, what are you going to tell me?” I’m going to tell you what Paul tells the Thessalonians. Verse 13: “We ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved.” That’s number one. Verse 13, he says, “I know you’ve got all kinds of questions about different things, but don’t doubt this: that God chose you to be saved.” Verse 14: “God “called you … through [the] gospel.” How did this happen? The gospel was preached to you, and you believed it. Verse 15: “[In light of that], brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings we passed on to you.” And then, in verse 16 and 17: “And rest in the Lord Jesus Christ alone.”[5]
Wonderful example of pastoral ministry, isn’t it? Here is his concern. Here are their questions. He doesn’t dismiss their questions. He doesn’t treat them in some off-the-cuff fashion. No, he says, “I don’t want you to be unsettled. I don’t want you to be deceived. You should know this: that this will happen and that will happen.” He says, “But here’s really what you need to hold on to: God chose you to be saved, called you through the gospel. Now, please stand firm, rest in what you were taught, and trust in Jesus.”
Now, he’s essentially taking the same approach, if you turn back now to 1 Thessalonians and to chapter 4. His pastoral concern for them is expressed in verse 13: “Brothers, we do[n’t] want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope.” “You are those who have been born again to a living hope,”[6] he says. In his introduction to them, he talks about their faith that functions, their love that labors, and their hope that hangs on.[7] You can find that in chapter 1, as he begins his letter. He says, “You’re not like the rest of people, who come to the end of life or face the end of life, and they’re without God and without hope.[8] You used to be like that. You were once fiddling around with the gods of Mount Olympus. But you know that that is no longer the case. And so I don’t want you to be ignorant. I want you to understand.
I want you to notice that he immediately goes, in verse 14, to what we believe. What we believe. “We believe,” he says. “We believe.” This is not “We feel,” “We think,” “We have a notion,” “We have a speculative conjecture.” No: “We believe.”
Now, this came across to me when I was picking up a postcard from a display in a stationery exhibition in New York. And because there’s a lot… I like to go to those exhibitions, because you get free stuff at all the different stands. And it’s like Halloween for me with the bag, you know. Just, “Would you like?” “Oh, yes please! Yeah, just fill it all up.” So I got my bag all filled up as best I could, and then afterwards, I went through to find out what I had. And I had some very nice stuff, but one—a postcard—stood out so wonderfully to me. It was very nice graphically. On the back it said, “La Carte Postale,” so I figured it’s probably French. But it’s a postcard. And on the front, on the nice graphic on the front, it says, “Everything will be okay.” “Aw,” I said, “now, that is nice.” I said, “That is nice! Everything will be okay. Wow!” I mean, it’s cozy, that, isn’t it? It makes you feel good, doesn’t it? “Everything will be okay.”
Then I thought, “How will everything be okay? When will everything be okay? What if everything isn’t okay? What if I send this to somebody, and it isn’t okay? Then they’ll say, ‘Are you messing with me? Why’d you send me a card says everything will be okay? Have you seen my life? That wasn’t nice of you to do that.’”
And some people have got the notion—indeed, there is a superficial form of Christianity which goes along these lines: “Listen, I know you’re having a dreadful day, but everything will be okay. Trust me on that.” Why would we trust you on that? On what basis do you say everything will be okay?
Now, it’s interesting that Paul says, “Now, look, I don’t want you to be unsettled. I want you to make sure that you’re not grieving like the rest of men, who have no hope. Everything will be okay.” No! Look at what he does. “We believe,” he says. “We believe,” and then he says, “and so we believe…” What do we believe? Well, he says, “We believe that Jesus died and rose again.”
Mark this, and mark it carefully, especially if you’re wondering about Christianity. And hopefully there are some this morning who are here just investigatively, looking into things. The Christian view of the world is tied directly to the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It is grounded and founded in the person and the work of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s not a theological paradigm. It’s not a speculative notion. It is entirely centered in an individual. And the convictions which underpin the convictions about the second coming of Jesus are directly tied to the convictions concerning the appearing of Jesus. So you will notice that that is the way that Paul’s logic works: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe…” You see, unless we believe in who Jesus is and what he has done as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, as the one who brings hope to our hopelessness, forgiveness to our rebellion, peace to our unsettled hearts—unless that has become our conviction—then any notions concerning what goes on from there will founder on the rocks of our doubts and despairs.
Now, Paul says because “we believe that Jesus died and rose again … we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” In other words, “The Father did not abandon Jesus to the grave, and the Father will not abandon you to the grave,” he says. “So your loved ones who have died believing in Christ have not been abandoned. That’s what you’re asking me about. It is impossible for them to be abandoned, in Christ.”
And you see, this is where Paul’s doctrine of union with Christ is absolutely foundational: that we have been united with Christ in his death; therefore, we are united with him in his resurrection. It is ontologically impossible for this not to happen if we are now in Christ. “We believe that Jesus died” for our sins, that he “rose again” for our justification. That’s what underlies his phraseology. “And so we believe” that he will then “bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”
Now, this is Paul’s conviction throughout his letters. Here’s 2 Corinthians 4:14—Paul again: “We know for certain that he who raised the Lord Jesus from [the dead] shall also … raise us [with Jesus]. We shall all stand together before him.”[9]
Now, you will notice that it is not our believing that makes it so. It’s not our believing that makes it so. We’re glad that the winter is now in our rearview mirror. There was a significant winter. Some of us live with ponds around, and those ponds freeze and invite us to step out on them. If the pond is frozen to the depth of a sixteenth of an inch, no amount of your believing will allow you, at 227 pounds, to stand on that without immersing yourself. Your believing won’t make it so. If it is frozen to a depth of two and a half feet, even if you only have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you may possibly even drive your car out onto the lake. It is the foundation which provides the basis for the believing. It is not the believing which makes the foundation of significance. And until we grasp that, we very quickly go wrong.
Death, then, says Paul, is unable to destroy the solidarity which exists between Christ and those who are in Christ. We saw that in Romans chapter 8, where Paul eventually says, “What will separate us from the love of Christ?” And then he runs through a whole list of things: “Will this do it, that do it, the next thing do it? Will death do it?” He says, “No, none of these things will separate us from the love of Christ.”[10] Why? Because they can’t! That’s the point, you see. They can’t! Because we are in Christ. In Christ.
So the specific concern about the believers who have already died is then addressed. He says, “You need to know this: that those who are still alive”—verse 15—“who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.”
“Fallen asleep.” This is one of the metaphors that the Bible uses for death for a Christian. Don’t you love falling asleep? I spent the whole of last night trying to fall asleep, I like it so much. And maybe this afternoon, I may try it again. I may say to my wife, “I think I’ll just fall asleep.” And she goes, “No, don’t fall asleep! Why would you fall asleep? Aren’t you afraid to fall asleep?” Why would I be afraid to fall asleep? When I sleep, it’s refreshment.
Death for the Christian is to fall asleep in the arms of Jesus and waken up and find out that you’re home. It’s not the entirety of what happens in death, but it is a wonderful picture, isn’t it? “Fallen asleep.” “Those who have fallen asleep,” he said, “will not be preceded by those of us who are still alive.” He’s not suggesting that he is still alive but any who are still alive. Because, he says—verse 16—“the Lord himself”—he’s not sending an assistant—“the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel … with the trumpet call of God.”
That’s a noisy verse? Isn’t that a noisy verse? There’s a lot of noise in that verse. I point that out because this is the verse that everybody tells me about is the secret rapture. So they always ask me, “Pastor, what do you think about the secret rapture?” I always say, “What secret rapture?” They say, “Well, the secret rapture and the loud command, the voice of the archangel, the trumpet call of God.” I always say, “That doesn’t sound secret to me.” Who blows a trumpet when it’s a secret? You don’t have people shouting out of the heavens, “Hello, hello! I got a secret coming up here!” “Well, if it’s a secret, why are you shouting about it? Why are you blowing the trumpet? It can’t be secret.” Of course it isn’t secret! You only need the English language to know it isn’t secret.
I live my entire life deflecting those who come to me… I had a letter last week from someone: “We’ve stopped listening to the radio because Begg does no longer, apparently, believe in the secret rapture.” Well, forgive me! There’s a jolly trumpet! There’s a whole thing going on! And the trumpet thing here is not just thrown in willy-nilly, like, “Hey, throw a trumpet in.” You know, Paul says, “Why don’t we put a trumpet in as well?” No! If you know the Old Testament, you know that from the very get-go in Exodus, the trumpet is central to what’s going on. The trumpet signals the anointing of the king. This trumpet signals the execution of judgment. The trumpet signals the sound of salvation. So it’s no surprise when Paul says, “And now there will be a loud cry, and the archangel, and the trumpet blast will signal this.”
“But don’t worry,” he says, “that somehow or another, those who are in their graves are going to get shortchanged. No! No, no! The dead in Christ will rise first, and after that, we who are still alive and left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
In other words, it’s going to be dramatic. Dramatic! We don’t have time now—we’ll deal with it this evening, perhaps—but the drama of things is not ferreted away in some obscure passage of the Bible. For example, let me just do one: “Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him.”[11] Really? Wow!
One of the journalists, incidentally, was quoting a lady who showed up at the radio station that is owned by the man who was wrapping things up for us yesterday, and it was all locked up. She was there on Thursday or Friday, looking in. He had locked it all up. He hadn’t sold it. No, no. You don’t want to sell it. You might need it on Monday. And so… She was looking in. And it was, you know, locked up and everything. She’s just looking in the darkness. And she turned—not realizing she’s speaking to a journalist—she just turned to a stranger, and she said to him (I wrote it down), “Is this where the end of the world is happening?” The guy said, “How funny is that, you know?”
Let me tell you something: when it happens, there’ll be nobody keeking through windows and looking through letter boxes and stuff trying to find it, because it is dramatic. As the lightning flashes across the sky, it will be decisive.[12] It’s not going to just trail off into oblivion. First Corinthians 15, Paul says, “[And] then the end will come.”[13] And, as we will see later on, it is sudden.
And all of this because God speaks. God speaks. He has spoken creation into being; Christ has spoken at the grave of Lazarus, and he has come out;[14] and he speaks now, and he brings his people with him.
Interesting: his actually is the only place in the New Testament that speaks unambiguously about the rapture. The only place. There are other tangential references, but you couldn’t build a doctrine from any of the other references. You can get to them once you move from here. Incidentally, the word rapture comes from the Latin rapere, which is a verb which means “to seize.” And since the main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things, we know enough to know that we’re not going to take one reference out of the entire Bible and build a complete doctrine on the strength of that, are we, church? Are we? And then we’re going to fight for it and argue for it and make it a touchstone of evangelical orthodoxy? Are we?
I’m not. I respect the views of people who differ from me in these things, but I understand clearly what is secondary and what is peripheral and what is central and what is primary. And what is primary and what is clear is what Paul drives home. And when you read your Bible, you must always look and say, “What is it that he’s actually now saying? What is his emphasis here? What is his purpose in addressing this issue?” You’ve got it as he finishes verse 17 and into verse 18. He says, “Listen, we will be caught up with him in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, but here’s the deal: we will be with the Lord forever. We will be with the Lord forever.” Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I like that! Everything leads up to this, and nothing really matters beyond this. What else do you need to know? We will be with the Lord forever!
“What will it be like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think of this?”
“I have a view.”
“Do you think that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you know?”
“We will be with the Lord forever.”
“Yeah, but what about the…”
“Interesting. We will be with the Lord forever.”
“You’re an obscurantist, Begg.”
“Thank you. We will be with the Lord forever.”
“Your mind is facile.”
“Thank you. We will be with the Lord…”
Listen, think about it this way: Imagine you had been given, prebirth, you know, a sort of layout of how it was going to be, how you got born. Now, you only need to be marginally claustrophobic, as I am, to say, “There’s no way in the world that I’m going through that gate. If that’s what’s involved, forget it! I can’t go in that bag. It took me ages to open my eyes in the shower. I’m not going through that, and I hate narrow spaces.” But you did it, didn’t you? You did it. God helping you, you did it. He did it. He brought you to birth. He brought you through. He gave you a song to sing and everything else. I don’t know how it works. All I know is he’ll take care of it, and we will be with the Lord forever.
And so he says… And here’s the point of application, verse 18. Here’s your responsibility: “Encourage each other.” “Encourage each other.” He doesn’t say, “Annoy each other,” “Intrigue each other,” “Argue with each other,” “Alarm each other,” “Get everybody unsettled.” No, he says, “Encourage each other.” “Be encouraged with this fact.”
Isn’t it interesting how little there is of contemporary hymnody concerning the return of Jesus Christ? You really have to go back quite a way to find hymnody. You’ve got to go back to Fanny Crosby to come on the hymn that she wrote, “What a Gathering.” And only those and such as those will know these words:
When the blessed, who sleep in Jesus, at his bidding shall arise,
From the silence of the grave and from the sea,
And with bodies all celestial we shall meet them in the skies,
What a gathering of the ransomed that will be!What a gathering, what a gathering,
What a gathering of the ransomed in that summer land of love!
What a gathering, what a gathering,
What a gathering in that happy home above![15]
Baxter, in his day in Kidderminster in England, put it down in a poem, part of which reads as follows:
Lord, it belongs not to my care
Whether I die or live;
To love and serve [you] is my share,
And this [your] grace must give.If life be long, I will be glad
That I may long obey;
If short, yet why should I be sad
To [soar to] endless day?
And this closing stanza’s wonderful. I’m going to put it in my little black book when I get finished here today:
My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim;
But [it’s] enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with him.[16]
“My knowledge of that life is small.” I’ve got more questions than I’ve got answers.
The eye of faith is dim;
But [it’s] enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with him.
You don’t need the ticket for the airplane till you’re ready to fly. And when your dad promised you, “You can make the journey; I will have the ticket for you,” you don’t have to come to him every day in the preceding month or six weeks saying, “Do you have the ticket? Do you have the ticket?” He said, “Son, the ticket will be there on the day you take the journey. Trust me.” “Father…” “Son, I got the ticket. It’ll be there on the day.”
Do you believe that? “We believe that Jesus died and rose again.” Do you? Do you believe it enough to give up your rebellion, to entrust yourself entirely to Christ? “And so we believe…” Without part one, there’s no part two. And you cannot get to part two unless you start with part one.
We’d love to talk with you about these things. We know we can’t make it happen. We tell the story, don’t we? God opens blind eyes. I trust he’ll open some of our eyes today. Think about it today. Come back tonight. We’ll think some more about these things.
Let’s pray:
Father, thank you now for the Bible. Thank you for the privilege of thinking about it, turning to it. I pray that you’ll make us students of your Word so that we might find in it Christ as a Savior and a friend and that in trusting him and in entrusting our lives to him, we may rest secure that he has everything under control.
We pray now that your mercy will extend throughout the hours of this day and into the days of this week, that grace and mercy and peace might be our portion now, and until Jesus comes or calls us to himself, and then forevermore. Amen.
[1] See Acts 17:11.
[2] Edgar Whiseant and Greg Brewer, The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 (Nashville: World Bible Society, 1989), 10.
[3] 2 Peter 3:4 (paraphrased).
[4] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John t. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2.925.
[5] 2 Thessalonians 2:16–17 (paraphrased).
[6] See 1 Peter 1:3.
[7] See 1 Thessalonians 1:3.
[8] See Ephesians 2:12.
[9] 2 Corinthians 4:14 (Phillips).
[10] Romans 8:35, 37 (paraphrased).
[11] Revelation 1:7 (NIV 1984).
[12] See Matthew 24:27; Luke 17:24.
[13] 1 Corinthians 15:24 (NIV 1984).
[14] See John 11:43–44.
[15] Fanny Crosby, “What a Gathering” (1887). Lyrics lightly altered.
[16] Richard Baxter, “Lord, It Belongs Not to My Care” (1681).
Copyright © 2025, Alistair Begg. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations for sermons preached on or after November 6, 2011 are taken from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
For sermons preached before November 6, 2011, unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973 1978 1984 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.