RE CHRIST'S AT HIS COMING."

Well then: from these words it is clear that the end of the expectant
state of the blessed dead, and the reunion of their spirits with their
risen bodies, will take place AT THE COMING OF CHRIST. Here at once we
are met by a necessity to clear and explain that which these words
import. In these days, it is by no means superfluous to say that we
Christians do look forward to a real personal coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ upon this our earth. I sometimes wonder whether ordinary
Christian men and women ever figure to themselves what this means. I
suppose we hardly do, because we fancy it is so far off from ourselves
and our times, that we do not feel ourselves called upon to make it a
subject of our practical thoughts. To this we might say, first, that
we are by no means sure of this; and then, that even if it were true,
the interest of that time of His coming for every one of us is hardly
lessened by its not being near us, seeing that if we be His, it will
be, whenever it comes, the day of our resurrection from the dead. It
is evidently the duty of every Christian man to make it part of his
ordinary thoughts and anticipations--that return of the Lord Jesus
from heaven, even as He was seen to go up into heaven. Now, our object
to-day is to ascertain how much we know from Scripture, without
indulging in speculations of our own, about this coming, and this
resurrection which shall accompany it. The latter of these two we made
the subject of a sermon a very few Sundays ago; but it was not so much
with our present view, as to lay down the hope of the resurrection as
an element among the foundations of the Christian life.

Now one of the first and most important revelations respecting this
matter is found in the fourth chapter of 1 Thess., ver. 13-18. These
Thessalonians had been, as we learn from the two epistles to them,
strangely excited about the coming of the Lord's kingdom. Perhaps the
Apostle's preaching among them had taken especially this form; for he
was accused before the magistrates of saying that there was besides or
superior to Caesar another king, one Jesus. And in this excitement of
the Thessalonians, fancying as they did that the Lord's kingdom would
come in their own time, they thought that their friends who through
Jesus had died a happy death were losers by not having lived to
witness the Lord's coming. Indeed, they sorrowed for them as those
that had no hope: by which expressi