PASSAGE · BSB

1 Thessalonians 4

4 positions in the corpus lean on this chapter. Cited verses are marked.

1Finally, brothers, we ask and encourage you in the Lord Jesus to live in a way that is pleasing to God, just as you have received from us. This is how you already live, so you should do so all the more.

2For you know the instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.

3For it is God’s will that you should be holy: You must abstain from sexual immorality;

4each of you must know how to control his own body in holiness and honor,

5not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God;

6and no one should ever violate or exploit his brother in this regard, because the Lord will avenge all such acts, as we have already told you and solemnly warned you.

7For God has not called us to impurity, but to holiness.

8Anyone, then, who rejects this command does not reject man but God, the very One who gives you His Holy Spirit.

9Now about brotherly love, you do not need anyone to write to you, because you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.

10And you are indeed showing this love to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to excel more and more

11and to aspire to live quietly, to attend to your own matters, and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you.

12Then you will behave properly toward outsiders, without being dependent on anyone.

13Brothers, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who are without hope.

14For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, we also believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him.

15By the word of the Lord, we declare to you that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who have fallen asleep.

16For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will be the first to rise.

17After that, we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.

18Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Who leans on it

Second London Baptist Confession on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCENOT FOUNDThe confession requires no millennial view. Chapters 31 and 32 are its whole eschatology and neither mentions Revelation 20, a thousand years, or a reign of Christ on earth before the judgement. What they do require is o…John MacArthur on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Dispensational premillennialism: a pretribulational rapture removes the church before a seven-year tribulation, followed by Christ's return to establish a literal thousand-year earthly reign fulfilling God's land and kin…Justin Peters on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCEAFFIRMS°Premillennial and explicitly pretribulational: Christ returns bodily to remove believers before a seven-year tribulation, returns again in glory at its end, and then reigns a literal thousand years on earth, which the st…Westminster Confession on the millennium & christ's returnPRIMARY SOURCELEANS°The Confession requires no millennial position. It never mentions a millennium, never cites Revelation 20, and never uses the word. What it does fix is the shape of the end: one last day on which the living are changed a…