to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." The Apostle Paul doubtless had the words of Christ in mind when he said this; for there are four items in connection with the Lord's promise that are exactly covered by four in Paul's words. (1) Jesus said, "I come again." Paul said, "The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven." (2) Jesus said, "and receive you unto myself." Paul said, "We shall be caught up to meet the Lord." (3) Jesus said, "that where I am there ye may be also." Paul said, "So shall we ever be with the Lord." (4) Jesus prefaces His words with "Let not your heart be troubled" (John 14:1). Paul closes his by saying, "Comfort one another with these words." Paul's words are an inspired commentary upon the promise of Jesus.

In one of his later epistles Paul says again, "Our citizenship is in heaven; whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of His glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself" (Phil. 3:20, 21). In Heb. 9:28 we read again, "Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins

of many, shall appear a second time apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation." The Apostle Peter in urging the Jews to repentance in Acts 3:19-21 says, "Repent ye, therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that so there may come seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord; and that he may send the Christ who hath been appointed for you, even Jesus: whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, whereof God spake by the mouth of his holy prophets that have been from of old." All the passages quoted, as well as many others, assert in the most distinct and unambiguous terms that OUR LORD JESUS IS COMING AGAIN.

There are those who would interpret at least some of these passages as referring to the death of the believer, but the passages will not admit of this interpretation. At the death of the believer, while our Lord Jesus may draw near, He does not come "with a shout, nor "with the voice of the archangel," nor "with the trump of God." At the death of the believer, those who are alive and left surely are not caught up with them to

meet the Lord in the air. Jesus Himself drew a plain contrast between the death of the believer and His own coming again. Speaking to Peter about the future of John He said, "If I will that he (John) tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" It is plain from the context that "If I will that he tarry" means, "If I will that he remain alive." Now if we put Christ's coming at the believer's death, then we would get this nonsense, "If I will that he remain alive until he die, what is that to thee?" Of course, it is not what our Lord meant. What He meant, as is plainly indiated by the words in their context, was "If I will that he remain alive until my own personal return."

There are others who would have us interpret the coming again spoken of in the verses above as referring to the coming of Christ at the coming of the Holy Spirit. The coming of the Holy Spirit is doubtless in a very real and important sense a coming of Christ. This appears from John 14:15-18; 20-23, where Jesus says, "If ye love me ye will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you forever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, for it

beholdeth him not, neither knoweth him: ye know him; for he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you. He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself unto him. Judas (not Iscariot) saith unto him, Lord, what is come to pass that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." It is plain from these words that the coming of the Holy Spirit is a coming of Jesus Christ, because it is His work to reveal Christ to us and to form Christ in us, so that Christ comes to make His abode with us; but this coming of Christ is not that which is referred to in the passages under consideration. This is evident from the fact that all these promises but one (John 14:3) were made after the coming of the Holy Spirit and pointed to a coming still future. Furthermore, Jesus at the coming of the Holy Spirit does not receive us unto Himself to be with Him, rather He comes to be

with us (John 14:18, 21, 23), but at His coming again mentioned in John 14:3, and I Thess. 4:16, 17, He takes us to be with Him. Further still, He does not at His coming in the Spirit fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of His glory (Phil. 3:20, 21), and at the coming of the Spirit, there is no trump of the archangel, no shout, no resurrection, no rapture in the clouds-in other words the coming of Christ at the coming of the Holy Spirit in scarcely any particular conforms to the plain and explicit statements of Christ and the Apostles concerning His Second Coming.

Many scholarly students of the Bible, whose opinion is well worth considering, take the coming again mentioned in the verses above to be at the Destruction of Jerusalem. There is an element of truth in this interpretation. The destruction of Jerusalem was in an important sense a precursor, prophecy and type of the judgment of the end of this age and therefore in Matt. 24 and Mark 13 the two events are described in connection with each other. But God's judgment on Jerusalem at that time is manifestly not the event referred to in the passages given in the opening of this