Transcript:

Evening, evening, evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for Bibles and beer. Tonight, it is time yet again for an updated twist on the Wednesday night Bible study that you may have grown up with today. Reverend Dr. David Breeden will offer readings from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that make up the Bible. We’ll cover some of the Christian basics, explore the Bible’s themes, contradictions and curiosities tonight. Grab your Bibles, bring them on up open to the New Testament, because tonight we’re going to go all exegesis on Paul and the Rapture. Something doesn’t make sense in the literary voice doesn’t match. So find a glass of wine or stout and let’s dig in a witch drink. Do you have on tap tonight, David?I have a local beer barrel house. This is a particular one as a lager called Wonder Stuff because, hey, what more wonderful is there than raising from the dead? So let’s crack open a beer here and think about it. Yeah. All right. Absolutely. Well, let’s get right at. By the way, I do have to share your beer brewed by monks. So it’s related to holy water. And here we have a medieval illustration of of a nice monk having a good quaff of beer out of his bowl. And so. Yeah, oh, very nearly holy water. Tonight I want to talk about Paul takes it all back or does that is the question and central question theologically about two books, first and second Thessalonians, very short little books, but very important in Christian teachings. Now the first epistle to the Thessalonians, usually written as one Thessalonians, is considered an authentic letter by Paul to the Church of Thessalonika, probably written in fifty two of the common era. You can see the map here. Thessalonika is way up to the north up here, Macedonia on a map here. And Thessalonika was the capital of that particular area back in Roman days. So a very important church to have gotten started there. But a fair piece from Athens. So it appears that the situation was grief among those converts who had assumed the second coming would occur before loved ones died. They were asking, what now? Now what?The trick here to remember is that Christianity from its very beginning was an apocalyptic faith. The end is always near and Paul was preaching that as well.The end is near now. The people in Thessaloniki and the church thought the end is near. Therefore, my loved ones aren’t going to die. Right. And so we’re all going to be happily ever after here. And then time passed, as time passed, as time passes and the loved ones begin to die off problem. They are not happy with what Paul was preaching to them. So now what is going to happen? So First Thessalonians for 13, but we do not want you to be uninformed brothers and sisters, writes Paul, about those who have died so that you may not grieve as others do, who have no hope for, since we believe that Jesus died and rose again. Even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.So by golly, when when Jesus comes again, God comes again. You see. Do you see the little jumble of that here too? Who’s coming back?Christ, yeah. Don’t really know. But he’s going to bring the dead people back with him. So I guess he’s going to come back with their souls. And this is one of the things that’s been debatable through Christian theological time. Right. So and this is probably the most famous bit right here for this. We declare to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who have died, will by no means precede those who have died. Wait for it for the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the arch angels calling with the sound of God’s trumpet will descend from heaven and the dead in ...