Welcome to Studies with Stearman. Join us as we look deeper into the Bible.

Strengthen your faith with us, even as we see the day approaching. And now, here's Gary.

When you study the Bible, if you do it long enough, you begin to see patterns emerging.

We're going to look at one of those patterns today.

We've been talking about the finer points of the doctrine of the catching away of the church.

And I wanted to start today with a thought. First Thessalonius 4, 16, and 17, we all know,

for the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout. The voice of the archangel,

the trump of God, the dead in Christ, shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be

caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,

and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

We know those words, we think about them, this being an event that takes place in the physical

domain of the earth, that is, in the clouds, in the atmosphere.

But if you stop and think about it, the Bible goes way out of its way to make

this a very real kind of an event. Acts 1.9, when Jesus ascended, he talked to his disciples.

Go to the ninth verse of the first chapter of Acts, and when he had spoken these things while

they beheld, he was taken

up, and a cloud received him out of their sight. And the word for cloud there, in the original

manuscript, is the ordinary word for cloud. It's just the ordinary Greek word for a cloud in the

sky. But somehow he was taken up. Didn't say he rose, didn't say he flew,

he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight. Now, I think that's fascinating

because we're going to be taken up. In other words, Jesus was the model for our resurrection in every way.

The tenth verse says, and while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up,

...