It breaks long loving relationships and unions.

It snatches people away from us, but one day death will be swallowed up in victory.

Death will be destroyed.

Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson.

Perhaps you've sat at the bedside of a loved one who has been ravaged by disease,

or your doctor has given you a diagnosis of cancer and followed it with the words stage 4 or terminal.

In those trials, what hope do you have and what hope can you point loved ones to?

John MacArthur helps you with that today on Grace to You as he continues his study titled The End is Not the End.

In a few moments, John's going to show you what comes after death, what it will be like to live with Christ forever.

It's a message that should comfort you if you're a believer, and also motivate you to tell others about the eternal hope that only Christ offers.

With the lesson, here's John MacArthur.

Skeptics, both ancient and modern, have argued against the truth of resurrection,

scoffing at the idea that the body which disintegrates in the grave or which is virtually destroyed in a fire or the bottom of the sea or in some other way, could ever rise from the dead.

So Paul writes this chapter, this massively important chapter of 58 verses to help us understand the resurrection.

Now there are four lines to follow here.

There is first the great transformation, then the great triumph, then the great thanksgiving, and then the great therefore.

That's just a way that we can break it down so that we can access with some level of understanding its wonderful truths.

So let's begin with the great transformation that takes place in resurrection.

And its first mention of this promise there is in John 14, where our Lord says, I'm coming to get you.

Now we don't know much more than that until we get to first Corinthians and find out that in getting us, He has to transform us.

And then we find out in the passage in 1 Thessalonians, which explains the rapture, that when He comes to get us, the people who are dead are going to be transformed first and the rest of us gathered with them and changed on the way up.

This unique event, this catching away of the church, this resurrection of the church, the live and dead, is the event which is the next event on God's prophetic calendar.

...