Twice-Coming Saints: Do Certain Believers Return with Christ Two Times?
Question: The saints come in the rapture and then come back at the second coming. So, they come twice. Is that really what happens?
This answer argues from the text, not from tradition. If the passage will not carry a doctrine, the doctrine is set aside.
The issue requires distinguishing carefully between different groups of redeemed people and different events in God's prophetic program.
In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul describes the catching away of the body of Christ:
"For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. ... For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first." (1 Thessalonians 4:14, 16)
Here, "them which sleep in Jesus" and "the dead in Christ" refer to members of the body of Christ who have died. These are those who have been saved by grace through faith in the present dispensation, not "the saints" in the sense of kingdom-era Israel. Paul's subject is the body of Christ, not Israel's prophetic saints.
By contrast, Jude 1:14 quotes an ancient prophecy of Enoch:
Access note: public and archive access are still being finalized. Use the passages, test the reasoning, and question the assumptions.
"And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints."
Because Jude explicitly calls this a prophecy of Enoch, it cannot be about the body of Christ or the rapture. Ephesians 3 makes that clear. Paul writes that the "dispensation of the grace of God" and the "mystery" were:
"Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men..." (Ephesians 3:5)
If Enoch prophesied about the event Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians 4, then Paul's statement that the mystery "in other ages was not made known" would be false. The only consistent reading is that Jude 1:14 speaks of the second coming of Christ in His kingdom program, not of the rapture of the body of Christ.
Therefore:
- 1 Thessalonians 4 concerns the rapture of the body of Christ: "them which sleep in Jesus" and "the dead in Christ."
- Jude 1:14 concerns the second coming in judgment: "ten thousands of his saints," connected with Enoch's prophecy and Israel's prophetic program.
However, there is a real overlap to consider. There are "saints" who belong both to the kingdom program and to the body of Christ---those from the early period in which the kingdom offer to Israel was still active while the body of Christ was being revealed and formed. Such people are:
- Saints in the prophetic, Israelite sense (connected to the kingdom hope), and
- Also "in Christ" as part of the body of Christ during the overlap.
These particular saints participate in the rapture as members of the body of Christ ("the dead in Christ" and those alive at His coming), and then also return with Christ at the second coming when "the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints." In that sense, they do "come twice": they accompany Christ at the rapture as those whom "God will bring with him," and they accompany Him again in His return to earth in glory.
This is not true of all saints of all ages, but it is true of those who stand in that unique overlap period. They share a "double blessing," as it were---present in both great "parades": the catching away of the body of Christ, and the later triumphant return of Christ with His saints.
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