Godmindbody Part 3, Chapter 9: 1 and 2 Thessalonians

Saint Paul writing his epistles

Godmindbody: The Bible, Prophecy, Miracles and TMS Healing Explained

By Robert Ensor

Copyright © 2025 Robert Ensor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.The author’s moral rights have been asserted. First Published September 2025.

All Bible quotations, unless otherwise stated or referenced, are taken from the online World English Bible, which is in the public domain. It is available at the following link: https://ebible.org/eng-web/index.htm. English language Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. I am no linguist, and I don’t know any linguists, so I have had to rely on others’ translations and romanizations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Occasionally, I have examined the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Bible, zeroing in on key words where the received English translation is debatable or misses the full meaning of the original.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a therapist – merely a concerned layperson (!) – and nothing in this book should be considered medical advice. Nor should it be considered a substitute for diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments from qualified doctors. If you have symptoms, I recommend that you see a doctor to rule out anything serious and get proper care.

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Chapter 9: 1 and 2 Thessalonians 

The next significant New Testament chapter concerned with the End Times is 1 Thessalonians 4, written by Saint Paul. Paul was a Jewish Pharisee who persecuted Christians until one day, on the road to Damascus, Christ was revealed to him (Acts 9). Paul, struck blind, had his sight restored through a Christian called Ananias and began his ministry, which was characterised by the conversion of large numbers of Gentiles. He was later imprisoned and martyred for his faith. Paul wrote more of the New Testament than any other author, and these writings took the form of letters sent to fellow Christians and churches.

1 Thessalonians is a letter Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica, which he had founded and was forced to leave due to persecution (Acts 17). Indeed, it is implied that some of the Christians in Thessalonica were killed for their faith. To encourage his brethren, and console them in their grief, Paul wrote the following verses: ‘But we don’t want you to be ignorant brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don’t grieve like the rest, who have no hope.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The reference to grieving here makes it plain that ‘those who have fallen asleep’ are those Christians whose bodies are dead. But the souls of physically dead saved Christians go to heaven to await the resurrection. Hence they are merely ‘sleeping’, because they will awake.

Paul went on: ‘For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Again, as believers in Christ, our lives are after the pattern of his, because he is a literal, physical part of us: we ate his ascended, spiritualised body and carry it with us, which is the pre-rapture proof of Christ’s ascent. Jesus received the Holy Spirit, did good works, was accepted by some, rejected by others, died, was resurrected, and ascended. Ergo, true Christians all receive the spirit, do the works, die, resurrect, and ascend in the flesh, except for some of the elect, who will not taste death. The meaning of ‘rose’ in 1 Thessalonians 4:14 is dual; the resurrection of the dead, so that they are no longer lying as if asleep, and then their being raised up bodily into the sky.

‘For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with God’s trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, we who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet with the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever.’ (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17). First of all, ‘this we tell you by the word of the Lord’, means that Paul had received the following information via direct revelation from Christ, like the revelation that turned him from a Pharisaic persecutor of Christians to arguably the most active Christian on earth within a few days.

What Paul wrote here is that the Christians who died physically will be resurrected (their souls will return to reanimate their bodies), put on immortality, and ascend in those glorified bodies. He seems to mean that all the dead Christians will resurrect simultaneously, though that is not absolutely plain. An important point to understand here is that Paul didn’t know exactly when Christ was coming back, because no one knows that except the Father, and so he assumed it might occur within his lifetime; hence he wrote, ‘we who are alive, who remain’ for the Second Coming. At that time, Paul probably didn’t know there would be centuries of church history, and that the dead Thessalonian Christians would remain sleeping for so long. Paul was right insofar as he will participate in the rapture, but as one of the resurrected sleepers. The sounding of the angelic trumpet heralds the arrival of God on earth, whether on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:16) or in eschatological Edom. The fact Paul wrote that Jesus comes when the trumpet sounds by itself falsifies the notion that Christians will be raptured before the tribulation, a time that is not associated with the visible manifestation of Christ in our world, and demonstrates that the rapture occurs when Jesus returns to earth.

Then, Paul wrote, those who are alive (spiritually and physically) at the moment of Christ’s reappearance, will follow the ‘dead in Christ’ to meet with them and Christ ‘in the air’ on the day of his coming. In ancient Greek, the phrase ‘To meet the Lord’ (eis apantesin tou kyriou) referred to a welcoming delegation coming out of a city to receive and accompany an arriving dignitary.[i] Then of course, they come back into the city with him. The implication was that Christians will rise to be with Christ in the sky, and then descend with him to the earth to help establish the millennial kingdom.

‘So we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore comfort one another with these words.’ Believers participating in the first resurrection could not be with the Lord forever if they are to stay in heaven, while he descends to make war on the Antichrist. They must come down to earth with him for the millennium, to be with him forever. Spiritual rebirth – a kind of resurrection in which the spirit goes to heaven before returning to the body – is thus a preview of, and a preparation for, the full physical ascension and descension of the elect. Where the soul goes, the body follows.

Paul went on: ‘but concerning the times and seasons, you have no need that anything be written to you. For you yourselves know that the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:1–2). Again, we know that Paul truly did not know exactly when Christ would return. Whereas the more detailed information about the dead rising first was definitely received via direct revelation, Paul here was reiterating Jesus’ teaching on the Mount of Olives about the Son of Man coming unexpectedly (Matthew 24:42), which in itself constitutes strong evidence for an early, pre-70 AD dating of the gospels, at least in oral form, because 1 Thessalonians is generally dated to 49–51 AD and in that letter Paul was basically paraphrasing Jesus’ Olivet Discourse. Again, pretribulation rapturists believe that the surprising ‘thief in the night’ aspect of Jesus’ coming means that he must ‘come’ to rapture the church before the tribulation. But there is no need to stretch the definition of Jesus’ ‘coming’ and the ‘day of the Lord’ in this context across seven years, as this verse and similar ones in the Olivet Discourse can simply be explained by the fact that no one knows the exact 24-hour day of Jesus’ coming, and though the general timeframe would be expected by astute Christians after the abomination, the precise moment could nonetheless be surprising to everyone, but primarily to nonbelievers. Moreover, we have already established through a close reading of the Hebrew prophets that ‘that day’ and ‘the Day of the Lord’ can be used in the broader and the 24-hour sense.

‘For when they are saying “peace and safety”, then sudden destruction will come on them, like birth pains on a pregnant woman.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:3). This is a difficult verse. Pre-tribulation dispensationalists take 1 Thessalonians 5:3 to mean that Christians will be raptured before the tribulation, because Jesus will come and get them in a time of peace and safety, and they believe the tribulation period will not be peaceful or safe. This is a pretty good argument, but I believe 1 Thessalonians 5:3 refers back to Jesus’ Olivet Discourse, when he spoke of people marrying and eating as if all were fine, like they did before the Great Flood, then you have two working in a field, with one taken and one left (Matthew 24:37–44). Those verses were about the rapture, which occurs on the 24-hour day Jesus returns. By mentioning the cries for ‘peace and safety’, Paul was also citing Jeremiah 8:16 ‘we have sinned against Yahweh. We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of healing, and behold, dismay! The snorting of his horses is heard from Dan. The whole land trembles at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones; for they have come and have devoured the land and all that is in it, the city and those who dwell therein.’ Jeremiah 8:16 could mean that the snorting of Yahweh’s horses is to be heard from the ancient city of Dan in northern Israel due to the volume of the horses, though they arrive in Jerusalem from Edom, since Yahweh was the last person identified before ‘the snorting of his horses’, and Jesus and his army from heaven are elsewhere prophesied to ride white horses into battle (Revelation 19). Zechariah (14) also foretold that the Antichrist and his armies would attack Jerusalem on that day. Furthermore, the invasion occurs in the eschatological context of the people of Israel being deceived (Jeremiah 8:2). We know that ‘they’ (1 Thessalonians 5:3) will not be saying peace before the tribulation starts, and they will probably do it in the second half of Daniel’s 70^th week, since the mid-week ‘abomination’ has already been ‘committed’ (Jeremiah 8:12), and the waters ‘poisoned’ (Jeremiah 8:14) in the manner of Revelation (8:11;16), when the people are complacent and the invasion of Israel occurs in Jeremiah 8. All of the above considerations, in conjunction with Revelation’s interval between the trumpets and the bowls, and the likely non-global nature of the Antichrist’s empire, paint a picture of a world that is convalescing and beginning to get back on its feet after the devastation just before Jesus arrives.

However, in Jeremiah 8:13 the fig tree’s leaves are fading, and in Matthew 24:32 Jesus is near, even at the gates, when the fig tree is producing its leaves. The solution to this apparent contradiction is that the fig tree was producing leaves until the invasion devoured ‘the land’ and ‘all’ that was ‘in it’ (Jeremiah 8:16). Moreover, it is implicit that those who are saying peace and safety are impious, and that they are mistaken in their complacency. This is clarified by Paul’s following sentence and verse: ‘Then they will in no way escape. But you, brothers, aren’t in darkness, that the day should overtake you like a thief.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:3–4). In other words, the Christians will not be harmed by the Day of the Lord or completely surprised by it, though they couldn’t foresee the exact moment. That does not mean, however, that good Christians won’t face danger in the foregoing tribulation period, which includes a persecution of Christians. It also does not follow that because Christians won’t be totally surprised by the day, they must be raptured off the planet before the tribulation even starts. From Jeremiah 8 and elsewhere in Scripture, we know that won’t be the case. Paul’s use of ‘the day’, the thief in the night simile and the word ‘sudden’ further indicate that the ‘sudden destruction’ he is talking about will come on the actual 24-hour day of the Second Coming, not a wider period; we have established in the foregoing chapter that the Olivet Discourse he was citing used ‘the thief’ and ‘the day’ to denote the literal return of Christ, and the overall context of 1 Thessalonians 4–5 is about the rapture and the Parousia.

‘You are all children of light and children of the day. We don’t belong to the night, nor the darkness, so then let’s not sleep, as the rest do, but let’s watch and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep in the night; and those who are drunk are drunk in the night. But since we belong to the day, let’s be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God didn’t appoint us to wrath, but to the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him.’ (1 Thessalonians 5–9). Again, Paul echoed Jesus’ parables about servants and virgins watching and waiting for him in the night. The emphasis on watching and waiting in the night, and not sleeping or getting drunk, may be taken as an implication that those who are not ready or watching during that critical period, but are asleep, or otherwise unprepared, will miss their chance to participate in the rapture. This passage further suggests that vigilant saved Christians will have some idea of when Jesus will come, but not an exact day or hour; hence the need for a vigil. Being asleep and awake are of course also metaphors for one’s spiritual state. The helmet that protects Christians from God’s wrath is described by Paul as ‘the hope of salvation’. Indeed, it is the guarantee of preservation, the Holy Spirit, which rests on the head like a helmet, protecting believers from sin.

Pretribulation rapturists have made much of ‘God didn’t appoint us to wrath, but to the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ’, taking it to mean that the Church will not suffer the tribulation due to their absence from earth at that time, with tribulation equating to wrath in this (mis)reading. But again, ‘wrath’ and God’s wrath are used in multiple senses. Wrath can mean the wrath of Jesus on the literal day he returns to fight the Campaign of Armageddon. The elect will not be caught in the crossfire of that wrath, for they will be raptured to be with Jesus and even to fight with him in that campaign clothed in immortal, invulnerable bodies. Wrath can also mean the wrath of God at the throne judgements. True Christians will be exempt from that wrath, too. The point is, wrath in this context doesn’t have to mean the entire tribulation period, as pretribulation rapturists believe. And from Revelation, we know that the elect will be spared certain divine judgements, such as the sores (16:2) and locusts (9:3), though they will remain on the earth at that juncture.

Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians (5:23) ends with ‘may your soul, spirit and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Salvation is the unification of spirit, soul and body, that enables the preservation of this trifecta. The above verse also proves that Paul knew the resurrection will include the physical body, contrary to the false claims of some Gnostics about the apostle’s teachings.[ii]

In 2 Thessalonians 1:6–10, Paul wrote as part of another letter to the Thessalonians: ‘For it is a righteous thing with God to repay affliction to those who afflict you, and to give relief to you who are afflicted with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, punishing those who don’t know God, and to those who don’t obey the good news of our Lord Jesus, who will pay the penalty: eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes in that day to be glorified in his saints and to be admired among all those who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed’. We receive a lot of eschatological information here from Paul, who clearly established some criteria for salvation. Those who don’t know Jesus (via rebirth experiences) and don’t obey the gospel (i.e. receive him and do the works) are to face ‘eternal destruction’, which can only mean the obliteration of body and soul forever, as Jesus said he had power to do in Matthew 10:28, because the body is destroyed as a normal state of affairs. Jesus coming with his angels in ‘flaming fire’ corresponds to his intervention in the Campaign of Armageddon elsewhere in Scripture, specifically the fire in the fourth bowl judgement (Revelation 16:8) and the destruction of the beast by fire in Daniel 7:11. 2 Thessalonians 1:6–10 also clarifies that the angels will fight with him on the Day of the Lord, in addition to the elect. In 2 Thessalonians 1:10, Paul also differentiated between the ‘saints’ in whom Jesus is ‘glorified’, who are the elect in their eternal glory bodies, and ‘those who have believed’ and admire Jesus upon his return, the non-elect Christians that remain alive at that time. There will be believers who will not participate in the rapture, but are nonetheless saved, awaiting the bestowal of their inheritance at a later date. The remnant falls into this category. Then there are those who are unsaved at the time of the rapture but will be saved in the millennium. So, contrary to some evangelical teachings, if you aren’t raptured with the sounding of the trumpet, that shouldn’t necessarily be cause for concern, since only a tiny proportion of all the total saved souls will partake in that ascent of the quick and the dead. The Lord repaying those who ‘afflict’ Christians when he comes corresponds to the sheep and goats judgement in which those who didn’t help his sheep are condemned.

Paul continued: ‘Now brothers, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to him, we ask you not to be quickly shaken in your mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter as if from us, saying that the day of Christ has already come. Let no one deceive you in any way.’ (2 Thessalonians 2:1–3). We can glean from this passage that Paul was concerned about imitators spreading fake news about Jesus’ return, and that he did not believe it was going to come soon at the time he wrote the letter (circa 50 AD). Pretribulation rapturists believe that ‘coming’ here applies to the general tribulation period, which would be cause for Christians to be ‘troubled’, rather than the 24-hour period of Jesus’ return, which they wouldn’t need to be troubled by.[iii] But the verse begins with ‘concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to him’, meaning that Jesus’ (literal) coming and the gathering of the elect to him described in the previous letter occur at or near the same time, a fact pretribulation rapturists deny. The ‘day of Christ’ is thus the aforementioned coming and gathering, not a seven-year tribulation period, as some pretribulation rapturists assert. The contextual preceding verses (2 Thessalonians 1:6–10) were concerned with the actual reappearance of Christ with angels and fire to judge the enemies of his people, not a rapture without such a wrathful cloud-coming. Moreover, the Christians at Thessalonica would be troubled by reports of the coming of Christ if they felt that Jesus had already returned somewhere else and they had been left out of the rapture, which made them worry that their position was among the condemned goats excluded from the kingdom and at risk of being caught up in the wrath associated with the Lord’s reappearance. That is why Paul went to great pains to stress to them in his previous letter that they had nothing to fear from Christ’s return: ‘For God didn’t appoint us to wrath.’

‘For it will not be unless the rebellion[iv] comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of destruction. He opposes and exalts himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, setting himself up as God. Don’t you remember that when I was still with you, I told you these things?’ (2 Thessalonians 2:3–5). Unfortunately, we don’t know everything Paul told the Thessalonians when he was with them or the letter that Paul was replying to, so we don’t have the full context of this letter. Moreover, everything Paul wrote in the foregoing passage (2 Thessalonians 2:3–5) corroborates what we have learned from the Olivet Discourse and Daniel concerning the abomination of desolation that comes approximately 3.5 years before Christ’s return. Paul though is more specific about what that abomination is: the Antichrist exalting himself as God in the temple, in a similar manner to Antiochus, which is why Daniel wrote so extensively about the Greek tyrant. Nobody did anything like that in the Roman-Jewish War; Titus set foot inside the burning temple, but he did not proclaim himself to be God at that moment. Ergo, an exclusively Preterist interpretation is falsified by Paul’s words. Again, 2 Thessalonians 2:3–5 clearly presupposes that the good (saved) Christians Paul addressed his letters to would be there to see the abomination of desolation, in order to look out for it as a sign and to know that Jesus would come after it; therefore, they would not have been raptured out of the earth at that juncture, even midway through Daniel’s final ‘week’ of tribulation, because the rapture comes towards the end of the week. Note as well that the Antichrist is called ‘the son of perdition’, a title also applied to Judas in John 17:12. Is the Antichrist the reincarnation of Judas? Acts 1:18 has Judas falling, and his bowls bursting out, and Antiochus was struck with intense torment in the bowels and fell from his chariot (2 Maccabees 9:5–7)…

‘Now you know what is restraining him, to the end that he may be revealed in his own season. For the mystery of lawlessness works. Only there is one who restrains now, until he is taken out of the way.’ (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7). Again, we lack context here because we didn’t hear Paul’s preaching in Thessalonica, but presumably God or one of his angels was and still is restraining this son of destruction, because God is more powerful than the devil and therefore able to restrain him. ‘But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then God’s kingdom has come upon you. Or how can one enter into the house of the strong man and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then he plunders his house.’ (Matthew 12:29). Furthermore, the time was not yet right as of circa 50 AD, the date of composition, in that the gospel had yet to be preached to all the nations; a mission Paul was dedicated to. Everyone must be given some kind of knowledge of Jesus in order to make a choice, in at least one of their incarnations, so that they can be judged fairly.[v]

‘Then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will kill with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the manifestation of his coming; even he whose coming is according to the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deception of wickedness for those who are being lost, for they didn’t receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Because of this, God sends them a powerful delusion, that they should believe a lie, that they all might be judged who didn’t believe the truth’. (2 Thessalonians 2:8–11).

The Lord also kills the Antichrist in Daniel (7:11), Isaiah (14:24) and Revelation 19:20. Paul’s references to the Antichrist having the power to perform ‘lying wonders’ is echoed by John’s reports of the False Prophet’s misleading ‘miracles’ in Revelation 13:13. But what does Paul mean by lying wonders? That the Antichrist will be able to perform miracles due to the power of Satan? The use of illusionism, like street magicians? Or that they will not be true miracles, but technological. Given advances in technology, and the content of the Revelation, the latter seems more plausible, and will be the case. I have written more on this subject in the Summary and Discussion chapter.

Why will God give people a strong delusion so that they will believe and follow this Antichrist? Paul answered this frequently asked question in the text of his letter: the delusion is their punishment for not accepting the truth earlier, which presupposes that by the time of the end, everyone so affected by the delusion will have at least heard of and had access to the gospel, even if they never actually read or listened to it. In John 5:43, Jesus said: ‘I have come in my Father’s name, and you don’t receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.’

Read the next chapter: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindbody-part-3-chapter-10-revelation

[i] Hultberg, Alan. Blasing, Craig, Moo, Douglas. 2018. Three Views on The Rapture: Pretribulation, Prewrath or Posttribulation (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology). Zondervan Academic; Second edition.

[ii] Irenaeus. Against Heresies.

[iii] The Bible Explained. 2023. II Thessalonians 2 Explained: What is the Falling Away & the Day of Christ? YouTube Video. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weibOM4Ex3o

[iv] Or falling away (apostasia in the original Greek). This falling away or apostasy is a falling away from Christ, which has been underway in the west since at least the First World War. Source for the word apostasia: Scripture4All Greek Interlinear Bible, https://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/NTpdf/2th2.pdf

[v] ‘If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have had sin; but now they have no excuse for sin.’ John 15:22. World English Bible.