Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:17)
I was watching CBN’s 700 Club this morning, and they were featuring a lovely celebration for Rosh Hashanah. They had someone playing the “shofar,” a horn usually made out of a ram’s horn. It is very significant to the Jews because it was the blast of a shofar from the thick cloud over Mt. Sinai that announced God’s presence and made the Israelites quake in their boots. It is also said that the trumpet that sounds at the rapture (1 Corinthians 15:52, 1 Thess. 4:16) will be a shofar.
At the blast of that horn, we will be caught up in the air to meet Him.
My mind pictured the scene. I imagined myself just a small dot in a crowd of millions, gazing upon Him from afar. Then a warm and wonderful realization dawned: my relationship with Him will not be from afar. He is not like today’s celebrities who are separated from us by security guards, roped-off areas or elevated stages. Those celebrities have clearly separated themselves from the crowd, and we, “the crowd,” accepted long ago that we are nameless and faceless to them.
Not so with Jesus. When Jesus looks at us, He never sees a crowd. He sees Gwenn and Julie and Hannah and Michael and Steve and Nathan. He even sees Dakota’s tow head and long legs and infectious laugh growing inside of Yvonne. He already knows her intimately. And me. And you too.
When the shofar sounds, we will finally be together, like lovers previously separated on different continents. I will not have to grab a pair of binoculars to see Him, or wait in a long line to shake His hand, or hope to get a brief glimpse of Him when He passes by.
He will be mine. And He will be yours. And we will all have our own sacred romance with Him. He will give us each a new name that is ours alone and that symbolizes our own unique relationship. And we will never have to feel that we are taking up His valuable time, for there is no time in heaven. And we will not be jealous of His relationship with others, because He will make each of us feel like we are His all in all, because we are.
We will touch Him. We will look into His eyes. We will hear His voice and smile at His laughter. And we will smell His fragrance.
He will extend His hands to us just as He did to Thomas, and we, too, will trace the deeply-cut scars in his palms with our finger, then reverently turn his hands over, to see the matching scars on the other side, where the nails pierced through.
And we will weep.
And He will wipe every tear from our eyes.
…all at the sound of the shofar. Come Lord Jesus.
