In Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians he gives some additional information concerning the coming of the Lord and our gathering together unto him. From the first verse of the second chapter we learn that the coming of the Lord referred to is that coming in which the saints are gathered together unto him. Paul would not have them troubled by thinking that that day was “just at hand.” One writer, well known to the Gospel Advocate readers, makes this comment on the phrase, “at hand”: “In every translation known to me, except the Douay, the King James, and the American Revised Version, this reads ‘the day of the Lord is now present.’ Some one had made those Thessalonians believe that the day of the Lord had already broken in upon them.” I know that some translations have “present” instead of “at hand”, but they are not so numerous as the foregoing quotation would have us believe. The following translations have “at hand”: Latin Vulgate, Bible Union, Living Oracles, Sharpe, George R. Noyes (Harvard University teacher), Anderson, Syriac, Sawyer, and James MacKnight. So far as scholarship goes, it is very likely that the scholarship back of the American Standard Version outweighs the scholarship of all the translations referred to in the foregoing quotation, with the exception of the English Revision. But it matters little to us what those Thessalonian brethren thought about the matter; it does not affect Paul’s teaching on the subject. Paul tells us that a falling away must come first and the man of sin be revealed. This must be, he tells us, before the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together unto him. But the theory that is now so attractive to some people has this man of sin developed after the saints are taken up to meet the Lord in the air; the man of sin is then to be destroyed at what is termed the second stage of his coming. But Paul plainly says that the coming he is here talking about is the coming in which the saints are gathered together unto the Lord. It is strange that a theory will so blind people that they cannot see a plain statement in the very passages from which they claim to deduce their teaching. Pointed Paragraphs: Jesus and Paul were not contentious, yet they contended earnestly for the truth. They were the greatest fighters of all time. They were moved by two Loves. They loved man so much that they fought with determination anything and everything that would hurt man. They loved the truth so much that they fought everything that was in the way of its progress. And they stirred people as none others ever did. It has been said that it is useless to quote the Bible to one who disbelieves it. But Jesus quoted it to the devil. There is power in an appropriate passage of Scripture that even a disbeliever cannot evade.