Now let us follow on with the description. With the Lord Jesus, accompanying Him, though unseen to those below on the earth, will be the myriads of spirits of the blessed dead, And notice,--for it is an important point, since Holy Scripture is consistent with itself in another place on this matter,--that at this coming none are with the Lord, no spirits of the departed, I mean, except those of the blessed dead. In other words, this is not the general coming to judgment, when the whole of the dead shall stand before God, but it is that first resurrection of which the Evangelist speaks in the Apocalypse, when he says, chap. xx. 5, "_The rest of the dead lived not again until_ (a prescribed time which he mentions, whatever that may mean) _the thousand years were finished This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ_." Then, the Lord being still descending from heaven and on the way to this world, the dead in Christ shall rise first--the first thing: the graves shall be opened, and the bodies of the saints that sleep shall come forth, and, for so the words surely imply, their spirits, which have come with the Lord, shall be united to those bodies, each to his own. Here, again, I can see no difficulty. The same body, even to us now on earth, does not imply that the same particles compose it. And even the expression "the same body" is perhaps a fallacious one. In St. Paul's great argument on this subject in 1 Cor. xv. he expressly tells us, that it is not that body which was sown in the earth, but a new and glorified one, even as the beautiful plant, which springs from the insignificant or the ill-favoured seed, is not that which was sown, but a body which God has given. Whatever the bodies shall be, they will be recognised as those befitting the spirits which are reunited to them, as they also befit the new and glorious state into which they are now entering. This done, they who are alive and remain on earth, having been, which is not asserted here, but is in 1 Cor. xv., changed so as to be in the image of the incorruptible, spiritual, heavenly, will be caught up together with the risen saints in clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: to _meet_ Him, because He is in His way from heaven to earth, on which He is about to stand in that latter day.