Christ's certain and sudden appearance to judgment

1. Concerning the immediate Antecedents to the judgment of the righteous.

1. The first Antecedent to the righteous judgment will be their resurrection from the dead, 1 Thes. 4. 16. The dead in Christ shall rise first; when Christ descends from heaven, the souls of the righteous shall descend with him, 1 Thes. 4. 14. Them that sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. The spirits of all the just men and women made perfect shall then come down and find out their own bodies, which have been sleeping in the bed of their graves, and they shall enter again into their old habitations; they went out of them, it may be with fear and trembling, with grief and sorrow, being unwilling to leave them behind, though they were so rotten and ruinous: but O with what joy will they return and enter again, when the building shall be repaired, when their bodies shall be raised by the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, and healed of all infirmities, when they shall be made incorruptible and immortal! see 1 Cor. 15. 52. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last Trump, for the Trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. And vers. 54. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory, then shall they triumph over death, and the grave, saying, vers. 55. O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy Victory? The Lord Jesus will then make them victorious over this conqueror, vers. 57. Thanks be to God, who hath given ⟨p. 32⟩us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. The parting of soul and body was never so sad unto any of the Saints at their death, as the meeting will be sweet at their resurrection; O how will the soul wonder at the sudden and strange metamorphosis of the body? when the soul left the body vile to putrefy and corrupt in the grave, and shall find it come forth more bright and glorious than gold, after it hath been refined in a Furnace; when the vile body shall be fashioned like unto Christs most glorious body,