Your Appointment, Not His Return

One distinction is worth making explicit before this part of the book closes, because everything you have just read — the thief's today, Paul's far better, the soul's release from the fractures ordinary time imposes — could be quietly misread into a claim this book does not actually hold. The misreading matters enough to name directly, because Part Four and Part Six are about to spend a great deal of space on a question this section could easily seem to have already answered.

Your death is your appointment with Christ. "Just as people are appointed to die once, and then to face judgment" (Hebrews 9:27, NET) is personal, certain, and — given everything Augustine's account of time has just shown you — possibly an appointment that arrives with no felt interval at all between your last breath and His presence. But your appointment is not His return. Those are not two names for the same event, however close they may feel from the inside.

Paul is the reason this has to be said plainly rather than left to assumption. Writing to comfort a congregation grieving over believers who had already died before the return they were promised, he does not tell them their loved ones already received, individually, everything that return was going to give. He tells them the opposite: that the Lord Himself is coming down, that the dead in Christ will rise, and that the living will be caught up together with them, at the same moment, to meet Him in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). Paul's whole comfort to a grieving church depends on that being one shared, future, corporate event — not a private one each believer already collected the moment their own heart stopped. Whatever the timing of that shared event turns out to be, and Part Four is about to walk you through three serious answers to exactly that question, it is not the same claim as the personal appointment this part of the book has just spent its pages on. Keep the two distinct. You will need the distinction again before this book is finished.