When are Old Testament saints resurrected?

Question 10172.

When are Old Testament saints resurrected? It sounds like a specialist question, and then you realise it is really a question about Abraham, Moses, David, Ruth and Daniel, and about whether the people whose stories formed our faith are raised with us or separately from us.

My answer is that Old Testament saints are raised at the Second Coming of Jesus, not at the Rapture of the Church, and the reason lies in the way Scripture keeps the two peoples distinct without making them rivals.

Where the question comes from

Paul tells the Thessalonians that the dead in Christ will rise first when the Lord descends. Dead in Christ is a phrase with a technical edge to it. Being in Christ is Paul’s shorthand for union with the risen Jesus through the baptising work of the Spirit, something that began at Pentecost and defines the Church.

Old Testament saints were saved by faith in exactly the same way we are, resting on a promise rather than a completed work, but they were not in Christ in that Pauline sense. So when Paul describes the Rapture he is describing the raising of a particular company, and it is worth noticing what he does not say as well as what he does.

That is why I do not include Old Testament saints in the Rapture. Not because they matter less, and certainly not because their salvation is different in kind, but because the passage that describes the Rapture describes a group defined by a relationship that began after their deaths. My article on what the Rapture is sets out the event itself.

What Daniel says about the timing

Daniel gives us the clearest timing statement. In chapter 12 the resurrection of many who sleep in the dust follows the time of trouble such as never has been, which is the Great Tribulation. That places the raising of Israel’s dead at the close of that period, when the Messiah returns to deliver his people.

Daniel is then given a personal promise: go your way till the end, and you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days (Daniel 12:13). At the end of the days, not before the days begin. If Old Testament saints were raised seven years earlier at the Rapture, that promise would have been oddly worded.

Isaiah says something similar. Your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise, and he calls the dwellers in the dust to awake and sing for joy (Isaiah 26:19). The context there is national deliverance and the Lord coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth, which again points to the Second Coming rather than to a signless departure of the Church.

Where the Old Testament saints are now

Before the cross, the righteous dead went to a place of comfort that Jesus described as Abraham’s side, distinct from the place of torment, and both within the realm of the dead. Old Testament saints were conscious, at rest and secure, but they were not yet in the presence of God in the way believers are now.

Something changed at the ascension. Paul says that when Jesus ascended on high he led a host of captives, which many take to mean that the righteous dead were brought into the immediate presence of God when the work of redemption was finished. From that point the pattern is simple: absent from the body, present with the Lord.

So the Old Testament saints are not asleep in a holding cell waiting for the trumpet. They are with the Lord, conscious and content, awaiting the resurrection of their bodies just as departed believers today are. My article on Abraham’s bosom works through the earlier arrangement.

Why the distinction matters

Someone will ask why this matters if everyone ends up in the same kingdom. It matters because it is a test case for how we read prophecy. If the promises made to Israel are simply absorbed into the Church, then words in Scripture can be redefined whenever a system requires it, and the ground under every other promise becomes soft.

Keeping Old Testament saints in their own resurrection is one small piece of taking God at his word. He said Israel, and he meant Israel. He said the Church, and he meant the Church. Both are saved by grace through faith in the same Saviour, and both are raised by the same power, at times that suit the programme he has revealed.

The distinction is not a wall. Hebrews 11 ends by telling us that those great believers will not be made perfect apart from us, which is a lovely way of saying that the whole family arrives together in the end even if the doors open at different moments. I take the wider issue up when asking about the difference between Israel and the Church.

Are they part of the first resurrection?

Yes, in the sense that Revelation uses the phrase. The first resurrection is not a single moment but a class, the resurrection of the righteous, over against the second resurrection of the unrighteous a thousand years later. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection, John writes, and Old Testament saints share in it.

Paul’s phrase is each in his own order. The word he uses was employed of troops arranged in rank, and it implies sequence within a single operation rather than separate unrelated events. Christ the firstfruits, then those who belong to him at his coming, then the end.

So there is no competition between the companies. Different ranks, one army, one resurrection life, and one Saviour whose empty tomb guarantees all of it. That is how I hold the Rapture and the Second Coming together without collapsing them.

What the Old Testament saints will do

Scripture gives us glimpses. Ezekiel speaks of David as prince over Israel in the restored kingdom, which many take to mean the resurrected David serving under the Messiah in the Millennium. Jesus tells the twelve they will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes. Daniel is promised his allotted place.

The picture that emerges is of a millennial kingdom with resurrected Old Testament saints in positions of responsibility, alongside the glorified Church, over a population of people who survived the Tribulation in ordinary bodies. It is a fuller and stranger world than most of our hymns imagine.

I find it encouraging that the people who waited longest are given real work rather than a permanent rest. Abraham looked for a city whose designer and builder is God. He is going to see it, walk in it, and have something to do in it, which is more than the popular picture of clouds and harps ever offered him.

A word about certainty

I hold this position with confidence, but not with the same confidence I hold the resurrection itself. The timing of the raising of Old Testament saints is an inference from several passages rather than a single explicit statement, and honest believers who share my framework have occasionally placed them at the Rapture instead.

What no believer should doubt is that they are raised, that they inherit the promises made to them, and that God has not lost a single one of them across the millennia. The timing is a matter for careful study. The fact is a matter of plain revelation, and the two deserve different levels of insistence.

That distinction between what Scripture states and what we deduce is one I try to keep visible in everything I write. It is the difference between teaching the Bible and defending a system, and readers can always tell which one they are being given.

What about believers between the Testaments?

A question that sometimes follows is where the faithful of the intertestamental period belong, and the honest answer is with the Old Testament saints. The company is not defined by the closing of a canon but by living before the cross and resting on promises rather than on an accomplished redemption.

Simeon and Anna in the temple are the last of that line and the first witnesses of the next. Simeon holds the infant Jesus and says he can now depart in peace, which is the language of a man whose long wait has ended. He belongs among the Old Testament saints, and he saw the beginning of what they had all been promised.

John the Baptist is the hinge. Jesus says no one born of women is greater than John, and then adds that the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he, which points to the change of dispensation rather than to any deficiency in John. Old Testament saints stand on one side of that line and the Church on the other, both saved by the same grace.

Peter tells us that the prophets searched carefully into the salvation they were predicting, and were told they were serving not themselves but us (1 Peter 1:12). They laboured for a generation they would not meet. The resurrection is where they finally meet it.

So, now what?

Read Hebrews 11 again with this in mind. Every one of those people died without receiving what was promised, and God commends them for believing anyway. They are still waiting, and they have never once been forgotten.

That is the point to take home. The Old Testament saints have been waiting far longer than you have been waiting for whatever it is you are waiting for, and their resurrection is as fixed in God’s diary as tomorrow morning. Can you trust him with your rather shorter wait?

But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.

Daniel 12:13, ESV