The Bible does not describe one general resurrection at the end of everything. It describes a sequence — and the order is the point.
Most Christians carry a mental picture of the end that goes something like this: history runs out, a trumpet blows, everybody who ever lived comes out of the ground at once, and the sorting happens on the spot.
It is a tidy picture. It is not the one Scripture paints.
The Bible speaks of resurrection the way it speaks of harvest — in stages, with intervals between them, each group coming up in an appointed slot. Paul says so with a word borrowed straight from the military parade ground, and John, writing the last book of the canon, drops a plain chronological marker into the middle of Revelation 20 that most readers skim right past.
This is careful, unglamorous work. There is no date in it and nothing to post about. But getting the sequence right is how you inoculate yourself against both errors — the sensationalist who has the whole calendar mapped, and the cynic who says nobody can know anything so why read the passage at all.
Paul’s Word: Order
In the great resurrection chapter, Paul says something easy to read past.
But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. … But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming, then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father.
1 Corinthians 15:20, 23–24 (NASB1995)
The phrase each in his own order translates a Greek word — tagma — that meant a rank or division of troops. Paul is not saying “everybody, sorted.” He is saying “this division, then that division,” the way a column moves through a gate.
And look at the connective tissue. Christ the first fruits — that already establishes a gap of two thousand years and counting between rank one and rank two, which by itself proves that resurrection in Scripture is not a single instantaneous event. After that, those who belong to Christ at His coming. Then comes the end. Two Greek words there, epeita and eita, both meaning “next in a series.”
Paul had every opportunity to say “and then everyone at once.” He wrote a marching order instead.
The Two Destinations Jesus Named
Before Paul, Jesus had already distinguished the outcomes.
Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.
John 5:28–29 (NASB1995)
Two resurrections named by their outcome: life and judgment. Daniel had said the same thing five centuries earlier — “many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2).
Neither text gives you the interval. Both texts give you the categories. Jesus uses an hour is coming the same way He used it in John 5:25 for a work already underway — a Hebraic idiom for an appointed season, not a sixty-minute window. So the categories are fixed and the timing is left open until John receives the vision.
The Number in Revelation 20
Then John, describing those who come to life and reign with Christ, adds a clause that functions like a timestamp.
The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power.
Revelation 20:5–6 (NASB1995)
Three things sit in those two verses, and each one is load-bearing.
- “The first resurrection” is a name, not a description of priority. Ordinal numbers imply a second. John is not calling it “the best” resurrection; he is numbering it.
- “The rest of the dead did not come to life until…” That is an explicit statement of interval. Whatever else is debated about Revelation 20, the text itself places a span of time between one group coming to life and another group coming to life. A reading that collapses them into one event has to work against the sentence, not with it.
- “The second death has no power” over the first group. Which tells you the second group faces something the first group does not — and John describes it eight verses later at the great white throne, where the dead are judged from the books (Revelation 20:11–15).
Read plainly, the shape is: Christ first. Then those who are His, at His coming. Then, after the thousand years, the rest of the dead — raised not to life but to judgment.
Where Honest Believers Differ
Sobriety means saying what the text says and no more, so let me be straight about the seams.
Christians who read Revelation 20 symbolically take “the first resurrection” as the new birth or the believer’s entry into heaven at death, and place a single bodily resurrection at the end. They are not liberals and they are not fools; they are reading a book full of dragons and stars and they conclude the thousand is figurative too. I do not find that persuasive — the same verb for “came to life” governs both groups in verse 4 and verse 5, and it strains the sentence to make it mean spiritual life in one clause and bodily life in the next. But I can state their case without a sneer, and so should you.
And within the futurist reading, there is real internal debate about whether the resurrection of Old Testament and Tribulation saints belongs to the same moment as the Church’s, or to a later stage inside the same general rank. Daniel 12:1–2 places Israel’s deliverance after the great distress; Revelation 20:4 names the martyrs of the Tribulation specifically. Careful men differ. The frame holds either way.
What no honest reading can do is erase the sequence. It is in Paul’s word tagma, in John’s ordinal, in the explicit until.
Why a Man Should Care About the Order
Because sequence is where sensationalism goes to die.
Every date-setter in living memory has made the same mistake: he took an event out of its rank and attached it to a headline. Move a piece out of the order and prophecy becomes a Rorschach test for the evening news. Keep the order, and you have a framework that absorbs the news without being driven by it. You can watch the Middle East soberly. You can read a bad month in the world without needing it to mean something.
And because the order tells you which line you are standing in.
Everyone reading this will be raised. That is not the question the Bible leaves open. The question is which rank you come up in — and that is settled not at the trumpet but now, by whether you belong to Christ. Those who are Christ’s at His coming. The whole weight of that clause falls on the possessive.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”
John 11:25–26 (NASB1995)
He does not say He has the resurrection. He says He is it. The first rank in the column is a Person, and everyone in the second rank is there because they are His.
So study the order. Not so you can chart the calendar — you cannot, and men who try have a perfect record of being wrong. Study it so that when the trumpet finally sounds, you are not surprised by what happens, and you already know exactly where you stand in the line.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist