Would you please clarify a part of the following two verses from 1 Thessalonians KJV?
4:16For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: 4:17Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
Does the shout of the Lord himself, the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God occur simultaneously, or are they sequential in nature, thereby initiating the Rapture of the Church?
I realize that these things happen in a split second, so perhaps my question is moot.
There is a view that when God sent the ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac, He saved the two horns to be used as shofars. He blew the left one (called the first trump) in Exodus 19 in preparation for the giving of the Law, and will blow the right one (the last trump) in 1 Thes. 4:16 to initiate the Rapture. If so, then Exodus 19 can serve as an interesting type or model of the Rapture.
For what it’s worth, in Exodus the sound of the trumpet came first and then and the voice of God calling Moses up the mountain. But note that Paul described the whole thing taking place in the twinkling of an eye, so we may not be able to distinguish the sequence.