I posted this in another thread, Thought it applied here as well,In the virgins parable the groom does not advance all the way to the brides house.
In rev 14;14 Jesus gathers from the sky.
In 1 thess 4 Jesus stops in the sky and we meet him there.
In rev 19, now we finally see a coming to earth.
3 separate vivid events.
Imagine we are living at the end of the tribulation, Scripture’s sequence is stark and linear: the world is convulsing, the saints are hunted, and the man of sin operates without restraint, but the moment Christ appears everything changes at once — His revelation is not gradual but catastrophic, the dead in Christ rise in glorified bodies, the living believers are transformed, and both are gathered to Him in the air because the ground is about to become the site of judgment; Paul says the wicked are destroyed by “the brightness of His coming” (2 Thess 2:8), which is why the meeting happens above the earth, not on it. The old order collapses in a single hour, the corruption of the nations ends, and after the resurrection of the righteous comes the resurrection of the wicked (John 5:28–29), followed by the final judgment and the separation of the two groups. What follows is the new creation, not a return to a damaged planet, not a millennial repopulation of mortal survivors, and certainly not a literal Borg cube‑city confined to ethnic Israel; the New Jerusalem is temple imagery for God’s presence filling the renewed cosmos. Everything you say is in there, Everything in scripture is in there.