Why is the alert statement always executed before the previous statement?

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code show as below:

right_out.onclick = function(){
   var lis = ul.getElementsByTagName('li');
   var temp = lis[lis.length-1].innerHTML;
   ul.removeChild(lis[lis.length-1]);
   alert(temp);
}

The removeChild line is clearly above, why is the alert statement executed first?
Then I tried to add the setTimeOut timer to the alert statement, and the result was still the same.

var lis = ul.getElementsByTagName('li');
var temp = lis[0].innerHTML;
ul.removeChild(lis[0]);
setTimeout(function(){
    alert(temp)
},1000);