All about the Rapture. PT 1
II Thessalonians Chapter 2:1-12
Matthew 24:44 "Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
1Th 5:2 for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
Re 16:15 "Behold, I come like a thief! Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed."
There are many other similar verses that could be printed but these will do to illustrate statements we have all heard about the second coming of Jesus.
We have heard that He may be coming very soon. We have heard that He could come at any moment. We have heard that the event is called 'the rapture of the church'.
We will look at some of the what and why for statements like these.
But first we will go to our text and allow the Apostle Paul (via the Holy Spirit) to introduce this subject properly.
Verse one clearly indicates the subject Paul is introducing:
He says, “Concerning:
Paul immediately assumes that some are really worried regarding the rapture. They are thinking that it is to happen now! It is as though they are saying, “Something is wrong! Where is He? He should have been here by now! Paul said He is coming soon!”. We could add to that a thought that comes out of First Thessalonians … “ Where is he? People in our church are dying! It is God's fault, he should have come back by now. People are dying and missing out on being taken to heaven.”
Paul corrected that thought in his first book, by saying to them … “Don't be misinformed … your loved ones have not missed out on anything … they did not die and go out of existence … they are already with the Lord. And they will be coming back with Him when He comes.”
Paul, in verse 2, adds his 'disclaimer' … “You believe that the coming of Jesus is supposed to happen immediately … you did not get that from me. I never told you that”.
The New King James translation ends the verse with … as though the day of Christ had come.
The Old King James said, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
And the NIV puts it like this: saying that the day of the Lord has already come.
My view is that both the NIV and the NKJV are wrong. They are trying to say that the Thessalonians thought that they had missed the rapture. I disagree for two reasons.
First: The word, at hand, used in the King James come from the New Testament Greek word, enistemi ( ενιστημι) and the Greek dictionary (Lexicon) gives the following defintions:
AV-present 3, things present 2, be at hand 1, come 1; 7
1) to place in or among, to put in
2) to be upon, impend, threaten
3) close at hand
And , back to our chapter 2 and verse 3, That day will NOT come until …
I will paraphrase the first part of the chapter:
With reference to the rapture, don't be shook up by what you think you heard from me about the timing of it … it will not come until certain things happen first.
What day will not happen until certain things happen first? The day Paul calls 'our gathering together'. In other words, the rapture will not happen until …
But wait a minute, what kind of talk is that? I thought the rapture could happen at any time … unannounced? Paul is saying that it CANNOT happen until ….
I will get back to this later.
But now it is time to talk about various views that we have heard and discover why these views exist
The most common views1 go by these 'titles': Pre-Trib. Mid-Trib and Post-Trib.
Why the word, Trib? It is short for tribulation. The Tribulation is known as a future period of time in which the world will undergo severe trouble. Jesus said this:
Matthew 24:21,22 "For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened.
Without going into a great amount of detail and scripture … we will concede that this tribulation period is usually defined as being seven years long and that the last half of it is really bad … and is called the Great Tribulation.
Pre-trib - teaches that the rapture happens just before that, and that all Christians living at the time will be caught up into the air to meet the Lord.
Mid-Trib - teaches that this rapture happens at the half-way point and that Christians will be taken up and miss the worst part of the Tribulation.
Post-Trib – teaches … you guessed it, the meeting the Lord in the air happens right at the end of the tribulation.
While there are a few variations, these are the main ones. Why do they even exist? Isn't the bible clear, simple and plain regarding this?
The answer to how different views regarding the rapture ever came into being is important and it is not immediately obvious.
Many popular prophecy teachers are pre-trib. I will list some of the more common statements that are often heard coming from pre-trib teachers and are often accepted by many of us … but statements that really need to be compared to scripture.
1. “The Tribulation period will be a terrible time of suffering and death on the earth, but Christians need not fear it because they will have all gone up in the rapture.”
2. The tribulation is a time known as 'The Wrath of God' and since believers are not appointed to wrath2, they will escape it, having first been taken to heaven.
3. The tribulation is a time of suffering like this world has never seen and God would never subject His children to something that awful3.
4. The tribulation period is known in scripture as 'The Time of Jacob's Trouble4'. Jacob refers to Israel, the Jews, and therefor the church will be gone.
5. In Revelation 4:1 John sees a door open in heaven and hears a voice as loud as a trumpet saying 'Come up here'. Immediately John rises up through the door into heaven … he represents the whole church going up to heaven. After this point in Revelation the word Church does not appear, therefore it is not present on earth from that point on. The whole book of Revelation which covers in detail the Tribulation period happens after John is called up … therefore the church is not here on earth during the Tribulation.
6. This age is known as the age of grace. The previous age was called the age of Law. The Old Testament tells us that the future seven year period is a conclusion to the Age of Law. Therefore the age of Grace being over, the church will be taken to heaven.
All of the above statements are based on a common foundation. Many people who believe these things may not even realize that their beliefs are built on any particular system of presuppositions, but here they are:
The foundation is called 'Dispensationalism5'. In this view, God has dealt with man from the beginning of history in a number of different ways. And, in this view God's requirements were different for each specific time period. The time periods are named: Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Grace, Millennial Kingdom.
The Age of Grace (our present age) is often called 'The Church Age'.
Here is a quote from https://www.gotquestions.org/seven-dispensations.html.
The sixth dispensation, the one in which we now live, is the Dispensation of Grace. It began with the New Covenant in Christ’s blood (Luke 22:20). This “Age of Grace” or “Church Age” occurs between the 69th and 70th week of Daniel 9:24. It starts with the coming of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and ends with the Rapture of the church (1 Thessalonians 4). This dispensation is worldwide and includes both Jews and the Gentiles. Man’s responsibility during the Dispensation of Grace is to believe in Jesus, the Son of God (John 3:18). In this dispensation the Holy Spirit indwells believers as the Comforter (John 14:16-26). This dispensation has lasted for over 2,000 years, and no one knows when it will end. We do know that it will end with the Rapture of all born-again believers from the earth to go to heaven with Christ. Following the Rapture will be the judgments of God lasting for seven years.6 -
So, to illustrate the dispensations in a chart form, it would look a little like this:
Innocence| Conscience | Human Government | Promise | Law | Church/Grace | Law | Millen.
Notice that Law is on there twice. That is because there is still a remaining seven year period of time left to finish off the age of Law.
All of the above is based on the dispensational platform which insists that the Church age, or the age of Grace is somewhat of a parenthesis inserted into the Law age. It also insists that the Church age started on the day of Pentecost.
Back to our text in 2Thessalonians and skipping ahead to verse 5-7 for just a moment. Paul is saying that something is restraining the Anti-christ from being revealed. Then he calls that 'something' a He. “He will restrain until He is taken out of the way.” The assumption is that Paul is referring to the Holy Spirit's restraining power, but at some point He will be taken out and taken back to heaven. When that happens, the pre-trib position is that the church also goes. Why? Because of Jesus' promise .. John 14:16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever--
Mt 28:20 "teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Amen.
So Jesus sends the Holy Spirit as our comforter and counsellor … so when the Counsellor is taken up to heaven, the church goes too … so that they will not be left 'comfortless'.
You may be thinking that all of this makes pretty good sense up to this point, but now I need to point out some serious difficulties with this view.
I will insert another chart here. It will be a magnification of the right hand end of the one above. This is a chart of the word Law, above, on the very right.
| First half of Tribulation | Second half of Tribulation | Millennial reign of Jesus.
The Pre-trib teaching is that all born-again people are raptured right at the beginning . Of those who are left behind, some will quickly realize what just happened and they will get saved. They will read their bibles and realize that the second half of the tribulation will be terrible, but they can use this time to build their faith.
Many will die for their new found Christian faith. Some will remain alive until the end. They have missed the rapture, so they will still have natural bodies as they live into the thousand year reign of Christ, set up farming, have children etc.
During this time up in heaven, the judgment seat7 of Christ has occurred, and also the marriage supper of the Lamb8 of God up in heaven.
Here are the difficulties:
Dispensationalism is what we refer to as a 'system'. What this means is, someone .. some theologian … worked it out in all of its detail. Others come along and study it out and, as far as they can see, it makes sense. So they believe the system that someone developed. I have made it a practice to go to scripture only without developing any kind of system. It is a little harder, because it seems like re-inventing the wheel. But contextually taking the bible teaching about this is much safer.
In our next session I will give clear biblical responses to some of the statements of both pre-trib teachers and post-trib teachers. We will find that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
1 Common views held by Evangelicals, that is. Evangelicals are those churches NOT in the association designated as PLURA. The letters of the PLURA acronym stand for Presbyterian, Lutheran, United, Roman Catholic, and Anglican. Evangelical examples would be Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelical Free, Alliance, Methodist, Church of Christ, etc. etc.
2 1Th 5:9 For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,
3 Re 3:10 "Because you have kept My command to persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of trial which shall come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.
4 Jer 30:7 Alas! For that day is great, So that none is like it; And it is the time of Jacob’s trouble, But he shall be saved out of it.
5 Dispensationalism is a theological system that teaches biblical history is best understood in light of a number of successive administrations of God's dealings with mankind, which it calls "dispensations." It maintains fundamental distinctions between God's plans for national Israel and for the New Testament Church, and emphasizes prophecy of the end-times and a pre-tribulation rapture of the church prior to Christ's Second Coming. Its beginnings are usually associated with the Plymouth Brethren movement in the UK and the teachings of John Nelson Darby. http://www.theopedia.com/dispensationalism
6 https://www.gotquestions.org/seven-dispensations.html
7 Heb 9:27 And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment,
8Re 19:7 "Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready."
9Re 7:9 After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands,
Matthew 24:44 "Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
1Th 5:2 for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
Re 16:15 "Behold, I come like a thief! Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed."
There are many other similar verses that could be printed but these will do to illustrate statements we have all heard about the second coming of Jesus.
We have heard that He may be coming very soon. We have heard that He could come at any moment. We have heard that the event is called 'the rapture of the church'.
We will look at some of the what and why for statements like these.
But first we will go to our text and allow the Apostle Paul (via the Holy Spirit) to introduce this subject properly.
Verse one clearly indicates the subject Paul is introducing:
He says, “Concerning:
- The coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and
- Our being gathered together to Him”
Paul immediately assumes that some are really worried regarding the rapture. They are thinking that it is to happen now! It is as though they are saying, “Something is wrong! Where is He? He should have been here by now! Paul said He is coming soon!”. We could add to that a thought that comes out of First Thessalonians … “ Where is he? People in our church are dying! It is God's fault, he should have come back by now. People are dying and missing out on being taken to heaven.”
Paul corrected that thought in his first book, by saying to them … “Don't be misinformed … your loved ones have not missed out on anything … they did not die and go out of existence … they are already with the Lord. And they will be coming back with Him when He comes.”
Paul, in verse 2, adds his 'disclaimer' … “You believe that the coming of Jesus is supposed to happen immediately … you did not get that from me. I never told you that”.
The New King James translation ends the verse with … as though the day of Christ had come.
The Old King James said, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
And the NIV puts it like this: saying that the day of the Lord has already come.
My view is that both the NIV and the NKJV are wrong. They are trying to say that the Thessalonians thought that they had missed the rapture. I disagree for two reasons.
First: The word, at hand, used in the King James come from the New Testament Greek word, enistemi ( ενιστημι) and the Greek dictionary (Lexicon) gives the following defintions:
AV-present 3, things present 2, be at hand 1, come 1; 7
1) to place in or among, to put in
2) to be upon, impend, threaten
3) close at hand
- present
And , back to our chapter 2 and verse 3, That day will NOT come until …
I will paraphrase the first part of the chapter:
With reference to the rapture, don't be shook up by what you think you heard from me about the timing of it … it will not come until certain things happen first.
What day will not happen until certain things happen first? The day Paul calls 'our gathering together'. In other words, the rapture will not happen until …
But wait a minute, what kind of talk is that? I thought the rapture could happen at any time … unannounced? Paul is saying that it CANNOT happen until ….
I will get back to this later.
But now it is time to talk about various views that we have heard and discover why these views exist
The most common views1 go by these 'titles': Pre-Trib. Mid-Trib and Post-Trib.
Why the word, Trib? It is short for tribulation. The Tribulation is known as a future period of time in which the world will undergo severe trouble. Jesus said this:
Matthew 24:21,22 "For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened.
Without going into a great amount of detail and scripture … we will concede that this tribulation period is usually defined as being seven years long and that the last half of it is really bad … and is called the Great Tribulation.
Pre-trib - teaches that the rapture happens just before that, and that all Christians living at the time will be caught up into the air to meet the Lord.
Mid-Trib - teaches that this rapture happens at the half-way point and that Christians will be taken up and miss the worst part of the Tribulation.
Post-Trib – teaches … you guessed it, the meeting the Lord in the air happens right at the end of the tribulation.
While there are a few variations, these are the main ones. Why do they even exist? Isn't the bible clear, simple and plain regarding this?
The answer to how different views regarding the rapture ever came into being is important and it is not immediately obvious.
Many popular prophecy teachers are pre-trib. I will list some of the more common statements that are often heard coming from pre-trib teachers and are often accepted by many of us … but statements that really need to be compared to scripture.
1. “The Tribulation period will be a terrible time of suffering and death on the earth, but Christians need not fear it because they will have all gone up in the rapture.”
2. The tribulation is a time known as 'The Wrath of God' and since believers are not appointed to wrath2, they will escape it, having first been taken to heaven.
3. The tribulation is a time of suffering like this world has never seen and God would never subject His children to something that awful3.
4. The tribulation period is known in scripture as 'The Time of Jacob's Trouble4'. Jacob refers to Israel, the Jews, and therefor the church will be gone.
5. In Revelation 4:1 John sees a door open in heaven and hears a voice as loud as a trumpet saying 'Come up here'. Immediately John rises up through the door into heaven … he represents the whole church going up to heaven. After this point in Revelation the word Church does not appear, therefore it is not present on earth from that point on. The whole book of Revelation which covers in detail the Tribulation period happens after John is called up … therefore the church is not here on earth during the Tribulation.
6. This age is known as the age of grace. The previous age was called the age of Law. The Old Testament tells us that the future seven year period is a conclusion to the Age of Law. Therefore the age of Grace being over, the church will be taken to heaven.
All of the above statements are based on a common foundation. Many people who believe these things may not even realize that their beliefs are built on any particular system of presuppositions, but here they are:
The foundation is called 'Dispensationalism5'. In this view, God has dealt with man from the beginning of history in a number of different ways. And, in this view God's requirements were different for each specific time period. The time periods are named: Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Grace, Millennial Kingdom.
The Age of Grace (our present age) is often called 'The Church Age'.
Here is a quote from https://www.gotquestions.org/seven-dispensations.html.
The sixth dispensation, the one in which we now live, is the Dispensation of Grace. It began with the New Covenant in Christ’s blood (Luke 22:20). This “Age of Grace” or “Church Age” occurs between the 69th and 70th week of Daniel 9:24. It starts with the coming of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and ends with the Rapture of the church (1 Thessalonians 4). This dispensation is worldwide and includes both Jews and the Gentiles. Man’s responsibility during the Dispensation of Grace is to believe in Jesus, the Son of God (John 3:18). In this dispensation the Holy Spirit indwells believers as the Comforter (John 14:16-26). This dispensation has lasted for over 2,000 years, and no one knows when it will end. We do know that it will end with the Rapture of all born-again believers from the earth to go to heaven with Christ. Following the Rapture will be the judgments of God lasting for seven years.6 -
So, to illustrate the dispensations in a chart form, it would look a little like this:
Innocence| Conscience | Human Government | Promise | Law | Church/Grace | Law | Millen.
Notice that Law is on there twice. That is because there is still a remaining seven year period of time left to finish off the age of Law.
All of the above is based on the dispensational platform which insists that the Church age, or the age of Grace is somewhat of a parenthesis inserted into the Law age. It also insists that the Church age started on the day of Pentecost.
Back to our text in 2Thessalonians and skipping ahead to verse 5-7 for just a moment. Paul is saying that something is restraining the Anti-christ from being revealed. Then he calls that 'something' a He. “He will restrain until He is taken out of the way.” The assumption is that Paul is referring to the Holy Spirit's restraining power, but at some point He will be taken out and taken back to heaven. When that happens, the pre-trib position is that the church also goes. Why? Because of Jesus' promise .. John 14:16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever--
Mt 28:20 "teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Amen.
So Jesus sends the Holy Spirit as our comforter and counsellor … so when the Counsellor is taken up to heaven, the church goes too … so that they will not be left 'comfortless'.
You may be thinking that all of this makes pretty good sense up to this point, but now I need to point out some serious difficulties with this view.
I will insert another chart here. It will be a magnification of the right hand end of the one above. This is a chart of the word Law, above, on the very right.
| First half of Tribulation | Second half of Tribulation | Millennial reign of Jesus.
The Pre-trib teaching is that all born-again people are raptured right at the beginning . Of those who are left behind, some will quickly realize what just happened and they will get saved. They will read their bibles and realize that the second half of the tribulation will be terrible, but they can use this time to build their faith.
Many will die for their new found Christian faith. Some will remain alive until the end. They have missed the rapture, so they will still have natural bodies as they live into the thousand year reign of Christ, set up farming, have children etc.
During this time up in heaven, the judgment seat7 of Christ has occurred, and also the marriage supper of the Lamb8 of God up in heaven.
Here are the difficulties:
- Jesus promised to be with us to the end of the age … so when the end of the age arrives and the Holy Spirit is taken back to heaven, we follow and we continue to be with Jesus. But what about some kind of a promise to those unfortunate wonderful new believers who missed the rapture. They may have to give their lives for Jesus … but Jesus did not promise to be with them nor send them any kind of a comforter? The Holy Spirit had come down to indwell believers … now He has been taken out. All new believers will not have the indwelling Holy Spirit to comfort them, or empower them .. or enable to make it through this terrible time! How unfair!
- Some of these new believers are dying and showing up in heaven … where we already are .. in our brand new bodies. We were changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the trumpet blast. We are in heaven, and after the judgment expect to be at the marriage supper, but we also are surrounded by an innumerable number of new believers who have just been killed …but, because they missed the rapture, they have only spirit bodies. They missed the judgment seat of Christ. And they have missed the wedding. These young Christians living on earth during the tribulation are not called 'church, the Bride of Christ' because Jesus just raptured the church. So they are not the church … because the whole church has already been taken to heaven. They come from every nation9 … so they are not the Jews (Israel). They are spirit bodies of believers who have not yet been judged. When will they be judged? When will they get their new bodies? When can they (if ever) become part of the 'Bride of Christ' since the wedding is already past?
- There is no actual scripture that says anyone will be raptured BEFORE the tribulation. It can only be assumed because we believe that the church and Israel must remain separate … the age of law and of grace cannot be mixed together.
Dispensationalism is what we refer to as a 'system'. What this means is, someone .. some theologian … worked it out in all of its detail. Others come along and study it out and, as far as they can see, it makes sense. So they believe the system that someone developed. I have made it a practice to go to scripture only without developing any kind of system. It is a little harder, because it seems like re-inventing the wheel. But contextually taking the bible teaching about this is much safer.
In our next session I will give clear biblical responses to some of the statements of both pre-trib teachers and post-trib teachers. We will find that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
1 Common views held by Evangelicals, that is. Evangelicals are those churches NOT in the association designated as PLURA. The letters of the PLURA acronym stand for Presbyterian, Lutheran, United, Roman Catholic, and Anglican. Evangelical examples would be Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelical Free, Alliance, Methodist, Church of Christ, etc. etc.
2 1Th 5:9 For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,
3 Re 3:10 "Because you have kept My command to persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of trial which shall come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.
4 Jer 30:7 Alas! For that day is great, So that none is like it; And it is the time of Jacob’s trouble, But he shall be saved out of it.
5 Dispensationalism is a theological system that teaches biblical history is best understood in light of a number of successive administrations of God's dealings with mankind, which it calls "dispensations." It maintains fundamental distinctions between God's plans for national Israel and for the New Testament Church, and emphasizes prophecy of the end-times and a pre-tribulation rapture of the church prior to Christ's Second Coming. Its beginnings are usually associated with the Plymouth Brethren movement in the UK and the teachings of John Nelson Darby. http://www.theopedia.com/dispensationalism
6 https://www.gotquestions.org/seven-dispensations.html
7 Heb 9:27 And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment,
8Re 19:7 "Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready."
9Re 7:9 After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands,