Malachi 3 -- Who Is Raptured?

“I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant,whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. When you look at the word to Moses concerning Pharaoh the message needed to be given to Pharaoh before God could judge. By rejecting that word it opened the door for God to judge him. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years. The last two thousand years has been a time of the saints being sanctified by the washing of the water in the word. It takes longer, but if you immerse yourself in the word of God, in the fellowship of the saints, in prayer and praise you can get sanctified in this way. However, there will still be many left, like rocks that contain tiny bits of silver and gold. The Lord does not want to lose any of that. These are those servants who buried the Lord’s talent in the ground. So, for them it will be like a refiner's fire. The heat is so great the rocks melt, the silver and gold which is more dense will sink to the bottom and you can skim off the lighter elements called “dross”. This is the purpose of the first three and a half years of the tribulation.