The idea of a rapture generates controversy even among futurists. Like Preterists, some futurists see no scriptural basis for such fantasy. The majority do, however, and even they cannot unite on it fully, except that they base it loosely on a scant few passages, namely Matthew 24:37-41, Daniel 9, 1 Thessalonians 4, and Acts 1:9-11. To derive from these passages the idea of a “taking up” of the church, we must approach them with preconceived notions rooted in tradition and popular culture rather than in the Scriptures themselves. This presents conflict, as we see in Matthew.
Contrary to what popular culture teaches, Jesus doesn’t say that anyone is left
behind, as if unbelievers are left on a loathsome planet to their dismay; he just says
left. And he says the opposite of what popular culture says. Note his wording in Matthew:
For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left. (Mt 24:37-41)
To illustrate his point, Jesus references Noah, who was righteous and who inherited the earth. When the rains came and flooded the land, the
wicked were swept away and the
righteous were left, not the other way around, as popular culture insists. When his disciples ask him where the wicked are taken, Jesus says not that they are literally taken somewhere, for their corpses are exposed to the vultures (
Lk 17:37). They continue to inhabit the earth, but they are dead in spirit (the body without the spirit is dead (
Jas 2:26)); they do not live in paradise with God. Those not in Christ have no life; they are not numbered among the kingdom of heaven. The wicked are taken from the kingdom. Think about the church in general. Though it opens its doors and may inadvertently admit undesirable elements from time to time, it is not a den of iniquity. Certainly unbelievers enter, but so do the righteous; indeed, the church is where the righteous gather. The Lord said he would gather his people, and he has. And note that Jesus says no one was left
behind; they were just left, and definitely
not to their dismay.
Not only does Jesus not use the phrase
left behind, he also stands opposite popular culture on its very premise. The wicked got too pervasive, and
they were the ones who were taken, or who would not inherit the earth.
This passage in the Olivet Discourse is applicable specifically to the destruction of the temple. The Olivet Discourse, after all, portents this looming tribulation. In Revelation, John the Divine refers to the imagery of birds feasting on the corpses of kings, merchants, and mighty men, and indeed all men who perished in the struggle to maintain a cult of temple that God so detested (
Rv 19:17-18).
Jesus tells us in this monologue and also in the Beatitudes that the righteous remain on the earth to inherit it. He charges his apostles to pray that the Father’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The earth is where the Lord intends to establish his paradise. Rapture theology, on the other hand, teaches that Jesus comes not to redeem the earth but to destroy it. This theology not only disagrees with scripture but, on its face, is anathema to it. It is a foreign theology introduced in the nineteenth century, allegedly from a Scottish teenager’s 1830 vision of the end times. Before then, no one had ever heard of a rapture.
The 70 weeks theology that futurists derive from Daniel 9 is extraordinarily convoluted and beyond the purview of this exposition, but in brief, it is, like premillennialism and futurism in general, a theory that has been recently introduced to Christendom. During the Reformation, Protestants believed that the seventy weeks (490 day-years) of Daniel had already run their course. Catholics also believed this. Christians simply had not thought of separating the time measure with two thousand years of ecclesiastical history.
Another passage that requires futurist assumptions to read into it some vague concept of a church literally taken up into heaven, a realm that is not literal, is in 1 Thessalonians:
Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. (1 Thes 4:17)
To believe that this is a reference to a rapture, we first must believe that a person’s spirit, which defies any literal existence, can manipulate or be manipulated by nature, that even after we die, the spiritual man still shares confines with the natural man. But of course, the natural order is not heaven; it is not where the spirit resides for eternity. This verse is about something completely different than a lifting up of the church into the atmosphere. Objects cannot float around the earth in the air that we breathe. If we were to do that in our new bodies, we would be restricted to the very confines that natural man is restricted to. That is not eternity. Paul seems to be using the word in the same sense he uses it in Ephesians when he equates sin to the “prince of the power of the air.” (
Ep 2:2) That is, the air represents a “sphere of life and influence,” as Wallace calls it.* Believers are in the sphere and influence of the Lord, as Paul tells the Thessalonians, and unbelievers are in the sphere and influence of sin, as he tells the Ephesians.
Concerning those who are asleep (
1 Thes 4:13-18), Paul is simply reassuring his contemporaries who are still alive that their fellow believers who have died, though their flesh rots, are still alive in Christ. Salvation is no longer strictly nationalistic; it is also for the individual.
Notice also that Paul is writing in the present and addressing people living in the years between the crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem.
We who are alive, he says; not
those who are alive centuries from now. Whether dead or alive, Paul continues in the next chapter, “We live together with him.” (
1 Thes 5:10). We also see in 1 Corinthians that Paul expects the Lord’s coming in his generation when he says “we shall not all sleep.” (
I Cor 15:51) Paul also says this to the Corinthians:
Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. (1 Cor 10:11)
That Paul would tell one group of a rapture and another group something diametrically opposed to a rapture is hypocritical. Paul is telling his contemporaries in Corinth unequivocally that they are experiencing the end of the age. He is
not clearly telling his contemporaries in Thessalonica that they will experience a rapture. Thus the one remedy that can fix this apparent contradiction is to adjust our interpretation of his conveyance to the Thessalonians.
Barclay makes no mention of a rapture in his commentary, but says simply that Paul lays down a great principle in these verses to the Thessalonians, that a man who has lived in Christ is still alive in Christ even when dead and buried
(https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/dsb/1-thessalonians-4.html).
Though the natural man is dead, the covenant man is alive.
Now let’s look at Acts 1:9-11. The ESV translation is that Jesus “was lifted up.” When we “lift up” someone, we honor that person. We
lift up a soldier or a police officer for his heroism. The Greek language also captures this concept. The transliteration for the expression in the online Blue Letter Bible lexicon is the word
epairō, which translates to lift up or raise up, or metaphorically to exalt
(www.blbclassic.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G1869&t=ESV).
But more important, note what the two men in white robes do. Presumably angels, they challenge the reaction of the apostles.
Why look toward heaven? they ask. “Jesus will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” If looking up is pointless, then that is not the way Jesus left (and so he does not descend that way from above on a stratus cloud). Note what else the angels say: that Jesus will come the same the apostles saw him leave. The apostles did not actually see Jesus lifted up into heaven, as a cloud had taken him out of their sight, but yet they look up to heaven for him after the cloud takes him. So, what was this ascension? Did Jesus actually float up into space? Is that where heaven is? Some physical place in the universe? That’s foolishness. Jesus ascends in a cloud of gory. So that’s the way he comes back. Jesus comes unnoticed, like a thief.
As an aside, suppose the apostles did see him leave. They would not have seen him leave on a white horse; Luke does not mention any animals at all when Jesus is lifted up. If futurists are to believe Acts, then they would have to alter their interpretation of Revelation 19:11-16.
Rapture theology is a foreign theology that really did not emerge in the church until about 1830 under the leadership of the likes of Edward Irving, John Darby, D.L. Moody, and C.I. Scofield. And in hindsight, even the most ardent futurist must see that this theory in all its iterations really has served no useful purpose. It has generated more confusion than understanding, more anxiety than serenity. It requires constant explanation because those new to the theory do not derive a rapture theology simply by reading scripture. Again, it is a foreign theology, a new-age load of hogwash.
* Foy E. Wallace, Jr.,
The Book of Revelation: Consisting of a Commentary on the Apocalypse of the New Testament (Fort Smith, AR: Richard E. Black, PDF version of ninth printing) 273.
