ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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are there anymore signs that need to be fulfilled
The answer is:
1) We have been living in the last days for the last two thousand years, since Christ's earthly ministry. The question of "the end times" is a fundamentally loaded term. Do we mean by this the idea that we are living in a dying age that will pass away, and that this is effectively synonymous in meaning with the biblical language of "the last days"? Or do we mean a specific set of time just before the Eschaton? And if we mean that, how do we define it exactly?
2) As far as "the rapture" goes. There's no such thing. Or, more accurately, the modern Dispensationalist idea of "the rapture" that is widely known in the popular consciousness is false. It's false doctrine and unbiblical. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests that Christians will be beamed away into heaven at some point, or that Christians will suddenly vanish, there is no "great disappearing" of Christians that is going to happen a la "The Left Behind" fiction. And such an idea is entirely foreign to the Christian religion, instead it is a purely modern idea that has only ever been believed by a relative minority of Christians. If you had a time machine and went back 250 years and asked Christians about "the rapture" they would all look at you funny, as they wouldn't know what you were talking about. Instead, what Christianity has always taught is that when the Lord Jesus returns in glory the dead will be raised, bodily. That is how Christians have always understood the passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17, that at Christ's glorious coming, the dead will be raised, and the living will join them in being transformed, and we will dwell with the Lord who has returned here. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 isn't about us going up into heaven, but Jesus coming down to earth. We meet the Lord as He returns, and then we are with the Lord forever not "up there", but down here. World without end.
-CryptoLutheran
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