I just had The Rapture dream ...

RainySunflower said:

Post of another place where I write.

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Jesus promised He would send the Holy Spirit after He ascended, and so about a week after He ascended, He kept His promise and the Holy Spirit was poured out upon all those gathered in the upper room. When this happened, they began to speak different languages. This happened during the Jewish Feast of Shavu'ot, also called Pentecost. Shavu'ot was one of the three major festival on the Jewish calendar, where God commanded all Jewish males to come to the Tabernacle (later, the Temple in Jerusalem) to offer sacrifices. Because of this, Jerusalem was full of Jewish pilgrims from many different places, who all spoke different languages. They took notice of the twenty or so people who started speaking, because they were speaking the languages of these different Jewish pilgrims. Some among the pilgrims were astonished, "Are these not Galileans, and yet they are speaking in our languages?" but others scoffed and said, "Pfft, these guys are drunk as heck".

This is when St. Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, stood up and addressed the crowd that was gathering. He then gave a lengthy sermon, and quoted the Prophet Joel. Joel had prophesied that in the last days God would pour out His Spirit on all flesh, "your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams", then Peter says that Joel's prophecy was being fulfilled right then and there. This was the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy, on Pentecost two thousand years ago, when God poured out the Holy Spirit upon His Church. Peter then went on to preach that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah, and though Jesus was put to death by the plotting of wicked men, God raised Him up, vindicating Him, and that He is truly Lord Messiah, and now is the time to repent, believe the good news of God's victory through the Messiah, and to come and be part of what God is doing through Jesus by receiving baptism and repenting.

When the crowd heard these words, they believed and they received baptism and became Christians, about three thousand in total. And that is the day as Christians we usually remember as the "birthday" of the Church. When God fulfilled His promise to send the Holy Spirit, and the Apostles were given the power to bear witness to Christ beginning in Jerusalem, throughout the cities of Judea and Samaria, and then further to the various nations of the world. Soon the Apostles would go from preaching in Jerusalem and Judea, and would be preaching the Gospel in places like Antioch, Ephesus, Athens, and even the heart of the Roman Empire, the city of Rome itself. This is the day when God inaugurated His Church to the Gospel mission which she has been living for the last two thousand years, which we are still living today--by the power of the Holy Spirit who was poured out two thousand years ago on Pentecost.

-CryptoLutheran

RainySunflower said:

Well, I'm not the only one with same dream / vision .... For sure it's not random. ^^

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Dispensational Premillennialism has been a highly public version of Eschatology for many decades now. It began in the early 1800's among the Plymouth Brethren through the teachings of John Darby; it gained traction across the Atlantic in America through a number of high profile names, such as Dwight L. Moody and Cyrus Scofield. In the 20th century it continued to gain steam among Evangelical circles, and reached some of the greatest heights of popularity between the 1960's and the 1990's.

There have been myriad published works advocating for a Dispensationalist reading of the Bible, including sensationalist works of prediction and outlines for when "the Rapture" will happen, what happens after the Rapture, and many other things. There has been a lot of money poured into Dispensationalist media--such as books and movies which have shaped at generations of Christians who have grown up, or influenced, by Dispensationalist theology, hermeneutics, and an overall religious worldview.

Nightmare scenarios--such as nuclear war--have been a big part of the modern Dispensationalist media landscape. It shouldn't be shocking, then, that lots of people have these doomsday scenarios as part of the backdrop of their religious outlook. As such "rapture dreams" shouldn't be surprising, because the Dispensationalist culture that exists provides a rich exposure to influence the conscious and subconcious mind. And dreams are what happen when we sleep of the mind sorting through things. I frequently have certain kinds of dreams that often seem to directly correlate with recent events or recently resurfaced memories, or my emotional state, or lingering feelings and memories or thoughts which my brain is clearly sorting through in some way--often resulting in dreams. Sometimes very strange dreams. Innocuous dreams, and sometimes disturbing dreams--because the brain is weird, and the brain does weird things.

We should not attribute special meaning to our dreams without a sufficiently good reason. When Daniel interpreted the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, this was a special case. These dreams were from God, and Daniel was the one with the God-given task to interpret them in order to prophesy--to proclaim God's word of Judgment against Babylon (and not just Babylon, but all the temporal powers of the world) and also proclaim God's word of deliverance, for God would bring the Jews out of Exile from Babylon and the Temple would be rebuilt. The most important of these prophetic visions is one which Daniel himself has, of the Son of Man being taken before the Ancient of Days and given everlasting kingdom--that's Jesus. Jesus is the Son of Man, and when He ascended He was given all power, authority, and dominion and He is seated at the right hand of the Father as King of kings and Lord of lords--King Messiah reigns.

Unless there is a very good reason--we should not trust our fallen intuition, or simply believe what someone else says, even if they claim to have gifts of prophecy or etc--we should not take our dreams to be anything more than just that: dreams.

God has used dreams and visions in His dealings, historically, with people--but just look at the biblical evidence, how many hundreds of thousands (even millions) of people have lived throughout history. How many times are people's dreams considered of Divine origin with special significance? A healthy, and indeed godly, skepticism is a good thing. Scripture is full of warnings about chasing after false teachers, warning about false visions, false prophets, false signs and wonders, etc.

Just because you, or even if a thousand people, have dreams about nuclear war, or dreams about "the Rapture"--that isn't evidence of Divine cause; it's evidence that people dream and have dreams that reflect their conscious and subconscious thoughts. I am willing to bet that anyone who has dreamed about nuclear war in the context of apocalyptic end of the world stuff has been exposed to those ideas at some point in their life, through movies, television, books, or YouTube videos, or a sermon or a talk or a teaching lesson from a "prophecy expert". It didn't show up out of no where, because ever since human beings created the atom bomb the human imagination has envisioned hundreds of nightmare scenarios of what would happen should the bombs drop. Since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the world at large has been held captive to the horrific possibility of nuclear war.

-CryptoLutheran