The Rapture

Great Debates
1

This question has two parts and was inspired by the thread about the 2nd Coming:

  1. What is the scriptural basis for the Rature (wherein the Triune God wisks away all his loyal subjects sparing them from the seven year Tribulatiuon)? I’ve read the Bible multiple times, and I dont remember anything like this even being alluded to.

  2. Were the Rapture to actually happen, according to Dr’s LaHaye and Jenkins, the remnants of humanity will be tricked somehow into not believing that the Rapture is responsible for the disappearance of millions worldwide. For the sake of this question, let’s assume that you are Satan, the Rapture DID happen, and now you have to trick all of the unbelievers into continuing to unbelieve. To me, if everyone I knew who was a Christian suddenly disappeared out of their clothes tomorrow, I would turn on some Fox News (I have a feeling the anchors and corespondents would still be around), grab my KJV Bible, and get to repenting.

So, as Satan, how do you make the Rapture rational?

2

If you have magic powers, you can just force people to perceive whatever you want. God’s favorite thug, Satan, could simply erase everyone’s memory of the missing people.

3

Ok, I can’t accuse you of not playing by the rules, but to my understanding, there are still believers AFTER the Rapture. These are the supposed Tribulation Saints who do not get the Mark of the Beast on their foreheads and are still proselytizing after the Rapture.

Also, I don’t believe that (were they real, HUGE stipulation) God or Satan EVER practiced mind control per se. Satan is the deciever; he can’t MAKE you believe anything, only steer you on an unrighteous course. And God acts the same way; free will and all that.

4

I don’t recall exactly, but at some point Jesus says something on the order of: “two people will be walking yadda yadda, one will be taken and one will be left… as is was in the days of Moses[?]” (Was it Moses?)

The problem is that this gets things a bit reversed. The believers are the ones who are left. The ones who are taken are taken away and sent out of creation. Honestly, the whole thing is a bit odd. It’s a belief by a relatively small portion of American Christians, and virtually no one else. The entire idea was essentially based on a very bad reading of a poorly-translated Bible a century back.

5

Except those five times that the god/satan forced Pharoah to do evil things to the Israelites:

So, yeah, the god/satan doesn’t practice mind control. Except when he does.

6

Hmmm. Of course I’m familiar with these passages, but I guess I never thought of them that way. Good catch.

7

I have no answer to the second question, but the answer to the first is that there is no real scriptural basis for Rapture theology. Those who believe in it point mainly to this misinterpreted verse in Thessalonians:

1 Thessalonians 4:17 “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”

The phrase that I bolded, “caught up together,” is one word harpagesometha (literally “caught up together”) in the original Greek.

The verse appears in the Latin Vulgate as thus (with the relevant phrase bolded):
“deinde nos qui vivimus qui relinquimur simul rapiemur cum illis in nubibus obviam Domino in aera et sic semper cum Domino erimus”

The word rapiemur, above, is a future tense form of the Latin verb rapere, which means “to seize, grab, carry away.” The future perfect tense of the word is rapturus. The term, “rapture,” therefore, is derived from the Latin.

This verse represents an answer Paul was giving to people who questioned whether those who had already died before Jesus came back would still be able to go to Heaven (this was at a time when people still believed that Jesus would return within “this generation”). Paul was telling them that not only would the dead go to heaven, they would ascend before the living. He was talking about the second coming, though, not a preliminary ascension before a “tribulation.”

The whole rapture theory was largely the fever dream of a nineteenth century preacher named John Nelson Darby. Darby conflated the verse from thessalonians with this from Revelation:
Revelation 3:10 “Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep from you the hour of trial that is going to come to the whole world to test those who live on the Earth.”

and this one:

Revelation 20:5,6 5 But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. 6 Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.

From those three verses, Darby got the notion in his head that the good people were going to get raptured (“first resurrection”)and the bad people would endure a period of “tribulation” before the “second resurrection.”

This was a new theory, as formulated by Darby (based partially on the visions of a schzophrenic teenage girl), and was really never really a part of any Christian doctrine before him. It is still not accepted by most Christian churches. It’s really sort of peculiar to American fundamentalists.

8

Wow, I had never heard any of this before. My family (father, uncles) are all very firm believers in the Rapture, and I always wondered where they got this from. They were, of course, unable to suitably answer my question (“just cuz” stopped cutting it when i was about twelve years old). Thanks Dio.

I’m intrigued by the “dreams of a schizophrenic girl” part. Where can I get more info on this?

9

If I were Satan, and assuming the people raptured were bodily ascended into heaven, I would create fake bodies to make it appear that those wacky Christians just offed themselves Heaven’s Gate style. Couldn’t be any harder than fabricating all those dinosaur bones, could it?

10

You ask, wiki answers:

*Scriptural basis

Supporters of the doctrine of the rapture generally proof-text the following primary sources[13] in the New Testament (the following are quoted from the NKJV):

* "In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also."
  (John 14:2–3)

* "For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself."
  (Philippians 3:20-21)

* "And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?""
  (1 Corinthians 15:49–55) Note that the saying that is quoted toward the end of these passages comes from the Old Testament as follows: "Death is swallowed up in victory" is from Isaiah 25:8 and "O Death, where is your sting?" is found in Hosea 13:14.

* "For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord."
  (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17)

* "Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way."
  (2 Thessalonians 2:1-7)

Note that the Rapture isn’t really mainstream.

11

A little off-topic, but what is this about testing? God is supposed to know everything that has happened, is happening, and ever will happen. So for any given test, He must know the answer from the beginning of time. If the results of a test are known beforehand, what’s the point?

12

Maragret MacDonad.

I should note that many Rapturists dispute the amount f influence that MacDonald had on Darby. That does not make Darby’s theology any more Biblical, tough.

13

Yes, I’ve read these passages, and maybe I’m more dense than I had hoped, but I did not walk away having read them feeling like they addressed the contemporary idea of the Rapture in any way. I know the Good Book is vague and allegorical, but this seems like so much reaching. Also, these verses jump around not only so much in time, but also in placement in the New Testament, that all but a scholar would miss any connection between them. A scholar I r not.

14

IIRC, that’s the result of a mistranslation of the Hebrew.

15

I have never heard that.

How about this one?

Sounds pretty unambiguous. God caused them to make war against Israel in order to fulfill a promise to Moses.

16

Ok, but isn’t this just God saying “Kill these dudes, I’m cool with it” and then people following his orders? This isn’t mind control, just believers doing what they are told to. The whole free will thing that the Bible is so big on means that any of them could have backed out at any time. The problem is that in the Old Testament, there was a very good chance you might run into God while browsing for some figs in the marketplace and have to explain your going AWOL.

He was everywhere in those days…

17

You’ve wandered into the cul-de-suck of Calvinist “predestinaton”, my personal favortie Christian theological conundrum. God already knows everything that will happen, so when he created me, he already knew I was going straight to Hell for bad puns and general wikedness. Free will is preserved by the deft trick of assuming that God knew what I *would * choose, even though the choice were mine alone. Cold comfort farm.

They also famously asserted that very, very few of us were destined to “get our wings”, as it were. Jolly bunch, those Calvinists. Managed to make Jesus into the Nastiest Hall Monitor Evah and Everlasting.

18

No. This is god causing Israel’s neighbors to make war on Israel. Think of it as a Biblical Gulf of Tonkin incident, contrived by god, so that the Israelites can exterminate them without becoming bad people.

19

So God made 9/11 happen so that we might exterminate the Muslims with a clear conscience? Just occured to me, and its so utterly stupid, its probably an article of faith to some wizened soul out there.

20

I was told that by someone who did study (AFAIK) the original, in ancient Hebrew. I cannot confirm or deny it, having no ability to read any version of Hebrew.