On the Rapture and the Second Coming
The teaching of the Rapture as happening prior to the Tribulation at the end of time is now a remarkably well-accepted doctrine among mainline Evangelicals for having arisen only in the last two centuries, largely stemming from the ecstatic visions of a 15-year-old Scotch-Irish girl in 1830 and the writings of Hal Lindsey, a self-proclaimed visionary who claims to have God-given insight regarding modern reinterpretations of eschatological scripture.
Hal Lindsey himself is widely regarded among Evangelicals as a crackpot, yet the doctrines made mainstream by his work pervade modern churches nonetheless. It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which a large part of the nominal church, disillusioned by the lack of a rapture upon entering the tribulation, falls away as described in II Thessalonians 2:3:
Let no one in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction.
II Thessalonians 2:3 (NASB)
“Apostasy” in the KJV and several other translations here appears as “Falling Away”, exactly the sort of thing that a disillusionment would lead to. But wait! The rapture proponents have a scenario as well, in which a period of hardship comes immediately preceding the tribulation, and the church, not expecting a rapture, believes in the Antichrist who arises after this pseudo-tribulation as the second coming of Christ they have been expecting.The danger then is not necessarily in one belief or the other, but rather in which one is false. In none of the passages normally quoted to support the rapture is a distinction evident from the Second Coming and Glorious Appearing of Christ, which clearly occurs after the Tribulation so as to usher in the Millennial Reign. The separation of Christ’s return into two stages seems silly considering there is nothing in the Bible to support two separate events besides the implicit reading of Dispensationalists that the “church age” ends with the beginning of the Tribulation and so we will not suffer through it. But even in this belief, Israel was not taken out of the world when its age ended and the Church age began, but rather suffered much throughout the church age. Why is the Church then exempt from the sufferings of Israel? The idea of a “secret rapture”, or people disappearing with no explanation is even more ridiculous - based on the assumption that people would be smart enough to resist the strong delusion of II Thessalonians 2:11 if they knew it was a work of God Himself, and brought into the mainstream by the Left Behind series.
For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will. Unless those days had been cut short, no life would have been saved, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be cut short.
Matthew 24:21-22
This verse in no unclear language states that there will be elect during the Tribulation. The Elect are defined in Ephesians 1:4 as those that God has “chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him”. One is therefore still elect before his moment of salvation: though it would seem to us that a just-saved person’s eternal destination has changed before our eyes, at no point had that person been Hellbound, God having known that the moment of salvation was in the future, and not being willing that any should perish (II Peter 3:9) would not let that soul escape into Hell. Why then would God only remove some of the elect during the Rapture? The parable of the workers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16 tells us that in terms of wages (the things that happen to us at the End), believers that are hired into the Kingdom of God at a late hour receive the same reward as those who are hired early in their life. Why then would God discriminate in this manner against the late-hour workers and the early-hour workers?
The Rapture is, I believe, a teaching that has sneaked into our mainstream churches in broad daylight without the scrutiny that ought to be given new teachings like this. Certainly there are many who refute the rapture even still, but it has entered the public consciousness through the Left Behind series and through the Church’s acceptance of the theology implicit therein to the point that even unbelievers see rapture theology as a well-established tenet of the Christian faith. The fact that it is far from a settled debate needs to re-enter the public consciousness for the sake of the Church, and for the sake of the people we reach.
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