Win the World or Escape the Earth? by Tony Wastall & Ian Rossol

Author:Tony, Wastall & Ian, Rossol [Tony, Wastall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: River Publishing & Media Ltd
Published: 2011-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The rapture riddle

Without warning and at precisely the same moment, road networks the world over come to a standstill as drivers mysteriously disappear from their vehicles. Cars plough into each other with no-one at the wheel. Buses hurtle off roads killing and injuring tens of thousands of passengers. Trucks and lorries jack-knife and spin over, causing mayhem and carnage. Passengers and pedestrians alike are killed in their multitudes. And the chaos is not confined to the road system alone for trains, airplanes and ships all find themselves missing crew members and indeed numbers of passengers.

Meanwhile across every continent the same phenomenon is occurring: factory and office workers, school children, shopkeepers, civil servants, hospital patients – people from every stratum of life simply vanish without a trace. In some parts of the globe whole communities of people disappear while in other places, just ones and twos. No nation of the world is unaffected by this extraordinary occurrence.

If the popular rapture teaching is to be believed, this is the scenario the world is soon going to experience as Christians are ‘evacuated’ to heaven by an act of God in order to escape a global meltdown of human warfare and divine judgment. Where is this teaching based in Scripture? We are going to investigate.

The teaching of a secret rapture of believers prior to the full return of Christ is built around 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, which uses an expression from which the term ‘rapture’ has been coined. The passage reads as follows:

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 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 key phrase is ‘caught up’. It translates from the Greek word harpazo , which means to seize, take by force or snatch away. In the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible harpazo is translated using the word rapio. It is from this Latin word that the English word ‘rapture’ is derived.

So the word itself is biblical – not so the elaborate scheme of future events that dispensationalists have constructed around it. They anticipate the church being removed from the earth ushering in a period of tribulation and bringing the Jews once more onto the centre stage of history.

It is important to realise that dispensationalism, as popularised today, falls into question as a system if its teaching on the two-stage return of Christ is undermined. If there is no rapture what happens to the case for a distinct role for the Jewish nation, a tribulation period and colourful end-time characters like the beast and the antichrist? It is immediately weakened.

Variations in rapture teaching

The idea that the church will be secretly raptured away from the earth at the beginning of a seven-year period of tribulation is referred to as the ‘pre-tribulation rapture’ position.

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