Rapture Practice

 

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, 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. Therefore encourage one another with these words.  1 Thessalonians 4:16-18

 This Advent we’ve been studying the Savior who Comes Near. In today’s passage we have a beautiful picture of a promised future day when Jesus will very literally Come Near. A couple of days ago we looked at Matthew 24 and saw that at Jesus’ return all the nations of the world will mourn. While this will certainly be true as the reality of their choices become clear to unbelievers, for those who are found in Christ, the situation will be vastly different.

 I’m a very visual person and things I see often stick in my head. This can be bad when I’ve allowed images I shouldn’t have to be in front of me – for me this would involve something like watching a horror movie or even a documentary including footage of trauma. It can extend as far as the mental images created when reading about horrific events like the holocaust or the terrible genocides that have taken place in Africa. One of these very “stuck” visuals is the rapture scene from the 2000 version of Left Behind staring a young Kirk Cameron shared below.

 As I’ve matured in my Christian walk, I’ve learned that the portrayals of potential prophecy fulfillment given in Christian fiction are not necessarily 100% accurate. These prophecies were written with figurative, creative language because we are not intended to know exactly what the circumstances and situations will be like. It may also be because the images the prophets saw didn’t match anything in their experience so they had to describe them as best they could – say if they saw a tank or a helicopter they wouldn’t know how to describe it except as a locust covered in armor. When I was a young Christian, and a young mom, I got totally sucked into the Left Behind books. I read nonstop. I set my baby up with some toys on the floor next to me and then proceeded to ignore him for hours unless he demanded my attention in a way I couldn’t put off. For days, weeks even, I did little else than read those books and they built themselves a place in my heart and mind. They created a framework for me to understand eschatological (end times) prophecy that made little sense to me otherwise. While this can be helpful, I think in hindsight that it can also be detrimental. That’s one of the main reasons I’ve avoided the exceptionally popular series, The Chosen. These fictional representations of scripture can very easily be taken as gospel truth by my subconscious. When I read the Bible in the future, those images and storylines are overlaid on scripture and it affects my understanding. If, as he is in The Chosen, Peter is portrayed as a man struggling with bad choices, who betrays his people and puts his wife at risk, then when I read about him in God’s Word, that’s how my mind pictures him. For crying out loud, I can’t read the story of Nathan the prophet confronting King David about his sin with Bathsheba through a parable (2 Samuel 12) without hearing Pa Grape from Veggie Tales singing, “There once was a man, a very rich man. He had a lot of sheep. He had a lot lambs…” I accept that this may be a phenomenon limited to myself or a few like me. Perhaps most people out there can read or watch things about the Bible and not overlay them on the scriptural truth in God’s Word. But I can’t. So, things like The Chosen are not for me.  

 But, what’s done is done, and I now have a very distinct picture of what the rapture might look like. In Matthew 24:40-41, Jesus Himself gives us a picture of the rapture, saying that two people will be working side by side and one will be taken while the other will be… left behind. Will their clothes be left in a pile, carefully arranged in the posture in which they were worn? Only God knows, but what we do know is that those who are still alive when Jesus returns will be “caught up” and meet the believers who have gone on before us in the clouds (1 Thessalonians 4:17). The phrase translated “caught up” is ἁρπαγησόμεθα ἁρπάζω and is defined by Strongs G726 as “to seize (in various applications):—catch (away, up), pluck, pull, take (by force).” This is not a subtle happening. In other places in the Bible that it is used (i.e. Matthew 13:19 and Jude 1:23) it symbolizes an aggressive removing of something, often in the face of imminent danger. But the way it is used in Acts 8:39 most resonates with my understanding of what the rapture will look like. In this passage, Phillip is witnessing to an Ethiopian eunuch and just after he baptized him in the water near the road they were travelling on, “the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.” Now, in this case, presumably, Phillips clothes went with him, but it gives this same impression of “now you see him, now you don’t” that I get from Matthew 24:40-41 discussed earlier.

Here's the Thing: While we like to have an idea of what is coming, truly only God knows what those events will entail. What we do know is that Jesus is coming back, and when He does, I want to be found in Him, whether still breathing on the earth or resting, waiting for Him, in the ground. 

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