As I was driving one day I encountered a bumper sticker admonishing me:
“WARNING! In the event of Rapture, this car will be driverless.”
The strange belief in the Rapture teaches that some day (sooner rather
than later), without warning, born-again Christians will begin to float
up from the freeway, abandoned vehicles careening wildly. There will be
airliners in the sky suddenly with no one at the controls! Presumably,
God is removing these favored ones from earth to spare them the
tribulation of the Anti-Christ which the rest of us will have to endure.
Unfortunately the Rapture has been promoted widely by the Left Behind series of books that have sold over 70 million copies.
The Rapture represents a radical misinterpretation of Scripture. I
remember watching “Sixty Minutes” a year ago and was appalled to hear
the announcer say that “the Rapture is an unmistakenly Christian
doctrine”. It is not!
It is a serious distortion of Scripture.
It is astonishing that a belief so contrary to Scripture and the
tradition of the Church could be propagated by so-called “Christians”.
According to the Bible and according to the belief not only of Orthodox
Christians but also of the Roman Catholic and most Protestant mainline
churches, the true Rapture will not be secret; it will be the great and
very visible Second Coming of Jesus at the end of the world. That is the
one and only “Rapture”. It will not be a separate, secret event but one
that "every eye shall see" (1 Thess. 4:16-17).
The word rapture is not found in Scripture but hearkens to 1 Thess. 4:17
where St. Paul says that when the Lord comes again “we who are
alive…shall be caught up…in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
This “being caught up…in the clouds” — <i>arpagisometha</i> in Greek - is translated by some as “raptured”. The word itself is not found in Orthodox theology.
The notion of a rapture in which Christ comes unseen to take believers
away secretly, and only later comes back again for everyone else
publicly—this whole teaching is quite novel. It was almost unheard of
until John Nelson Darby formulated it in the 1800s as part of a new
approach to the Bible, sometimes called “dispensationalism”.
The purpose of the “Rapture” is to protect the elect from the
tribulations of the end times. Yet Jesus said nothing about sparing
anyone from tribulation. In fact, He said, “In the world you have
tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”
Nowhere did Jesus ever say that He would return secretly to rapture the
elect. Rather, He promised to be with His elect in all tribulations.
“Lo, I am with you always. I will never leave you or forsake you.” He
even had something good to say about being persecuted: “Blessed are
those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:10).
Those who espouse the Rapture claim that Matthew 24:40-41 refers clearly
to the rapture of the just, “Then shall two be in the field; the one
shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the
mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”
The entire passage, however, refers to Christ’s second coming where He
will judge the living and the dead and separate the just from the
unjust.
Darby taught as dogma that when the Scriptures reveal that the Lord will
reign on earth for a thousand years (Rev. 20:4), this figure is to be
taken literally, rather than as a symbol for eternity as we believe. The
Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431 condemned as heresy this teaching which
is called Chialiasmos (millenianism or 1000 years).
In fact, the Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787 A.D.) in which the
essential truths of the Christian faith were defined never mention a
rapture. Yet Evangelical Christians and Pentecostals keep using obscure
passages of the Book of Revelation which purport to give a detailed
timetable of what will happen at the end of the world, despite the fact
that Jesus Himself warned that no man knows either the day or the hour
when the Son of Man shall return.
A major problem with the Rapture is that it ends up teaching not two but
three comings of Jesus — first His birth in Bethlehem; second, His
secret coming to snatch away (rapture) the “born-again”; and third, His
coming at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead and to
reign in glory. Yet only two not three comings of Christ are mentioned
in the Bible. We have the clearest definition of this in the Nicene
Creed when we confess that “the Lord Jesus Christ…will come again in
glory to judge the living and the dead. His Kingdom will have no end…. I
expect the resurrection of the dead. And the life of the ages to come.”
There is no mention of a “Rapture”.
As already stated, most Christians, Orthodox, Roman Catholics and
Protestants do not believe in the Rapture. In fact, one Protestant
pastor, John L. Gray, summarized magnificently what we Orthodox and most
other Christians believe about the Rapture when he wrote these
remarkable words:
"Though many believe and teach this 'Pre-Tribulation Rapture' theory,
they erroneously do so, because neither Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, nor
any of the other writers of the Bible taught this. Nor did the early
Church Fathers, nor any others for many hundreds of years…. Did you know
that NONE of this was ever taught prior to 1812, and that all forms of
Pre-Tribulation Rapture teaching were developed since that date? …. If I
were to preach something, or believe something, supposedly from the
Bible, but cannot find that ANYONE ELSE before 1812 ever believed it or
taught it, I would seriously question that it is based on the Bible."
Thus the Rapture is foreign to the Bible and to the living tradition of
the Church. It is what we call a heresy, a false teaching. False
teachings, such as this, happen when people — like John Darby — believe
that they have the right to interpret the Scriptures individually apart
from the Living Body of Christ — the Church — where the Spirit of Truth
abides and leads us to all truth.
I can think of no better words to conclude than those of Jesus when He speaks of the one and only “Rapture”, the Second Coming:
“Be on guard. Be alert! You do not know when that time will come…keep
watch…if He comes suddenly, do not let Him find you sleeping. What I say
to you, I say to everyone: Watch!” (Mark 13:32-37).
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