Rapture – The End of the Church Age
"How can a
young man cleanse his way by taking heed thereto according to Thy Word,"
Psalm 119:9. "Thy Word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against
Thee," Psalm 119:11. "Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light
unto my path," Psalm 119:105. "Jesus prayed to the Father, to
sanctify them in truth, Thy Word is truth," John 17:17. "For the
grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God shall stand
forever," Isaiah 40:8.
Before we get
started we are going to have a few moments of silent prayer so you can make
sure that you are focused and ready to study the Word under the teaching
ministry of God the Holy Spirit. We are to walk by the Spirit but when we sin
that walk by the Spirit stops and we start living according to the sin nature
so we need to confess our sin. At that instant we recover fellowship and we can
resume our forward walk by the Spirit. So we have a few moments of silent
prayer then I will open in prayer. Let's pray.
Father, we are so
very grateful we have this time to come together to study Your Word, to bring
prayer requests before You, to focus upon individual needs within the
congregation as well as for our nation. Father, we pray for wisdom for our
leaders; we pray for wisdom for the leaders in different realms. From the
realms of the churches, the realms of other organizations, as well as realms
within the city, county, state politics, and Father, especially wisdom for
those who can have an impact on quelling the violence in Missouri and on
bringing a focus upon the truth, and for people who would be responsive to
truth and let cool heads prevail. Father, we pray that in this situation as
well as others that there may be opportunities to make the gospel clear, for
the only hope for this nation is for people to get their focus upon the Word of
God and upon the gospel of grace and the completed work of Jesus Christ on the
cross. Father, we pray that you would challenge each of us to be more alert to
the fact that we have opportunities every day to make an impact for the gospel.
To talk to somebody, to mention something, to say something, to make a comment
that you can use in order to bring peoples' focus back to the Word of God and
eternal truth. Father, we pray that You will challenge us tonight as we go
forward in our study of dispensations and come to a better understanding of how
our spiritual life plays a role in the angelic conflict and then on into the
future in terms of the rapture and the Tribulation. We pray this in Christ's
Name, Amen.
XV. Dispensation of
the Church continued
K. The End of the
Church Age
Open your Bibles
with me to 1 Thessalonians 4. We won't get there for a few minutes, but in the
last two or three lessons, maybe four, we have been going through the church
age and we have been looking through the characteristics of the church age and
the distinctives of the church age; and that that stands out as most
distinctive in the church age is the presence of the Holy Spirit in a distinct
way from how He was involved in the Old Testament and how He will be involved
under the New covenant in the millennial kingdom. During the church age we saw
from Romans 6:3-4 that in the church age it is the baptism by the Holy Spirit
that distinguishes the individual believer in the church age from believers of
all other generations. We are baptized by the Spirit at the incident of
salvation. That never happened before the day of Pentecost in AD 33 and it will never happen again after
the rapture.
Now there is some
disagreement among some dispensationalists about that, but I will show you that
this is the case because that which marks the distinctiveness, the most focused
distinctive of the church age is that baptism by the Holy Spirit. So if the
church is raptured before the tribulation then there will not be a baptism of
the Holy Spirit for tribulation saints. It goes back to a different modus
operandi for their spiritual life. So we have this distinctive. It is similar,
but it is not as great as the role the Holy Spirit will play in the millennial
kingdom. We will come back to some of those passages when we get there. Now as
we have gone through each of these different eras let's just go through this
chart once again. I think I've gotten fixed what didn't work last week.
We are going to
start off in the Old Testament. We had two ages. An age and a dispensation are
distinct. An age may include several dispensations because God shifts how He
administers human history within those ages. The ages are marked off by
distinctions within certain people. For example, from the creation until the
call of Abraham everyone on the earth was a Gentile. Everyone on earth was
treated by God the same and God was working in and through the entire human
race. But with the failure at the tower of Babel, God shifted gears and began
to work through one individual and his descendents and that was Abraham and his
descendents through Isaac and Jacob. Now Abraham had eight sons. There is only
one that is the line of the seed and that is Isaac. Isaac had two sons, Jacob
and Esau, only one is the line of the seed. So it is through Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob that we have Israel. So we have the age of Israel that extends up to
the cross. Now in the first dispensation we call it perfect environment. Older dispensationalists
called it innocence and there is
nothing wrong with that term because it is a judicial term and it means without
guilt; and there was no guilt in the Garden of Eden. So it was a dispensation
of innocence. It was a perfect
environment. The covenant that governed God's relationship with man was the
Edenic covenant or the Creation covenant as I have called it in the slide,
Genesis 1:28-30.
The second category
is responsibility, then they were to fulfill that covenant by being obedient,
by filling the earth, by subduing the earth and they failed by eating the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then we have the divine
judgment, which was spiritual death. This brings in the next dispensation,
which is the dispensation of Conscience. It is governed by the Adamic covenant,
which is a modification of the Creation covenant. The Adamic covenant is
spelled out in Genesis 3:14-19. The responsibility is the animal sacrifice,
substitutionary sacrifice, blood sacrifice, a death to pay for sin in a
substitutionary way. It is not a permanent solution; it is only a temporary
solution until the final victory by the Seed of the woman.
Then we have the
dominance of evil and wickedness on the human race. We have the influx of
fallen angels who seek to destroy the genetic purity of the human race. God
brings judgment through the Noahic flood. At the end of the flood there is a
new covenant. This is the covenant with Noah. It establishes human government
that is to oversee the governing of the human race to establish righteousness
on the earth. Man is told to fill the earth but again he fails to do that. He
organizes himself at the tower of Babel to assert his authority against God.
God brings judgment, the confusion of languages.
Then God calls out
Abraham. He gives Abraham a new covenant. The responsibility is for him and his
descendents to stay a distinct people from the other Gentiles. They fail to do
that and they are on the verge of total assimilation by Genesis 34. So God has
them removed down to Egypt where they enter into slavery, but this is to
protect them. And during their time under Egyptian bondage they grow from
approximately seventy people to somewhere between two and a half to three
million people as God oversees their population growth and their safety.
God redeems them as
a nation from slavery, brings them to Mt. Sinai, and gives them a new covenant.
This is the only temporary covenant, the Mosaic covenant. Their responsibility
is to obey the Law. They fail to obey the Law again and again so they are taken
out under divine discipline and scattered throughout the nations. It is after a
portion of them are returned that God sends the Messiah in fulfillment of
promises and prophecies in the Old Testament. He is a new revelation. He is the
LOGOS of God. He is the very incarnation of
God. In terms of the human race there is a new responsibility. They are to
repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. They are to accept the Messiah.
Instead they reject the Messiah. Although may tens of thousands accepted Him,
most did not. The result was judgment at the cross and ultimately the fifth
cycle of discipline in AD 70.
That brought in the
new church age. The New covenant is applied but it is not initiated. It does
not begin. The New covenant is yet future. The New covenant is with the house
of Judah and the house of Israel. There are just blessings from the New
covenant during the church age. The issue in the church age is the gospel,
faith alone in Christ alone. Most will reject Christ. The end will come. The
judgment that comes is the Tribulation. This follows the rapture of the church
and then some time after the rapture of the church we have the Tribulation
seven year period, also known as the time of Jacob's wrath and the time of Daniel's
70th week.
That is our chart to
this point. We need to understand all those different dimensions. So in the
last part in talking about the church age I want to relate the church age to
the angelic conflict. The church age is related to the angelic conflict in
numerous passages in the epistles. And this is important because it tells us
that we as church age believers have a very important and distinct role to play
in terms of our spiritual life during this dispensation. Angels are watching
us. They learn from us. We have a testimony before the angels. As they observe
how we respond to the grace of God and how we live our Christian life in
obedience to God.
In 1 Corinthians 4
the Apostle Paul is defending his apostleship to the Corinthians who were a
messed up group of Christians. They were as disobedient and as arrogant and as
licentious and as profligate as any group of Christians at any time in history.
They were believers. Paul calls them "saints." So behavior is never
an accurate guide to a person's justification. We are justified not because of
who we are or what we have done. We are justified because of who God is and
what Christ has done on the cross. In 1 Corinthians 4 Paul is defending his
apostleship because one of the things that they did in their rebelliousness was
to impugn and assault and malign his apostolic authority. So at the conclusion
of that he says in 1 Corinthians 4:9, "For, I think, God has exhibited us
apostles last of all, as men condemned to death." His point is really that
in terms of human viewpoint, in terms of the wisdom of the Greeks, the apostles
are not special. They would never make anybody's list of the top five hundred
popular people in the world. They would never show up positively on any of the
entertainment shows on television. Nobody would want to be around them. They
usually didn't have much. Some of them had a little more, some less, some had
wives and families. Paul did not. But in terms of the world's thinking in terms
of success they didn't measure up very much.
In this same
section, 1 Corinthians 4:2 Paul says, what matters to God is that a steward is
found faithful (trustworthy). That is the issue. It is not how many people they
get saved; it is not how many people come to their church, the size of the church,
the size of the Sunday school, or any of the other barometers that modern
churches use to measure success. God's measure of success is that a man is
found faithful. So Paul goes on from there and he says that God has exhibited
us apostles last of all as men condemned to death "because we have become
a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men," 1 Corinthians 4:9.
There is our role as believers. We are watched by human beings and by angels.
Eventually we have a
distinct role in relation to angels. In 1 Corinthians 6:3 Paul is again
castigating these carnal Corinthians because they are taking each other to
court over irrelevant issues. They are creating a spectacle before the carnal
Corinthians and they are being more carnal. They are out-sinning the
Corinthians and making the Corinthians blush. And so Paul again writes to them
and he says don't you know that we shall judge angels in the future? In the
millennial kingdom we will be in a position as believers to judge or to rule
over the angels. We have been made a little lower than the angels now, to be
promoted over them in the millennial kingdom. We are learning things today that
are beyond their experience and it is from the wisdom of the Word of God, the
wisdom of that which is taught in the Word, the wisdom of Bible doctrine that
will give us that ability to wisely judge the angels in the future; not now but
in the future. So Paul says, "don't you know." This is important. You
are in preparation; you are in training because your future role is to judge
over the angels. "How much more," he says, "should we judge
matters in this life?" His argument in this passage is that when believers
fall out, and they will, that they should be going to other believers to help
them resolve their conflicts and to restore peace and to reconcile. But
obviously, when Christians are operating on carnality then we have no one to go
to.
Later on in a
passage that has been interpreted, misinterpreted, and ripped apart in many
ways, 1 Corinthians 11, Paul talks about the fact that there are different
roles assigned by God to men, males, and to females. God has made male souls
different from female souls and God has distinct roles. It doesn't mean that
one is better than the other, or one is metaphysically or ontologically superior to the
other and one is less equal than another, but that there are roles. And in this
discussion Paul is talking about the fact that the women ought to have their
head covered and I believe in the context he is talking about hairstyles; that
there are specific hairstyles that distinguish women from men and that women
are to wear their hair in a way that reflects femininity and men are to wear
their hair in a way that reflects masculinity.
The Greeks had all
kinds of sexual perversions and cross-dressing was one of them. And so you
would have men who were a little gender confused and they would be very proud
of the LGBT law that Houston is trying to pass. And
so they were dressing like women. I go through the whole thing in the 1 Corinthians
series. And so a part of this was that the woman's hair was a sign of her
submission to the authority of her husband and that she wasn't going to wear it
like a man, indicating that she was the one who would be in authority or as we
say in an English idiom, "wearing the pants in the family." Of course
now women wear pants as much as men do, so it doesn't have the force that it
once did. But that is what this passage is talking about. And without getting
into all of those issues, the conclusion that Paul has here is important. He
says, "Therefore the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her
head, because of the angels," 1 Corinthians 11:10.
Now what was the
original angelic sin? It was a violation of God's authority. Satan rebelled
against the authority of God. So one of the things that the angels are learning
from you, blank (put your name
there), is how to respect authority. Think about that. The angels are watching
you to learn how to respect authority and that is what this is talking about.
Now there is a lot of debate in the passage about what the sign of authority
is. There are some who think it is a hat. This was a common interpretation for
many centuries. This is why in some churches the custom is for women always to
wear hats. That is not our custom. That is not our background. We understood
that this was the issue. It is because of the angels. Sometimes some churches
do not let women wear hats because they think that the hats will block the
vision of other people. I don't know about that. I think the hats are very
attractive on women, but it has nothing to do with this passage. This passage
is about dressing in a manner that reflects submission to the wife's authority
that is the husband.
Another passage
dealing with this is in 1 Timothy 3:16 "And by common confession great is
the mystery of godliness." There is that word again. "Godliness"
is the Greek word EUSEBEIA, which is sometimes translated
"piety." I find that words like "godliness" and
"piety" and "holiness" are words that have been used so
much in Christianity that they have lost their real meaning. The idea of EUSEBEIA is somewhat captured if we think about
the word "godliness" in its old English connotation.
"Godliness" – that suffix of "liness" means likeness.
It means to be like God. If you think about the fact that we have been called
by God and He is working to conform us to the image of Christ that is
"God-likeness"; when the character of Christ is displayed in us
through the fruit of the Spirit that is being "God-like." So the
shortcut to this definition is that "godliness" means the spiritual
life. So he says "great is the mystery" that is the kind of spiritual
life in the church age was not revealed in the Old Testament. It was a mystery.
It was a previously unrevealed doctrine. It is now revealed in the New
Testament because it is based on walking by the Spirit. Nobody else in human
history had ever had that opportunity before. So he goes on to say "great
is the mystery of godliness" and of course that is grounded in the
character of Christ, so the next few lines focus upon the person of Christ.
"He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by
angels," that is the line I am looking at. Christ was watched by the
angels. We are in Christ; we are united with Him, so the conclusion is that we
too are watched by the angels.
Paul gives a charge
to his young protégée, Timothy. You were young in that culture before you were
forty. After that you were a little bit older, but Timothy wasn't a 19-, 20-,
or 25- or 30-year-old kid. He was probably in his late 30s at this time and had
a measure of maturity behind him. So Paul says, "I solemnly charge you in
the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of His chosen angels …" He is
treating the witness to what is going on in the local church as something that
is quite serious. So he is giving this charge to Timothy that it is being
witnessed to by the angels.
Then in 1 Peter 1:
12, "It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves (in
terms of Old Testament saints) but you, in these things which now have been
announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy
Spirit sent from heaven — things into which angels long to look." So
you are learning things from the teaching of God's Word that angels are
learning as well. That this was not the way God dealt with the angels in
eternity past. They didn't have these lessons in Scripture. They didn't learn
about God's grace in the same way so they learned in the dynamic of the pastor
teaching the Word of God and the individual believer learning the Word of God
and applying the Word of God. There is a whole dynamic there that the angels
are watching and they are learning and this is part of their education. So one
of the reasons things happen to you and things happen to me that give us
opportunities to trust the Lord is so that God can teach the angels about His
grace and about His character.
Lessons From the
Church Age in the Angelic Conflict
1. God's right to
rule.
God's authority to
rule over his creation because that was the challenge of Satan; he wanted to be
like God. He wanted to carve out a part of the creation at that time, part of
the angels, and to rule over them. And his idea must have been that he could do
it better than God could do it. What God is showing in human history is that no
one could do it better than He can do it and that the more autonomy Satan has,
the more disaster and chaos ensues. This is why one of the lessons under the
Tribulation period is Satan is given almost total free reign and everything
just turns to absolute disaster.
2. God has the right
to be the sole object of worship.
He is not going to share the throne with anybody. He is not going to give
anyone else an option. He has the right to be the sole object of worship and He
doesn't allow anyone to compete with Him.
3. The supremacy of
God's essence over all creation.
God is supreme. He is the creator of the angels. He is the creator of human
beings. He is the creator of the heavens and the earth and the seas and all
that is in them and He must therefore be honored and obeyed.
4. The importance of
authority orientation.
This is emphasized
and I pointed out earlier in the passage in 1 Corinthians 11:10, but it goes
back to Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, when Satan rebelled against God. He disobeyed
God's authority. It happened in the Garden of Eden. That was the test. The
issue in the Garden of Eden with the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil wasn't that something would happen physically to man that he would
physically die, but that if he disobeyed God (an act that violated God's
authority) then it would not only change his metaphysical condition, he would
die spiritually and be separated from God. But it would reverberate through all
of the universe. I mean that is just something for us to contemplate that
Adam's act of disobedience, just eating that piece of fruit, changed the
dynamics of the physical universe. It had an impact on animals; it had an
impact on the laws of physics; it had an impact on many, many, many things and
all of that is because of disobedience. So God is teaching the importance of
complete and total obedience to His authority.
5. The supremacy of
dependence on Him and the futility of independence from Him.
Even if it is the
least little thing, when we think we can go our way it will have tragic
unintended consequences. So we need to be dependent upon Him. The word for that
is "trust." The word for that is "faith"; that is the
faith-rest drill. We need to depend on Him and trust His Word.
6. God is absolutely
just in sending Satan to the lake of fire.
God is not being cruel and mean to His creatures. God is not being unfair. God
is being absolutely just because it is that single act of Lucifer's rebellion
against God that brought about all of this horror in human history. It brought
about all this sickness, all the disease, all of warfare, all of the divorce,
all of the crises of poverty and everything else that we can think of is all
the result of Satan's decision. And we have to understand that; that it is so
horrible that it is worthy of eternal condemnation.
7. God's right as
the Creator to be the object of His creatures' love.
We are to love Him
unconditionally and totally. He is to be the object of love and when we learn
what that is all about, then in turn that allows us to love others for His love
and the pattern of His love is what helps us to understand what love is;
otherwise, we are just basing it on emotion, on sentiment, on what we feel,
what others feel, what others do.
8. The importance of
grace orientation and how it functions.
We have to emphasize
grace. Let me make a point here. Earlier, I have been thinking about this ever
since I've gone back through these notes and gone back through and thought
about this. Among dispensationalists we have the tradition of calling the
present age the church age. There are others who call it the age of grace,
emphasizing grace. But grace has been operative all the way through history. Ever
since Adam's fall grace has been operative. I think a better term might be the
age of the Holy Spirit, but the millennial kingdom even better than that. So I
am not so sure I like calling the church age the age of grace because it
implies there is something distinctive there and I am not sure that that is it.
All through human history we are learning about grace orientation. We saw a
great lesson on grace orientation in the life of Abraham. We will see soon
great lessons in grace orientation in the life of Samuel and in the life of
Saul and in the life of David as we go forward in 1 Samuel when we finish our
studies on Romans on Thursday night. But what
we learn in the angelic conflict is the importance of grace orientation and how
it functions. God is demonstrating His grace toward us day after day.
9. In the angelic
conflict we see God's absolute and exclusive right to be obeyed as well as His
absolute and exclusive right to judge His creatures.
That there is no
other judge who is omniscient; there is no other judge who is absolutely
righteous. God is absolutely righteous and it is correlative to His absolute
knowledge. Only someone who is truly omniscient can be truly righteous in His
judgments, because He knows all the facts and knows the issues. So God alone
has the right to be obeyed because of His nature, because of His character.
10. We also learn in
the angelic conflict why the creature cannot live apart from the Creator. The
creature must be exclusively dependent upon the Creator. That takes us back to
point #5, which states "the supremacy of dependence on Him and the
futility of independence from Him."
11. We learn why
Satan should not be allowed to rule his own domain as an independent creature,
because it would just cause collapse.
This is why
everything ultimately leads to Satan being given almost unrestricted authority
during the tribulation period and then we see in the millennial kingdom that
during that period he is off the planet; he is not messing with anybody at all.
We see the horrors of the sin nature displayed. There will still be a huge
segment of the population during the millennial kingdom that will rebel against
God. This is why the Messiah has to rule with a rod of iron during the
millennial kingdom. Because there are so many unbelievers and eventually when
Satan is released they will willingly and rapidly flock to his banner. Enormous
numbers! Thousands upon thousands; hundreds of thousands will flock to his
banner and leave and follow his revolt against God and finally Gog and Magog
revolution and God will destroy them with fire from heaven.
12. The honor and
glory for the creature only comes from honor and glory of the Creator.
The only way in
which we are truly glorified, the only way which we have any lasting honor, is
as a result of being totally submissive to God and totally dependent upon Him
and totally obedient. That is the only way we can ever have any lasting honor
and glory, otherwise all glory and honor is fleeting. It is here today and gone
tomorrow, but only that honor that is connected to the Lord Jesus Christ will
last.
13. The importance
of loyal humble servanthood to the Creator as well as demonstrating all of the
character qualities that is necessary in a creature to rule and reign with
Christ.
This is emphasized
again and again in the angelic conflict. Only by being a loyal humble servant
to God can we have any success and in that we demonstrate the character of
Jesus Christ.
Question: I am
wondering if the fact that women were to have their heads covered wasn't
representative of the fact that in the culture at the time... prostitutes would
show their 'availability' by having their heads uncovered.
Answer: He is asking
a question getting off into the issue related to the head covering and relating
to a cultural issue. When Paul deals with authority in terms of the role of the
men and women he never ties it to a cultural issue. He never does. In that
passage he goes back to creation and what he is indicating there is that there
is a distinction. The point that I am making and the only thing that I want to
get into here is that Paul is demonstrating that whatever that symbol is,
whether it is a hat or hair or whatever it is, the reason that it has to be
there is because of the angels, because it is signifying authority. The only
point I am making here is that we need to recognize that—and it is not
just women, men are under the various authorities as well as children, everyone
has authorities over them—how we respond to authority is being watched by
the angels.
Why I Believe in the
Pre-Trib Rapture
What ends the church
age? Now I believe what ends the church age is the rapture of the church. And
so what I want to cover now is some reasons why I believe in a pre-Trib
rapture. Now the term Pre-Tribulation means before the Tribulation. There are
other terms that are used in this discussion. One is Post-Tribulation. These
are people who believe that the rapture occurs after the Tribulation, after the
seven years of Daniel's 70th week, and that it is after the
Tribulation, Jesus will return. And as it were, as Jesus is descending from
heaven to the earth to defeat the enemies of Israel at the campaign of
Armageddon, he has a nanosecond or two where He pauses on the way down and all
of those who are alive in Christ are caught up to be with Him and the dead in
Christ as well. They rise first and then the rest of us come up instantly
afterward. That is the end of the Tribulation. The basic problem with that, and
I will demonstrate this in another way as we get into things, is that if every
believer alive and dead is raptured at the end of the Tribulation then one
second later there is not a single believer in a mortal body on the earth,
which means there are no believers who will survive in the Tribulation in
mortal bodies to go into the millennial kingdom and to repopulate the earth.
It is very clear
from Revelation 20 that there are people who populate the earth during the
millennial kingdom who have children with sin natures who will not believe in
Jesus as the Messiah and will revolt against Him following Satan in that revolt
at the end of the millennial kingdom. So that means there has to be some people
who are believers who survive the Tribulation and go into the millennial
kingdom with mortal bodies to marry and to propagate and to build a mortal
population upon the earth. But if everyone alive who is a believer is raptured
as Jesus is coming down gets their new resurrection body then no one is left to
have a mortal body. It is rationally unacceptable. So that is actually one of
my arguments for why I believe in the pre-Trib rapture, but we will focus more
on scriptural arguments as we go through this.
A couple of
questions we need to address:
What is the Rapture?
We probably won't
get to the second question tonight, but we are going to take some time to
understand what the Bible teaches about the rapture in the first part. So the
first question is What exactly is the rapture? Now I am going to give you a
definition for the rapture that may be a little different for some of you than
some of the things you have heard in the past. That is because I have a
reputation for clarity and precision. So we are going to make this clear and
precise because I have been nailed on this wrongly before. The rapture is the
translation of all living believers from the earth at the end of the church age
immediately following the resurrection of all dead church age believers; the rapture
occurs before the Tribulation begins.
If you look at the
text in 1 Thessalonians 4 where we have the rapture passage the term "rapture"
is a Latin word that was used to translate the Greek word HARPAZO, and HARPAZO is the word that refers to "caught
up together." That is how it is translated in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. So we
read in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, "For the Lord Himself will descend
from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with
the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first."
That is resurrection; that is not rapture. 1 Thessalonians 4:17,
"Then," a nanosecond later, "we who are alive and remain
will be raptured with them in the clouds." That is where the
word rapture comes from. It is that word HARPAZO. HARPAZO only applies to those who are alive and
remain. So technically, based on the grammar and the use of the verb, only
those who are alive and remain are described as being "snatched up,"
which is what HARPAZO means. But if you want to continue to
think that the rapture includes both feel free. That is just not the verb that
is applied to the dead believers. They are resurrected. So I have tried to be
rigorously precise in this definition that the rapture is the translation of
the living believers from the earth at the end of the church age and that immediately
follows the resurrection of all dead church age believers, and that the rapture
occurs prior to or before the Tribulation begins.
The central passage
everyone goes to is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. I have put the whole passage up
here on the screen. It will be difficult for you to see, but sometimes it is
important to put the whole section up there, and we want to read it. Paul says,
"But we do not want you to be ignorant (uninformed), brethren."
I have always wondered where the punctuation was in his mind. Is he saying I
don't want you to be ignorant, brethren, or is he saying, I don't want you to
be ignorant brethren? I am not sure. Sometimes it is important where you place
the commas, as Sandy always tries to help me with.
"I do not want
you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep;
lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus
died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him." Notice the
involvement of God in this action at the rapture. "God will bring with Him
those who sleep in Jesus." As we will see, "sleep in Jesus"
is a euphemism that is used consistently in Scripture to describe believers who
have died physically. It is not talking about soul sleep. It is simply talking
about the fact that they have died physically. It is just a euphemism. Their
soul is with the Lord; their immaterial soul and spirit is with the Lord and
their physical body is in the grave until this event. Paul says, "For this
we say to you by the word of the Lord." Now that is important as well
because he is saying that this was what Jesus taught as well. So the question
you ought to ask is what? When did Jesus teach this? We will see that in a
little while. "For this we say to you by the word of the Lord"—he
is not simply saying that God told me and now I am telling you, he is not just
using that as just an expression for inspiration; he is saying that this was
indicated by teaching from Jesus.
"But 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 have
fallen asleep." Apparently the Thessalonians were afraid that somehow those
who were alive when Jesus got back would get to heaven a long time before those
who died would get to heaven. It is important because this indicates that Paul
taught them some things about prophecy and
eschatology. Guess what! He was only in Thessalonica for about two to three
months. So that means that contrary to a lot of arrogant believers in this life
today who say, oh, we don't need to worry about future things. People just
debate and divide over those things all the time. We just need to focus on
living the Christian life. Well the apostle Paul must have thought that these
things were so important that if he only had three months to teach somebody
this is part of what he would teach them.
We live in a world
today due to post-modernism where people don't want distinctions. They don't
want people coming to certain conclusions on things because epistemologically
we can't really know. If you've bought into the modern world's thinking then
you have these subtle influences that you can't really know certain things.
That is why they continue to debate some things or many things. We are told in
1 Thessalonians 4:16, "For the Lord Himself," speaking of Jesus,
distinguishing Jesus from God who is mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 4:14.
"The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the
voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead
in Christ will rise first," resurrection, the same verb used earlier when
it talks about we believe that Jesus died and rose again. "The dead in
Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught
up together with them". So it shows that it is very close together.
We don't get the
dynamics until we get into 1 Corinthians 15 where we are told that it is in the
blink of an eye. Some have said that that is a 64th of a second. We
are not going to be able to tell the difference. We are not going to say
1-2-3-okay, now I can go up. It is just going to be so fast that humanly
speaking we couldn't tell the difference. "The Lord will descend from
heaven with a shout". That "shout", I believe, is part of or
simultaneous with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead
in Christ immediately go up, "then we who are alive and remain shall be
caught up with them in the clouds". That is important. We meet the
Lord "in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall
always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these
words." The comfort is not in feelings; the comfort is in knowing truth.
Now we need to look
at rapture vocabulary. I always love to have a little fun with the animations
here. It is HARPAZO. We are "caught up." HARPAZO is the key word here, "to be caught
up." It means "to seize upon with force" or "to snatch
up." It has sometimes been used with what a thief does when he picks your
pocket. He snatches something. It is unexpected and it is quick, and it is used
here in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Every now and then you will hear somebody say the
rapture is not mentioned in the Bible. Well the word "rapture" comes
from the Latin word rapto. The Latin
verb rapto translates the Greek word HARPAZO in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. So when Jerome
translated 1 Thessalonians 4:17 into Latin he used the Latin word rapto, which is where we get the word
"rapture." So yes, the word "rapture" is used in the Bible.
It is a biblical word.
Now another word
that we see in 2 Thessalonians 2:1, "Now we request you, brethren, with
regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together to
Him." The word here used for "gathering together" is the Greek
word EPISUNAGOGE—"gathering together" or
"assembly." SUNAGOGE. What do you think that word means? Synagogue; it means an
assembly. It is a synonym for the Greek word ECCLESIA. We are gathered together; there is an
assembly in the clouds. So in 2 Thessalonians 2:1 Paul says, "Now we
request you, brethren." Who is the "we"? The "we" is,
he is talking about himself and the apostles; probably Timothy and Silas were
with Him. Then he says, "we request you, brethren", the
Thessalonians, "with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
our" that would be Paul and his apostolic entourage and those Thessalonian
believers, "our gathering together to Him." So this is definitely
talking about the rapture of the church.
1 Corinthians 15:51-52: "Behold, I tell you a mystery"
Paul says, "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." A
long time ago somebody said that is a sign that should go over the nursery.
"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 imperishable, and we shall be changed." So this is
describing the rapture of the church and the word that is used here is the
Greek word ALLASSO, which means "to change,"
"to transform," "to exchange." So we who are alive we have
an exchange of this mortal flesh. That is the context of 1 Corinthians 15. Whether
it is dead and corrupt or not there is an exchange of this mortal corrupt body
for incorruptible flesh.
Another key verse is
John 14:3. This is where Jesus clearly taught the rapture in John 14:1-3. In
fact, the three strongest passages for the rapture are John 14:1-3, which you
might not at first glance think of as a rapture passage, 1 Thessalonians 4 and
1 Corinthians 15. Jesus says in John 14:3, "And if I go and prepare a
place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself." Where is
Jesus? Where did Jesus go at the ascension? Where does Jesus go at the ascension?
He goes to the right hand of the Father in heaven. So He is going to prepare a
place where? In heaven and He is going to take us where He is, in heaven. But
if you believe in a post-Trib rapture then when Jesus is coming down, He is
descending at the end of the Tribulation at the Second Coming, believers will
go up with Him to the clouds, but they don't go to heaven. They just come back
to the earth and then they establish the kingdom in a post-Trib premillennial
viewpoint. Now if you are amillennial you've got other problems and other
issues. But Jesus is saying here that He is going to prepare a place for us
that we are going to go to. Next time we'll probably get to understanding what
that place is and that it is a temporary abode. He uses the word here, PARALAMBANO, which means "to take to" or
"to receive to oneself."
Another passage is
from Paul in Titus 2:13 where Paul says, "looking for the blessed hope and
the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus." And
this is an important passage because it tells us that as believers what we are
looking for next isn't the antichrist; it is Jesus Christ. What we are looking
for next isn't the Tribulation; it isn't the appearance of the great harlot; it
isn't the seal judgments. The next thing we are looking for is "the
blessed hope and appearance of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus
Christ." That is the next thing to happen. The word that he uses here for
appearance is the word EPIPHANEIA, meaning "a manifestation" or "an appearance"
in Titus 2:13.
Philippians 3:11. Paul states simply, "in order that I
may attain to the resurrection of the dead." But he doesn't use the normal
word for "resurrection," which is ANASTASIS. He adds a prefix to it EXANASTASIS, which means "out of the
resurrection of the dead." That indicates a group that is separate and
distinct from those who are simply resurrected. Old Testament saints will be
resurrected. Tribulation saints will be resurrected at the end of the
Tribulation period. This distinguishes this resurrection from the other
resurrections. So he says, "in order that I may attain to the
"rapture." That is what he is talking about here, that EXANASTASIS, "that he may attain to the
resurrection from the dead", which indicates that by this point Paul probably
began to think that he might not survive and go up alive at the rapture because
he calls it an "exit resurrection" from the dead.
1 Thessalonians
1:10. "And to wait for His Son from
heaven, whom He raised from the dead, that is Jesus, who delivers us from the
wrath to come." The key word there is "delivers us," which is
the Greek word RHUOMAI, meaning "to draw something to
oneself," "to rescue by a forcible act," or "to
deliver." Sometimes it is a synonym for salvation, but it means usually a
deliverance from a physical catastrophe. The physical catastrophe in that
context is "the wrath to come," which is a term which is sometimes
used (not always) for the Tribulation period.
"Therefore, gird
your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the
grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ." The word
that is used there for the revelation of Jesus Christ is APOKALUPSIS, meaning "an uncovering,"
"laying something bare," "to reveal something or a
revelation" in 1 Peter 1:13. In
James 5:7, "Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the
Lord." Now in context he is talking to brethren who are church age
believers. The term we are going t see here used for the "coming of the Lord"
is the word PAROUSIA; and PAROUSIA is not a technical term for the rapture.
It is used here for the rapture, but in other places it refers to the Second
Coming. So it is not a technical term for the rapture.
Father, thank You
for this opportunity to study these things this evening, to think about the
rapture not as the way to escape and avoid problems that we might have in this
life, for the Scripture is very clear that man is born to trouble as the sparks
fly upward. And we will always experience tribulation, that is with a lowercase
't', in this life, adversity, difficulties, challenges. It is not until we are
face-to-face with You and freed from our sin nature and from living in this
cosmic system that we will be freed from adversity. But the Tribulation, the
Great Tribulation, that which is described as Daniel's 70th week, is
a time of such horror that it is not a place for the bride of Christ.
Therefore, we will be removed before that happens for its purpose has nothing
to do with us. We will not be purified in the Tribulation; we will be purified
at the Bema Seat of the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that we might be prepared in
good works the Scripture says, living our life to serve and to glorify You and
we pray this in Christ's Name, Amen.