What is the rapture?

Question 10042.

The rapture is the moment when Jesus comes to catch His living and dead people up from the earth to meet Him in the air, and I can think of few truths that steady a believer’s heart more surely than this one. Paul wrote about the rapture not to satisfy idle curiosity but to comfort grieving Christians who had buried loved ones, and that pastoral purpose still sets the tone every time I teach it. The rapture is not a scare story to frighten the nervous. It is a family reunion in the clouds, promised by the Lord Himself.

The word rapture itself comes from the Latin rapturus, which the old Vulgate used to translate a Greek verb Paul employs in 1 Thessalonians 4. Some object that the English word is not found in their Bible, and that is quite true, yet the idea most certainly is. Call it the catching up, the gathering, the blessed hope, or the rapture, the event described is one and the same, and it is woven right through the pages of the New Testament from the lips of Jesus to the letters of Paul.

The key text for the rapture

Everything begins with 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18. The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the sound of the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. The verb translated caught up is harpazo, meaning to seize suddenly and carry off by force. That single word gives the event its whole character. It is sudden, it is powerful, and it is entirely the work of God.

Paul supplies a second witness in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52. He calls it a mystery, a truth not previously revealed in the Old Testament. We shall not all sleep, he says, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. The dead will be raised imperishable and the living transformed. Put the two passages together and the picture of the rapture is complete. It involves resurrection for those who have died in Jesus and instant glorification for those still alive when He comes. Both companies are gathered, and not one is left behind.

How the rapture differs from the Second Coming

People often blur the catching away with the Second Coming, but I keep the two firmly apart, and I do so because the texts themselves do. At the rapture Jesus comes for His saints and meets them in the air above the earth. At the Second Coming He comes with His saints, and His feet actually touch the Mount of Olives. At the rapture believers are removed from the earth to be with Him. At the Second Coming He returns to reign upon the earth in person. I work through this comparison side by side in my study of the difference between the rapture and the Second Coming.

This distinction is not hair-splitting for its own sake. The New Testament describes the catching away as imminent, able to happen at any moment with no prophetic signs required beforehand, while the Second Coming is preceded by a whole sequence of visible tribulation events that anyone could see approaching. Two comings, two purposes, two entirely different moods. One is the thief in the night for a watching bride. The other is the King riding out on a white horse to judge the nations and claim His throne. Keeping them separate keeps the whole prophetic picture clear.

Who is included in the rapture

The catching away gathers up the Church, the body of Christ, every single believer from Pentecost to that final trumpet, whether long dead or newly converted that very morning. Paul makes a particular point of comforting those who had lost loved ones in death. The dead in Christ are not disadvantaged in the slightest. They rise first, before the living are changed. Not one believer who ever truly trusted Jesus in this age will be left behind in the grave when He comes for His own. That is a promise to lean your whole weight upon at a graveside.

I stress that word Church because it matters enormously to how I read prophecy. The catching away removes believers before God resumes His unfinished programme with Israel in the tribulation. This is why I keep Israel and the Church distinct throughout my teaching, a thread I follow closely in my study of the difference between Israel and the Church. The Church has a heavenly hope, snatched up to be for ever with her Lord, while Israel’s covenant promises are fulfilled on the earth in the kingdom to come.

When will the rapture happen?

I hold to a pretribulational timing, which means I believe the catching up takes place before the seven-year tribulation begins. My reasons rest on 1 Thessalonians 5:9, that God has not destined us for wrath but for salvation through our Lord Jesus, and on the promise of Revelation 3:10 to keep the faithful from the very hour of trial coming upon the whole world. If the tribulation is the outpouring of wrath, and the Church is promised exemption from wrath, then the rapture must remove her before it begins. I lay the full case out in my study of when the rapture will happen.

What I will never do is set a date. The whole point of imminence is that no one knows the day or the hour, and any teacher who fixes a calendar has stepped clean outside the plain warning of Jesus. The event could happen before you finish reading this sentence, or it could be many years away. That uncertainty is not meant to unsettle me or to send me into feverish calculation. It is meant to keep me ready, watchful and busy in my Master’s work every single day, as a servant who expects his Lord at any moment.

Why the rapture is called the blessed hope

Titus 2:13 names it our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus. When Paul finishes his teaching on the catching away he does not say, therefore go and argue about it with other Christians. He says, therefore encourage one another with these words. That tells me how the doctrine is meant to function in a believer’s life, not as ammunition for debate but as fuel for hope, for purity, and for comfort standing beside an open grave. Prophecy that does not warm the heart has been misused somewhere along the way.

I have stood beside too many coffins to treat this as a mere theory to be filed away. When a brother or sister dies in the Lord, this is the promise I cling to with both hands, that the parting is not final, that the trumpet will sound, that the dead in Christ will rise, and that we shall always be with the Lord and with one another. Hope like that changes how you grieve, and it changes how you live in the meantime. It puts steel in your sorrow and a song in your waiting.

Common objections to the rapture

I know this hope has its critics, and I try to answer them fairly rather than brushing them aside. Some say the word rapture is not in the Bible, and, as I noted, the word itself is Latin while the truth is thoroughly biblical. Others argue that Jesus described only one future coming rather than two, yet the New Testament plainly holds together a coming for the saints and a later coming with them, a distinction I keep straight in my study of whether the rapture is taught in Scripture. Neither objection touches the substance of what Paul actually promised his grieving readers.

The deepest objection is really about comfort and usefulness. People fear that hoping for a sudden removal breeds escapism, a faith too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. I have found the very opposite to be true in practice. The believers I know who live nearest to this hope are the most useful, the most generous, and the most willing to spend themselves for others, precisely because they hold this passing world so loosely in their hands. Looking for the Lord has never once made me lazy. It has only ever made me more eager to be found faithful.

So, now what?

If Jesus could come at any moment, then the question presses in on every one of us. Are you ready to meet Him? The catching away is unspeakable joy for those who belong to Jesus and unspeakable loss for those who do not. There is no third option and no time to lose. If you have never trusted Him for yourself, do it now, today, while the door of grace still stands wide open and the trumpet has not yet sounded.

And if you are already His, then live like a people expecting their Lord at the door. Let the hope of His coming loosen your grip on this passing world, fire up your witness to those still lost, and comfort your deepest sorrows. He said He would come again and receive us to Himself, and He does not lie. I believe Him, and I am waiting with my lamp lit. Are you?

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

John 14:3 (ESV)