We will be caught up in the air.

As I mentioned in the Preface, the 1972 movie, A Thief in the Night, begins with a husband being snatched out of his bathroom while he is shaving. His wife is left behind. This is the rapture, probably the most discussed event of the end times. Suddenly, all the Christians on earth are taken to be with Jesus, and the Great Tribulation begins.

When I was a boy in the 70s, the big debate in my circles was whether the rapture would happen before the seven-year Tribulation (pre-trib rapture), in the middle of it (mid-trib rapture), or at the end of it (post-trib rapture). But there was no question about whether there would be a rapture or a Tribulation. These were assumptions.

A quick look on YouTube and elsewhere will quickly reveal that there is a lot of debate today about whether the idea of a rapture is even biblical in the first place. The same goes for a seven-year Tribulation. What is all the debate about, you ask?

2. The core text is 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17:

"We who are living, who are remaining until the arrival of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep because the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are living, the ones remaining, together with them will be snatched in the clouds for the meeting of the Lord in the air. And thus always we will be with the Lord."

The key word in Greek is "will be snatched," "will be caught up," "will be taken." The word was translated into Latin as rapiemur. The Latin word is where the idea of a "raptor" dinosaur comes from, a dinosaur that Jurassic Park vividly pictured as "snatching" people to eat them. It has a sense of seizing or grabbing. 

So what's all the fuss about? Isn't it clear?

The questions are two fold. First, how literal is this picture. Isn't the air all around us? I reject this sort of "demythologizing" of the text -- attempts to make the text fit with our current conceptions of the world. They thought heaven was straight up. In Acts 1:9, Jesus ascends straight up into a cloud. Don't try to make the biblical text conform to our picture of the world. It wasn't written to us originally. It was written to them, and they pictured heaven as straight up. Get over it.

The more serious question is what happens after we are snatched up to meet Jesus in the air. A very good argument can be made that we meet Jesus in the air in order to come back down for the judgment of the world. Arguments have been made that his language of meeting Jesus is reminiscent of what happens when a dignitary comes to town. You go to the edge of town to escort him into the city.

Paul had a sense that both Christians would participate in the judgment of the world, including the judgment of angels. He tells the Corinthians that they would judge angels and the world (1 Cor. 6:2-3). Jesus tells the disciples that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the children of Israel (Matt. 19:28). The New Testament generally sees the kingdom of God as something that happens on a "new" earth (e.g., Rev. 21:1-2; Luke 13:29), but it is on earth.

1 Thessalonians 4 does not say where we will be forever with the Lord, but the most likely answer given the rest of the New Testament is that it will be on a renewed earth. Jesus will descend. The dead will rise re-embodied from the ground to meet Jesus. Then we will be "snatched up" as well.

The battle lines will be drawn. Those on Jesus' side will be on the right side of the battle lines. The judgment of the world will commence. Here it probably is significant that the word air refers to the sky just above the earth, not to heaven. That is to say, we are meeting Jesus right above the earth, not in heaven.

Paul's writings know nothing of a seven-year period between Jesus' arrival and the judgment. Nor do they know anything of a thousand year Millennium. It is an argument from silence, but it puts pressure on us to make sure we are interpreting the passages in Revelation correctly.  

3. Another set of passages that are often taken to be about the rapture are Matthew 24:36-41 and Luke 17:34-36. Here is what Matthew 24 says: 

"As they were in those days before the Flood -- eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage -- right up until the day Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the Flood came and took them all, so also will be the arrival of the Son of Humanity. Then two will be in the field. One is taken, and one is left. As two women are grinding in the mill, one is taken and one is left." 

As Craig Keener and others have shown, this passage is actually saying something dramatically different than what we think of as the rapture. [1] If we follow the train of thought, those that the Flood takes away are not the saved, but the damned! The passage is not talking about the taking away of the righteous, but the sweeping away of those who are wicked.

It is the same in Luke's version. Luke 17:34-35 talk similarly about one being taken and one left. Then the disciples ask where they are taken. Jesus' response is that they are taken to where the vultures gather around dead bodies (17:37). So, far from supporting the dispensational understanding of the rapture, these verses picture the righteous remaining on earth in the coming kingdom.

4. What about Revelation 7:14? Does not Revelation picture the righteous in heaven, those who have been snatched up from the earth from the Great Tribulation? We will explore the idea of the Tribulation in chapter 5. For now, here is how Revelation 7 reads:

"After these things I looked and, behold, a great crowd whom no one was able to number from every nation and tribes and peoples and tongues standing before the throne and before the Lamb... And one of the elders answered, saying to me, 'Who are these who have put on white robes, and from where have they come?'

"And I said to him, 'Sir, you know.' And he said to me, 'These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes and they made them white by the blood of the Lamb'" (Rev. 7:9, 13-14).

It has been all too easy to see this group as the group of those who have been raptured from the earth. However, the picture is much more grim. How is it that they have come to the throne room of God? 

We find the most likely answer in the previous chapter -- the context...

[1] Michael Brown and Craig Keener, Not Afraid of the Antichrist: Why We Don't Believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture (Bloomington, MN: Chosen, 2019), 146.