The hope that at any moment the churchgoers of today will be caught up to Heaven is not a true, scriptural hope, and a multitude of God's people will be horrified and totally unprepared to stand in Christ when they enter the moral horrors that are on the horizon. They will not be able to bear a bright witness of Christ because they are not prepared to stand in the evil day. This precisely is what Satan is counting on.

Let me now present several more passages that have to do with the great historic coming of Jesus Christ in the clouds of glory. As I understand the following verses they all apply to the same event, although each may have a different emphasis.

Immediately after the distress of those days "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken." At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. (Matthew 24:29-31—NIV)

The passage above may be the strongest in the Bible concerning the historic second coming of the Lord. There are the great signs in the heavens as well as the trumpet call gathering together God's elect. The emphasis is on the majesty and grandeur of the appearing of Christ to establish His Kingdom on the earth.

Another is as follows:

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, 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. (I Thessalonians 4:16,17—NIV)

The above is sometimes viewed as a special coming that will precede the great historic coming. It is not, as I understand it. We notice the trumpet call of God, the resurrection of the dead, and the gathering together of God's elect.

This passage is tied to Matthew 24 by the common employment of the Greek term parousia for "coming."

The emphasis here is on the fact that the living and the dead saints will enter the Kingdom at the same time. It was written by the Apostle Paul to comfort the believers whose relatives and friends had died. It has nothing to do with our escaping Antichrist or the great tribulation by leaving the earth and going to Heaven. There is no basis in the above text to suggest such an interpretation. For this reason it should not continue to be preached. It is giving God's people a misleading vision of the future.

To be continued.