God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. (II Thessalonians 1:6,7—NIV)

The Coming of the Lord

We Christians hold an unscriptural concept concerning the coming of the Lord. We think the Lord is returning to take His Church to Heaven. There is no scriptural basis for this tradition, as far as I have been able to determine.

There is abundant Old and New Testament to support the doctrine that the Lord Jesus will return with His saints to establish justice among the nations.

Some are teaching that the Lord will return before His second coming in order to catch up His people so they will escape Antichrist and the great tribulation. This is pure mythology. There is no indication whatever in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, in the fourth chapter of First Thessalonians, in the first chapter of Second Thessalonians, or in any other major description of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth.

We ought not to be teaching that which is not found clearly stated in the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation.

Our unscriptural teaching that the Lord will return before His historical second coming to catch up the saints so they will not suffer has a negative effect on the spiritual maturing of the believers. They remain as silly, undisciplined children jumping up and down next to their pews in the hope any moment now they will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air.

There is an age of moral horrors on the horizon. The believers simply are not prepared for the catastrophes we are facing in America. They will not be able to serve as witnesses of God's faithful protection. They will be screaming in terror along with the unsaved because they have not strengthened themselves against the time of great darkness. The unscriptural "any-moment-rapture" myth is leaving them unprepared to stand in the day of evil, in direct opposition to Paul's exhortation in the Book of Ephesians concerning preparing ourselves for the hour of intense spiritual oppression.

How long will it be before Christian people wake up to the fact they have been deceived?

An intelligent high-school senior who knows his or her Bible can easily refute the arguments set forth by the rapturists.

The main support (as far as I know) for the "rapture" myth is the fourth chapter of First Thessalonians. This passage is not speaking of the going of the Church but of the coming of the saints with the Lord Jesus to raise their bodies from the dead. Then they, along with the living, shall rise to meet the Commander-in Chief in the air so they may descend with Him in the battle we term "Armageddon."

The "rapture passage" of the fourth chapter of I Thessalonians was not written to comfort the living saints concerning Antichrist or the great tribulation. It was presented by the Apostle Paul to comfort the living saints concerning the saints whose bodies are sleeping in the ground—that the living would not go before them into the Kingdom.

Any intelligent believer can read the "rapture" verses in First Thessalonians and see if I have interpreted the text correctly.

To be continued.