"And the dead in Christ shall rise first."

This does not mean the saints rise up in the air, it means they rise from the dead and stand on their feet on the earth.

The Lord Jesus did not ascend into the clouds until forty days after He rose from the dead.

The central hope of the teaching of Paul is the resurrection from the dead, not the catching up of the believers to meet the Lord.

The fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians is the "resurrection chapter" of the Bible. The ascension is not even mentioned in this chapter. The ascension is not on a same level of importance as the resurrection. The catching up is not part of the Divine redemption from sin and death.

The idea that we are caught up in order to escape Antichrist and the great tribulation has not been thought through. We cannot possibly ascend until we first have been resurrected. After we have been resurrected we cannot be harmed by Antichrist or the great tribulation. This fact alone completely destroys the concept of the "rapture" as a device to protect us from Antichrist and the great tribulation.

The bodily resurrection of the dead is the central hope of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. There is no comparable hope in any of the religions of the world.

One of the tremendous evils produced by the teaching of the pre-tribulation "rapture" of the saints, a delusion brought forth in the nineteenth century, is the abandoning of the hope of the resurrection of the dead, which is the true hope of the Gospel of the Kingdom.

The Apostle Paul groaned for the redemption of his body. The believers of today do not hope for the resurrection, the gaining of an incorruptible body so they can serve God in righteousness on the earth. They hope for a flight to Heaven so they will not suffer any longer. This doctrine has come from the humanistic teaching that people must not be allowed to suffer, that people have a "right" not to suffer.

How totally the doctrine of the "rapture" has destroyed the historical hope of the resurrection can be determined by asking one of today's believers in the "rapture" about the resurrection from the dead. He knows little or nothing about the basic hope of the Christian Church. He does not know whether our present body is to be raised, or whether it is a spiritual body from Heaven that is to be raised, or whether any body at all is going to be raised.

The hope of the resurrection of the mortal body from the grave has been lost to the churches because of the stress on the ascension. The Scriptures do not emphasize the ascension. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament speak of the resurrection of the body as the hope of the Gospel of the Kingdom.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12:2)

To be continued.