No, I don’t mean aeroplanes; I’ve spent far too much time in those things.
In the past couple of days, I’ve come across a couple of excellent blog posts that look at what is sometimes called the ‘rapture’. This is the notion that when Jesus returns, all of his followers will fly up in the air, to go back to heaven with him. Rapture stories in one form or another have been best sellers in the Christian fiction market for years. However, though the concept is firmly embedded in the Evangelical mindset, there is little by way of Biblical evidence for it. But, as Chris Wright says in The God I Don’t Understand, there are massive pressures to shape our thoughts of the End Times according to popular culture, rather than through the Bible and the historical understandings of the church.
The two posts that I recently came across, do a good job of explaining why we need to re-examine ideas about the rapture against Scriptural teaching. The first one is by Kurt Willems and is entitled Why The Rapture Isn’t Biblical… and Why It Matters. He opens with a general statement about the breadth of the Bible’s teaching.
Eventually this planet would be destroyed and we Christians would “fly away” to heaven at the rapture of the church. Certain Christians understood the timing of the rapture as it corresponds to the book of Revelation differently than others, but no one ever denied the imminent return of Jesus to evacuate the church out of earth.
What I’ve come to realize is that the church of my youth probably had the rapture all wrong. You see, the Bible flows from Creation (Gen 1-2) to Renewed Creation (Rev 21-22). This is the narrative of Scripture. Nothing in the text (if read in its proper context) alludes to the actual complete destruction of the planet. This world’s worth to the Creator runs deep and because of this, the world as a whole ought to be intrinsically valuable to us.
He then moves on to examine at some depth 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, which is one of the passages often used to justify teaching on the rapture. There isn’t space to quote all of his arguments, so please read the whole post. However, his conclusion is clear:
Rapture, as it is popularly understood, is nowhere to be found in this “rapture” passage. Christ will return to resurrect, to purge, to heal, and to establish the eternal kingdom of God on this earth. Heaven and earth will unite like a bride and husband – for all eternity. That’s it.
The second piece on the rapture is a section in a longer article entitled The Dangerous Heresy of Zionism by Carl Medearis. He writes:
The rapture is a popular idea that Jesus will actually return twice: first of all secretly, to rescue true believers out of the world, then later visibly with his saints to judge the world. There is, again, no basis in Scripture for this novel idea. The Bible is emphatic: the return of Jesus will be personal, sudden, public, visible and glorious.
Matthew 24:30-31 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17
“At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the peoples of the earth[a] will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, 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.” “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.
The idea of a secret rapture is actually based on a misreading of Matthew 24:40-41 and Luke 17:34-35 where Jesus warns that one person will be taken and the other left behind. Rapture proponents insist it is the believers who will be taken and that unbelievers left behind. However, in the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13, Jesus provides the key to interpreting the later parable, “Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’” (Matthew 13:30).
So it will be unbelievers who are ‘taken’ first and believers who are ‘left behind’ to be with Christ.
However we understand the ambiguous apocalyptic language of Matthew 24, or Revelation, about the future, we must hold on to the clear promises of Jesus. He will never leave us nor forsake us (John 10:27-30; 14:14-27). The biblical vision of the future is of paradise restored and healing of the nations.
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:1-2)
Our mandate is to be peacemakers not widow makers (Matthew 5:3-10). We are ‘God’s co-workers’ entrusted as ambassadors with a ministry of reconciliation not speculation (2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2).
I realise that there is a lot in Medearis’ article that is likely to upset some readers of kouyanet. If you disagree with what he says about Israel, please feel free to comment on the original site but do not do so here. This post isn’t about the role of Israel and I will delete any comments which are off topic.
If you want to read more about a Biblical view of the future, you cannot do better than get hold of Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright. For a view of how rapture theology appears to non-Christians, Paul Beaumont’s Brief Eternity is well worth a read.
15 replies on “You’ll Never Get Me Up In One of Those Things”
RT @kouya: You’ll Never Get Me Up In One of Those Things: Some thoughts on rapture theology… http://t.co/UyUceyd4Wt
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I loved flying in those planes!
I think Tom Wright makes some good points but a few things he wrote wound me up. For one he quotes scripture selectively and avoids ideas clearly taught like the new heavens and earth.
Have you watched the documentary Hellbound?
I’ve not heard of Hellbound, Emma. Tell me more.
I helped with some research for it. It is about the various Christian doctrines of hell, and is written and directed by Kevin Miller. One of the interviewees is Robin Parry, who is a Brit and you might have heard of (?). It includes interviews with a very wide range of people from Mark Driscoll to an Orthodox archbishop to death metal rockers, with everyone in between.
http://www.hellboundthemovie.com
I’ve asked Kevin how you can get hold of the movie in the UK. Will get back to you.
You can order it here: http://www.storenvy.com/stores/24906-hellbound or buy/rent a digital version here: http://vimeo.com/ondemand/hellbound And I don’t know if you’d take this as an encouragement or a warning, but helping with this doc set me on a path over the last few years that has radically altered the content and method of my theology (not to mention got me a Masters degree in it.)
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I couldn’t decide what to blog on today, but I finally went with the rapture: http://t.co/FARSJpQast
This might be a tad controversial.
Tom Wright certainly does not avoid the idea of the new heavens and the new earth. You may disagree with him, and that’s fine, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable to say he ignores it.
“All things: here we have the new heaven, the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the new Temple (which is the same thing as the new Jerusalem; as we shall see, there is no temple in the city because the whole city is the new temple), and, not least, the new people, people who have woken up to find themselves beyond the reach of death, tears and pain. ‘The first things have passed away.’
So many Christians have read John’s book expecting that the final scene will be a picture of ‘heaven’ that they fail completely to see the full glory of what he is saying. Plato was wrong. It isn’t a matter — it wasn’t ever a matter — of ‘heaven’ being the perfect world to which we shall (perhaps) go one day, and ‘earth’ being the shabby, second-rate temporary dwelling from which we shall be glad to depart for good. As we have seen throughout the book, ‘earth’ is a glorious part of God’s glorious creation, and ‘heaven’, though God’s own abode, is also the place where the ‘sea’ stands as a reminder of the power of evil, so much so that at one point there is ‘war in heaven’. God’s two-level world needs renewing in both its elements.
But when that is done, we are left not with a new heaven only, but a new heaven and a new earth — and they are joined together completely and for ever. The word ‘dwell’ in verse 3 is crucial, because the word John uses conjures up the idea of God ‘dwelling’ in the Temple in Jerusalem, revealing his glory in the midst of his people. This is what John’s gospel says about Jesus: the Word became flesh and lived, ‘dwelt’, pitched his tent, ‘tabernacled’, in our midst, and we gazed upon his glory. What God did in Jesus, coming to an unknowing world and an unwelcoming people, he is doing on a cosmic scale. He is coming to live, for ever, in our midst, a healing, comforting, celebrating presence. And the idea of ‘incarnation’, so long a key topic in our thinking about Jesus, is revealed as the key topic in our thinking about God’s future for the world. Heaven and earth were joined together in Jesus; heaven and earth will one day be joined fully and for ever. Paul says exactly the same thing in Ephesians 1.10.
That is why the closing scene in the Bible is not a vision of human beings going up to heaven, as in so much popular imagination, nor even of Jesus himself coming down to earth, but of the new Jerusalem itself coming down from heaven to earth. At first sight, this is a bit of a shock: surely the new Jerusalem, the bride of the lamb, consists of the people of God, and surely they are on earth already ! How can they have been in heaven as well?
The clue here is that, as Paul says in Colossians 3.3, ‘our life is hidden with the Messiah in God’. When somebody belongs to the Messiah, they continue with their life on earth, but they have a secret life as well, a fresh gift from God, which becomes part of the hidden reality that will be ‘revealed’ at the last day (Colossians 3.4; 1 John 3.2). That is why, in those great scenes in Revelation 5, 7 and 19, there is a great, uncountable number of people standing around God’s throne in heaven, singing glad songs and shouting out their praises. This is the heavenly reality which corresponds to the (apparently) weak, feeble praises of the church on earth. And one day this heavenly reality will be revealed, revealed as the true partner of the lamb, now transformed, Cinderella-like, from slave-girl to bride.
The newness of this vision is not a matter of God throwing away his first creation and, as it were, trying again, having a second shot to see if he can get it right this time. That is the superficial impression many have received from 20.11, when heaven and earth flee from God’s presence, and from the statement in 10.6 that there would be ‘no more time’ — which, as we have seen, is not saying that time itself will be abolished, but that there will be no more delay. What we have in Revelation 21 and 22, however, is the utter transformation of heaven and earth by means of God abolishing, from within both heaven and earth, everything that has to do both with the as-yet incomplete plan for creation and, more particularly, with the horrible, disgusting and tragic effects of human sin.
The new world, in other words, will be like the present one in the sense of its being a world full of beauty, power, delight, tenderness and glory. In this new world, for instance, the temple, which was properly there in heaven as well as on earth (11.19), will be abolished (21.22); not because it was a stupid idea for God to dwell among his people, but because the Temple was the advance model of God’s great hidden plan for the whole cosmos, now at last to be realized. The new world will be like the present one, but without all those features, particularly death, tears and everything that causes them, which make the present world what it is.”