False Beliefs About the Rapture

I grew up believing in the rapture because people around me did. I won’t apologize for that, because it’s entirely normal, and there’s no other way it could have happened. The vast majority of Christians raised in any given denominational or theological tradition do exactly the same thing. It can’t be helped. You trust the people who first taught you the truths that blessed you, and that’s as it should be … at least at first.

But I don’t believe in the rapture because my dad believed in it. Not anymore. That ship sailed years ago.

Why I Believe in the Rapture

I believe in the rapture because the scriptures plainly teach it in words almost impossible to understand any other way. I believe in the rapture because the endless objections raised against it by its critics, when studied carefully, all turn out to be straw men, presumptuous, toothless and incoherent. Far too frequently they are grossly insulting to both the intelligence and character of those who think the way I do about the future of the church. Despite continuous reading on the subject, I have yet to encounter a single argument against a pre-wrath rapture of the church that is even the slightest bit compelling or difficult to rebut. I am still looking for an amillennial or postmillennial Bible scholar with a line of reasoning that shakes my faith.

I am not writing about the rapture quite so much in 2024, notwithstanding its obvious relevance. That’s not because it no longer interests me, but because I’ve already written so much positively about the teaching from a scriptural perspective, as well as responding somewhere in the history of this blog to almost every argument raised against the rapture that I thought a fence sitter might find the least bit persuasive. You can find my posts on the subject here, here, here, here, here and here, for starters. Some of these posts are among our most popular.

Everyone is Wrong?

But I’m going to write about the rapture today for what I think might be the first time this year. Last week a social media acquaintance linked me to a recent post on the rapture by Terry Wolfe that makes assertions about it I have never encountered before. That seems worth at least a few minutes of time to think through.

One of my “tells” for a false teacher is his conviction that he has discovered something in scripture nobody else has ever seen before. Wolfe, author of 2020’s rather presumptuously entitled Maybe Everyone is Wrong: Revelations, Conspiracy, and the Kingdom of Heaven, draws attention to three beliefs he says are in error:

1. That the rapture happens to the Gentile Church;
2. That God will take people up to heaven;
3. That the rapture could happen any day now.

How commonly dispensationalists hold these beliefs is a matter open to debate, especially the way Wolfe frames them, which in the first two cases at least is either less than perfectly honest or simply mistaken. After “debunking” these three self-constructed reframings of dispensational teaching, Wolfe, who actually believes in a rapture, then goes on to set out a rapture theory that is among the most bizarre I’ve ever encountered. Let’s have a look.

1/ Gentiles Aren’t the Endgame

I’ll let Wolfe explain himself:

“The (Gentile) Church likes to assume that it is the sole focus of God’s prophecy from now on. They ignore the mountains of prophecies from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel which point to Israel’s redemption being the goal of God’s plans. They think that because the Jews rejected Jesus the first time, God has given up on them and chosen the Gentile believers as his people forever. The New Testament specifically debunks this.

[Quotes Romans 11:25-29]

Believers who do remember these passages and the older prophecies tend to fall for the deception that the State of Israel is the fulfillment of those prophecies, and so they become mere Zionists instead, which is also an error.”

Indeed, the modern State of Israel is not the fulfillment of prophecy, though it may certainly be a stepping stone on the way toward prophetic fulfillment. Time will tell. God has not given up on his earthly people, and both Old and New Testaments teach the restoration of national Israel in a future day. So I’m totally with Wolfe through most of this, except that he’s tilting at a straw man.

No dispensationalist I know rejects the concept of national Israel’s restoration, and even amillennialists and postmillennialists don’t claim Gentiles are the “endgame”. All recognize that the church of which we are part was originally almost 100% Jewish and only became mostly Gentile as the Jews obeyed the Great Commission and took the gospel to the world. All recognize that the modern church has plenty of ethnic Jews in it — who hasn’t heard of Jews for Jesus? — and many Reformed commentators claim the only biblical hope for Jews is via the church.

So of course “Gentiles aren’t the endgame”. But nobody says they are.

2/ They Don’t Get Taken to Heaven

Next, Wolfe quotes 1 Thessalonians 4:14-17, then adds this:

“Now think about it carefully: we see clearly that the Lord descends from Heaven to return to earth before either the Resurrection or the Rapture happens. This is very important, because the triumphant return of Jesus (ie. with a shout and trumpet) is something we can find in other passages of prophecies, creating a ‘hyperlink’ of sorts. This situates the ‘Rapture’ event at a very particular time in the future. It is all related to the ‘Day of the Lord’. It’s a time of judgment against the wicked world, and the establishment of Zion, which becomes the Millennial Kingdom. What does this mean in regards to the Rapture logic? It means those who are ‘caught up’ to be ‘ever be with the Lord’ will first need to experience everything leading up to the Day of the Lord, which involves all the crazy cataclysms described in Revelation, but it also means that they will not be taken up to Heaven — since Jesus is not going to be there! He’s coming down to be on the earth for 1,000 years!”

Here we have a mixture of truth with assumptions that simply don’t hold up to scrutiny. Wolfe has the church going through the Great Tribulation on earth because he sees the Lord’s return to meet his people in the air as simultaneous with the day of the Lord and a shout and trumpet he fails to specify. In fact, the only reference to the Lord Jesus shouting in the New Testament is this one in 1 Thessalonians. That is the only time the word keleusma appears (literally, a “cry of command”). When the Lord shouts in the Old Testament, it is in connection with his judgment of the nations through Nebuchadnezzar, not his future judgment of the nations at the return of Christ. As for trumpets, Revelation has a series of seven related to judgment alone. There are numerous trumpet calls in the New Testament, and no reason to try to identify the trumpet blast of 1 Thessalonians 4 with any particular one of these.

Wolfe doesn’t say he envisions the day of the Lord as a single, 24-hour day, which is a good thing, because that’s not the way scripture uses the phrase. In fact, the Old Testament prophets employ “day of the Lord” as a euphemism for coming cataclysms to occur in various times and places. Ezekiel uses it to describe the sacking of parts of Egypt by the Babylonians. Isaiah uses it to describe the slaughter of the Babylonians by the Medes, which occurred in the lifetime of Daniel. Obadiah uses it to describe God’s judgment of Edom for its violence against Israel. Zephaniah uses it to describe God’s judgment on Judah. In no case is the day of the Lord a 24-hour period, and in many cases the period described is much, much longer. Basically, when you read about the day of the Lord, don’t think about any particular time period or duration. The expression simply means God is intervening personally to get the job done.

This being the case, there is no reason whatsoever to assume the Lord’s return to the air for believers must occur simultaneously with his establishment of his millennial kingdom. Yes, Jesus is coming to earth for 1,000 years, and yes, we will be coming with him. But the “day of the Lord” concept allows plenty of room for the marriage supper of the Lamb (and, implicitly, the judgment seat of Christ) to take place in heaven prior to the Lord’s glorious return to earth, in the very same order as John describes in Revelation 19.

So then, there is no reason to suggest believers will not go to heaven at the time of rapture apart from systematic theological assumptions that have little or no scriptural basis. We will “meet the Lord in the air”, and keep on going up!

3/ Timing Will Remain a Mystery

Wolfe believes the conviction that the rapture could happen any day now is also an error:

“Christ’s return will be sudden and shocking to those who are still alive on earth at that time. The Church will be killed by that point. We’ll be relaxing in Heaven as we wait for the Day of the Lord. ‘Those who are alive and remain’ will not be Gentiles or traditional Christians, but a special Remnant that meets the ‘two witnesses’ and sees the success of the Satanic World Government. The Man of Sin will appear to have overcome the promises of God. The world will be deceived. The 144,000 will not trust the Man of Sin or believe that the promises are broken, but that doesn’t mean they will understand the timing either. So it will be a mystery until the end.”

Wolfe’s rapture scenario has the terminal generations of the church that Christ built martyred to a man (and woman), a wholesale slaughter of the righteous for which there is no historical precedent in scripture, not even the days of Ahab. While many have died for the name of Christ over the centuries to the glory of God, I must say I consider such an occurrence staggeringly unlikely.

I absolutely agree that “no one knows that day or hour” of Christ’s second advent, but that does not necessarily have anything to do with the timing of the rapture, which was not plainly stated by the Lord, but which may be inferred from other scriptures. Many Christians indeed believe that the rapture may happen any day now. Others, like yours truly, believe we can observe general trends that point to the likelihood of Christ’s return for his people without presuming to know what only God does. Paul writes that the man of lawlessness is currently under restraint. He cannot be revealed to the world until that restraint is lifted, when “he who now restrains it” is “out of the way”. In the absence of a more compelling scriptural suggestion, I believe the best candidate for the unnamed person restraining the man of lawlessness is the Holy Spirit operating through his church, and that the church will be raptured just prior to the revelation of the man of lawlessness. That doesn’t mean we will know exactly when it’s coming, of course, but the interval between the removal of every existing influence for good in the world and the arrival of the worst leader in history to prominence is unlikely to be lengthy.

‘We Don’t Need a Rapture’? Really?

Wolfe finishes with this:

“Why do Christians hate the idea of persecution? Are we so soft, lukewarm, and out of touch with the teachings of Jesus that they think being attacked by Satan’s conspiracy is the same as God’s wrath? The New Testament is clear that there are special rewards for martyrs. It’s nothing to be afraid of. We go to Heaven the old fashioned way!

The Rapture will happen for the Remnant, the 144,000 Israelites, because they are the penultimate Chosen Ones at the climax of Satanic world power, showing that even the most evil time imaginable cannot overwhelm Israelites who put their trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.”

One of the most tiresome and insulting tropes ever advanced by those who believe the church will go through the Great Tribulation is that Christians who do not believe what they do are all cowards. Of course Christians don’t “need” a rapture! Dispensational pre-tribbers believe in a rapture because the Great Tribulation is the time of Jacob’s trouble, not yours and mine. It has literally nothing to do with the church. Dispensational pre-tribbers believe in a rapture because Paul taught it and because it is consistent with the prophetic teaching of scripture, not because we are all escapists. Martyrdom indeed has its reward, but historically it has been a privilege reserved to comparatively few of Christ’s followers.

As for a raptured Israelite remnant, I am not surprised this is the first time I have ever encountered the teaching, mostly because it is so patently absurd. If the rapture were a teaching exclusively pertaining to Israel, we would surely find it in James, Hebrews or maybe 1 Peter, which were all written to diaspora Jews who had confessed Christ. Where do we actually find it? In 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, letters written to churches in Gentile cities with a mixture of Jewish and Gentile believers. Paul says without distinction that “We who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with [the dead in Christ] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” I take “we” to mean “we Christians”, not “we Jews”. The letter’s original readership would surely have taken it exactly the same way.

If the rapture were indeed limited to Great Tribulation Jews, what possible motive would Paul have to delude the poor Gentiles in Thessalonica, Corinth and throughout the world in the years since he wrote with the false hope that they might have the privilege of being included in the great event, that their Lord and Savior might come for them personally? And if the rapture is for the 144,000, why are the dead in Christ included and even given the prominence of rising first?

‘Absurd’ is not too strong a word to characterize such a claim.