Posted on 05/24/2011 7:39:20 AM PDT by Bed_Zeppelin
I travel from time to time. Unfortunately, this requires sleeping in hotel rooms. My last hotel stay had me pondering the differences between a hotel room and my own home. The "hospitality" industry specializes in the sterile and generic. I can hope for little more than clean sheets, hot water, and maybe a coffee machine. Even luxury hotels, despite elegant fixtures and expensive amenities, are designed for standardized guests. Any art on the walls is mass-produced.
One hotel room is the same as another. But my house, with all its quirks, is a home: a long-term habitat, a place of relationships and authentic hospitality. I don't feel like a guest. Indeed, even my guests shouldn't feel like guests, but like family.
(Excerpt) Read more at christianitytoday.com ...
But what if God meant it to be something more like a home, and less like a hotel?
Since the Rapture theory has only been around since the 1830s I would say no one is left behind.
“Our answer is shaped in part by our eschatology.”
That is correct. While the word “Rapture” is never used in the Bible and the theory itself didn’t come into being until the late 1800s, it is still right there in scripture.
“Its formulation came about by means of inductive reasoning. Certain biblical passages concerning the Second Coming, and the role Christians will play in that event, were blended together inductively to establish the teaching.”
I would say that you need to read your Bible, if you’ve got one.
Tanach (Jewish Bible) in hand. Hmmm....nope, nothing in there!
So why didn’t Christians in previous generations come up with it?
What was the point of Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessaloniacans?
I have no idea, but I don’t think it was to tell Christians to fly away in their beautiful balloons.
However Justin Martyr (died 165CE), had Many think that to be true,
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
as amillennialism is the position of the
Roman "church".
chiliastic tendencies in his theology.
Just because he was chiliastic doesn’t mean he believed he or any other Christian would fly, fly away.
If you study the Torah from a Jewish perspective God teaches that we are in this world to be involved in trying to improve it starting with ourselves, not to flee or float or disappear to some other world or place. We are to engage this world and fill it with the light of HaShem.
I could easily believe that “Oh, things are getting to difficult. Time to take a time out and run away!”
I would have to say that the Rapture Theory is just an escapist belief contrary to what God wants Jews and Christians to do in this world - engage it, change it, and make it better.
I think the Rapture started back in the early 1960s when Jews started coming back to Torah both here in the USA and in the former Soviet Union.
***So why didn’t Christians in previous generations come up with it?***
The bobby pin, the steam locomotive, and electric lights have been around for thousands of years. But we just recently discovered them. Why was that? Think it out.
The word, “rapture” comes from the Greek, “harpatzo” and, “rapto” in Latin. What is the context of those words in the Christian’s New Testament? Does it mean to fly away, disappear, go to another world or something else? What did it mean to people before 1830?
The answer is in why Paul wrote his second epistle to the Thessaloniacans.
You got me. However, the farther from the start we get the more we seem to want to categorize things about the Bible (rapture, pre/post trib, dispensational/non-dispensational).
So evil just remains on the planet?
Jesus does not seperate the Wheat from the Tares?
GOD spared Noah and his family by having him build an ark.
Since GOD said he would not destroy the earth with water again, but he will destroy the earth with fire, then how would GOD save his flock from a burning earth and heavens?
GOD has to remove his believers from the earth, if he intends to judge the entire planet, if GOD only plans on judging a few nations not all of them, then maybe he will tell his believers to move to Steamboat Springs Colorado.
You didn’t think it out. Maybe it was because a statist sacral organization with another agenda, who attempted to suppress education and the Holy Scriptures from the ordinary person, who persecuted and killed as many truly saved believers as it could find, and burned their Bibles — maybe that “church” succeeded in blinding the general public from all kinds of Truth (even from its incompletely “reformed” children), for well over a thousand years. Maybe that is why God’s plan in end-times eschatology for the true-believers-in-the-Christ-of-the-Bible remained hidden until the Age of Grace was about to come to a close. But it was there all along, not discovered by humans who simply cannot receive the (deep) things of the Holy Spirit, for it was foolishness to them. And still is. But it was initially blindingly clear to the original apostles, and was included in their records. It is spiritually discerned.
However, the Greek words pertaining to Christ's second advent, parousia (#3952), apokalupsis (#602), and epiphaneia (#2014) are.
Without denial of dispensational or covenant theology, and distinction between Israel and the church - rejection of replacement theology - and the Present Age to preceeding ages, the divine purpose of the the Present Age, its character, and prophecies related to its course (including its foretold end), those words are foundational to the doctrine of the translation of the church in accordance with that intimated by the Holy Spirit in Jno 14:1-3; II Ths 2:1; I Ths 4:13-18; I Cor 1:8; 15:51,52; Phi 3:20,21; II Cor 5:1-9
It seems to me the Christian Rapture is very much like a product recall by the Feds. (I say this half-serious and half-tongue in cheek.)
How so?
God wants us to engage this world to improve it in a Godly way. At some point the Christians stop doing this because the Left has rendered it impotent. As you can see today Leftism continues its march unabated especially in this country.
As the Left continues to destroy the world and the Christians stand by on the sidelines it gets soooooooooooo bad that God decides to get the do-nothing Christians out of the way by rapturing them all to Cloud 9, a parallel universe, another dimension, or another planet, or a place in between universes.
The rest of the God fearers slog it out with the Left with the God fearers eventually win.
Aside from all of that I think the rapture is like global warming. It happens every moment of every day without end because there people are going to heaven all the time after they take their last breath.
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