Myth 6: In case of the Rapture, this vehicle will be unattended.
You can know when the rapture takes place by answering the following three questions using scripture.
1. Who rises first?
2. When do they rise?
3. When is the last trumpet?
That's far less than Harry Potter and nobody actually believes that story either.
If they try to explain away the sudden disappearance of millions of born-again Christians by saying space aliens took us away because we weren’t vibrationally in tune with the spiritually evolved people left behind . . . don’t believe them.
Just sayin’.
When I first read this, I thought it sad “rupture”, and thought it was a thread about hernias.
When I first read this, I thought it said “rupture”, and thought it was a thread about hernias.
The event of 1 Thess. 4 differs from the return of Christ in Mt. 24, Rev. 19 and Zech. 14.
In 1 Thess. 4, there is no warning, Jesus does not touch the earth, there is no action of judgment by Jesus, and the believers who are both dead and living go UP to be with him.
In the Second Coming passages, his feet touch the earth, he does a major smackdown on the nations, there is great political, spiritual and cosmic disaster preceding the event, the whole world sees him coming, and the believers are coming with him in a great army.
Don’t be grounded when the Rapture comes.
Thanks Viking83, this was well-written and informative.
The author makes some glaring mis-statements about the pre-trib position, and I think glosses over scripture in favor of Church teaching. However, I don’t think most people who believe in a pre-trib Rapture expect Catholics to believe in such, just as non-Catholics don’t believe the Pope is the direct spiritual descendant of Peter, that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven or that the bread and the wine become the literal body and blood of Christ during communion. If they did, Catholics would become “fundamentalists”, and “fundamentalists” would become Catholics!
Bookmark.
Amazing how such an article can miss the one thing that all dispensationalists state clearly:
DISPENSATIONALISM is arrived at by the normal, literal, or plain or grammatical-historical interpretation of the Bible.
The Bible is not allegorized (like the Catholics and other fringe elements do), and in all instances: the original intent of the writer is studied.
So if you take the Bible literally, you are by nature, a dispensationalist.
The Bible clearly teaches the rapture. An argument by any church father is meaningless: Scripture is God’s opinion, and that is the only opinon that matters.
>> About ten years ago, I mentioned to a Catholic friend that I was starting to work on a book critiquing the Left Behind novels.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t ... critique. Greatness is rarely created by piggy-backing on someone else.
The Left Behind Novels are Christian fiction. They’re vaguely based on Biblical Revelation ... but only vaguely. We “fundamentalists” do not believe there exists a Book of LaHaye in the Bible. It is a compelling story of the End Times with a Godly message ... nothing more.
SnakeDoc
Darby was not the first dispensationalist.
Ephraem (A.D. 373) wrote extensively on the Rapture, but his writings were not translated from Latin until 1995.
See “Final Warning” by Jeffrey ISBN 0-921714-24-6
the Church was the New Israel and that Christians -- consisting of both Jews and Gentiles (cf. Romans 10:12) -- had replaced the Jews
If the Church "REPLACES" the Jews. You are calling God a liar.
There are ONLY two theories: Every other is a derivative of one of those two: REPLACEMENT or FULFILLMENT Theology.
God keeps His promises or He changes his mind. Catholics, and most liberal denominations, believe he changes His mind.
Evangelicals, conservative denominations, believe He will literally fulfill ALL His promises on His time schedule.
Lots of inaccuracies about Dispensational history and teaching in that one article...
like this, “The first dispensationalist premise is that Jesus Christ failed to establish the kingdom for the Jews during His first coming.”
Great Post - a little side note to the Catholic bashers. it was the Catholic Councils of the church that decided which books would be in the New Testament and the Book of Revelation was not a shoe-in.
St. Augustine championed its inclusion:
Augustine ... adopted the Book of Revelation partly because it had been so troublesome and its place needed to be stabilized. And partly because it helped him solve some other theological dilemmas that he was wrestling with in his own studies. So around 393, 394 it seems there were several councils that were being convened in his own region where debates ... with people who believed in greater degree of free will and other kinds of theological issues were all taking place. And during this context of these councils the decision on which books to use in the New Testament as the authority, behind which all other Christian theology would be worked out, came up. Augustine championed using the Book of Revelation within the New Testament, assuming, as others had, that it was actually written by the Apostle John, therefore carrying authority. ...
What Augustine does by helping put the Book of Revelation in the Bible really accomplishes two things. One, he provides what will become, at least eventually, the normative reinterpretation of the book by reading all of the symbolism in it as just that, symbolism and not literal history. Now, that doesn’t happen overnight, but his view is the one that will eventually carry the day throughout most of later Christian tradition.
The second thing that he does in canonizing the Book of Revelation is they put it at the end of the New Testament, and this also has a very significant symbolic force. Because at the end of the Book of Revelation, we have a strong warning, “You may not add to or take away from any thing in this book.” Now originally in the Book of Revelation that refers to the revelation that John himself saw—write it, seal it, don’t do anything more with it, it’s over. But when you take that put it at the end of the New Testament, it has the double force of saying John’s revelation of the end is sealed up but also this is the end of the New Testament, there will no longer be any future revelations from God that will stand alongside of the New Testament itself. ...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/brevelation.html
ping for later reading