The Mystery of the Rapture

First: I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded...and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

Second: 5 The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed.

I am not sure I understand what the first and second resurrections are. I suspect they follow the same pattern as birth and death. The first resurrection would be physical. The second would be spiritual. You can be born twice and you could die twice but you get only one resurrection. There is only one sacrifice.

Scripture says Christ is the resurrection and the life. He is certainly the first resurrection and I believe he is also the second resurrection if there is a second resurrection. There is no resurrection outside of Christ.

Resurrection and life go together in revelation 20:4 but the ones standing before God at the White Throne are called dead. The dead were judged. Even though they are resurrected, it is still their first resurrection.

This is your interpretation that you want to force upon the scripture. God's wisdom is so far superior to ours, that we have this tendency to force our narrow visions upon fragmented revelations of His purposes.

Nope...Didn't interpret anything...Sometime you just hafta believe what God says...

Therefore, for you to say that God purposely deludes people so that they can be damned by Him cannot be pleasing to Him:

2Th 2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
2Th 2:12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Right here, God says you are wrong...Now who am I going to believe, you or God???

It doesn't even matter whether you think I'm taking this out of context; God said it and it's our duty to study the scriptures to find out how it applies...We can't just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist...

Since the word “Rapture” is not found in the Scriptures, why is it shown the reverence as if it was?

It is shown reverence only by the spiritually lazy, for whom it supplies an excuse for their spiritual laziness.

At the end of Christ's Sermon on the Mount is His declaration that "whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock." Although those who believe in a pre-tribulation rapture theory are aware of the Sermon on the Mount, they sit around waiting to raptured while other Christians do the hard work of upholding Christian values at at time when those values are under assault.

Like drunken people lovingly patting their bottles, pre-tribbers lovingly recite the scriptural passages they they have learned to twist into excuses for their spiritual laziness. Like lazy people using their spending money on lottery tickets so they can escape having to work, pre-tribbers are using their religious imaginations to dream of a great escape from the tribulations that others will have to endure.

As Christ taught: "And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon thet house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it."

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