Camp Gagnon - Who is NOT Going to Heaven

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

Today we’re talking about one of the most debated topics in modern Christianity: The Rapture. We’re going beyond the "Left Behind" headlines to trace the actual origins of this doctrine, from the verses in the Bible to the 19th-century theories of John Darby. Is the escape of the faithful a foundational Christian belief or a relatively new invention fueled by fear? WELCOME TO RELIGION CAMP! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Morgan & Morgan and Blue Chew Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon ✝️☪️✡️🕉️☦️ Religion Camp Merch: https://camp-rd.com 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com 🏕️ Get Today In History Email Here (Free): https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 Christos YAPPIN 2:44 The Rapture in The Bible 7:48 Many Interpretations of The Rapture 12:55 1,000 Year Period 15:51 Details of The Rapture 25:21 Final Judgment 28:13 Early Christians Didn’t Teach The Rapture 30:11 John Darby Creates The Rapture 34:04 First Bible to Include Rapture Teachings 37:03 Left Behind Series 41:57 Fear of Being Left Behind 44:06 Will The Rapture Happen? 50:16 Drop Your Thoughts! #rapture #religion #religious #endtimes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. In a single instant all over the world, tons of people simply vanish. A car doing 70 on the interstate, and then the driver's seat just goes empty.

A pilot is gone from the cockpit at 30,000 feet. A surgeon just vanishes mid incision. A mother turns around in the grocery store, and her toddler's stroller is empty. This is the rapture. And you may have already had a picture of it in your head, right? Empty cars, people left behind, the world descending into chaos, while the faithful, the people that God saved, watch from above. This is one apocalyptic belief in Christianity, and this is one interpretation of the end of the world in Revelation 20. The disappearances are just step one.

It's the beginning of the end. What comes after is potentially even scarier. And here's the thing. This is one of the most vivid, detailed, terrifying, specific visions of the end of the world that human beings have ever produced. And almost none of it is where you think that it came from. The version that millions of people are waiting to happen, the sudden disappearance, the seven-year clock, that whole sequence can be traced to a single guy. in a single decade, less than 200 years ago.

So how did this idea come to feel like the oldest apocalyptic prophecy in the whole world? Well, today we're going to find out. We're going to walk through this apocalyptic worldview step by step, breaking down the text and revelation, walking through the rapture exactly as its believers see it. And then we're going to find out where this map of the future actually came from. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to Religion Camp.

My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent. to where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from every religion from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do in this tent, is I try to figure out what everybody believes. I feel like for most people in the world, God is the single most important thing in their lives. And for me, not to know the basics of everyone's religion just feels, I don't know,

it feels kind of entitled, right? And on top of that, I'm fascinated by religion. I grew up very Catholic, so I'm always interested in what other people believe, and I try to see how the worldview matched with mine, and I take all the good stuff from the religions that I study and I apply them to my own life. And today is a fascinating one. But before we jump in, I just want to say thank you.

To you, yeah, dude. I want to say thanks to you for tuning in. Whatever you're doing right now. Maybe you're driving a church. Maybe you're at work. Maybe you're driving a FedEx truck. Maybe you're mowing the lawn. Whatever you're doing, I am grateful that you're here

and that you click on this video because every time you comment or like or engage with the content, you tell the algorithm, gods, that we're doing a good job. And you help keep the lights on at the tension, and keep the fire burning here at the campsite. And I want to say thanks to the man right beside me. He's my good pal. Christos Papadopados, the Greek freak himself, the Orthodox legend.

How are you, friend? What's up, everybody? Christos, I'm glad you're here. Have you ever heard of the rapture? I have. Is this something that you were taught in, like, Greek Sunday school? Actually, I don't remember it being taught at Sunday school at all. This is an interesting thing, because as a Catholic, we never talked about the rapture.

I went my whole life, never talking about the rapture, and then I start going to a Presbyterian middle school. and oh boy there were some rapture folks in there and they were like the rapture's coming we started reading the left behind books and I was like this is crazy like people just like clothes laying in the street and they're like yeah this person raptured out of here

butt naked I was like that's crazy why do you gotta go naked what kind of heaven is this is like a ditty party heaven this seems a little wild right wait they leave naked well that's the kind of the image people always says they're like oh there's clothes on the ground rapture

but like they never really went into the details of like why they had to be. We'll get into the details of like where this all comes from, why people believe in and like what specific Christians believe this? Because again, this is not something that I was raised believing, but who knows? Maybe there's some truth to it. We're going to dig deep into it today.

Now, if you pick up an English Bible and you flip to the back and you're looking for the word rapture, you're like, all right, where's this rapture thing coming from? Where in the Bible is it? You're not going to find it. It's not in the King James. It's not even in most modern translations. sometimes they'll put it in like a footnote of like a, you know, like a reader's Bible, you know,

where like a rapturist will like put it, you know, that's like a like paired with a section. So I'm sure you're wondering, you're like, Mark, okay, how does the most famous end time event in modern Christianity, like this amazing thing where people just go missing one day and they just, you know, sort of ascend into heaven with God, where does it? It's not in the book. It's not in the Bible. So where does this come from? Like, where do we get it? Well, it's not even from. The whole idea rests on a handful of verses in a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to a group of new Christians in the Greek city of Thessalonica. This is the book of Thessalonians. This was written around like 50 AD. And it's one of the oldest documents in the entire New Testament. It's the book of First Thessalonians. And their community had a problem, all right? So if you don't know, Paul is basically writing letters to all the churches and he was addressing them and assessing what their specific

problems were. And the problem with the Thessalonians is that some of their members had died. And the survivors were starting to panic. And they had been told that Jesus was coming back and he was coming back when? Very soon. So what happened to the people who didn't make it? Like, did they miss it? Were they just gone forever? Like, if you died before Jesus comes back, like, what does that mean for their soul? So Paul writes back to comfort them. And in First Thessalonians, chapter four he paints a picture when christ returns he says the dead believers will rise first and then the living believers will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the lord in the air so he's telling them that the dead aren't at a disadvantage everyone who belongs to christ will come back to life

and will be gathered up all at once and that phrase that that word there caught up is the whole thing. Like in the Greek, like in the original sort of translation, like in the actual sort of vernacular, the word is harpazzo. It means to seize, to snatch, to like grab suddenly and like carry off.

It's kind of a violent, fast word. My pronunciation is pretty good on there, right? Harpazo. Yeah, it's great. Thank you. It's the same kind of word that you would use for like, like a hawk, like flying down and like snashing like a little rabbit or something. You'd be like, yeah, he harpazoed him.

So now when Christians in the early centuries are translating the Bible from Greek into Latin, they rendered the word harpazo as rapturo from rapporte, basically to seize. And that Latin word is where we get the English word rapture. So the term everyone uses isn't directly in the Bible, right? It's like, okay, it's a word that's used in the Greek that gets transliterated and becomes a new word. So depending on, you know, if you're like very much like a literalist going through every little detail, you're like, well, technically it is. So that's where it comes from.

It's an echo of the Latin translation of this Greek word for snatched away. And then Paul drops another hint on this whole idea of the rapture in 1st Corinthians chapter 15. He's basically describing this same moment to a church in Corinth and he says,

it'll happen, quote, in a flash in the twinkling of an eye. The living transformed instantly, like even faster than you can blink. And that's kind of it. Like, that's like sort of the raw biblical material as far as I was able to find. And all the believers snatching up into the clouds in an instant to meet the returning Christ.

But here's what's really important to take away from this section. And remember this for the rest of our sort of conversation today. In Paul's own words, he describes one event. Christ comes, the dead rise, the living are caught up. And everyone's together. One sort of, you know, returning and one gathering. But when Christianity talks about the rapture, now, if you go to a very specific church and they're talking about, you know, the end of times,

like the rapture's coming, there are a few other little plot points that are kind of thrown in the mix that Paul doesn't really write about. And we'll get to those in a minute. Because just because Paul doesn't describe it, doesn't mean that this belief is unimportant or that it's untrue or that we should even discredit it. Because it is a huge part of a lot of modern Christian's theologies about the end time. So perhaps it's not something that, you know, Catholics or Greek Orthodox are raised with, but there are a lot of Christians that do hold this dear to them. So in the practice of operating good faith, we're going to accept it as possible.

It's just not laid out in scripture like maybe you would have thought if you didn't go and read it. It's kind of pieced together from like different parts of the Bible. So what it comes down to is how you interpret certain texts. And that's where we're going to get into right now because there are a few different distinct ways to read apocalyptic literature in the Bible. And each of them gives us a slightly different story of what the end of the world will look like.

Now, we did an entire episode where we walked through the totality of the book of Revelation, this revelation of John of Pathmos, and we go through like beat by beat without really telling you what any of it means. So if you haven't seen that, you should go check it out

because here we're kind of doing the opposite. We're going to talk about this specific line and what people actually do with it. Well, we're talking about what people do with just one part of it because the book is massive and there's so many different things and we could do breakdowns for literally weeks on this one book. But the book of Revelation is the last book of the Bible,

and it is wild. And it doesn't necessarily come with an instruction manual of like, here's what it all means. It's very mystical. And it doesn't always tell us explicitly what it represents. Like it's a lot of kind of apocalyptic literature is sort of weird. It's kind of a fever dream. Which means that for nearly 2,000 years,

Christians have been reading the same book, and many of them got different things and kind of different meanings and different ways that they should conduct their lives. broadly, there have been four major ways to interpret it. And real quick, the reason we're going on this little side quest here is because the idea of the rapture doesn't appear in all the ways to interpret Revelation. But I want you to know which readings of the book you can find it and then we'll get back to the rapture itself. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? That's a power move.

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for the people.com slash gagnon or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That is for the people.com slash gagnon. This is a paid advertisement. So some Christians are preterists. They read revelation as if everything it's describing already happened. Like back in the first century, it was really about the Roman Empire persecuting early Christians and the beast was Rome and 666 was, you know, Gamutria for Nero. And the whole thing is basically like a historical allegory. But some are historicists, and they think Revelation is a coded

timeline of all of church history unfolding century by century, and you can actually match the symbols and the imagery to real events across 2,000 years. So it's like half historical, some of it's in the past, and half of it is prophetic or futuristic, and some of it's happening right now,

if that makes sense, and we are in the timeline. And then there are idealists. They think it's not a timeline at all, but more like kind of a poem basically, like this recurring spiritual pattern about good and evil that plays out in every age, not like a literal sequence of events past and future. It's sort of a metaphor for whatever time you're currently living in. And then some are futurists. They think most of revelation hasn't happened yet. It is a prophecy. It is a proper preview. It is a revelation to John

about the future and the end of the world. Now, most Christians throughout history, toward reading revelation either symbolically, like as a poem about the ongoing struggles that humanity faces, or they interpreted it as being something that was already fulfilled, kind of a preterist, kind of, you know, this is something that happened in the first centuries of the church. The idea that it's a literal, chronological, minute-by-minute forecast of the future, that is a more recent interpretation, the futurist one, where it's like, hey, this is coming, Armageddon's going to happen. And it's the futurist interpretation that allows room for this idea of the rapture.

Now, there is one other really important factor that plays into all of this. And it's about a single phrase in Revelation 20. And it's this thing of the thousand years. We call it the millennium. It's a period where Christ reigns and evil is basically bound up and tied and sort of squashed for a period of a thousand years. And Christian theology is super divided here. You talk to a Lutheran pastor and a Baptist and a Methodist, and they might all tell you, like, different understandings of what this millennium is.

So one belief about the millennium says that Christ returns after a golden age, ushered in basically gradually by the church. Another says that this thousand years is symbolic and that we're actually spiritually inside of it right now. And still another, the one we're actually talking about today, think Christ returns before a literal future thousand-year kingdom on Earth. Now, that one's the most fun one. And the last group that I just mentioned are called pre-millennialists. So Christ basically comes back.

And then this millennium, this thousand years of Jesus reigning, this new kingdom on earth, is what happens. So I know this is kind of confusing. So let me try to kind of wrap it up. There are four different major ways to interpret the book of Revelation. And historically, they interpret it one way. And now there are sort of more kind of futurist, you know, kind of interpretations. And within the book of Revelation is this line about the millennium, which people also disagree about.

different ways of just interpreting that one line, just that idea of the millennium. And how you interpret the millennium really affects whether or not you believe in the rapture at all. So for our interpretation of Revelation that we're talking about today, the one that believes in the rapture, it is a futurist reading of Revelation plus a literal future millennium, plus the belief that the rapture is a separate event from the Second Coming. So you get all of these beliefs and these interpretations and they stack together. and that package has a name. And it's called dispensationalism.

Now, I know that that word is big, and it's maybe confusing. Don't freak out. It literally just translates to the future, divided up, into acts. That's it. And that makes it pretty simple to understand because that's essentially what this whole theology is,

the belief that Revelation tells us about several acts or plot points or elements on sort of the story arc, if you will, about how the end of the world will go down in the future. This is the lens. This is the system that takes all of these scattered kind of puzzle pieces, Paul's letters to the Thessalonians and Daniels, you know, ancient prophecies and Jesus's warnings and all the apocalyptic stuff and revelation, and then assembles them into a continuous

chronological story. So you have the rapture and then the tribulation and then the Antichrist and then Armageddon, then Christ returns and then the millennium, which is the thousand years of the reign of Christ. And once you have that lens, the whole layout falls in. to basically like a blockbuster. It is a fantastic movie. So let's just break it all down. Let's walk through the end of the world

exactly the way that dispensationalists would see it. So it begins without a warning. There's no final war. There's no announcement, no countdown that everyone's aware of. Christ descends part way to earth into the air. Paul describes a shout, the voice of an archangel, a trumpet blast that sounds across the entire world. And according to Paul's letters that are in the Bible, the dead believers rise first.

Then in the twinkling of an eye, like I said, the living believers are transformed and basically snatched upward to meet them, and then they're gone. Every genuine Christian on the planet in the same instant is removed. The people who are still on Earth have no idea of what just happened. There's no divine voice that explains it. There are just gaps. There are empty seats. There are missing coworkers.

there are maybe family members that you know that are just gone. And if you're still there, it's a little scary. The world suddenly is short a bunch of people with no explanation. And as a result, who knows what happens? Governments might scramble. You might have a, you know, like a faithful politician, which I doubt, not to get on my political soapbox, but how many of these politicians are going to heaven? Right?

Pick your side of the aisle. Slim Piggins. That's all I'll say. Lindsay Graham is somewhere right now. He's somewhere. you know, RIP, pour them out for him, who knows. Now, all that to say, cars might crash, planes might fall, surgeons might disappear. And in this worldview, the confusion is kind of the point.

God is using the disappearance, the sudden, unexplained on purpose. Now, again, not all of this is like written out textually in the Bible. This is interpretations of a bunch of different verses kind of put together over time. Now, at this point, the church, literally like the body of believers, of the Church of Christ that worship Christ as the Lord is gone, and with the church gone, now the clock starts. And the world doesn't know it yet, but it has just entered into the tribulation,

a seven-year period of catastrophe. And there's more catastrophes that come after another, and it gets even worse. Now, where does the number seven come from? Well, once again, it's not from Revelation directly. It's pulled from an ancient prophecy in the book of Daniel, written centuries before Christ, about 70 weeks of years basically, which, you know, the last of which in the system gets detached

and dropped into the far future as like a final seven-year week. It's sort of confusing. But you split it in half and then the second three and a half years become what believers call the Great Tribulation. This is the worst of the worst. It's chaos. And in all of this chaos steps a man. And this man is brilliant. And he is charming and he arrives with exactly what a terrified and confused and unraveling world is begging for. He's going to come in and offer peace in order and security and answers. He's going to broker deals that no one else could broker. He's going to solve conflicts that are unsolvable.

And people are going to love him. And everyone's going to love him. And odds are you're going to love him. And he's the Antichrist. Whoa. Plot twist. I would love to be like a preacher in the South in like the 1800s. Right? Oh, man, I would deliver the heck out of this.

I'd be like, yeah, you guys are going to love him, and he's actually the Antichrist. I love to be one now. Now, come up to the altar. Let's get some testimonies. I would crush it. Now, this Antichrist, this is the beast that is described in Revelation 13. This is the figure that Paul calls the man of lawlessness. We did an entire episode just on the Antichrist within Christian eschatology.

You should absolutely check it out. And in this timeline, the reason he's so dangerous is not because he's super evil and, you know, is terrifying and scary. It's precisely that he doesn't look dangerous at all and he actually looks like a savior. That's the point. He is the anti-Christos. He is Christ, but opposite. And you look at him and you're like, oh, this guy's basically Jesus, but he's not. He's here to lead you astray. But then, at the midpoint of all this, three and a half years in the peace shatters. And the world leader that everyone trusted reveals what he actually is. The promises of order starts to turn into tyranny. He starts demanding worship.

and loyalty to him basically becomes the only way you can live. And in the famous image from Revelation, no one can buy or sell anything without the mark of the beast. And the number is 666. It's not just like a barcode or a chip necessarily. I mean, maybe it is. I mean, this is kind of the thing that people will say, like if you're watching, you know, YouTube videos.

But in the deeper meeting, it represents total allegiance to an anti-God world order. So you're either in and, you know, life is pretty good. You can buy stuff and you're sort of cohabitating or allowing this anti-god world order, or you're cut off from it. And you basically have no food or economy or a job or your life. And the chaos throughout the tribulation gets even worse. So Revelation describes them in waves.

So you have seals, like not like SeaWorld, like stamp. You guys get it. And then you have trumpets and you got bulls. and, you know, they're striking the land and the sea and the sky and the water and there's human health that's falling apart. And the whole structure of civilization is basically, like literally coming undone. The world is basically ending. And meanwhile, there's another story happening at the same time. In this theology, which again, is not all Christians.

It is a very specific subset of specific Christians, might I say, mostly Protestant. In this theology, some of the people who were left behind in Act 1 actually become Christians during the tribulation. and they are called the Tribulation Saints. These are people who missed the rapture the first time around, but, you know, turn to God in the middle of the nightmare, usually at the cost of their lives, and they are now saintly. So even the left behind world isn't beyond hope.

It's just a, it's going to be a longer road for y'all, all right? And then the armies of the world gather together for a little chat, we could say. They all kind of, they gather around, and they just want to hash it out. and this is called Armageddon, which you think is the name of the battle. It's actually the place where they're all meeting. And it's thought that in the original translation, the name comes from Megito.

It is a real hill in northern Israel that sat over many ancient battlefields. And the vision, in this specific vision, all the powers of the rebellious world assemble there for one last stand. And who's leading the rebel armies? The Antichrist. And this is the moment that pre-tribulation,

theology has been working towards. I mean, the moment that it gets to kind of separate from the rapture. Now, back then, at the beginning of the seven years when the rapture happened, Christ came back quietly in the air for his people. But now he comes publicly, invisibly, and loudly to the earth itself with all the people he took up with him. So Revelation 19 gives us this image. Heaven opens up and Christ appears riding a white horse. His eyes are on fire. He is crowned. bearing the titles faithful and true and King of Kings. And this is not the gentle shepherd that maybe you've seen in like a Sunday school mural. This is not, you know, just a poor man from Nazareth going into town on a donkey.

This is a conqueror arriving to end an unjust war. And, oh boy, it ends fast. The Antichrist and all the bad guys, they get destroyed. and the world system built on this beast collapses, and the long rebellion of history against God is over, and it's not some drawn-out long, arduous battle of going back and forth in a stalemate with a trench and a line that doesn't move. It's an instant.

Satan himself is finally seized and bound. Now this is the good part of the movie. Now the millennium begins within this specific perspective. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.c.cate. Christ gets to rain on earth for

a thousand years. In this literal reading, if we're going with that, it's an actual kingdom, like a literal golden age, and it is the fulfillment of every ancient prophetic hope. It's a world finally ruled the way that it was supposed to be ruled. Roll credits, that's the greatest movie ever. Oh, skirt, end credit scene, it's not done. No, still note over, because at the end of that thousand years, Revelation says that Satan coming back up for one final boss fight. Yeah. And unbelievably, he's still able to gather another rebellion and people are still following him, dude. That's how good this Satan guy is. I mean, not good, but cunning, can we say? Deceptive? Sure. The great deceiver, right? As they say, the adversary. So people still

go with Satan and they're like, you know what, let's give this Satan guy one more spin on the wheel. I think he might got it this time. It's almost a, I mean, if you look at it from a kind of a metaphorical perspective like a commentary on human nature that even after there's already been a war even after a thousand years of paradise and everyone sees how bad things were and how great things are some people are still going to choose satan and fight against god what's wrong with this right now this last uprisin guess what crushed instantly bang that's it and then comes the final scene this is the great white throne everybody in all of history every single person who has ever lived and died, raised again from the dead, and then died again. Shout out Lazarus.

Which is funny when we talk about Lazarus. The guy died twice. We never talked about that. Lazarus died, went to heaven, and God was like, you're not going to believe this. There's a sequel. Sent him back down to Earth, bang, wakes up. Jesus is there. He's like, wait, I was just talking to him. He's like, don't tell anyone. And then Lazarus goes on for like another couple years and then dies again. And then Jesus cries at his death. is it because he's the only one that hasn't risen twice I wait wait who who you're Lazarus is stealing Jesus's thunder oh a little bit

a little bit well if you think about it right Elisha never even dies and if you're Catholic neither does Mary ascended to heaven don't know who either of those two people are but we're getting lost here all right so everyone in all of history comes back and they're basically judged evil is sent for the last time and death itself is thrown out. No more death. People don't die anymore and that part of the human cycle, right, of death being a punishment of Adam and Eve. It is done. Now, what's left at the end of Revelation is basically the opposite of everything that came before. Not fire, not disappearance,

not terror, not chaos. It is a new heaven and a new earth, a city, the new Jerusalem coming down. God also pulls up and dwells directly with humanity all the souls of humanity. All the souls of sort of reunited with their creator and perfect communion with God. And there's a promise. It's pretty plain. No more death. No more crying. And God will wipe away every tier.

There will be no more pain. I mean, how awesome is that? It's not pretty sweet. The old order, the empire, the suffering, the evil, the death, and the crying. It's gone for good. And that is the map of this specific dispensationalist philosophy. from the moment of the rapture to seven years of increasingly harder and harder tribulation to chaos and Armageddon to the return of Christ to a world made new it is a fantastic story

it is cinematic it's got everything you want there's a hero there's a you know a great sage you could say there's a trial there's a moment of no return and then a transformation where we've learned something that's the hero's journey my boy there's a villain there's of course there's a I can't forget that. We're basically, we're describing every great story ever. We're talking about Harry Potter right now. But it all comes back to the Biblio. Now, millions of people believe that it is the literal future of the planet.

That's pretty wild. Maybe it is. I don't know. But there's something that almost nobody who believes in the rapture actually knows. That for roughly the first, I don't know, 18, 100 years of Christianity, the version that we just walked through didn't really exist. So, like, let's say you got dropped into, like, I don't know, like a church in Rome and like 700. And you told them about this thing.

You're like, hey, the rapture, right? Jesus coming back. We're going to go. And there's going to be a war and all this stuff. They would be like, maybe we've heard parts of that, but they would be a little confused. So if you go all the way to the beginning, the apostles, the early church, the martyrs in the arena, they absolutely believe that Jesus would return. That was like in the deal. Last supper, like, hey, I'm coming back.

Don't worry. They believed in judgment and in resurrection. and in a final reckoning. That conviction runs straight through the whole story. Like, don't get me wrong. As a Catholic, I believe Jesus is coming back. As a Greek Orthodox, you've 100% think Jesus is coming back. You have pictures of him all over your house.

You can't wait until he shows up, and you get to take a picture off and be like, no, not even close. My bad. Turns out he's Arab. I've got his name. You got it. Literally Christos. You're going to look at him and be like, this is so funny.

My name's also. And he's going to be like, no way, how do you spell it? And you're like, with an O at the end. He's like, oh, that's so funny. Mine's not. Anyway, so the specific thing, like a secret separate rapture that quietly empties the church out of the world before like the seven year tribulation, the disappearance and like the left behind survivors and the cars with people missing, the two stage sequence of return. You will not really find it laid out anywhere in like the early church teaching as far as I'm concerned. Not in the medieval church.

It's not even in the Reformation. Like Martin Luther's not really even talking about this. And then 1830, not BC. I'm talking 1830 like, like recently 1830. Like Mark Twain 1830? When was Mark Twain alive? I think it was the end of the 1800s. That's how you know.

But you got what I'm saying. Civil War 1830. Now we're getting closer. It appears. The man at the center of this whole thing is an Irishman named John Nelson Darby. Was that close to Mark Twain? He was born in 1835. Oh, I'm on it with that, dude.

I was, I think I kind of nailed that. You were talking about middle-aged Mark Twain. Yeah, exactly. Not newborn Mark Twain. No. No, I'm talking, you know, roughly the time, right? Now, sorry, this guy, John Nelson Darby, he's a lawyer and then became a priest in the church of Ireland, and he grew, you could say, disillusioned in his practice.

And so, as most fervent believers that are disillusioned with sort of the bureaucracy of a big church, he joins an intense movement. called the Plymouth Brethren. Now, Darby, don't be wrong, was brilliant and also a little anxious, and was convinced that the mainstream church had lost the thread of prophecy entirely. So his one big move, the idea that everything hangs on, was a hard split between Israel in the church. Yeah, God, he argued, had two separate peoples with two separate destinies.

You had an earthly people, Israel, and a heavenly people, the church. church, aka like believers or Christians. And once you divide them that cleanly, a gap kind of like cracks open in the prophetic timeline. So again, at this point in the 1830s, Israel as a nation doesn't exist. This is sort of talking about like the biblical idea of Israel. So just to be clear, the leftover 17th week of Daniel that we talked about, it gets shoved into the future as the seven year tribulation and the church being heavenly has no business being on earth for it. the church gets removed first. They get evacuated because they're believers. They're raptured out before the earthly drama begins. That's the seam where the second coming quietly splits into

two sort of smaller second comings, right? Now, where Darby actually got this is kind of a scandal in its own right. So there is a centuries old claim that he didn't derive it from careful study at all. Now, this is a claim. It's difficult to verify these things historically. So this is what sort of circulates online that people have discussed. But basically it goes like this, that in 1830, a 15-year-old Scottish girl named Margaret McDonald, in a state of religious ecstasy, had a vision containing the seed of a two-stage coming,

which Darby then heard and kind of borrowed and then kind of spread and systematized really without credit. Now, is it true? It's disputed. Defenders will go through McDonald's actual words and argue that there's no clear rapture in them. There's no, like, two-part second coming. But then critics say that the timing is, like,

really kind of, you know, too neat to be a coincidence. So it is not settled by any means. I'm not going to weigh in on 1800s drama. But to be fair, a few scattered earlier figures, like an obscure 18th-century Baptist named Morgan Edwards and a handful of others, seem to kind of gesture at something rapture-ish before Darby. But those are fragments that,

were kind of sort of assembling in retrospect. No one had ever assembled them into a full kind of worldview schematic until Darby. You know, whatever the spark was, Darby was the engine. And his idea crossed the Atlantic. So through the 1860s into the 1870s, Darby was touring the United States, preaching to Protestant audiences that were hungry for this kind of like confident, literal Bible-centric, solar scripture,

a detailed reading of prophecy and, oh boy, a colic wildfire. But it was just one teaching amongst many, but what made it unstoppable was a book, specifically a study Bible. Yes, this is what I was referencing before, these sort of like reader bibles that will have like the text and then like an interpretation of the text sort of next to it to kind of help you understand. So in 1909, an American named Cyrus Schofield published the Schofield reference Bible through Oxford University Press, and it did something.

pretty clever. It printed the beloved, trusted King James text that was read all through the Anglican sort of Protestant world, and it is the actual words of scripture for many Christians, and most people don't really dispute it, and wrapped in the book are Schofield's own footnotes and commentary right there on the same page. And those notes were kind of pure, reminiscent of Darby. It talks about the Israel Church split, the pre-tribulation rapture, the entire architecture that we've just laid out. And it was presented not as one guy's theory or some dude has an interpretation of this, but like, hey, if you're reading this, this is obviously what it means. It's sitting right there next to the sacred

words of scripture. Like, I'm not making it up. This is like God's word. And then like, you know, the fan fiction of God's word that's like they're kind of saying is God's word. It's a little, you know, it's a little, uh, you get what I'm saying, right? You kind of, he's just, like yeah it's the same it's like when you like you have like a restaurant then like another restaurant right next to it that has like similar branding and people kind of get confused so i'm not saying it's wrong i'm just saying that's how it's sort of spread so for millions of readers of the scofield bible there was suddenly no real distinction between the bible and the footnote like obviously they didn't claim like also this is the bible but people reading it on their own after church they got a little

confused and also the story is so good it's like if you're reading the bible and you start reading this for like, I forgot the Bible. I mean, he's talking about seals and bowls. Like, let me read about this crazy, like, cinematic end of the world. So, if it shared the page with the Word of God in the same sort of authoritative type, it kind of felt like the Word of God. Now, the Schofield Bible was a hit. I mean, we're talking Harry Potter numbers.

This was selling in the millions. And it became one of Oxford's best-selling books ever, literally. And as a result, it trained generations of American Christians, as well as American Christian pastors to read Darby's 1830. rapture tribulation system schematic as if it was kind of on par to any other sort of Christian theology. And then of course, pop culture takes it and then cemented it into the brains of Christians around the world. So in 1970, a preacher named Hal Lindsay published the late great planet Earth. This was a fun little paperback kind of deal, basically wiring Cold War headlines directly into

revelation. So like, it's basically been like, hey, we're in the height of the Cold War. Well, it turns out the Cold War is a part of Revelation. People were like, what? So it became a bestselling nonfiction book, perhaps the bestselling of the entire decade. We're talking tens of millions of copies, even a film that was narrated by none other than Orson Wells. And then came the 90s and 2000. This is my generation. This is the stuff I was on left behind. So you got Tim LeHay and then Jerry Jenkins. and they take a novel that becomes a massive hit about basically kids that are left behind and the rapture happens, they got to deal with the chaos.

And then that basically turned like Darby's timeline into like a page turning thriller. And the series was 16 books. There were tens of millions of copies sold. And then for what do you do with a good book, turn to the movie. And it opens exactly where we open this episode, the moment after the disappearance,

like piles of clothes, the car with like an empty. driver's seat. And that is why the image is in your head, not because it's like, you know, like written out word for word by Paul to someone. It's like, you know, because a 19th century Irish guy really laid out an awesome interpretation that got printed next to the King James text, that they got packaged into a 70s bestseller that they got turned into like a fictionalized, like religious novel that then got turned into a movie. And through that sequence, it was basically made the uncontested truth of the Protestant Christian idea of the end of the world.

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the raw materials in this story is ancient. Paul really did write about being caught up in the the clouds 2,000 years ago and all the Christians going up with the debt. Daniel's 70 weeks, that's in the Bible. Revelations, beasts, and the mark of the beast and the battles and the trumpets and, you know, that day happening like the twinkling of an eye. Those texts are real and verified and very old and they have plagued Christians' minds for millennia. Funny, right?

Yeah, see what I did there? Mm-hmm. Maybe two millennium, right? Maybe three. Maybe three. But the arrangement, so like the dispefews, hearing cars, the countdown, the sort of chronology of everything, the two-stage vanishing act, and like people sort of ascending, and then all that stuff. That's younger than, like, I mean,

the 1830s, like the, when did the telephone happen? Alexander Graham Bell? I think it was before that. Like, the telephone happened, and then this version of the rapture happened after. I'm almost positive. Telephone was invented in 1876. Oh, okay, so roughly around the same time. It took us 100 years, from independence to figure it out. That's actually really impressive when we put it that way. That's wild. True. Someone was born during like the American Revolution

and then in their lifetime they were like, hello? But they got prank called. Someone was hanging with George Washington and they got prank called. Think about that. Yeah, but it took 100 years to go from wooden teeth to telephone.

And we're getting off topic. Not wooden teeth, actually. They were human teeth and you don't want to know where they came from. That's a little dark history for you. Google that. Anyway, it feels like it was like when I remember hearing it as a kid, I was like, oh, this is like, they didn't teach us this in Catholic school. This was carved into the foundation of Christianity.

It wasn't exactly. And the effect of the theology runs so deep that at the height of its popularity and culture, some Protestant churches were holding rapture drills. I remember 2012, people were like, hey, 2012, my calendar's up. Rapture time. People were like praying people with rapture stuff. Like, they're super Christian dad. They would like leave their clothes around.

like they would just like drop a cup of water and then like everyone in the house would like hide and they'd be like oh the rapture there were like literal rehearsals the same way like a school was like a fire drill or something congregations and christian schools would practice for this moment of disappearance like what would the faithful do what would the world look like you know the instant that it happened like if your parents get raptured and you don't like where should you go children raised in this context of teaching described coming home to an empty house and feeling like the terror like it happened they got left behind. I wasn't a true believer. I didn't love Jesus enough. I was a sinner and everyone else left and I'm here alone. That's how deep it went. I knew people that were on this

wave. They were like, hey, the rapture's going to happen and I'm going. And if I don't go, I'm going to go later whenever the chaos happens. They didn't make a threat really. But it kind of sound like I was about to say, right? Honestly, that is, it's kind of a fear thing that kind of drives the whole thing. It's like, hey, knock, knock, all of a sudden, the one who knocks comes and you better hope that he takes you with him. Because if you strip away the timelines and the footnotes and all the details, the pre-tribulation rapture is answering a simple question. Am I going to make it when Jesus comes back and says,

hey, all the good people, all the straight A students that love Jesus, you're coming with me. And that's really at the bottom line. That's like what all the people that really believe this or even flirt with this are hoping. Like, hey, I'm going to make it, right? And it answers with a very clear line drawn right down the middle, of the human race, the saved and those that are left behind.

But remember, many Christians read the exact same verses, and they don't see any reason to believe any of this. They say, like, hey, this is symbolic, this is theater turmoil that human beings are dealing with. It's not a literal schedule. Like, we've become too literal with apocalyptic literature. It's a poem about, like, faith, surviving evil, not like a countdown to, like, a plane falling out of the sky because the pilot was Christian.

Which, if you're going to be in a plane and you believe in the rapture, you better hope your pilot's not Christian, right? Why? Because what if he gets raptured and then the whole plane crashes, dude? That's a good point. You want to be like, hey, guy, are you Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish? Great. We love that.

You believe in God. You want to live. You love humanity. But when the rapture happens, you're going to be here for another seven years. Like, if you're one of these people that believes that, you don't want a Christian guy. It would be terrifying. Now, the reason we can't look away from this is like, hey, what if they're not wrong? like what if maybe they're right what if maybe were the ones that are misinterpreing it so there you

have it there's the roadmap according to dispensationalism and the dispensationalists i hope i did a good job of representing it in the most honest and truthful way that i could truly maybe i made some jokes here and there i don't mean to disparage anyone's uh beliefs about the end of times i just did go to protestant school for a long time and it's just kind of fun to poke fun of my christian brethren now there are four different interpretations we only talked about one of them, you know, the millennium, the tribulation, all that stuff. So this is not the totality of what Christians believe. It is just a sliver. So now, just in case you show up at your house and everyone's gone and all your Christian friends are nowhere to be seen and you're

still here with all the sinners, at least you know what happened. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief synopsis about dispensationalist rapture theology. Like I said, it's a wild story. It is fun to go on the ride as a Catholic. It's not really something we got down with super hard. Again, Jesus is coming back. We love Jesus. You know, Lord and Savior. It's on my necklace.

Shout out to him, right? Saved all of humanity. God sent his only son. So we might not perish, but have eternal life. That's what we believe. All Christians are on that wave. But the rapture, end of time, people flying out of cars and clothes left behind,

going up to heaven butt-necked. that's Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer that's why every step and dollar raised matters on September 19th

join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk challenge yourself friends and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research together we can carry the fire

and help create a world free from the fear of cancer register today at PMCF walk dot CA it's tough for me to like really get on board I'm like it just seems like it just seems like we're maybe interpreting

very sort of strange apocalyptic literature that's kind of poetic and symbolic maybe maybe a little too literally which is rich coming from a Catholic that believes that the last supper was literal and not symbolic and Protestants we just flipped it like Protestants will be like no no the last supper that was that was a symbol

that's not literally his body and that's bread that's not literally blood it's just wine. This is a symbol. But the end of times, I mean, that's literally going to happen. And the Catholics, we're like, dude, the end of time stuff, you guys are crazy. That's literally a metaphor. But this bread is literally Jesus. It's kind of funny how we do stuff, right? Aren't we just so cute with our little fights? Right? Right, Protestants? Right, guys? Don't hate me. Anyway, Cretius, what did you think? What did you learn about the rapture today? I learned that it's terrifying and that I don't want a Christian pilot. That is true. You don't,

maybe a little Christian. You want him to be like a bad, Christian. You want to be like raised in the church. He loves Jesus, but you know, he's got temperance, but not right now. Kind of St. Augustine vibes. Drinks heavily. Not on the job. Not on the job, but outside. We're getting very specific with our pilot sort of

classifications here. Maybe, I can't imagine if God does the rapture, he's just going to make the planes crash. I'm sure he's going to be like, knock on the window, like, hey, great news. You're getting out of here, but you've got to go into O'Hare right now. Maybe it's a diversion. Put it on not a

Pilot. Yeah, you can do autopilot. Which, I mean, Pilot. I feel like Jesus just hears the name Pilot, and he's like, oh, this guy again. I've dealt with you once. I wonder if he does anything with Pilot at the end of times. Like, you think if you go to heaven and you see Jesus, you're like, yeah, where's Pilot? And he's like, where do you think?

You're like, yeah, you want to know where pilot is? And you're like, where's Hitler? And he's like, oh, Hitler actually repented right at the end. You're like, wait, what? That's crazy. Where's Jane Goodall? And he's like, oh, she wasn't Christian. And they're like, no, what, Jane Goodalls is crazy.

That's going to be crazy. I can't wait to get to heaven and find out what's going on. It's like going to be like, I wonder if there's going to be like a week of gossip. If I know anything about my family, oh, there's going to be a lot of gossip. We're going to get to heaven. We're going to be like, did you see the neighbors? Didn't make it. Now, we're friends, but you seem sure that you're going.

I mean, I feel like, I feel like God's going to see this podcast and be like, hey, you, you looked into it. I'm going to purgatory probably that's another Catholic thing when was the last time you confessed I confessed actually not that long ago funny you mentioned this yeah I confessed right before my sister's funeral which was like nine months ago

and then I confessed like four months ago hmm yeah I like confession to be honest with you was it in the booth or no always in the booth dude really yeah you gotta cut it up with the homie in the sauna you gotta pop in there drive through window be like father it's been X amount of days

it's also embarrassing to go in there and you haven't been a confession in like five years and he's like, when was your last confession? You're like, I think Obama was president. He's like, whoa. And I'm like, I know, dude, it's been a minute.

I'm going through it right now. How much time you got? And you can just tell it. He's like, oh my gosh, I was going to get out of here in two minutes. Literally you're my last guy. And you haven't been in here since Obama? You got here in like early Facebook days?

This is crazy. How many hell marries were you told? That's the thing. It kind of depends on the priest. That's sort of fire. You go to a priest and like sometimes He'll be like, I once time I got prescribed a podcast. It's a priest's homie of mine.

Was it the priest's podcast? No, imagine that. He was like, check out this podcast. Also, use the promo code. Use the promo code Jesus. It really helps out of the show. But I went to a priest's friend and I did confession. He was like, your penance, I'm going to send you a link.

Just check this out. It's going to really kind of answer a lot of stuff for you. I click a two hour long podcast with ads. It's very modern, though. The audacity. ads on a Jesus podcast? Edit that out. I was just like, all right.

So that was cool. And then sometimes you go in, I've told the priest like the darkest secrets and he goes, two Hail Mary's. I'm like, what?

You didn't think I brought it? By the way, can I talk about this on my podcast? Yeah, it's a little offensive. Like, I come in here, I spill the beans. I'm like, dude, I did this bad thing.

I did this bad thing, this, this, this and this. And he goes, yeah, it's like two Hail Mary's. Like, what's the exchange rate on sins to Hill Mary's? Like, I feel like Hail Mary's that much.

That's awesome. I assumed it would be like pesos. I assumed he'd be like, yeah, 10,000 Hail Marys get started. Right. But it goes a long way. Say your Hail Marys today, all right. Happy Sunday. Anyway, hope you enjoyed the episode.

I hope you learned something about the rapture. If you are a dispensationalist, tell me if I got anything wrong. Truly, I have no conviction here. I'm not trying to prove anyone right. I just want to represent all the ideas as best I can. So drop a comment. Let me know if you're not a dispensationalist. Maybe you're not even Christian.

Maybe you don't believe that Jesus, Christ to the Lord, what do you think about this? How does this fit with your end-time story? If you are Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever you are, I would love to know what you're thinking. So please drop a comment. I read all of them. Even if I don't get to all of them, I might not respond, but someone will and it'll be nice, you know, conducive to the community. Just be nice about it, right? We've got a nice little vibe going, and don't mush the vibe. That's all I'm asking, all right? Also, if you like history content, great news, we have history camp. If you like deep dives on mysteries, conspiracies, all sorts of craziness happening

in the world today. Great news. We have Camp Gagnon. That is the main channel where everything goes down. I do interviews with people way smarter than me. It is a great time. And if you just like to rock with a religious Bible, great news, you are in the right place. This is religion camp. We do these every single Sunday. Make sure you to subscribe. It really helps out the show. And I'll see you next Sunday. Go to church or Goodwar or the mosque or the synagogue or wherever you want to go and just believe something. All right. Life is better with belief. That's my thought. Anyway, God bless you all. Peace be with you. Have a blessed Sunday. And I'll see you next week. Peace. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer.

That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.