Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is the Rapture Real? | Keith and Patrick

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Is Jesus going to return to snatch his people up to heaven before the great tribulation? Or does this idea require us to read the Bible the way conspiracy theorists read history? Keith and Patrick tackle a popular belief from pop theology. They dive into key passages like Matthew 24:37-41 and 1 Thess. 4:16-17 to show how the Left Behind reading of these passages is a creative, but careless way to make sense of the text. Resources: 40 Questions about the End Times by Eckhard Schnabel Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. In this episode, Patrick and I are going to tackle a fun topic. I think a topic that you've probably heard about and it's kind of fun to discuss and think through the history and the practical application of the rapture. Patrick, when did you first hear the rapture? I think I first heard about the rapture from my mom. My mom became a Christian when I was in the fourth grade, so I didn't really grow up in church or church culture. But the church she went to was really invested in this 90s book series. A lot of people will recognize it called Left Behind. There's actually been movies made about there. There's a Nicholas Cage one. If you're a great Nicholas Cage lover, I'm sure you've already seen it. But one of the things that happens in the book is that Jesus returns and everybody gets raptured, which apparently means they like bodily, disappear or like their bodies of, I don't know. All that I know is that their clothes get left behind, and then they fly up in the sky to be with Jesus, and he rescues them off into heaven for a tribulation. And did you know all that when you were a kid? Well, I knew enough to know that when I came home and couldn't find my mom, it was possible she got raptured and I was just left behind. Your mom was a rapture evangelist, I guess, right? I don't know if she was. I mean, on one level,

I think I liked this as a kid because it's kind of interesting, you know, like, oh, like, what if this rapture happened? Plains are crashing and cars are crashed. You know, like, a fifth, sixth grader. That's pretty cool stuff. You must have been a pretty anxious kid if you immediately went to, I can't find mom. She must have been raptured. Oh, crap. She's raptured. Well, and now I love the rapture because a really fun thing to do is go online and search for rapture memes. One of my favorite ones is a guy who's like pinned to the top of his ceiling. And apparently the rapture's happened, but because he didn't cut a hole in his roof, he's just stuck there and can't get out. That's pretty good. You're a horrible person. You've got a

rapture hole in your house, right? I first heard of the rapture when I was a kid going to this Bible camp. My parents would send me every summer. We ain't go to church. It was more of just something fun to do in the summer. And they were part of a group called the Plymouth Brethren, which we'll come back to later in this episode as we kind of talk about the history of the rapture. So to them, it was really important. The whole left behind theology that you referred to that kind of forms the basis for the Kirk Cameron and then the Nicholas Cage. Let's don't forget Kurt Cameron additions that you're aging yourself more than me. Maybe so. But there's real theology behind those books. I'm not saying it's particularly good theology. I'm just saying that it's real stuff there that people

believe and study the Bible and came to these conclusions. And they taught that to us as kids. And we were kind of scared to death because there was these rapture songs. And we would sing about people who were left behind. Did you say rapture songs or rap songs? No, you're on a roll. Rapture songs that you would sing about people being left behind and will you be ready? And I was scared to death as a kid. I was going to be left behind. I don't know.

Did you know you were going to be left behind? Back then, what I believed was, at least what they were teaching me was, is that to be left behind was to kind of go to hell. It was to be on the bad side of God. See, I always knew I was going to be left behind as a kid. I always knew. I was like, that's why he went home. I know my mom got raptured. She's for sure going to heaven, but me?

But you probably not. I was worried. Still not sure you are. So maybe some of you are not as familiar with the rapture as Patrick and I, and let me just try to briefly explain it. The rapture is a teaching that says that Jesus will return in the future, and he will gather all Christians who believe in him, and he will take them to heaven. And after a certain amount of time, he will come back and establish his millennial kingdom. And in between that, the seven years is a period of tribulation, hardship, trial. So it's kind of like Jesus is coming on a rescue mission to get all the good people off of earth before things go to hell and handbasket.

Right. And the view that I'm kind of laying out here is called a pre-tribulational view of the rapture, meaning exactly what you just said. Christians are taken out of earth before the tribulation, and then Jesus comes back, brings his judgment, establishes this millennial kingdom. I mean, if you want to go online, there's all kinds of charts and graphs. It can get pretty complicated depending on how deep you get into it. There's a great left behind Wikipedia page if you want to go down that particular rabiddle. Now, if it's not already obvious, this is not a theological perspective that either Keith or I subscribe to, and largely because we don't think it's something that can be found in the Bible. Now, there's some people listening like, okay, I'm not listening this podcast to get some sort of esoteric theological lesson. So does this even really matter? I mean, you even be talking about this?

Well, it really matters. What you believe about the end of the story matters how you live during the story. When I was on staff with the Campus Crusade, I was friends with a guy who I believe is now still the campus director of crew in Springfield. And he was taking classes at Dallas Seminary. And one of the professors was explaining to the class why so many of them have second jobs. So they're a professor and an author, a professor and a pastor, a professor.

professor and something else. And according to my friend, he told the class, this professor told the class that the reason they're all having to work these extra jobs is because they didn't save for retirement because they're left behind theology, taught them that Jesus was coming back soon. And so to save for retirement was kind of pointless and maybe even faithless. And so this professor was giving them kind of some advice saying, hey, your theology matters and save for retirement because you don't want to end up like me working multiple jobs. So your theology matters in all kinds of ways in your life and your beliefs about how God's kingdom comes on earth will affect how you live your life now. I think that's absolutely true. And one of our concerns about this particular theology is

precisely that it trains people to not worry about this world. It gives you an attitude that says, this world, again, it's only destined for, in many perspectives, destruction, or at least terrible tribulation and suffering. And so why worry? about it. There's far more important things to spend your time on it. And I think that that perspective would surprise Jesus, because his great prayer was not that he would return and rapture us away to go to heaven. His great prayer was, God, your kingdom come on earth as in heaven. Before we go any further, let me just say this, the people who ran that Bible camp that I went to when I was a kid, a part of this Plymouth Brethren group, again, that will come back and explain some of the

history of how they're related to this teaching on the rapture. We're some of the godliest people I know. I mean, I owe myself being a Christian in human terms largely to that group of people. They talked to me about Jesus. They prayed for me. They modeled godly character. They're just good people. And there are a lot of smart, sincere Christians who hold to this view of rapture. So Patrick and I like to have fun.

We make fun of ourselves. We make fun of a lot of things, including this belief on rapture. Now, we don't think it's right. We don't think it's biblical. We don't think it's helpful. But we're not mocking the Christians as much as just kind of having fun with some beliefs Christians have that as you think about them don't quite make sense. Yeah, and along the same lines, thinking about my own past with rapture beliefs, my mom, when she became a Christian, was

studiously trying to learn about the Bible. And she was doing the best with the resources that she was given by her church at the time. And everybody's saying, these are great books. You should trust them. And again, I think if we could get my mom on the show now, she'd say that she probably doesn't hold that perspective anymore. But here's what I find so interesting. The stuff around the rapture and the end times, it was the first thing in my life that ever got me interested in the Bible. Up until then, I had zero interest in reading my Bible. None of it sounded very fascinating or engaging, but this was the first time I started getting interested. Now, here's the deal. Reading the Bible the way that people who hold to a rapture perspective read it, I don't think is a good

way of reading the Bible, but I am to this day thankful that there are people who are serious about reading their Bibles, however they're reading it. When I think about the kind of perspective you have to take to come to a view of the rapture that we're talking about. I kind of call it a conspiracy theory perspective. What I'm trying to get at is that I think there's a way that we can read our Bible. We read it the same way that conspiracy theorists read history. So like a conspiracy theory, we'll go back to a historical event, maybe JFK getting shot from the grassy knoll, and they'll look at all the details. And they'll say, well, if you look at the angles, and if you look at the timing, and if you look at the pictures, and they reconstruct all the little details in a new way,

which honestly kind of has an inner coherence. It kind of almost makes sense. And that's the beauty of conspiracy theories. They give you this feeling of, I'm an insider, I'm a truth seeker, I see through the lies that everybody else believes, and I see the core in the center of it all. And we can do the exact same thing with our Bibles. We can read it and we can rearrange the details in a way that kind of does have an internal coherence.

It kind of does make sense, but it's really removed from what the Bible itself is trying to say and communicate. So if we kind of work from our day backwards, what we find is that the rapture is taught most prominently in left behind books and the movies like that. But if we keep just kind of working our way back, what we find is that there is, like I mentioned earlier, a theology behind the rapture. And that theology belongs to a guy named John Nelson Darby. He taught something called dispensational theology. He lived in the 1800s in the United Kingdom and was a really prominent Bible teacher. His teaching on in times and rapture and millennial kingdom and things like that became popularized

in the Schofield Reference Bible in the United States in the early 1900s. And then that became popular when World War I was happening and there was this kind of feeling like the end of the world was here. And so it was a combination of a relatively modern theology, something that only was a came about in the 1800s, popularized at a time of great social upheaval, made people very open to this idea that the end of the world was coming and that Christians were going to be able to escape all the difficulties and trials that the world was facing. So if I'm understanding you, right, part of what we need to understand is that if we want to hold to the left behind version of the rapture, we're buying into a theology which literally no one believed before 1831,

before the time of John Darby. And that's not to say that there couldn't be things that the church got wrong for 1,800 years. That's, of course, possible. But any time someone starts making a claim like that, I think we should look into it. We should say, well, hold on. There have been a lot of wonderful people who've been serious about their Bibles throughout the centuries, and if none of them came to the same conclusion as this person, maybe this person was the one

who was wrong, not the rest of Christian history. During the early 1900s, you also have this debate between the modernness and the fundamentalists. And so the fundamentalists were people that we would probably just call Christians who are serious about their faith. Don't think of modern-day fundamentalism and import that back to the 1920s. They were just serious Christians who believed in the resurrection of Jesus, who believed the Bible was the Word of God, who believed in the virgin birth, just kind of the basics or the fundamentals of the faith. And then you had this modernist debate that said, hey, look, give it. science and the progress that we've seen in the centuries, we need to move beyond the Bible.

We need to reinterpret the Bible in a more figurative way. And they started denying some of the more miraculous parts of the Bible. So the fundamentalists, or again, just the serious Christians, they react against what they see as the liberalizing trends of modernism by saying, look, we've got to be really committed to literal interpretation of the Bible. We can't spiritualize this way. We can't turn it into fables. We've got to be strict literalists. But strict literalism will get you into a lot of trouble. Strict literalism will lead you away from what the Bible is trying to teach.

So it was based on what they called and what they saw and believed as strict literalism that they interpreted Jesus' return to the earth to take away Christians before the tribulation. And one of the challenges of strict literalism is that it never actually works. Jesus says, I am the door of the sheep. But so far as I know, there are no strict literalists who believe that Jesus is literally made of wood. Now, my only point in saying that is that we all understand there's times where you have to pick and choose, and there's times where we're going to take things metaphorically and symbolically in times when we don't, whether we call ourselves a literalist or we don't call ourselves a literalist. What I find fascinating about rapture theology is that, in my opinion, it's actually the opposite of literalism.

It's the opposite of literalism because it doesn't actually come out of the literal text of the Bible. You will find nowhere in the Bible a passage which talks about Jesus returning to escape away his people for a seven-year tribulation. To come to that conclusion, you have to piece together a lot of different passages in a very novel way, in a very creative way, in a very non-literal imaginative way. I think it's a really imaginative theology. It gets marks for that, but it gets very low marks on the literalism. So even if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I do take the Bible literalism. literally. Rapture theology isn't a great place to start. So if we're just following a historical progress of this doctrine, like we said, it starts in the 1800s with John Nelson Darby. The Civil War and World War I provides this context for people thinking the end of the world is near.

You've got the modernist, fundamentalist debate. But then if you fast forward to the 1970s, you get a movie called The Thief in the Night, which was produced by the Billy Graham Association. and it was an amazingly powerful film. Maybe a better way of saying it is that it was amazingly influential film. Randall Balmer, who's a professor and kind of a cultural observer, says it is only a slight exaggeration to say that a thief in the night affected the evangelical film industry the way that sound or color affected Hollywood. Think about that.

Think about how much sound and color affected Hollywood. Well, that's how much he's saying that the thief in the night film promoting this rap that all Christians are going to be taken, that their clothes and their families and their life is going to be completely left behind before this great tribulation comes. That's how much that impacted the evangelical church. And doesn't that kind of make sense? Because left behind theology is kind of like action-adventure theology. It's great for TV. It's great for movies. That's why we've had multiple left-behind movies since the books originally came out. So how Lindsay has a book in the 70s, called the late great planet Earth. And he continues to popularize this in ways that

appeal to that kind of action movie genre. He said that the locusts and Revelation are these army helicopters. And he was really specific on exactly what kind of army helicopter. And can't you see that the Apostle John, when he wrote that letter of Revelation, was talking about this particular helicopter that's now come into existence? Look, guys, this is the end. that the Book of Revelation talked about. And now we're almost expanding beyond the rapture, but I think it's worth saying. One of the problems with a lot of the end-time specialists who have popularized this view is that they seem to think that the Book of Revelation was written primarily about 20th century

or now 21st century America, which is a view that I find bizarre, at the very least, because it suggests that the author John, when he wrote the book of Revelation, he gave it to ancient people and said, hey, guys, I just want you to know, this isn't going to apply to you at all. It's not going to be anything that talks to you in your day. But if you could just hold on to it for 2,000 years for the Americans, they're really going to benefit from it. So just hold tight. They're going to come. And more recently, I don't know exactly when, but more recently, Jim Baker from Jim and Tamufay Baker fame, was on CBN promoting the same thing, how Lindsay was back in the 70s, that these particular helicopters is what John was thinking of when he was talking

about the locusts and the judgment of the locusts. So again, one of the biggest problems with this view, before we even get to the Bible, is that, first of all, it's historically novel. It's from the 1800s. Most Christians throughout history have not believed this. The second biggest problem is, again, that it takes a conspiracy theory approach to the Bible. To get this view of the rapture, what you have to do is take little passages and pieces from all over the Bible and rearrange them in a way that when you rearrange them, there is kind of

an internal coherence. It kind of makes sense what people are saying. But when you read those passages in their original context, you'll really quickly realize this can't possibly be talking about what the end-time specialists say that they're talking about. So maybe the best place to go next is actually hopping into the Bible and reading two of the big passages that get tossed around that appear to some people to be teaching the rapture. We'll go ahead and start in Matthew 24. So Matthew chapter 24, verse 37, listen to what Jesus says.

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Up to the day Noah entered the Ark, and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at a handmill. One will be taken and the other left.

The left behind theology says that the person you want to be there is the person who was taken, who is taken out of earth before the judgment came. But let's think about that for a second. Jesus is clearly comparing his return to the days of Noah. If you were alive in the days of Noah, did you want to be taken or did you want to be left? Well, you wanted to be left because to be taken was to suffer the judgment of the flood. So do you see that left behind theology in this pre-tribute? Rappur has gotten this exactly backwards. In Noah's Day, you wanted to be left behind. That's

where the believers in God were. Those who were taken, well, they were the ones who were judged. Yeah, and again, a strict literal reading of this passage cannot lead to a rapture theology. In verse 39, the people who are judged are literally described in this way. It says, until the flood came and took them away. It's obvious that Jesus saw the people who were being taken away as those who undergo judgment, and it's obvious that he wanted his followers to be like Noah, the only ones left behind. So let's go ahead and look at another passage. First Thessalonians 4, verses 16 and 17. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

After that, we who are still alive and are left will be snatched up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever. So this is kind of the classic rapture passage, and people read it. And here's the thing, if you already have a rapture theology in your head, you're probably thinking, see, you just proved your own point was wrong. If you don't have a rapture theology in your head, however, you would never come to the conclusion that what this passage is describing is Jesus coming down to take people up and rescue them back to heaven. Why do I say that? Well, if you read the passage carefully, what's the happening. It's clear that Jesus is coming down. Jesus is coming from heaven down to earth. In fact,

we have lots of other passages in the New Testament, which describe Jesus' return in this exact way that he's going to come, that there's going to be the resurrection of the dead. To add in a second step that Jesus is going to go back up to heaven, that's really imaginative. It's really creative. The problem is there's nothing in the passage that talks about Jesus going back up and returning to heaven. Now, the obvious pushback here is going to be, well, doesn't it describe people coming up in the clouds to meet with him? What's going on there? Well, I think what's happening there, the people coming up in the clouds to meet him, it's actually playing on an old Roman tradition. Back in the ancient world, whenever a king or an emperor would come into your city, what people would do is they would leave the city,

and they would go outside of the city gates to meet the king on his way in. When the king showed up, they would basically lead him in procession into the city. This is what happens on Palm Sunday, by the way. Jesus is outside of the city of Jerusalem. And what do people do? They come out of Jerusalem. they all take up palm branches and they lead him in procession back into the city. Well, that's what Paul's describing here. He's saying that all Jesus's followers on earth are going to meet him between heaven and earth to lead him in procession. Where?

Well, obviously not back up to heaven to where Jesus's kingdom is coming. They're going to lead him down to earth. Again, if you want to say that Jesus is going back up to heaven afterwards, you've got to find a verse that says it. And there simply isn't a verse that says it. We started this episode by talking about how your beliefs concerning the or lots of things about what the Bible would refer to as your last days, how it affects how you live now.

And one of the things that I think is a little bit misleading about rapture theology and can lead us to some wrong conclusions about the Christian life is that it tends to teach that Christians escape the tribulations of this world. So the whole idea of collecting Christians out of the world and taking them out is to keep them safe from the tribulation period. But I think that's almost the opposite of what the Bible teaches, for sure opposite of what Jesus taught. He said, in this world, we will always have trouble. Paul says in Acts 1422 that it is going through the tribulations of this world that we enter into the kingdom of God. So I'm afraid that it unintentionally promotes this idea that Christians

will be removed from the difficulties and hard times of this life instead of seeing that oftentimes the kingdom of God comes in the midst of through because of the tribulations we endure. Yeah, so even if you don't have a left behind theology, I know a lot of Christians who, when they're suffering in life, seem to be a little bit surprised. Why is this happening? This isn't a part of God's plan. This isn't what God intends. And I'm always a little bit surprised by that, because like Keith just said, that's exactly what Jesus promises his followers. In fact, it's not just what he promises. It's what he says will actually bring about his mission on earth. Part of how God's kingdom comes on earth is by Christians willingly undergoing

persecution, suffering, and hardship, and not responding to it with anger, frustration, violence, but responding to it in faith, responding to it in patience, in trusting God. Somehow, when we undergo hardship and we show that we know that there's a better end, we know that we've got a God who will, in the end, protect us and give us a place in his renewed creation. When we live that way, it shows the world that we believe in something greater, something better, something truer than what they believe. If we don't have persecution or hardship in our life, there's no way for us to display that to the watching world. So I can imagine some of you saying, okay, guys, great, you don't believe in the rapture,

but what do you believe in? It doesn't do us much good to just say, don't believe in this, without giving us something that you think the Bible teaches. So fair enough, we can't explore it all here, but we can at least give a little bit of an idea. And we believe that the New Testament pretty clearly teaches that we currently live in the last days, that the last days in a biblical mindset, biblical worldview, started with the coming of Jesus at his incarnation. That began the last days. And we live in that time period. Some people call it the age of the church. But whatever you call it, we live here in this world until Christ's returns. And when Jesus returns, he will resurrect all those who believe in him and establish his

kingdom, fully establish his kingdom of love, justice, and mercy. And we can be a part of that through giving our allegiance to him. We can be a part of that kingdom even now as he builds it here on earth, looking forward to a future time when it will be fully established on a renewed creation, a renewed and transformed earth. The Bible says that all things we do as we give our allegiance to Christ in this life will in some way that we don't fully understand have continuity with the renewed world that he's going to make when he returns. So we aren't just building things to watch them burn.

There's going to be parts of our culture, parts of the business that you work with, parts of the schools that you work. And there's going to be parts of what you've done, which will have continuity with the world that Jesus is going to build. I will never forget when I was in college hearing a talk by guy named Jaram Bars. And in the middle of this talk, he was saying how he loved Jane Austen and her novels. And whatever you think about Jane Austen, there was the next comment that surprised me. He said, I can't wait to read Jane Austen's next novel in heaven.

I hope she talks about some of the characters she wrote about on Earth. And that was a revolutionary moment for me because it made me realize two things. My hope is for an eternal life here on this earth. And it also made me realize that the things I do right now, they're going to going to have carryover. They matter. They were going to echo into eternity. That's going to change how you live when you live that way. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member

is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.