Should We Expect a Rapture at Any Moment?

The end time prophecies contained in Scripture have led Christians in every age to wondered whether they will be the ones to face such tribulations. The historic answer is yes. Jesus warned us that we would have to face persecution (John 15:20), and no generation of Christianity has been exempted.

However, in the nineteenth century, dispensationalists began teaching that Christians will not have to face this trial. Instead, before the great tribulation begins, they will be caught up to heaven and spared the reign of the Antichrist and the horrors it contains.

They referred to this event as the Rapture, based on the Latin word rapio(“to snatch, to carry away”), in reference to an event Paul describes when “we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:17).

According to the scenario dispensationalists propose, the Rapture is the next event in God’s plan and will happen without warning, at any moment. Jesus will descend into the atmosphere and all true Christians will be caught up to be with him in the sky. This will include dead Christians, who will be raised back to life. Jesus will then take his followers back to heaven while the Antichrist reigns and all hell breaks loose on earth. Then, at the end of the great tribulation, Jesus will return to earth, slay the Antichrist, and begin his thousand-year earthly reign.

There are multiple problems with this view. First, as we have seen, the Church rejects the idea of a future earthly millennium, so the overall scenario is based on a false premise.

Furthermore, the dispensationalist view does not fit what St. Paul says. It splits the Second Coming in half, with Jesus first descending to claim his Church and then, years later, returning to deal with the Antichrist. Yet in the relevant passages, Paul speaks only of a single coming.

This is confirmed when he takes up the same subject in his second letter to the Thessalonians, referring to a single event involving “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him” (2 Thess. 2:1), the same event he had spoken of just prior to this, describing what will take place “when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels . . . when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints” (1:7, 10).

Paul very clearly explains, however, that this “day of the Lord . . . will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.” (2:3-4).

In the end, “the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming” (2:8). On the same occasion, “those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus . . . shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord” (1:9).

The sequence Paul lays out clearly does not involve Christians being caught up to heaven while the Antichrist reigns on earth a thousand years before the Final Judgment. Instead, it involves the Antichrist reigning first and then Jesus returning to destroy the Antichrist, raise the dead, accomplish the Final Judgment, and take the faithful to be with him in the heavens.

Thus we shouldn’t expect a Rapture to take place at any moment now.We willbe caught up to be with Jesus—after the reign of the man of lawlessness, not before.

In the meantime, the promise of Jesus—“I will keep you from the hour of trial which is coming on the whole world, to try those who dwell upon the earth” (Rev. 3:10)—should not be interpreted as an exemption from struggles but as a special grace of perseverance in the midst of them: “While I was with them, I kept them in thy name. . . . I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one” (John 16:12, 15).

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