What Does the Bible Say About the Rapture? 1 Thessalonians 4

The word “rapture” is not in the Bible, but the promise is. When the Lord comes down from heaven, Paul writes, the dead in Christ will rise and the living will be “caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Christians share that hope and differ on its timing.

Paul did not write those lines to start an argument about timing. He wrote to a young church that was burying its dead, and he ended the sentence with the part that matters most to every one of us: “and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” The Latin Bible puts it in six words, et sic semper cum Domino erimus. Every view below, from the most detailed end-times chart to the simplest creed, agrees on that last clause. The disagreements are about the hour. The promise is about the company we will keep.

It comes from Latin. Where the King James Version says “we which are alive and remain shall be caught up,” the Vulgate, the Latin Bible of the Western Church, says rapiemur, we shall be snatched up, from the verb rapio, to seize or snatch. English took “rapture” from that root. Search the King James Bible for the word itself and you will find it nowhere.

Paul’s Greek verb is harpazo. Thayer’s Greek lexicon defines it “to seize, carry off by force,” and the same word describes the Spirit of the Lord catching Philip away after he baptised the Ethiopian (Acts 8:39) and the man in Christ whom Paul describes as “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2). It is a strong, sudden word. Nobody drifts upward in it. God takes hold.

The central passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, and it is worth reading whole:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

1 Thessalonians 4:16–18

Paul tells the same mystery to the Corinthians: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump” (1 Corinthians 15:51–52). Jesus gives the promise in his own voice the night before he dies: “I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:3).

Two further texts are read in very different ways. Jesus says, “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left” (Matthew 24:40). The Left Behind novels, as the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s study describes them, hear in it believers taken from the earth. The Missouri Synod reads the same verse beside the flood in the verse before, which “took them all away” (Matthew 24:39), and so understands the ones taken as those swept off in judgment, like Noah’s neighbours. Paul’s word “meet” is a second puzzle. In Greek it is apantesis, and the New Testament uses it elsewhere for the wise virgins going out at midnight to meet the bridegroom (Matthew 25:6) and for the believers who walked out of Rome to meet Paul on the road (Acts 28:15). In both, as the post-tribulation teacher John Piper observes, people “go out to meet a dignitary and then accompany him in to the place from which they came out.” Piper concludes that “we rise to meet the Lord in the air and then welcome him to earth as king.” Pre-tribulation teachers read the same meeting as the start of a journey to heaven, the coming Dallas Theological Seminary describes as one “to receive to Himself into heaven” his people.

Here the paths divide, and good Christians walk each of them.

Dispensationalists see two stages. First Christ comes “in the air” for his church, and later he comes to the earth in glory. Dallas Theological Seminary, which teaches this view, puts the first stage this way in its doctrinal statement: “the next great event in the fulfillment of prophecy will be the coming of the Lord in the air to receive to Himself into heaven both His own who are alive and remain until His coming and also all who have fallen asleep in Jesus.” It calls this event “the blessed hope,” taking the phrase from Titus 2:13.

The Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed churches teach one visible return of Christ, with no separate coming before it, and post-tribulation teachers, as we will see, also hold one event. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod puts it in one line: “The rapture and the second coming of Christ are the same event.” Its study notes that Paul’s description in verse 16, with its shout, the archangel’s voice and the trumpet, “does not speak of a hidden, secret coming of Christ.”

This is the question premillennialists divide on. Premillennialism, in John Piper’s definition, is “the view that the second coming of Christ will precede the millennium and that he will rule personally and bodily on the earth during the thousand years.” Its teachers ask when the church is caught up: before, during or after the time of great tribulation? Jesus speaks of that time in Matthew 24:21, and dispensational teachers count it as seven years, the last of the seventy “weeks” in Daniel 9:24–27. A book Zondervan published in 1984, The Rapture: Pre-, Mid-, or Post-Tribulational?, gave each answer its own champion. “Premillennialists continue to be divided on the question of the Rapture of the church,” its publisher’s description begins. Paul Feinberg argued for the first view, Gleason Archer for the second and Douglas Moo for the third, and each replied to the other two.

Pre-tribulation

Believers are caught up before the tribulation begins and are with the Lord while it runs its course on earth. This is the view of Dallas Theological Seminary, whose statement says that during that time “the church, the body of Christ, will be in heaven.” Thomas Ice of the Pre-Trib Research Center calls Christ’s promise to the church at Philadelphia the verse that answers the critics: “I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world” (Revelation 3:10). In his reading the church is “promised exemption from the seven-year tribulation period.” For those left on earth, Dallas Seminary’s statement says, “The whole period of Israel’s seventieth week will be a time of judgment on the whole earth.” This is the view most people mean when they say “the rapture”, the one behind Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the Left Behind novels (1995–2007).

Mid-tribulation

Believers are caught up halfway through, after the first three and a half years. Gleason Archer, who argued for it in the 1984 book, wrote that “This interpretation makes a clear division between the first half as the period of the wrath of man, and the second half as the period of the wrath of God,” so that “the final generation of the pre-Rapture church will be subject to the wrath of man, but spared from the wrath of God.” Mid-tribulationists point to Daniel’s last week, which breaks in the middle when “he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease” (Daniel 9:27), and they match Paul’s “last trump” (1 Corinthians 15:52) with the seventh trumpet of Revelation 11:15.

Post-tribulation

Believers go through the tribulation and are caught up at its end, when Christ returns in glory. Douglas Moo made this case in the same book, and John Piper defines the view as holding that “the rapture and the glorious second coming are part of one simultaneous event. The saints rise to meet the Lord in the air and accompany him back as the rightful king of the earth.” Post-tribulationists point to the order of Jesus’ own words, where the gathering comes after the tribulation: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days … they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect” (Matthew 24:29–31). Piper adds that Matthew’s word for that gathering is the one Paul uses for “our gathering together unto him” (2 Thessalonians 2:1), and that in Matthew “it is clearly a post-tribulational context.” Post-tribulationists also cite Paul’s warning to the same church not to be shaken, “for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). If Paul were a pre-tribulationist, Piper asks, “why did he not simply say in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 that the Christians don’t need to worry that the day of the Lord is here because all the Christians are still here?” Preterists read Matthew 24:29–31 differently again, as Christ’s “judgment coming at the end of the Jewish age,” in R.C. Sproul’s words, fulfilled in AD 70.

Four traditions answer in their own words, and each holds the hope of 1 Thessalonians 4 as firmly as anyone.

The Catholic Church teaches that “Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers” (Catechism, paragraph 675), and that she “will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection” (paragraph 677). The church is not lifted out before the trial; she follows Christ through it. There is more on this in Do Catholics believe in the rapture?

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America teaches the same in a few plain words: “For 2,000 years, the Orthodox Church has taught one Second Coming, one Resurrection, and one people of God.” The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, as we saw, calls the rapture and the Second Coming “the same event.” The Reformed Belgic Confession of 1561, one of the confessions of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, says that Christ “will come from heaven, bodily and visibly, as he ascended, with great glory and majesty,” and it borrows Paul’s words from 1 Thessalonians 4:16 for that one day: “with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet.” The same church describes itself as “generally amillennialist,” and its synod of 1920 adopted statements that “implicitly reject dispensationalism.”

“Amillennial” means reading the thousand years of Revelation 20 as a picture of Christ’s reign now, from his ascension to the last day, rather than a future kingdom on earth. On that reading there is no earthly thousand-year reign still to come. The Missouri Synod’s study sums it up: “The second coming of Jesus will be the end of this age, not its beginning.”

In its modern form, from the nineteenth century and from one man above all. John Nelson Darby, a former clergyman of the Church of Ireland, became the leading figure among the Plymouth Brethren and taught them the system now called dispensationalism. Britannica describes it as dividing history into “dispensations,” periods in which God acts in different ways toward his people, with the present age “one of expectant waiting for the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” The Rapture, the Antichrist and Armageddon each had their place in its order of the last days.

Most Protestant churches rejected the Brethren’s wider teaching, but many accepted the premillennial hope of Darby’s followers, and it spread through Bible conferences and preaching, especially in North America. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese says plainly that “no one ever taught this for the first 1,800 years of Christianity.” Dispensationalists answer from Scripture first, with verses such as Revelation 3:10, and they also name earlier witnesses. Thomas Ice of the Pre-Trib Research Center points to Morgan Edwards, a Baptist who set out a rapture before the second coming in a student essay at Bristol in 1742–44, and to a sermon known as Pseudo-Ephraem, which he dates to the fourth century. Ice concludes that “while Darby may have restored the pretrib rapture, he did not originate it.” Each of us can open 1 Thessalonians and weigh it.

No. On this every church agrees, because Jesus settled it: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36). Paul tells the same church that received the promise of the rapture that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2).

That has not stopped people from naming dates. Britannica lists some of them: the former NASA engineer Edgar Whisenant chose Rosh Hashanah in 1988, and the evangelist Harold Camping named two dates in 2011. The days came and went, and the plain word of Jesus was still standing where he left it.

What he asks of us instead is simpler and harder: “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matthew 24:42). Watching means living today as people who expect to see his face: keeping faith and love on like armour, “for an helmet, the hope of salvation” (1 Thessalonians 5:8), and comforting one another, as Paul told the grieving Thessalonians to do. Whichever timing we hold, the hope is the same, and the church has prayed it since the last page of the Bible was written: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

---

• Do Catholics believe in the rapture?
• 17 Bible verses about the rapture
• When is Jesus coming back?
• 22 Bible verses about the end times
• What is the abomination of desolation?