Caught Up in the Clouds

When the early church met in councils to deal with heresies, it produced several creedal statements that have since been received by the church as sound summaries of essential biblical teachings. In statements of faith such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, we find affirmations that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead, that there will be a second advent of Christ to consummate His kingdom. The early church confessed that this will be a visible return, and this has been the common belief of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and historic Protestantism despite the many other theological differences that separate those traditions. There has also been a common belief that there will be only one second coming of Christ, which is to be identified with His visible return to bring the new heavens and earth.

Beginning with the work of John Nelson Darby in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, differences began to arise among those who call themselves Protestant concerning how many comings of Christ are yet ahead of us. Darby founded the system of dispensationalism, which posits an additional return of Jesus before His final return as Judge and King. This additional return will be for Jesus to remove the church from the earth, and it will be an invisible event inasmuch as the world will not see Jesus, although the world will see the church disappear. This “secret rapture” of the church is usually connected to a three-and-a-half- or seven-year period of tribulation for the world between the church’s removal and Christ’s final return. So prevalent has this view become that when a professing Christian asks about the “rapture,” the person is usually asking about this invisible coming of Jesus to remove His church before the great tribulation.

The word rapture is a perfectly fine term for Christ’s taking the church to be with Him in the air. The problem for the dispensational position on a secret rapture is that Scripture portrays the catching up of Christians to be a public event in which Jesus will be seen. In other words, the rapture and the second coming of Jesus to judge the world are not to be separated. They will happen at the same time. Paul tells us as much in today’s passage. First Thessalonians 4:13–18 refers not to a secret rapture before another, final return of Jesus; rather, it speaks of the second coming as happening only once. On that day, the dead in Christ will rise and Christians who are still living will join them “in the air” to meet the Savior as He returns to earth.