Where do I find the Rapture in the Bible?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

The original (Greek or Hebrew) translation of the word "rapture" means "caught up". 1 Thessalonians 4: 16-17.

Christ will descend from the clouds, and those who were saved and physically died, shall be raised.....that means that a whole bunch of people are going to come back from the dead and be caught up in the air. THEN, we who are alive and remain shall be raptured, or "caught up" to meet them in the air. Keep in mind, this all happens in "the twinkling of an eye."

Answer 2

The Rapture has its origins in the nineteenth century beginning with John Nelson Darby, a British evangelical preacher and founder of the Plymouth Brethren. Although few people belong the the Plymouth Brethren Church, many Christians believe in its founder's most enduring theological creation, the Rapture. The Rapture has no genuine biblical support, but Darby combed The Bible looking for isolated passages that could be used to support or prove the Rapture.

As part of his hypothesis, John Darby invented "dispensations" - intervals of time ordering God's grand timetable for world events. Proponents admit that the dispensationalist system is not spelled out in any single passage in the Bible. Nevertheless proponents insist that a comprehensive system is necessary and that Darby's dispensationalism, with its divisions of history and its two-stage future return of Christ, is "the only system" that can make sense of otherwise contradictory biblical passages. They argue that otherwise, "The Bible cannot be understood as a consistent and cohesive whole. The only alternative is to allegorize large portions of scripture . . . in order to keep the Bible from contradicting itself. (Lindsey, The Rapture: Truth or Consequences, p57)"

Christians have always taught that Jesus will return to earth and that believers should live in the urgent and hopeful anticipation of his second coming. Barbara R. Rossing (The Rapture Exposed) says Darby's new teaching was that Christ would return twice, first in secret to "Rapture" his church out of the world and up to heaven, then a second time after seven years of global tribulation for non-believers, to establish a Jerusalem-based kingdom on earth (called the "Glorious Appearing" - a phrase from Titus 2:13).

Darby relied on 1 Thessalonians 4: 16-17 as evidence for the coming Rapture: "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." Here, Paul was not writing about "Rapture", but about the resurrection of the dead at Christ's second coming, as the Thessalonians feared that some family members would be left in their graves when he returned, an event Paul expected to occur within his own lifetime.

An important tool for popularising Darby's system was the Scofield Reference Bible, a best-selling work published in 1909. It has been called "perhaps the most important single document in all fundamentalist literature." With sales in the millions, it became the version of the Bible through which Americans read their scriptures throughout much of the twentieth century. Scofield's notes and headings were woven in with the biblical text itself, elevating Darby's theology to a level of biblical authority that no previous writing had.