Category Archives: Christianity

What Is the Rapture?

Dan Vander Lugt
Bible, Christianity, , ,

From the earliest days of the church, Christians have anticipated a day in which Jesus will return for all those who believe in Him. This hope is rooted in many Scripture passages, all of which make it clear that the issue is not whether Jesus will return but when.

The term rapture is derived from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 . Like other texts referring to Christ’s return, this passage speaks of Jesus returning in power and glory to resurrect the dead. But more clearly than any other passage, it tells of His “catching up” of believers.

The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18).

The term rapture itself is taken from Jerome’s 4th century Latin translation, the Vulgate. He translated the Greek term for “caught up” with the Latin term that had the same meaning — rapiemur. Rapiemur is from rapto, the word from which rapture has been derived.

Not all Christians use the term rapture, but for many Christians this term aptly represents the glorious moment when Jesus will appear in the sky to “catch up” His church before returning to rescue a remnant of Israel and set up His kingdom on earth.

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Do I Have to Attend a Local Church To Be Considered Part of the Body of Christ?

Dan Vander Lugt
Bible, Christianity, , ,

Some people deny that the Scriptures make a distinction between the local, organized church and the universal, spiritual church, claiming that every time the church is mentioned in the New Testament the reference is to the local church. There are, however, practical,common-sense reasons to distinguish between them. In Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares ( Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 ), false Christians (the tares) are portrayed as hidden within the organized, visible church until the end of the age when Jesus and His angels will remove the tares from the wheat. In addition, when the apostles told new converts how they could be saved, they never made involvement with the church or membership in a church a condition ( Acts 3:12-26; 16:30-31 ).

Since some people within the local, visible church are not true believers and some true believers may not yet be associated with a local church, it seems clear that it is possible for people to be part of the body of Christ (as believers in Christ) even if they are not part of the organized, earthly church. Likewise, it seems apparent that a person can be part of a local, organized church and still not be a part of Christ’s true, universal church.

Some groups, such as the Quakers and the Plymouth Brethren, minimize the importance of membership in the institutional church by pointing to the corruption that has always existed within it. They stress the relationship of the believer to God through Christ and avoid the establishment of membership roles and formal patterns of leadership or organization.

Others, like the Roman Catholic Church, believe they can trace their beginning to the establishment of the church by Christ ( Matthew 16:18 ) and claim that they have inherited from the apostles the authority to forgive sins and convey the saving grace of Christ. They believe that the personal spiritual condition of the ministering authorities is irrelevant, as long as they are the duly appointed representatives of the institutional church.

Probably a middle position is best, recognizing that while the local church isn’t necessary for salvation, it plays an essential role as a source of applied doctrinal teaching and fellowship, a place of service and prayer, and as an authority for discipline.

The fact that hypocrisy exists within the visible, institutional, local church doesn’t justify a blanket condemnation of the church and its work. The earliest believers saw a need for united prayer, study, and fellowship ( Acts 2:41-47 ). The writer of Hebrews actually warned people not to forsake the assembling of themselves together ( Hebrews 10:25 ). The apostle Paul emphasized the interdependency of believers by describing how every believer is gifted spiritually in ways that build up other believers ( Romans 12:1-8; 1Corinthians 12:12-27; Ephesians 4:11-16; 1 Peter 4:10-11 ).

People who willingly ignore or disregard church fellowship imply that they have no need of the spiritual gifts God has bestowed on others for the common good ( Romans 12:1-8; 1 Corinthians 12:1-31 ). Just as we are born into a family for our care and nurture as infants, so believers are born into the family of God and need more mature Christians to nurture them in their years of immaturity ( 1 Corinthians 3:1-15 ).

Participation in a local church, with a realistic eye toward the shortcomings of all institutions and other believers, is the best way that we can grow spiritually and help build God’s kingdom.

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Why Do Many Western People Doubt the Accuracy of the Gospels?

Dan Vander Lugt
Bible, Christianity, , , , , ,

There is an old saying that “familiarity breeds contempt.” The Gospels are so familiar in Western culture, and were so deeply influential in its shaping, that Westerners often fail to think about them objectively. Because they are so close and familiar, most people don’t value them enough even to know what they contain. In his book Ring of Truth, Oxford scholar and longtime friend of C. S. Lewis, J. B. Phillips, wrote:

So long as a man confines his ideas of Christ to a rather misty hero figure of long ago who died a tragic death, and so long as his ideas of Christianity are bounded by what he calls the Sermon on the Mount (which he has almost certainly not read in its entirety since he became grown-up), then the living truth never has a chance to touch him. This is plainly what has happened to many otherwise intelligent people. Over the years I have had hundreds of conversations with people, many of them of higher intellectual calibre than my own, who quite obviously had no idea of what Christianity is really about. I was in no case trying to catch them out: I was simply and gently trying to find out what they knew about the New Testament. My conclusion was that they knew virtually nothing. This I find pathetic and somewhat horrifying. It means that the most important Event in human history is politely and quietly bypassed. For it is not as though the evidence had been examined and found unconvincing: it had simply never been examined.

But beyond the tendency to take the Gospels for granted, many Western people unknowingly reflect the unexamined assumptions of their generation. Unaware of their bias, their denial of the reliability of the gospel tradition is usually much stronger than the reasons they give for doing so. (See the ATQ article Recent Media Have Claimed Jesus Christ Is Legendary: Is It True?)

The emotional power of untested assumptions reflects some of the natural inclinations that the apostle Paul wrote about in his first New Testament letter to the Corinthians.

“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one”
(1 Corinthians 2:14-15 NKJV).

The inability of unbelievers to recognize their bias is a striking example of spiritual blindness. But along with a spiritual blindness that unconsciously distorts reality so that truth becomes invisible even when in plain view, there may be an element of intentional hostility (Matthew 13:11-17; Romans 1:18-22).

Yet Christians are in no position to “judge” modern unbelievers who seem to grasp at straws to avoid the truth. They are probably no worse people than we are. The New Testament makes it clear that apart from God’s grace, everyone—including Peter (Matthew 16:23), Paul (Acts 9:1-6), Jesus’ own family (Mark 3:21; John 7:5), Jesus’ townspeople (Mark 6:1-5), and others who should have known better (John 20:24-29) were inflicted with spiritual blindness and infected with doubt.

For many people in the West, Christianity has become a convenient scapegoat. This shouldn’t surprise us. Just as pagan intellectuals like Julian the Apostate once blamed the gospel for the deterioration of the Roman Empire, unbelieving Western intellectuals today blame Christian faith either directly or indirectly for the Western cultural failures and offenses of the past 2,000 years. The world’s hostility toward Christ isn’t incidental, and the same hatred that was directed toward Him and His message can be expected to be directed against the genuine story of His life, death, and resurrection.

See the ATQ article What Are Some Arguments Used to Downplay the Significance of the Gospels?

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How Can a Decomposed Body Be Resurrected?

Dan Vander Lugt
Bible, Christianity, , , ,

A body buried in a wooden casket would normally be entirely decomposed after a few hundred years, depending upon the conditions of the soil. Similarly, a seaman buried at sea would leave no traces. (Not a trace seems to remain of all of those who went down with the Titanic, for instance.)

The apostle Paul made it clear that our new body, though possessing some identity with our mortal body, will be a new “spiritual body” ( 1 Corinthians 15:35-44 ). God will not need to gather up the scattered molecules of our earthly bodies. (Remember that the bodies of many Christians have already decomposed, been completely destroyed by fire, or have been devoured by animals.) Therefore, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 doesn’t refer to a bizarre scene in which the ashes in funerary urns or decayed bodies in earthly graves are suddenly reconstituted. Rather, the resurrection is the wonderful occasion in which believers who have died will again be granted full bodily form, this time in a glorified heavenly body that can never again die or experience decay.

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When Will the Rapture Occur?

Dan Vander Lugt
Bible, Christianity, , , , , , , ,

The early church wasn’t dogmatic about the time sequence of endtime events. This fact should keep us from being so dogmatic in our interpretation of biblical endtime prophecy that we either become contemptuous of Christians who don’t share our viewpoint, or we make their view of the rapture a test for fellowship. Keeping in mind the need for constraint and tolerance on this issue, we’ll explain why we believe the rapture will take place before the tribulation.

The main support for a pretribulational rapture is the clear biblical evidence for the imminence of Christ’s return — the evidence that the Lord’s return will be without warning ( Matthew 24:36-39,43,45-51;25:13 ) — along with the most reasonable interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 .

Belief in the imminence of the Lord’s return involves the implication that the rapture will occur before the time of great tribulation mentioned in Matthew 24:2 , 2 Thessalonians 2:3 , and Revelation 17:14 . If the Lord’s return is to be truly imminent (without warning), it will occur before this tribulation time. Consider that if the events described in these passages began taking place — bringing about, among other things, the first 3 1/2 years of the Antichrist’s reign — believers would realize that they were in the last days and there would be no element of surprise. If surprise were ruled out, we would say that the Lord’s return will be soon, but not imminent.

2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 , which speaks of the revealing of the Antichrist, must be understood in the light of the statement, “He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming” ( 2 Thessalonians 2:7-8 ).

It is our view that the “restrainer” is the Holy Spirit working through the church of Jesus Christ. Therefore, we believe that the Antichrist will not be openly revealed until the church is taken away in the rapture and its influence of being “salt” and “light” is removed. (It is important to realize that the Holy Spirit will continue to work among the people on earth even after the removal of the church. However, the Holy Spirit will not work through the body of Christ as He is doing today)

We respect anyone who has a strong view of scriptural authority, including our friends whose study has led them to a midtribulational or a posttribulational viewpoint. Our main problem with their viewpoints is the elimination of the possibility of a truly imminent, any-moment rapture.

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