Page 23 - Signs of the End

THE SIGNS OF THE END 17

The verse above gives an important detail concerning the Rapture
of the Church. The Lord will indeed descend from heaven, as we shall
see presently, in His return for the believers.

It should be appreciated that many false doctrines about the Messiah
are being taught today. The Lord is said to be among us now in some
guise (The Unification Church), or that He will alight from a UFO,
or that He is within us all and is not going to make an actual, physical
return (universalist churches and all those denominations that have
thrown their Bibles away). But the angels have clearly specified in
the p assage above that the Lord will come back from heaven in just
the manner that the men of Galilee saw Him go into heaven. Cor­
roborating that miracle Paul wrote the following:

“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” (I T hess. 4:16-17).

This is the ultimate proof text, the clearest announcement of the
Rapture of the Church to be found in the Bible. The very word Rap­
ture is taken from the expression “caught up,” “rapture” being a
cognative of the Latin for “caught up.” We learn in the above Scrip­
ture that one does not have to be living at the time of the return of
the Lord to go in the Rapture. In fact, “the dead in Christ will rise
first.” Obviously, believers, dating from the time of the cross, will be
translated to heaven just as the Lord Himself was. All believers of
the Church Age are to be resurrected to a heavenly meeting with the
Lord.

We learn more of this Christian hope from Paul’s writing in I Cor­
inthians 15. Paul indicates that the resurrection of Christ entitles us
all to an equal resurrection, “every man in his own order”:

“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits
of them that slept.