Page 196 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4
Lord in the air; and having met Him in the air, where is the
evidence that they change direction and come back with Him
to the earth?
In order to deal with this problem, Gundry went into a
complicated effort to prove that the Greek word translated
“will come down” means “a complete, uninterrupted de­
scent.”1 This is another illustration of Gundry’s taking an
ordinary word and attempting to invest it with a technical
meaning. The fact that the church meets the Lord in the air, a
tremendous event in itself, implies at least that the Lord will
stop His descent in order to greet the church. First Thessalo­
nians 4 says nothing about continuing the journey to the
earth.
Here Gundry appealed to the argument from silence,
stating, “But surely it is strange that in this, the fullest de­
scription of the rapture, there should be no mention of a
change in direction from earthward to heaven, or a halt. The
absence of a specific phrase such as 'to the earth’ cannot be
very significant, for there is not one NT account of the second
coming which contains such a phrase.”2 While Gundry ar­
gued strenuously against any argument from silence as used
by the pretribulationists, here he argued that his point of view
must be correct because the Bible is silent.
It would seem much more reasonable to say that the
silence indicates that there is no return to the earth and that
actually the purpose of Christ’s coming is to take them from
earth to heaven. Gundry’s efforts to prove that there must be
continued movement in the same direction is contradicted by
Mark 14:13, where the disciples meet the man carrying a
pitcher and follow him, and in Luke 17:12, where the lepers
met Christ, but Christ did not accompany them when they
returned. It is always hazardous to make arbitrary definitions
about how a word is used when, as a matter of fact, the word is
a common word.
Posttribulationists are also faced with the question as to
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