Jesus and the End-Time

The Conclusion of the End-Time
 The Gathering of the Elect

But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Those who are familiar with other interpretations of the end-time have recognized by now that I differ at several key points with an interpretation known as pre-tribulationism. Pre-tribulationism is part of that method of interpretation discussed earlier that "rightly divides the word of truth." Until recently it was mainly confined to Bible institutes, to a few theological seminaries, and to the people under their influence; now it has become widely known, primarily through the enormous popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth. That book teaches a common form of pre-tribulationism

For the sake of those who are unfamiliar with it, I will describe pre-tribulationism as it is commonly accepted. I feel the need to do this because otherwise you might, after reading my interpretation, read up on pre-tribulationism and then try to "weave them together." I want to assure you at the outset of our discussion concerning the gathering of the elect this is not possible. Our respective interpretations must stand on their own merits-their only common ground is the sincere desire to interpret the Word of God accurately. But we begin with different principles and we end with different conclusions. For those who are uncomfortable with these differences, I will share a recent conversation with a pre-tribulationist friend. I said that we had opposing views of the end-time. "No," he said, "We don't have opposing views. We have differing views.

Of course he was right, and I stood corrected.

What, then is pre-tribulationism? The most popular form of it is that Jesus will come secretly and take away all Christian believers from the earth. This could happen at any time, without warning: cars would be left driverless, planes left pilotless, operating rooms left surgeonless. (As you might suppose, imaginative writers are having a field day with this prospect.1) Then, following this event (called a "secret rapture") the Antichrist will hold full sway in the world and all those who are left behind by the rapture will suffer greatly at his hands, particularly those who turn in repentance to Christ. Then, in turn, God will impose great judgments on the Antichrist and his servants. The period of time that includes the reign of Antichrist and the judgments of God upon him is called the "tribulation." Hence the term "pre-tribulation," meaning that before the tribulation Jesus will come secretly and take his believers out of the world. Not until after the tribulation will he come all the way to earth and there establish his thousand-year reign.

Nothing is more boring than rebuttal argument, and it is not my purpose to refute anyone. Listing in detail what is wrong with pre-tribulationism will not make my interpretation any more sound. So not in detail, but in summation, I will share with you why I am not a pre-tribulationist. If you have stuck with me this far, you deserve to know why I do not accept a point of view that has been so helpful to so many in our day.

  1. I find pre-tribulationism highly speculative. No ordinary reading of the text, without a pre-tribulationist to guide you, will yield this understanding of the end-time. You can see it only after you have been told what to look for-and then you must be careful not to see some other things in the Bible that do not fit into the scheme.
  2. Pre-tribulationism is based on ambiguous verses of Scripture2, the ambiguity of which is ignored by the interpreters.
  3. It tends towards sensationalism.
  4. It makes more of the "rapture" than of the return of Jesus. Long before the current spate of books on the subject George E. Ladd thought this had gone so far that he wrote a book to defend the thesis that "the Blessed Hope is the second coming of Jesus Christ and not a pre-tribulation rapture."3
In these four points I am generalizing about pre-triulationism in its popular, not its scholarly, form' that is the form in which it has reached and influenced multitudes. What scholar there is in me is uneasy about making unsupported generalizations, but refutation is not really part of my task in this book. And since pre-tribulation literature is available on almost any discount house bookrack, any reader can make his own judgments.

Earlier we considered briefly Jesus' own words about the gathering of the elect:

"And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other" (Matthew 24:31). Now we will look in more detail at Paul's words to the Thessalonians about the same event. For the sake of convenience we will use the term rapture for the gathering of the elect, since it is commonly used and understood so today.

Paul described the rapture for the Thessalonians because they were worried about the Christians who had already died. They wondered whether these would have the opportunity to share in the coming Kingdom. Paul's description assured them. In terms similar to 1 Corinthians 15 he showed how both the living and the dead will share in the resurrection and rapture at the return of Jesus. Now we are concerned mainly with the fate of the living when the dead are raised up, and Paul provides a specific answer. "Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air."

There is nothing symbolic or visionary about this event. It is unique, certainly, and like the resurrection body of Jesus we have nothing in history to compare it with; no artist can paint a picture of it, no filmmaker can dramatize it. But there is no doubt at all that Paul believed it will happen and he wanted us to believe it, too.

So we are dealing with an actual future event. It is not so outlandish when you consider it in the light of Paul's teaching about the church as the body of Christ. At the close of the age the Church will recapitulate, as the body of Christ, the resurrection and ascension of her Lord. Our salvation is not complete until this happens: "It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). While John's words do not speak of the rapture as such, they do speak to the hope of which the rapture is a way of fulfillment.4

We stress the actuality of the rapture for the same reason that Paul did. It is God's revealed way of drawing the people whom he has redeemed in history out of history into his own presence. As such it is the concluding historical even in the story of our salvation. Jus a God really did become a man in Jesus, just as Jesus really died a sinner's death, just as he really ascended into heaven, just so he really is coming back, and we really are going to join him. Nor is the hope of the rapture tacked on to the Gospel at a later date by wishful thinkers who saw that the Kingdom had not been fulfilled in the lifetime of the apostles. Rather, this hope is part of the first recorded teaching of the Gospel. (According to most scholars, 1 Thessalonians was either the first or second of all New Testament books to be written.) SO the rapture of the Church has always been part of the Gospel of salvation.

Thus it may not be denied on biblical grounds. You may deny it on philosophical grounds (because you have decided before hand what God may or may not DO). You may deny it on semantic grounds (claiming that Paul and Jesus did not mean what they said). But since we are committed to the plain meaning of the Bible, we take the rapture as an actual event. Here we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our pre-tribulationist brothers and sisters.

But we part company with them rather quickly, because we also take the rapture as a public event. There is nothing very secret about a "cry of command," and "archangel's call," or "the sound of the trumpet of God." We get the distinct impression from these audible images that God will call our attention to what he is doing. This passage in conjunction with Matthew 24:29-31 gives us an audio-visual effect, for there Jesus said that all the tribes of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. In both passages the gathering of God's people occurs in the context of the coming of Jesus-and that is very public indeed.

It is public in the sense not only that everyone will see and hear it (though we do not know precisely how it will sound and look) but also that the identity of the elect, God'' people, will become public. God'' elect will become visible in its wholeness. Election, by the way, does not mean selection. God does not select individuals to make up his elect. The elect is the body of Christ.5 God has chosen the body of Christ; you and I, as individuals, can choose, by faith, to belong to it.

In the rapture the judgment of God is manifest. When the trumpet sounds there will be no more doubt as to who are the children of God. For then you are either included in the elect or you are not; you are either caught up to meet the Lord in the air or you are not.

As we have before asserted, we take the rapture to be the final event in time. Both Jesus and Paul look to this event as the conclusion of the end-time, beyond which lies life forever with God. But about this eternal experience they tell us very little. For these reason, and in the absence of plain propositions from the Old and New Testaments, we find it speculative to use visionary materials-subject to varied interpretations-in order to find a basis for saying that history continues beyond this event. Further, Jesus describes the collapse of the physical universe as attending his return; obviously anything that happens after that must belong to a world either remade or replaced. Either way life as we know it must come to an end in that moment. The elect will be with Jesus, and the others will surely find more important things to wonder about than their cars going driverless and their operating rooms going surgeonless. A new set of rules will be in force, in which drivers and surgeons are no longer important.

Since it is Paul's purpose to comfort the Christians, he does not tell us the fate of those who are left. But it must be terrible to be outside of Jesus' concern. Why else do all the tribes of the earth mourn when they see him appearing?

Paul comforts the Christians because they have, or should have, the confidence that they will be with Jesus in that day. They have confidence in Jesus, not in themselves, not in their goodness, but in him. It is a great tragedy if we cannot thus comfort one another, and a greater one still if we do not trust him and allow ourselves to be included when he catches his loved ones up to meet him in the air.

1 Lindsey, op cit., p. 136, is an example.

2 For example, 2 Thessalonians 2:7 is used to prove that the Holy Spirit will be withdrawn sometime during or before the reign of the son of perdition:
And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work' only he who now retrains it will do so until he is out of the way.
1 Thessalonians 5:9 is used to show that the Church will escape tribulation: "For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ."
The first verse is obscure and the second is ambiguous. In the absence of clear scriptural statements supporting them, the interpretations assigned to the verses by the pre-tribulationists are highly debatable.

3 Ladd, The Blessed Hope, p.11.

4 Though I here wrote 1 John 3:1-3 in discussing the rapture, I am still unrepentant for criticizing Ryrie's citation of it (see not 1, chapter 4). Ryrie sys that 1 John 3:3 calls the rapture a "purifying hope" and it says no such thing. The most that can be said for 1 John 3:1-3 in connection with the rapture is that it expresses a parallel hope in different terms. 5 Alan Richardson't argument is pertinent to an understanding of just who will be included in the gathering of the elect:
The New Testament conception of 'the elect' is thus thoroughly eschatological. The Anointed One is 'the Elect": cf. Luke 23:35. Christ, as the Elect, is even now in the later days gathering together his elect into his body the Church. If Christians are 'the elect,' it is because they are 'in Christ,' because they are baptized into the person of him who alone may with complete propriety be called the Elect of God. In him their salvation is assured, and nothing can be laid to the charge of God's elect (Romans 8:33). The divine purpose from the foundation of the world was to recreate a new humanity in Christ. Thus, in Romans 8:28-30 St. Paul says that the whole Church corporately was in this sense "foreknown" of God, who ordained beforehand that it should be conformed to the image of his Son: God's 'foreordaining' came first, that is, his determination of the plan to create a new humanity who responded and were justified in Christ: those who are justified in Christ shall be 'glorified' in him at the parousia. If we read this passage as if it related to the atomic individuals, we shall create difficulties which are wholly of our imagining; we will then have to ask why it was that God picked out some individuals, and not others, and 'predestined' them to salvation since the foundation of the world. Paul, of course does not think of the Church as made up of a collection of individuals, but as a body: it is the body which is foreknown, foreordained, called, justified and is to be glorified. There is no suggestion here or elsewhere in the New Testament that some individuals are predestined to a mechanical salvation irrespectively of their own decision for Christ. It is stressed that, though God calls us, we must respond. There are no elect automatons in the Kingdom of God.
Alan Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament, Harper and Brothers, 1958, pp. 278, 279.

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