Justified True Belief

(P1) Jesus taught one coming, visible to the whole world, after the tribulation. + A pre-tribulation rapture is a coming of Christ before the tribulation (the final stretch of intense trouble on earth, usually reckoned at seven years) in which he quietly takes the church out of the world and returns in public only later. Everything the apostles wrote about that return builds on what Jesus said one afternoon on the Mount of Olives, his long answer in Matthew 24-25, Mark 13 and Luke 21 that is known as the Olivet Discourse, so that is where the question has to start. (1) The disciples asked about one coming and Jesus described one. - The question was plain: "Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" (Matthew 24:3). The word behind "coming" is parousia, the ordinary Greek word for the arrival of an important person, the state visit of a king to one of his cities. It became the New Testament's usual word for the return of Christ, and Jesus, Paul, James, Peter and John all use it. - Jesus answers with a long account of what lies ahead: false christs, wars, persecution, the desolating sacrilege (a defiling of God's holy place that Daniel had foretold), a great tribulation, and then the arrival of the Son of Man. There is one arrival in the whole discourse. He never mentions an earlier, quieter one. - Think of a friend describing her wedding day from the first guest to the last dance. If she never mentions the bride arriving twice, it is because the bride arrived once. (2) The coming Jesus describes is after the tribulation, not before it. - His own words fix the order: "But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven." (Mark 13:24-27) - So the gathering of his people comes after the tribulation, and the Son of Man does it in full view. That is the opposite order from a rescue before the trouble begins. - Jesus also says the tribulation is shortened "for the sake of the elect, whom he chose" (Mark 13:20). The elect are simply God's chosen people, the New Testament's ordinary name for believers. You do not send a school home early for the sake of children who left at breakfast. The elect are in those days, which is why the days are cut short. - His parable of the weeds says the same thing in a field. The owner refuses to pull the weeds early: "Let both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30), and the harvest "is the end of the age" (Matthew 13:39), when the angels gather the wicked and the righteous shine in the kingdom (Matthew 13:41-43). One harvest, at the end, with the wheat left standing until then. - One thing should be said before moving on. Some scholars think "the Son of Man coming in clouds" in Mark 13:26 is borrowed from Daniel 7, where the son of man comes up to God's throne to be vindicated, and they apply the verse to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 rather than to Christ's return. If they are right, the pre-tribulation view loses far more than the case for one coming does (D13). (3) The coming is visible to everyone on earth. - Jesus warns against exactly the idea of a hidden arrival: "So, if they say to you, Look, he is in the wilderness, do not go out. If they say, Look, he is in the inner rooms, do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man." (Matthew 24:26-27) - John says the same from Patmos, the island where he received Revelation: "Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him" (Revelation 1:7). And the angels at the ascension promised the disciples that Jesus "will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11), which was in a cloud, in daylight, with people watching. - Nobody has to be told that lightning struck. A coming like lightning cannot be a coming that the world misses. (4) The rest of the New Testament waits for that one public appearing. - Paul calls the Christian hope "the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). The word is epiphaneia, an appearing or showing forth, the word Greeks used when a god or an emperor showed himself in public. Christ "will appear a second time" (Hebrews 9:28): a second time, not a second and then a third. "When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." (Colossians 3:4) - Every time the New Testament names the hope, it is an appearing. It is never a disappearing. Therefore, on the teaching of Jesus himself, Christ's people are gathered at one visible coming that follows the tribulation.

(P2) Paul's teaching on the Lord's coming is the teaching of Jesus. + The doctrine of a separate rapture rests chiefly on one passage, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, so the whole question is whether Paul describes there the coming Jesus described or a different one. (1) Paul says he is passing on a word from the Lord. - Here is the passage: "For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, 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, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord." (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17) - "By a word from the Lord" is Paul telling his readers that this is Jesus' teaching, the same way he tells the Corinthians that the Lord's Supper is what he "received from the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:23). He is reporting, not inventing. - The occasion explains the emphasis. Paul had spent only a short time in Thessalonica, three Sabbaths in the synagogue and perhaps a few weeks more, before he was run out of town (Acts 17:1-10). Some believers had since died, and the church grieved as though the dead would miss the great day. So Paul builds his answer on what they already believed, that Jesus died and rose (1 Thessalonians 4:14), and his stress falls on order: the dead will rise first. Picture a family worried that the grandparents will miss the reunion, and being told that the grandparents will be first through the door. (2) Every element of Paul's picture is already in Jesus' picture. - Set the two side by side. Jesus: the Son of Man "coming on the clouds of heaven", "a loud trumpet call", "his angels", and "they will gather his elect from the four winds" (Matthew 24:30-31). Paul: the Lord descending "in the clouds", "the trumpet of God", "the voice of an archangel", and believers "caught up together" to him. - Clouds, trumpet, angels, gathering. Nothing in Paul's scene is missing from Jesus' scene, and nothing in Jesus' scene is contradicted by Paul's. - When two witnesses describe an accident with the same car, the same corner and the same time of day, the jury concludes they saw one accident. It does not conclude there were two. (3) Paul's second letter uses Jesus' own word for the gathering. - Paul returns to the subject: "Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him" (2 Thessalonians 2:1). The Greek noun behind "being gathered together" is episunagoge, the assembling of a crowd into one place. Its verb, episunago, is the very word Jesus used when he said the Son of Man will "gather his elect from the four winds" (Mark 13:27). - Paul then dates that coming: "that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed" (2 Thessalonians 2:3), and the Lord will destroy that man "by the appearance of his coming" (2 Thessalonians 2:8). The man of lawlessness is Paul's name for the final great rebel against God, the figure most readers call the antichrist. - So the parousia Paul is discussing falls after the man of lawlessness. That is exactly where Jesus put the desolating sacrilege (Mark 13:14), the defiling of the holy place that opens the great tribulation. Paul's rebel and Jesus' sacrilege are the same moment in the same story, and both writers put the coming after it. - If the programme says the keynote is after lunch, nobody books a second keynote at breakfast. (4) Paul borrows Jesus' thief in the night for the same day. - A few lines after describing the trumpet and the clouds, Paul adds, "For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." (1 Thessalonians 5:2) Jesus had said, "if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake" (Matthew 24:43). - For Paul "the day of the Lord" is the day Christ returns: "the day of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 1:8), the day "when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints" (2 Thessalonians 1:10). And it is worth remembering that chapter divisions were added to the Bible centuries later. What we call chapters 4 and 5 of the first letter was one continuous page, so the coming of 4:16 and the day of 5:2 are one day. Therefore, what Paul teaches about the coming of the Lord is what Jesus taught, and the gathering of 1 Thessalonians 4 is the gathering of Mark 13.

(P3) At that coming all who belong to Christ are raised. + Paul places the resurrection of believers at the coming he describes, and he knows one such resurrection, not two of them seven years apart. (1) The coming of 1 Thessalonians 4 is the resurrection of the dead. - "And the dead in Christ will rise first." (1 Thessalonians 4:16) Whatever else this scene is, it is graves opening. That is not a quiet evacuation of the living. It is the event every Christian funeral looks forward to. - Paul describes the same moment to Corinth with the same trumpet: "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed." (1 Corinthians 15:52) Same order too: the dead raised, then the living changed. - Two letters, one alarm clock. When the trumpet of God sounds, the dead rise. (2) Paul knows one order for those who belong to Christ. - "But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ." (1 Corinthians 15:23) "Firstfruits" is the first sheaf of a harvest, the one that promises the rest is coming. Two orders, one line between them: Christ first, then all his people, at his coming. - A pre-tribulation rapture needs that second order cut in two: the church raised before the tribulation, and the believers who die during it raised after it, seven years apart, with both events called "his coming". Paul draws no such line, and no other text draws it for him. - Think of a roll call. Paul reads two names off the list, Christ and then everyone who belongs to him. A pre-tribulation rapture needs a third line that the list does not have. - For the people who rise at that trumpet, "Death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15:54). A careful reader of the surrounding verses may wonder whether death is finished for the whole creation in that same hour, or only after the thousand-year reign of Revelation 20. That is the millennium question, and Christians answer it differently. Nothing in P1 through P4 depends on the answer (C1), because every answer to it has one resurrection of Christ's people, not two. (3) Paul calls the trumpet of that day the last one. - The dead are raised "at the last trumpet" (1 Corinthians 15:52), and Jesus said his angels gather the elect "with a loud trumpet call" after the tribulation (Matthew 24:31). The natural reading is one trumpet. The other reading needs two trumpets seven years apart, each raising or gathering God's people, with the earlier of them named "last". - A fair reader will ask whether "last" means the last of the seven trumpets in Revelation. It does not, and pre-tribulation writers are right to say so, since Revelation was written decades after this letter. Paul was drawing on the prophets instead. For them one great trumpet calls God's scattered people home: "in that day a great trumpet will be blown", and the lost and the driven out "will come and worship the Lord on the holy mountain at Jerusalem" (Isaiah 27:13). That is the trumpet Jesus named for the gathering of the elect. - Even so, "last" is Paul's own word for it, and it is a poor word for the first of two. When the last bell of the school day rings, no child expects another bell an hour later. If one rang, the first was not the last. (4) Jesus put the resurrection on "the last day". - Four times in one chapter Jesus promises the believer, "I will raise him up on the last day" (John 6:40; also 6:39, 44, 54). Martha knew the teaching: "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." (John 11:24) - And the resurrection of life is a single thing in his mouth: "an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment." (John 5:28-29) One voice, one resurrection of life. Whether the resurrection of judgment shares its hour or follows a thousand years later is the same open millennium question (C1). - "The last day" is a poor name for a day that falls seven years before the Lord's return. A book's last chapter is the one after which there are no more chapters. (5) Heaven keeps Christ until the day everything is set right. - Peter says of Jesus that "heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago" (Acts 3:21). He stays until the restoration. He is not sent out early for a preliminary visit. - The same day transforms the living: "we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body" (Philippians 3:20-21). Creation itself waits for that moment, "the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23). Therefore, the coming at which believers are raised is the one resurrection of Christ's people, and it cannot be the opening act of a seven-year drama with a second resurrection of his people at its close.

(P4) At that coming believers rise to welcome the Lord as he arrives. + To a modern ear, being "caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air" sounds like leaving. To Paul's first readers it meant the opposite. (1) "To meet" was the word for going out to welcome someone home. - The Greek word is apantesis, and in the Greek-speaking world it was the ordinary term for a formal welcome. When a governor or a king approached a city, its leading citizens went out through the gates to meet him and escort him back in with honour. - The New Testament uses the word twice more, and both times the direction of travel is spelled out. In the parable of the ten virgins the cry goes up, "Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him." (Matthew 25:6), and the wise ones then "went in with him to the marriage feast" (Matthew 25:10). When Paul approached Rome, the Christians there "came as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet us", and the next verse says, "And when we came into Rome" (Acts 28:15-16). The welcoming party turned around and went back in with the man they had met. - Think of the arrivals hall at an airport. You go to meet your daughter at arrivals so you can bring her home. You do not meet her there so that the two of you can get on another plane. (2) "Caught up" reverses a word the pagans used for death. - The verb is harpazo, to snatch or seize suddenly. Its Latin translation is rapio, one form of which, raptum, gives English the word "rapture". On Greek and Latin gravestones this was a word for dying: Fate snatched the loved one away. - Paul turns it around. Believers are not snatched away by death into the grave. They are snatched up into life, the dead and the living together, to greet the Lord who has come to destroy death. The word says how suddenly it happens. It carries no idea of being taken out of the world for a while. (3) The clouds are the sign of God's presence, not an altitude. - Daniel's vision is the source: "with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days" (Daniel 7:13), the Ancient of Days being Daniel's name for God on his throne. Before that, the pillar of cloud led Israel (Exodus 13:21), and the cloud of glory filled the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34) and Solomon's temple (1 Kings 8:10-11). A cloud took Jesus from the disciples' sight (Acts 1:9), and he will come "in the same way" (Acts 1:11). - So "in the clouds" tells you whose glory Christ arrives in. It does not tell you how many feet above the ground the meeting happens. He is not an aeroplane pausing at ten thousand feet to take on passengers before climbing again. (4) What follows the meeting is a throne, not a departure. - In the same discourse as the virgins going out to meet the bridegroom, Jesus says what happens next: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations" (Matthew 25:31-32). Arrival, welcome, throne, judgment. - Paul dates both halves of that day together. God will "grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels" (2 Thessalonians 1:7), and the wicked will be punished "when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints" (2 Thessalonians 1:10). Relief and judgment, one day. - Paul ends the scene, "and so we will always be with the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:17): with him wherever he is, and where he is, on that day, is the world he has come back to claim. Therefore, Paul's readers heard 1 Thessalonians 4 as a homecoming procession: the King arrives, his people go out to bring him in, and he sits down to reign.

(C1) Therefore, Christ returns once, visibly, with no earlier coming to remove the church. + Christ comes back once, in full view of the world, and nothing in the New Testament describes an earlier, quieter visit to collect the church. The argument is deductive, which means the premises work like links in a chain: if each link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. The standard for a link is the ordinary one, that each premise is more plausible than its denial, and each of the four is a reading of the plainest texts on the subject. (1) A pre-tribulation rapture needs five things the texts refuse. - It needs a coming that is earlier than the visible one. Jesus placed the gathering of the elect after the tribulation (P1). - It needs a coming that is secret. Jesus said his coming would be like lightning, and he warned against believing in a hidden one (P1). - It needs the coming of 1 Thessalonians 4 to be a different event from the coming of Mark 13. Paul gives it the same clouds, trumpet, angels and gathering, calls it a word from the Lord, and in the next letter dates it after the man of lawlessness (P2). - It needs the resurrection of believers to be a first instalment, with a second resurrection of Christ's people seven years later. Paul knows one order for those who belong to Christ, at the last trumpet, and Jesus put it on the last day (P3). - And it needs "to meet the Lord in the air" to mean departure, when the word means welcome (P4). (2) What follows is what the church has always confessed. - The creeds say it in one line: he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. One coming, in glory, for judgment. That is exactly what C1 says, no more and no less. - Christians who differ sharply about the thousand years of Revelation 20 agree on this. Posttribulational premillennialists expect Christ to return after the tribulation and then reign on earth for a thousand years. Amillennialists read the thousand years as the present age of the church. Postmillennialists expect a golden age of the gospel before he returns. The Catholic and Orthodox churches confess it too. All of them, whatever else they dispute, hold to one return. The two-stage coming is the view of one tradition within evangelical Protestantism, and it appeared in the late 1820s and 1830s (D7). (3) What stays open. - The millennium stays open. Whether Christ's thousand-year reign in Revelation 20 is future and earthly, or the present age, or a golden age before his return, is a question left exactly where it was found. Nothing in P1 through P4 turns on it. - So do the length and severity of the final tribulation, whether the "man of lawlessness" is one person or a recurring power, and what future God holds for the Jewish people. The one thing settled is that the church meets its Lord when he comes, and that he comes once. - Nobody is put outside the faith. Christians who expect a pre-tribulation rapture are brothers and sisters holding a mistaken view on a secondary question, and the case against that view is made from the texts they love. Therefore, the New Testament's hope is a single, public, unmistakable return of Christ, at which the dead are raised, his people gather to welcome him, and the world is judged. There is no earlier, quieter coming to take the church out of the way.