Rethinking The Rapture

Watch this blog on this week’s episode of The PRODCAST.

INTRODUCTION

For decades, Christians have been taught to believe that one day, in the twinkling of an eye, believers will vanish like Captain Spock in his starship transporter. Their clothes will be left behind, planes will be crashing, chaos will be erupting, and a confused world will be left in total panic. But is this actually what the Bible teaches?

Today… We're going to tear this doctrine apart, piece by piece, and we are going to do so from Matthew 24. In a couple of weeks, we will do a second part, looking at 1 Thessalonians 4, which is one of the flagship verses for dispensationalists. And it is my hope that by the end of these two articles, you will see, without a shadow of a doubt, that the rapture is not a biblical doctrine.

So, with that, let us read our text from Matthew 24 and dive right in! 

"But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then there will be two men in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. - Matthew 24:36-41

PART 1: YOU'VE BEEN LEFT BEHIND…

At the zenith of my choral career—circa the late 1990s—I was chosen to perform a solo in front of my entire private Christian high school from a well-known rendition by D.C. Talk of "I Wish We'd All Been Ready." Apparently, the talent pool was a little shallow that year, or I was simply the overzealous poster boy they needed to warn the world about the imminent rapture. Either way, I was given the unenviable task of alerting my fellow students— many of whom could be tares among the wheat patch—to repent or face eschatological doom. 

The moment arrived, and with all the vocal prowess of Peter Brady, I stepped forward, heart pounding, voice trembling, and quivered out the following warning by song:

"There's no time to change your mind; the Son has come, and you've been left behind. I wish we'd all been ready!"

If you don't recognize the cheesy reference, consider yourself blessed and highly favored among men. But if you do, take a moment to cringe along with me at the sheer ubiquity with which this foolish doctrine had spread. By far, the largestChristian band on earth, at least in the 90s and early 2000s, was D.C. Talk. And here, this wildly popular band with a massive platform was singing a song about humans performing heavenly teleportation like something you would see on Star Gate SG1 and people being left behind to face a future of guns, bombs, and total global war. 

This is not only the kind of panic porn that dispensationalism produces, but it contradicts the numerous passages in the Old Testament that describe the Kingdom of Jesus being one of peace on earth, where people will eventually beat their weapons of war into utensils of production (Isaiah 2:4), how Jesus' Kingdom will spread until the entire world is filled with His peace (Isaiah 9:7), how lambs will no longer be killed by wolves at some point during the reign of Jesus (Isaiah 11:6); and how the people of earth will never learn the art of war again (Isaiah 2:4). 

These passages do not speak about the eternal state because, in them, humans still grow old and die. They are speakingabout what life will eventually look like under the reign of Christ. But, sadly, dispensationalism continues to convince the majority of Christians to expect disaster, to practice fear over hope, to adopt a loser mentality instead of one of victory, and to cause God's people to long to escape this world instead of working in it to redeem it. And, if you are wondering why I attack this heresy with as much vigor as I do, that is why. Dispensationalism is not just a quirky eschatological position that I think is wrong. I consider it a cancer upon the Church, a poison that has gotten into her veins, and I will work with all my energy and effort to purge it from our ranks. 

Because for years, this fear-laced fantasy of being raptured into the sky while sinners staggered around in disbelief has been peddled like it is an undeniable truth. Christians at any moment are supposed to vanish without a trace, leaving behind a neatly folded pile of clothing, unoccupied dentures, eye-glasses, pacemakers, breast implants, and any other plastic surgery enhancements that are not permitted in heaven, as they soar like iron man up to meet the Lord in the air.

And then, of course, after the Church is removed from the world, chaos would ensue. Pilots would evaporate mid-flight, causing commercial airliners to spiral like bombs down to the earth. Unmanned cars would careen over mountain vistas. Panicked crowds would wander the streets, searching for missing loved ones and fondling through raptured people's pockets, looking for loose change. Riots would break out in the streets like the summer of 22. And just before the world ripped itself apart, a handsome European Antichrist would step onto the world's stage with a convenient lie to explain the rapture event. This Antichrist will supposedly bring world peace, end world hunger, make the deserts bloom like gardens, and end all war on earth. Basically, all of those glorious promises in Isaiah about what Jesus is going to do in His Kingdom, the dispensationalists claim the Antichrist will do, which seems a little Satanic if you ask me. 

But, amid all of the mud-slinging, anxiety-laden panic they sling like ice in Albuquerque, many end up terrified, enraged, and always ready to escape. And for years, I believed this garbage.

That is until I stopped drinking from the septic tank of Big Eva's publishing wing and actually started to read the Bible for myself. You know, it's incredible what happens when you stop listening to the prophecy shamans and end-time prognosticators, and you simply read the text. So much freedom occurs when we do that simple thing. 

So today, we are going to be Rethinking The Rapture. We are going to be reexamining one of the sacred red heifers of modern-day evangelicalism and determining whether this doctrine is Biblical or not. To do that, we will not be looking through the lens of Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, or the latest doomsday bestsellers but through the lens of Scripture and seeking to discover what the Bible says. Does the Bible predict a moment when millions and millions of Christians vanish and are taken away? Or is this doctrine nothing more than a clever little lie inserted by the enemy to cause the Church to operate from a posture of slothfulness and defeat? Is the rapture a heavenly dispensational Wonka-vator, where our eccentric messiah calls us up and out of earth's little chocolate factory? Or have we completely misunderstood the Bible's teaching on this?

Now… Before we answer that question, let me clarify what I believe.

According to Scripture, Jesus will not return to rapture the Church out of here. He will not evacuate His people and abandon the world He bought and paid for with His own blood (Acts 20:28). He is not a derelict King who surrenders His dominion to a usurping Antichrist. As the true and better Adam (1 Cor. 15:45), He will not allow the world to spiral into ruin, but He will restore and redeem it, subduing all things under His reign (Ps. 72:8-11). His Kingdom is not a failing enterprise, but a growing mustard seed (Matt. 13:31-32), a molecule of leaven that will work through the entire lump (Matt. 13:33), and a stone that will grow into a mountain, filling the whole earth (Dan. 2:35, 44-45).

Jesus will return at the consummation of history, not to salvage a defeated church, but to receive a triumphant and faithful bride (Eph. 5:27; Rev. 19:7-9). He will return after His Kingdom has spread to the ends of the earth (Ps. 2:8). He will return when His glory is declared among all nations (Isa. 66:18-19) when all peoples, tribes, and tongues confess Him as Lord (Phil. 2:10-11). He will return when all His enemies have been put under His feet, for He must reign until that great work is accomplished (1 Cor. 15:25-26). He will return when every family of the earth is brought into the blessings of God through the Gospel (Gen. 12:3). He will return when the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covers the earth as the waters cover the seas (Hab. 2:14; Isa. 11:9). He will return when the nations bring their obedience and tribute to Him (Gen. 49:10; Rev. 21:24-26). And not a moment sooner. 

At His coming, the final resurrection will take place, as both the righteous and the wicked are raised for judgment (John 5:28-29; Acts 24:15; Rev. 20:12-13). The living and the dead will stand before Him (2 Tim. 4:1). Some will be cast into the lake of fire, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 25:41; Rev. 20:14-15), while others will enter into the eternal Kingdom, reigning with Christ forever in the new heavens and the new earth (Rev. 21:1-3). The meek shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5), and the nations shall walk in His light (Rev. 21:24), for the increase of His government and peace, there shall be no end (Isa. 9:7).

Christ is not coming to abandon His dominion—He is coming to bring it to its final, glorious fulfillment. Victory belongs to Christ. All of that is true. And all of that is still in our future.

But, again, what is not in our future is the pop-theology disaster that dispensationalists have been selling to us for the last hundred years. The most popular end-time fantasies, peddled from pulpits and publishing houses as if they were gospel truth, is nothing more than fictional fear-mongering masquerading as biblical prophecy. These kinds of books are remarkable for their sales but awful for the souls, catapulting men like Tim Lahaye, Jerry Jenkins, and Hal Lindsey into the multi-million dollar net worth range but impoverishing millions upon millions of souls in the process. As they got rich, the Church became poor. 

And, as we have seen on this show for the last 16 weeks, so much of what people expect to occur in the future has already happened in the past. We have proven it. We have shown the Biblical receipts; we have documented it in eyewitness testimony in the first century. And to be honest, we have put out on the internet one of the most dense and comprehensive treatments of Matthew 24 that you can find anywhere on the internet. 

For weeks now, we've been working our way through Matthew 24, and what have we found? The very events that so many Christians insist are future—the rise of false messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes, tribulations, signs in the heavens, the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation, even the so-called "Second Coming"—all of these things have already occurred within the first forty years of the Church.

Which brings us to today's topic: the so-called rapture of Matthew 24:38-41.

Dispensationalists love this passage. They cling to it and throw it around like a teenage Arthur wielding Excalibur. To them, it is proof positive that, at any moment, believers could be snatched away from the earth, leaving behind a bewildered world to suffer through the horrors of the tribulation.

But is that really what Jesus was saying? It's time to set the record straight and see what Scripture actually teaches. To do that, let's begin by looking at some history, and then we will open up our Bibles and get into Matthew 24. 

PART 2: THE ABOMINATION OF A DISPENSATION (THE RISE OF A HERESY)

For nearly two millennia, the Church of Jesus Christ marched forward, one battle at a time, with a singular, undisputed vision of history: Christ reigns now, His Kingdom is advancing today, and He will return once that Kingdom has infiltrated the entire world. This was not a matter of debate. From the early church fathers to the medieval theologians, from Eastern Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism, and later, the Reformers, the doctrine was clear: Christ's return was a singular, final, and triumphant conclusion to a successful worldwide invasion.

The notion of a secret rapture, however, a fragmented second coming, and a postponed kingdom was not only absent from church history but would have been recognized as an alien doctrine—contradicting Scripture, church tradition, and every major theological authority for eighteen centuries. To suggest otherwise is to engage in historical revisionism, the kind that would have left Augustine scratching his bald North African head, Aquinas rolling his Aristotelian eyes, and Calvinwriting a thousand-page treatise so weighty it could sink a ship in Lake Geneva.

And yet, here we are in the 21st century, with millions of Christians believing a doctrine wholly absent from the first 1800 years of church history. A doctrine conjured out of thin air by a man unqualified for serious theological inquiry, whose exegesis was as reckless as his ecclesiology.

Where did this eschatological ayahuasca come from?

Not from Scripture. Not from the Church Fathers. Not from the Reformers. No, this theological hallucinogen was brewed up in the fevered imagination of one man—a 19th-century sectarian whose name is barely known outside the confines of evangelical and dispensational circles.

His name was John Nelson Darby. And what he unleashed upon the world was the 19th-century equivalent of what Anthony Fauci unleashed in the 2020s. Except Darby's mind virus has infected far more people than the WUFLU, it has lasted far longer than the Fauci ouchie and done immeasurably more damage than anything Senior Antonio ever concocted.

For a moment, let us stop to consider a bit of history. 

JOHN NELSON DARBY 

John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was a man at war with the Church. His departure from the Anglican communion wasn't the noble break of a reformer striving for purity. It was the revolt of a man who couldn't submit to authority. Darby, unlike Luther or Calvin, wasn't fighting to recover the ancient faith—he was rejecting it. His rebellion wasn't about reformation; it was about revolution.

Darby was born into privilege, educated at Westminster and Trinity College Dublin, and ordained as an Anglican priest. But his priesthood was brief. Early in his ministry, he displayed a growing distaste for structure and hierarchy, which he saw as barriers to his theological convictions. His first conflict with the Church of England erupted over its role in the state. Darby believed that the Church should be wholly separate from political entanglements—a critique that, on the surface, sounded righteous but masked his deeper hostility toward institutional authority.

The breaking point came when the Church of Ireland (part of the Anglican communion) introduced reforms to loosen requirements for conversion from Catholicism. Darby, who was ministering among the Catholic population in Ireland, was outraged. He saw the reforms as a compromise of the faith, but his reaction revealed something more than doctrinal purity—it revealed his contempt for ecclesiastical governance. Rather than engage within the system to seek change, Darby abandoned it altogether and left to establish his own work.

In 1827, he broke from the Anglican Church, but he didn't leave quietly. He declared the entire structure of denominational Christianity corrupt and began preaching a radical ecclesiology: that the visible, organized Church was a failure. To Darby, denominations were not branches of Christ's Kingdom but obstacles to true faith. He dismissed ordained pastors as unnecessary and creeds as man-made inventions that hindered the Spirit.

However, his rebellion against the Church led to a revolt against the Church's theology. Darby began to recast Christian doctrine through his own lens, inventing a new theological system: Dispensationalism. His system divided history into distinct 'dispensations,' each governed by different divine principles. Central to his system was the idea that the Church was not part of God's original plan but a 'parenthesis' in His work with Israel. The Church, Darby taught, was a temporary anomaly—and would soon be removed from the earth through a secret rapture.

This doctrine, the secret rapture, was Darby's invention, a theological patch to cover the holes in his stupid system. But the patch became its centerpiece. Despite its absence from all church history, Darby spread this idea through his writings and travels, particularly in America, where it found fertile soil among the revivalist movements.

Darby's legacy is one of confusion, fear, and defeatism. His ecclesiology taught Christians to despise the historic Church. His eschatology taught them to expect defeat and escape. His theology of the rapture taught them to flee from the world rather than conquer it for Christ. If Darby were a general, he would convince the armies to run away like cowards, to hide in foxholes, and to lose the war on purpose. And, the generations that have been shaped by Darby's puzzling thinking have been generations of retreat, a cowardly church, waiting for escape instead of working for Jesus' victory.

Now, the antidote to this, of course, is the Bible and knowing what it really says. But, before we eviscerate this doctrine of a secret rapture entirely, we need to look at one more man who helped fuel dispensationalism to be the primary eschatological system in the twenty-first-century Church. 

C.I. SCOFIELD

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921) was one of the most influential figures in spreading dispensationalism and making it the majority view in American evangelicalism. But, despite that accomplishment, his life was marked by deception, fraud, and moral failure. To understand why his teachings are so dangerous, we must first understand the man behind the mask.

Scofield was a lawyer by profession, but he gained a reputation as a conman and a fraud. He was convicted of forging signatures, and he served jail time for financial crimes. His life was filled with deception and manipulation. He abandoned his wife and children, leaving them in poverty while he reinvented himself as a preacher. Despite his public image of piety, he lived a life marred by dishonesty, drunkenness, and financial scams.

So, how did such a wicked man rise to prominence in Christian circles? Not through deep theological study or faithfulness to the historic doctrines of the Church, and certainly not from living a holy life, but through deception, marketing tricks, and the gullibility of an undiscerning church. Scofield's greatest weapon was not his sermons or his arguments—it was his pen. In 1909, he published The Scofield Reference Bible, which became the primary tool for spreading dispensational thinking.

Unlike his predecessor, John Nelson Darby, who argued for dispensationalism through his debates and writings, Scofield inserted his theology directly into the pages of Scripture through his commentary. His footnotes taught readers to interpret the Bible through a dispensational lens, turning biblical prophecy into a timeline of doom and defeat. Readers absorbed his ideas as if they were part of the Bible itself, mistaking his interpretations for divine truth.

Through this literary sleight of hand, Scofield implanted dispensationalism into American Christianity. Seminaries, particularly Dallas Theological Seminary, became centers for this teaching, producing pastors more familiar with end-times charts than with the historic creeds of the Church. These pastors, along with "Christian" publishing companies, spread Scofield's pessimistic view of history and convinced a century of Christians that the Church was doomed to failure, the world was inevitably spiraling into chaos, and a sudden rapture was our only hope. Kind of like Wanka's golden ticket. And like the Oompa Loompa's "I don't like the look of it." 

Now, as a result, this doctrine has been catastrophic. Instead of hope and mission, the Church has been filled with fear and retreat. Instead of fighting for the Kingdom of God on earth, many Christians have been taught to daydream about leaving it. This doctrine has neutered the Church, making it a cultural eunuch, castrated, afraid, and impotent. 

Scofield's teachings have endured not because they are biblical, but because they were well marketed and seem to fit well within the American psyche that expects calamity from our news outlets that sell us violence, mayhem, and tragedy on a daily basis. Scofield's legacy is a church that has traded victory for defeat and mission for escapism. It all began with a man whose life was marred by sin, hatred for his family, deception, and self-interest, which should have disqualified him from ministry and from publishing his gangrenous ideas, as the Bible notes. 

And, like I said before, the way to beat this is to simply open up our Bibles and see what it actually says. So, with that, I want us to read our passage one more time and then dive into it.

36 "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. 37 For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be. 40 Then there will be two men in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. 41 Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. - Matthew 24:36-41

PART 3: JESUS WAS NOT A DISPLAY DOWNER

The claim that Matthew 24:36-41 supports a secret rapture is one of the most grotesque misreadings of Scripture ever imposed upon the Church. It is not simply wrong; it is a theological hallucination, a doctrine so foreign to the Bible that it survives only by the sheer force of repetition and willful ignorance.

For decades, prophecy-obsessed evangelicals have misread these passages. But, as we have been saying all along, when we actually read them in context, without importing pop-eschatology fairy tales into it, we find that the ones taken away are not the righteous but the wicked. And, what we will see is that the ones who are "left behind" are the Church, not the pagans, who God intentionally leaves here to build and labor until our Lord returns. 

Now, to prove that, I want to look at a few different arguments. First

JESUS DOES NOT SWITCH SUBJECTS

The entire rapture framework hangs upon a single false assumption: that Matthew 24:36 marks a dramatic shift in Jesus' teaching. According to some dispensationalists, Jesus had been speaking about the destruction of Jerusalem in the previous verses, but now, with the phrase "But of that day and hour no one knows," He supposedly pivots to discuss His Second Coming at the end of the world. This is pure fantasy. There is no subject change here. The "day and hour" refers to the same event Jesus has been describing all along—the destruction of Jerusalem in that generation.

For instance, if I told you that a massive blizzard was coming to New England this weekend, and I gave you all the evidence and signs to be looking for in the clouds, you would know I was referring to a near-term event. And, if I concluded my remarks by saying, "Of the day and the hour this will begin, no one knows," you would not intuitively say, "Well, I guess he is now talking about the end of human history." You would rightly say, "he does not know if the snowstorm will begin on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or at 5 o'clock or 6." You would not insert thousands of years into my words because you are not a moron. In the same way, the dumbest possible thing we could do in verse 36 is assume Jesus is abandoning everything He just said to leapfrog His way to the end of the world. 

There is no ambiguity in the text. Jesus had just warned the disciples that the temple would be razed to the ground and that their entire Old Covenant world would come crashing down right before their eyes. But now, He adds a crucial detail: while the signs of Jerusalem's fall would be visible, the exact moment of its final destruction would remain hidden. This follows the exact pattern of biblical prophecy—when God declares impending judgment, He gives signs leading up to it but keeps the precise moment that it will begin concealed. This is how He has always dealt with Israel in the past. The prophets repeatedly warned of the "Day of the Lord" against Israel and other nations, yet God alone determined the final hour when judgment would strike. 

Also, to foolishly claim that Jesus does not know when He will return is akin to blasphemy! Jesus is the second member of the Trinity. He is God in the flesh. He is not saying that the date for His return is totally a crap shoot that no one can possibly know. He is not saying, "I do not know the millennium, but I am coming back." He says that the day and the hour have been withheld. Plus, He just said that it would happen in a single generation, which is forty years (Matthew 24:34). So, He knew it was going to happen within 40 years, but He refused to tell them if it would occur on a Thursday at 2:00 O'clock or on a Friday at 7. This is a far cry from not knowing when He would return. 

The language of divine judgment in this passage is unmistakable. The suddenness of the event does not mean it is far off—it simply means that, like every major act of God's wrath in history, it would catch the wicked off guard. The generation of Noah's day did not expect the flood. The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah did not expect fire from heaven. The Jews in Jeremiah's time did not expect Babylon to breach their walls. And the unbelieving Jews of the first century did not expect Rome to trample their city into dust. But it happened. And Jesus is making it clear—it will happen again in their own generation.

Now, we need to consider the death knell to this rapture theology by looking at the "days of Noah."

"AS IN THE DAYS OF NOAH" 

Jesus follows His former statement with one of the most explicit analogies in all of Scripture—the days of Noah. Yet dispensationalists invert its meaning entirely. The analogy is so simple and so direct that it can only misunderstood by those determined to reject its truth. Let me explain.

If Matthew 24: 36-41 is about a rapture, then we have some major problems. Because Jesus says, it will be just like Noah's days. So what does that mean? Well, in Noah's day, we should ask the question, who was taken away? Genesis 7:23 explicitly states that the wicked were the ones who were swept away by the flood, not the righteous. So, while Noah and his family, the righteous remnant, were left behind, preserved in the ark, the pagans who refused to heed God's warning were taken away. The pattern is unmistakable: the ones taken were the wicked, and the ones left behind were the righteous. Jesus says that His coming will be just like the days of Noah, meaning those taken in Matthew 24 are the wicked, not the righteous. The flood was not a rapture but a sweeping judgment.

And this is part of a consistent biblical pattern where "being taken" signifies judgment, and being "left behind" signifies preservation. For instance, in Jeremiah 52, during the Babylonian exile, the wicked were carried away into captivity. At the same time, the remnant was left in the land. In 2 Kings 17, when Assyria overthrew the northern Kingdom, the covenant-breakers were taken away in chains, and the few left behind were preserved by God. Jesus reinforces this idea in his Parable of the Weeds (Matthew 13:30), where He says, "Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to burn them (showing that they are being removed) but gather my wheat into my barn." (showing that they are being kept, left behind, for a purpose. 

Luke's parallel account in Luke 17:26-37 adds further clarity. Along with Noah, Jesus uses the example of Lot and Sodom. The wicked inhabitants of Sodom were taken away in destruction, while Lot and his family were left behind, spared from the fire. The disciples ask, "Where, Lord?" referring to those taken, and Jesus replies, "Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather" (Luke 17:37). This grim imagery shows that those who are taken are not the righteous Church who is raptured up to heaven but the rebels who are devoured in destruction. This point alone completely dismantles the dispensational view and disallows Matthew 24 as being one of their proof texts. 

Also, just for fun, if this was about a rapture that happens in our lifetime, Jesus might have said something like: "Two men will be in a factory. One will disappear while the other is left making computer chips." Or, "two women will be cooking on their state-of-the-art stove. One will float up to heaven like a vapor, while the other is left boiling water." But He mentioned two men in a field and two women grinding wheat at a mill, which are not common modern-day jobs. It seems like, he is speaking to a people where the majority of men worked in the field and the majority of women would mill their wheat into flour. At every level, this passage bears the makings of an ancient text delivered to ancient people concerning an ancient event. Not something concerning us in the modern world. 

Dispensationalists misapply the word "taken" because they fail to understand the Hebrew pattern of judgment. To be taken in Scripture is to be stripped from the land and removed from God's blessing. To be left behind is to remain under His covenant protection. Jesus' teaching fits perfectly into the postmillennial pattern of victory and expansion: the wicked are being removed, and the righteous are being given dominion and inheritance on the earth. Noah stayed to repopulate the world. Lot remained to repopulate the region. The remnant of Israel was rebuilt after the exile. The Church, through Christ, remains to fill the earth with His glory, as Habakkuk 2:14 declares. Again, if we are thinking in Biblical categories, we should want to be "Left Behind," not longing for escape. 

PART 4: TYING UP A FEW LOOSE ENDS

We have now come to the moment where we drive the final stake through the heart of this eschatological zombie. The dispensationalist rapture is a theological fabrication, a doctrine conjured in the fevered minds of 19th-century men who, instead of trusting the clear teaching of Scripture, superimposed their own anxieties onto the text. But here's where we bring everything together.

DISPENSATIONALISTS BIG FAT GREEK PROBLEM

If you want to be "taken," you are asking for destruction. You are begging to be swept away in judgment. You are not raptured into paradise—you are removed in wrath.

And the linguistic evidence only strengthens this reality. The Greek word for "taken" (παραλαμβάνεται) is the same term used when Pilate handed Jesus over to be taken to His execution (John 19:16). This is not a word of salvation—it is a word of judgment, of being seized for destruction. The word for "left" (ἀφίημι, aphiēmi) means to be spared, to remain safely. The ones "left behind" in Tim Lahaye's world are the unfortunate souls who missed the boat ride to heaven, but in the Bible, those who are left behind are the ones God blesses and leaves back to build! 

THE GREAT ESCAPE MINDSET IS A LIE

And this is where dispensationalism has done the most damage. It has turned the Church into a people waiting for an escape instead of working toward victory. It has convinced Christians that history belongs to the Antichrist instead of the real Christ. It has neutered the Church's mission, convincing entire generations to sit on their hands, waiting to be rocketed to heaven instead of laboring for the Kingdom.

And the irony? They are the ones who refuse to fight. They are the ones who act like the Church is losing, and their only hope is a divine evacuation plan. That is not the Gospel. That is not biblical eschatology. That is the theology of quitters.

TIME TO WAKE UP

Jesus isn't coming back to rescue a defeated church—He is returning for a victorious bride. The Church is not an intermission in Jewish history. We are the Israel of God, and we are in the main event. The gates of hell do not advance against us. We are the ones who will see them fall as we march ever onward. 

We are not meant to escape history—we are meant to shape it. We are here to disciple nations. To bring every thought captive to Christ. To push back the darkness. To build, conquer, and expand Christ's dominion until the whole earth is filled with His glory.

So, what are you doing? Are you waiting to be raptured? Or are you fighting for the Kingdom? Are you buying your talents in the sand? Or will Jesus find you working? These are important questions to consider as we wrap up today's article. 

CONCLUSION

Jesus will return one day—not to vaporize His Church in some Darby-inspired sci-fi escape plan, but to judge the living and the dead, to consummate His reign, and to establish the final and full victory of His Kingdom. There will be no secret rapture, no great Houdini-style vanishing act, no pause in redemptive history where the forces of darkness get to play King of the Hill while the saints sit in the clouds, twiddling their thumbs. That is theological cowardice. That is a lie that has neutered the Church for generations. That is not the mission of Christ.

When Christ returns, it will be to usher in eternity. He will not bring war; He will bring us into His perfect peace. He will not rescue us from the clenches of devastation but will perfectly usher us into full and perfect redemption. That is the future we are looking forward to, and we have a lot of work left to do before we get there. 

Today, we are the generation that is called to build. To build churches. To build marriages. To build families. To build legacies. To build Christian businesses. To build godly stores of wealth. To build disciples in all the nations. To build cities that bow the knee to Christ, counties that call upon the name of the Lord, commonwealths that are no longer sanctuaries for trannies, but sacred geographies dedicated to the Lordship of our Almighty Christ. The Church is Christ's body, His bride, and His weapon of war against the gates of hell. 

So what are you doing with your time? What are you doing with your life? Are you waiting to be beamed up like a Star Trek extra? Are you burying your talents in the sand because you think this world is beyond redemption? Or are you using every second that you have been given to advance His Kingdom, where you live, work, and play?

Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for a sign. The call to action has already been given. The mission is clear: go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations. Crush the works of darkness where they tarry. Take every thought captive to Christ. Advance His Kingdom until every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus is Lord.

Are you in? Are you part of the mission? Or are you still clinging to an eschatology of surrender?

As for me and my house, we refuse to surrender. We refuse to retreat. And we refuse to let a lie rob the Church of its power any longer. Jesus is reigning right now. The battle is on right now. The victory is being secured right now. The only question left is whether you are going to stand with Christ in that victory or whether you are going to sit on the sidelines waiting for an evacuation that will never come.

And it is my prayer that you would get involved. Build. Fight. Push forward. Make disciples. Change your city. Change your family. Change your culture. But do not sit still. We have work to do! And we have more winning to do!