Does Your Church Teach About the Rapture(Catching up) Heaven, Hell, Prophecy?

[GISMYS_7]

1 Thess. 3:13==so that He may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus ""with all His saints.""" When Jesus returns to earth to destroy all evil we raptured saints come with Him.
◄ Revelation 20:5 ►
Unbelievers
(The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.)

 

[Helen]

Rubbish!!!

 

[Phoneman777]

Hey breadman,
I've missed you!

Am I the only one on this whole forum that agrees with you every now and then??

Nope. I agreed with him about the ""Coming of our Lord" and "our gathering together with Him" as being two events that happen simultaneously on the same day, not 7 years apart.

 

[Phoneman777]

Rubbish!!!

What's rubbish, BG?

 

[GISMYS_7]

Rubbish!!!

Should I take it you will be left behind?? Your choice!!

 

[Helen]

Should I take it you will be left behind?? Your choice!!

Yes indeed...it is the tears which are "taken"...not the wheat!

 

[GISMYS_7]

These are the last dayA!! I need not waste my time ==google =Jack Van Impe - The Rapture Explained

 

[Nancy]

Does Your Church Teach About the Rapture(Catching up) Heaven, Hell, Prophecy,Last Days?? Or is your church little more than a semi-private social club? When was the last Sunday you heard a sermon about the Rapture(Catching up) Heaven, Hell, Prophecy,.Last Days?? Or does your church teach lets all just be happy and we are all OK and I am OK so no worries??

My Pastor only touches on it now and then but, several months back we had 11 weeks of bible study on eschatology. He is an awesome teacher and I did not miss one single class. I have been very intrigued with the subject from day one!
Blessings!
-nancy

 

[Nancy]

My Pastor only touches on it now and then but, several months back we had 11 weeks of bible study on eschatology. He is an awesome teacher and I did not miss one single class. I have been very intrigued with the subject from day one!
Blessings!
-nancy

"He" meaning one of the Elders..

 

[GISMYS_7]

Jack Van Impe Greatest Binle Prophecy Teacher of Our Day!!

Jack Van Impe 88 years old but still the Greatest Binle Prophecy Teacher of Our Day!!
Google===Videos of jack van impe - the rapture explained

 

[Nancy]

I don't hear a lot of preachers anywhere talk on Heaven or Hell, which I think is a spiritual travesty. Why is that?

Their congregation is not praying enough for the Pastor, and leaders in the church to be bold in their convictions? I suppose maybe that is one of many reasons. I think we need to consider the demographics of your Church as well...my Church has many single mothers and folks fighting many addictions...some are limited in even the basic understandings of scripture so, I suppose that could factor in as well? And of course, there are the ones who water down part of the truth and totally go to the other extreme in order to keep their "buildings" full...they are in the category of those mentioned in
Matthew 7:21-23 New King James Version (NKJV)
I Never Knew You
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
God Bless you abundantly,
-nancy

 

[Nancy]

Rubbish!!!

Back in the 90's, I watched all that "Rubbish" but, God has brought me a loooong way since then. The only televangelist I can agree with would be Charles Stanley. Of course, I do not watch television anyhow so, can't say who else I might stomach. I did watch Jack Van Impe and his wife for a while in the 90's when still a babe in Christ, God has brought me into so much truth and wisdom since then. We all grow as we allow the Spirit to work in and through us if we are TRULY seeking His TRUTH. Have you heard of "seed money"? Talk about rubbish, lol.

Matthew 7:21-23 New King James Version (NKJV)
I Never Knew You
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
Second Peter 2:1-3 “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.”

 

[Enoch111]

How is John 14:1-4 about a rapture?

When Jesus said "I will come again and receive you unto myself" He was speaking about "the catching up" of the saints. That is a plain and direct reference to the Rapture. He did not say in this passage "I will come again to judge the world and destroy my enemies", since that is reserved for the Second Coming of Christ. Here He is addressing His "own" (the apostles) and by extension all the children of God. And He prefaces this by saying "Let not your heart be troubled", which means that there is no connection of the Rapture with the Tribulation.

However, we have also been given a clear but brief description of the Resurrection/Rapture by Paul, which confirms that Christ will come to receive His own unto Himself and take them to Heaven (where those mansions are located).

1 THESSALONIANS 4
13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.
15 For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent [precede] them which are asleep. [the dead in Christ]
16 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:
17 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.
18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

NT Scripture shows us that the coming of Christ for His saints was always a "Blessed Hope" and a constant expectation -- that it would be unannounced and sudden, and that Christians should always be ready. But we know that the apostles were martyred and that Christ did not come for His saints at that time. It is still a future event, and it is tied into the completion of the Church with the full complement of Gentiles (Rom 11:25).

 

[GodsGrace]

Nope. I agreed with him about the ""Coming of our Lord" and "our gathering together with Him" as being two events that happen simultaneously on the same day, not 7 years apart.

Yes, I agree. I don't even know about the 7 years apart...

 

[GodsGrace]

When Jesus said "I will come again and receive you unto myself" He was speaking about "the catching up" of the saints. That is a plain and direct reference to the Rapture. He did not say in this passage "I will come again to judge the world and destroy my enemies", since that is reserved for the Second Coming of Christ. Here He is addressing His "own" (the apostles) and by extension all the children of God. And He prefaces this by saying "Let not your heart be troubled", which means that there is no connection of the Rapture with the Tribulation.

However, we have also been given a clear but brief description of the Resurrection/Rapture by Paul, which confirms that Christ will come to receive His own unto Himself and take them to Heaven (where those mansions are located).

1 THESSALONIANS 4
13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.
15 For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent [precede] them which are asleep. [the dead in Christ]
16 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:
17 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.
18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

NT Scripture shows us that the coming of Christ for His saints was always a "Blessed Hope" and a constant expectation -- that it would be unannounced and sudden, and that Christians should always be ready. But we know that the apostles were martyred and that Christ did not come for His saints at that time. It is still a future event, and it is tied into the completion of the Church with the full complement of Gentiles (Rom 11:25).

I think we agree. Jesus is coming back one time, at the end, and the dead will get their glorified body first, and then those that are still alive at that time.
I also understand that we will be in the New Earth which is maybe the New Jerusalem...not sure.

 

[Nancy]

Yes, I agree. I don't even know about the 7 years apart...

I'm jumping in here for a sec...I haven't gone back in this thread to see what I missed...I think they MIGHT be speaking of the 70 weeks in Daniel 9 when an angel appears to Daniel to tell him he future of Israel.
The 70 weeks=7 years. The Great Tribulation is to last for 7 years. During the first 3.5 ears, there will be peace...then, when the abomination of desolation will set himself up as God in the newly built Jewish temple, the Mid rapture folk believe this is when they will be pulled out of the earth to meet Jesus in the sky. For me personally, I have been back and forth so many times I am starting to even wonder if what anybody says about a "rapture" is even true at all! Frustrating so, I pretty much leave it be as it is not important to me nor is it necessary to even know for a Christian, IMO.

 

[epostle1]

All the theologians, scripture scholars, bishops, saints and reformers were incapable of interpreting God's word....until....
...John Nelson Darby came along. He broke off from the Plymouth Brethren over theological disputes. Founder of the Exclusive Brethren sect, Darby invented pre-tribulation rapture theology in 1830 that was totally foreign to all of Christianity.

His theory was further popularized in the United States in the early 20th century by the wide circulation of the Scofield Reference Bible. The footnotes were made doctrine by American dispensationists.

...fast forward to 1970...

The biggest-selling work of non-fiction (other than the Bible) since 1970 is dispensationalist Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (Bantam, 1970), which sold more than 40 million copies and established the blueprint for a number of other popular, self-described “Bible prophecy” experts (including Tim LaHaye, creator and coauthor of the Left Behind series)

LaHaye’s first work of “Bible prophecy” was The Beginning of the End (Tyndale, 1972), essentially a carbon copy of Lindsey’s mega-seller. In the years that followed, Lindsey and LaHaye, along with authors such as Salem Kirban, David Wilkinson, Dave Hunt, Grant Jeffrey, John Walvoord, and others, produced a string of best-selling books warning of the rapidly approaching pretribulation Rapture, the Antichrist, and the tribulation.

One message of LaHaye’s that comes across clearly in books such as Are We Living in the End Times?, Rapture Under Attack, and Revelation Unveiled is that the Catholic Church is apostate, Catholicism is “Babylonian mysticism” and an “idolatrous religion,” and Catholics worship Mary, knowing little about the real Jesus Christ. It’s difficult to overstate the dislike — even hatred — LaHaye has for the Catholic Church or to exaggerate the ridiculous character of his attacks. He condemns the use of candles in Catholic churches, insists there’s hardly any difference between Hinduism and Catholicism, and emphatically declares that the Catholic Church killed at least 40 million people during the “dark ages.”

When I asked LaHaye, via e-mail, why he never refers to Catholic sources or official documents in his writings, he replied:

Because I think that for centuries the Catholic Church has presented church history in a manner protective of “Mother church.” . . . I have seen more concern on the part of your church for Hindus, Buddhists, and other pagan religions than they do [sic] for those who love Jesus Christ as He is presented in the Bible and are committed to making Him known to the lost so they will not be Left Behind.

In other words, the Catholic Church is simply wrong and doesn’t deserve a fair hearing. LaHaye has not only revealed himself to be an anti-Catholic polemicist but a theologian with a seriously skewed view of God’s salvific work. In a newspaper interview, LaHaye said, “We’ve [himself and Jenkins] created a series of books about the greatest cosmic event that will happen in the history of the world.” What is that “greatest cosmic event”? The Incarnation? The Cross? The Resurrection? No, the Rapture — a modern, man-made belief based on a distorted Christology and an anemic ecclesiology.

Library : Five Myths About the Rapture

It's ironic; all this talk about "end time persecution" and/or "great tribulation" while guys like Lahaye inflict it on Catholics.

copied from https://www.christianityboard.com/t...or-will-you-be-left-behind.26166/#post-415216

 

[Nancy]

These are the scriptures which show that God has not appointed us to wrath, but what is the context of them? There are several possible interpretations:

(1) In Romans 5:9 the wrath on the unbeliever is contrasted with justification of the believer. The obvious context of this scriptures is that the wrath to come is not the tribulation in the end-time, but the wrath of God on the unbelievers in Gehenna, the lake of fire, at the end of the millennium reign of Christ (Revelation 20:15).

(2) The context of 1 Thessalonians 5:9 is the wrath to come on the Day of the Lord.

(1 Thessalonians 5:2) "For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night."

This being so then the wrath spoken of is the wrath coming on the unbelievers who fight against Jerusalem on the day of the Lord (Zechariah 14:12), the day Jesus returns (Zechariah 14:4), and is nothing at all to do with the tribulation. As the last part of 1 Thessalonians 5:9 states, that will be the day we obtain salvation (Hebrews 9:28; 1 Peter 1:5).

(3) All Christians have been called to suffer persecution, so this cannot possibly refer to the wrath of Satan, or his wrath through people, while alive in this life. Paul suffered exceptional persecution (Acts 14:19; 2 Corinthians 11:23-25) so he could not possibly mean that God has not appointed us to that. He also said, "Everyone who lives godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12), so this does not refer to the persecution that Christians will get during the tribulation period.

(4) Another way to interpret this is that God will protect his people from the end-time plagues that will come on the earth during the tribulation period (See #9.122 below).

So, what do you believe? Honestly, my beliefs have changed so many times on the "Rapture" theory that I am way closer to NOT believing it all together as, the more I read and understand, I think The Spirit has enlightened me through study...not that it really matters anyhow.

I choose #4 Above

 

[epostle1]

Yes!! Satan hates and fights against the rapture!!! We have records of the church fathers teaching the rapture back to the 300AD and 1 Thess. 4:16-18 has been there all along!!

This clever argument, used by Ryrie, LaHaye, Lindsey, and others, is effective in persuading those with little knowledge of historical theology or the beliefs of the early Church. True, several early Christian writers — notably Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus, and Lactanitus — were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign. But the premillennialism they embraced was quite different from that taught by modern dispensationalists.

Catholic scholars acknowledge that some of the Fathers were influenced by the Jewish belief in an earthly Messianic kingdom, while others embraced millennarianism as a reaction to the Gnostic antagonism toward the material realm. But the Catholic Church does not look to one Church Father in isolation — or even a select group of Fathers — and claim their teachings are infallible or definitive. Rather, the Church views their writings as valuable guides providing insights and perspectives that assist the Magisterium — the teaching office of the Church — in defining, clarifying, and defending Church doctrine.

Those early premillennialists did not hold to distinctively modern and dispensationalist beliefs, especially not the belief in a pretribulation Rapture and the radical distinction between an earthly and a heavenly people of God; such beliefs didn’t come about until many centuries later. The early Church Fathers, whether premillennialist or otherwise, believed that the Church was the New Israel and that Christians — consisting of both Jews and Gentiles (cf. Romans 10:12) — had replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people.

In attempting to prove the validity of their beliefs by appealing to early Church Fathers, dispensationalists always ignore the Church Fathers’ unanimous teachings about the nature of the Eucharist, the authority and nature of the Church, and a host of other distinctively Catholic beliefs. They also conveniently blur the lines between the historical premillennialism of certain early Church writers and the dispensational premillennialism of Darby and his disciples.
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=5788

 

[epostle1]

These are the scriptures which show that God has not appointed us to wrath, but what is the context of them? There are several possible interpretations:

(1) In Romans 5:9 the wrath on the unbeliever is contrasted with justification of the believer. The obvious context of this scriptures is that the wrath to come is not the tribulation in the end-time, but the wrath of God on the unbelievers in Gehenna, the lake of fire, at the end of the millennium reign of Christ (Revelation 20:15).

(2) The context of 1 Thessalonians 5:9 is the wrath to come on the Day of the Lord.

(1 Thessalonians 5:2) "For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night."

This being so then the wrath spoken of is the wrath coming on the unbelievers who fight against Jerusalem on the day of the Lord (Zechariah 14:12), the day Jesus returns (Zechariah 14:4), and is nothing at all to do with the tribulation. As the last part of 1 Thessalonians 5:9 states, that will be the day we obtain salvation (Hebrews 9:28; 1 Peter 1:5).

(3) All Christians have been called to suffer persecution, so this cannot possibly refer to the wrath of Satan, or his wrath through people, while alive in this life. Paul suffered exceptional persecution (Acts 14:19; 2 Corinthians 11:23-25) so he could not possibly mean that God has not appointed us to that. He also said, "Everyone who lives godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." (2 Timothy 3:12), so this does not refer to the persecution that Christians will get during the tribulation period.

(4) Another way to interpret this is that God will protect his people from the end-time plagues that will come on the earth during the tribulation period (See #9.122 below).

So, what do you believe? Honestly, my beliefs have changed so many times on the "Rapture" theory that I am way closer to NOT believing it all together as, the more I read and understand, I think The Spirit has enlightened me through study...not that it really matters anyhow.

I choose #4 Above

Problems with the pre-tribulational view are highlighted by Baptist (and premillennial) theologian Dale Moody, who wrote:
"Belief in a pre-tribulational rapture . . . contradicts all three chapters in the New Testament that mention the tribulation and the rapture together (Mark 13:24–27; Matt. 24:26–31; 2 Thess. 2:1–12). . . . The theory is so biblically bankrupt that the usual defense is made using three passages that do not even mention a tribulation (John 14:3; 1 Thess. 4:17; 1 Cor. 15:52). These are important passages, but they have not had one word to say about a pre-tribulational rapture. The score is 3 to 0, three passages for a post-tribulational rapture and three that say nothing on the subject.
. . . Pre-tribulationism is biblically bankrupt and does not know it" (The Word of Truth, 556–7).

As far as the millennium goes, we tend to agree with Augustine and, derivatively, with the amillennialists. The Catholic position has thus historically been "amillennial" (as has been the majority Christian position in general, including that of the Protestant Reformers), though Catholics do not typically use this term. The Church has rejected the premillennial position, sometimes called "millenarianism" (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church 676). In the 1940s the Holy Office judged that premillennialism "cannot safely be taught," though the Church has not dogmatically defined this issue.

With respect to the rapture, Catholics certainly believe that the event of our gathering together to be with Christ will take place, though they do not generally use the word "rapture" to refer to this event (somewhat ironically, since the term "rapture" is derived from the text of the Latin Vulgate of 1 Thess. 4:17—"we will be caught up," [Latin: rapiemur]).
https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-rapture