Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Rapture

People ask me, "do you believe that Jesus will come back and take His children away at some point, in what many call the Rapture?" And I answer, yes, I definitely do. I think that Jesus Christ has offered us an exciting event, explained in 1 Thessalonians 4:17:

Then we who are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.

...hey, I'm not here to start a weeks-long argue with people about pre-trib, post-trib, mid-trib and all that. I think the Bible makes it obvious what God is teaching. I'm telling you what I see in the Bible, and it makes it pretty clear. We call it the Rapture - that time when Jesus pulls His children into Heaven - and we get the English word from the Latin word rapto, meaning “to seize" or "be carried away" whether in spirit or body, and the dictionary explains that it means to be transported quickly from one place to another. The Greek word is harpadzo and is translated “caught up”. The Latin translation uses the term rapto, but the Greek translation says it is harpadzo, and it used 13 times in the New Testament. Harpadzo is translated “caught up” 4 times, “take by force” 3 times, “catch away” 2 times, “pluck” 2 times, “catch” once and “pull” once. (Here are some of the references in case you want to look: Acts 8:39, 2 Cor. 12:2-4, Rev. 12;5 and Matt. 11:12) I am truly looking forward to the opportunity to escape death if God so chooses (who wouldn't like to bypass the pain of death - it sounds like a mighty nice option, believe me) and I try to live my life as if Christ would come today and make harpadzo a reality.


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I truly love the students in my classes at Christian Academy of Knoxville. What an enthusiastic group of learners. I constantly tell them that they are the rebels of this generation because they are thinkers. Thinking has gone by the wayside in this world. These students are the revolutionaries.