What about the rapture?
Text: Matthew 24 (Bonus)
Hosts:
J. Kent Edwards
Vicki Hitzges
Nathan Norman
Narrator: Brian French
The CrossTalk Podcast is a production of CrossTalk Global, equipping biblical communicators, so every culture hears God’s voice. To find out more, or to support the work of this ministry please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org
Produced by Nathan James Norman/Untold Podcast Production
© 2025 CrossTalk Global
Nathan: So this is a bonus episode which we are releasing in reference to last week's episode which came from Matthew 24. And you know, the question came up, well, where is the rapture in all of this? And so we thought we would just have a little bit of a discussion, a little bit off script for the most part to discuss that. What happened to the Rapture?
Kent: Vicki, you asked that question.
Vicki: Yeah, I thought we were going to be, we Christians were going to be raptured before all the bad stuff happened, right?
Kent: Yeah, I have heard that many times and many people and many of our listeners, I'm sure believe that. But I've wrestled with this because of Matthew 24. I mean, I remember back in Bible school taking a class in the book of Revelation and the professor I had probably not the best, actually said there were going to be seven individual raptures. And he made this crazy theories of seven times people were getting sucked up to heaven. And I couldn't find any evidence for that. But he said for sure, if you don't believe in seven raptures, you must believe in at least one pre tribulation rapture. And the passage that he used was Revelation 4. You've been in the church, probably noticed every pastor wants to preach Revelation 1:3. Looking at the seven churches and so on. We understand that and that's very helpful and applicable. But in chapter four, John gets caught up into the heavens and that is the explanation for why we are. As he goes up to heaven then so we will be caught up out of this earth and be with him. Because God never pours out his wrath on his people. His wrath is poured out on non Christians, on the evil, but never on Christians. So we're removed from that and so we're exempt. I struggle with that a bit, Nathan. Have you?
Nathan: Yeah, I've struggled a bit because there's a lot of conversation about this. I mean, on the one hand you have kind of the popular conversations that came around from left behind and that's kind of a pre tribulation Rapture viewpoint. And it's hard to have conversations without talking about left behind. At least it was 20 years ago.
Kent: No, it's been hugely influential.
Nathan: It's kind of failed. But then, you know, you have the pendulum swing back all of a sudden. And kind of the popular thing within Evangelical Protestant circles right now is now amillennialism, which says that there isn't going to be a rapture or that the rapture is concurrent with the return Jesus. Right. And you have the hardship too of well, wait a minute, if we're talking about the rapture, Jesus comes and meets us in the sky, but he's not back yet for real. So it's a secret second coming where he kind of comes halfway down and then everybody goes up. And then the people left on the world are like, wait, what happened? And then Jesus finally comes back down to bring about final judgment and usher in the new heaven and new earth. The arguments against that obviously are like, well, wait a minute. Now you're kind of having Jesus return twice, one secret, one visible. But Jesus said just in the passage we read in Matthew that everyone would know, right? But a counter argument to that would say, well, you know, just like the Old Testament scholars or the first century Jewish scholars, they missed that Jesus was the Messiah because they failed to see that the Old Testament prophecies were about two separate comings. You know, his first coming and then his second coming. Just in the same way, too, we might be misunderstanding prophecy to say, well, you know, Jesus is going to kind of half come back and then fully come back again because we don't fully understand prophecy. Okay, you know, fair enough. So there's a lot of conversation that happens about rapture. And I found people are very impassioned about their viewpoints on this. And probably I kind of jokingly said in the main episode, when it was talking about how terrible it would be for the believers and everything, I was like, well, I don't like that theology. So I'm pre tribulation all the way. Because I don't want to be here, I don't want to suffer.
Kent: And I hope I'm wrong. Right? Please prove me wrong. I have no desire to go through the great tribulation as it's described in these.
Vicki: What's your position called? Ahtrib.
Kent: Post trib.
Vicki: Post trib.
Kent: So my position is post trib. And I guess I got there because. And I know there's lots of discussion about imagery and so on in the book of Revelation, but it seems to me that we always should interpret the obscure with the clear. Okay, so just growing up, I had a lot of people doing a lot of crazy things with the imagery in Revelation. But in Matthew 24, this is very clear. This is not a lot of hidden metaphors that are hard to understand. Jesus is asked clearly, what's going to happen in the future? And he answers as clearly as he can. And he never mentions. In fact, he specifically says, you're going to be here throughout that whole time. And when people say.
Nathan: And all God's people say amen.
Kent: And it kind of follows even with Jesus teaching and the Beatitudes, because remember, if you are a Beatitude kind of person, the final Beatitude, the eighth beatitude is blessed are those who are persecuted because that is the inevitable result of living a God centered life. We will be persecuted because it bothers evil people and they lash out because your holiness makes them see their sin. And they don't want to believe that they are sinning. They don't want to feel any guilt for the actions that they are committed. And God does have. God's people have always felt God's wrath against sinners. I mean, I think of Daniel in Babylon. God sent his wrath on his own people, had them exiled right from their land and they were taken captive in Babylon. Daniel was a righteous man, no question about that. But he was suffering because of the wrath that God poured out on his sinning people. So do God's people get caught up in the wrath of God? Yeah, they do. So how do I make sense of the Rapture? Well, I know there is a Rapture because Paul says that explains that in 1 Thessalonians 4, doesn't he?
Vicki: For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
Kent: So there clearly is a rapture. And I believe as you look at chapter 24 and we go through this terrible time of increasing persecution until finally the abomination of desolation. Then Jesus will come and he will appear in the sky. As we just read in Matthew 24, and as you just read from 1 Thessalonians, the dead in Christ will rise and meet him first. I'm not sure why they get to go first, but anyway, I'm not bitter. I'll wait my turn. And then we will be caught up in the air and we will meet him and then he will continue to come down. There is one Rapture for all believers and it will happen in two stages, but at one time.
Vicki: Why that clear this up for me. Absent from the bodies present with the Lord. So our soul is already, if we're dead, going to be in heaven, but our bodies will go up.
Kent: Yeah, our soul and body will be reunited. Okay, so we'll have a heavenly body and we will be caught up. We'll meet Jesus in the air and then we will come down with him, just as Matthew 24 says. And that's when the new heaven and the new earth will take place. So why be caught up? Why not just wait for him to come? I got some insight into this from a book written by Kenneth Bailey, an excellent evangelical scholar who wrote the book the Poet and the Peasant. He taught for many years at the University of Beirut, American University in Beirut, rather. And all of his students were from the Middle East. And so he got to understand Middle east customs and moors very well. And what he learned from his students was when a dignitary came, come to a town, the town would come out to him and bring them in to their town as a kind of honor. In fact, he mentions that that happened with former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. One time, the president was coming to this town, and the whole town came out to meet him when he was still maybe a mile away from the city. And they shut off the engine in the car, and the people pushed the car into the town as a sign of honoring. We're so glad we want you here, and we are coming with you in your glory in a lesser way. Sometimes I've found myself, maybe you have, too, doing this. When we've had guests come to the house, you know, they say they'll be here at a certain time, and we're watching. The house is clean, we're ready. Food's not in a panic. So we're watching out the door. We see their car come up, and we will often open the door and walk out to greet them and then come in with them into the house. That's the honor I think God is going to give us. We have the honor to come and meet our Savior in the air and come with him as his children as he comes for the second time, not as a baby, but as the king of kings and Lord of lords, to set up his kingdom here on earth forever. And we get to join him as he comes to begin his work on Earth. I think it's an act of worship that we're invited to join him, and all believers from all ages will all be there. Can you imagine? That's going to be a day to remember, A day that could never be forgotten.
Nathan: Yeah, I think it's important, too, like you said earlier, Kent, is, you know, we approach these kinds of questions with some. Some amount of doctrinal humility. And I think whatever Bible teachers were listening to on these things, I would be concerned if they didn't approach it with some amount of humility to say, well, this is what I think it is. Because as you've pointed out numerous times, Saul of Tarsus had better biolable knowledge than all of us put together. And his conclusion was that Jesus is not the Messiah and I should kill his followers.
Kent: Right?
Nathan: So we have to have, if he got that amount of Bible prophecy wrong about the Messiah, so too we can have a terrible understanding of future prophecy and might get it wrong. The big things are, yes, God is going to transform us, those who followed Christ. We're going to have a glorified body. Jesus is going to come back. And it's going to be in a way that we know Jesus came back. It's not going to be surreptitiously, it's not going to be as a peasant child again like he did the first time. But every eye will see him. Everyone will know it is him. So those are the big things and that is our hope. I've frequently been saying for the last few years as Christians need to start thinking of Jesus's second coming as second Christmas. Everybody loves Christmas. Think of it as second Christmas. There's a lot of Christians who are like, oh no, he's going to come back. It's the worst thing. No, it's your blessed hope. Right? I think the idea of a pre tribulation rapture is really kind of like a Western world American. I don't like suffering. I like to be comfortable. Hope or wishful thinking maybe I should say. But most Christians throughout the ages have understood to truly faithfully follow Christ means a life of difficulty. And there is going to be some amount of persecution. I mean even John wrote in first John, he said, dear children, this is the last hour. As you have heard, the Antichrist is coming. Even now many Antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. And so the spirit of the Antichrist has been alive and unfortunately well in the world since the time that Jesus ascended into heaven. There is a spirit of the age that is trying to fight against Christ and his followers. And so most Christians have understood. There have been difficulties, there have been hardships, but when Jesus comes back, oh yeah, it's going to be great. That is second Christmas. That is our blessed hope, the greatest day we will ever experience in our lives. But we do come at all of this with amount of doctrinal humility because we might be wrong and we could be wrong. And let's major on the majors and if we're wrong about the timing of the rapture, meh, great, I hope I'm wrong. Right, yeah. And God's going to work it out.
Kent: I guess, for me. I just think. I do think Matthew 24 is really a controlling narrative that needs to dominate the obscure throughout the years. I just found this to be a helpful blueprint. Jesus knows the future. He's explaining it to his disciples, and this is what they need to know. This is the major strokes of what's coming. Details. We don't know the major strokes. This is it.
Nathan: So for you, this is the key text by which you would interpret like future prophecy and say, Revelation or Thessalonians.
Kent: Yes. Because Jesus is given and Matthew gives him a whole chapter here to explain what is to come and when will you return? I don't know how we can get any clearer than Jesus. Direct statements on that. So I use this as a controlling document. And it's been helpful to me through the years as people have thrown around and misused the Bible in many ways to accomplish different things. To come back to this as my anchor.
Vicki: We aren't sure when or how Christ will come back, but we know there will be persecution and Christ will come back in a way that's unmistakable. To meet us in the air, the greatest day of our lives.
Nathan: We hope you've enjoyed this bonus episode of the crosstalk Podcast. I trust that today's discussion of God's Word has been helpful and served as an encouragement to not just be hearers of the Word, but doers together. Let's bring God's Word to life to our lives. This week, the CrossTalk Podcast is a production of Crosstalk Global, equipping biblical communicators so every culture hears God's voice. To find out more to support the work of this ministry Ministry, please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org to help us train the next generation of biblical communicators. All you have to do is click donate in the show notes and make a donation of any size. You can support this show by sharing it on social media and telling your friends. Tune in next Friday as we rejoin our discussion through the Gospel of Matthew. Be sure to join us. Welcome to Rapture Talk. All Rapture all the time. I'm your host, Nathan Norman, who Kent often thinks of me as Brian French.
Kent: I'm really caught up in this topic.