The Rapture Verses

They're way cooler than disappearing from the earth...

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Photo by Jannis Nöbauer on Unsplash

Dear reader,

Last week we took a look at why there was every reason to ignore the Left Behind series and its underlying theology when it was first released in 1995. I promised that we’d look at the verses in scripture used to support the idea of the rapture. Jump back and read that if you haven’t already.

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In this article I want to show that the pop understanding of a rapture probably isn’t there, and why those verses are so much more interesting than that.

Before I get into that, a subscriber (Christina) did a cursory look at keywords that appear (or don’t, more to the point) in the Left Behind series. She looked for words that might relate to imagery traditionally used around understandings of eschatology in scripture. She looked up words like union (ie union with God) bride, wedding, marriage (images used frequently in scripture to describe the relationship between Christ and the Church), and things like crucifixion and resurrection (central to the Christian faith), along with judge and judgement.

Here is a set of images with the results for each book in the series. Click on each image to get a larger version.