The scriptures do not teach that there will be any kind of rapture. I know this is going to come across as patronizing, but the reason that the rapture idea has any leverage is that people are not as knowledgeable of their Bibles as they need to be to understand the 1 Thess 4 text.
The Second Coming is real – Jesus will indeed come back and take His place in God’s renewed creation. But there will be no rapture. To understand the true Biblical picture, one must have the correct model for how reality is constituted. Heaven is not “up there somewhere†– it is not a “place†in what we see around us as physical reality. Therefore, there is no sense at all to a picture where people are “snatched up†to go off to heaven. That image appeals to an entirely incorrect way about thinking about “where†Heaven is.
Paul’s description of Jesus’ reappearance in 1 Thessalonians 4 is a metaphorical rendering of what he says in two other passages: 1 Corinthians 15:51-54 and Phillipians 3:20-21. Here is the 1 Corinthians passage:
51Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed 52in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."
Now here is the 1 Thessalonians 4 passage:
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. 17After 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.
Clearly the the same scenario is being described in both texts – unless the dead in Christ will be raised twice. Note the structural parallels (this has already been pointed out in an earlier post).
1. Both accounts have a trumpet sounding.
2. Both accounts have the dead being raised.
3. The 1 Corinthians account has those alive at the time being transformed, while the 1 Thess account has them snatched up in the air.
I suggest that it is clear that only one thing can be happening to those who are alive at the time of Jesus’ return. And I suggest that the 1 Corinthians texts is a literal description – those alive are transformed, while the 1 Thess text is really saying the same thing, but in a highly metaphorical fashion. So no one is really being snatched away.
Note how the Phillipians text endorses the 1 Corinthians text in respect to what actually happens to those alive at the time of Jesus’ return – they are transformed, not snatched away:
20But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body
Both the 1 Corinthians and the Phillipians texts are asserting that those who are alive at Jesus’ appearing will be changed or transformed so that their mortal bodies will become incorruptible, deathless. This is all that Paul intends to say in Thessalonians, but he uses poetic imagery, from biblical and political sources, to enhance his message. Little did he know how his rich metaphors would be misunderstood two millennia later.
First, Paul echoes the story of Moses coming down the mountain (echoed in the 1 Thess text by “himself will come down from heavenâ€Â) with the Torah. The trumpet sounds (just as in the 1 Thess text), a loud voice is heard (echoed by the voice of the archangel in the 1 Thess text), and after a long wait, Moses comes to see what’s been going on in his absence (echoing, of course, Jesus’ return to Earth in 1 Thess 4 after a long absence).
Second, he echoes Daniel 7, in which “the people of the saints of the Most High†are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up to sit with God in glory. Of course, in the New Testament version, this vindication is the resurrection of the dead and the transformation of the living.
Third, Paul conjures up images of an emperor visiting a colony or province. The citizens go out to meet him in open country and then escort him into the city – that is how you greeted an emperor in the culture in which Paul is writing. Paul’s image of the people “meeting the Lord in the air†should be read with the assumption that the people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade world.
I am not making this stuff up. The allusions are clear and scriptural. Paul knows his Bible and is drawing on these images to construct an exceedingly rich metaphor for the transformation of the living at Jesus’ return.
Paul’s mixed metaphors of trumpets blowing and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are not to be understood as literal truth, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.