In most churches you will hear teaching of what is called “THE RAPTURE of THE CHURCH.” The word RAPTURE does not appear in most English Bibles, and it is not in the Greek manuscripts, so where did it come from?
The first appearance of the word “Rapture” was in the Latin Vulgate Bible, the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. It was the Latin word “rapio” which was then translated to the word “rapture,” the English equivalent.
Rapio comes from Latin, “rapere:” “to seize, especially abduct.” Rapio was the Vulgate translation of the Greek word “harpazo,” found in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and translated in our English Bibles “caught-up”. There is a sense in which the Greek word harpazo can mean “caught-up,” as when a vulture (raptor) snatches its prey and then flies away with it.
In Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Harpazo is defined as “to snatch” or to “take by force,” but it does not have a directional connotation to it. (There is no “up” in that word).
How is the word used in other places in the Bible? Here’s the best example:
In John 6:15 it says "they tried to 'take Jesus by force' to make Him their king." That's the same Greek word, "harpazo."
The use of the word “Rapture” was propagated by J. N. Darby, (beginning in 1827) who is said to have been the first to teach the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture, the taking away of the saints before the great tribulation.
Most people who espouse this doctrine cannot explain it. They just know what they have heard from their pastor, and they believe it just because he said it. This is called “Coat-tail Christianity.” Of course, that won't work; we really need to study it for ourselves. This I did in about 1976, and found that rapture isn’t really taught in the Bible.
The “rapture” is said to occur prior to the “great tribulation” that Jesus taught about on the Mount of Olives, found in Luke 21, Matthew 24 and Mark 13. Jesus didn’t mention any such event.
Jesus did warn his disciples to flee to the hills when they saw armies surrounding Jerusalem, and this they did in A. D. 66. Cestius Gallus Roman army besieged the city and the church left Jerusalem. They removed to Pella in Decapolis where they were safe throughout the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred in A. D. 70. This fleeing to safety was not “rapture,” but a departure to a safe place while the destruction Jesus foretold took place.
The pre-tribulation rapture is put together by assembling a lot of scriptures that are not connected, but are used to support a flying away to heaven before the great tribulation. The idea of being accounted worthy to escape was used by some as a lead-in to the "rapture," because they didn’t have the teaching of what actually happened as a result of that warning which Jesus gave His followers, i.e. how they escaped destruction by following His warning.
If you assume the warning by Jesus to be foretelling a “rapture,” the scripture in 1 Thessalonians. 4:17 could be construed to support such an idea when taken from most Bible translations, but the Greek text tells a different story.
The idea of rapture is that we are taken up into the sky and on to “heaven,” wherever that is.
Let’s look at some of the Greek words used in that scripture and see what they really mean.
The word for "air" in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 is the Greek word "aer" which means "air, as naturally circumambient." It means the air that "immediately surrounds" us, not the air up in the sky (of which there is very little).
If the writer had wanted to say “sky,” he could have used the Greek word "ouranous," but it is not in this verse. The primary meaning of ouranous is “sky” but it is sometimes rendered "air" in the KJV. However, that is not the word translated "air" in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. It is not talking about flying up into the sky when it uses "aer."
Actually, in the Greek text it says "into" air rather than "in the air." The word used here is the Greek: "eis," meaning into, or as one German version of the Bible rendered it: "towards air."
There is a good reason that there can be no pre-tribulational rapture of the church in our future as many have so confidently taught for over a century. That is because the great tribulation that Jesus foretold is already past history. He said it would be in that generation, and Jesus is always right.
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