Sermon: The Rapture and Trumpets
A False Interpretation
#1727-PM
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 16-Sep-23; 80 minutes
description: The sad delusion that has gripped most Protestant evangelicals, that is the pre-Tribulation "rapture" concept made popular by the Left Behind books and movies, hopelessly messes up the timing of prophecy, espousing the notion that God's chosen people will be wafted off to heaven for a period ranging from 3 to 7 years to be protected from the terror of God's wrath. This interpretation demands that Christ return twice—once a near miss to rapture the saints, causing mayhem to occur on earth as vehicles and hazardous machinery are immediately abandoned allowing their owners to be whisked off to heaven. Because God's true saints have been enlightened to His plan of salvation through His Holy days, they are immune to such foolishness as the pre-Tribulation rapture theory. The Feast of Trumpets depicts Christ's dramatic return to earth, recalling the dramatic trumpet blast at Mount Sinai in which God first introduced Himself to the children of Israel. I Thessalonians 4:15-17 takes place after the tribulation at which time Christ resurrects His dead saints and transforms His living saints into spirit beings containing the mind of Christ to follow their leader back to earth to put an end permanently to the governments of men, the Babylonish system, replacing it permanently with the Kingdom of God, administered exclusively by spirit beings, offspring of Almighty God. Christ's return to the earth will never consist of a secret near hit-and-miss around the barn, but following the breaking of the 5th, 6th, and 7th seal consisting of a fearful blast of trumpets leading to the 7th trumpet plague at which time the last trumpet will formally usher in the resurrection of the saints and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, bringing back the remnant of Israel, setting up the capitol city in Jerusalem, initially on this earth, awaiting a future new earth and Jerusalem.
transcript:
Little more than 25 years ago, a major phenomenon, certainly among evangelical Protestants, ran its course. You remember Jerry Falwell? He said the book that started it was probably greater than that of any other book in modern times outside the Bible. That book was Left Behind by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins. It was published in 1995. (That was the same year I gave that split sermon.) When the series was concluded in 2007, it consisted of 16 books, including three prequels. Three movies starring Kirk Cameron were released in 2004 and 2005 and a reboot starring of all people, Nicolas Cage, was released in 2014 and its sequel starring Kevin Sorbo was released just this year.
The title, Left Behind, refers to the world after what Protestants call the Rapture. The rapture is based on a particularly evangelical interpretation of I Thessalonians 4:15-18. (We will be going there and spending some time in I Thessalonians 4:15-18 in a bit.) This view of the end times is a facet of a theological framework called dispensationalism, and dispensationalism is built on the idea that throughout history God has worked and saved people in different ways.
They say the first dispensation was before the Flood and He worked with certain people in certain ways differently than He worked with people after the Flood, or after giving the law at Sinai, or after Jesus Christ. They have several dispensations, I cannot remember, probably seven. But that is this theological framework. That God adjusts how He saves people depending on the times, rather than realizing that God tells us frequently that He does not change. He saves people the same way all the time.
So, dispensationalists, many of them evangelical Protestants, have developed an interpretation of end time biblical prophecy that hinges on their understanding of both dispensationalism and the rapture, which has been in circulation, the idea of the rapture that is, among American evangelicals only since the 1830s. So it is a fairly new, if you call a couple of hundred years new. But it is an idea that came out of this framework of dispensationalism. And so what they are saying there is that after the rapture, God is going to work with humanity in even a different way in those years of the Tribulation and Day of the Lord.
Now, the most popular rapture belief is pre-tribulationist. I am throwing around some theological words here. But they are pretty easy to understand. Pre-tribulationist means that it is before the Tribulation, before the Great Tribulation. So they believe that the rapture occurs before the Tribulation even begins. And you could say that it pretty much marks the beginning of the Tribulation. They also say that the rapture occurs as much as seven years before the second coming of Christ. I mean, Jesus told us that a three and a half year tribulation would be pretty much more than anyone can bear.
This interpretation says that it will be seven years long, a week of years. And they come up with this because they badly misinterpret the Seventy Weeks Prophecy in Daniel 9:26-27 and they apply the verses there. (We will not go into it today. We have got stuff on the website if you want to check out the Seventy Weeks Prophecy.) But they apply those verses to the beast or to the antiChrist instead of Christ. If you apply those verses to Christ, then you get a far different picture of what is going on in that Seventy Weeks Prophecy. And a lot of that has to do with what we will be celebrating in ten days, in the Day of Atonement, because in that week, the last week of the Seventy Weeks Prophecy in which He gets cut off in the middle, He does a lot of those things like atoning for our sins.
So they apply though these things to a human man, the beast or the anti-Christ. And as they see it, the final week of years before the return of Christ, like I said, seven years of tribulation, that is the heyday of antiChrist.
In addition, because the apostle Paul writes in I Thessalonians 5:9 that, "God did not appoint us [or true believers] to wrath," which they apply or interpret specifically as God's wrath in the Day of the Lord. If you look at it that way, saved Christians cannot be on earth when the cataclysmic events of the Great Tribulation and the Day of the Lord occur before Christ returns. They have narrowly placed God's wrath into that time period as if He could not have wrath any other time. So they conclude that God must rapture them to heaven years before Jesus returns to earth because He has to keep this promise that He has not appointed us to wrath.
Now, practically, if you look at it just from these few facts that I have given you, the interpretation of these evangelical Protestants demands that Christ returns twice at the end. He first comes to earth in a near miss. He does not actually set foot, but He gets down close enough to snatch away the saints and then He must go off to heaven with the saints and they enjoy their partying and feasting for seven years while the earth burns. That is the way it has to be. And then of course, after the time of the Tribulation and the Day of the Lord is over, He comes again, but this time He hits, comes, and brings all the saints with Him and His feet then come to rest on the Mount of Olives. And then of course, that is the time when we will be with Him and have to fight the beast, the false prophet, and their armies at Armageddon.
The only problem with this is that Scripture does not support it, that is, the two returns of Jesus Christ. Jesus never says I will come again and again or I will come once, yes, twice, nothing like that. His return is always in the singular, I will appear, I will come again, I will return. You know, it is not like there is any duplication of His coming.
I know this is a brief overview and it may have confused you a little because I was throwing a lot at you at once. But to my mind, the pre-tribulation rapture is a false teaching designed to assure and to comfort theologically ignorant people that they will not have to suffer the catastrophes of the last days. They will be whisked off to heaven on the near miss and avoid all the messy chaos of destruction and suffering and death that are going to happen in the Tribulation and the Day of the Lord.
This is interesting because some in the church of God consider the Place of Safety in the same light. (I will not be going into this.) But many people in the church have treated the Place of Safety as a divine "get out of jail free card" so that they will just go off to a place of safety and not have to worry about what is going on in the world during that time. I do not think that is a healthy spiritual approach, but we have one significant advantage over evangelicals in considering this particular prophecy. And that advantage is that we keep God's holy days, particularly the Feast of Trumpets, because the Feast of Trumpets is a holy day that focuses on the return of Jesus Christ. We have been keeping this (some of us) for decades, many decades. We have heard sermon after sermon about Christ's return. We have had our nose stuck in the Bible for a long time.
Now, Worldwide Church of God, if nothing else, was a prophecy machine for many years, churning out articles and speculation about prophecy, most of which centers around the return of Jesus Christ. We have studied into this very heavily because we keep the Feast of Trumpets. God brings us back to the subject at least once a year and we get a heavy dose of what the day means, what it commemorates, in advance.
So, after so many years of study and sermons on this particular event, that is, His glorious appearing, which is the wording you can find there in Titus 2:13, we know it, we know the context of the verses that are there in Scripture. And we know it so much better than they do because God has forced us to understand it and just to compare the scriptures and do timelines and try to figure things out using the whole gospel of God, the whole counsel of God, to understand as much as we can about this coming spectacular event. So, the truth of Christ, found all over the Bible, scripture supporting scripture, sets us free from the false teaching of the rapture as the evangelical Protestants teach it.
Let us go to I Thessalonians 4.
I Thessalonians 4:15-18 For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 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. Therefore comfort one another with these words.
Just so there is no confusion on the matter, the rapture, if it is correctly seen and put in its proper timing, is a biblical teaching. It is right here in I Thessalonians 4. They got it from some place. So the rapture, we do not usually think of it in terms of those words, but the rapture is a truth. What the Protestants get wrong (well, they get several things wrong), but predominantly it is the timing that they get wrong.
Now, we refrain from calling it the rapture because we do not want people to confuse the truth with what I feel is a very sadly lacking evangelical interpretation. It is better to use words that do not have this idea in it like, Christ's return, the second coming, the first resurrection, that sort of thing, a glorious appearing of Jesus Christ. That is a whole lot better. One of the things that it does in most of those cases is it puts the spotlight on Jesus Christ, not on our being whisked away to avoid any kind of wrath. So to differentiate the two interpretations, theirs is going to be called the rapture and I will call ours Christ's second coming or something similar to that.
Why do they, then, call it the rapture? You notice as we went through I Thessalonians 4:15-18, that the word rapture was not there. Well, the answer lies in the Greek word that is translated as a phrase, "shall be caught up." "Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air."( That is verse 17.) Obviously, we do not see the word rapture there. It is actually a Greek word. The New Testament is written in Greek and it is harpagesomethe. (How did those Greeks keep all those letters in their mouth?)
They get the word rapture because early on the Greek text was translated into Latin, the Latin Vulgate. In that translation, harpagesomethe was translated as rapere from which the English word rapture descended. You see the "rap" is in both terms rapere and rapture. So it is not an arcane or mysterious word at all. It simply means, rapere, "to be caught up." That is how it is translated here in our Bibles. It can mean snatched or it can mean seized. That is all that rapere means. That is all what harpagesomethe means as well. Birds of prey are called raptors because that is how they hunt. They usually snatch their prey either out of the air or off the ground. They swoop down from above, like they imagine Jesus Christ doing, and snatching away the prey, which would be converted Christians at the time or as they would say, born again Christians, and they are carried away.
Rapere also has the impression or can be used as raiders plundering, let us say, a seaside town. So they come in and they snatch away or they seize the goods of the people. It even can be used in the sense of kidnapping because that is what you do when you kidnap somebody. You snatch them out of wherever it happens to be and take them away.
Now there is a little problem with using rapere or its modern equivalents because it has connotations that we might not want to put into our theology or to at least have a little bit of a link to our theology. One is the word rape. That also comes from rapere and the other sense of the word rapture. The one sense of the word is to snatch away; the other sense of the word rapture is to have some sort of ecstasy, even a spiritual ecstasy or a sexual ecstasy. So we use the term rapt or rapturous in that sense. These all come from rapere. So all of them contain this similar notion of being suddenly or violently taken or carried away. Either you could be carried away physically or you could be carried away emotionally.
When people confuse the biblical term, we will call the rapture a biblical term, and the common uses of rapture, meaning a kind of ecstasy, this event in I Thessalonians 4 can begin to take on a kind of mystical, emotional quality, an air of otherworldliness and rapture, and people can become carried away. (pun intended) So this is why I said it is probably better if we do not call it the rapture. We do not want anybody to get a wrong idea. If we do not call it the rapture, it will limit confusion.
I will try to explain again what rapture advocates believe will happen just so we have this down. They believe that someday soon Jesus will return. Well, we are fine with that. That is good. But they believe that suddenly, without warning, He will snatch away all Christians on earth, whisking them off to heaven for a three and a half or seven year marriage supper. So they are just suddenly gone. In the meantime, as they are being whisked off to heaven, utter mayhem reigns on earth because when born again Christians suddenly vanish while at the controls of cars, trucks, trains, heavy equipment, and the like, things just go into chaos and many die.
If you ever saw the original Kirk Cameron movie, Left Behind, they had planes plunging out of the sky because the pilot was a born again Christian. And they would show people's clothes and their shoes and everything just lying there. I know when I see a pair of shoes on the floor and there is no one around, I think they have been raptured. But that does not sound like something our God would do. That He would take all the Christians away and let chaos reign like that on His act of taking them away, and many dying just because of His act of snatching them away.
As the movie showed, the unsaved relatives of all these people who were snatched away, frantically and unsuccessfully searched for their loved ones who have been raptured to heaven. The media provides 24-hour coverage of this mysterious disappearance of millions of people, as they see it, and they speculate wildly about the cause of what happened here. Everything from a mass alien abduction to shifting dimensions. You know, all these people just suddenly shifted into the seventh dimension or something or that they have ascended, they had leveled up on their consciousness and suddenly they were some sort of the being that was living among all the things in the universe or whatever.
But because all this confusion is happening and all of the moral people in the world are gone, the situation gives rise to the antiChrist and from that precedes all the horrors of the Tribulation.
Now this belief, held by millions of professing Christians, runs contrary to Scripture in two major ways. The first one, as mentioned earlier, this Protestant rapture takes place either three and a half or seven years before Christ returns. Whereas we believe the Bible said it occurs at His second coming. Not any time before, but as Christ descends, people are caught up into the air to be with Him. So as I mentioned earlier, for this reason, the Protestant concept is often called the pre-tribulation rapture and our view is called the post-tribulation rapture. Prefixes there, "pre" mean before and "post" meaning after.
The second reason this runs contrary to what we believe and contrary to Scripture, when believers are caught up into the air, Protestants believe that they will go immediately to heaven for a years-long spectacular feast. The Bible, as far as we understand it, says that the saints accompany Christ to earth to fight in His heavenly army and to help establish God's Kingdom. (That is what Austin [del Castillo] was talking about earlier in his sermonette.)
Succinctly, these two differences, these two points that I have just given, show differences in timing and destination. Now we are going to talk mostly about timing in this sermon. Once we have fixed the timing, the destination is pretty easy to understand.
Let us go back to I Thessalonians 4 here. I am sure you are already there in your Bible. We have not gone any place else so if you kept your Bible open, you are in the right place. I want to read verses 15 and 16 again.
I Thessalonians 4:15-16 For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
In these two verses, the apostle gives two parallel indications of the timing of this event. One is in one verse, one is in the other. In verse 15, Paul says it occurs at the coming of the Lord. That is the first indication of timing here. And then in verse 16, Christ descends from heaven. They are the same thing. The coming of the Lord and the descending from heaven are the same event. He is not discussing two different events, but they are the same event. But Paul provides a little bit more by writing that he appears with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and the trumpet of God.
Here we need to know something about Hebrew and Hebrew speaking. Now this is obviously in Greek, but Paul was a Hebrew. He tells us that a couple of times, that he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. So he was thoroughly, 100% a Hebrew. He did everything Hebraic, if you will. He wrote Greek as Hebrew, he thought in Hebrew, his expressions were Hebrew. So everybody knew that he was a Jew because he was so Hebrew in the way that he did things.
And one of the distinctive patterns of Hebrew, the language this time I am talking about, the language of Hebrew, is that it uses parallelisms. You go through the Proverbs, you go through the Psalms, you go through the Prophets, they are all writing in parallel. They will tell you one thing and then they will tell it to you again, but they will change the words so you do not mistake what they said the first time. So things are written in these parallel phrases. It is not all the time, but it is a good part of the time. It is just the way the Hebrew language is. That is one of its distinctive features. That it tells you something and then it defines what it told you the first time by using different words, synonyms.
This is very important because in these prophetic passages here, he does this and it helps us greatly to understand what he means and to put things on par so that we can have a greater confidence in what we are saying and certainly in this area of timing. I mean, just notice that last phrase we read, "with the voice of an archangel." Now, the first one was a shout. First, there is a shout in verse 16, then there is the voice of an archangel, and then there is a trumpet of God. You might think those are different things, but they are not. They are very much the same. They are not exactly the same, but they all point to the same thing. And so he gives us all three things: shout, voice, and the trumpet so that we understand something important. They all point to the same thing and it is especially true in terms of timing. This is where knowledge of the Feast of Trumpets comes into play.
Let us go back to Leviticus 23.
Leviticus 23:23-25 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel, saying: 'In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a Sabbath rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work on it. You shall offer an offering made by fire to the Lord.'"
Here we have this feast being named "a Sabbath rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation." The key phrase there is a memorial of blowing of trumpets. Now, if you have been in the church even a short while, you know that the underlying idea here is a remembrance or a commemoration of shouting. That is one way that phrase, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, can be interpreted or translated. Why? Because it refers to what the Hebrews called, "the shout of a shofar." They heard what came out of a shofar when it was blown as a shout.
The shofar was a ram's horn. It was a cornet, a trumpet cornet. Do you know what the word cornet means? It is a horn trumpet. Corn and horn have the same base word, root. So it is all the same. The word, if you want to look it up, it is terua, and that word means to cry out, to shout, to raise a war cry, to sound the alarm, or shout for joy. It has a lot to do with shouting, crying, raising your voice. All are contemplated. Maybe I should take a step back here. When Paul, in I Thessalonians 4, talks about the shout and the voice and the trumpet they are all contemplated in the word terua, shouting, raising the voice, blasting on a trumpet.
The Day of Trumpets has a lot to do with making a lot of noise. And it is shouting, triumphant shouting. It is also raising the alarm of war. It is blowing on a trumpet. It is hearing the shout of the shofar. But these ideas are all contained within the holy day, within this idea of this loud noise at this particular time.
Let us go to Exodus the 19th chapter. I want to use this as an example because I think it is significant. This is before the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. We have the Ten Commandments in chapter 20. But the people of Israel, the children of Israel in the wilderness at Sinai, were gathered before the mountain and God was going to come down and speak to them, give them the law personally. And this is what they experienced.
Exodus 19:16-20 Then it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunderings and lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain; and the sound of the trumpet was very loud, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. [There was fear and so much vibration in the air because of these trumpets that everybody was shaking.] Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was completely in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire. Its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. And when the blast of the trumpet [the shout of the shofar, we might say] sounded long and became louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by voice. Then the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up.
I am convinced—this is my own personal belief, my own personal conclusion—that this event is what the Israelites in the wilderness remembered or memorialized on the Feast of Trumpets. This did not occur on a Day of Trumpets as far as we can tell. The closest holy day that we know of to this actual time is Pentecost. But right now, I am not worried about appointed times. I am more concerned that we get the understanding that God Himself was descending to earth. And what accompanied Him? Fire, smoke, earthquake, and a lot of loud noise—enough to make you deaf.
That is the idea here. I do not want to dwell on timing at this point in this particular context, but I do want us to put these circumstances, this event and all of its particulars, with the idea of God descending, God descending to earth. So when God descended on Mount Sinai, with an earsplitting sound of a trumpet, enough to set people trembling, and then not only that, there was a long increasingly louder trumpet blast at the end. So loud noises, voices, trumpet blasts, fire, smoke, thick clouds, earthquakes, all are connected to the coming or descent of God to earth. When God comes, He lets you know and He does not hold back.
Let us go to Joel the second chapter. We sang the song in our hymnal that has this as its base.
Joel 2:1-3 Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in My holy mountain! Let all of the inhabitants of the land tremble; for the day of the Lord is coming. For it is at hand: a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, like the morning clouds spread over the mountains. A people come, great and strong, the like of whom has never been; nor will there ever be any such after them, even for many successive generations. A fire devours before them, and behind them a flame burns; the land is like the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; surely nothing shall escape them.
Joel 2:10-11 The earth quakes before them, the heavens tremble; the sun and moon grow dark, and the stars diminish their brightness. The Lord gives voice before His army, for His camp is very great; for strong is the One who executes His word. For the day of the Lord is great and very terrible; who can endure it?
The description here in Joel 2 is almost the same as the one in Exodus 19. And what is happening in both of these passages? Christ is coming, God is descending to earth.
Let us go to Zephaniah 1.
Zephaniah 1:14-16 The great day of the Lord is near; it is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of the Lord is bitter; there the mighty men shall cry out. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of devastation and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet and alarm against the fortified cities and against the high towers.
Again, quite similar to the two passages we have seen before in Exodus 19 and Joel 2. When Christ comes, when God descends upon earth, you have all of these similar things happening. A lot of noise, is what I am getting at here. The noise mostly; of course, there is the earthquake, there is the smoke, cloud, thick darkness, etc. But right now it is the trumpet that we are thinking about.
Now, to combat these very clear time markers that we see in I Thessalonians 4, which I have tried to explain here by going to these other scriptures, rapture advocates must assert that Christ returns twice and the trumpet sounds twice too. The first time, they say, He comes in secret, nobody knows except all those millions of people who got whisked away and everybody who saw them get whisked away, and all the airplanes and everything that crash. That does not sound too secret to me. But that is how they explain it. It is a secret rapture, a secret coming to earth. And I guess the first trumpet that sounds is pretty secret too. Nobody hears it. If they heard it, then it would not be a secret. I will just leave that right there.
Now, quite contrary to Scripture, that first trumpet blast that precedes the rapture would have to be actually the very first trumpet blast of the end times. Well before the seventh seal and the blowing of the first trumpet, because remember their rapture occurs before the Great Tribulation. There are no trumpets in the Great Tribulation until you get to the seventh, when everything is opened up and the Day of the Lord begins. That is when the trumpets start happening. But the rapture starts with a trumpet that is not even in the Bible and it is a secret trumpet. I still have not figured that one out.
So, before the tribulation comes there are seals, right? You have the first four seals, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then you have the fifth seal, which is about the martyrdom of the saints. And then you have the sixth seal, which is the heavenly signs, sun, moon, all that becomes dark; and then you have the seventh seal, which is the opening of the seven trumpet plagues. Right? Do I have that right? Right, I do. I have got it in my notes here.
The first trumpet does not sound until Revelation 8 with the beginning of the seven trumpet plagues. But they put the rapture sometime between the fourth and the fifth seal because what we understand that martyrdom of the saints happens during the Great Tribulation. So there is something wrong with the trumpets here.
Let us go to I Corinthians 15. Let us gather some more evidence here. Obviously, this is the resurrection chapter. This is the well known section about the first resurrection, the changing of the bodies of the saints and their being raised to eternal life.
I Corinthians 15:50-52 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit in corruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery [This is something not generally known he is telling us here. This is something you have to learn from Scripture, from revelation.]: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed [he is talking about the elect, the firstfruits of God]—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet [the last trumpet, not the first, not one that occurs before everything else, but the last trumpet]. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
So Paul, being a Hebrew, he also provides here some parallel timing for us to consider. His details eliminate two returns or two trumpet blasts years apart. First, in verse 50 he speaks about the Kingdom of God. That is one of the time markers here. It parallels the coming of the Lord. In I Thessalonians 4:15, the coming of the Lord and the Kingdom of God are the same. You know how you know this? Because you cannot have a kingdom without a king. If the coming of the Kingdom of God happens, it is going to come in the person of Jesus Christ, the King.
The second one is the resurrection and the transformation of the saints which occurs specifically at the last trumpet and that is parallel to the trumpet of God in I Thessalonians 4:16. The last trumpet and the trumpet of God are the same trumpet blast. Paul did not decide between writing I Thessalonians 4 and I Corinthians 15 that it was a different trumpet. Christ comes at the last trumpet. He just did not use the term last trumpet in I Thessalonians 4. He just called it the trumpet of God. That is the trumpet of God because it trumpets the return of the King. So the same trumpet, the last trumpet, announces both Christ's triumphant return to set up His Kingdom and the resurrection of the elect, that is, the firstfruits.
Let us go somewhere else.
Revelation 11:15-18 Then the seventh angel sounded [this is the last trumpet here]: And there were loud voices in heaven saying [notice "voices in heaven," another tie-in to I Thessalonians 4], "The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever." And the twenty-four elders who sat before God on their thrones fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: "We give you thanks, O Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was and who is to come, because You have taken Your great power and reigned. The nations were angry, and Your wrath has come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that You should reward Your servants the prophets and the saints, and those who fear Your name, small and great, and should destroy those who destroy the earth." Then the temple of God was opened in heaven, and the ark of His covenant was seen in His temple, and there were lightnings, noises, thunderings, an earthquake, and great hail.
Since we have read Exodus 19 and Joel 2 and Zephaniah 1, what is happening? God is descending to earth and all of these things are happening. There is a great announcement: God is coming here! Here He comes. But these things all occur at the same time to announce the same event, the one magnificent event of all history, the return of Jesus Christ in power and glory to set up His Kingdom.
So, note here that in the context of chapter 11, which is an inset chapter, it does not necessarily go with the flow of the rest of the book, the trumpet sounds at the same time the Two Witnesses are raised. Earlier in the chapter, the Witnesses are resurrected starting in verse 11. They are resurrected, as far as we know, at the same time as the rest of the elect. Remember, a big point in I Thessalonians 4 is that this is going to happen for all of us at the same time. The dead in Christ shall rise first and those who are alive will be caught up. So they happen at the same in the same event. It is not going to be one happens seven years before and the other one happens when Christ returns. That is not the way it is. This all happens at the same time.
Now, the seven bowls, or the seven vials of God's wrath, have already been poured out by this time in the overall chronology. Remember, I said when this occurs, this is when Christ returns. And so He has already started the judgments on all of the people of the earth. And the seventh bowl, if we look there very quickly in chapter 16, verse 17,
Revelation 16:17-18 The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple of heaven from the throne, saying, "It is done!" And there were noises and thunderings and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such a mighty and great earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth. [And then the hail comes down also].
If we go back to chapter 11, we have in verse 13, when the Two Witnesses are raised:
Revelation 11:13 In the same hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell. In the earthquake seven thousand men were killed, and the rest were afraid and gave glory to the God of heaven.
And then in verse 19, the last half, "there were lightnings, noises, thunderings, an earthquake, and great hail."
All of these things seem to be aligned together timewise. They all occur at the return of Jesus Christ. It is part of the great announcement of His appearing.
So, there are seven trumpets. They are judgments against rebellious humanity during the Day of the Lord. If you want to, you could look at them. Revelation 8:1 through chapter 9, verse 29. Those are the trumpets. The seven trumpets are the outworking of opening the seventh seal, which is the Day of the Lord. The seventh and last trumpet judgment is executed by the Judge Himself, personally, with His coming. His coming and the destruction He wields as judgment upon the earth is that fight at the end when He puts down all rule against Him. Like I said, it is the culmination of God's wrath on sinful, unrepentant humanity.
Let us go back a page here if we are still in Revelation 11. Let us go to chapter 10, verses 5 through 7. This is also an inset. It is out of line here.
Revelation 10:5-7 And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land, lifted up his hand to heaven and swore by Him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and the things that are in it, the earth and the things that are in it, and the sea and the things that are in it, that there should be delay no longer. But in the days of the sounding of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, the mystery of God would be finished, as He declared to His servants the prophets.
The seventh angel sounding in that seventh judgment announces the end of the mystery of God, the end of the plan of God, if you will, up until the point where Jesus comes and establishes His Kingdom. What God is doing with the earth and in the earth will, at that point, be revealed through the coming of Jesus Christ, through the establishment of the Kingdom. There is obviously a lot more to come. There is the whole Millennium, there is the Great White Throne Judgment and all that still to come. But at this point, everything is revealed to everyone. It is all open. Jesus Christ returns. He judges His enemies, and in quick order, He brings Israel back and begins setting up His Kingdom in Jerusalem, and it goes on from there.
So at this point, the mystery of God's plan of salvation is finished. That is, the mystery part is finished. All will be revealed. And so we have this happening in chapter 19.
Revelation 19:1-16 After these things I heard a loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, "Alleluia! Salvation and glory and honor and power belong to the Lord our God! For true and righteous are His judgments, because He has judged the great harlot who corrupted the earth with her fornication; and He has avenged on her the blood of His servants shed by her." Again they said, "Alleluia! Her smoke rises up forever and ever [meaning she is completely destroyed and will not return.] And the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who sat on the throne, saying, "Amen! Alleluia!"
Then a voice came from the throne, saying, "Praise our God, all you His servants and those who fear Him, both small and great!" And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, as the sound of many waters and as the sound of mighty thunderings, saying, "Alleluia! For the Lord God omnipotent reigns! Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready." [Just tuck that in the back of your brain.] And to her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. Then he said to me, "Write: 'Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb!'" And he said to me, "These are the true sayings of God."
And I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, "See that you do not do that! I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren who have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. And the armies in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, followed Him on white horses. Now out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should strike the nations. And He Himself will rule them with a rod of iron. He Himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.
That is all we need for now.
That is what happens on the same day, in the same continuous action as when the saints are changed. It is not something that is spread out over a long time. God does this in one day.
Let us go to Matthew 24. (Martin was here this morning.)
Matthew 24:29-31 "Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with the great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other."
So the trumpet sounds to send His angels to gather the elect from all over the earth. Why? To meet the returning Lord Jesus Christ in the air. To clinch the argument about the Protestant rapture or this second coming of Jesus Christ, as it says in the Bible, verse 29 plainly says "Immediately after the tribulation of those days." Not pre-tribulation. Post-tribulation. It is right there in the Greek. You can go look it up.
Let us look at Isaiah 27.
Isaiah 27:12-13 And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will thresh, from the channel of the River to the Brook of Egypt; and you will be gathered one by one, O you children of Israel. So it shall be in that day: the great trumpet will be blown; they will come, who are about to perish in the land of the Assyria, and they who are outcast in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.
This has a, at least the way I read it, dual way of being fulfilled in the end time. It is very similar to what is said in Matthew 24 about the elect from all over being gathered together by the angels. But it also means that when that great trumpet sounds, Israel will begin to be regathered to the holy land, but it is not the sound of the great trumpet. It is when Christ finally comes in person to intervene in world affairs.
Zechariah 14, let us go there. Do not want to leave this out. We just sang the song. That is where it came from.
Zechariah 14:3-5 Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as He fights in the day of battle. And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from east to west, making a very large valley; half of the mountain shall move toward the north and half of it toward the south. Then you shall flee through My mountain valley, for the mountain valley shall reach to Azal. Yes, you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Thus the Lord my God will come, and all the saints with You [or as the margin says, with Him.]
Zechariah 14:9 And the Lord shall be King over all the earth. In that day it shall be—"The Lord is one," and His name one.
This verse clearly answers (remember the second one) where the saints go when they are changed at the time of Christ's return. The answer is not heaven. It says very clearly in verse 5 at the very end there that all the saints come with Him. Christians who are changed at that time and rise from their graves at that time, immediately return with the King to the earth. This is exactly what Paul writes in I Thessalonians 4:17, "And thus we shall always be with the Lord." Can you imagine? Jesus Christ comes down in power and great glory and they meet in the air somewhere and then He says, "See you, I'm going to earth. You guys go to heaven." It does not make sense. He comes down to get us so we can follow Him down to earth and fight His enemies and set up the Kingdom of God.
Let us go to Revelation 14.
Revelation 14:1 Then I looked, and behold, a Lamb standing on Mount Zion, and with Him one hundred and forty-four thousand, having His Father's name written on their foreheads.
Revelation 14:4 These are the ones who are not defiled with women, for they are [spiritual] virgins. These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever He goes. These were redeemed from among men, being firstfruits to God and to the Lamb.
The thing I wanted us to get there was what I emphasized. As the bride of Christ, the elect, the 144,000 will accompany Him wherever He goes. This is what makes the split in the air of Him coming to earth and them going elsewhere kind of ridiculous. I mean, let us just look at John 14, verse 3. Out of the mouth of our Savior Himself.
John 14:3 "And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again [once] and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also."
He is not going to put us on the sidelines for the biggest event in world history. He says, "I'm going to come get you. I'm going to save you. I'm going to change you and then we are going to go to work together."
As we wrap up here, let us go to I Thessalonians 5. We will read the first 10 verses here. Now, I want you to see how these things transition throughout this section because Paul was not done when he was describing the return of Christ and the change that would come, the meeting Christ in the air, because he needed to explain something very important.
I Thessalonians 5:1 But concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I should write to you.
He said, you know the prophecies, you know the times, you know what is going to happen in prophecy. That has been explained.
I Thessalonians 5:2-4 For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. [we had that explained very well for us] For when they say, "Peace and safety," then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this day should overtake you as a thief.
See, we have prior warning, we know that we do not know the day and the hour. But we know, because of the prophetic timeline and being awake and aware, that it is close.
I Thessalonians 5:5 You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of the darkness.
He is saying that there is a very sharp distinction between us and the world. And so what happens at the end should not affect us the same way as it affects the people in the world.
I Thessalonians 5:6-9 Therefore [always going to have a conclusion after this] let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober. [Be serious about the times, be serious about our spiritual condition, be serious and sober about what is going on so that we are ready.] For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night. [He is talking about them being in darkness. They are continuing in their ways. And so they are still in darkness. They are spiritually drunk, if you will.] But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ . . .
See, we are not of the darkness. Those who are of the darkness will suffer wrath, but those who are of the light will not suffer wrath because they are in a good relationship with Jesus Christ. They do not have a reason for God to be wrathful at them. And that is why they will not suffer wrath. It is not because they are going to be taken away some time before the tribulation and not have to suffer those things. It is because God loves them and He is going to give them what they need and help them and He will not make them suffer His wrath, His punishment.
I Thessalonians 5:10 . . . who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him.
So whether we are in the one group that sleeps, that is, are dead and need to be raised from our graves, or whether we are awake and we will be called up to meet them in the air, what are we doing? What is the qualification? We are living together with Him. Not just then—now.
The people who believe in the rapture use verse 9, that God has not appointed us to wrath, to say God will keep Christians from the tumult on earth during the tribulation, reading into it their contention that they will be kept safe in heaven. But the verse mentions nothing about heaven or earth so it really has no bearing on the whereabouts of the saints when Christ returns. Instead, the context makes a strong argument about God's plan for us starting right now, starting in the present. However many years or decades or centuries or millennia, the return of Christ is in the future. We know from the Parable of the Virgins, which occurs when the bridegroom comes. But the whole idea of that parable is there were five wise virgins that were ready for it at any time. And five foolish who had let their oil run out, they were not ready.
He is saying here in I Thessalonians 5, to counter the idea that we can lay back because we are saved, we can wait until Christ returns and He is just going to save us, Paul is saying, "No, we can't do that." We have to, from this point forward, be making ourselves ready like the wise virgins in Matthew 25. His protection, His keeping us from wrath, begins right now with preparing us spiritually both to take on the mind of Christ and to get us ready for our roles in the Kingdom. Those are the ones that will rise in the air to meet the Lord when He comes.
Look at Philippians 1, back a few pages, starting with verse 6.
Philippians 1:6 Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.
He has got a process that He is going through and it begins now. It had begun many years earlier when you were first converted, but right now it begins now, if you are not aware of it, and He is completing His work in us in an ongoing process. And it is in the process that He protects us from wrath.
Philippians 1:9-11 And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.
What saves you from wrath? Your relationship with Jesus Christ and God the Father, and your following Their way of life. It is not protection, physical protection from tribulation at the end that saves you from wrath. It is your conversion. It is your Christ-likeness. It is your transformation into the image of Jesus Christ and God's grace that saves you from wrath. It is your working together.
Paul later in the same book talks about we do our part in this work and God does His part in this work. That is a relationship where we both work together in the same process—and that is what saves us from wrath. If we are busy following these instructions that we saw just in these three verses here in Philippians 1, we do not need to fear God's wrath because we are under His grace, not wrath.
Let us finish in Luke 21:36. We were also here earlier.
Luke 21:36 "Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man."
If we are found doing these things, we will be among those who shall be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. As Paul says, we can take great comfort in these words.
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