The scene is the interior of a Boeing 747. It is the wee-small hours of the morning and the plane is somewhere over the
Atlantic Ocean en route from the US to London. The Captain has
left the cockpit for a stroll down the aisle to check on his
passengers and to flirt with his senior flight attendant, but she
has something more pressing on her mind. "People are missing,"
she says.
"What do you mean?"
"A whole bunch of people, just gone! I've been everywhere.
I'm telling you, dozens of people are missing. Their shoes,
their socks, their clothes, everything was left behind. These
people are gone!"
An elderly woman in first class, looking more than bleary-eyed, held her husband's sweater and pants in her arms. "What in
the world?" she said. "Harold?" Harold was gone. Evaporated
into thin air. Or something.
Harold is just one of millions of born-again Christians and
all children (whether Christian or not), from early teens down to
those not quite born, disappeared. The world fears some alien
attack or some incredible nuclear disaster and never figures out
the common denominator. So, appointing the newly installed
president of Romania, Nicholae Carpathia, as Secretary General of
the United Nations (because he made a moving speech about peace
and disarmament) the planet's nations agree to give up their
sovereignty, their weapons, even their names. Nicholae splits
the world into 10 regions and orchestrates a seven-year truce
between Israel and its enemies. A new era of peace and
prosperity supposedly has begun.
But wait. Not all is right. A backslidden fundamentalist
pastor, who sees the error of his ways only after he has been
left behind while almost everyone he knows is raptured, pulls
together a ragtag group of new believers opposed to Carpathia.
They call themselves the Tribulation Force, and they know who
Carpathia really is: the Antichrist. Duh-da-duh-duh!
For those of you who have seen the Left Behind video or the
movie that is currently in theatres(1) or read the dramatic
Christian thriller upon which they are based,(2) you recognize all
this. It is the fictionalized account which purports to tell the
amazing story of "The Rapture," that moment preached about by
fire and brimstone folks who quote Paul in First Thessalonians to
remind us "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."(3)
The original Left Behind volume was published in 1995 and
seven sequels have followed so far. I have heard that some 30-million copies have been purchased which puts this into the Harry
Potter-like publishing stratosphere. Three-million copies of the
video have been sold; the film version is in theatres as we
speak. Jerry Jenkins, the co-author of the books with TV
preacher Tim LaHaye, calls himself "the most famous writer
nobody's ever heard of." And he is probably right. The result
has been a flood of questions to me and other mainline pastors
around the nation: "Have you read it? Have you seen it? What do
you think of "Left Behind?"
For what it is worth, similar questions have been around
since the beginning of Christianity. In the first-century
church, folks believed that Jesus was coming back in their
lifetime. The Apostle Paul believed it. The church described in
the book of Acts believed it to the point that they sold their
houses and everything in them without regret because who needed
jewelry and silverware and real estate if they were leaving to
join Jesus in heaven in a matter of days or months or even years?
Of course, as we all know, Jesus did not return then. The
result is that every generation since has looked for the same
thing the early church did - the return of Jesus at any moment.
And the preaching has been the same: Are we ready? God forbid we
be "left behind!"
The issue received extra attention a little over a year ago
as our calendar had its odometer roll over - Y2K. There was that
flood of people into Jerusalem who believed the millennium would
mark the second coming of Jesus and the end of time. They wanted
to be in Israel so they could see the event live and in person.
CBS News did a "60-Minutes" report(4) featuring apocalyptic
writer Hal Lindsey, the author of the hugely-popular best-seller,
The Late, Great Planet Earth.(5) That book told of how the birth
of modern Israel signaled that we were in the "end times," that
the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic portions of
scripture predicted that the Antichrist's arrival was imminent,
that Christians would soon be raptured (taken up to heaven by
Jesus) before all the bad stuff started happening, but after
seven years of "tribulation" Jesus Christ would return to earth
and usher in a thousand-year reign of justice and peace. It sold
millions of copies. Now, the author was leading 200 pilgrims on
what could be called a doomsday tour of Israel. The TV program
showed him conducting a Bible study about the battle of
Armageddon. Hal was saying that the struggle would be
incredible: "In the first attack, a quarter of the population of
the earth is destroyed. Blood will stand to the horse's bridle
for a space of 200 miles." That is a LOT of blood!
The members of Lindsey's tour group needed no convincing.
They believed that all the prophetic signs were pointing in that
direction - earthquakes, famines, floods, "wars and rumors of
wars." These are the last days. Soon comes the Rapture, the
instant calling to heaven of all good Christians, while everybody
else will be left behind. We have seen the bumper stickers for
years: "Warning: In case of the Rapture, this car will have no
driver." Perhaps that is part of God's judgment on unbelievers -
all these out-of-control vehicles careening every which way and
mowing down any reprobate who happens to be left in the road.
And that is precisely the way the Left Behind books and movie
portray it. Then there are the bumper stickers in response: "In
case of the Rapture, Can I have your car?" Uh huh.
Well, as we know, Jesus did not return with the advent of
the year 2000, and most folks were not surprised. Despite all
the hype, that was not even the real beginning of the new
millennium - after all, the calendar would have started with the
year ONE, not ZERO! But even that is deceptive because when the
calendar creators of the Middle Ages began to publish their
calculations, they got some things WRONG. According to all we
can find out, Jesus was not born in the year ONE, but actually
four to six years earlier! If you wonder about the start of the
third millennium signaling the return of Jesus and the Rapture,
that would have been perhaps in 1994 or 1996. If it occurred
back then and you and I missed it like the Left Behind folks, I
might be worried. I say MIGHT BE, because all those people who
were sure they were going to be "raptured" out of their cars are
still here too! Go figure.
One little aside about the Rapture. I know you have heard
about it, and before this Left Behind series ever came out. I
noticed it as we sang during Kirk Nite on Wednesday, "Near the
Cross:"
In the cross, in the cross,
Be my glory ever;
When my raptured soul shall find,
Rest beyond the river.(6)
Lots of people take great comfort in that thought. And even
more take great satisfaction in the idea that good people will be
rewarded and evil people will get clobbered - understandable. So
saying, you need to know that, for centuries of Christian
teaching, the church never envisioned things this way. This
concept of a Rapture in which Christians are snatched away from
the troubles of this world at the return of Jesus comes from a
fellow named John Nelson Darby, a lawyer turned minister who was
a member of the Plymouth Brethren sect in England in the middle
of the 19th century. Darby preached something called
Dispensational Premillennialism which said that all of history
could be divided into seven eras or "dispensations" and that the
present age, which he called "the age of the church," immediately
preceded this "Rapture." Darby's excuse for a Rapture was that a
seven-year period of terrible tribulation was coming and the
church was going to be spared that misery. Once the tribulation
was over, then a thousand-year-long reign of God (the Millennium)
would follow. The "Rapture" idea does not come from the book of
Revelation, despite what the producers of Left Behind say in
their publicity - we have already seen that it comes from Paul
and Darby's literal reading of that one tiny passage from I
Thessalonians:
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.
Two problems. First, the imagery should be understood as
poetic, not photographic (the same problem that lots of folks
like Hal Lindsay have in reading the book of Revelation) - it was
a wonderful word of hope for Christians who were terribly worried
that friends and relatives who had died would miss the return of
Jesus - Paul says NO, they will be included too; they will not
miss out. The second problem is that Darby has taken texts from
different sources (the Rapture from Paul and the Tribulation and
Millennium from Revelation), and joined them as if they were a
seamless whole. That is an interpretive no-no; as someone very
wise has said, "A text without a context is a pretext."
This idea of a Rapture, despite all we hear about it, has
hardly any biblical support. The reason it is as widely
discussed in our day as it is is that a fellow by the name of
C.I. Scofield, another lawyer, became enamored of Darby's
theology, and published a study Bible (the Scofield Reference
edition - you may have one in your home) which included all the
teaching about the dispensations in the notes. It was a popular
Bible, and thus, lots of people who never heard of Darby DID
learn about the Rapture in Scofield's notes. The point is this:
if you are worried about the Rapture, regardless of the Left
Behind series, DON'T! If the Bible doesn't, you need not either.
One other aside: it may surprise you to learn that the book
of Revelation never mentions the Antichrist. Antichrist is a
word which occurs only in John's letters in the New Testament(7)
and describes a particular individual or a group of people who
oppose God and God's purpose. Depending upon which period of
history you might be seeing, the Antichrist has been variously
identified as Hitler, Mussolini, Napoleon, and in the Middle Ages
by the Reformers, often the Pope. Now, in Left Behind, the
Secretary General of the U.N. A better understanding of
Antichrist is not so much a person as a principle, any principle
which is actively opposed to God.
OK, the Bible does not teach a "Rapture," as the Left Behind
series presents it. BUT the Bible does clearly teach that Jesus
is coming again. The church around the world affirms it over and
over in the Apostles Creed: "I believe in God, the Father,
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His
only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, etc.
etc...He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of
God the Father Almighty. From thence HE SHALL COME...to judge
the quick and the dead." But, so saying, the return might not be
in the way that traditional understanding has taught (and I can
promise it will not be the cause of massive traffic accidents
because of driver-less vehicles - what kind of God would cause
such a mess?). So saying, I am satisfied to leave the details in
the Lord's hands. I am content to know that, one day, whether
individually at the end of my earthly journey or as one of a
great band of believers at the end of history, he is coming for
me, and I will see him face to face.
Jesus himself once spoke to the question. We read it a
moment ago: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the
angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." OK.
At the end of the film version of Left Behind, one of the
main characters, a TV reporter by the name of Buck Williams,
reflects on all he has seen and heard. He is not quite sure how
to process everything, but he finally says, "I don't have all the
answers. But for now, faith is enough." 'Nuff said. 'Nuff
said.
No, the world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ. Yes,
he is coming again. We need no "rapture;" we will encounter him
at the end of our lives or at the end of human history, whenever
that might be. There will come a day when the aim of God, the
dream of God, the purpose of God will be realized. There will
come a day when EVERY knee shall bow...and EVERY tongue will
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.(8) I have said it before and I
say it again:
- Yes, there will come a day when the wrong shall fail, the
right prevail because Jesus Christ is Lord.
- There will come a day when the principalities and powers,
the rulers of darkness of this world will reluctantly
declare that Jesus Christ is Lord!
- There will come a day when sin will no longer have dominion
over anyone and we will be able to shout Jesus Christ is
Lord.
- There will come a day when justice rolls down like waters
and righteousness like a mighty stream because Jesus Christ
is Lord!
- There will come a day when ALL God's children, red and
yellow, black and white, will join in one mighty chorus and
sing, Jesus Christ is Lord!
- There will come a day when all tears are wiped away and
there will be no more sorrow or pain or crying or death
because Jesus Christ is Lord.
Are you ready? I am ready. Oh, yes, I am ready!
Amen!
1. Cloud Ten Pictures in association with Namesake Entertainment, Left Behind: The
Movie, © 2000, Peter Lalonde, Paul Lalonde, Joe Goodman, Ralph Winter, Producers
2. Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind : a novel of the earth's last days, (Wheaton,
Ill. : Tyndale House Publishers, 1995)
3. I Thessalonians 4:16-17
4. 12/22/99 broadcast produced by Michael Rosenbaum; Copyright 1999, CBS Worldwide
Inc., All Rights Reserved.
5. With C. C. Carlson, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970)
6. Fanny Crosby, 1869
7. I John 2:18, 22; I John 4:3; II John 7
8. Philippians 2:10-11
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