Rapture: The Thessalonian Key, part 1

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.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, NKJV

One of the worst objections I have ever heard to the Rapture is that the word Rapture is never found in the Bible.  Such an objection is ludicrous.  It's laughable.  It's lamentable.  Because it is so ill-informed.

First of all, we use a lot of words that aren't found in the Bible to explain theological truths.  Like the word trinity to explain the nature of the relationship between Father, Son & Holy Spirit in the godhead.  Or demon, which was not a word used in the earlier English translations but which came to be associated with evil spirits that plague and possess people, and from which Christ offers deliverance.  Even the word millennium, employed by Christians to explain their particular eschatalogical view whether they believe in the Millennium or not, cannot be found in the Scriptures.

So I have no problem saying that the word rapture is not in the Bible.  But perhaps it should be.

Rapture is an English word that describes the state of being transported by a loft emotion.  It is ecstasy or the expression of ecstatic feeling.  In a theological sense it is employed to describe the idea of a person being transported from one place to another, especially to heaven.

As with all things English, very little of the language is original to the British Isle.  Rapture actually comes from an obsolete French word for abduction or carrying off, which is traced back to rapt for carried away.  The French word, in turn, comes from the Latin raptus which means the same thing.

Raptus at its simplest means "carrying off by force".  It has been used in a spiritual or rhetorical sense to describe out of body experiences.  In the legal terms of the Roman Empire, it meant "carrying off by force", usually associated with crimes of property, theft, and abduction. In canonical law, it was used to refer to the abduction of women for the purpose of compelled marriage.

In the late 4th Century, a man named Jerome was commissioned by the religious powers of the time to translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin--the common language of the Roman Empire.  He finished his work in Bethlehem in 405 AD, supposedly while living in the cave believed to be the birthplace of Jesus.  While translating the Greek New Testament, he encountered the Greek word harpazo, which means to seize, to carry off by force, to eagerly claim for one's self, to snatch out or snatch away.

 Harpazo is the word used in Acts 8:39 to describe how "the Spirit of the Lord caught away Phillip, that the eunuch saw him no more."  It is the same word Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 12:2, 4 to describe his own experience, whether in or out of the body, of being "caught up to the third heaven...into paradise."  It is the same word used in Revelation 12:5 to describe how the manchild "was caught up unto God, and to his throne."

It is derived from the Greek word haireomai, which means to take for one's self, to prefer, to choose by vote or election.  This word is itself akin to airo which means to raise up, elevate, lift up, raise from the ground, bear away what has been raised, move from its place, take off or take away, remove, carry off, carry away, and so on.

One native Greek-speaker has been quoted as saying, "It's like two of you are walking along.  You turn your head, and when you turn back, your friend is gone and you don't know where he went."  Very literally speaking, it means to be grabbed by the hair of the head and snatched away.

So when Jerome came across the Greek word harpazo, he chose the Latin rapere to translate it, a word derived from raptus which means "to seize by force and carry off."

Bringing the Bible into the English language, those translators looked at harpazo and rapere and chose the phrases "caught up" and "caught away", a translation that could just as well have been "rapture."

So for those who say the word Rapture is not in the Bible, I like to say, "You're right--but it should be!"