Believing in an invisible return of Jesus, an invisible worldwide “scooping up” of believers to be taken away somewhere, followed by seven years of Hollywood apocalypse scenarios, then a third coming of Jesus, is a remarkable example of scriptural interpretive contortionism.
Where exactly does the Bible clearly and explicitly teach:
an invisible return of Jesus,
an invisible worldwide “scooping up” of believers to be taken away somewhere,
seven years of apocalypse scenarios,
then a third coming of Jesus,
as a comprehensive, clear eschatology?
You have to take each of those elements and mash them together through private interpretation, connecting dots that Scripture does not connect, and using convoluted charts and timelines to arrive at the Hal Lindsey/John Nelson Darby/Left Behind version of dispensational theology known as the Secret Rapture.
Fictional novels, ear-tickling, speculative end-time scenarios, and Hollywood treatments of Scripture shouldn’t influence our attempts to rightly divide and understand God’s Word when it comes to such important matters.
The return of Jesus Christ is a singular event, followed by the establishment of the promised Kingdom, and ultimately the eternal Kingdom. It’s simple, clear, and doesn’t require fifteen different eschatological formulas or confusing doctrines of human tradition to understand or anticipate with great hope.
Here, Wright addresses the image of believers being suctioned up into the air and taken away to heaven at the return of Christ, as popularized in modern novels and movies:
“…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. 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.
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, as the Left Behind series suggests, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.”
Wright makes another very poignant observation about the current worldview of some Christians who believe, wrongly in my opinion, that scripture teaches that believers will be scooped up to avoid a ‘Great Tribulation’, then return seven years later with Jesus to dish out the final portion of God’s wrath on the world.
“Paul’s misunderstood metaphors present a challenge for us: How can we reuse biblical imagery, including Paul’s, so as to clarify the truth, not distort it? And how can we do so, as he did, in such a way as to subvert the political imagery of the dominant and dehumanizing empires of our world? We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic vision of God’s whole creation?“
Let’s allow the whole Word of God to speak to us and teach us rather than magnifying pet verses out of context and being seduced by pop theology – like Left Behind.
