9.24.2025

The King is coming! But maybe not in the way some people think. 

Last week I wrote that the true meaning of the gospel in the New Testament is a royal announcement that God has returned to Jerusalem in the person of Jesus to reclaim the world from Satan. I want to expand on what that means for us today, but I first need to take a little detour – but I’ll come back to it!

My social media has been BLOWING UP with predictions about the rapture occurring sometime on September 23-24. The apparent deadline is sunset in Jerusalem today which is about 10:30 AM our time. Which means there are 4 hours to go while I’m writing this. 

I’m confident that by noon or so we will all be reading this because we’ll all still be here. 

One man sold his car since he wouldn’t need it (I don’t know why he thought he needed the money). I’ve seen videos of people speaking with absolute confidence of the “confirmations” they’ve received from God that today is the day. One woman posted that her 3 year old suddenly started speaking in Hebrew (we had to take her word; as far as I know she never posted a video of it, and I’m not sure she’d recognize Hebrew anyway). Another woman asked off work so she could be with her family when the rapture occurred, and we saw her getting fired as a confirmation that today was the day! 

They're really kind of pitiful, and I would feel sorry for them if the whole failed prediction of Christ’s return AGAIN didn’t give Christianity such a black eye!

And, oh, the mockery! I’ve seen videos of people launching helium filled blow-up dolls off of roofs, of people standing outside blowing trumpets to scare their neighbors, of people leaving piles of clothes around their homes as pranks to make their family members think they’ve been “left behind.”  And I’m not going to go into all the texts I’ve gotten from my agnostic and atheist friends!

How did all this get started? The doctrine of a secret rapture of the church – the idea that one day Jesus will return and believers will suddenly disappear, marking the beginning of 7 years of tribulation for those left behind – was not taught by Jesus or Paul . . . in fact it wasn’t taught at all until the 1820s. 

Feel free to Google this – it’s just a basic part of Christian history. To quote Muldar from the X-Files, “The truth is out there.” 

The idea of a pre-Tribulation “secret” rapture was developed by an English clergyman,  John Nelson Darby, in 1827. Darby’s teaching didn’t catch on in England but was picked up by an American, C. I. Scofield, who incorporated Darby’s ideas into his Scofield Reference Bible. In 1970, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth further spread the doctrine, becoming the #1 bestselling book of the 70s. In more recent years, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ enormously popular Left Behind series cemented it into the popular imagination. This series, while fictional, did more to influence the way the American evangelical church understands the end of the world than any theological texts. 

But my major problem with it – besides the fact that it misreads scripture all over the place – is that, with its images of unmanned planes falling from the sky and families being torn apart, it’s been used to scare children into obedience, to keep believers anxious about being ready and to turn Christianity into a countdown of terror instead of a promise of hope. 

It reshifts the focus of why Jesus came to earth. 

Once we step out of the fear of being “left behind,” we begin to see that Christ was never an “escape plan.” Christ is heaven breaking into earth, the Kingdom of God coming near. As someone put it, “Christ is embodiment, not evacuation.”

And that’s what rapture-theology is about: the abandonment of God’s creation. God is not going to abandon it. Romans 8 tells us creation is groaning as it waits to “be set free from its enslavement to decay” (8:21).  Jesus isn’t going to pull us out of any tribulation. He told his disciples at the Last Supper, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). The Gospel is overcoming, not escaping. 

The beauty of the gospel – of the “Good News” – is that God is Love and in Christ, death and darkness are shattered, humanity has been invited into the light and freedom of New Creation, and we have been given the privilege to spread the love of Christ to a world that desperately needs that love. 

God loves us. Christ died and rose again. Because of those two events, we are swept up into something unimaginably wonderful, spanning not just humanity but all of Creation. 

The Good News is not about escaping creation but is about a New Creation. God is reclaiming his lost world and he’s inviting us to take part in it. That’s the gospel. The gospel is not an end-times code to crack but is Good News that sets all creation free. The Good News is actually good news! 

The heart of the Gospel is “Loving God . . . Loving Others.” It’s love that makes us whole, and if love isn’t the center of our message, then we have nothing. It’s up to us to release something eternal into the world, and not get distracted by the noise. 

But what about Christ’s return? Yes, the King is coming, and like the gospel, it is a royal proclamation. I’ll write about that next week as we get back to what the Good News of Christ really means. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry