THE RAPTURE OF THE SAINTS
THE RAPTURE OF THE SAINTS. This picture by the great Bruxelloise painter René Magritte shows a large number of really ordinary looking people floating, or soaring, upward into the air. Such a thing doesn’t normally happen. Not even in Brussels. But could it happen? How would it happen? And why? And when?
‘Rapture’ is a word used to describe an event foretold in the Bible when the saints will be ‘caught up’ to meet Jesus in the air. Some object that the word ‘Rapture’ is not scriptural. This is both true and not true. Rapture—from Latin rapio—means ‘snatching’ or ‘seizing’ or ‘taking’. And while the word itself does not appear in our English Bibles, there are several Bible passages which speak of the Lord ‘taking’ his people up into the air. So the word Rapture, like the words Incarnation or Trinity, does represent a genuine biblical idea, even though it’s not found in the Bible.
Again, some people say that the Rapture is a recent idea. But it’s not. It comes from the Bible. Nor is it just a New Testament idea. Its origins lie deep in the Old Testament. So we shouldn’t be surprised that some Israelites held to such a hope before Christian times, as intertestamental-period texts show. And, later still, the idea appears in rabbinic literature.
I follow it from the beginning, through the New Testament, down into the teaching of the early church and the rabbis.
Enoch
The first rapture occurs right at the beginning of the Bible, in the fifth chapter of Genesis. We read how Enoch the patriarch walked with God, then ‘he was not, for God took (laqaḥ) him’ (Gen. 5.24). This is in contrast to all the other patriarchs. The brief summaries of their lives, in Genesis 5, close with the words, “And he died.” But, in the same place, we read of Enoch that “God took him”.