The Pros And Cons Of The Rapture

The day has finally arrived the Lord has made his return. Only the prepared will be ready to return with the Lord. The weather isn’t how it usually is; the stores are not even operating how they usually do. Not only are there people missing from homes, jobs and schools but there are still a great remainder of people left looking and wondering where their loved ones have vanished. But the question has arisen what precautions have humans taken in order to prepare for the coming back of the Lord? Many people have different views and perspectives of how they believe the world will eventually end including Christians. Not all Christians have the same beliefs of how God will make his return. Some believe that it should be called the “Rapture” while

By this they mean the physical removal from earth of the true believers in Christ in preparation for the “Great Tribulation,” a seven-year period of unparalleled calamity which will herald the end”(Cozby). The belief that the world is ending soon is predominantly customary among Pentecostal and evangelical Christians. Yet not all evangelicals and Pentecostals subscribe to this end-time teaching, and some have even pointed out its dangers. Arden Burrell, a prominent pastor and administrator in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God church in Australia, has pointed out one of the main problems with such teachings. His warning to the church was, "Your eschatology is defeating you." He explained this by saying that the belief that Jesus is coming back within a few years was “causing people to put both their temporal and spiritual lives on hold”(Burell). They were not making proper plans and provision for their future, or their children's future, nor were they making an effort in their spiritual lives to do the will of God, and grow in God's strength. Instead they were using the supposed forthcoming homecoming of Jesus as a justification for carelessness and laziness. The scriptures of First Thessalonians 4 and 5 are recognizable to nearly all Christians as a explanation of the so-called "rapture of the church." The rapture can be considered as a point in eternity which will extend beyond into our past time frame at some fixed point on God's calendar. However, as we have seen, God has not given us the date. For “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of