DECEMBER 7 2019
ARE YOU RAPTURE-READY?
Am I Rapture-Ready? I hope so, but first something personal.
I am a creature of habit, among them thrice-weekly exercise: every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, between 4-6 pm. In the winter I run on my treadmill, bike on my stationary bike and do pushups on my EVER GLIDE PLUS machine. In the summer I bike to town for groceries almost every day – 12 km.
Exercise has been proven in countless studies to improve mood, alertness, memory and happiness, as well as physical wellbeing. Age – whether 21, 41 or my 91 – has little to do with it.
I quit smoking in 1960, and started running. Over the years I have reduced my distance from 15 km to 10 to 8 to 5 and now to 3, but have increased the variety of exercise, keeping it roughly at 3 x 1 hour per week. Clinical trials have established that running – not biking, not walking – extends life expectancy: one hour of running adds 7 hours to your lifespan, to a maximum of 3 years. I have long exceeded that 3 year period.
Another habit is writing my blog: by the end of this month I have concluded my 1000th: 20 years of weekly writings, from 2000-10 for the regional daily, the INTELLIGENCER, and thereafter my weekly blog. It keeps my brain functioning, and that brings me to the topic of the week: RAPTURE and its website: RAPTUREREADY.COM.
Any minute now.
The Rapture clock on RAPTUREREADY.COM shows the 23.55 hour, 5 minutes before midnight, which means that, according to this website, Christ will return any minute now and whisk believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. I sense some ‘Schadenfreude’ there, a very unchristian trait.
The website “raptureready.com’ advises the soon–to-depart to stick a note on the fridge to brief those left behind – husbands, wives, and in-laws – about the horrors in store for them.
The Rapture ravers are correct to some degree. The current civilization has an expiry date, a point in time only God knows who created the cosmos and installed a tipping point in its plan. The proverbial “It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back”, applies to this situation. The earth is finite and the laws of creation certainly apply: rules of life we discard at our own peril.
So, what are these laws?
Dr. Barry Commoner, a long time professor of biology, has condensed them to 4 rules:
- Everything is connected to everything else.
- Nature knows best
- Nothing disappears
- There is no free lunch.
I see a lot of biblical truths in these rules.
In THE RIDDLE OF LIFE Dr. J.H. Bavinck writes about this interconnectedness: (My translation)
”If the sun had a mind of its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a Hand mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. Because, unknowingly, that so superior sun serves the tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.
That little plant cannot think beyond its nature. It winks at the
sun and dreams of the joy that awaits it in a life of light and sunshine. But it has no inkling that it serves just as much as it is served by others. It serves the minuscule seeds it now carries and that later will form new plants. It serves the animal, looking for food, or is needed to help another plant using it as a crutch to climb higher. In manifold ways it serves other creatures that need support or shade or nourishment or moisture.
“When we look around us with open eyes and minds, then there
is one thing that time and again touches us to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature may think that it is there only for itself, but in the final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be. Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way. What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help is their sole goal, but all that serving goes automatically, and thus is simply an unconscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this into motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an in-born act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.”
And we, humans?
We are on top of the ‘service’ society, following Christ’ rule, as found in Matthew 20: 28, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve”.
We not only must serve each other: we, as physical, spiritual and moral beings, we must be servants for all of creation: we must not only serve all created entities: our mandate, the law for us is to enhance all that lives, to make all that exists more beautiful.
Let me elaborate on the other three laws:
Nature knows best
Nothing disappears
There is no free lunch.
God has instilled in creation, in nature if you like, irrefutable laws. The relationship of everything to everything else is evident in opposite ways as well: our greed, our polluting, our wasteful ways, is backfiring on us, because it also applies in negative ways: just as ‘good’ is pervasive, so is ‘evil’. Today ‘evil’ connects everything to everything else. We are sadly discovering that nothing disappears and that the free water, air, soil we have abused, now comes with the final bill: a bill too steep to repay, meaning collapse.
The COP 25, now meeting in Madrid, the 25th gathering on Climate Heating, now cries out in ever more desperate intonations: “listen to the cries of creation”; “mend our sinful ways”; “abandon greed”; “live within the means of the earth”, and the warnings become ever more pronounced, because “NOTHING DISAPPEARS and THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.
Jesus told us, “The wages of sin is death.”
RAPTUREREADY.COM, the favorite website of the majority of the people that call themselves evangelical Christians preaches a different gospel, a very dangerous gospel, and today its two most prominent proponents are Michael Pence, the USA Vice-President, and Michael Pompeo, the USA Secretary of State, the person in charge of USA foreign policy.
One look at the raptureready website and it is striking to see that “Israel is the Key to All End-Time Prophecy”. That’s why the current administration in Washington fully sides with Israel: it sees the Palestinians as the Philistines, Israel’s arch enemy of old. Both Pence and Pompeo are admirers of the ARMAGEDDON belief, the place, a bit south of the Lake of Galilee, in the plain of Jezreel, where, supposedly, the last battle is to be fought.
Here is their reasoning:
The apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In the Christian tradition,
the world is created perfect. Then there is the fall into sin followed by a
long period of moral degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle
between the good (the returned Christ) and evil (The Anti-Christ). Good wins,
of course, and the New Jerusalem is established and with it the 1,000 year of
reign of King Jesus on earth.
This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly.
Is Rapture biblical?
The Rapture proponents rely on 1 Thessalonians 4: 17: meeting Christ in the air. The Greek word here, ‘apantesin’ is the same word used in Matthew 25: 6 and Acts 28: 15. It simply means ‘meeting somebody coming from afar. And, as Acts 1: 11 attests, we will see him in the air coming down, the same way he departed: promise made, promise kept.
And the ”left behind” assumption?
The real clincher there is found in that scary chapter of Matthew 24 with its heading, “Signs of the End of the Age.”
It mentions one text that the church has never really understood, because it has never come to grips with The Kingdom, which is God’s creation; the Gospel of the Kingdom is all about the New Creation to come. When verse 14 says that The Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world, then it does not point to church or bible. It also has nothing to do with missionary work and sermons. The gospel mentioned here is the Gospel of the EARTH, which is screaming loud and clear. It has everything to do with God’s Created Word, his Direct or Primary Word. That’s why the Belgic Confession tells us that we know God FIRST by his Creation, calling it the most beautiful book.
We now experience – and COP 25 in Madrid speaks volumes – that abusing God’s name – and that’s what we have been doing from way back – leads to destruction. As the TEN Commandments tell us: (Exodus 20: 7) You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
Polluting the earth is misusing God’s name, fully in line with Romans 1: 20, For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Oh, yes, RAPTURE.
Back to the Bible and Matthew 24. Am I RAPTUREREADY? Because there will be rapture. Matthew 24 plainly says so: “Until the Flood came (verse 39) and took them all away”. That is Rapture, not a word the Bible uses. It comes from the Latin verb ‘rapio, rapui, raptum’, meaning ‘to snatch away. Our word ‘rape’ has the same origin.
So, who are taken away? Am I? No. Is Noah: no, he was safely tucked away in the Ark.
So, who were taken away? The sinners were taken away!! They all drowned!! And says the same chapter, “So it will be when the Lord returns.” The sinners will be raptured – will be taken away: they don’t belong on God’s Holy Earth, but the saints, the followers of Christ, will remain on the earth, for, says Genesis 3: 19, “For earth we are and to earth we will return.”
Are you RAPTURE-READY?
G.K. Chesterton wrote that original sin is the “only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” The believer and atheist alike can agree that there is an undeniable brokenness to the world, a sickness that needs remedy.
Original sin at work: that’s what we are experiencing. Christ died to take that away. Sin spoiled Paradise. This means that Paradise must be restored. And Jesus did that. That was his mission. When he died, he exclaimed, “It is accomplished: Paradise regained!”
And now comes the hard part. The church has been totally ‘anthropocentric’, has seen only human salvation as its core message. That is wrong! The church has totally failed in its mission, because personal salvation and the salvation of creation go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.
The Biblical truth is that going to heaven is mission impossible. God created the world and called it ‘good’ seven times. There’s where our destination remains: being fully human in a perfect world.
That’s why we must become cosmos-ready, because John 3: 16 unambiguously states that God so loved the cosmos that he gave his Son to regain it. Believing that gives us eternal life.
Christ taught us how to live. We again need to learn ‘how to live on the earth permanently,’ because our final destination is God’s earth.