Is the rapture in the book of Revelation?

Where the word comes from

The rapture is built on a letter Paul wrote to a young church in Thessalonica, in Greece, about AD 50, decades before Revelation. Some of its members had died, and the others were grieving and afraid the dead would miss Christ’s return.

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with God’s trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever.

The Greek verb for “caught up” is harpazō, to seize or snatch. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate rendered it rapiemur, “we will be seized,” and from that Latin verb English took the word rapture. Paul’s own point is comfort: “Therefore comfort one another with these words” (4:18). And the word for “to meet” is apantēsis, used for a city’s delegation going out to welcome an arriving dignitary and escort him in. Acts 28:15 uses it of the believers who walked out from Rome to meet Paul. For many scholars, then, Paul pictures a welcoming party that comes back down with the Lord, not a departure.

What Revelation has, and does not have

The verb harpazō appears in Revelation exactly once. A woman clothed with the sun gives birth, a dragon waits to devour the child, and “Her child was caught up to God and to his throne” (Revelation 12:5). The one caught up is the Messiah, not the church.

Readers who teach a rapture point to other verses. To one church Christ promises, “I also will keep you from the hour of testing which is to come on the whole world” (3:10). In 4:1 a voice tells John, “Come up here,” and some read his ascent as a picture of the church being taken up. They note that the word for church, so common in chapters 2 and 3, does not return until 22:16. Others answer that Revelation keeps God’s people on earth through its troubles: the beast is allowed “to make war with the saints” (13:7), and the martyrs who reign with Christ are those who refused the mark (20:4).

Darby and the 1830s

For most of church history, Christians read 1 Thessalonians 4 as a description of Christ’s single, visible return. In the 1830s the Anglo-Irish preacher John Nelson Darby, a founder of the Plymouth Brethren, taught something new: a coming of Christ for his church, before seven years of tribulation, followed later by his return in glory. His system, called dispensationalism, crossed to America through Bible conferences and the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) sold millions, and the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, from 1995, put the vanishing millions on bestseller lists. Jesus’s line “one will be taken and one will be left” (Matthew 24:40) is often quoted; others note that, a verse earlier, the ones the flood “took away” were the ones judged.

How readers split

• Before the tribulation. Darby’s view, held by many evangelical and Pentecostal churches.
• In the middle, or before the worst of it. Smaller groups place the rapture partway through.
• After the tribulation. Believers are caught up only at the visible return, to meet Christ and come back with him.
• No separate rapture. The Catholic and Orthodox churches and most older Protestant churches read Paul’s words as the second coming itself.

Herald tells the text: Revelation’s last chapters end not with people leaving the earth but with a city coming down to it (Revelation 21:2).