Left Behind?

I have noticed, just in the last few years, that a lot of people have become very interested in what is going to happen after the rapture of the body of Christ. You may be familiar with the “Left Behind” series of books, some of which have been turned into movies. From what I understand, Tim LaHaye spent ten years researching the Book of Revelation, and then got Jerry B. Jenkins to fictionalize the timeline that he had developed. While I will admit that the series is, apparently (I haven’t actually read any of them, although I did watch one of the movies), entertaining, and certainly not any worse than most fiction, I just can’t help but think that there are better ways that we could be spending our time.

Let me ask you a question: If you were an astronaut, training for the first manned mission to Mars, would you spend your free time reading books about Venus? Or, to put it another way, if you were a volunteer on your way to Haiti, would you be studying Canada? Or, if you were about to go on a missions trip to a remote island in the South Pacific, would you try to learn all you could about Zimbabwe before you left? Perhaps more importantly, would you be reading books about Canada or Zimbabwe written by someone who had never actually been there?

I don’t mean to sound impassive or unsympathetic, but it’s hard for me to get all worked up over what happens here on earth after the rapture: I don’t plan on being here! There has been a lot of discussion back and forth over whether it’s possible to miss the rapture and still go to Heaven—after all, God is the God of second chances—but, honestly, do you think that it will be easier to get right with God after the church goes home? Besides that, what happens if something should happen to you before the rapture? You could get hit by a drunk driver tonight. Accidents happen all the time.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “People who plan on getting saved at the eleventh hour often die at ten thirty.” This is a reference to a parable that Jesus told about workers in the field, and the lord of that property paid each of them the same amount, even those that started work at the eleventh hour. The point of the parable is that it doesn’t matter at what stage of your life you give your heart to Jesus, as long as you remain faithful once you make that commitment, but the point of the bumper sticker is that you have no promise of tomorrow.

My point is that we don’t know when the rapture will be. I believe that it will happen in my lifetime, but so did John Newton. I have attended the funerals of many people who believed that they would live to see the rapture. On the other hand, there are some who have studied Revelation and have concluded that the rapture is still a long way off, as evidenced by the many prophesies that remain, as yet, unfulfilled. I personally that God is a great God and that He could fulfill many prophesies in a matter of hours (to be honest, I suspect that there will be more than a few people at judgment who will say, “But God, you said this would happen before the rapture,” only to have it explained to them exactly how they misinterpreted the prophecy).

The bottom line is, we should be doing all that we can to make sure that we are ready now, rather than worry about what might happen if we are not ready at the appointed time, or even worry about the signs pointing to the appointed time. As long as you are ready, it doesn’t really matter when the rapture will come, or what will happen afterwards.