SEVERAL QUESTIONS
1. Do you believe in the “secret rapture” theory?
2. Will there be any life on the earth during the millennium period?
1. The word rapture is from a Latin word that means “to carry off by force.” By some strange aberration some religious folks applied that term to the Lord’s taking saints from the earth, as if they will have to be forced to go or somebody or power will have to be forced to let them go—a sort of seizing and carrying away. But I could not believe in the “secret rapture” unless I had some evidence. That evidence is lacking.
2. I have found no evidence that there is to be a thousand-year period in which there will be no life on the earth. There is evidence, however, that there will be life on the earth so long as the earth continues. “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” (Gen. 8:22.) A careful reading of 2 Pet. 3:1-14 will show that so long as the earth remaineth Christians are exhorted to be “looking for and earnestly desiring the coming of the day of God, by reason of which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.” Any student can find other evidence to the same import.
But suppose one believes the affirmative of both these questions, what is practical about such belief? If you hold to a notion that helps neither your faith nor your practice, why waste time with it? Why disturb others with it?
Pointed Paragraphs:
Jesus came to save sinners, not to make sinners. People were sinners before Jesus came, and they would have continued to be sinners had not Jesus come. If people do not believe in him, they continue sinning just as they would have done had he not come.
Though Jesus was moved with compassion at the sight of human suffering, his miracles of healing were not performed primarily to relieve suffering. If that were so, he would cure all sick folks even now, or cause that no one would ever be afflicted in any way. His miracles were performed as signs that God was with him.
Jesus put a higher value on man than on animals. “How much then is a man of more value than a sheep! Wherefore it is lawful to do good on the sabbath day.” (Matt. 12:12.) There is something of vast worth in man, else God would not have been mindful of him.