2023-01-28 A Meditation on Rapture

“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, and so we will always be with the Lord.” (1 Th 4:17 ESV)

The soldier deals with a clutter of information by certainty that “But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”” (Jn 5:17); “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:22–23). The “fullness” is an inner dynamo “still working”, meting out word and gentler emotions with a determined wrestling match against the crazed and bludgeoning reversion theologies. That is, a soldier expects quality from their faith, not hairbrained deadening insistence on seeing everything through biblical prophecy.

Yet we do see through biblical prophecy, insofar as we have no “canon within a canon” we nonetheless have a humanistic editing board that elevates around verses that promise attended to, new life, in Christ. We hear that inner dynamo still churning, thoughts still wondrously forming, opinions and tangible ways to affirm that this is a faith we do love. God is righteous; He proves Himself righteous by dying for us, “just in case” God the Father had done anything wrong by way of tutoring us, He sends His Son to bear all the blame. This is a religion that goes the distance. This is a religion that honors the abundant streams of thought and conversation within each human heart.

The soldier therefore has their thinking cap and their wise spectacles, to interpret prophecy as fundamentally not literal predictions perhaps, but as relating to God’s key war: the war with unbelief and sin. God’s key war is to save His Creation. God’s key war is to lighten the heart with change and amendment of life. God’s key war is to give each of us a laughter at jokes, or a lightness of being. God’s key war is progressive, hearing the plea of so many heard from the soldier’s servant perch: we would rather be with the embedded, those not extracted, if the prize for those who extract themselves from society is simply a half-way prize. The “rapture” prize is incomplete, a bludgeoned omnipresence of this “Jesus” of some sort or another, and we for one would rather be labeled “unsaved” than to diminish thought and human created expansiveness. Yet the horsemen are real, in external tome for our formerly ill souls; the horsemen are beckoning to a spaceship real and true, imbued with matter-of-fact tasks and duties of a thoughtful and fighting reality. We fight with words. We fight with civic duty. We fight with resisting the borg of unthoughtfulness.