1 Thessalonians 5:2
2 For [gar] yourselves [autos] know [eido] perfectly [akribos] that [hoti] the day [hemera] of the Lord [kurios] so [houto] cometh [erchomai] as [hos] a thief [kleptes] in [en] the night. [nux] KJV-Interlinear
2 For you yourselves
know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the
night. NASB
For you know,
indicates that this doctrine was well known by the Thessalonians and we can
presume that others back in Pauls
day, understood this principle as well. Because they had obviously been taught
the doctrine of the Rapture.
They knew also, that
the Rapture would come upon the world as a thief would come to a house to rob
it.
A thief comes when you
least expect it.He plans his theft, as
it were, when you will not be home, when you have dropped your guard. He plans to come and take your property, and
then leave, only for you to discover after the fact, that you have been robbed.
You will not know when
you were robbed, but only that it occurred in the past night, or at a time when
you were away from home.
You cannot plan for the
coming of the thief, otherwise you would be there waiting to catch him, or to
cause him to abort his burglary.And
even after he has robbed you, you cannot know exactly the hour that he was in
your home.You know only that your
things are now missing.
And so, the imminence of
the Rapture is a permanent and unchanging doctrine. No one will ever guess the moment, the hour,
the day or week or month or year, decade or perhaps even the century of His
coming.No one who is living at the time
of the Rapture, that is.
Now, you and I can
guess and predict, perhaps this century or the next, as being the century of
the Rapture.But what if it isn t for
another two centuries?That is certainly
a possibility.What if there were a
massive epidemic and the population of the world died off by the billions? Then the Rapture may not occur for a very
long time, while the population takes many centuries to rebuild itself again.
Two principles are
apparent here.
First, we cannot
predict the date of the Rapture.
Second, people (in
general) in the Rapture generation, will be taken by complete surprise. And certainly unbelievers who are generally
clueless about Christian doctrines, will take some time, after the Rapture,
before they figure it all out.
As for believers, there
will be a very spiritually weak generation of believers living in that day. But then that describes our day, and nearly
every generation in history.
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