“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Tim 4:1).
The doctrine of the Rapture is a lie foisted on the Church by teachers who neither know nor understand the Scriptures. Many of these so-called teachers are conceited and arrogant men, and the focus and emphasis of their preaching is focused on the fictional Rapture and the fictional Great Tribulation. These doctrines are central to the crazy heresy known as Dispensational Premillennialism, a variant of Premillennialism.
Origins
An outbreak of supernatural gifts, which included healing and speaking in tongues, occurred in Scotland in 1826-1829, due to a few Scottish preachers saying that the world’s problems could only be addressed through supernatural gifts from the Holy Spirit. The teaching spread rapidly and many people came to investigate these strange occurrences.
In this connection, the doctrine of the Rapture first made its appearance in the visions of a woman from the area named Mary MacDonald in 1830. Her visions included a partial or mid-tribulational Rapture, and the message of her visions was disseminated through the preaching of Edward Irving, the minister of the church she attended.
At the same time period, John Nelson Darby in Ireland was reaching his own (it is said) but similar eschatological views, which include a pretribulational Rapture. However, it seems to me that Darby got his ideas about the Rapture either from Mary MacDonald’s own writing, or through Irving’s preaching. It is too much of a coincidence that he arrived at the same teaching independently at the same time as MacDonald.
This view is supported in a biography of Mary MacDonald, which begins: “At church and we hear fabulous teachings of the Rapture; however, when we get home, we can’t find the word. That is because the Rapture is not in the Bible and does not come from any Bible reference. It comes from the ecstatic utterances of Margaret MacDonald in 1830.
In 1830, Margaret MacDonald had a series of visions that were picked up by John Darby, Edward Irving, and John Pusey”.
Unfortunately, many of these local Scottish churches became steeped in doctrinal confusion and heresy due to their Pentecostal influence and claimed supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit; supernatural gifts which biblically belonged exclusively to the apostles (2 Cor 12:12; Acts 5:15-17; 8:14-17) and “loaned” on occasion to deacons (Acts 6:1-8; 8:5-17). But although there have been periods in the history of the Church during which miraculous gifts were exercised by powerful impartation of the Holy Spirit, they are not common. And most of these occurrences reveal the presence and involvement of Satan.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his book “Joy Unspeakable”, on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and revival, pointed out that wherever there is a work of the Holy spirt, there you will find Satan, secretly working to produce false miracles with which to corrupt the Spirit’s work, as prophesied by Jesus in the parables of the Wheat and the Tares and the Dragnet (Matt ch 13).
Revivals and sexual immorality
One glaring historical example of Satan’s polluting influence in confusing the fruit of the Spirit and the works of the flesh (Gal 5:19-23) is during the Kentucky Revival camp meetings, which occurred during the Second Great Awakening series of revivals from the 1790s to 1830s. During these Revival meetings, a preaching tower was erected, from the top of which the preacher could see the multitudes and his voice be more effectively projected to reach them. However, even while he was preaching the Gospel, prostitutes had brazenly set up their business within the framework of the tower, directly beneath him.
Furthermore, there were separate camp quarters for the men and the women. But there was so much traffic between the two that guards had to patrol between them all night every night. One journalist, a critic of the bizarre and wicked goings-on during the revival, wryly commented in his newspaper article, that there were more children born of the flesh than of the Spirit. And another report tells of normally respectable and conservative women who, when under the power of the (demonic) spirit, would rip open their blouse to reveal their breasts. And thus were the tares once again sown among the wheat (Matt ch 13), and the name and work of God brought into disrepute.
However, God did not allow the situation to remain on such a degraded note. The Second Great Awakening produced a lot more good fruit than evil, despite Satan’s work of destruction. It was during the Second Great Awakening that William Miller preached his famous and influential sermons on prophecy and the return of Jesus, which culminated in the founding of the Seventh Day Adventist movement. And thus, God had Satan in derision, as this movement grew into a worldwide church.
The Rapture is a novelty
The Dispensational Premillennialist belief in the Rapture is not found anywhere in the entire history of the church before 1830. It began with Mary MacDonald, William Irving, and J. N. Darby, as already stated. No one has yet found any credible evidence beyond them that anybody believed or taught such a thing. Because of this, it is impossible for Darby to have arrived at his Rapture eschatology through the study of Scripture and history. His method would likely have been that, hearing or reading MacDonald’s visionary teaching, he would have looked for verses in Scripture which he thought could prove the teaching of the visions, and thus promoted it as his discovery from personal bible study – or some such.
As for Darby’s Premillennial views, he most likely got them from the writings of a 16th century Jesuit priest named Francisco Ribera. The Protestant Reformers had been teaching that the Pope was antichrist, and the teaching was having a powerful effect, and various tracts describing the Pope as the Antichrist and his number being 666 were circulating throughout Europe. The Geneva Bible had similar notes in its comments on Revelation; and the Reformers were hammering this view from their pulpits. So, in 1585, Ribera wrote a 500-page commentary on the book of Revelation, which proposed a futurist view (as opposed to the biblical Historicist view of the Reformers and Adventists). Ribera applied the first chapters of Revelation to ancient pagan Rome, and the rest referred to a still future period of 3½ literal years, immediately prior to the return of Jesus.
By proposing a futurist interpretation of Revelation, he was able to deflect the criticisms against the Pope, and leave it all comfortably in an unknowable time period in the future. Ribera and Darby were able to cherry-pick enough disparate references from the writings of early Church Fathers and from the Bible to concoct a cohesive but false view of prophecy. This eschatological system, to which was added the Rapture, has been the bane of the Church ever since.
In contrast to Darby, the great evangelist R. A. Torrey, wisely wrote in his book “What the Bible Teaches” that his (Torrey’s) approach was to look at the Scriptures and draw his teaching from them, rather than searching for verses to prove a doctrine. It is this which, in my opinion, makes Torrey’s book superior to most systematic theologies.
Grandiose but false claims to antiquity
Nevertheless, despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever, Premillennial Dispensationalists insist that their teaching was the major view of the early Church until Origen and Augustine corrupted it and gave the Church a new eschatology.
During the first centuries there was a large number of futurist believers, known as Chiliasts – hence the name Chiliasm – but their teaching did not have the main elements of Dispensational doctrines, and often taught the very opposite doctrines; so it cannot be claimed by them as any kind of forerunner of Dispensationalism. It was this movement which Augustine resisted, not modern-day Dispensationalism.
In Chiliasm, there was no Rapture, no Great Tribulation, and no restored national Israel in a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. The Israel of Chiliasm was a spiritual Israel i.e. all who confessed Christ as Saviour, regardless of ethnic or national origin (Matt 16:18; Eph 2:13-22 cf 3:10, 21). And, despite that Augustine contributed to the abandonment of this claimed form of Premillennialism because of his spiritualising of the prophecies, Chiliasm, in fact, died a natural death in the process of centuries, as first one date and then another for the return of Christ came and went. The doctrine changed repeatedly as Christians developed a better understanding of how the prophecies concerning Israel, the Church, and end-times, should be understood.
False claims made by false prophets
So, despite the Dispensationalists’ desperate attempts to give themselves legitimacy by falsely claiming a connection to an early eschatological movement, their Emperor’s clothing is exposed, and they are left naked and ashamed in the glare of history and reality. They have nothing but an elaborate and false system which wrests Scripture and leads people into error and advocates a false Gospel.
But Satan is not very original in his methods of corruption. A very similar problem to that caused by him through Mary MacDonald and William Irving, occurred in the 2nd century in which the famous Church Father, Tertullian, was involved, and who was sympathetic to the movement. The founder of the heresy, Montanus (hence its name of Montanism), and two prominent women followers, Priscilla and Maxima, claimed to have had a series of direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, and to be able to prophesy. Montanism caused real problems for the Church because of the false claims and false teaching made by these three false prophets, and it was rejected as a heresy.
And, just as Mary MacDonald claimed authority for her claims that the Rapture was revealed to her by the Holy Spirit, so Priscilla and Maxima claimed the same source for the authority for their “New Prophecy” as it became known, along with its “new” revelations. Such is always the way with the Christian cults. montanism heresy – Search
Dispensationalism’s shot in the arm
As for our previously mentioned John Nelson Darby, he and a colleague, William Kelly, the heretics who founded the Brethren Movement, began teaching their Dispensationalist heresy. In 1909, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield published the first edition of his lying Reference Bible, which gave the heresy a massive shot in the arm. Through it, Scofield introduced Dispensational teaching into the Scriptures by inserting his heretical notes into the bible text margins, and by a clever use of descriptive and misleading paragraph headings.
This Bible spread Dispensationalism widely throughout Christianity, and it has since become the popular view of end-times theology among Christians. The teachings of the notes and insertions of the Reference Bible were condensed in a booklet titled “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth” and “The Scofield Bible Correspondence Course”. These publications spread the heresy on a massive scale and ensured its place as a permanent fixture in the thinking of many Christians, churches, theological colleges, and whole denominations. And it has had continuous and massive injections of renewed teaching in the form of popularly written apocalyptic novels and books explaining its eschatology.
Dispensationalism is another False Gospel
The apostle Paul cursed all those who preach a false gospel, be they men or angels (Gal 1:8-9). Dispensationalism is certainly a false gospel as it abrogates the permanence of the New Covenant and revives the Old Covenant, thus bringing Israel into bondage (Acts 15:7-11).
This bizarre, complicated, compartmentalised, system of several dispensations is the result of the false teachers discussed in this article. These heretics wrongly applied prophecies made to Israel by the Old Testament prophets, which produced a wrong understanding of Israel and the Church and their relationship to each other. Instead of seeing that the Church is the “mystery of Christ” revealed to Paul and the apostles by revelation (Eph 3:2-6), which is that “the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel” (Eph 3:6); and instead of seeing the Church as the fulfilment of prophecy and which was to exist “world without end”, i.e. forever and ever (Eph 3:21), they see it as God’s Plan B, calling the so-called Church Age “The Great Parenthesis”; an interruption of the “prophetic clock” and God’s plan for Israel.
It is this teaching which has resulted in Christian Zionism, an abomination which has brought genocide and untold suffering to the land of Palestine and brought endless war and slaughter to a whole people.
References
Margaret MacDonald / The origin of the Rapture – Israel & The Church in the Last Days
All scriptures in this article are taken from the Authorised King James Version of the Bible.