I’ve been feeling a deep fear lately about the rapture and especially what might come after.
It’s not the event of the rapture itself that frightens me, but the unknown that follows…death, judgment, eternity. These are weighty things, and at times, they overwhelm me.
Has anyone else wrestled with this kind of fear? Any Scripture or encouragement would be deeply appreciated. God bless you.
oh dear sweet Jenny, when I was young I had those fears now I regularly pray for God to take me home. Look at how amazing this fallen world is and we have a whole new perfect world to serve and explore. not to mention the rest of the universe!
try 1st Corinthians 2:9
Let not your heart be troubled, earth is hell for those who are saved and heaven for those who are not.
A Bible verse for you….
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:4-7
May I suggest that you read and think about the doxology at the end of Jude, which reads in the NIV:-
**24 **To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy – **25 **to the only God our Saviour be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and for evermore! Amen.
Two questions.
Who is it that is going to be presented?
and
Who is doing the presenting?
If you belief what this verse is saying, what have you to fear?
Are your questions rhetorical or do they require an answer.
I have my hand up! Pick me! Pick me! 
Truly, what is there to fear? And that verse just humbles me, and fills my heart with joy
A fresh hearing of the Gospel is always a good thing:
Christ died for you.
Christ is risen.
Christ has defeated death.
In Christ you pass through Judgment to Life.
Both.
its an attempt to get people to think, so if you know the answer, then trust God and glory in worship and serving him.
When you say that you are wrestling with “fear”, I immediately wonder what “flavor of fear” you mean. I’m not trying to overly-complicate the emotion you are experiencing, but fear is a fairly complicated human emotion, yet a familiar feeling that is universally experienced. When you say you “fear”, I immediately associate your word with something I have felt before, and I sympathize.
Learned psychologists have spent entire lifetimes trying to understand the inner-workings of the emotion that we describe as fear, because what we feel can stem from a variety of sources; one kind can actually be very different from another kind. Rather than trying to extract from you the basis for your fear, I think it more efficient for this forum to focus on the remedies that can ease the sensation. For sake of brevity, I will mention (for now) only one effective antidote, and that is “gratitude” (Phil. 4:6).
In the simplest of terms, it is not possible for your brain to fear something (in the negative sense of fear (GK:phobos)) for which you are thankful. Dread and gratitude do not easily coexist in your mind, your internal wiring will quite simply attach to one and ignore the other (test this for yourself). Your creator wired you with the innate gift of fear as a tool He knew you would need, and one that would be essential for your prosperity. In His love for you however, He instructs you, through His word, in the beautiful art of “thanksgiving” as a mitigating tool that manages your emotion of fear. Thanksgiving positively “transforms our mind” to give proper recognition (attribution) to the one who loves us, and is infinitely more capable of facing whatever we fear without the slightest chance of Him succumbing to it. Thanksgiving emotes into love, and, as we know “there is no fear in love. Because “fear is torturous” (phobos echo kolasis), Love perfected casts it out. (from 1 John 4:18 paraphrased); Love (agape) through thanksgiving will not coexist in your mind with fear (phobos).
The fear you describe is one that arises when you think of entering into the unknown. This is a normal emotion that was gifted to you by your Creator, because He loves you. The mitigation for the negative aspects of that emotion is thanksgiving which you will begin to feel as Love. Thank God for all His marvelous works, and especially for His promise of eternal bliss in His perfect presence.
I beseech you therefore, my sister, “by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)
“Fear Not”
KP
Why would you be scared of the rapture, it’s only something to do with God. God is good, right? You wouldn’t be scared of a good person, place, thing or idea unless you had a moral flaw.
I’m not even scared of Adolph Hitler, and he was totally evil.
@KPuff I whole-heartedly agree with your advice to praise! It’s difficult to remember to do this when experiencing fear, or grief, or doubt or any negative, painful emotion..but it works. It really REALLY works, and I had no idea why, other than God. But, because the human brain is endlessly fascinating, the way you describe how the brain functions, and that the effects of prayer on brain activity can be measured scientifically, it makes perfect sense that praise would have such a profound effect on human emotion.
And before someone rebukes me for relying on science rather than God, what I’m trying to point out is that so many non-believers want “proof” that God exists, and science, in its efforts to disprove God, only proves His existence, and I use all of these little tidbits to open up pathways of communication with non-believers, like my sons.
But when I praise Him, through sobs, through dread and fear, through pain, I feel His presence and He lifts me up.
What a great topic!
Get the time frame right, and the whole New Testament pops into vivid focus and makes sense. Get the time frame wrong, and you might well spiral into immediate irrelevance, and a much lower quality of life. Life is GREAT! God’s plans are AMAZING! Let’s go move some mountains for His glory!
The state-of-the-art best eschatology, postmillennialism, usually includes some form of preterism. Most of the prophecies in the Olivet Discourse, and John’s more detailed retelling of that discourse in prophetic (visual, right-brain) imagery, refers to the Jewish War, which lasted 7 years, started on schedule 40 years after Jesus pronounced God’s pending judgment upon “this generation,” and kicked the feet out from under the Kingdom of God’s two chief enemies – Rome, and apostate Israel.
Get the time frame right, and you can even explain Apocalypse to Turkish Muslims in a way that makes sense.
Well, one idea is to just remember that the writer of Revelation is the same John who wrote the Gospel bearing his name. John the disciple, also known as John the Baptist, or John the divine, and also known as John the Revelator, is a friendly writer who knew Jesus, and write a gospel himself. Gospel means Good News, remember? He’s close to Christ, and neither betrayed him like Judas nor had the horrible doubts and faltering of Peter, who in spite of being ordained as the rock on which Christ would build his church denied him three times overnight on the Friday he was crucified. John is the one Jesus appears to with his last prophecy, and John himself died for the prophetic message, so he could write it down, seal the scroll, and deliver it to safekeeping for the future. John can be trusted, just keep reading his two books. John was also the recipient of three epistles from Paul, and reading those, you can become more friends with John, and understand his prophecy better, as if it were yours and Paul was writing to you. Also, since you do possess the book, it’s your prophecy too.. just follow in the letter of the New Testament manuscript. Remember, all scripture is the law.
Why not just think of it as being a case of when the rapture gets here for real, it will be the second coming and all will be well? I get it, but yet overusing religious terminology to give yourself a “fit in” patina of respectability in an unjust social culture or during an oppressive civil war or war of conquest has a limited envelope of possibilities and the window does expire.
If you just have a church group as a sort of latter day Noah’s Ark for security during times of secular unrest and civil strife, first off that might have theological implications for post lifetime outcomes and secondly, if both the group are cohesive and the strife is real, it’s both true that abuses are likely and that the conditions might require you to do something else civil or come and go more than more cloistered members of the group are comfortable with.
Also, in a state of chaos and upheaval, gee, your group might be politically involved with the revolution anyway. How good is that? The revolution might be unjust or altruistic, maybe you need to get more space by yourself with distance from the law and the government is allowing its territory to just overpopulate.
if it’s a case of real kidnappings, extortions, kidnappings, and ransom demands by local authorities as the union saw in the 1860s, then there’s also an envelope of impact and a window of opportunity for you as far as scripted or secretarially appointed religious services go. Some raptures are more like the fall of Berlin, others are more like getting caught out in a dumb argument with some over hyped person in a local neighborhood watch pecking order. If you catch the Russians spying on you what will you do? Everyone you know is white, right? Then again, what if suddenly the Spanish invade an Indian reservation and start bumping off everyone who won’t sing God Save the Queen. You’re a religious conservative, right?
Well, one idea is to just remember that the writer of Revelation is the same John who wrote the Gospel bearing his name. John the disciple, also known as John the Baptist, or John the divine,
John the Baptist is very much a totally different person than John the Apostle (John the son of Zebedee). This we can say with total certainty. John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin and was beheaded by Herod. John the Apostle was still alive after Jesus rose from the dead, and is mentioned by name still in the Acts of the Apostles.
John the Divine/John the Revelator/John of Patmos may be the same John as the Apostle, but we actually don’t know. Just as we don’t know who authored the Fourth Gospel, though ancient tradition says it was John the Apostle. Some of our earliest witnesses attest to there being at least two Johns, John the Apostle and John the Presbyter, the latter being identified as the John who wrote the Johanine Epistles and the Revelation; while John the Apostle is identified as the same as John the Evangelist–the author of the Fourth Gospel.
The Johanine texts could be the product of a single John: John the Apostle. Or there could be three Johns: John the Apostle, John the Presbyter, and John the Revelator. There isn’t a unified, and certainly dogmatic, position on this. So while the general opinion, rooted in later tradition, is a singular John–the Apostle–as the author of all the Johanine texts, in the strictest sense we actually don’t know.
I’ve heard of this. John of Revelation I’m certain is St. John Chrystotom. That’s the real him, the one who wrote the 66th book in Greece if not in Greek. I never get this far. Everyone else is thinking about the identity of Christ in the King County Washington area, and I’m in fact on athletic King County. You might not have a local address, it doesn’t matter, you’re an athlete already.
In case anybody wants to know, the identity of the King is that it’s Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
… What? I don’t understand what you’re saying.
St. John Chrysostom is a Church Father from centuries after the Revelation was written.
No, I think it was the same person, unless he was Lewis the fourteenth. Lewis Descartes isn’t possible to explain without photos and drawing in the United States.
Uh, thank you very much. If you’re interested in which John of Patmos I really meant, the book 1914 can be searched and accessed on Apple iTunes books app for the iPhone. John Denton Pinkstone French is something else writing during the early stages of World War One. In Athens, near the agean.
Incorrect @OptionalAlgebra
… and your confusion rests on a categorical historical error that collapses an ancient prophetic figure into a modern literary personality with no evidentiary bridge between them.
John of Patmos is a first century Jewish Christian prophet exiled on Patmos during the reign of Domitian, writing the Apocalypse to seven historical churches in Roman Asia Minor under conditions of imperial pressure and cultic coercion, a context explicitly embedded in the text itself ~Revelation 1:4, 1:9, 2:13, 17:9, with internal markers of persecution, emperor worship, and covenantal judgment flowing directly from the cross of Christ and His victory over the powers through suffering and faithful witness.
John Denton Pinkstone French is a twentieth century British writer active during the First World War era, producing speculative or literary material in a modern geopolitical context, separated from the Johannine Apocalypse by nearly nineteen centuries, radically different language worlds, theological horizons, audiences, and purposes, and nowhere attested in patristic, canonical, or manuscript traditions as connected to the apostolic or prophetic John.
The Book of Revelation self identifies its author as Ἰωάννης Iōannēs writing as a servant δοῦλος of Jesus Christ, bearing witness μαρτυρέω to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, language saturated with covenantal and cruciform theology rooted in the slain Lamb ἀρνίον ἐσφαγμένον ~Revelation 1:1–2, 5:6, a framework irreducible to modern literary symbolism or post Enlightenment allegory.
Early external testimony from pre Augustinian sources is unanimous and unambiguous, with Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian all affirming the Apocalypse as written by John the disciple of the Lord or at minimum by a first century prophetic John embedded in the apostolic circle, received and read by churches that traced their faith directly to the cross and resurrection, not to twentieth century wartime speculation.
Nowhere is there manuscript evidence, patristic citation, or canonical dispute linking the Apocalypse to a modern author, not one Greek codex, not one Syriac or Latin witness, not one early church reader, and to assert such a connection is to add to the text what Scripture itself never claims and what history flatly denies ~Revelation 22:18–19.
The Apocalypse stands as crucified Christ theology in prophetic form, confronting empire, idolatry, and compromise through the victory of the Lamb who conquers by being slain, while modern writings from 1914 reflect an entirely different horizon of meaning, anxiety, and narrative intention, and the two cannot be harmonized without dissolving the authority and historical rootedness of Scripture itself.
So in short, your identification is incorrect, historically indefensible, textually unsupported, and theologically incoherent, and fidelity to Scripture demands that John of Patmos remain where the Bible places him, at the foot of the cross bearing witness to the risen Christ for the sake of suffering churches awaiting His return.
J.
That makes your name MacGrouider. Ta.