Introduction to the Rapture

 

02/18/2026

 

Samuel Clifford

 

What is the Rapture? 

 

The Rapture is the term for the eschatological event in which those who are saved will be caught up to meet the Lord Jesus Christ and will be taken up to heaven to be with God. It is greatly described in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18: 

 

“For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.” 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 KJV 

 

In these verses, Paul teaches that when Jesus comes back, the dead who believed in Christ will be physically resurrected, and immediately following, the believers who are alive will also rise, and the two groups will meet in the air and go to be with Jesus. 

 

What is the Pre-Tribulation Rapture?

 

The Pre-Tribulation Rapture is the belief that the Rapture of the Church occurs before the seven years of the Great Tribulation when God will pour out his wrath upon the world.

 

John Darby and the Rapture: 

 

There is a common misconception that John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish preacher who was a very influential figure, created the Rapture concept. However, an etymological (etymology: the study of the origin of words) study reveals the word and its theological usage was present centuries earlier. In Jerome's Vulgate, the word “rapiemur'' is used in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, which is related to the word “rapture.” This is interesting as 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 describes what the Rapture is believed to be, meaning the concept of the Rapture was already existent in the early church. This translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was written by St. Jerome, who was asked to write it by Pope Damasus in 382 AD to bring order out of the proliferation of Old Latin versions that were in circulation. His translation became the standard Latin version of the Bible for the Western Latin-speaking church. St. Jerome, a scholar/translator, originally rendered the Latin rapiemur (the first person plural future passive indicative tense of rapio) from the Greek harpagesometha (the first person plural future passive indicative tense of harpazo).

 

The word “rapture” itself derives from the Latin word “rapio,” meaning “caught up,” and is found in English as early as the fourteenth century in the Vernon Manuscript: “wan he [Elijah] was rapt into paradys.” John Lydgate (1370 - ca. 1451), an early fifteenth-century associate of Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote of the witnesses in Revelation 11: “In this wyse were the brethren twayne to heaven rapt.” The word is also found in a sixteenth-century text in which William Bond referred to Paul’s mystical experience: “He was rapt & taken vp in to the thyrde heuen.” These examples prove sufficient enough. However, more than ten other examples could be brought to the table (see chart below).

Margaret Macdonald:

 

One very popular myth about the Pre-Tribulation Rapture is that it originated from Margaret Macdonald, a teenage girl who was a part of the cultic Irvinite Movement. In the 1830s, Macdonald gave a series of supposedly prophetic utterances from which John Nelson Darby allegedly got his belief in the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. However, there are at least five problems with this idea:

 

  1. There is no direct evidence that Darby developed any of his ideas from Macdonald’s prophecy. In fact, Darby even denied Macdonald’s speech as utterances of the Holy Spirit. 

 

  1. Darby had already formed his beliefs on the Pre-Tribulation Rapture before Macdonald’s utterance in the 1830s. 

 

  1. Macdonald’s prophecy doesn’t actually speak of a Pre-Tribulation Rapture of the Church. Instead, she saw a series of raptures and had a historicist view of the Tribulation, believing that the Church should prepare itself for the appearance of the Antichrist.

 

​"This is the fiery trial which is to try us. — It will be for the purging and purifying of the real members of the body of Jesus... it is the being filled with the Spirit that will take us out of the way. ... Now shall the awful sight of a false Christ be seen on this earth, and nothing but the living Christ of God within us can detect this snare of antichrist." - Margaret McDonald, The Restoration of Apostles and Prophets; In the Catholic Apostolic Church (1861) She says the church would see Antichrist. 

 

  1. Even in the bizarre and nonevidential circumstance that Darby did develop his views on the Rapture from Macdonald, to state that this proves the Pre-Tribulation Rapture as incorrect would be to commit the genetic fallacy (the fallacy of irrelevance that is based solely on someone's or something's history, origin, or source rather than its current meaning or context).

 

  1. Pretribulationism is found before Darby in Church History (see “Church History” section for examples).