Search and rescue – or invasion and annexation?

I, like Josh, don’t believe the Bible teaches a “rapture”. Shocking as that may be for some, the passage that serves as the primary source for the doctrine was never about a rapture, at least as commonly understood. That passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Let’s get a picture of what’s going on here.

Most modern translations of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 apparently take their cue from the KJV: “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.”

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.” (NKJV)

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of {the} archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” (NASB)

“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” (NIV)

Close scrutiny of both the grammar and vocabulary made me question the propriety of this translation. Let’s start with the vocabulary.

The Greek word commonly translated in this passage as “shout” is keleuma, which Thayer and Smith identifies as an “order, command, spec. a stimulating cry…that by which a signal is given to men, e.g. to rowers by the master of a ship, to soldiers by a commander (with a loud summons, a trumpet call)”. BAGD concurs that keleuma is a “sound of command”. Only the NIV actually translates it that way. The problem with using the word “shout” to translate keleuma is that at once it manages to be both more specific and more generic than the word being translated: not all shouts are commands, and by no means is it a given that what is referred to here is a vocalized command. This word is sufficiently ambiguous in and of itself about the manner in which the order is delivered – but what we must not miss here is that it is in fact an order being delivered. Paul’s picture here is one of the Lord commanding His army. The implication is that what is happening in this passage is a battle or invasion rather than a search and rescue operation!

The next word of interest is phone, translated as “voice” in all the above-mentioned translations. This word can indeed mean “voice” (cf. “phonetics”), but the word itself hosts a larger range of meanings than that. Thayer and Smith and BAGD both give the first (and hence primary) meaning as a sound or tone coming from “inanimate things, as musical instruments” (cf. “symphony”)

While neither keleuma nor phone necessarily eliminates the voice as the referent in this passage, the collocation of the three “with” phrases is definitely more suggestive of a different reading. Bearing in mind that among the most common meanings of phone is “a sound made by instruments” and the fact that a keleuma means “an order” that may be conveyed by the blast of a trumpet, surely it is no coincidence that the next phrase actually places a trumpet (salpigx) at the same scene! The sequence of “with” phrases (Gk. en + dative) hence appear to be co-referential. Each phrase in the succession seems to expound upon the previous: an order, a sound, a trumpet. The genitive archangelou that modifies “trumpet” in this case would be a genitive of source/cause (i.e., the sound is created by the archangel blowing the trumpet of God). Hence the whole syntagm is to be construed as one: a signal of command coming as the sound of a note from an archangel blowing a trumpet of God. This is a picture of building vividness, one that reminds me of the old line, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superman!”

The grammatical collocation of en + dative as seen in our “with” phrases often functions as an instrumental construction, and more specifically as a dative of manner. The more traditional reading here is that the construction denotes accompaniment, i.e. along with the descending Lord came the “shout”, etc. However, if the “with” phrases are used as instrumental phrases, with the nouns as dative of manner, the Lord’s signal of attack via His archangel was the manner in which the Lord descended. The trumpet should indeed be characterized as a trumpet of God!

Hence in the same way that George W. Bush invaded Iraq, God is pictured as descending upon His enemies with His armies. For is God not omnipresent? Does He really live in the sky beyond the clouds? Whatever your view on the rapture, surely it’s more likely that the Lord’s “descent” from the sky described here is a metaphorical depiction of what is happening in the spiritual realm! God visited the final judgment on apostate Israel through the physical agency of Titus’ Roman armies sacking the Holy City and ending the practice of the Old Covenant by destroying the Temple. The Day of the Lord came in AD 70.

“We who are alive and remain will be caught up together with [the risen dead in Christ] to meet the Lord in the air.” Of course, as has been much discussed elsewhere, this verse’s contribution to our understanding of the Lord’s mission centers around the prepositional phrase eis apantesin, often rendered “to meet”, but which more properly carries the connotation of “to go out to receive”. This phrase refers to a greeting party going out to usher in a coming dignitary or other person of importance, not an exodus! (See also Mat 25:1 and Acts 28:15, which both use this term in that sense). With Paul’s following statement, “And so we will always be with the Lord,” it now becomes clear that what is being promised is the presence of the Lord here on earth — not in heaven. Indeed, this passage is related to the coming down of the New Jerusalem from the sky in Revelation 21. The New Jerusalem, the New Heavens and Earth, are the new eternal Covenant established by Jesus.

Now look at Daniel 7:13, in which Daniel was shown a vision of the Son of Man “coming on the clouds of heaven” to go into the presence of the Ancient of Days. Everyone understands that Daniel was using apocalyptic imagery to refer to a spiritual reality rather than to the Son of Man taking a literal trip through space on a cloudmobile. Now, on the principle of Scripture interpreting Scripture, do you honestly think that it would occur to the first century audience, especially the Jews more familiar with the Old Testament than we are, that Paul was predicting a transference of location on literal clouds?

Jesus may have literally disappeared into a cloud at His ascension in Acts 1. The cloud may well have been a vision akin to Daniel’s as a sign to them (I think that this is fulfillment of Daniel 7:13). The common objection that the angels promised that He would return “in like manner” is easily refuted: the Greek word here translated “in like manner” was translated “as” when used by Jesus in Luke 13:34, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” Clearly, for Jesus to comfort Jerusalem’s children “in like manner” to a hen sheltering its young under its wings necessitates that one of the two things being compared in the simile to be figurative. The angels’ words were thus in no way a promise that Jesus would return in exactly the same manner literally.

There is more. But that’s enough for now.

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