Transcript

Thank you everybody for joining us in this Catholic Truth podcast, where we teach and preach nothing but the Catholic truth, which has come down to us for 2,000 years from Jesus and the Apostles.

We are happy to teach and preach the truth from Jesus, and we want to help you to know your faith, love your faith, defend your faith, and to live it with purpose and passion.

We want to thank you for joining us today on this episode.

My name is Brian Mercier, I am your host, and we have a very special guest today.

His name is Paul Thigpen, and he is an internationally known speaker, a bestselling author, and an award-winning journalist who has written over 35 books.

I believe they’ve been translated into something like 15 different languages, so he’s really studied and he’s really popular.

His most famous book is The Rapture Trap, which you can find on his website and on other platforms as well.

We’ll be talking a lot about that in this video, which we’re going to be discussing regarding the Rapture.

But before we get to that, I just want to say that Mr. Thigpen, in 2008, was appointed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to their National Advisory Board as a lay advisor.

He serves the Church as a professor, a historian, an apologist, and a catechist.

You might say that he does it all, and he’s been an apologist for a very long time.

There’s no person that I can think of on the topic of the Rapture than Paul Thigpen, who is an expert on this.

The Rapture is, as we’re going to see, unbiblical; it is not a teaching of Jesus Christ, and it’s not a teaching of Christianity.

Here to talk about this today, we are going to welcome to the show Paul Thigpen.

Thank you for joining us today.

Great to be here, Brian.

Thanks for the invitation.

Absolutely!

Some of our listeners might be asking, Well, what’s a Rapture?

You know, for any of our listeners who might not know or think they know, could you just give us a brief explanation of what the Rapture is and maybe a little bit of the controversy around it?

Sure!

Yeah, it comes from a Latin word that means to be snatched, like snatched up.

That’s why raptors, like Velociraptors, the dinosaurs, were called that; they were snatchers.

And so, in Catholic tradition, it has more to do with being...

Caught up in ecstasy, so you might talk about St. Catherine of Siena praying and being in a rapture, that kind of thing.

There are some Christian traditions, though, in which it is a notion, even though the word itself in that sense doesn’t appear in Scripture.

The notion is that in between Jesus' first coming, which was, of course, at Bethlehem as our Savior, and His final second coming in glory, clouds of glory, and with His angels and saints—that second coming as judge—there is, in between, toward the end of time, a secret coming in which He will be invisible; He will be unseen and unheard by the world.

But that true believers will be snatched, you might say, or pulled out of the world into heaven, to go back with Him to heaven.

And that will happen.

They disagree over exactly when it will happen.

Some say before the great tribulation at the end of the world, some say in the middle, some say afterwards.

So basically, you have this kind of end-times scenario where God’s going to take His faithful followers from the earth, and then all hell at some point will break loose upon the people who are left.

Is that fair to say?

Yes, although again, there’s some disagreement.

Some folks would say they’re all snatched out before any of the tribulation at the end; others would say in the midway; others would say more toward the end.

But the idea is that He comes secretly—Jesus comes secretly and kind of rescues the Church out of what’s happening to the rest of the world.

Yeah, thank you.

And I think it’s fair to say that many people on our channel will say Catholics are evil because they don’t believe in the Rapture.

You know, it’s clearly biblical, but Catholics, you know, don’t follow the Bible.

But it’s not just Catholics that don’t accept the Rapture, is it?

I mean, as far as I know, Orthodox don’t accept it, and if I’m not mistaken, most Protestant religions would reject the Rapture as well.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve found.

I grew up in a tradition where they actually talked about it.

I’m a convert to the Catholic faith.

When I started working on my doctorate in Church history and historical theology, it was inevitable that I’d look at this notion in light of history.

One of the things I discovered was that it really is not a Catholic-Protestant argument.

Not only is it not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church, as you said, the Eastern Orthodox Churches don’t accept it, but also even the founders of the Protestant movement—Luther, Calvin, Zwingli—and then later people like Wesley, who founded the Methodist denomination or movement, anyway, none of them believed that.

They would interpret the passages that are often seen as biblical proof and never mention such a thing.

It’s a very recent development in Church history.

The first time—go ahead.

Oh, go ahead, please.

I was just going to ask you about that.

Okay, if it’s not historical and most Christians didn’t accept it, and even Protestant reformers long after the Protestant Reformation didn’t accept it, then, you know, kind of when did it begin?

Who invented it, and how did it come to light?

It’s a very complicated kind of history.

You have the ideas you normally meet today, say, in certain fundamentalist Protestant circles.

Full-blown belief did not really come out until the 1800s.

Before that, you might have an occasional person, like in the late 1700s.

Interestingly enough, you had a Jesuit from Chile who taught a kind of rapture, but it was interestingly enough based on the idea that the people who were raptured were the ones who were daily communicants with the Eucharist.

So obviously, that’s not going to be picked up.

You’d have an occasional person, Cotton Mather, one of the Puritan divines, that there was some kind of taking the Christians out of the world, but very kind of eccentric, very unusual.

What happened in the 1800s is that it became a popular belief among a small circle of a certain kind of Protestants in England, and they themselves were partly influenced by a young woman who had what she thought was a vision of things.

The way she described it was this kind of rapture.

It became very popular in those circles, and then what happened is it influenced certain movements in England—Christian movements in England.

About that time, the American revival movement was one of the ways of revival that was becoming very popular.

So you end up having hundreds of thousands of people going to revivals in America from a particular kind of revivalist tradition.

The Bible teachers kind of crossed the Atlantic, and a lot of the people who believed this notion of the rapture started preaching it at these large revival meetings, and that began to spread.

Then places like Moody Bible Institute, named after Dwight Moody, who was one of the great evangelists of the revival movements, picked it up and began training pastors from all over the country to believe it.

What really pushed it, though, was that there was a particular commentary of the Bible, the King James Bible, that taught maybe just a part of a whole system called dispensationalism.

It would take a long time to go into it, but anyway, in his notes, he just put it as if it were a fact.

A lot of folks would read the Bible—sometimes it’s this much text and this much commentary—and they would read it almost as if it’s part of the Bible and think, Oh, well, this must be how it is.

And that particular Bible, called the Scofield Bible, after the man who did it—who, by the way, was not a theologian; he was actually a lawyer—is a good keynote to understand.

Yeah, the Scofield Bible then became the bestselling Bible in America, with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of copies sold.

People were reading these notes as if it were just part of Scripture.

So, between the Scofield Bible, the revival meetings, and then certain places like Moody Bible College, where they were training pastors who then went on to teach their people, it became extremely popular in America.

It went to some other places in the world too, but America was kind of the anomaly, both in history and geographically.

We know so many people here—I do personally—who believe it, and so it kind of seems like part of the norm.

But if you look at the whole span of 2,000 years of Church history and the entire Church, there are more than a billion Christians worldwide who do not believe it.

So it’s good to have it in context that way.

Yeah, absolutely.

And like you said, in the 1700s, it was virtually unheard of.

In the 1800s, it started to get traction.

And there was something about the Left Behind series too, right?

Would you say the Left Behind series, that fictional book series, really helped popularize this unbiblical theory of the Rapture?

It did for a new generation.

It’s the kind of idea that goes through cycles, like a lot of things.

You know, like this, you know, almost religious fad.

But this is one with some staying power.

What will happen, especially with the kind of folks you have on TV—the TV preachers who will push it for some of the stuff—it’s a whole industry.

I could go into that.

They push this and get people to believe it, and then they sell their books and their videos, and that’s kind of their industry.

But what happened was there probably had been back in the 70s a big push.

I mean, Hal Lindsey wrote a book called The Late Great Planet Earth, and that became a bestseller with so many million copies sold.

That was the time when I was graduating from high school and just becoming a Christian, so that became one way in which it got popularized.

But here we are, 30 years later, around the turn of this last century, around the year 2000, and a new generation gets popularized by a couple of authors who wrote the Left Behind series.

They’ve been part of their teaching all along, and just the Left Behind books were novels that built on the premise that Jesus did come back secretly.

And they ended up making a feature film out of it, which was really popular.

They did all kinds of stuff—children's books—and I could go on and on, but it became quite an industry.

It was at that time when more than ever it began to kind of, what do I want to say, leak into Catholic circles.

Catholics were watching the TV stuff, watching the films, reading the books, and of course, again, it’s not Catholic teaching.

So what happened was right around that time, you had, for instance, the bishops of Illinois get together and make a statement saying that this is not Catholic teaching.

We understand that these books have been given as assigned reading in Catholic schools and they’re in Catholic school libraries; they’re not to be there.

One particular TV preacher—I won’t name him—was trying to woo Catholics to his audience, and he said, Oh, the Catholic Church teaches us that kind of thing, and the Pope embraces this.

Then I had Matt Pinto, founder of Ascension Press, approach me and say, You know, there’s no Catholic book responding to all this.

Why don’t you do it?

That had been one of my specializations in my Church history studies, so I said, Go for it.

I wrote The Rapture Trap, which came out in, I think, 2001, and it’s still in print, which is unusual for a Catholic paperback.

So it was like the first book.

Then right after, Carl Olson, one of my friends, and some other folks began to also write about it.

So it wasn’t just my book, but others that began to kind of say, Hey, let’s look at this in a historical and theological context.

It really is not biblical; it’s really kind of eccentric historically.

So I even had that same TV preacher get on in one of his episodes with my book and claim that I didn’t believe in the Second Coming because I didn’t believe in the Rapture.

It got really messy.

I approached him privately, tried to, and said, Let’s get together and talk this out as brothers; that’s not true.

He stonewalled, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, there were some people so deeply invested in it that they could not even consider the possibility that the Rapture is not true.

Now we’re going to get to the Bible verses that some Protestants try to use in a minute.

You know, they utilize three or four verses to try to prove that there was a Rapture.

But before we do, why don’t Catholics and most Protestants accept it?

I mean, maybe this is a rhetorical, easy question, but why don’t they accept the Rapture?

What are some of the problems with the Rapture?

Well, first of all, tradition is important to us.

We don’t think that some notion like this is going to be done by some kind of private revelation to a young girl in a vision that puts out this doctrine that is contrary to what the Church has always taught and the way the Scripture has always been believed—not just by Catholics, but by Orthodox and Protestants.

When you go to look at the verses that are used to support it in Scripture, they don’t support it.

They’ve always been interpreted other ways, not just by Catholics but by the others I mentioned.

In fact, it ends up pressing against certain things that we know to be Christian truth.

When it has been popular, it’s often led to spiritual and social consequences that are bad—fruit is the best way to put it.

So, kind of for all those reasons.

But the main reason is that this is not the faith that was received from the Apostles and has been handed down.

It’s a very eccentric, late-in-history faith development that comes in part from, you know, some young woman’s vision and ecstasy, and then others too kind of picked up on that.

So basically, it’s a tradition of man—to quote Mark 7:7—or in this case, a tradition of woman, but it doesn’t come from Jesus.

Yeah, and I mean, you could also say, all right, you had that idea kind of in the Jesuit from Chile, but again, it wasn’t really similar.

The interesting connection I feel to make is that that Jesuit’s work on what he thought was—I don’t think he ever called it Rapture—but this withdrawal of Christians to faithful communicants, daily communicants, that book was translated by a man in England who then became a promoter of the Rapture doctrine.

So you have to wonder if he was influenced by this thing.

And by the way, the Church condemned the book that the Jesuit had written, of course.

But things like this tend to have...

So it’s not just the girl in the vision, but this guy picking up this thing from a kind of renegade Jesuit and then trying to look in Scripture to find some place where they could say, Oh yeah, that’s what that’s talking about.

That’s how ideas like that often get going.

Yeah, and you mentioned Scripture, and I just mentioned it a minute ago.

Could you mention or talk about perhaps some of the top verses that some denominations and non-denominational churches will use to try to prove the Rapture, and maybe talk about why they don’t hold up?

You know, why Christians throughout most of history did not translate them that way, and it’s a very new invention.

Yeah, there are a couple of places in 1 and 2 Thessalonians where St. Paul is talking about the Lord’s second coming.

So, 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and 2 Thessalonians 2:1 and 17, he talks about the Lord’s returning and that we’ll be caught up in the air to meet Him.

So they’ll say, Okay, see, it doesn’t say Rapture, but that’s what it is.

We’re being caught up out of the world and taken out.

Of course, the problem is that when he describes those, all the words he’s using, with the angel, trumpet, and shouts and stuff, are all the same things that he uses throughout to mean the final coming.

So this is not talking about something separate; this is talking about some kind of event when Jesus finally comes in glory at the end—not secretly.

It’s anything but secret, like the lightning coming from east to west, as Jesus said, and the sound of the trumpet to the angels and all that.

He’s coming with His angels and saints; there’s nothing secret about that.

In fact, you know, so I mean that leaves you with a problem.

All right, so what does it mean that we’re kind of caught up to meet Him when He appears?

Here’s the interesting thing, and you can find this in St. John Chrysostom in the 4th century.

He’s already talking about this in this passage.

During that time and during the time of Jesus, there was something that was called the perugia, meaning in Greek an appearance or appearing.

It was a popular custom in the Mediterranean world where if you had either someone who was royalty or a general who had just had a great conquest, they would be welcomed into a big walled city with a parade to honor them.

As they came into the city, it was called the perugia, an appearance.

The people of the city would go out to meet them and then escort them back in.

Apontixis is what was called the meeting—going out to meet them—and perugia was the name of the appearance.

Those are the words being used by St. Paul there.

If you think about it, the Gospel story of Palm Sunday is precisely that: Jesus is seen as a king who’s coming into the city, so the people go out to meet Him, and they put their garments down and have the palm branches and all the other things, and then they escort Him back in.

It gave the people a chance to kind of, you know, take part in the party, have fun in the parade.

In fact, St. Paul then uses this in other places—the imagery of how Jesus took captivity captive and made a spectacle of all the demonic powers and then gave gifts to men.

That’s from the same thing because what the conquering generals would do in this parade was they would bring the leaders of the enemy they had just conquered in, and then they would take the loot from the enemy and give it to the people as a way of, you know, brown-nosing and getting their support and dividing up and giving them gifts.

That’s exactly what he’s talking about.

So it’s a very common thing there, and as early as the 4th century, St. John Chrysostom is saying, Yeah, that’s what this is talking about.

Jesus' perugia—He’s like this great king that St. Paul has alluded to, coming into earth at the end, and those who love Him and want to receive Him come out to greet Him.

As you said, there’s nothing secret about it, right?

Right, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to comment on that secret part because it almost seems like Jesus came, but then He’s going to come again secretly, and then He’s going to come again at the end of time.

So it’s not the second coming that traditional Christianity understands; it almost seems like it’s a third coming.

Exactly, and that’s been, you know, the critique all along.

You know, from folks who are even Protestant scholars who look at this and reject the notion of a Rapture say, Look, there’s no way you can talk about these as...

Because the argument would be back, Okay, well, it’s not really two more comings; it’s two phases of the second coming.

But even, you know, Protestant scholars just say, No, you really can’t get that from the text.

It is a third coming.

He comes and goes back to phase, you know, phase one of another when He has another coming.

But yeah, you know, it’s just like, No, that’s a new idea.

So that’s one set of passages.

Another one that you’ll hear the most frequently, I think, and this is where the words left behind come from that gave the title to the series, the books, and the movies, is that in the Gospel of Matthew 24:37 and following verses, Jesus is in the middle of what’s called the little apocalypse in the Gospel.

His apostles come to Him and say—they’re talking about the stones of the temple—and He says it’s going to be torn down one day.

So they say, Well, when will that happen, number one?

And number two, what will be the sign of your coming?

Apparently, they believed—and I think it was pretty common then—that when the tearing down of the temple would come and all that, that would be the time when He appears.

And He does that, right?

But when He responds, it begins to be clear He’s talking about two different events.

We know from history, you know, in 70 AD, Jerusalem gets torn down.

That’s the judgment of the people.

That’s when He says, When you see the troops surrounding the city, get out, and all that happened.

But that answers the first question: when will be the time that this happens?

When you see the city being surrounded by troops, that’s the day of judgment—get out.

But then He goes on to talk about things at the very end when He returns.

So He’s answering the second question, but you can’t confuse those two things.

So that’s the passage, the context of it.

But what they focus on is where Jesus says that at the time of the judgment there will be, for instance, two women in the fields, and one will be taken and the other one left behind; two people sleeping in a bed, one will be taken and the other left behind, and all these things.

By confusing those two things, they say, Oh, see, that means that in the secret Rapture they’re going to be snatched out of the bed, snatched out of the field, snatched from the mill, or wherever it is that they are, and the righteous one will be taken away and the evil one left for judgment.

So first of all, I would say—and I think the great tradition of the Church, not just Catholic—is that no, that’s talking about judgment coming suddenly.

There will be people who die and people who survive when Jerusalem is destroyed.

But even if it were the final judgment, let’s just grant that.

The key here is that Jesus says it will be as it was in the days of Noah: one will be taken and one will be left behind.

Okay, in the days of Noah, who was taken away in judgment?

That’s what He’s talking about.

It’s taken away in judgment, not snatched into the air.

In the days of Noah, who was taken away?

The wicked were taken away; they were washed away by the flood.

They were drowned; they were lost.

The ones left behind were the righteous—Noah and his family.

So if Jesus says this kind of judgment is about those like the days of Noah, they’ve got it exactly opposite.

It’s not that the righteous will be taken away and the wicked left behind; it’s the wicked who will be taken away in judgment and the righteous left behind.

And we would agree with that.

Yes, that’s what happens.

It’s a judgment.

Finally, when He says to the goats, Go to the place before you go to hell, basically, you’re going off to judgment.

They are taken away to judgment then.

That’s very interesting.

Forever, that’s very interesting because the Bible doesn’t say; it just says one will be taken and one will be left.

It doesn’t say, you know, good or evil.

They just assume it’s good people, perhaps based off the erroneous interpretations of Thessalonians.

But it definitely distinctly compares it and says it’s going to be the same as the days of Noah.

And as you just said, the evil people were the ones who were taken, and the righteous were left.

They do it completely backwards.

I think that’s so interesting.

And taken away, not being snatched out of the air.

Nobody got snatched out of the air, you know, into heaven in Noah’s day.

But who did get taken away?

They were taken away in judgment, washed away by the flood, by the judgment of God.

Yeah, very powerful, very frightening.

Keep in mind that’s what will happen at His second coming: the wicked will be judged and taken away to eternal misery.

So interesting that for basically over 1,800 years, virtually every Christian in existence ever always associated these verses with the second coming of Christ.

And then a couple of individuals—who we’ll just say one of the women, for example—who have no biblical training and maybe some others as well, just completely change that.

Somehow, they start to preach that, and it slowly starts to, like a trickle effect, catch on.

And that’s why we’re doing this show, you know, because many people are sincere.

They sincerely believe this is biblical; they sincerely think this is going to happen, and they really just don’t know that it’s not.

They don’t know the difference because they’ve never been told.

So we kind of want to reverse that message for anyone who’s confused by it and help them to see what the true Christian tradition is.

Yeah, that’s, you know, and that’s one reason why I work my head off to get a PhD in historical theology, because in Church history, that’s so useful.

You just have the book sitting in front of you.

It’s a great book; it’s the book of books.

But when you go to interpret it, you need help.

People can take it in a thousand directions, and one of the first places to look is how has the Church, Christians in general, even interpreted this over all the centuries?

You begin to see, oh, this notion is eccentric; it’s late.

Nobody even thought of that until relatively recently.

For some folks, if it’s been around 200 years, well, that’s forever.

But I remember talking to a guy one time who, very without even realizing the irony of what he was saying, said, Well, what are you studying?

And he was—I don’t even know who Chris is—he said, What are you studying?

I said, Well, right now I’m studying the Church Fathers.

He said, Oh yeah, I like those guys, like Moody, like I mentioned a while ago, and stuff.

And he named all these 1800s revivalists as Church Fathers, and I thought, okay, we need some more Church history here.

Yeah, and I’m not trying to dismiss it or judge them.

I mean, our culture in general has given up so much history and so much study.

One thing I learned—my mom had Alzheimer’s—and one of the things I learned for an individual, that’s also true of a society and culture, is that if you lose your memory, you lose your identity.

That’s so important.

Memory is critical to identity because there came a time when she, for much of her past, could not remember who she was.

I feel like our culture is at that place in many ways.

I’ve taught college students who come in, and they have no sense of history at all—history from the last two years.

They would hear, The people, the people, the people from the earth, you know, who said that?

And they would kind of guess George Washington, and then afterward they said, During what?

Was it during World War I? They had no idea who said it, and they even had no idea that Lincoln was not with World War I or that Washington wasn’t with the Civil War.

I thought, oh my goodness, so we’ve got to learn; we’ve got to help people to learn their history.

And I would even add on to that, and it’s amazing the context it gives you.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I definitely would add on to that—no disrespect intended—but for Protestant religions as well, they used to be part of the Church of Christ before Luther broke away.

For a long time, they remembered that history, but subsequently, they’ve just forgotten that history, in a sense forgotten who they are and what the real truth of Christ is.

I think that’s interesting.

Many Protestants even disagree on this, and maybe this is the last thing that we can talk about today.

But, you know, this kind of has a lot to do with the end of the world, the second coming of Christ.

Some people say that, you know, Jesus is going to come back and just take His people with Him.

Others say that Jesus is going to come back down and literally live here on earth for a thousand years.

Some will say He will literally put His feet on Israel and rule from there.

You know, there are different people who have a futurist view, a preterist view, and different things like that.

Can you talk about, you know, maybe briefly just kind of give people a nutshell version of these different views and then maybe what the Catholic view is and why it’s correct?

Yeah, let me see how I can summarize that.

That’s a lot; I apologize.

You have a notion that’s referred to as millenarianism, from the Latin word for a thousand years.

There’s a passage in Revelation that is so figurative in its language and so mysterious in so many ways that talks about Christ will reign for a thousand years.

And then the devil is released afterward.

He'll be bound for a thousand years with Christ's reign, and then he'll be released afterward, and then the end.

So you do have a couple of early Christian writers who see that as kind of a literal thing—a literal thousand years.

But early on, the Church said, No, that’s not what that means.

We’re not sure what it means, but it doesn’t mean that.

St. Augustine's position has probably been the most mainstream position, that the book is talking about the thousand years like all the numbers in the Book of Revelation—144,000, 666—they're all symbolic.

If not, I mean, we’re in trouble because it talks about 144,000 being saved and going to heaven.

Well, then what about the rest of us?

You know?

And the Jehovah's Witnesses take that literally and then say the rest of us live in an earthly paradise instead of heaven.

So that thousand, you know, he says it’s 10 times 10 times 10; it’s the number kind of of great fullness and a long time, whatever it means literally.

So St. Augustine said, yes, the devil is decisively defeated by Christ, and then the Church age comes where, to a certain extent, the devil is chained.

That thousand years refers to the life of the Church—not a literal thousand years, but a very long time.

Then at the end, when it is time for Christ to return soon and the great tribulation, the devil returns.

I mean, it’s not that he can’t do anything now, but the stuff he was doing before the Church came was much worse.

He’ll be released, and God will give him the chance to do all kinds of terrible things on the earth—the great tribulation—and then Christ will come.

So that’s called amillennial, which means no millennium, but I’d rather call it kind of a symbolic millennium that the thousand years refers to that.

So you have others who believe that the millennium—and people like Calvin, who’s one of these, John Calvin, the Protestant reformer—that the thousand years refers to a time when we will have a time on earth of things getting better and better, and the Holy Spirit ruling more through His people.

Then at the end of it, we’ll basically have a perfected world that Jesus comes back to, and we give it to Him.

So the premillennial folks think all this horrible stuff’s going to happen before Jesus comes and reigns for a little thousand years.

The post-millennial guys say, No, actually, through the work of the Holy Spirit, there will be a gradual improvement until things are really good, and then Jesus comes back, and we kind of give it to Him as a gift.

And the Catholics would say, no, it’s more like a—you know, present millennial would be the word that’s most often used.

We’re in the millennium now; we’re in the thousand years.

The Church is here; Christ is reigning through the Church.

But there will be a time at the end when it gets really bad.

So you’ve got those interpretations.

The Catholic Church has specifically, now it’s a part of the Church documents, magisterial documents, and you have it also in the Catechism that the millenarian view is mistaken—that there will not be a literal rule of Christ for a thousand years here in which everything is just beautiful and perfect.

No, it’s that we don’t know for sure when He’s coming back; it could be at any time.

But when He does come back, then in all His glory, He will come back as judge, and He will judge the world.

All the passages about the final judgment will be there.

There will be a resurrection of the dead, so everyone gets their bodies back because the body will take part in the judgment as well.

There will be the judgment, the resurrection of the body, the resurrection of the righteous.

Then those who are in friendship with God will be welcomed into heaven; they’ve been out already there, and the saints do come back with them and the angels at the second coming.

Then the others set off to hell, and all that is happening.

Then the devil and all of his allies and all the evil will finally be definitively prevented from doing what they’ve done, and there will be a new heavens and a new earth.

We’re not exactly sure what that means, but that this heavenly condition then for all of us who are in friendship with the Lord will be done, and we don’t have to worry about all the other stuff anymore—decisively done, decisively ended—all that evil.

Great, that’s a good summary.

Thank you.

And I find it interesting personally that throughout the whole Bible, I mean, I can’t think of a single instance where most Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, or anyone else translates the number 1000 as a literal number.

I mean, I’m pretty sure almost every scholar knows that it’s a symbolic number, which means a long period of time.

You know, one day to us is like a thousand days to God.

A thousand days to us is like a day to God.

But yet recently, some people have said, Nope, this thousand years is literal, out of a complete break with all of Christian tradition—not just Catholic, but all Christian tradition.

They say that that’s literal.

I find that very interesting.

Again, you do have a few people in Church history who have said a literal thousand-year reign, that kind of thing, but I mean, it’s so minuscule the number of people that, up until recently, it was, you know, everyone would look at it as eccentric.

So the great theologians of the Church, going back to the Church Fathers, would all say it’s symbolic.

Okay, so basically all of this comes down to the Rapture is not a secret coming.

There’s nobody going to be snatched into the air at any time.

The movies Left Behind are not true; the books are not true.

What we’re really talking about here is the end of time, where Jesus is going to come again to judge the living and the dead, and it’s not going to happen before that time, right?

Yes, and the important thing to remember again is that this other notion of the Rapture can lead people to kind of give up on trying to do anything good in the world.

Well, it’s all going to hell literally anyway, so why should I? So it’s very important to realize that if we don’t accept that Rapture notion, we’re in here for the long haul.

Also, that Jesus said those who endure to the end will be saved—not those who are snatched out will be saved.

So suffering is a part of the Christian life, and that’s one of the things I discovered becoming Catholic: this beautiful teaching about redemptive suffering.

Suffering can have a redemptive purpose, whereas the whole Rapture notion is, I’m going to escape that suffering because I’m the good guy, so I get pulled out, or at least I’ve been saved, so I get pulled out.

But that’s not the Christian life.

Talk to a Chinese Christian who’s been imprisoned in labor camps and stuff all their life under the Communist Party there, and if you were to come and say, Oh, don’t you know when Jesus comes, He’s going to come secretly and keep us from suffering?

He’s going to snatch us out, they would say, Why didn’t He snatch me?

They know better than that.

All through history, Christians suffer, and if they take it the right way, it’s redemptive.

But they are persecuted.

We’re not going to be snatched out when things get really bad.

That’s exactly right.

Matthew chapter 10—you know, Pick up your cross and follow me.

He who does not pick up his cross and follow me has no fellowship with me; he cannot be my disciple.

I think that’s a very crucial point: we are going to suffer.

And you know what?

You made the perfect connection that we’re talking about Matthew 24, where one will be saved and one will be taken.

But Jesus also makes it clear that he who perseveres to the end will be saved, meaning you’re going to have to persevere through the suffering to be saved.

Perfect!

I mean, I think that’s a great summary of the Rapture.

I mean, you wrote an entire book, and I want to point my audience—I’m going to link your information, your website, and everything you do, Mr. Thigpen, down below in the description section.

We’re going to let people know where they can follow you.

We’re going to link your book down there, and I would highly recommend that people get this book.

I mean, look at how thick this book is!

We just scratched the surface.

If you would like to know a lot more information on the history of it, on the biblical aspect of it, just the different religions and how it came to be—I mean, there’s a whole part on William Miller in here.

It’s a very interesting story.

I mean, he’s self-taught, and yet so many people followed him, and it’s just so interesting.

So I’m going to link all this down below for our audience, and I would recommend that you all check that out.

I want to thank you, Dr. Thigpen, for joining us today on Catholic Truth and explaining this to us and our audience.

Brian, it’s been a great pleasure.

I pray that God will bless all your viewers and lead them more and more to the truth about Him and conform them to the image of His Son.

Amen, and the pleasure is all ours!

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