Will the sky change during the rapture?

A:

Barbara R. Rossing (The Rapture Exposed) says that the Rapture has its origins in the nineteenth century beginning, according to one critic, with a young girl's vision. In 1830, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, fifteen-year-old Margaret MacDonald attended a healing service. There, she was said to have seen a vision of a two-stage return of Jesus Christ. The story of her vision was adopted and amplified by John Nelson Darby, a British evangelical preacher and founder of the Plymouth Brethren.

The belief that Jesus will come again was not new, and Christians have always taught that Jesus will return to earth and that believers should live in anticipation of his second coming. Darby's new teaching was that Christ would return twice. The first return would be in secret, to "Rapture" his church out of the world and up to heaven. Pictures of the Rapture portray the sky full of people on their way to heaven. This is the one change that proponents of Darby's scheme seem to agree on. Christ would return a second time after seven years of global tribulation for non-believers, to establish a Jerusalem-based kingdom on earth.

In 1830, it was easy to teach that people would travel physically up to heaven, because few people really knew what is really above the clouds and most people still thought of heaven as "up there" physically. Now we know it is a nonsense to think of people being snatched up through the sky, as Darby had envisaged. John Nelson Darby has sunk into obscurity, apart from his followers in the Plymouth Brethren, and so should his theology. There will be no Rapture and the sky will not be filled with people taken bodily up into heaven.