Will there be any saved on earth after 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. Darby's theology has been accepted not only by members of the Plymouth Brethren but by millions of other Christians, perhaps because it sounds biblical.

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. The only persons to remain on earth during the "tribulation" would be non-believers. However, it is claimed that these non-believers would be given the chance to repent and those who do would also be saved. Christ would return a second time after the seven years of global tribulation, to establish a Jerusalem-based kingdom on earth.

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.