Let’s just cut to the chase.
If you’re reading this, I’m assuming The Rapture™ didn’t actually happen. That’s okay, it’s not the first time people thought that The Rapture™ was actually going to happen, despite never even showing up in the holy texts; there have been literally hundreds of predictions for this biblical event, and this false alarm definitely won’t be the last.
The word “Rapture” never showed up in the bible, New or Old Testament; the concept actually originated in the 19th century from John Nelson Darby, a bible teacher from the United Kingdom.
John Nelson Darby had a literal reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, which says that “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. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”
Darby interpreted this as a secret event in which Christians would be removed from the earth to meet the lord before the Tribulation period, a seven-year period in which great suffering is inflicted on humanity, leading up to the return of Christ.
Darby’s interpretation would gain popularity in 1830 with his dispensationalism, a protestant theological system that organizes history in the bible into periods, then later in the 1900s with the Scofield Reference Bible, and even later in the 1970s, when books like The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins were released.
All of these would contribute to the gradual popularity of the Rapture until it became a significant aspect of American Evangelicism and the wider Christian culture.
As for when the Rapture actually happens? Nobody knows, and that’s the point.
Despite Jesus saying the date of the Tribulation, which in turn is the date of the Rapture, is unknown to everybody but God, people have still tried to predict when the Rapture is supposed to take place.
Harold Camping, an American radio broadcaster, had multiple predictions of when this event would take place, like 1994, 1995, and 2011; however, after 2011, he said he would not predict again.
Another would-be prophet is David Meade, who is an American author and conspiracy theorist; however, David Meade is merely a pen name, as his real identity is yet to be known, and he predicted that not only would it happen on September 23, 2017, but the end of the world would be brought about from a collision with another planet called Nibiru, which would then ensue a tribulation on October, 2017 (you know, after everybody is dead), he also predicted that a convergence of planets would signal the beginning of the Rapture and another tribulation in 2018.
Despite the Rapture being a relatively new interpretation in Christianity, it managed to be a huge part of Christian culture, though some people may be a little too excited about it because false alarms around this event happen all the time, and this is no different.
To the people who are disappointed in this year’s prediction, keep your head up; there’s always next Tuesday.
