Rapture Fever

88 RAPTURE FEVER
is fiding fret. No wonder. Many Christians today are sick and
tired of riding in the back of humanism’s bus. They are fed up
with being regarded as third-class citizens, irrelevant to the
modern world. They are beginning to perceive that their shortened
view of time is what has helped to make them culturally
irrelevant.
The older generation of American fundamentalists is still
being thrilled and chilled in fits of Rapture fever, but not so
much the younger generation. Younger fundamentalists are
now beginning to recognize a long-ignored biblical truth: the
future of thti world belongs to the Church ofJesus Christ if His people
remain faithful to His word. They are beginning to understand
Jesus’ words of victory in Matthew 28: “And Jesus came and
spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven
and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
have commanded you: and, 10, I am with you alway, even unto
the end of the world. Amen” (VV. 18-20). They have at last
begun to take seriously the promised victory of the Church’s
Great Commission rather than the past horror of Israel’s Great
Tribulation. They are’ steadily abandoning that older eschatology
of corporate defeat and heavenly rescue.
In short, Christians are at long last beginning to view Jesus
Christ as the Lord of all history and the head of His progressively
triumphant Church rather than as “Captain Jesus and
His angels.”
The Same Argument the Liberals Use
By interpretingJesus’ promise that He would soon return in
power and judgment against Israel as if it were a promise of
His second coming at the Rapture, dispensationalists are caught
in a dilemma. They teach that Paul and the apostles taught the
eth-Century Evangelicali.im, 1870-1925 (New York Oxford University Press, 1980),