bassinette just off the parents’ bed, Jesus will wrap His people in the clouds, and everything empty in us will be filled. So maybe those Rapture movies have been misled us about God.


Several Septembers ago, my wife had our first child, a girl. We named her Sophia, which means “wisdom” in New Testament Greek. So far, raising a small child is kind of like winning the lottery day after day after day, with the joy com- pounded by the fact that no one ever told you just how wonderful the whole thing would be. If I had a quarter for every time some well-meaning parent told me that my life was “about to be turned upside down,” I could have stocked Fort Knox by now. Of course it has been lots of work, but all the talk shows, seminars, and par- enting books get you in the mind-set that you’re training for the heavyweight title, then finally the bell rings and the gloves come off because you realize it’s not a fight at all. All the bravado was a sham, overpowered by the beauty and goodness and wonder of grace in a diaper. Babies don’t yet have a sense of time, beyond whatever might mark bedtime at night and waking in the morning. The tempo of these markings forms something of the holiness around parent- ing, like tending a farm throughout its various seasons. The days may be filled with new and even chaotic activities, but these adventures are hedged into the two routines that do not change in our house, and therein have become sacred to us. No matter what happens each day, everyone knows how it will end and how it will begin again. These endings are just around nightfall, after dinner has been eaten and plenty of time has been given to romping around on the carpet, reading stories, and staring at the moon. When Sophia was a baby, after finish- ing her milk she would receive my kiss and Mom would take her in her arms. Sophia would lock her eyes on mine the second she was taken, and Mom would stop just before turning out of view into the hall. This brief hallowed pause, this secret moment where time stood still, I will take to my grave. Extending her arm toward me, Sophia and I would stare and wave at each other until Mom made the


slow turn and the wall blocked our view. All was well with the world. “Comfort one another with these words,” Paul says, because the One you long for and who longs for you has been hidden for a time in that fuzzy in-between state before sleep, between day and night. Though you have a sense that your eyes are still locked, you cannot see Him direct- ly, the night will be longer than you would wish, and there will be sleep so deep that you will wonder if it is really sleep at all. You will imagine that the sleep is all that life is, that this great yearning will not be quenched outside of your dreams, but it’s not true, no matter how dark the night. On the heels of this great end- ing will come that distant beginning, when creation cannot hold back the news any longer, and


print edition of Evangel.


the same air that Ephesians 2:2 tells us has been under the control of another ruler will be lifted from its fallenness as it receives back what has somehow kept it all together to begin with. And all will be well with the world.


Interestingly, Paul doesn’t say a word about heaven in the 1 Thessalonians 4 passage. In fact, he is using specific lan- guage that described imperial visitations in Roman culture. When the emperor (who was hailed as the “son of God,” by the way) scheduled an official visit to a particular city in the empire, strict codes of welcome were followed. These included first and foremost, “meeting” the emperor outside of the city—the same word Paul uses—in order to receive him with great trumpets and fanfare, and then to escort him into the gates. By all indications, Paul had this in mind.


If this is so, then maybe it frees the Rapture to really live up to its name; not some slick exit down the fire escape before all is lost, but the followers of Jesus truly rapt, in the sense of engrossed and immersed, in the consummation that is the very dawn of the new age. Really, it is a romantic term that somehow cap- tures the exhale, the sighs of two people


Read “The Heart of Apostolic Leadership” in the October


who have finally lost themselves in that embrace that they have been racing toward for too long.


Of course, we should not expect the world’s response to Christ’s second com- ing to be terribly unlike its response to the first. It should not surprise us that Paul tells the other side of the story (1 Thes. 5). There will be a refusal to accept the new age by some. They will long for the “peace and safety” (v. 2) of the old pecking order of competition, scarcity, and violence. They will not know how to function apart from this previous system. Like the confusion at the Tower of Babel, for them the Second Coming upsets all they have built. Yet the fact that through the Second Coming, God will tear the monstrosity down, is good news for the world, awfully and terribly good. Finally, as God pronounced in Genesis 1, creation will be truly good again, the joyful domain of Creator and created, the boundless playground of Father and child. At long last, the hungering morning will swallow the darkness.


Just at dawn, the cooing starts. Dab- bling around with the things in her crib for a while, somehow Sophia doesn’t even need to look at the door. I cracked it open ever so slightly and silently at a moment when she was looking away, yet she seems to have a sense for it beyond vision. As she catches my eye in that tiny opening between the door and the wall, there is an exuberant sigh of relief, followed by the jumping joy of morning as I slowly open the door. Humming a melody while lift- ing the window shade with Sophia in my arms, a new day begins as it should begin, rapt in the warmth of the sun, rapt in one another, rapt in the radiance of the good- ness that is the end of the long night and the start of about what we can only guess. It is hardly strange that the New Testa- ment concludes with this wild hope—this hope that could be lost if it were elaborated any more, if it were spoken beyond a whis- per, if it were translated into charts and graphs and movies and apocalyptic novels. “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20).


Josh Rice is a staff pastor for Mount Paran Church of God in Atlanta.


EVANGEL | October 2010 23


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