Question: Have you heard of the book titled Rapture Shock? It says that some true believers will not ...

December 1, 1996

TBC Staff

Question: Have you heard of the book titled Rapture Shock? It says that some true believers will not be taken at the Rapture due to sin in their lives...and are the ones referred to in Revelation as washing their garments during the Tribulation. Can you please comment on this?

Response: There is no biblical basis for this teaching. Nor is it logical that those who happen to be alive at the time of the Rapture would be dealt with differently from those who died earlier. If some sin in a true believer’s life disqualifies him or her from going to heaven, then where do those who die in such condition go? We would have to propose an evangelical purgatory! Our entitlement to heaven, whether taken there through death (“absent from the body ...present with the Lord” - 2 Cor:5:8) or at the Rapture, is the redemptive work of Christ upon the cross, not our works nor how fully we have lived for the Lord. From 1 Corinthians:3:11-15 we know that even those true Christians whose works do not endure God’s testing fire but are all burned up at the “judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor:5:10) are, nevertheless, saved: “but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire” (1 Cor:3:15). There is no scripture that says the saved are kept out of heaven, either at death or at the Rapture.