The Rapture

Someone who has entered a room once cannot enter it for the first time again.  They can only enter it for the next consecutive number of times: for the second time, the third time, and so on.  No one can return only once and also return twice; only one of these can be true.  In the same way, a person cannot have woken up from their sleep at 6:00 AM if the first time they have awoken for that morning is at 8:00.  The contradictions--and thus logical impossibilities--of the alternative ideas are precisely what so many evangelicals believe with regard to the return of Jesus.  They hold that he will have two second advents of sorts, which by necessity would make the second of the "second" comings the third.

A highly popular idea among some evangelicals is that of Jesus "rapturing" Christians away from Earth before a cataclysmic period where divine wrath, human savagery, and demonic malice all devastate the world, only one of them doing so justly.  After seven years they call the Tribulation, Jesus returns again with the raptured souls to establish a kingdom for a thousand years before the unrighteous dead are resurrected (Revelation 20:11-15)--according to many evangelicals, the fate of this group is eternal conscious torment in blatant, active disregard for the Biblical punishment of hell being the fate of death where one is never again revived (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28).  When it comes to the Second Coming, they believe there will be two "phases" or that there is actually a third coming of Christ!

They acknowledge that the Bible teaches Christ will return, as is very explicitly stated over and over (Mathew 24:30, Acts 1:6-11, Revelation 19:11-21, and more verses touch on this).  The return of Christ is also said to be accompanied by a trumpet blast at which the saved are gathered to him (Matthew 24:31) and after which Jesus defeats the beast and the false prophet with their armies (again, Revelation 19:11-21), with Paul twice speaking of a trumpet that marks the resurrection of the righteous/redeemed dead (1 Corinthians 15:50-55, 1 Thessalonians 4:3-18).  This is when those who sleep in death reconciled to God will be restored to bodily life.  The first resurrection, reserved for the righteous or repentant, occurs when Jesus returns to instate his millennial kingdom (Revelation 20:4-6), and the passages about a trumpet and a divine eschatological appearance are connected with a resurrection.

Thus, according to the actual statements in the Bible, there is no rapture independent of the full Second Coming.  The first resurrection cannot happen before the first resurrection!  Christians will not all sleep in death, Paul says in both 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4.  Those who die slip into temporary nonexistence or unconscious, dreamless sleep of the soul at death (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10), and the return of Christ, occurring around a trumpet blast, is when those in right standing with Yahweh will come back to conscious life.  The first resurrection is one of glory, the resurrection to eternal life (Daniel 12:2).  There is no broad resurrection prior to this; up to this point, there are only the atypical restorations of specific individuals like Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus for them to biologically die again.

The pre-Tribulation rapture, as it is called, is purely unbiblical in its timing, as if there could be two second advents of Christ with neither of them being the third as evangelicals assume!  Nowhere does the Bible say that Jesus returns again and again.  As he departed, so he is said to one day appear for the second time (Acts 1:11).  The events before the Second Coming and their sequence aside, the return of Christ itself is a very clear and foundational doctrine of Christianity (though of course eschatology could not be as foundational as core Biblical metaphysics and their consistency with the necessary truths of rationalism).  It is also very clear that if the return of Jesus is what signals the rapture of those who sleep in death restored to Yahweh, and this is the first resurrection, then there could not be a previous awakening of dead souls seven years earlier.