I'd like to ask you a question. Can we still believe in the rapture? And here to deal with that very pertinent question today is Dr. Mark Hitchcock. Welcome back, Mark,

to Prophecy Watchers. Well, thanks for having me back again. It's always good to be with you.

You know, we've got a lot to talk about

today. Mark's book is, you know, a question. Can we still believe in the rapture? Why would you

ask such a question? I know I believe in the rapture. I know you do. Right. Well, I worked on this

book, as you can see with Dr. Ed Heinzen. Ed teaches up at Liberty University.

And, you know, what we found is we talked to a lot of people today and they say they don't even believe in the rapture. I always talk about the rapture, so I don't believe in the rapture. Now some of them, when they say that, mean, well, I don't believe in the pre-trib rapture. But there's other people just say they don't believe in the rapture at all.

And I think we're seeing this type of thinking really proliferate among younger people, the younger generation. They're just not interested in prophecy, really in general. And I think a lot of them see the pre-trib rapture as kind of fiction, kind of coming out of left behind. It's just kind of fiction. where they see it as kind of what I might call kind of tabloid Christianity. Yeah.

And they don't really think it's real. They just think it's some kind of fictional idea. And what we want to do is come and show people that the rapture is true. It's real. And it's exciting. I mean, it's the next event on God's prophetic calendar. and it's an event that's going to be the most shocking event that's ever happened in world history. Now, you are a

professor of Bible, and you can tell us about how that has worked for you lately, and you're also

a pastor, teacher, and I'm sure you teach on prophecy and on the coming rapture.

And the people who attend your church, this is no surprise to them.

But there are a lot of people out there in churches. In fact, we run into them all the time.

All over the world, in fact. We get letters from Australia, from Norway, from England,

who really dispute the idea of the rapture with us. And sometimes they're angry.

Right. Well, you know, first of all, just doctrine per se is not being taught in most churches

of state. The Bible's not being taught. Doctrine's really not being taught.

But even where it is being taught, one doctrine that's not taught generally is eschatology

or future things and in-time events.

It's really there's a great lack of that out there and especially this idea of the rapture

of the church.

You know, there was a man that visited our church not long ago and he called me on the phone, he wrote me an email and said, you know, I heard you believe in rapture doctrine. You know, and that really upset him about our church. I said, well, look, you have to believe in the rapture. It's in the Bible. You know, the issue is the timing of it, but you know, the Bible says at some point in time in 1st Thessalonians 4, those who are alive and remain are going to be caught up in the Lord to meet, caught up in the air to meet the Lord. You have to believe in it, but this idea of a pre-trib rapture, it was just so upsetting to him, then he ended up he didn't want to come to our church because we believe in that. And to me, it's a tragic thing. You know, one of the first letters Paul wrote, probably a second letter, First Thessalonians, he talks all about the Antichrist and the Day of the Lord and the rapture, the catching away of the saints. These were new believers. They'd been, people just been believers in a short period of time. Yeah. He was teaching them these things. Most people can go to churches

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