Joseph Prince Sermon Why The Rapture Is Our Hope In These Last Days: We look at 1 Thessalonians 1, at the Christian posture, We are to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.”
You see, our Christian position today, our posture today is not to look forward to finally ending up in the grave. We end up dying, that’s not the Christian position, If you read carefully in the New Testament, it is always pointing to the coming of the Lord.
Even Paul was looking forward to the coming of the Lord, because no one knows the day or the hour, but of all the generations that ever lived since Jesus rose from the dead, it is our generation that saw Israel come back as a nation.
In 1948, we saw the fulfilment of 2 great World Wars that Jesus talked about, Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom And He was talking about a war, a world war on that scale a global war.
We saw that in this past, generation. Jesus says: Jerusalem will be under the foot of Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. So we know that Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Gentiles the moment Israel rebelled against God and God sent them into captivity.
God delivered them into the hands of the Babylonians and since then, the prophetic time clock started ticking and from then on, all the way, even in the time of Jesus, they were under the Romans.
So Jerusalem has been under the foot of Gentiles all these years but in 1967, in the Six Day War, Jerusalem came back to the Jews and this is a fulfilment of Scripture.
The Bible says that: “Jerusalem will be under the foot of non-Jews, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled So give and take, we are in the season where the times of the Gentiles are about to be fulfilled.
It is not fully fulfilled yet, It will be fulfilled but an indication there, from what Jesus said, the moment Jerusalem comes back to the hands of the Jews, and we also see in the Scriptures that, the Bible tells us that before He (Jesus) comes again, there will be great earthquakes. Not just a normal small-scale earthquake, but great earthquakes. We’ve never seen great earthquakes on the scale that we have seen in our generation.
So we know that the rapture is coming and the earth is travailing, The Lord is just telling us, God is not behind the World Wars, God is not behind the earthquakes, but God is the One telling us that the earth is groaning because of man’s sin and is groaning for the manifestation of the sons of God and these are the signs, these are the symptoms, so to speak that you need to look out for that will point you to the nearness of the coming of the Lord.
So “no one knows the day nor the hour, if you read on the Internet or on YouTube, about exact day the Lord will return, you can just forget about it because no one knows the day nor the hour. But we can see the signs are all telling us that we are actually that final generation.
So that’s one aspect of redemption, But the thing that we’re waiting for right now is our bodily redemption, This body unfortunately it decays, it grows old, it falls sick, it is subject to sickness and all that. Yes, we can trust God for healing but the idea of healing is actually not immortality, but what we are looking forward when Jesus comes again is immortality, a body that is immortal, Like Jesus’ body this is something we must look forward to.
When we have this hope, when the people of God, have this hope in them, the Bible says: This blessed hope, purifies themselves. Whoever has this hope purifies himself.
Pastor Joseph Prince wants us to become less afraid of Rapture and more hopeful towards it, because in it lies our redemption from a frail body, we will be like Jesus.