Are you afraid of being left behind at the rapture? Probably not, if you are a Christian. But we all know people who we fear may not make the cut when Christ returns for His church. They will have to go through the Great Tribulation. Or will they?
Did you know that the notion of the rapture of the church, and much of today's popular end-times teaching, did not exist before Englishman John Nelson Darby began to teach it in the 1830's? When Darby's ideas appeared and began to spread, many thought that they were unbiblical, or even heretical. If the church viewed his ideas so negatively, why are they now the most popular end-times view in the American church?
Take a look with me at how this school of thought, called dispensationalism, began. We will learn how and why it emerged as America's most popular last days perspective despite the opposition of eighteen centuries of church scholarship. We will see what the church believed before it came along. And most important, we will see that those earlier centuries of scholars had it right all along.