The Rapture scenario continues to elude me

Just a quick report. I'm struggling through Hal Lindsey's book of 1999, Vanished, which was recommended to me as a help to resolve my ongoing inability to settle the questions involving the idea of a premillennial Rapture. Well, it doesn't resolve it. Yet. But I am having a very hard time reading it. Something about the way it is organized makes it hard for me to follow, and he spends too much time, for my purposes anyway, answering other interpretive schemes that don't persuade me at all anyway -- Dominionism and Reconstructionism for instance. For some time I've found the premillennial interpretation to be the best of the field at elucidating the scripture, just not entirely convincing to me yet.

I'm MOSTLY convinced that scripture does describe the return of Jesus in two different sets of terms such that the idea of the Rapture of the Church's occurring separately from His return to earth as conquering king is a reasonable interpretation. That is not completely resolved for me either because I'm not entirely sure which references apply to which event, and there's one that's taken to apply to the Rapture that has the Lord appearing with a "shout" that hardly sounds like a quiet snatching-away of His people. BUT overall the two-stage return of Christ is plausible. And there is precedent for such a division into two in the fact that Jesus' first advent only fulfilled the Suffering Servant prophecies of the Old Testament, leaving the prophecies of his return as triumphant warrior king for the Second Coming, which wasn't clearly understood until after His resxurrection and ascension. So as we approach the last of the last days it seems perfectly reasonable that a more precise outline of His return should also begin to appear, and also to expect that it too won't be fully understood until it is upon us or even later.

Unfortunately it's hard to point to exactly what it is that gives me the most trouble with Lindsey's presentation. Cobra helicopters are the least of the problem though. There is one place Lindsey makes himself utterly untrustworthy it seems to me, when he brings up Jesus' likening the kingdom of heaven to leaven gradually worked throughout a lump. Lindsey simply insists that scripture ONLY uses "leaven" to refer to sin and evil, without explaining how on earth he can treat its use to represent "the kingdom of heaven" in the same way. The Dominionists no doubt misuse that passage to support their cause but that's no excuse to try to make it refer to something else it obviously doesn't refer to. That lost me completely and shakes my faith in Lindsey's thinking. But it's a minor point in the overall interpretive scheme.

One thing I've always had a problem with concerning Rapture scenarios that put a great emphasis on the completion of God's dealings with Israel, is how to view the covenant of the land God gave to Abraham. Certainly it was given without condition and forever, but there is also the passage in Hebrews where we are told that Abraham was not looking to an earthly land but to an eternal abode -- unless I've utterly misunderstood that passage.

Hebrews 11:8-16: By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as [in] a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker [is] God. Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised. Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, [so many] as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of [them], and embraced [them], and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that [country] from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better [country], that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

I see present-day Israel on the earthly land and can't help but attribute that to God's own purposes -- what other option is there? But does that make that earthly land the fulfillment of the covenant promise? Aren't Christians also "heirs of Abraham" and as such also heirs of that unconditional covenant, and doesn't that put the covenant on a New Testament footing that changes how we are to understand it? We are to read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, that's our primary directive for Biblical exegesis.

Yet it's not impossible to my mind that some -- a few -- of the promises to the Jews may not be completely fulfilled in the New Covenant and remain to be fulfilled -- or that there is a double fulfillment in the Church and earthly Israel both. Of course I can't go with any interpretation that seems to imply that the Jews are not to be saved by the same means as all the rest of us, through the death of Christ. Lindsey doesn't seem to make that error but he's a tad ambiguous on that point, and others of his basic persuasion do make that error.

One thing I am very sure of is that there remains a "week" or seven years left over from Daniel's prophecy of the time required to completely fulfill God's plan for Israel, the "seventieth week of Daniel" left after the first 69 were fulfilled in the first coming of Christ. I'm just not completely sure how to understand its purpose. Apparently it includes, or is synonymous with, the Day of the Lord, the time of the Antichrist, a time of unprecedented evil on the earth, also known as the Great Tribulation, during which time the vast majority of believers will be martyred. This idea of the fulfillment of God's plan for israel is hardly a happy one.

This period is also foreshadowed in Isaiah 61, 1 and 2, the first verse of which Jesus read in the synagogue to announce His Messiahship, leaving out the second verse which refers to the Day of the Lord, now clearly to be connected with His second coming:

Isaiah 61:1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD [is] upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to [them that are] bound; 2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;

It appears that it isn't primarily the Rapture itself that's the problem for me, it's the whole scenario in which the Rapture occurs, and especially what supposedly happens AFTER the Rapture. Of course a different understanding of all that could change my acceptance of the timing of the Rapture itself too.

But overall I'm still where I was when I began this book by Lindsey. Well, I'll keep reading and perhaps reread the book, since I don't feel I'm getting anything very clear out of it yet.