What Did Billy Graham Preach About the Rapture?
“We who live who survives shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
That word ‘caught up’ is a translation of a Greek word and it means to snatch away.
There’s coming a time when Jesus Christ is coming back and he’s going to snatch away from out of all the graveyards of the world. And those that are alive and remain will be snatched away and we’re going to meet the Lord it says ‘in the air’.
I want to be sure that I’m caught up. Like the old story about the little boy that saw his grandmother reading the Bible all day long, and one of his friends askd, “What’s your grandmother doing?” To which he said, “She’s cramming for her finals.”
And we ought to be as an old Indian who used to say, who used to come with us, he used to say, “I’m packed and ready”. We ought to be packed and ready well…and not be too glued to this world and all the evils of the world and the things of the world, the materialism of the world.
We’re told that the bodies of both the dead in Christ and those alive at his coming would be caught up together, or as Phillips translates it, “we will be swept up together.”
Winston Churchill’s favorite scripture passage, quoted at his general by the Archbishop of Canterbury, was this, “Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep but we shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last Trump. For the dead in
Christ shall be raised.”
What a tremendous passage for Winston Churchill to choose.
He believed that ‘in a twinkling of an eye’, which means the flash of an eyelash, will be the coming of Jesus Christ, and men will be changed, and we will have bodies like the body of the Lord Jesus Christ.
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, the voice of the archangel, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.
All of your loved ones that knew the Lord, you’re gonna see again. And you’re going to know them. As a matter of fact, I believe that they can watch us now. I think that they are sitting in a stadium very much like this from time to time, watching us finish the race of life. And we’re going to be reunited at that moment when Christ comes, in the great Resurrection takes fall.
He told three people in the New Testament to come forth, to rise from the dead, and they did. It was a foretaste of what he can do for the whole world that has believed and trusted in him.”