An expression not used by Seventh-day Adventists but common among other premillennialists, meaning, literally, “the catching up,” or “the taking up,” used in a religious sense of the saints’ being caught up to meet Christ in the air as mentioned in 1 Thess. 4:17 . It has become (especially in the phrase “secret rapture”) somewhat a technical term of the pretribulationist-dispensationalist form of premillennialism, used to denote a supposed removal of the church to heaven that leaves the Jews and the “nations” on the earth to go through the final tribulation. (See SB , No. 1520 and note.)
The idea of a “secret rapture” does not occur in Scripture. It is a theological concept superimposed upon certain passages in the NT ( Matt. 24:40 , 41 ; 1 Thess. 4:17 ). Christ and the NT writers explicitly affirm that the taking up of the saints occurs at the time of the personal, visible, glorious coming of Christ in the clouds of heaven (see SDACom 7:884–887). The coming of antichrist and the great tribulation precedes, not follows, the rapture ( Matt. 24:21–31 ; 2 Thess. 2:1–3 ). See Second Advent .