The First Fairy Tale by
Dale K. Brown
CHAPTER 31
"THE RAPTURE"
Before Armageddon, before the Second Coming, will be the Rapture! God, in this incarnation, has some serious problems, one of which is his inability to tell time. He prophetically mistakes days for weeks, weeks for months, and months for years. Another problem, also having to do with raw numbers, involves a totally unnecessary Second Coming. Unnecessary, because if his plan of salvation, as understood by Rapturists, is ultimately successful, it would be so diabolically destructive to all life forms on the planet that no flesh would be saved alive!
The plan starts off benignly enough with the Great Tribulation all Christianity has been waiting for. Millions of the righteous get roasted by the bad guys in this scenario, just for being good, which proves that no good deeds go unpunished. So many good guys get the chop, in fact, that the need for a rapture is damn near eliminated on the spot. But, somehow, enough good guys escape to warrant supernatural extraction.
Round two of the plan of salvation (what a name!) involves the economic, political, and social collapse of the entire world, which then descends into a state of barbaric anarchy, starvation, and worldwide civil wars. Side orders of famine and pestilence may be ordered at this time which decimate one third of all humans who have thus far managed to survive. Hard on the heels of these calamities comes a full nuclear exchange between whoever's left, in which a second third of earth's population gets the chop.
By this time, less than a third of the pre-tribulation populace will have survived; and the end is not yet. A two hundred million man (and perhaps, woman) army of fanatical Chinese, who presumably have remained isolated from the rest of the world and its travails, swoop down out of outer Mongolia and kill off the remaining third of human kind.
All this is alleged to occur before the Lord of the Rapture returns to take a hand and turn things really ugly. In fact, it may be necessary for God to host both the rapture and the resurrection a bit early because, at this point, aside from the heathen Chinese, there's no one left for him to kill!
By whatever means required, believers are asked to accept that somehow, somewhere, enough non-Chinese villains are left alive to warrant their Lord's wrath, which he, the God of love, now mercifully unleashes on his unrepentant children. He smites them with boils in unmentionable places. He turns all the water on the planet to blood, then stokes up the sun and toasts more sinners, then, they say, he sends that 200 million man Oriental Army marching toward what by now must be the totally unpopulated city of Jerusalem.
Just what the heathen Chinese will eat, what with all vegetation and animals destroyed, or what they will drink, now that all H2O on the planet has coagulated, has never been made public but, after their long and grueling 1,000 mile plus march, they reportedly all will die in their tracks within sight of the Promised Land! (Possibly from a Big Mac attack!)
After these preliminaries, a great planet wide earthquake flattens all the cities, and then their Lord returns. Upon his arrival, the righteous, who are unaccountably still living (and those who have died over the eons), are instantly transmuted into spiritual entities and raptured away to a place of safety.
No mention is made of what they're safe from, however. All the bad guys are toast and the earth's a smoldering ruin. This plan has been referred to as a Great Mystery and, to those among us who know less, it would appear to be a qualified success in that regard. A plan of salvation in which no one is saved is, indeed, puzzling.
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirtytwo
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