For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. and the dead in Christ will rise first.
I dare say that no one will miss the trumpet of God nor will there be anything secret or selective in the event described in Thessalonians. The same is true for almost all the verses quoted to support the rapture. They're out of context and woven into a straw mat of verses carefully selected to buttress that theory.
Men, women, and children, were fed alive to wild beasts and burned alive to entertain the pagans, yet Christians alive at the appropriate point in time are going to be spared because ... Because why? Because enduring to the end is too horrible to think about?
Believe what you like about the rapture, but be very careful tossing around Bible verses without context and without ever even looking into the view of those verses that was held for the first eighteen hundred years of Church history.
There will be worldwide persecution at some point but that doesn't mean the people with the appropriate decoder ring will be snatched away to avoid it. Christ himself said you would suffer in this world and reconciling His promise that you would suffer with the theory that you'll be spared is interesting to say the least.
I dare say that no one will miss the trumpet of God nor will there be anything secret or selective in the event described in Thessalonians. The same is true for almost all the verses quoted to support the rapture. They're out of context and woven into a straw mat of verses carefully selected to buttress that theory.
I like the way another poster described the doctrine of the "secret rapture:"