So you are saying the Dead in Christ and the Church are both raptured at the same time???
I don’t see that in the scripture?
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.
It says AFTER THAT...
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
It says “together with them”..
The living and the dead are raptured almost simultaneously...
so close together, that we see the raptured dead in the air on the way to heaven........
“So you are saying the Dead in Christ and the Church are both raptured at the same time”
The dead in Christ rise first. But that doesn’t mean the remaining church get raptured later after the tribulation. The Saints are part of the first coming. Two seperate comings of Christ are discribed where the gatherings are clearly different in nature.
First the meeting of the Saints in the clouds. Then the Gospels clearly say that Jesus Christ returns to the earth later and conquers it, when the people will be gathered from the four corners of the earth, separating the sheep from the goats. If this event is the same as the Rapture of the saints “sheep” wouldn’t there only be goats left on the earth? How could Jesus find sheep on Earth to separate from them when they’ve already been taken to the air?
It’s clear that two different events involving different peoples are described.