I don’t wish to enter into the debate on pre-trib or post-trib eschatology. But in pooh-poohing a secret rapture, BWN asks whether after reading 1 Thes 4:16, “do such expressions as ‘shout,’ ‘voice of the archangel,’ and ‘trump of God,’ imply secrecy?”
He also asks, “Can there be this display of the Lord’s glory, and of the angels’ glory, and of the saints’ glory, and yet the earth be ignorant that the hour of its visitation has come? When at the midnight hour the light which Gideon’s host had hidden, was suddenly set free from its earthen prison, was its brightness concealed? Did it not flash terror into the hearts of all the hosts of Midian?”
Writing on the secrecy of the rapture, an unnamed author in 1876, had a few more scriptural examples of glorious things done in secrecy—" ‘The natural man discerneth not the things of the Spirit of God.’ The eye of the natural body cannot see nor the ear hear the visions or voices of the Spirit! Horses and chariots filled the mountain but the prophet's servant had no eye for them until the Lord pleased. Daniel was given to see a glorious sight and to hear the voice of a multitude but the men with him saw nothing, only a terror fell on them and they hid. The glory on the Holy hill shone only in the eye of Peter, James and John though One object in it was as the brightness of the sun so that there was light enough to have lighted the whole land. Many bodies of saints arose, but only those to whom it was given knew of their resurrection! The heaven was opened to Stephen and Jesus and the Glory were seen by him, but the assembly saw nothing; their only object was their victim. If Paul went to paradise in the body (whether or not he could not say), none saw him. Philip was found at Azotus, no one tracked his flight from Gaza, for the Spirit had borne him away. In the light and the voice of Jesus which arrested Saul in his journey to Damascus, there was no word for his companions, nor form for their eyes. We have visions, audiences, resurrections, flights and ascensions and the heavens opened and yet neither eye nor ear conversing with a ray or utterance. For all these belonged to the region and energy of the Spirit, and lay outside the natural faculties.”
