Many people who are against the teachings of dispensationalism and the pre-trib rapture state that the pretribulation rapture was invented by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century. This is simply not true. There were Christians that believed and wrote about the pretribulation rapture long before Darby was born. For example take the hymn, “Great God, I own Thy sentence just” written by Isaac Watts, who was born on 1674 and died in 1748. In the second verse of this hymn Watts wrote,
“Yet faith may triumph o’er the grave,
And trample on the tombs;
My Jesus, my Redeemer, lives;
My God, my Savior, comes.”
As you can clearly see from the first line of the second verse, Watts writes about his faith overcoming the grave. This points to the belief that Watts and many others held to that the Church would be raptured and the dead in Christ would be risen again.
Nathaniel Holmes (1599–1678) a Puritan theologian and writer is said to have promoted and believed in the pre-trib rapture of the church. William C. Watson wrote about this in his 2015 book, Dispensationalism Before Darby: Seventeenth-century and Eighteenth-century English Apocalypticism.
To say that J. N. Darby invented the doctrine and that no-one believed in the pre-trib before him is not true. There are numerous believers in the pre-trib rapture before Darby. To credit Darby with the invention of the doctrine is the same as crediting Luther with the doctrine of justification by faith. Luther did not create the doctrine of justification by faith, the teaching was always in the Bible. All what Luther did was teach what the Word of God had always taught in an age where the doctrine was not widely taught. Darby did the same with the doctrine of the pre-trib rapture, he taught what the Word of God has always taught.
“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18)
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