Disqualified from the Rapture?

“I have a question,” said a woman in my Hebrew Roots class. “If I am angry with someone and I haven’t forgiven them yet and the Rapture comes, will I miss it?”  I could see that she was really troubled by the matter.  She didn’t mean she was carrying a long standing anger, she just meant in the last day or so.  She’s asking what if Jesus comes before she forgives the person she was angry with, will that disqualify her from going to be with Him?  Will He leave her behind if she’s still dealing with the anger?  Rapture or not, the issue is whether God turns away from us when we are angry. 

We need to look at this from a bigger picture than just being angry for the moment, or even for the day. My first question back to her was did she want to be angry with him (it was a him she was angry with).  No, she really didn’t.  She was fervently asking God to take the anger from her and to help her forgive him.  So her heart was not to relish in the anger or to justify it. She was taking full responsibility for it and wanting to repent and be free of it. She wanted to be right with God first and foremost. That is not the heart of someone whom Jesus would disregard.  She was responding like a person who is born again and wanting to please God.

Since God looks to see what’s in our hearts, her heart was in the right place. But what was she to do about this anger?  Well, sometimes we are provoked to anger because of injustice, because someone is acting in an unkind or ungodly way toward us. Even Yeshua got angry and pretty much let everyone around Him know it that day when He flipped over the tables in the temple, scattering coins and animals everywhere.   He was justifiably angry at ungodliness and sometimes there’s just cause for our anger too. 

We are created in His image and He sometimes gets very angry. God knows we’ll sometimes be angry.I’ve noticed that whenever He’s angry it’s because love has been violated somewhere, either love for Him or when people are being unloving to one another in some ungodly way.  But He doesn’t want us to stay angry. He says,  “Be angry and yet do not sin, and not let the sun go down on our anger” (Eph 4:26). In other words, don’t let it fester and feed on itself so it continues, or even grows into an even greater anger as anger can. Rage begins with an offense. Forgive and let it go to God for Him to deal with it. Might the person give you the same cause for anger another time? Quite possibly. So what are we to do?  Keep forgiving, “not seven times, but seventy-seven times” (Matt. 18:22).  Also, I have found that Yeshua’s paradigm-changing declaration from the Cross, “Abba, forgive them for they know not what they are doing” (Luke 23:34), puts things in a God-shaped perspective and will release you from anger every time and your tears will be turned to laughter.

So she wasn’t acting like a person who was not a candidate for Jesus taking her to be with Him. She was, in fact, hating what she saw as her own sin of anger and wanted to fully forgive and repent. Her heart was aligned with God, not against Him.

But here’s another aspect. Once we are born again, apart from decided that we really do not want God in our lives and we choose rebellion, turning our backs on Him and deliberately walking away from Him, our various conflicts and crises do not make us unborn again.  God doesn’t give us His Spirit and then take it back again every time we’re angry or we slip up.  We don’t live in a yo-yo faith where we’re His one day and not another just because we’re confronted with something we’re trying to learn how to deal with. If we’re His, we’re His. And He will help us learn to deal with things as we grow and mature in our life in God.




My friend was still dealing with some of the feelings of anger – which was, in her case, really exasperation – but she had repented of her anger and “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse (purify) us of all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Sometimes it takes a little while for our emotions to catch up with the decisions of our hearts.  Thank God for His unwavering faithfulness!