From the time of the Passover to Joshua, the Bible speaks about Egypt—I (God) brought you out of Egypt 67 times either directly by God or referenced by Moses or Joshua. It sure must have meant a lot to Him! And why, you may ask? Answer: to drum it into their ears that YOU MUST NOT RETURN TO EGYPT: For I am the LORD your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall ye defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. For I am the LORD that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:44-45)
And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying…After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. (Lev 18:1,3). Speaking ahead to the time when Israel will desire to have a king rule over them: But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. (Deu 17:16)
Passover is our salvation experience- when we became free from the bondage of Satan. Israel in the wilderness was called by Stephen, in Acts 7:38, The Church in the wilderness, showing that God’s dealings with them concerns us deeply (See also 1Cor. 10:1-6).
Their termination point was the Promised Land, ours is heaven; but God lumped both together with one phrase, GO OVER—Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spoke unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel (Josh 1:1-2).
The word GO OVER is used as Cross over in NLT, but that is just one of the meaning. As you check Strong Lite Hebrew Dictionary, the NO.6 set of meanings has everything that describes the New Testament Rapture:
to pass away
to emigrate, leave (one’s territory)
to vanish
to perish, cease to exist.
Now compare this to the words used to describe Rapture:
The Greek word anistēmi is SHALL RISE found in 1 Thess.4:17… the dead in Christ shall rise first. It means among other meanings: to cause to rise up, raise up raise up from laying down to raise up from the dead to raise up, cause to be born, to cause to appear, bring forward to rise, stand up of persons lying down, of persons lying on the ground of persons seated of those who leave a place to go elsewhere.
The Greek word harpazō is what we know as caught up in 1Thess.4:17 “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
It means From a derivative of; to seize (in various applications): – catch (away, up), pluck, pull, take (by force). The words pluck, pull, take by force describes HARVEST which brings out more understanding of the concept Rapture.
When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow (Deut. 24:20-21).
Two times rapture is mentioned in the Old Testament as harvest – going home with only well-formed crops or fruits at your disposal. from many planted, See Matt. 13:45-47 where we see Jesus demonstrating this. Who caught the fishes? Jesus. So many Christians, many church goers – He sits down and separates the good ones and throws away the bad ones. Note good ones in the 2 Old Testament Scriptures below:
The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He shall enter into peace: they shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness (Isaiah 57:1,2).
In this passage, the righteous man is the tzaddik , or the one justified by faith. He ‘perisheth,” from the Hebrew word ovad, meaning “to disappear or vanish.” The context suggests that his disappearance is curiously unaccounted for.
“Merciful men “ (men of loving kindness) are said to be ‘taken away, “ from the Hebrew term usaf. It means, “to harvest, or gather up.” Notice that this term is used twice in verse one. It is a term that describes reaping, giving great strength to the idea of harvest at the end of the Church Age.
The second example comes from the prophet Micah. Like Isaiah, he speaks from the perspective of a future event. In this forlorn and hopeless world, Israel’s friends are gone, just as they will be before the Great Tribulation, when Israel faces an anti-Semitic world, and the judgment of God:
Woe is me! for lain as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the grape gleanings of the vintage: there is no cluster to eat: my soul desired the first ripe fruit. The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood,’ they hunt every man his brother with a net (Micah 7:1,2).
In this Day of the Lord prophecy, we once again see a picture of the harvest, a representation of the end of the age. It is found in the word, “gathered, “where the Hebrew term osaf, is used in exactly the same context as that found in Isaiah 57.
Micah also uses the term, perished,” again from ovad meaning “to disappear or vanish.” He is saying that the good man has disappeared…simply vanished.
Comparing the Old Testament with the New Testament views of the rapture, we see exactly the same event from two perspectives. We visualize being quickly seized and taken up to the clouds, where we will meet the Lord in the atmospheric heavens, to be with Him forevermore.
This is the same description of the 7 instances of Rapture in the Bible.