Remembering, it is man, and not God, who put in the chapter and verse divisions, what does God teach us through Paul? "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
shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up
(raptured) together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,
and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Now as to the times and the
epochs [of what?], brethren, you have no need of anything to be written
to you. For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will
come just like a thief in the night. While they are saying, "Peace and
safety!" then destruction will come upon them suddenly like birth pangs
upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But you, brethren,
are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you like a thief;"
It seems that Paul associates the rapture with the beginning of the "day of the Lord"... rapture then wrath! (Any "day of the Lord" passages in the Old Testament will describe it as a day of "wrath".) It says here that it is the "day of the Lord" which comes "like a thief in the night,"
but if the rapture occurs immediately before it, that still raptures us
out before God's wrath begins, and both would come as a thief in the
night, right?