Do you think a fake Christ will meet the believers in the air?
I know what you're trying to ask, which appears in effort to strike down the warnings I've been saying that Lord Jesus and His Apostles gave about the coming false-Messiah in the role of Jesus Christ. That warning is not my idea, it is written and I've already well documented it from Scripture, and I plan to do a separate thread showing more Scripture about that coming event.
To be very clear about 1 Thess.4 regarding Christ's coming and His gathering His Church, that is about Christ's Church ONLY. So there is absolutely no reason to try and compare those 1 Thess.4 events to the coming Antichrist, simply because of this...
... if someone comes up to you and says, "Christ is here, or there", and you are not yet 'changed' to your "spiritual body" like Apostle Paul taught that will happen on the "last trump" of 1 Corinthians 15, then you know... that Christ they claim will be a fake. It is actually that simple.
Now just what did Lord Jesus warn about at the end of Luke 17 about the first one "taken"?
Luke 17:34-37
34 I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.
35 Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
36 Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
37 And they answered and said unto him, "Where, Lord?" And He said unto them, "Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together."
KJV
Pre-trib rapture preachers wrongly teach those ones "
taken" is about the 1 Thess.4:17 "
caught up" event they call a 'rapture'. That is NOT what that "
taken" idea above means, as when Christ's Apostles there asked Him, "
Where, Lord?", about where those would be "
taken" to, Jesus uses a metaphor that they will be where fowls are gathered to feast on a dead carcase.
The Matthew 24:28 version of Christ's answer makes it plain those fowls gather to eat on a dead "
carcase"...
Matt 24:28
28 For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.
KJV
And just to make sure that word "
carcase" means exactly that, i.e., a dead corpse, the Greek word in the NT manuscripts means exactly that, a dead carcase (NT:4430). Jesus uses that dead corpse idea there to point to the 'spiritually dead', the unbeliever or those who fall away to that false-Messiah in His place.