Introduction

Introduction

Christians Face Tribulation

I n June 2000, I (Craig) taught sixty pastors in Yelwa, Plateau State, Nigeria. The setting was not quite like camping out, but it was the best they could offer. At night, despite dispersing dangerously heavy mosquito spray three times, I had to choose whether to endure mosquito bites or to swelter by wrapping myself with layers to protect me from the mosquitoes. What the mosquitoes missed, the bedbugs got anyway.

But the pastors were enthusiastic and eager to learn. Some had traveled for many miles, and they slept overnight on the floor of the church. My host, John, was very hospitable, and he and the other impoverished Nigerian pastors showed their sacrificial gratitude in the best way they knew how: They gave me a chicken. The leaders also took me to eat pounded yam at a restaurant, where we sat at a table outside under a tin roof. From the corner of my eye I could see a lighter-skinned man who appeared to be from much farther north, perhaps from North Africa or the Middle East, gesturing toward us and giving instructions. Although I knew much less Hausa than the pastors with whom I was eating, I could tell that he was unhappy about my presence.

Two years later, there were no known Christians in Yelwa. On February 24, 2002, some Muslims in Yelwa surrounded a church and massacred the men, women and children inside. The targeted violence spread, until tens of thousands of Christians and followers of traditional tribal religions were displaced from the area. Churches were destroyed and converted into latrines. One friend told me that Yelwa, though geographically in majority Christian Plateau State, had now declared itself part of a Shari’ah state.

This followed the periodic slaughter of Christians elsewhere, a mass slaughter that had begun with a coordinated attack on churches and Christians in Jos on Friday, September 7, 2001, after prayers in the mosques. I had spent three summers in Jos and was panicked for my friends’ safety. One friend and former student, a Nigerian lawyer, spent three days in a church under siege with a corpse and no water. Over the course of that year, thousands died. Anxiously, I inquired about the safety of a young woman I knew who had lived in the most decimated area. Many church leaders were killed.

Because Plateau was majority Christian, eventually some younger men from Christian backgrounds attacked mosques and killed Muslims, thinking that such reprisals would teach jihadists that there was a cost to their actions. Civil war, however, was likely exactly what the jihadists wanted; if they could turn all Christians and Muslims against each other, it would require less work from them. They hated moderate Muslims as well as Christians. Probably most Muslims, like most Christians, wanted peace.

In May of 2004, some local Tarok tribespeople, angry at the Muslim takeover of Yelwa and that nothing had been done about it, attacked Yelwa and slaughtered a massive number of Muslims. Suddenly, the event made international news. One media report declared that Christians had massacred people in the “Muslim town of Yelwa.” U.S. Christians, whose country had bombed Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 a couple of years before, chided Nigerian Christians for not turning the other cheek.

In response to media reports of the massacre in Yelwa, the governor of Kano, a predominantly Muslim state, urged young Muslims to defend their faith. Young Muslims took up arms and began slaughtering Christians in Kano. The media, which in northern Nigeria was largely controlled by Muslims at the time, reported to the outside world that in local violence fifty persons had died. The media reports I saw did not specify the faith of those who were murdered. Meanwhile, friends from northern Nigeria reported to me that all the morgues were packed with bodies. Many had lost friends and relatives in the carnage, and some of my friends estimated that thousands of Christians had died. In one account that I could not verify directly, a baby was burned alive and the desperate mother was murdered for protesting.

My comments here do not address Muslims in general, and international media have become more discerning about Nigeria since the rise of Boko Haram. My point in recounting this tragedy that tore at my heart is simply to illustrate that we in the West have too easily bought into the lie that because God loves Christians, we will be spared tribulation. That was not true in northern Nigeria. In recent years that has not been true in Eritrea, Iran, Sudan, North Korea or many other countries.

Why then would it be true here? Jesus said, “You will be hated by all nations because of My name” (Matthew 24:9 NASB , emphasis added). Why should we expect to be exempt from such tribulation? Does God have special favoritism for the West? For the West where religion is declining, from which pornography is exported and where even Christians are growing increasingly biblically illiterate?

When Rome fell after several generations of Christian dominance, pagans insisted that this was the judgment of the gods against Christianity. The great North African theologian Augustine replied, in essence, “Far from it! Rome fell because its centuries of sins were piled as high as heaven, and because the commitment of the Christians there was too shallow to stay God’s judgment.”

And if we should not be exempt from such tribulation, what do we mean when we speak of being “raptured” to heaven before the “Great Tribulation”? Jesus tells us that the worst they can do to us is kill our bodies (see Matthew 10:28), and people have been doing that to us (and others) for a very long time.

Unrest in the West

Like many generations before us, we live in very troubled times. That observation is increasingly true even for Christians in America, who have often been spared the worst of sufferings faced by believers in many other parts of the world.

Surprisingly, in the West the radical secular response to Islamic terrorism has sometimes been loud denunciation of religion in general as dangerous and unthinking. Whereas social tolerance once meant respecting everyone’s diverse faith convictions, attacking and often stereotyping religion in social media has now become fair game. Those with limited exposure to positive expressions of Christian faith, including some university professors speaking far outside their sphere of expertise, denounce Christians as blind followers of ignorant myths they have been taught.

The authors of this book find such denunciations ironic, given that both of us were converted from unchurched, non-Christian backgrounds. One of us (Michael) holds a Ph.D. in Semitic languages from New York University and the other (Craig) a Ph.D. in New Testament and Christian origins from Duke University. One might hope that we have some understanding about what we believe and why we believe it!

Similarly, although Christians were on the forefront of movements to free slaves, promote women’s voting rights, abolish sex trafficking and so forth, a number of trendy thinkers now treat Christianity as oppressive, partly because in our quest for justice we value human life (including life before birth). Likewise, in following our faith we insist, at least for the Church, on exclusive sexual fidelity in heterosexual marriage—a view that until recently was the dominant moral conviction in society.

Especially because of these issues, some of those who disagree now denounce Christians as bigots to be lumped with the KKK or Aryan supremacists. (This again seems especially ironic to the authors of this book, one of whom is Jewish, and the other of whom is interracially married to a professor from central Africa.) Unfortunately, some poorly informed Christians loudly play into such widely promoted stereotypes, further undermining the Church’s witness in the culture.

So what happens if those with false stereotypes of Christians impose their values on the Church? If non-Christian values begin to encroach on what privately funded religious colleges can teach their students? If restrictions are placed on sharing our faith in public? We do not have to wait for such possibilities. What happens now when those with views hostile to Christians act out that hostility in public?

That would not be a new situation for Christians. One of the authors (Craig) was beaten for his witness more than once in the United States, in the late 1970s. The other author (Michael) was in a life-threatening situation when an angry Hindu mob shut down his preaching meeting in India. He has also been the subject of death threats from radical groups even in the United States.

Christians in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan and many other places already often suffer marginalization and sometimes open persecution for their faith. As already noted, Boko Haram (and before and besides them, other violent Islamists) have slaughtered thousands of Christians in northern Nigeria, sometimes kidnaping or torturing and regularly displacing them. (Although it is not the subject of this book, other minority religions are persecuted in many places, and speaking for justice for them is also important. Too few Christians openly condemned anti-Jewish policies in Nazi Germany.)

What Christians face in the United States is currently much less pronounced than what many of our brothers and sisters face around the world. It may be enough, however, to call our attention to where we have been living with false assumptions. We have often acted as if our nationality and rights will protect us. When Jesus says, “You will be hated by all nations because of my name,” that need not mean that every individual will hate us. But it does mean that we should never take nonpersecution for granted.

In fact, one widely held view in the Church has helped many American Christians take for granted that we will not be here when significant persecution comes. The view itself need not lead to that conclusion, but here is how we have heard many Christians express it. “Before things get really bad here (that is, for us, American Christians, who have our rights ), the Lord will take us away,” some say. “Meanwhile, non-Christians will be ‘left behind’ to endure the horrors of the Great Tribulation.”

One serious problem with that way of thinking—it is not what the Bible actually says.

Left Behind?

The premise of the LEFT BEHIND novels and movies is intriguing. What would happen if all true Christians were suddenly raptured to heaven, leaving the world behind to face God’s judgments during the Great Tribulation? These novels often helpfully present the Gospel, but there is nevertheless a problem with their Rapture-before-the-Tribulation premise.

The problem is that there is no biblical text that actually explicitly says that the Church will be taken out before the Tribulation. If you think otherwise, try to find one! All the arguments for a pre-Tribulational Rapture require extra assumptions beyond what any passage simply says—and some passages suggest otherwise.

This book, then, rests on a different premise. What if everybody was left behind? Or to put it more plainly, what if nobody really could expect to escape before terrible tribulation? That Christians would not escape the world except in the way Christians have traditionally escaped from tribulation in other generations, namely by dying? How would that affect the way we live?

It should be noted that the word rapture appears nowhere in the Bible. Still, 1 Thessalonians 4:17 speaks of “catching up,” an idea that can be communicated, albeit usually negatively, by the Latin terms rapio and raptus. The verse makes clear that Jesus’ followers will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air. The question remains, however, as to whether this catching up happens before or after the final time of Tribulation.

One can of course understand how Left Behind theology became popular. Obviously, the idea that we would escape tribulation is appealing. Yet many of our brothers and sisters around the world have long been experiencing what many of us in the West would consider tribulation: martyrdom, suffering from wars, facing famines, the kidnaping of their children and so forth.

Getting Ready

The issue, then, should not be whether we would prefer to escape tribulation. The issues should be whether the Bible actually teaches that we will escape it, and if not, how we should live. Such readiness is important for any kind of suffering we may face.

Being ready does not mean stockpiling food and weapons in the mountains. Being ready means that we are completely sold out to Jesus and ready to testify for Him no matter what our situation. It means that we are ready to suffer for Jesus in the short term because we realize that we will live forever with Him in His presence. It means that we will not take a mark of loyalty to the Beast—whether that is figurative or literal—because we belong to a different master, the Lamb.

The best way to prepare for such challenges is to live as if we experience a foretaste of them now. Do not conform to what peers or other pressures demand; be conformed to Christ’s image. Do not live for the values and rewards of this world; live for the promise of the coming one. Daniel and his three friends were ready for a fiery furnace and because they had already passed the test of the king’s table. If we live radically for Jesus now we will be prepared to stand no matter what other tests we face. Of course, having some food ready for short-term emergencies is basic common sense that is widely recommended. Blizzards, earthquakes or hurricanes can close stores, for example, and it is simply smart to be prepared for such emergencies, whatever one’s views of the end times.

But a pure survivalist mentality, perhaps apart from a setting in which people are actually already being hunted down, would miss this book’s point. As Jonathan Cahn says, “We’re not survivalists; we’re revivalists.” We are not in this world to live as long as we can, as if we have no future beyond it; we are in this world to make a difference for Christ. Living long to serve and influence more people is a good thing, but living long because we are afraid to die is still living according to this world’s values. Instead, we as believers stay in this world while we can so we can share the hope of Christ with our fellow human beings who need Him. Because we find strength in Him in the midst of our hardship, others, too, can find courage to follow Him in the face of this world’s hostility.

Conclusion

Why do we not believe in a pre-Trib Rapture? Most of us would not want to live in a building where all the screws and nails that held it together were loose. Why would we want to believe a doctrine in which every single verse used in support is loose—that is, out of context? Much of the rest of this book will survey texts used to defend pre-Tribulationalism, showing how all of them are out of context. But if your mind is open on the question you can simply examine those texts for yourself directly and come to the same conclusion.

Yet arguing against a pre-Tribulational Rapture is not so much about going through the Tribulation as it is about a triumphant hope. Our hope is not a halfway, secret return of Christ to earth and a secret Rapture of which Scripture offers no mention. Our hope is our Lord’s glorious return, witnessed by the nations, vindicating those who have sacrificed and suffered for His name. It is the time when the kingdom of this world will become the Kingdom of our God and of His Messiah (see Revelation 11:15), and when we as God’s servants, consecrated to Him, will receive our rewards (see verse 18).