1. Some Questions to Consider

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Some Questions to Consider

Moreover, the view that Christians are raptured and thus resurrected before the Tribulation makes biblical prophecy far more complex than it needs to be—even though in normal logic the simplest solution is typically the likeliest one. Left Behind theology divides the Second Coming into two parts, even though the Bible never distinguishes these parts in name or in timing. It requires prophecy “experts” to perform the interpretive gymnastics sometimes necessary to disentangle these “separate” events in different clauses of the same verse, for example, 2 Peter 3:10: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away.”

Consider, for example, the following passages and the questions that follow them.

The context of 1 Corinthians 15:23–26 is the resurrection of our bodies. Here Paul declares about this resurrection:

But each will be in its own proper order: Christ the first fruits, and afterward those who are Christ’s at His coming [parousia ], and then is the end, when Christ delivers the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has nullified all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all the enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be nullified is death.

What is the last enemy to be put down? If death is the last enemy, how does its defeat at our resurrection leave room for an antichrist or other enemies after our resurrection, which we expect at the Church’s Rapture?

Now read 1 Corinthians 15:50–52, which continues to address the resurrection of our bodies.

This is what I’m saying, brothers and sisters: flesh and blood aren’t able to inherit God’s kingdom; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Look, I’m telling you a mystery: we won’t all sleep [a common euphemism for “die”], but we’ll all be changed, in a flash, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet! For one will sound the trumpet, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

In 15:50–52, the resurrected inherit God’s Kingdom , presumably needing resurrection bodies to do so. This resurrection happens at the last trumpet. But how many trumpets can sound after the last one? Granted, Paul cannot have in mind the trumpets in the book of Revelation, which had not been written yet. But as we shall see later, Paul surely knew Jesus’ teaching about His return. Can this last trumpet, then, precede the trumpet of Matthew 24:29–31?

Right after the tribulation of those days . . . all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of man coming on heavenly clouds with power and great glory, and He will dispatch His angels with a loud trumpet, and they will gather His chosen ones from the four winds.

Yet the visible appearing of Christ in Matthew 24:30 and the gathering of the chosen in 24:31 explicitly follow the tribulation described there.

So let us look at 2 Thessalonians 1:5–10 (verse numbers have been retained for the sake of the discussion):

(5) This evidences God’s just judgment, so you may be shown worthy of God’s kingdom, on behalf of which you are suffering, (6) since it is just for God to pay back with tribulation those who put you through tribulation, (7) and to pay back with rest from it you who are enduring tribulation, along with us. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His powerful angels (8) in burning fire, executing punishment on those who don’t know God and don’t obey the good news about our Lord Jesus. (9) They will experience the just punishment of eternal destruction, away from the Lord’s face and from His strong glory, (10) when He comes to be shown glorious among His holy ones and to be admired among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed [by you].

Consider some questions about this passage.

While we are visiting 2 Thessalonians, let’s read 2:1–3. (We will look at 2 Thessalonians 2:4–7 in chapter 7 under the subhead, “Removing the Restrainer.”)

(1) Brothers and sisters, on the matter of the coming [parousia ] of our Lord Jesus Christ, even our gathering to Him, we ask you (2) not to be quickly shaken in your mind or panicked, whether through a spirit or a message or a letter as if it were from us, as if the Day of the Lord were already present. (3) Don’t let anybody trick you at all! For that day won’t come unless the revolt against God comes first and the lawless one destined for destruction is revealed.

Some interpreters believe that 2 Thessalonians 2:3 was already fulfilled in history and that Jesus could therefore return at any moment in His Kingdom. Probably more easily, others see this event as still future. Either way, does anything here support the removal of believers before the Tribulation?

More than four decades ago Arthur Katterjohn self-published a 68-page booklet called The Rapture—When? Although I (Craig) had already embraced the view before I read his booklet, the booklet influenced how I present it. Katterjohn very concisely treats all the New Testament passages about Jesus’ return. Toward the end of his booklet, he poses 31 questions to anyone who wants to affirm a pre-Tribulational Rapture of the Church. Since not all those questions are relevant for all pre-Tribulationalists today, we present just a few of them here. Not all these questions require post-Tribulational answers, but they do offer some food to provoke thought before we proceed:

As we shall repeatedly emphasize in this book, many texts explicitly mention the Lord Jesus returning after the Tribulation or at the end of the age to gather His faithful ones and to rule the earth. Why is not a single text explicit about any coming before the Tribulation?

Based on a theological system first devised in about 1830, some argue that the gospels and Revelation are silent about a pre-Tribulational Rapture because these books address only Israel, which will not be raptured. They argue that these parts of the Bible are not really meant for the Church (although 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all Scripture is useful for teaching). Yet we will not find explicit evidence of such a pre-Tribulational Rapture in Paul’s letters, either.

Meanwhile, whenever the context of passages that some people apply to a pre-Tribulation coming speak explicitly about timing, they refer explicitly only to events after any final Tribulation. If the theory of a secret Rapture is so secret that it is not even explicit in the Bible, why then should anyone be obligated to believe it? It is no surprise that nobody noticed this doctrine until about 1830. Even then, it was apparently discovered in the Bible only after a theological system originated that required it.

It may be no coincidence that Jesus’ warnings about tribulation and His return (see Matthew 24–25; Mark 13; Luke 21) directly precede His own passion (see Matthew 26–27; Mark 14–15; Luke 22–23). Indeed, suffering before glorification does fit the pattern of Jesus’ own ministry: He Himself was crucified—falsely accused and then executed as an enemy of public order. Because our Lord Jesus rose from the dead, we can have confidence that we, too, have a wonderful future forever in Him no matter what we suffer in the meantime. In light of eternity, our present experiences of suffering will fade like infinitesimal points of a lengthy past, remembered mainly for the honor they bring God and us in the light of eternity.

Because this book is addressed to a wide audience, we will not include heavy documentation in it as we do in our scholarly books. It must, however, address a number of proof texts because we are addressing a teaching that actually has no one biblical passage explicitly supporting it—just syllogisms and inferences. Since explicit biblical justification for pre-Tribulational claims is missing, the best that pre-Tribulationalism can do is construct secondary arguments for why the doctrine is true even though not a single text explicitly affirms it. These are arguments such as “The Church will not go through God’s wrath,” even though the term used for wrath in the supporting texts normally refers to something other than the Great Tribulation. This book will examine the main arguments and show why they are without merit.

But first, we will share how we and some other people realized that Left Behind theology—the view that we were taught as new converts—was wrong.