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March 19 - April 22, 2019
The same promises that helped believers endure fiery trials in centuries past will help us endure fiery trials right until the end of this age. The Lord knows how to keep His people.
there is only one Second Coming (rather than a Rapture and a Second Coming).
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.
we in the West have too easily bought into the lie that because God loves Christians, we will be spared tribulation.
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.”
Christians in America, who have often been spared the worst of sufferings faced by believers in many other parts of the world.
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.
Unfortunately, some poorly informed Christians loudly play into such widely promoted stereotypes, further undermining the Church’s witness in the culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we live radically for Jesus now we will be prepared to stand no matter what other tests we face.
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.
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).
the view that Christians are raptured and thus resurrected before the Tribulation makes biblical prophecy far more complex than it needs to be—even
The last enemy that will be nullified is death.
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?
Indeed, suffering before glorification does fit the pattern of Jesus’ own ministry:
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.
readiness to suffer for Christ as needed is something that we should have resolved to be ready for the moment we committed our lives to the Lord.
if we could overcome Satan in Jesus’ name, we had no reason to fear the Antichrist.
we live in a world that faces judgment for how we human beings treat God and one another.
Naturally, none of us relishes suffering, but we need to be ready for it if it comes.
we followers of Jesus are here for the long haul, as witnesses for Christ to our neighbors who need God’s love and help just as we do. Christians need to have realistic expectations so that we are ready to stand firm when sufferings come, rather than complaining that we should have been exempt from them.
the pre-Tribulational view began with a faulty inference from Scripture and then collected proof texts to back it up. It is a minority view in Church history; no one articulated this view clearly until 1830, and it did not become widespread until the twentieth century.
None of these observations makes the view wrong; they simply warn us not to assume that the view is as self-evident as those who have been schooled in it sometimes assume.
So far as we can tell from their surviving work, the earliest Church fathers in the second century were premillennial and post-Tribulational.
(Whatever view you hold on the Millennium, keep in mind that it appears explicitly in just one passage in one chapter of the Bible.
A much more common version of the amillennial view today—the view that the Millennium symbolizes Christ’s present reign—is what we normally mean by amillennialism. On this view, the Millennium stretches between Jesus’ first coming and His Second Coming, and the particular number of years is not meant literally.
In the fourth and fifth century, Augustine developed the idea that the Millennium symbolizes the entire present age,
Sixteenth-century Reformers such as Luther and Calvin continued this view.
Meanwhile, postmillennialism had begun to flourish in many evangelical circles. This was the view that Christians would successfully establish God’s Kingdom on earth, setting up the throne for Jesus so He could return.
Today some Reformed and charismatic circles have revived postmillennialism, but it remains a decidedly minority view among Christians generally.
History shows us that no end-time view merits trust simply because it is the dominant view in a particular time or group.
How did Darby arrive at a pre-Tribulational Rapture? Darby emphasized distinguishing God’s plan for the Church from God’s plan for Israel, and he distinguished these plans so sharply that God would deal with only one at a time.
World War I challenged postmillennial optimism, strengthening premillennialism’s appeal.
In the twentieth century, many prophecy teachers wrongly interpreted Jesus as saying that He would return within a forty-year generation of 1948, hence by 1988. (In context, the prophecy actually predicts the destruction of the Temple within forty years. Jesus’ prophecy was fulfilled right on schedule in the year 70.)
Prophecy teaching has been a major pastime since the late 1800s, with interpretations changing regularly as newspaper headlines change. Like newspaper headlines, they sometimes fail to anticipate some major events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Like horoscopes, though, they are right sometimes.) It is one thing to say, “Current events might fit God’s plans,” or, “This fits the ways that God works in history,” and quite another to try to match them point-for-point as if biblical texts were predicting our generation’s newspaper headlines.
