THE PRE-TRIB ORIGIN AND OTHER MISCONCEPTIONS
IN THE EARLY 1800S, A CHARISMATIC REVIVAL BROKE OUT in Scotland and England. It included prophecy, dreams, visions, and the gift of tongues. In the midst of this, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, a young woman, Margaret McDonald, suffering from a grave illness received and experienced a revelatory vision.
Eyewitness Rev. Robert Norton reported the content of what she saw. First, she said that her vision prophesied the coming of the Lord. Second, she stated that the sign of the Son of Man is not to be seen by the human eye but is rather the filling of believers with the Holy Spirit as the Lord descends from heaven with a shout. She referred to First Thessalonians 4:13-14,16-17:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. …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 will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.
According to Reverend Norton, she believed that only those who have the light of God within them would be able to see that sign because it is spiritually discerned. This is likely where the idea of a secret return of the Lord to rapture the saints prior to the Great Tribulation was born, although this doesn’t appear to be what she meant. Obviously, there were problems with her statement, not the least of which would be Revelation 1:7: “Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him; and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over Him.”
Well-meaning folks who experience genuine encounters with God do often spiritualize passages of Scripture or turn them into metaphors for things other than the intended meaning of the text when trying to make sense of what they have experienced. Predictably, this produces flawed results, as it did with Margaret McDonald. So her experience was real, but the interpretation of her experience was off. Especially in times of revival, we must learn to interpret experience in light of the Scriptures rather than interpret the Scriptures in light of experience.
On the basis of her vision, Margaret McDonald believed that the spiritual temple, not a physical one, must be raised, built up, and then we would be caught up to meet Jesus. She tied this to Ephesians 5:27, “that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless” as well as First Peter 2:1-10 and Joel 2:28-31.
According to her vision, those filled with the Spirit are able to see and feel spiritual things, while others, because they are not in the Spirit, cannot. In this sense, she believed, two shall be in one bed, one taken and the other left, which reflects the aforementioned tendency to misinterpretation by means of spiritualizing and making a metaphor of Matthew 24:38-44, again divorced from the historical setting of the text and what it actually states. In Margaret McDonald’s mind, all of this tied into First Corinthians 2:14, “But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.”
She believed that the people of God would be in a very dangerous situation when the Lord appears in this way. The wicked would wield the power to deceive so that a fiery ordeal would descend upon God’s people. Persecution, she believed, would increase in direct proportion to the increase of the Holy Spirit and that this would shake every soul to its core. Passages she cited for support would be Matthew 24:9-11 and First Peter 4:12-19. Drawing from Matthew 24, she believed a false christ would soon appear in her day.
COMMENTS ON MARGARET MCDONALD’S VISION
In my opinion, Margaret McDonald foresaw in some sense the latter day outpouring of the Holy Spirit before the Great Tribulation that would prepare the body of Christ to successfully and victoriously navigate it. She believed that the Great Tribulation would purify the church. Times of persecution and pressure do tend to separate the lukewarm from the passionate. On both points, she had it right in some ways, but in too many cases she misapplied the Scriptures, spiritualizing many passages and treating others as metaphors, as opposed to binding herself to the actual meaning of the words in context. In so doing, she inadvertently loosed the idea of a secret coming of the Lord before the tribulation, not seen by those without spiritual discernment, at which time the saints would be raptured away, although this kind of rapture was not her own belief. Other people, inspired by a misunderstanding of her words, crafted and then released the pre-tribulation rapture teaching.
When the wrong scriptures are employed to teach even right doctrines, doors open for heretical teachings to emerge as those who latch on to those misapplications develop mutations of the original teachings. In every age, when the Lord revives His church through His Holy Spirit, He sends messengers to proclaim His coming in the outpouring of His Spirit. Margaret McDonald foresaw this, but unfortunately and unintentionally spawned a false teaching that she never would have espoused personally.
As an example of this kind of divine announcement of an impending move of the Spirit, at the tender of age of eight my own son knelt before the altar in tears during a worship service as a voice spoke to him, “I’m coming soon.” Because we had not yet taught him concerning the return of Jesus, it was pure revelation. Hearing that kind of thing, in our fervent longing for the Lord’s return, people often tend to assume that God must be speaking of the parousia, the return of Jesus and the revelation of who He is in glory. This can feed the hope that He will take us off this earth before real trouble develops. In most cases, however, encounters of this kind mean only that a fresh move of God is imminent. The word my son received announced such a coming move of God.
Assumptions of a pretribulation rapture to deliver us from a season of trial and trouble hold an obvious appeal. We therefore hear what we want to hear and insert into the text of Scripture what we want to see. If we’re not grounded in the whole testimony of the Word of God, we’ll twist it all up.
TWO MEN WHO BUILT ON MARGARET MCDONALD’S WORDS
Two men took their cues from Margaret McDonald’s misapplication of the Word to develop and promulgate unbiblical doctrines that Margaret McDonald never intended. No record exists of the church teaching a pretribulation rapture before the early 1800s. One might ask, if the Scriptures so clearly teach this, then why was it unheard of prior to about 1830? Some claim that the early church fathers taught a pretribulation rapture, but having read the passages cited from their writings, I think that one could only come to that conclusion by reading those writings through a preconceived filter.
John Darby
John Darby fathered the doctrinal system we call Dispensationalism. Dispensationalism holds that certain actions of God are limited to their respective periods of history or “dispensations.” When a dispensation ends, so do the actions or gifts of God designated for that period of time. For instance, dispensationalists teach that when the apostolic age ended and the canon of Scripture was complete, the gifts of the Spirit ceased. Their “dispensation” had ended. Thus, when the “church age” ends, the church will be raptured away and the Great Tribulation will begin.
Dispensationalism enabled Darby to propose, falsely, the existence of two separate peoples of God—the church and Israel—with separate redemptive histories and destinies. Gentiles would be converted prior to the rapture, while Jews would become believers in Jesus during the tribulation period after the removal of the church from the earth. This division of the church and Israel founders on the rocks of Paul’s teaching in Romans 11 that both Jews and Gentiles are one in the same trunk of the spiritual olive tree. Jews are the natural branches while Gentiles have been grafted in. It’s one tree, not two. It’s one plan of salvation applicable to all, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).
I find it curious that so many Christians who accept, believe in, and practice the miraculous gifts of the Spirit so easily adopt a doctrine of the rapture birthed in, and dependent on, Dispensational theology that denies the reality of those gifts today.
Edward Irving
In his acceptance of tongues and prophecy, Edward Irving has generally been regarded as a forerunner of the Charismatic Renewal. He admitted that the doctrine of a pretribulation rapture cannot be found in Scripture and that it originated with a prophetess (Margaret McDonald) in the 1830s. Like Darby, he taught a secret coming to rapture the church before the unfolding of the seven years of tribulation. One can only assume that he had erroneously accepted an element of extra-biblical revelation as a solid truth because it appealed to him or seemed like revelation.
Both Darby and Irving knew Margaret McDonald. Both of them either misinterpreted her, misunderstood her, or took what they wanted from her visions and words in order to construct distinctive doctrines for personal gain and advancement. Neither of them accurately interpreted or applied the Scriptures with respect to the second coming of our Lord.
THE TRUTH
In addition to the passages cited in Chapter 1, the following apply.
Matthew 24:26-27
Matthew 24:26-27 so clearly states, “So if they say to you, ‘Behold, He is in the wilderness,’ do not go out, or, ‘Behold, He is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe them. For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes even to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” In other words, no hint of a secret coming to rapture the saints away prior to the Great Tribulation can be found in anything Jesus said. In Matthew 24 He warned the disciples not to accept claims of any kind that Jesus had returned if those claims of return did not conform to the parameters of His own words. Unless they saw Him appearing openly like lightning in the sky that all could witness, they were to reject any claims that He had come at all. There could, therefore, be no secret coming. Pretribulation rapture theory requires that we believe in two returns—one to take the saints off the earth and the other at the end of the tribulation period in final judgment—but the words of Jesus quite clearly rule this out.
Revelation 7:13-14
In His vision of the end times, the apostle John saw and wrote the same truth previously embedded in the words of Jesus in Matthew 24, that believers will not escape the Great Tribulation but rather live victoriously through it.
Then one of the elders answered, saying to me, “These who are clothed in the white robes, who are they, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “My lord, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:13-14).
How could they come “out of ” the Great Tribulation if they had not been “in” it? Pre-tribbers would assert that these are the Jewish believers converted after the church is raptured, but this requires that secret coming of the Lord that Jesus so clearly rules out. A further problem lies with the usual accompanying teaching that the Holy Spirit—as the restraining one—is taken off the earth as well during this post-rapture period. But First Corinthians 12:3 so clearly states that no one can say Jesus is Lord without the Holy Spirit. It would therefore be impossible for anyone to come to Jesus and recognize Him as Lord in a time when the Holy Spirit had vacated the earth. The entire pre-trib rapture argument comes unraveled on multiple fronts when examined in light of the whole of Scripture.
THE SEVEN CHURCHES OF REVELATION
In Revelation 2 and 3, John wrote to seven real churches in “Asia,” now known to us as Turkey. The text reflects very real situations those churches faced in the first century. In the letters to those churches, John drew his metaphors from actual conditions, obstacles, and pagan influences that existed in those cities at that time.
Some pretribulation rapturists, however, point to the absence of the word “church” (ekklesia in the Greek) after Revelation 3, claiming that the absence of that word supports the idea that the church is no longer on earth after Revelation 3. As already noted, they claim that the believers on earth spoken of in the book of Revelation after that point are Jews converted after the church has been caught up to heaven.
Doesn’t it seem obvious, however, that the word “church” does not occur after Revelation 3 for the simple reason that John was no longer writing to seven existing churches and that he had shifted from a set of pastoral letters into a collection of apocalyptic visions, rather than because the church would be taken off the earth? Revelation itself does not explain the absence of the word “church” in that way. Such an assumption is an imposition on the text without valid justification from within the text. Nothing in what John wrote should lead us to fill in the blanks or add to the text in such a manner. We must always interpret the Word of God by the Word of God itself.
Further, John wrote in Revelation 1:1, “the things which must soon take place.” “Soon” can only mean “soon.” The letters to the seven churches could not therefore be about some distant future, but rather the realities of seven actual churches existing in John’s day. These epistles have nothing to do with the end of a church age, the rapture of the saints, or any other related issue. The lessons and confrontations contained in them, however, can and should be applied to a multitude of similar situations in our own time. Further, John’s assertion that these things must “soon” take place should lead us to root much of the rest of the book in events that actually happened in the first and second centuries, even though they may foreshadow other similar events in the distant future.
HOLY SPIRIT WITHDRAWN?
Let me reiterate something I said above. Many who take the view that the church will escape to heaven before the tribulation claim that the Holy Spirit will be withdrawn from the earth at the same time. The most glaring flaw in that argument, however, is revealed in First Corinthians 12:3: “Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, ‘Jesus is accursed’; and no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” Pretribulation proponents insist that the Jews will come to Jesus en masse after the church has been evacuated. If what the apostle Paul wrote about confessing Jesus as Lord is true, however, then how could anyone, no matter what their racial or religious heritage, confess Jesus as Lord if the Holy Spirit has been removed?
Often cited in support of the view that the Holy Spirit will be withdrawn is Second Thessalonians 2:7, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way.” Note that the translators of the New American Standard Bible and many other versions fail to capitalize “he,” indicating that the text does not justify identifying “he” as the Holy Spirit.
In truth, no one knows who or what Paul actually referred to. The most common speculation identifies “he” as the restraining influence that the Roman Empire, its army, and its legal system exercised upon the nations they dominated. Prior to the rise of the empire, the Mediterranean region had been a dangerous place for any kind of travel or commerce. The order and justice imposed by Rome all but eliminated brigands and pirates and made trade possible over the roads they built. The economy thrived as a result and the gospel traveled to the farthest reaches of the empire, enabled by what the Romans had established. When Rome fell, chaos and lawlessness reigned and the Dark Ages descended upon the Mediterranean and Europe.
WOULD JESUS ALLOW HIS BRIDE TO SUFFER THROUGH IT?
People I respect have insisted that Jesus would never allow His beloved bride, the church, to go through a time of suffering like the Great Tribulation. Really? At the risk of sounding sarcastic, I think we might ask the more than 100,000 Christians martyred each year in modern times how they feel about that. Perhaps we should ask Middle Eastern Christians in Islamic states what they think. They are being driven from their homes, their churches are burned, and their bodies beheaded. Sounds like tribulation to me!
Did Jesus shield His bride from times of tribulation in Bible times? Absolutely not. Luke 21:36 says, “But keep on the alert at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are about to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” Escape in this context means strength to endure, to refuse to deny our Lord under pressure, rather than to evacuate. Jesus Himself said, “Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved” (Matt. 24:12-13). Second Thessalonians 1:4 reads, “We ourselves speak proudly of you among the churches of God for your perseverance and faith in the midst of all your persecutions and afflictions which you endure.” The hope of rapture and the kind of escape it implies requires no strength in the way that endurance and perseverance do. Our escape, our victory, is to have the power of perseverance to stand in the midst of tribulation rather than be defeated by it.
Let’s look at Luke 21:36 in its actual historical context and the impact it would have had on the early church, more in keeping with the actual words spoken. Those who see prophecies of Scripture as applying only to the distant future will fail to put them in their historical and textual contexts. Jesus used the words, “about to take place,” not as a reference to something to happen in the distant future. Further, the plural “you” to whom He spoke were the people standing before Him that day.
Prophetic perspective blends present, future, and distant future all into one frame. In this case, the entire chapter speaks to multiple time frames. What was “about to take place” in this layer of the blended frame was the Jewish rebellion against Rome and the utter destruction of the city and the temple with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. The church did, in fact, flee the city before its destruction and escaped what the rest of the population suffered. This particular part of the prophecy does not apply to the distant future and the actual end times.
So, whether Luke 21:36 is about us escaping by enduring, or is applicable only and specifically to the early church escaping the destruction of Jerusalem, it would seem to be abundantly clear that the rapture of the saints is not what Jesus had in mind.
As for whether or not Jesus would shield His bride from times of trial and tribulation, ask the apostle Paul. He wrote:
Are they servants of Christ?—I speak as if insane—I more so; in far more labors, in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death. Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure (2 Corinthians 11:23-27).
Peter and the apostles were flogged. Herod had Peter imprisoned and intended to kill him after first executing James. The Jewish establishment stoned Stephen, the deacon, to death. Christians were fed to the lions in the Roman coliseum. Some were burned at the stake. Does it not seem that God has often allowed His people to undergo serious tribulations? These things have strengthened their witness. The sacrifices of martyrs in every age have never failed to bear fruit. “And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death” (Rev. 12:11). They “overcame.” Victory!
PREPARATION TO ENDURE
Finally, doesn’t it seem that preparation to endure must be qualitatively different from preparation to escape? Doesn’t the Bible contain multiple exhortations to endure and to persevere in the face of trials? “You will be hated by all because of My name, but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved” (Matt. 10:22). And again, “But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved” (Matt. 24:13). The author of Hebrews understood this: “For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Heb. 12:3). James 1:12 declares, “Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.” It will be as if he had won a race and received the laurel wreath that served as a trophy in the ancient world.
Perhaps it was best stated by the apostle Paul in Romans 5:
And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Romans 5:3-5).
If I am preparing to escape and then find myself faced with the need to endure, am I not then in a weakened position? Unprepared, might I not then lose the battle? If, however, I am preparing to endure, and if I am doing what must be done to ready myself for the fiery trials I must face, and then I get to escape, what have I lost? Nothing! And I have gained strength, character, and hope in the process. We must prepare for our ultimate victory and refuse to buy into a defeatist theology that has us escaping a dying earth that we abandon to destruction.