Is a Pre-tribulation Rapture Credible?

What We Are Never Told

Christian theology has soaked in the idea of a pre-tribulation Rapture for the past 100 years--to the point that examining its credibility has become taboo, if not heretical. After all, if this is what the Bible clearly teaches, we question it to our peril, right? In reality, the egocentricity of modern eschatology has successfully blinded us to our forebears who did not hold this teaching. When are we ever told, for example, that C. H. Spurgeon did not hold this view but that he fought fiercely against it from its spurious beginning?

So we blindly, naively go on believing decade after decade that only the postmillennial or amillennial liberals reject a pre-tribulation Rapture. We are not taught that an entire army of Bible scholars predating our era held staunchly to historic premillennialism as the only view logically deduced from Scripture. For this reason, we do not understand the Rapture as they understood it but instead simplistically believe that anyone who does not believe in a pre-tribulation Rapture does not believe in the Rapture at all.

What We Must Find Out

The truth is that this ubiquitous teaching monopolizing the eschatological landscape for the past several generations is a total renovation of 1800 years of historic premillennialism. I will speak for myself--when I found this out, it was as if a blast of fresh spring air entered my mind, as sobering as the chill of reality became upon the heels of this blast. The paradigm shift of realizing the true timing and purpose of the Rapture forces a total realignment of the modern-day entitlement to an escape and puts the entire emphasis instead upon Christ Himself and His glorious Second Coming.

It is time we reckoned with history, lest we trifle with our own destiny. In 1830, John Nelson Darby almost single-handedly invented the pre-tribulation Rapture theory as the consummation of his entirely fabricated worldview of dispensationalism that makes it a theological necessity. Completely disregarding the fact that every renowned Bible scholar for the past 1800 years had viewed the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ as a single event, Darby claimed private, direct revelation for his theory and viciously opposed those who disagreed with him. How his erratically strange teaching went from stone-cold heretical to red-hot foundational is a magic trick to be credited to the scam-artist talent of C. I. Scofield. When we realize that it was marketing alone that floated and popularized this theory, we understand also that marketing has indeed aggressively kept it alive--not because it is true but because it is immeasurably lucrative.

Who would fight the teaching that we do not have to endure the Tribulation but that we will instead be delivered from it, while Israel faces the worst suffering imaginable without Christians present and without their Savior? This and so much more places the Church at total odds with Israel, all while paying them the lip service of political loyalty. But history tells another story, as it usually does. Yet, even if we did not know the history twisted up inside this pre-tribulation Rapture teaching, we should recognize from diligent Bible study that this idea does not hold up under scrutiny. Christ did not leave us with uncertainty regarding the gravest days yet to come. Nor did He give us a multiple choice quiz in which we choose "all of the above" as viable interpretations of eschatology.

What We Will Discover

In reality, there is only one biblically defensible interpretation of the Rapture, and this view is consistent with itself in every single Scripture reference given. Yet, when we examine this evidence straight on, with all dispensational bias laid aside, we will wonder why we have been so long bewitched by false hopes and false teachings.

As we begin our investigation, we must be aware that we will be told the pre-tribulation Rapture theory is now under more attack than ever. That will, of course, prove false by Spurgeon's story alone. We will see indeed that Spurgeon attacked this theory--not because he was persecuting anyone, as dissenters are accused today--but because he saw how dangerous this idea would become, especially as embedded in a dispensationalism that fractured the very nature of the gospel itself. If Spurgeon could roll over in his grave to see that all his fiercest efforts to protect the integrity of Scripture have been fastidiously ignored, even while homage to his scholarship still holds, we would hope he could shake some sense into us--that he, being dead, might yet speak.

But we do not need Spurgeon to awaken our dulled senses that have been lulled with false and even dangerous hopes. All we need is a reliable translation of God's Word and Hebrew and Greek lexicons. When we plunge into the truth, we will wonder in amazement how the reasonable doubt against this theory has remained suppressed as long as it has in present-day culture, given Spurgeon's staunch resistance alongside the personal price paid by Darby's one-time spiritual companions: not only George Müller but many in the Plymouth Brethren Movement. Their faithful voices echo today in the works of John Piper, R. C. Sproul, Matt O'Reilly, and a host of other eminent Bible scholars across denominational lines.

What We Must Expose

So, attack or no, we are in good company, and once invited behind the curtain into the evidence lab, we cannot be bullied away from asking honest questions. We would immediately notice that one elephant in the tent is the sheer lack of explicit textual evidence that identifies a seven-year gap between Christ's "appearing" and His Coming. A systematic review of biblical evidence cannot make this elephant disappear, and when we expose the manner and spirit in which Darby tried to do so anyway, we will be forced to question the credibility not only of his ideas but also of his entire Christian testimony. If a teacher fails to follow Christ in his own personal example, then by Christ's own teachings, that teacher's hermeneutics, rhetoric, and logic are not to be trusted, let alone marketed.

That there is more than one elephant in Darby's circus becomes obvious when we also expose his claim of the Rapture's imminency. Because he severed it completely from the Second Coming of Christ which is specifically sequenced--to the point that we are told to lift up our heads at the signs, though we cannot know the day or the hour--the pre-tribulation Rapture now follows no sequence. In changing the Rapture's timing, Darby claimed it has no antecedent. We cannot know when it will happen, and it has been supposed to happen now for the past 200 years. Actually, according to Darby, the Rapture has been imminent since Christ's Ascension.

If that were really true, then no prophecy must be fulfilled for it to happen. So what is keeping it from happening? Peter explains this with the paradox of a thousand years being as one day to the Lord, but this is not Darby's reasoning. Never mind the fact that the Apostles were living their very own tribulation in real time, making their hopes of imminency valid; Paul writes of numerous prerequisites to the Rapture--all of which Darby severs from the Last Days' timeline by unlinking the Rapture from the Second Coming of Christ. According to Darby, we don't know when it will happen; all we know is that it will happen any minute.

What We Must Rethink

That this "not knowing" should flip into a "constant knowing" that the Rapture is imminent isn't even logical in its own camp. More and more pressure is placed upon modern-day Bible "prophets" who scan the headlines for the latest clue. And why should the grandest event in history become the silly laughingstock of the world because of this ridiculous mindset? By no means are we saying it is ridiculous to watch the signs, for Christ tells us to do so. But the signs we are to watch are explicitly outlined in the very words Darby rejects as not applicable to the Church. Therefore, what is ridiculous is the attempt to watch the headlines with no corollary to the very events Christ foretold in His Olivet Discourse. If the Rapture is severed from the Second Coming, we are left only with the causeless cause.

So why try to say the always-imminent Rapture is now closer than ever? Hasn't it always been as close as it will ever be--according to Darby? The event triggered by nothing is supposed to trigger everything--all while this "nothing" is always "something" and "the next thing" in the headlines. How can the Rapture be connected to nothing and everything at the same time--to nothing in Scripture but to everything in the news? Even the argument that we are in the last days must presuppose something that preceded those last days--or the last of the last days--such that the Rapture that was always imminent is now more imminent than ever.

For a non-dispensationalist, this doesn't make sense. But the dispensationalist hunts for clues and then tapes them onto Scripture, all while outright bypassing eschatological sermons and parables of Christ because he deems them relevant only for the Jews during "their" Tribulation. But this loop becomes a trap, for the argument of imminence is outdated immediately in the news when the Rapture doesn't happen. The dogma that turned heads yesterday keeps turning them today--all while also requiring the Rapture's ubiquity in Scripture: the dispensationalist sees the Rapture everywhere precisely because he believes it is neither defined nor confined by any precedent. He can discover new Scriptures that meet new news--all because none of this has ever happened before "now." Thus does he float his evidence as a string of islands off the mainland.

What We Must Conclude

Ultimately, we will notice in the gymnastic carnival that a pre-tribulation Rapture violates all the fundamentals of critical reading. Even without knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, we can see glaring inconsistencies in this theology simply by taking God's Word at face value without spin. Pretend we had never heard of dispensationalism, and everything makes sense; Scripture is always consistent with Scripture. And then when we do delve into original languages and syntax as consistent with historical context and author's purpose, we find that we must violate logic itself to support the pre-tribulation Rapture view.

To hold this view, we must eisegete rather than exegete, and that is wrong. We are not entitled to create our own theories and then force Scripture to comply. To draw conclusions not supportable by explicit evidence is license, not inference. Reading to confirm our own bias is neither honest nor sustainable.  

So it comes to this: we cannot afford to believe an idea only because we are afraid of being labeled a heretic if we don't believe it. If an idea is true, the evidence will support it--and the odds are very, very good that Bible scholars now worshipping in heaven did indeed find this evidence long ago. We would do well to stand on their shoulders as we contemplate the end of days.