The Tribulation Passover
How the Rapture will be the same salvation sparing the faithful from God's wrathful judgment of the world, that the Passover was in sparing the nation of Israel from God's wrathful judgment of Egypt.
“‘I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth... When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth... The Lord has prepared a sacrifice; he has consecrated those he has invited... On that day I will punish all who avoid stepping on the threshold, who fill the temple of their gods with violence and deceit... I will bring such distress on all people that they will grope about like those who are blind, because they have sinned against the Lord. Their blood will be poured out like dust and their entrails like dung. Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath.’ In the fire of his jealousy the whole earth will be consumed, for he will make a sudden end of all who live on the earth.”—Zephaniah 1:2, 7, 17-18
Nothing like a little good cheer with which to start out the week, is there?
Believe it or not, as horrible as all that sounds, it really is good news.
Because it’s all part of the history, prophesy and plan leading up to the now-very-near future salvation of humanity from its own sinful, depraved disobedience and from the indignant wrath of the holy and righteous God who created the world and us for his pleasure and delight.
The purpose of which we’ve strayed so far away from in rebellious defiance, that God was forced first to redeem those of us chosen for salvation by sending his own Son to sacrifice himself and spill his precious blood as a propitiation for and salvation from the sins of all those who believe in him.
After which—when the “times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24) and on a day and hour nobody but God the Father knows (Matthew 24:36)—he'll pour his ultimate, wrathful judgment out on the rest of the world that proudly refuses to accept him.
In case you’re thinking, “Gosh, Gene, that’s a little heavy, isn’t it?”
That’s because it is.
All that’s all that heavy, because this is a heavy time with heavy things going on as the world’s rapidly approaching the culmination of its current incarnation.
“Previously on Kentucky Fried Christian...”
Last week, we talked about how and why the Jewish Passover that’s just coming to a close today, is important to the Christian believer, too. We discovered how along with so many other phenomena of the Lord’s faith and the history of the Jewish people, the Passover is a prophetic type for the future, along the lines of which the Old Testament’s historical chronicle and prophesy is full of examples.
One of the ways in which the Passover is a prophetic type is in how it sets the exemplary stage for the future emancipation of the faithful in both God’s first-born nation of Israel and the rest of the world, from the enslavement to sin under which we’ve all fallen since that little incident in the garden with the snake; and which is now in the process of becoming the systemic, globally universal regime of sinful depravity and rebellious disobedience to God that’s going to necessitate his final, wrathful judgment of the world and all mankind.
That’s the bad news.
The Good News is the holy and righteous God who can’t abide the sinfulness into which the world has descended and therefore must eventually judge it after patiently tolerating it for thousands of years; is also the loving and compassionate God who’s provided the way out (for all those who believe in it), from that judgment and its consignment into eternal suffering, in the person of the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, and in the sacrifice he made by which the sins of all mankind have been washed away, purchasing the gift of everlasting life in his holy and eternal kingdom and salvation from both earthly and eternal judgment.
Again, for those who believe, that’s the ultimate meaning of the Good News.
But this week, we’re going to take a look at a crucial rider attached to the whole deal for all those who come to the Lord’s faith before the time for that judgment comes, that gives us even more reason to both hope and rejoice in God’s love, grace and faithfulness; because we’re assured by his infallibly trustworthy word that “...God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,” as the apostle Paul conveys to us in 1 Thessalonians 5:9.
Furthermore, the Lord Yeshua himself gives us this reassurance, by the letter to the church in Philadelphia he dictates to the apostle John in the spirit, as part of his message to all of us through the letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor in Revelation 2-3:
“Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.” (Revelation 3:10)
From these two passages, we learn of God’s promise not just to ultimately save us from the spiritual judgment his holiness and righteousness must deliver onto every defiantly disobedient sinner; but also to spare his faithful from having to suffer through the punitive physical judgment that holiness and righteousness—powered by God’s commanding universal omnipotence—is going to deliver on the defiantly disobedient, incorrigible, unbelieving world itself.
All as per the pronouncements of the Lord made by his Holy Spirit through every prophet of the Old Testament, and which is so comprehensively and starkly summed up in the cited passage from Zephaniah.
The salvation from that specific earthly manifestation of God’s final spiritual judgment of the world, is what Christian believers have come to know as the Rapture of the Church.
“Ready to Beam Up?”
The Rapture of the Church is a hotly disputed fact of Holy Scripture: challenged for the most part by people—both believers and non—who appear to rely more on their own vainly imagined powers of interpretation and projection, rather than on a faithful reading and understanding of the admittedly cryptic and eclectically dispersed, but unmistakable presentations in Holy Scripture of the Rapture as established spiritual fact, substantiated by numerous associated passages in God’s trustworthy word.
It’ll be a spiritually effected manifestation of the same way in which the same Lord saved his chosen nation of Israel from the wrathful judgment he sent on Egypt and its false gods that one night about 3500 years ago, sparing their first-born from being killed along with the first-born of Pharaoh’s proudly defiant people.
Which serves as the type from the past for the very same kind of salvation in the very-near future, from the very same kind of wrathful judgment from God; only this time, that judgment won’t just be targeting the first-born of a specific, defiant nation, but the entire defiantly disobedient, proudly sinful world this place has now almost universally become, and the planet that hosts it.
God’s prophet warns of that globally universal judgment in Isaiah 26:21:
“See, the Lord is coming out of his dwelling to punish the people of the earth for their sins. The earth will disclose the blood shed on it; the earth will conceal its slain no longer.”
The Lord Jesus warns of it in Matthew 24:21 (NKJ):
“For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.”
However, as both the Lord Yeshua and the apostle Paul reassure us in Revelation 3:10 and 1 Thessalonians 5:9, God’s love for his faithful and his mercy and grace are so deep and unbound by any limitations, his word tells us his faithful who’ll be alive at the time that judgment begins to be delivered in the seven years of what’s going to be known as the Great Tribulation (Daniel 9:26-27), will be spared from the horrors that’ll first be the holocaust perpetrated by the beast on humanity; and then the horrors that’ll follow in the second half of the seven years, when God’s wrath against the beast’s declaration of himself as God and the world’s acceptance of him, will rain down on the world from the heavens and destroy about 2/3 of humanity and a good part of the physical world, too.
How will they (or maybe even, we?) be spared?
In a different context but certainly applicable here, the disciples asked the Lord Jesus in Matthew 19:25: “'Who then can be saved?'”
In the next verse, Matthew 19:26, we get the answer:
“Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’”
With God—the God who created the universe with only the power of his Word (Genesis 1:1-27, John 1:1-5); who sent his angel to kill the first-born of Egypt (Exodus 12:29-30); who parted the Red Sea (Exodus 14); who stopped the River Jordan so his people could cross over it into their promised land of Canaan (Joshua 3:14-4:18); who made water come out of a rock to quench the thirst of an entire nation (Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:1-13); who made quail fall from the sky by the untold thousands to feed his ungrateful, complaining people (Numbers 11); whose fire from the sky consumed Elijah’s sacrifice (1 Kings 18:16-40); whose angel destroyed 185,000 Assyrians in one night (2 Kings 19:35, Isaiah 37:36); whose prophets using the power of his Holy Spirit brought the dead back to life (1 Kings 17:17-24); whose only begotten Son performed countless miracles with the full power of his Holy Spirit; and who raised that same Son from the dead to everlasting life—
All things indeed are possible.
Just like the Passover sparing Israel from God’s wrathful judgment is a type for the event sparing God’s faithful from the Great Tribulation, the Old Testament also contains in its historical chronicle a record of the type for the way in which God’s faithful will be spared by the Rapture.
In Genesis 5, we learn of Enoch, who verse :22 tells us “walked faithfully with God.” Then, in verse :24, we read:
“Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.”
He didn’t die, he was just “no more, because God took him away.”
To prove it wasn’t just a one-off fluke to be dismissed as incredible, in 2 Kings 2:11 we learn the prophet Elijah didn’t die a physical death either, but was also “taken by God” while he was preparing his protege Elisha to take his place as prophet:
“As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.”
And in case that still wasn’t enough corroboration, we know from Acts 1:6-11, Mark 16:19 and Luke 24:50-51, that the resurrected Lord Yeshua himself, with his disciples as witnesses, was taken up into heaven from the Mount of Olives, where he last met with them.
“Beam Us Up, Lord!”
The apostle Paul gives us the most direct reference to the Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17:
“According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
Which tells us when it happens, the first to rise to meet the Lord will be all those faithful in the Messiah from his first coming until that time, who died and/or will have died before then. Taken up also will be all those faithful who’ll still be alive when the event occurs.
That’s substantiated by the Lord Yeshua’s own pronouncement in Matthew 24:40-41 (also recorded in Luke 17:34-35):
“Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
All this tells us that: the Lord’s final judgment of his chosen nation of Israel, along with the final judgment of all mankind, is coming soon; but because of the Lord’s love and compassion for his truly faithful—who by virtue of the faith he gives are already forced to live entire lives of suffering in his name at the hands of an unbelieving, wicked world—in his grace and by his omnipotent will, the faithful who’ll be alive at the time the Lord’s judgment begins, will be removed from the earth in the same way Enoch, Elijah and the Lord Jesus himself were; to be spared the pain of suffering the horrors of the Great Tribulation.
That gives us the “Why?” and the “How?” of it, along with the historical/spiritual precedents for it set in the type for the Rapture represented by the Passover, as well as by the examples of Enoch, Elijah and the Lord Yeshua.
That there’s going to be a Rapture of the Church is contestable only by an either disingenuously deliberate or genuinely mistaken misinterpretation and misapplication of what God’s word has to tell us about it.
There is, however, some debate about the timing of the event: with some adherents holding to the scripturally corroborated position of a pre-Tribulation Rapture; while some maintain—by what logic and scriptural support I personally can’t fathom—that it’ll be a post-Tribulation Rapture, on the basis of the incredible assertion that we’re currently in the Millennial Kingdom (now going into the third thousand of years); while still others maintain it’ll be a pre-wrath Rapture, taking place at the time after the Great Tribulation starts but right before the beast declares himself God and the flaming mountains of molten rock start to hurtle from the heavens and slam into the earth.
The deal breaker, however, against both the latter positions, comes in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 7-8, in which Paul informs us:
“Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction... For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed...” (emphasis added)
What Paul’s telling us is that the time of the Great Tribulation isn’t going to come until the “man of lawlessness,” the man who’ll be the beast of Revelation, will be revealed. And he won’t be revealed until “the one who now holds it back” (the full fruition of the works of lawlessness), “is taken out of the way.”
Who’s “the one who now holds it back?”
The person of God’s Holy Spirit, who is the presence and power of God on earth right now, dwelling in the hearts of all faithful believers.
In John 14:16-17, the Lord Jesus tells us by telling his disciples, that his sacrifice will make available the presence and power of God’s Holy Spirit to be with all who believe:
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth.”
The person of God’s Holy Spirit, then, dwelling in the hearts of faithful believers, is the presence and power of God in the world right now. With that presence and power still in the world, the lawlessness that is Satan’s universal scheme for the world, to be delivered by his proxy, the beast, with the assistance of his false prophet, can’t have complete dominion over the earth as long as God’s presence still remains in it through the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Paul tells us the Great Tribulation won’t begin until the the man who’ll be the beast is revealed; and that he can’t be revealed until the lawlessness he represents takes dominion over the world; and that that lawlessness can’t take over the world until “the one who now holds it back” is removed.
A faithful interpretation of God’s word tells us “the one who now holds it back” can only be the person of the Holy Spirit, because of what the Lord Yeshua himself tells us about him, where he is and how he works.
And the only way for the person of the Holy Spirit to be “taken out of the way,” is for all of the living hearts in which he dwells at any given time, to be removed from the world.
And all that indisputably sounds like a pre-Tribulation Rapture to me.
“Transport Complete!”
As is the case with so much of God’s incredibly complex yet infallibly consistent word, laying foundations and building precedents in the past for subsequent events to unfold according to those foundations and precedents in the future, the Passover sparing the Jewish nation from God’s wrathful judgment of Egypt, serves as the model for the Rapture of the Church sparing God’s living faithful from his wrathful judgment in the Great Tribulation.
The foundation and precedent for the means by which that salvation will occur are also laid and set in the supernatural way in which God removed Enoch, Elijah and the Lord Yeshua himself from the world.
The only question left to settle about it all is the timing of it. Although we may be able to ballpark it by what we can see going on in the world around us and how it comports with all the signs and conditions God’s word tells us will announce its imminence, the Lord Yeshua, the Son of God himself, also tells us in Matthew 24:26, even he doesn’t know exactly when the time’s going to be:
“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Regardless of when it’ll actually occur, we know from a faithful examination of God’s word that the Rapture will happen and that its happening will be the event announcing the immediate imminence of the Great Tribulation. The timing of that’s a matter of speculation as long as we still remain outside of that time, even if in all truthfulness, it’s no matter of speculation that it will indeed happen.
And a matter of speculation that by no means should get in the way of our prime directives as the Lord’s faithful anyway: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; to love our neighbor as ourselves; to do unto others as we’d have them do unto us; and to first seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness.
Because as long as we’re doing our part and being faithful to God’s word and obedient to his will with all that already on our plates that’s enough for us to have to struggle with, we should have no concern at all about when it’ll happen.
Because by being faithful and obedient to God’s word and will as a lifestyle choice, we’re already ready for it and he’s got us covered, no matter if it comes ten decades, ten years, ten days or ten minutes from now.
And ready we always have to be anyways, because the Lord promises that on top of not knowing when it’ll come, it’ll also come unexpectedly when it does:
“So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.” (Matthew 24:44)
And besides, no matter when it does come, we have God’s assurance that as long as we believe in the Lord Jesus, trust his promises and have confidence in the Father’s power to deliver on them, his ultimate earthly judgment and his ultimate spiritual judgment give us nothing about which to either worry or be afraid anyway, just like the Lord reassures us in John 5:24:
“Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.”
(Photo Credits: PerfectedByBlood.com; CredoMag.com; Pastor Mike Taylor via Blogspot.com;)
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