Biblical Audio Commentary – Post-Tribber Tribulation Saga

Biblical Audio Commentary – Post-Tribber Tribulation Saga

Transcript:

What if there was no pre-Trib Rapture?

The wars came as expected; what you didn’t anticipate was that they’d affect you as they did.  With all the prepping, you figured you were good for the long haul.  You’d hunker down and wait out the Tribulation – what there was of it that you believed would actually happen; after all, most of Revelation was symbolic and not literal – because that’s what you knew God intended.  But the lawlessness was worse than you thought.  Since you were rural, you were safe.  Only you weren’t.

The bombs dropped and the cities were left in ruins; no one remaining had food, and the mobs rampaged into the countryside.  They found your little enclave and overran it in their hunger and fury.  All your ammo and gold for protection and barter had no power to hold them back.  Twenty of them to one of you were overwhelming odds.  You felled several of them, but there were too many.

The one good thing was they let you and your wife live.  The only possession they let you take in their scorn when they kicked you out of your own home was your Bible.  You hadn’t read it much, but they saw the “Jesus loves you” plaque on the wall and ID’d you as a Christian.  Then they laughed and raped your wife in front of you.  “Now get out!” they ordered, so the both of you left, wondering why God would allow this to happen.

Before the horde of jackals came and sent you packing, life hadn’t been what you expected in this Tribulation period.  You had a well and weren’t dependent on city water.  You had a generator in case the electricity went out for a time.  What you didn’t expect was an extended blackout which necessitated using all your propane.  When that was gone and the generator could no longer run, that was the end of your electrical power.  You had even planned for that by installing solar panels on your roof, but a massive wave of hail stones destroyed them early on.

But you were resourceful.  Even with these difficulties, you resolved to dig a new well down by the creek where you wouldn’t have to sink the pipes too deeply.  The soil was sandy and easy to penetrate, but you had to locate a store that sold them.  Home Depot was out.  Luckily you bought the final supply that Menards had.  That trip used up the rest of the gasoline in your car.  None of the stations on your way had any more gas left to refill your tank, so you hoped you hadn’t forgotten anything.

It was hard work pounding the well drive point and subsequent pipes with a sledge hammer.  That was work for a younger man, but what else could you do?  No angels came along to assist.

In those months before the expulsion from your home, you quickly learned that the supply chains providing food to supermarkets had experienced serious disruption.  That led to your needing to begin consuming the many stores of food you’d socked away for just such a time.  However, as they began to diminish, and there was no end in sight for the replenishing of commercial sources, you began foraging and hunting.  The problem was that you’d never learned what plants were edible in your area.  What was safe to consume and what wasn’t?

You’d done a little hunting in your life, but never learned to set snares or use other passive means to find game.  For some reason neither deer nor turkeys made much of an appearance that fall, so this plan immediately showed its cracks.

As cold set in, you were thankful that you’d planned ahead by installing a wood burning stove in your house and had cut some firewood.  That soon burned up and it became apparent that constantly feeding that stove required hard, constant work.  Chopping and splitting enough for the daily ration took hours and left you exhausted.  You wished for being that young man you no longer were.

The wood burning provided just enough heat, but you and your wife were forced to resort to one-room living, as the rest of the rooms simply weren’t warm enough.  You cooked, slept, and did everything else in this single room where the wood-burner was.  The day a spark escaped and kindled a fire was one of the most horrifying experiences imaginable.  You managed to snuff out the flames, but they caused enough damage that you could only picture the disaster if your house had burned down in the middle of winter.

Food became scarcer.  You’d had this fantasy that God would provide manna in your need.  Maybe He still would, but perhaps He required you to suffer a little so as to try your faith, to assure that you were worthy.  If that was His criteria, it was working well.  The store of canned goods dwindled.  A few of the jars hadn’t sealed properly when canned, and your wife was poisoned by eating a peach.  It was only after a few bites that she realized its toxicity, but by then it was too late.  The next few days were scary ones as she became extremely dehydrated.  Carting so much water up from the well a quarter mile away almost proved your undoing.

You stumbled over a hidden root on one of your numerous trips to the well and back.  The face-plant left a serious bruise, but worse, when you tried to break your fall, you sprained your wrist while also sustaining a deep gash in your arm by a sharp branch.  The next day it was infected leaving both you and your wife ailing and weakened.

Not long after that the marauders came.  It was about that time that another earthquake struck.  The ground opened and you nearly fell into a deep rift.  For the rest of that day, you tried to make sense of the weird sky with comets streaking across the daytime horizon.

As you and your wife approached a town hoping you could find some morsel of food that hadn’t already been taken, terrible fires broke out as an unending procession of meteor showers cascaded from high above.  Trees, bushes, and grasses erupted into a flaming inferno that jumped from house to house and drove you from that community.  Scorched and blackened from the heat, you could barely walk in your pain and weakness.  How you wished there had been a pre-Tribulation Rapture!  Perhaps God would have granted that if you and so many hadn’t mocked the possibility, with Him finally saying, “Fine, you don’t want deliverance through my Glorious Appearing?  You wanted nothing more than to prove how strong in the Lord you were?  I desired to snatch you out of this alien place, but you preferred to burrow in and make the earth your home.  Very well, so be it.”

You came to a river, and as you were about to drink in your great thirst, unmindful of bacterial contamination and having been unsuccessful in prior attempts to purify, you noticed the water had begun to turn a sickly yellow.  A cautious drop on your tongue proved how bitter and toxic it was.

And then the lights went out.  The sun disappeared and total darkness came over the land.  It caused you to wander as though blind, and all you and your wife could do was sit and wait and hope.  Thankfully, the celestial bodies did reappear, but their presence was fleeting.  Time and again the sun winked out and you were stranded in the blackness that followed.

Your vitality ebbed to such a low point that you began wishing you could die.  Why had you thought this era of testing for the entire earth would be something magnificent for you and other believers?  If only it really had been for the anti-God, Christ-rejecting world, and not for the entire church as well!  What foolishness this fantasy was to believe in this being a time of great triumph.

It was at that moment you spotted an eagle and heard a cry echoing overhead: “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!”

Paging through your ragtag Bible in the book of Revelation, you realized that only the 5^th Trumpet was about to be blown.  There was so much more agony and suffering ahead.  Despair overtook you, and you wondered how God could punish His children in this way.  What happened to His church being the beloved Bride of Christ?  What kind of a God was He to torture the people He supposedly loved above all others?  Something was drastically wrong.

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One of the most important aspects of the fact that there will be a pre-Tribulation Rapture is the character of God.  He is not a wife-beater, and that’s exactly what He would be if He allowed His true church to enter and endure the Tribulation.

No, God is loving above all else, and faithful to those whom He has promised to deliver from His wrath to come.  This terrible period that will soon encompass the earth isn’t meant for those of us who have laid down ourselves and our agendas to Him – we who have repented of our sins, trusted in His magnificent promises, and confessed that Jesus alone is God, our Savior and Lord.

Do those who persist in thinking the church must experience the Tribulation have any idea of its severity?  I question whether they do.  There are some who think it’ll be a breeze because God will carry them through without incident and harm.  I think there will be help to those newly minted saints who come to Christ during these years, but Scripture recounts how Antichrist will impose his satanic rules and cause his minions to persecute, hunt down, behead, and martyr many.  To the Jew first, then the Gentile.  To the church first, then the unbelieving world.  It will not be a pleasant seven years for anyone, i.e. those who escape from one frying pan into the fire, to maybe or maybe not be able to flee until the next ordeal.

We can rejoice that God loves us so much, that in His mercy He indeed will bring us a great deliverance via the Rapture, so that we don’t face all these things.

To God be the glory!