Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The Tribulation Or the Day of the Lord?

“The Tribulation” is not the only term the pre-tribulation rapture camp has misused. They quite often apply the term “the Day of the Lord” to the entire 70th Week, too, because of their preconceived idea that the entire seven year period is God’s wrath. Most claim the Day of the Lord begins with the opening of the first seal, and completely ignore the fact that Joel 2:31 informs us that the Day of the Lord will not take place until after the sign in the sun, moon and stars, which takes place sometime after the sixth seal is removed from scroll.

To confuse the issue even more, they use their term “the Tribulation” interchangeably with the biblical term “the Day of the Lord,” even though there is no biblical foundation for this. This swapping of terms causes much unnecessary confusion, and leads to many wrong conclusions.

It must be understood that the Great Tribulation (Matt. 24:21) that begins after the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15) is a period of time containing a trial that’s aimed at followers of Christ, while The Day of the Lord is a period of time that contains a trial that is aimed at God’s enemies. The Great Tribulation and The Day of the Lord are completely different trials aimed at completely different people, and take place at completely different times. First, the Great Tribulation upon the elect, and then at, or slightly after the gathering of the elect, The Day of the Lord and God’s wrath will begin.

In the next post, I'll show an example from one of John Walvoord’s books where he erroneously swaps the term “The Day of the Lord” for the term “The Tribulation” in an attempt to prove the pre-tribulation rapture theory. While it may not have been Walvoord’s intent to be sneaky, the fact remains, and will be shown, that his swapping of terms tortures the biblical text in a way that usually slips under the noses of many innocent and unaware individuals, leading them to simply believe the pre-trib argument as presented by Walvoord and many of his counterparts. I know, sounds kind of like a conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?

To continue in this four part article click here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi dave great blog
something i've noticed is pretribbers say the coming of the lord and catching away are different
the former only being post trib and latter being pretrib

yet they quote 1 thess as a pretrib catching up which mentions "coming of the lord"

we who remain until the "coming of the lord"

we who are alive and remain shall be "caught up"

then they try to explain that this one passage is an exception!!

PWTribune said...

I'm sure you've noticed that there's an "exception" for just about every passage on this subject!