Will Christians Go Through The Tribulation Period? (I) Series

The rapid changes we have experienced in 2020 has caused many of us to think more about the end times. Think about how dramatically the world has changed since March. It makes one wonder what changes are coming in the days ahead. Will the pace of change continue? Will it slow down? Will it accelerate moving rapidly toward the end of the age? I am optimistic about our future. God always takes care of His people. But I also see trends that alarm me: moral decline in society, increased governmental control, pressures toward globalization, and compromise made by the ecumenical move to one-world religion.i These developments point toward the end of the age prophesied in Scripture. They awaken in us questions that need to be answered from a reliable source. For us that source is the word of God.

Today we will explore one question. It a difficult question to answer: Will Christians go through the Tribulation Period? Or we might put it this way: Will the church go through the Tribulation Period that is prophesied in the book of Revelation? If so, will it go through the whole seven years or just the first three and a half years? Will all the church go through the tribulation or only those Christians who were not ready for the rapture? There are many complications involved in attempting an answer to the question.

The three dominate theories that offer an answer are:

(1) The pre-tribulation position which says the church will be raptured before the seven-year tribulation period begins.

(2) The post-tribulation position believes the church will be caught up at the end of that period.

(3) And the mid-tribulation rapture theory says the church will be raptured halfway through the tribulation period.

There are good, knowledgeable people in each of these camps. I respect the scholarship and sincerity of all those leaders. I don’t consider myself an expert on eschatology (the branch of theology that studies the last things), but I am a student of the Bible and this subject constitutes a large portion of Scripture. For the next couple of Sundays, we will search out an answer to our question.

Before assessing these positions and attempting an answer, we need to establish some foundational concepts. We do not have time to do this in depth. But three vital issues must be considered if we are to proceed effectively. We will address the first one today and the other two next week. Then we will explore Scripture for at least a tentative answer to the question. The three foundational concepts are:

I. The Method to Use for Interpreting Bible Prophecy.

II. God’s Purpose for the Tribulation Period.

III. The Mystery of the Church Age.

Our focus today is: The Method to Use for Interpreting Bible Prophecy.

The primary reason there are so many different opinions on this subject is that people are using different methods of interpreting Scripture, and in particular prophetic passages concerning the last days. Hermeneutics is “the discipline that deals with principles of interpretation.”ii A valid hermeneutical method must be consistently applied if we are to makes sense of what the Bible says about the last days. Hermeneutics is a huge subject in itself. Bible colleges and seminaries require at least one course in the hermeneutics. If we get the method of interpretation wrong, we will probably misinterpret biblical passages that inform our answer. It will be like building a house on a crooked, defective foundation. During the history of the church various methods have been used, yielding extremely different results.

The two prevalent methods used in interpreting prophecy are the allegorical and the literal methods. The literal method is often called grammatical-historical method.

The allegorical method minimizes the literal meaning of a passage and looks for a hidden, spiritual meaning. It is influenced by platonic thought. “Plato taught that true reality actually lay behind what appeared to the human eye.”iii What the text actually says is not nearly as important as the allegorical, spiritual meaning assigned to it by the reader. The Jewish scholar, Philo used this method in his interpretation of the Old Testament. Later, the church father, Origin popularized it in Alexandria.iv

The problem with the allegorical method is that the interpretation is open to the subjective whim or imagination of the interpreter. It abandons the common sense of the words and fails to uphold the basic authority of Scripture itself. Using this method, the interpreter can inject his own ideas, justifying them as a higher, more spiritual meaning. There is no objective way to test his interpretation.v This is not a reliable way to interpret the Bible. Therefore, we reject this approach in favor of the literal method.

In contrast to the allegorical method, the literal (grammatical-historical) method interprets Scripture according to the normal meaning of the words and grammar. Before making an application of the passage, the interpreter seeks to understand what the historical writer was saying to the historical audience in that context. In this school of thought there can be many applications of the principles being communicated, but there is only one interpretation. And that interpretation is based on what the author communicated to the listener in his day.