Luke 21 is Luke's version of what is known as the Olivet Discourse, which is given in Matthew and Mark as well. This is where Jesus teaches the disciples about the very last days. It starts out with a prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD and then the scene shifts to the end times, when calamity is to come upon the whole world. This is understood to refer to the Day of the Lord or the Great Tribulation we are talking about in this thread, and Luke 21:36 tells us to pray to to be worthy to escape that worldwide calamity. And those who teach the Pre-Tribulation Rapture take it to mean we want to be worthy to be in the rapture before the Tribulation begins.
The switch occurs in the second half of Luke 21:24 about the "times of the Gentiles," how Jerusalem will be given over to the Gentiles until "the times of the Gentiles are finished." And the passage goes on to describe signs in the heavens and the coming of the Son of Man. We are clearly in a time long future to the calamity of 70AD when escape can't be a matter of fleeing to the mountains because the entire world is to be in tribulation.
quote:Luke 21 is Luke's version of what is known as the Olivet Discourse, which is given in Matthew and Mark as well
With some significant rewriting of it.
quote:This is where Jesus teaches the disciples about the very last days. It starts out with a prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD and then the scene shifts to the end times, when calamity is to come upon the whole world.
The Tribulation IS the fall of Jerusalem as is quite clear if you compare it with Mark (or Matthew - those two are almost identical). Mark and Matthew do NOT have a shift in time either - that is one of the important changes.
quote:This is understood to refer to the Day of the Lord or the Great Tribulation we are talking about in this thread, and Luke 21:36 tells us to pray to to be worthy to escape that worldwide calamity. And those who teach the Pre-Tribulation Rapture take it to mean we want to be worthy to be in the rapture before the Tribulation begins.
Nope. It is a little clearer in Mark - in that Mark actually mentions the word tribulation but the time jump is to the Second Coming in verse 27.
Luke 21
24 And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.
25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;
26 Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.
27 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
quote:The switch occurs in the second half of Luke 21:24 about the "times of the Gentiles," how Jerusalem will be given over to the Gentiles until "the times of the Gentiles are finished." And the passage goes on to describe signs in the heavens and the coming of the Son of Man.
Well, exactly - the jump is to events AFTER the Tribulation. That pretty much kills your whole argument.
quote:We are clearly in a time long future to the calamity of 70AD...
The shift in time is not that great. All the events - all of them - must complete within a generation (21:32). Revelation 11:2 suggests that the gap will be only 42 months.
quote:...when escape can't be a matter of fleeing to the mountains because the entire world is to be in tribulation.
You are suggesting a post-Tribulation Rapture to escape the Second Coming. (The advice to run to the mountains does refer to the actual Tribulation - which you have put in 70AD. I don’t think that the Rapture happened before then.)
Don't mean to jump in on your discussion but here is another thought from the Epistles by N T Wright
quote:The American obsession with the second coming of Jesus especially with distorted interpretations of it continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre[1]. Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a literal rapture in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been left behind. This pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of (distorted) faith.
This dramatic end-time scenario is based (wrongly, as we shall see) on Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, where he writes: For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17). What on earth (or in heaven) did Paul mean?
It is Paul who should be credited with creating this scenario. Jesus himself, as I have argued in various books, never predicted such an event[2]. The gospel passages about the Son of Man coming on the clouds (Mark 13:26, 14:62, for example) are about Jesus’ vindication, his coming to heaven from earth. The parables about a returning king or master (for example, Luke 19:11-27) were originally about God returning to Jerusalem, not about Jesus returning to earth. This, Jesus seemed to believe, was an event within space-time history, not one that would end it forever. The Ascension of Jesus and the Second Coming are nevertheless vital Christian doctrines[3], and I don’t deny that I believe some future event will result in the personal presence of Jesus within God’s new creation. This is taught throughout the New Testament outside the Gospels. But this event won’t in any way resemble the Left Behind account. Understanding what will happen requires a far more sophisticated cosmology than the one in which heaven is somewhere up there in our universe, rather than in a different dimension, a different space-time, altogether.
The New Testament, building on ancient biblical prophecy, envisages that the creator God will remake heaven and earth entirely, affirming the goodness of the old Creation but overcoming its mortality and corruptibility (e.g., Romans 8:18-27; Revelation 21:1; Isaiah 65:17, 66:22). When that happens, Jesus will appear within the resulting new world (e.g., Colossians 3:4; 1 John 3:2). Paul’s description of Jesus’ reappearance in 1 Thessalonians 4 is a brightly colored version of what he says in two other passages, 1 Corinthians 15:51-54 and Philippians 3:20-21: At Jesus’ coming or appearing, those who are still alive will be changed or transformed so that their mortal bodies will become incorruptible, deathless. This is all that Paul intends to say in Thessalonians, but here he borrows imageryfrom biblical and political sourcesto enhance his message. Little did he know how his rich metaphors would be misunderstood two millennia later.
First, Paul echoes the story of Moses coming down the mountain with the Torah. The trumpet sounds, a loud voice is heard, and after a long wait, Moses comes to see what’s been going on in his absence.
Second, he echoes Daniel 7, in which the people of the saints of the Most High (that is, the one like a son of man) are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up to sit with God in glory. This metaphor, applied to Jesus in the Gospels, is now applied to Christians who are suffering persecution.
Third, Paul conjures up images of an emperor visiting a colony or province. The citizens go out to meet him in open country and then escort him into the city. Paul’s image of the people meeting the Lord in the air should be read with the assumption that the people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade world.
Paul’s mixed metaphors of trumpets blowing and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are not to be understood as literal truth, as the Left Behind series suggests, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.
Paul’s misunderstood metaphors present a challenge for us: How can we reuse biblical imagery, including Paul’s, so as to clarify the truth, not distort it? And how can we do so, as he did, in such a way as to subvert the political imagery of the dominant and dehumanizing empires of our world?
We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic vision of God’s whole creation?
Edited by GDR, : No reason given.
Edited by AdminPhat, : edited paragraph spacing to make it easier to read.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God.
Well, GDR, I don't think I'm up to taking on N T Wright except to say that I don't get how he decides that a concept that sounds as physically literal as the Rapture descriptions do is really metaphorical. I cringe from the thought of getting into that kind of semantic argument here for the umpteenth time. The English language just doesn't support turning such a concept into a metaphor so I have to suppose he's winging it, with little or no justification, simply because he doesn't have the faith to believe in such a literal Rapture. And that's all I want to say at the moment.
The only way I can answer PaulK is to say that you can't just read a passage of such complex prophecy as Luke 21 as if it's chronological, it has to be read in the context of all the other passages on the same subject, and although Luke 21 leaps to the context of the Second Coming that doesn't rule out a Pre-Tribulation Rapture seven years prior because the Rapture is in essence part of the Second Coming: once it occurs you know the Second Coming is seven years future.
The Tribulation is described in many different places that make it clear it's the Day of the Lord that has been prophesied throughout the Old Testament to be a period of God's wrath on the earth no one will be able to withstand. And it certainly does precede the Second Coming so there's nothing out of order abourt that, then when in 21:36 we are admonished to pray that we will be worthy to escape the outpouring of wrath, it's talking about escaping it before it happens of course, and since it's a worldwide tribulation escape by being taken to heaven is a strong possibility.
That possibility is confirmed by other scriptures. Few Bible verses or even whole passages stand alone, and those from which the Pre Trib Rapture is deduced are scattered and often ambiguous. It takes more study than I'm up to and when I've tried I quickly get bogged down in the ambiguities and give up. Through most of my studies I held to the idea that the Rapture, which is indisputably described in the Bible as a real event, would happen at the time of Jesus' Second Coming. Understanding why that interpretation doesn't hold together scripturally really does take quite a bit of study of all the Biblical references in relation to each other.
It's taken some time to become familiar with the arguments for the Pre Trib Rapture by God's preachers and teachers who have worked through those ambiguities and do a good job of making the case; and there are many who argue for it who are independent of each other and yet come to the same conclusion using the same Biblical references, which adds to its credibility.
I've been listening lately to John MacArthur's preachings on the subject, and he makes use of the same scriptures Jeffress and others do, which just keeps piling on the evidence for it. He also organizes the material in a way that's easier for me to grasp, unless that's just because by now it's becoming familiar enough to me that I don't have to struggle as much to get the logic of it. And he's succinct. I'll post a video or two of his though it may be too much for people to watch through.
quote:The only way I can answer PaulK is to say that you can't just read a passage of such complex prophecy as Luke 21 as if it's chronological, it has to be read in the context of all the other passages on the same subject, and although Luke 21 leaps to the context of the Second Coming that doesn't rule out a Pre-Tribulation Rapture seven years prior because the Rapture is in essence part of the Second Coming: once it occurs you know the Second Coming is seven years future.
Luke 21 is not that complex. And it is easy to see where it is not chronological. It is probably much better to read it alongside the original - or at least earlier - version in Mark 13 (which the author of Luke had access to) because the rewriting obscures some points.
But - as usual - you don’t deal with my actual points. I am not even claiming that Luke 21 rules out a pre-Tribulation Rapture, only that it does not support it.
quote:The Tribulation is described in many different places that make it clear it's the Day of the Lord that has been prophesied throughout the Old Testament to be a period of God's wrath on the earth no one will be able to withstand. And it certainly does precede the Second Coming so there's nothing out of order abourt that, then when in 21:36 we are admonished to pray that we will be worthy to escape the outpouring of wrath, it's talking about escaping it before it happens of course, and since it's a worldwide tribulation escape by being taken to heaven is a strong possibility
However, escaping by taking actions on Earth is clearly present in the text - in the part that actually covers the Tribulation (as I pointed out) There is no equivalent mention of escaping by being absent from the Earth. Speculations unsupported by the text are not great evidence and you are going against the natural reading of 1 Thessalonians and contradicting Revelation 20.
quote:That possibility is confirmed by other scriptures. Few Bible verses or even whole passages stand alone, and those from which the Pre Trib Rapture is deduced are scattered and often ambiguous. It takes more study than I'm up to and when I've tried I quickly get bogged down in the ambiguities and give up.
More accurately the Rapture is read into verses which are open to other - and often better - interpretations. Which means that it is not really true to say that there is confirming scripture.
Especially as Revelation 20:4-6 contradicts a pre-Tribulation Rapture.
Here is is again:
4 And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
5 But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.
6 Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.
The FIRST resurrection - of Christian martyrs - immediately precedes the Millenium. There will be no general resurrection of Christians until after the Millenium. Since the Rapture includes a general resurrection of Christians it would have to be after the Millenium unless the Revelatiion is wrong.
quote:I've been listening lately to John MacArthur's preachings on the subject, and he makes use of the same scriptures Jeffress and others do, which just keeps piling on the evidence for it.
More accurately it confirms that there is no good evidence for the pre-Tribulation Rapture. Who would use such hopelessly weak arguments if there was a good case for it ?
quote:I'll post a video or two of his though it may be too much for people to watch through.
If he has good arguments why not write them out? If he doesn’t - as seems very likely - watching the video is a waste of time.
Here's John MacArrhur on the Pre Tribulation Rapture. Scriptures he refers to as defining the concept are
1 Thessalonians 4,
1 Corinthians 15 and John 14. These are whole chapters so it may be too much to copy out.
AbE: I see PaulK wants me to write out his arguments. I'll try to do that but I want to get at least one other video first. . .
However, escaping by taking actions on Earth is clearly present in the text - in the part that actually covers the Tribulation (as I pointed out)
No, that is where Jesus is talking about the coming destruction of the temple and Jerusalem, from which He tells them to flee to the mountains. The scene doesn't change until verse 24 where the final Tribulation or Day of the Lord is foreshadowed. Luke 21 is just one account of the Olivet Disourse where Jesus talks about both the 70 AD destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and uses that as a model to jump to the Day of the Lord or the final Tribulation coming on the entire Earth. The other accounts are in Mark 13 and Matthew 24-25. They are all to be read together to get a fuller picture.
The fuller talk of which the one I posted is just a part is titled "The Final Generation" in which MacArthur discussed Mark 13 (and says "this generation" clearly refers to the generation which will be alive at the time of the events Jesus prophesies.) The whole talk is in two parts, about one hour each so I'm sure it's too much to listen to, but I'll post the first hour and hope I'll be able to come back and give at least an outline of the points he is making. . .
. Near the beginning of this talk MacArthur says that he''s been preaching for over fifty years on this topic and through all his studies of the scriptures he's only continued to confirm his understanding of the Pre Trib Rapture. Other topics may be seen differently by continuing to study them over time, and certainly my own study of this topic keeps changing for that matter, but he is a much better reader of scripture than I am and the evidence for the Pre Tribulation Rapture continues to be compelling, and he lays it out compellingly as a result.
Oh, yes of course, PaulK, you know much better than John MacArthur what the Bible says. Of course. Nevertheless he does represent the many preachers and theologians who argue the Pre Trib Rapture from the scriptures, so I guess the reader can decide which of you makes the more persuasive case.
quote:No, that is where Jesus is talking about the coming destruction of the temple and Jerusalem, from which He tells them to flee to the mountains
Which is the Tribulation. You don’t see it because Luke’s rewrite added in a gap between the Tribulation and the Second Coming and you have magnified that gap to around 2000 years to try and fit the text to your beliefs. Even though Luke tells us that the gap can’t be anywhere near that long, as I already pointed out,
In reality the Oliver Discourse is primarily about the destruction of Herod’s Temple. The Disciples ask Jesus to tell them when the Temple will be destroyed and Jesus tells them - the idea that he suddenly started talking about something completely unrelated is not justified by anything in the text. It comes from the reality that the Temple was destroyed and the end did not come. But that’s not a valid reason to rewrite the text.
quote:The other accounts are in Mark 13 and Matthew 24-25. They are all to be read together to get a fuller picture.
A shame that you didn’t do that, then. I have. That’s how you can see that the fall of Jerusalem is the Tribulation - because the parallel verses in Mark are rather clearer on the subject. And I can tell you that Matthew’s version is pretty much redundant. It’s basically a copy of Mark’s.
quote:The fuller talk of which the one I posted is just a part is titled "The Final Generation" in which MacArthur discussed Mark 13 (and says "this generation" clearly refers to the generation which will be alive at the time of the events Jesus prophesies.)
That is certainly false - it is not at all clear. Indeed there are pointers in the text that quite strongly suggest otherwise. However, even if that is the meaning it means all the events must occur in the span of a single generation So, no. A span of close to 2000 years is right out.
quote:Oh, yes of course, PaulK, you know much better than John MacArthur what the Bible says.
I certainly know better than you.
quote:Nevertheless he does represent the many preachers and theologians who argue the Pre Trib Rapture from the scriptures
And we’ve seen those arguments and they are weak. Are you ever going to deal with Revelation 20:4-6 - apart from ignoring verse 4 and insisting on your own ideas instead ?
The FIRST resurrection - of Christian martyrs - immediately precedes the Millenium. There will be no general resurrection of Christians until after the Millenium. Since the Rapture includes a general resurrection of Christians it would have to be after the Millenium unless the Revelatiion is wrong.
No, this is the situation I mentioned above somewhere that I've found to be problematic though part of the Pre Trib teaching, that there are two different sets of believers. The Church is raptured and is in heaven during all the events of the Tribulation. During the Tribulation many others are converted but they are a different group, they are not the Church. A third of Israel will be among them, and they will be the "great multitude" of Revelation 7.
I am still not at all clear how we are to think of them. It took me a long time to accept the idea that there are two separate groups of believers at all, but even now that I accept it I feel a need to know a lot more about this second group. In any case they aren't the Church, they are the martyrs of the Great Tribulation and they have a separate judgment from the Church.
The Church's judgment is called the Bema Seat and it's for rewarding the Christians according to their deeds. The Church is spared judgment by God's wrath because Jesus died for us, so our judgment is what our deeds have earned us, which will be different for each individual. The other judgment is the Great White Throne Judgment, and although I know the unbelievers are sent to the Lake of Fire from there I am not at all clear about the believers of the Tribulation except that they are invited to inherit the Kingdom of God.
I would suggest that you refrain from commenting on MacArthur's reading of the generation that will be alive at the time of the events prophesied before hearing his argumemts. He's certainly heard yours. Ad nauseam I would suppose.
quote:No, this is the situation I mentioned above somewhere that I've found to be problematic though part of the Pre Trib teaching, that there are two different sets of believers. The Church is raptured and is in heaven during all the events of the Tribulation. During the Tribulation many others are converted but they are a different group, they are not the Church. A third of Israel will be among them, and they will be the "great multitude" of Revelation 7.
That is what the Pre Trib lot SAY. It is an interpretation, it is not the only possible interpretation. Do you really think that a human interpretation overrides something that the Bible clearly states ?
Obviously there can’t be a big resurrection of all the previous Christians before the FIRST resurrection. The word FIRST should tell you that.
quote:I would suggest that you refrain from commenting on MacArthur's reading of the generation that will be alive at the time of the events prophesied before hearing his argumemts.
I’ve refrained from commenting on any arguments that I haven’t already heard. I have commented on one obvious falsehood and on arguments already presented in this thread. I don’t see why I should refrain from either of this things.
I'm going with the reputable exegetes over you, my dear PK. As I said early on I've had to struggle to understand as much as I do, and your contradictions are not compelling in the slightest. Everybody at EvC thinks they know what the Bible says in so many direct words. Well that is one of the biggest delusions anybody has about the Bible.
Anyway I'm now trying to get a grip on the Millennium. See you later.
quote:You give no hint of having heard MacArthur on the subject
And I don’t claim to. However you did claim that he uses the same scriptures and we already know that those offer no real support for a pre Trib Rapture.
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