Myth

True or Not

The Tribulation is a time after the rapture of the saints and before the world ends that is years in length.

Not true.  When you take a word out of the Bible that means any time of stress and persecution and change it’s concept to a particular time of stress and persecution you change the understanding that you receive from the study of God’s word.  When the Bible uses the word tribulation it is referring to the local time people are experiencing and has nothing to do with the end of the world.

Matthew 24:21 refers to the end of the world and supports the belief of the Tribulation time

It would seem so until you read verse 34 and find that those in the living generation of that time would not perish until all of this has come to pass.  So, we are either in the Tribulation time right now or he is talking about something else.  He says that this generation will see all that he is talking about come to pass.  A generation is defined as a period of thirty to fifty years.  Forty years after the writing of Matthew 24 Rome descended on the Jerusalem with a vengeance and the estimates of the dead range around One Million four hundred thousand. (1,400,000) (Josephus “Jewish Wars”) 1,100,000 in Jerusalem and another 300,000 in the surrounding area.

Revelation 7:14 is referring to those that come to accept Christ during the time of tribulation after the rapture of the saints.

That is not what the verse says.  People looking for justification can easily imagine that this verse supports their belief but all this verse is saying is that those mentioned had suffered for their belief in Christ.  It could have been any suffering or it could have been the suffering referred to in Matthew 24.

When the Rapture comes the Christians will be taken to meet Christ and everyone else will be left waking around wondering what just happened.

It won’t happen like you think. This belief is base on Luke 17 but the question they asked was about Christ Kingdom which is the Church and that this Church would be rejected by the current generation (Luke 17:25).  Then, like in Matthew 24 he tells of the tribulation about to fall on Jerusalem that the Church would have to endure.  So many people murdered and the historian Josephus says it was random slaughter.  Whomever the solders ran into they killed.  If you were lucky and did not move around a lot you could survive.  Josephus describes the killing as one of opportunity with so many to kill that missing one here or there did not matter.  They raised so many crosses that they literally ran out of room to raise the crosses and wood to make crosses with.  Most were not crucified but slaughtered in the street.

The world will end on a day chosen by God

True.  2 Peter 3:10 says it will happen suddenly like a thief in the night.  We will not expect it and the duration of it will be a whole lot closer to a day than to years. Verse 6 and 7 seem to be saying it will happen like the flood of Noah’s day but this time the new earth will be in heaven.  Those that are saved will join Jesus in the air while those that are condemned will probably experience the destruction of this world.  But, that is it, no tribulation, no thousand years stuff.

In Thessalonica the Christians had been confused by misconceptions that were going around about how the world will end.  Not surprising that the same thing is happening now.  He points out in verse 14 that as we believe in the resurrection we can take comfort in knowing that eternal life is real.  Knowing that we shed our fear of the end of the world as we won't be here. 

Revelation is written in apocryphal images that the Christians, especially the Hebrew Christians, could understand the concepts while the Romans would misinterpret them based on their background.  

Consider a simple example of the "Angels of the seven Churches".  The Christians new that the angels were messengers of God.  Angels delivered the instructions from God to his people.  During 90AD, when this was written, the Christians knew who the ones were in the seven churches that were preaching the word of God to the congregations.  The Angels of the seven Churches were the pulpit preachers or the 90AD equivalent.   What they were being told was to remain faithful to what they were taught and not develop priests and popes.  They were not to change the worship into what they wanted but be faithful to what they knew God wanted or they would be taken out as easily as the jerking of a candlestick.  The catholic say that it was about this time that a man named Anacletus built a small chapel over the gave of Peter.  Today it is called the Sistine Chapel.  Anacletus is referred to as the Bishop of Rome and they do not mean the he held the office of the Elder.  They mean that he held an office above that of the leaders of the local congregation.  What they are in fact saying is that he held an office that changes the order given by God and in so doing have done what the book of Revelation was warning against.