Page 201 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture Question: Revised and Enlarged Edition
it will be a time of unparalleled suffering for the world as a
whole and for Christians, in particular. Those who come to
Christ in that time will face the probability of martyrdom. A
study of the Book of Revelation, if taken at all seriously, even if
due allowance is made for the symbolic, reveals an unparal­
leled situation of catastrophy. In the light of these facts, it
would seem that posttribulationists have a major problem:
how they can explain Paul's comforting the Thessalonian
church with the hope of the Rapture when, as a matter of fact,
if they were to be plunged into Great Tribulation, most of
them would be martyred. No amount of exegetical sidestep­
ping of the main issues can avoid this important question.
A posttribulational outlook would have also changed the
attitude of the Thessalonian Christians. If they were actually
facing the Great Tribulation, they should have rejoiced that
those who died in Christ had escaped its rigors. In Revelation
14:13, those who die arc declared blessed because they escape
persecution. Hicben has summarized this point well in stat­
ing, “But if they had been taught that the church must go
through the great tribulation, the logical reaction for them
would have been to rejoice that these loved ones had escaped
that great period of suffering, which they felt was about to
occur.’’5
Taken as a whole, 1 Thessalonians 4 is one of the
strongest passages on the pretribulational interpretation and
offers the least comfort to the posttribulational position. Al­
though many have attempted, and Gundry has gone to great
lengths to explain away this problem, the fact is the problem
remains for posttribulationism. If this were the only passage
dealing with the Rapture, posttribulationism would not have
any case at all.6 There are other passages, however, of which
1 Thessalonians 5 is one, where posttribulationists have posed
some problems that pretribulationists should consider care­
fully.

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