Page 227 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture Question: Revised and Enlarged Edition
which you arc suffering. God is just: He will pay back trouble
to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are trou­
bled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus
is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful
angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not
obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with
everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the
Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day he comes to
be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all
those who have believed. This includes you. because you be­
lieved our testimony to you" (2 Thess. 1:5-10).
Those who hold to a posttribulational rapture propose
that the Thessalonians will be delivered at the end of the
Tribulation by the coming of the Lord and that this is a con­
tradiction of the pretribulational view. On the surface this
seems plausible. However, in fact, the Thessalonians were not
delivered by the second coming of Christ and actually died
before either the Rapture or the Tribulation overtook the
world. Posttribulationists explain this by saying that the
Thessalonians are representative of the last generation of
Christians. But how could this be a comfort to the Thessalo­
nians in any realistic sense?
The pretribulational explanation is more cogent. The
Thessalonians are being told that God in His own time will
destroy their persecutors. Indeed the persecutors of the Thes­
salonians will not be present at the second coming of Christ,
for their resurrection is delayed until the end of the thousand
years of the millennial kingdom. At that time they will be
raised from the dead and cast into the lake of fire. Even if
posttribulationists are correct, the judgment of the persecutors
of the Thessalonians will not take place at the second coming
of Christ. Only if the Thessalonians are taken as representa­
tive of the saints at the time of the Second Coming, and their
persecutors are taken as representative of the wicked at the
time of the Second Coming, can this passage have any re-
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