Page 38 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture Question: Revised and Enlarged Edition

Tribulation in General Contrasted to
the Great Tribulation
Many posttribulationists beg the entire question of
whether the church will go through the Tribulation by as­
serting that the church has always been and is now in the
Tribulation. If this is true, there is no ground for even discuss­
ing the question. George H. Fromow, for instance, stated
plainly: “The Church is already passing through ‘the Great
Tribulation,’ according to the sense of Rev. vii. vv. 13, 14. . ..
Rev. vii. is the only passage where we find the Tribulation
called ‘great.’ Its use as embracing the whole of the Church’s
course, corresponds with the entire record of the Scriptural
history of the redeemed people of God, of ‘Saints,’ or ‘Gra­
cious Ones,’ or ‘Church,’ however they may be described.”2
The statement by Fromow illustrates the two leading
characteristics upon which the conclusions of posttribu-
lationism are built: (1) confusion of the Great Tribulation
with tribulation in general; (2) confusion of the church with
saints as a whole. Fromow is guilty, of course, of an oversight
in affirming that Revelation 7 is the only passage where the
Tribulation is called “great.” Christ used the same expression
in Matthew 24:21 (Kjv) and the same period is frequently
described as unprecedented (Jer. 30:7; Dan. 12:1). Some post­
tribulationists like George E. Ladd and Robert H. Gundry
concede that there is a future unfulfilled tribulation, but the
tendency is to confuse the issue in such a way that there is no
proper ground for discussion of pretribulationism. Post­
tribulationists like Arthur Katterjohn solve the problem by
largely ignoring what the Bible teaches about the great
Tribulation.3 For instance, he discussed Revelation 7:1-8 con­
cerning the 144,000, but he skipped Revelation 7:9-17, dealing
with the martyred dead of the Tribulation, and dismissed the
severity of the various judgments by calling them “largely
metaphorical.”
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