Will people be saved during the tribulation?

Question 10040.

I am often asked whether tribulation salvation is possible, and the short answer I give is a glad and immediate yes. When the Church has been caught up and the door of this present age of grace seems to slam shut, Scripture does not describe an empty earth abandoned to judgement and left to rot. It describes a harvest. The seven years that follow the rapture are the darkest chapter in human history, and yet they are also the setting for one of the largest ingatherings of souls the world will ever witness. God does not run out of mercy at the rapture. He keeps calling sinners home right through the storm.

People sometimes assume that once the rapture happens the offer of forgiveness is withdrawn, as though God grows weary of saving and simply gives up on the world. That is not the God I read about in my Bible. Right through the period John calls the great thlipsis, that crushing tribulation distress, heaven keeps summoning men and women to repentance. So the real question is not whether tribulation salvation happens but how it happens, who responds to it, and what it will cost the ones who believe in that terrible day.

What Scripture teaches about tribulation salvation

The clearest window into tribulation salvation is Revelation 7. John sees 144,000 sealed from the tribes of Israel, and then a second company so large that no one can number it, drawn from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne in white robes with palm branches in their hands. When one of the elders asks who they are, the answer is plain in Revelation 7:14. These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation, who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. That is unmistakable gospel language, and it settles the matter for me.

So tribulation salvation is not a fringe idea I have smuggled into the text. It sits right on the surface of Revelation. The same book that pours out seal and trumpet and bowl also shows a countless multitude worshipping the Lamb, and every one of them arrived there through faith exercised after the Church was gone. The blood that saves them is the same blood that saves you and me today. There is no second gospel and no secret back door. There is one Saviour, one cross, and one narrow way home, in that day as in this.

How the gospel goes out after the rapture

If the Church is removed at the rapture, a fair question follows at once. Who does the preaching? The answer is that God is never short of witnesses. The 144,000 sealed servants of Revelation 7 and 14 appear to be Jewish evangelists, marked out and divinely protected for the task. Alongside them, Revelation 14:6 shows an angel flying in mid-heaven with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on the earth. Two witnesses prophesy in Jerusalem for 1,260 days, a ministry I open up in my study of the two witnesses of Revelation 11.

Add to those human and angelic heralds the Bibles, the recordings, the sermons and the testimonies left behind by believers who suddenly vanished, and you begin to see that tribulation salvation will have no shortage of means. There is also the sheer force of events. When millions disappear in a moment and the world plunges into the horrors of Revelation 6 to 19, many who shrugged at Jesus for years will take Him with deadly seriousness. Sorrow has a way of opening ears that comfort kept firmly shut. Suffering saves no one, but God in mercy uses the shaking of the nations to bring proud hearts to the cross at last.

Does 2 Thessalonians 2 rule out tribulation salvation?

Some readers stumble over 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12, where God sends a strong delusion so that those who refused to love the truth believe what is false. Does that shut the door on tribulation salvation altogether? I do not think it does, and here is why. Paul is describing a specific judgement on people who have already, decisively and knowingly, rejected the truth they heard and loved their unrighteousness instead. It is a settling of accounts with hardened rebels, not a blanket ban on faith. The countless multitude who bow to the Lamb in Revelation 7 are living proof that the delusion falls on the defiant, not on every soul alive.

I take Scripture to interpret Scripture at this point. A vast throng saved out of the tribulation cannot sit comfortably beside a claim that nobody at all can be saved in the tribulation. The delusion of 2 Thessalonians 2 and the harvest of Revelation 7 simply describe two different sorts of people. One group loved their sin, hardened themselves against every warning, and got exactly what they chose. The other group heard, humbled themselves, believed, and were washed clean by the blood of the Lamb. Tribulation salvation belongs to the second group, and it is a genuine and glorious reality.

What tribulation salvation will cost

Coming to faith in that period will carry a price most of us in the comfortable West have never had to face. Revelation 13 tells of a mark without which no one may buy or sell, so that faith in Jesus will mean losing your livelihood overnight, and Revelation 20:4 speaks of those beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God. Many who trust the Lamb during the tribulation will pay for it with their very lives. Theirs is a salvation sealed in martyrdom, which is why John keeps showing them first under the altar crying out, and then standing in triumph before the throne of God.

That sobers me, and it ought to sober anyone tempted to gamble on getting saved later, once the free ride of this age is over. Waiting is a fool’s bet. The road to faith will only grow steeper and bloodier, not easier, once the restrainer is removed and the beast is loosed on the world. If mercy is stretched out to you now, in a day when believing costs you a little social awkwardness rather than your head, why on earth would you wait for the worst possible moment to say your yes to Jesus? Tribulation salvation is real, but it is a hard road, and no sane person should choose it over the open door of today.

Where tribulation salvation fits in God’s wider plan

Tribulation salvation makes complete sense once you keep Israel and the Church distinct, which is the thread running through everything I write on prophecy. The tribulation is chiefly the time when God resumes His unfinished dealings with the nation of Israel, the seventieth week of Daniel, and it climbs toward a national turning to the Messiah they once pierced. You can follow that argument in my piece on the future salvation of ethnic Israel, which sits right at the heart of the period, and in my study of what the tribulation is.

Meanwhile the Gentile harvest keeps coming in, nation by nation, until the Lamb returns in power and glory. Far from being a hopeless interval to be endured, the tribulation is stitched through with grace from beginning to end. Judgement and mercy run side by side, exactly as they have all through the Bible, and the God who declares Himself not willing that any should perish keeps holding out His hand right up to the very last hour. Tribulation salvation is the standing proof that His patience outlasts even the world’s deepest rebellion.

Tribulation salvation and the faithfulness of God

I take real comfort in the fact that tribulation salvation flows from the same unchanging character of God that I lean on this very morning. He does not become a different God after the rapture, stern where He was once gracious. The One who so loved the world that He gave His only Son, as John 3:16 declares, is the very One who will seal the 144,000 and gather the countless multitude out of the storm. His mercy has one settled disposition, and it runs like a bright thread from Genesis right through to the closing chapters of Revelation without a break.

That is why I never picture the tribulation as a time when God has turned His back on sinners. He turns His face toward them in judgement and in mercy at once, exactly as He always has done. Tribulation salvation is simply the gospel doing its ancient work in the hardest of all soils, and bearing fruit even there. If grace can reach and win a heart in that furnace of judgement, it can surely reach and win yours today, in this far kinder hour. That thought ought to make every one of us bolder.

So, now what?

If you are reading this before the rapture, then you are living in the kindest window of history, when trusting Jesus costs you far less than it will cost anyone left behind. Do not presume upon a later chance that may only reach you through fire and blood and a headsman’s blade. As 2 Corinthians 6:2 puts it, now is the favourable time, now is the day of salvation. Why wait for the storm when the door stands wide open in the calm? Turn to the Lamb today, and you will never see that hour at all.

And if you are already a believer, let this truth stir your evangelism rather than dull it. The very multitude of Revelation 7 may well include people you loved and prayed for, who finally believed once the world caved in around them. Keep sowing, keep witnessing, and keep your own hope bright, remembering that the Jesus who will save a countless throng out of the darkest years is the very same Jesus who reached down and saved you. Is there a name you should be praying for even now?

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.

Revelation 7:9 (ESV)