What is the tribulation?

Question 10044.

The tribulation period is a future span of seven years in which God pours out judgement on a rebellious world and resumes His unfinished dealings with the nation of Israel. It is the darkest stretch of history still to come, and Jesus Himself said there has never been anything like it and never will be again. When I teach on the tribulation I want people to feel both its real terror and its clear purpose, because it is not chaos simply let loose upon the earth. It is a measured, God-directed season with a definite beginning, a decisive midpoint, an appointed end, and a redemptive goal driving the whole of it.

A great deal of confusion falls away the moment you grasp that the tribulation is chiefly about Israel, not about the Church. This is Daniel’s seventieth week, the final unpaid instalment of a prophetic timetable given to the prophet centuries before Jesus was born. Understanding that one fact keeps the whole picture in focus and stops us reading ourselves into chapters where we do not belong. Let me walk you carefully through what Scripture actually says about this coming period.

Where the tribulation period comes from in Scripture

The backbone of the tribulation period is Daniel 9:24-27, the great prophecy of the seventy weeks. Sixty-nine of those weeks, or sevens of years, ran their appointed course right up to the coming of Messiah the Prince. One final week still remains unfulfilled, a seven-year period that begins the moment a coming ruler confirms a covenant with the many. That covenant is the starting gun of the whole period, and its violent breaking at the midpoint marks the descent into the very worst of its horrors. The clock has not yet started, but the prophecy guarantees it will.

Jesus draws directly on Daniel in Matthew 24, warning of great distress and pointing plainly to the abomination of desolation Daniel had spoken of. The underlying Hebrew and Greek both carry the sense of a pressing, crushing affliction, and the Greek word John uses throughout Revelation, thlipsis, means exactly that, a heavy pressure that squeezes the life out of a thing. Revelation 6 to 19 then gives us the fullest account of the tribulation period we possess anywhere in Scripture, unfolding relentlessly through seven seals, seven trumpets and seven bowls of wrath.

The purpose of the tribulation

Why does God ordain such a fearful period at all? The tribulation serves several ends at once, and it is worth naming them. It is the outpouring of righteous wrath upon a world that has finally filled up the measure of its long rebellion. It is the God-appointed means by which the nation of Israel is brought to the end of herself and to living faith in her Messiah. And it is the setting for a vast harvest of Gentiles who turn to the Lamb even under the falling judgements, which I explore in my study of whether people will be saved during the tribulation.

So the tribulation is judgement and mercy running side by side, which is exactly how God has always worked throughout the Scriptures. Jeremiah 30:7 calls it the time of Jacob’s trouble, and yet adds at once that he shall be saved out of it. The point of the pressure is never destruction for its own sake but a severe refining that finally drives a remnant home to God. He never once wields the rod without a redemptive aim held clearly in view, and the tribulation is no exception to that settled pattern.

The structure of the tribulation period

The tribulation period divides very neatly into two halves. The first three and a half years open with the rise of a charismatic world ruler who makes and then enforces his covenant, bringing a false and fragile peace to a frightened planet. At the midpoint everything turns on its head. The ruler breaks his covenant, desecrates the temple in Jerusalem, demands worship of himself as God, and unleashes what Scripture names the great tribulation, the more intense and bloody second half of the seven years. I unpack that darker phase in detail in my study of the great tribulation.

Through the whole of the period, the judgements escalate steadily in three great series. The seven seals give way to the seven trumpets, which in turn give way to the seven bowls of God’s undiluted wrath, each set heavier and more terrible than the one before it. Yet even here mercy keeps calling out. The 144,000 are sealed and sent, two witnesses prophesy in Jerusalem, and an angel proclaims the eternal gospel to every nation. Even at its very worst, the tribulation is never once emptied of the grace of God toward those who will still turn and believe.

Will the Church be in the tribulation?

This is where my dispensational reading matters most of all. I do not believe the Church will pass through the tribulation, because the Church is caught up at the rapture before the period even begins. The seven years belong squarely to God’s programme for Israel and the nations, and not to the body of Christ, which is a distinct entity with a heavenly hope. Paul says plainly in 1 Thessalonians 5:9 that God has not destined us for wrath, and the tribulation is wrath from its first seal to its last bowl. The two things cannot be forced together.

Some read Revelation and assume the Church must be present because they see saints suffering on the earth, but those are tribulation believers, saved after the rapture, not the Church of this present age of grace. Keeping Israel and the Church distinct, as I argue at length in my piece on the difference between Israel and the Church, is the interpretive key that unlocks the whole tribulation without confusion and without robbing the Church of her promised blessed hope.

How the tribulation ends

The tribulation does not simply fizzle out or wind down gradually. It climbs to a violent climax at Armageddon, where the assembled armies of the world gather against Jerusalem and, in the end, against the Lord Himself. At that very moment Jesus returns in blazing glory, this time with His saints, to crush the Antichrist with the breath of His mouth, rescue a repentant and mourning Israel, and establish His long-promised kingdom upon the earth. The horror gives way in an instant to the reign of the King, and I follow that thread on into my study of the millennium.

So the tribulation is a bridge, not a dead end. It carries history from the removal of the Church, across seven years of measured judgement, all the way to the visible return of Jesus and a thousand years of righteous rule from Jerusalem. Terrible as it will be for those who endure it, it is a controlled and purposeful terror, moving redemptive history steadily and surely toward the throne of Christ. Nothing in it is random, and nothing in it is outside the hand of God.

Reading the tribulation period with care

Whenever I teach the tribulation period I urge people to read Revelation slowly and literally, letting the text set the terms rather than forcing it into a tidy system of our own. When John writes of a third of the sea turning to blood or of a great star falling from heaven, I take him to mean real and dreadful events, even where the imagery stretches our ordinary categories. The same plain approach that reads Revelation 16:1 as a genuine outpouring of wrath is the approach that keeps the whole tribulation period coherent from start to finish.

This literal reading is also why I place the tribulation period firmly in the future rather than in the past, and why I resist collapsing it into the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. The distress Jesus described has never yet been equalled in all of history, and He said plainly that it never would be until He came. A future, worldwide tribulation period fits His words far better than any attempt to shrink them down to a single first-century calamity, however terrible that event genuinely was for those who lived through it.

So, now what?

I do not teach the tribulation to frighten people for the sport of it, but the warning is real and I will not soften it to spare anyone’s feelings. This is wrath you do not want to meet, and you were never made to bear it. The one way of escape is not a bunker or a stockpile of tinned food but the Saviour who bore the wrath of God in your place at the cross. Trust Him now, and you will never once taste that hour of trial.

For those who are already His, let the sober reality of the tribulation stir up compassion for a lost world and deep gratitude for the grace that has spared you. The very same Jesus who will one day judge the earth is the Jesus who has promised to keep His own from the hour of trial. Rest yourself in Him, and warn others plainly while there is still time and the door still stands open. Who around you needs that warning today?

For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.

Matthew 24:21 (ESV)