Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10172. When are Old Testament saints resurrected? It sounds like a specialist question, and then you realise it is really a question about Abraham, Moses, David, Ruth and Daniel, and about whether the people whose stories formed our faith are raised with us or separately from us. My answer is that Old Testament saints…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10178. We who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds. That phrase, caught up, is the engine of the whole passage, and it is the reason the English speaking church has a word like rapture at all. Paul chose a strong and slightly violent verb, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10185. A prophetic timeline is only as good as the texts holding it up, so let me set out the sequence I believe Scripture teaches and show you where each stage comes from. What follows runs from the moment the church is caught up to the moment God dwells with His people on a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10202. The last trumpet of 1 Corinthians 15:52 is regularly identified with the seventh trumpet of Revelation 11, and that identification is the single strongest argument the posttribulational position has. If Paul’s trumpet is John’s seventh, the church goes through the Tribulation and the pretribulational rapture collapses. So it deserves a careful answer rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10153. The blessed hope is one of those expressions that has been said so often in Christian circles that it can slide past the ear without registering. Paul used it once, with great precision, and he attached it to a very specific event rather than to a general optimism about things working out. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10112. The marriage supper of the Lamb is the wedding feast celebrating the union of Jesus and his church, announced in Revelation 19 immediately before he returns in glory. The bride is the church, the Lamb is the Bridegroom, and the feast marks the point at which the long betrothal is finally consummated in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10097. The first resurrection is named only once in Scripture, in Revelation 20, and yet it carries an enormous weight of meaning. John sees those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, says they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years, and then adds, “This is the first…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10094. Historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism agree on the headline. Jesus returns bodily to the earth before a literal thousand year reign, and He reigns in person over a real kingdom. Against amillennialism and postmillennialism, both stand together, and I want to say clearly at the outset that historic premillennialists are brothers in Christ…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10090. Deliverance from wrath is not a secondary curiosity in eschatology. It goes to the heart of what the Church is promised and, in my view, to the heart of the pretribulational case. If God has told His people that they will not face the coming outpouring of judgement, then the timing of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10087. The one taken one left saying in Matthew 24:40-41 must be among the most quoted prophetic verses in popular Christianity. It has been printed on bumper stickers, set to music and used as the backbone of novels and films. Almost everyone who quotes it assumes that being taken means being caught up to…