WHY AND HOW?
For many years, a very real website offered $5,000 US to anyone in the world who could produce a Scripture that spoke of a Pretrib Rapture. After more than a decade, they shut down the page with their money still in their pockets.
For almost as many years, I have asked for the same Scripture. I have received many Scriptures from people who told me that they were the answer to my request. Most of the Scriptures spoke to the goodness of God and a couple, at least on the surface, out of context and cleverly misinterpreted, almost seemed to support the idea…
Of course, when you read the paragraph before that verse and the paragraph after that verse, it becomes quite obvious that it says no such thing…
I cannot count the number of people who have told me that if I understood that God is good, the Tribulation is bad, and that we will follow the dead and ascend to meet Christ at his return… even though God never really spoke of a PreTrib Rapture, I would understand that He really meant to but that it somehow escaped his attention…
How did Satan sell this childish and silly doctrine? He gave the idea to a Jesuit Priest, who, writing under a pen name and pretending to be a converted Jew, put it in a book, written in Latin.
He then got a copy of the book into the hands of the very first Pentecostal preacher in England, who translated it into English and fell in love with the idea.
He then sent two Americans to England, C. I. Scofield, a would be Bible scholar, and D. L. Moody, an uneducated shoe salesman turned Evangelist.
Scofield twisted the Scripture and put the idea of a pretrib rapture in his Study Bible as if it were Bible truth.
D. L. Moody put it into his sermons, and terrified sinners flooded the altars… Suddenly, he was the most famous Evangelist in America. When pastors and other evangelists saw the numbers, they bought the doctrine… Biblical or not, it filled the pews and the offering plates…
More than that, sinners, terrified that they might be caught sinning at Christ’s sudden return and face the Tribulation, caught the dream…
Fear and wishful thinking are powerful motivational tools… Ask any evangelist…
It also helped that Christians in America had faced no (zero) persecution in several centuries… You fear what you do not know… You fear the Tribulation in ways that would baffle a Christian suffering persecution in the real world…
But that begs the question, why?
Very, very simple… If you can sell the church on the idea that they will escape the Tribulation, they will stumble into the Tribulation, frightened and unprepared… The chances that they will accept and worship the Antichrist and take his mark are increased ten thousand fold… You can rob God Almighty of the souls of the people He died to save…
When Americans tell me about the rapture, they tell me how bad the Tribulation will be. They might even suffer and be forced to die for Jesus!!!!! A loving God would never allow an American Christian to suffer like that! Yes, Paul and so many more suffered and died for Jesus… BUT THEY WEREN’T AMERICANS!!!!!
JESUS IS NOT RETURNING FOR A SINFUL, NASTY, UGLY, MESSED UP BRIDE, A BRIDE CONVINCED THAT HE DIED TO MAKE THEM RICH, HEALTHY AND COMFY IN BABYLON!!!!
BRIDE, MEET THE REFINERS FIRE!
DO NOT BE FOOLED…
PRAY-THINK-PRAY
David…
End Time Thinker 