´¯`•. July 14, 2009

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Trib Stances

I’d always been a Pre-Tribber.  Primarily because that’s what the churches I’ve gone to taught me to be, and that’s what my family was.  ((And over half my friends, or so a poll I put up a few years ago indicated.))  What is a ‘Pre-Tribber’?  A person who believes that before the Great Tribulation (leading to the end of the world as we know it), they will be bodily taken out of this world and not experience any of the bad things that will happen.  That’s the Pre-Tribulation stance of Christianity.  It’s also, btw, very wrong.

I had to re-evaluate my position as a staunch pre-Tribber since 2007.  Why?  Because Solana had a 7-year treaty called the ENPI that’s with Israel and the Middle Eastern nations, and it was ‘confirmed with many’ as of January 2007.  “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week…”  Daniel 9:27a  Which means that the Tribulation would begin with the confirming of a covenant that is slated to last one week (seven days equates to seven years in this passage).  And according to the pre-Trib stance, we’re raptured before the Tribulation (which is the 7-year period), right?  If we were going to be raptured before the  7-year Trib began, it HAD to happen by January 2007.  And having blogged here since 2000, you got to read along as year after year (starting in 2003, when I first read about Solana and his ENPI), I anxiously waited to be raptured every Rosh Ha’Shana.  But it didn’t happen.  And if I’m here and the ENPI – and Trib – started in January of 2007… well, then obviously the rapture is NOT pre-Trib.

I had a choice – I could be like Mike Mickey of RaptureAlert and dismiss the current events before my eyes and cling to a dead hope, or I had to realize that my viewpoint was WRONG and that meant changing what I believed.  Trust, me, NOT an easy thing to do.  But I’d already had experience with that – I started my exodus from Christianity in 2003, and every day from that point on I had to go over EVERYTHING I’d been taught and figure out what actually was Truth and what was church-taught BS.  Not an easy choice.  There are a LOT of people out there still pre-Trib… either unaware of the ENPI or dismissing it as ‘not possibly the predicted 7-year treaty, because (after all) they’re still here, right?  I couldn’t do that.  I can’t pretend reality away.

And as I started digging into other viewpoints, I found that things I’d held to regarding the pre-Trib rapture weren’t true after all.  I thought Noah had been taken into the ark 7 days before the flood (symbolic of Christ-followers being raptured 7 years before the end – or for the duration of the Trib)… but the verses I’d been given and echoed were out of context.  Talk about a slap in my face!  I was yet again hurt by the ‘church’… who give people what they want to suit their purposes, not GOD’S purposes.  ((And I had to apologize for repeating false information.  Humiliating and worse.))

Before I got around to reading up on the pre-Wrath stance, I was reading about the plagues in Egypt (y’know, Moses et al?) and I noticed something TorahClass said about it that really caught my eye – that the plagues were 10… they were divided into three groups of three, and the last was the judgment day of Egypt.  I immediately thought of the end times ‘plagues’, which are three groups of seven (trumpets, bowls, vials) with a culmination of Judgment Day for the World.   Threes are unity – bringing people back out of Egypt and into their own nation with their God alone.  Unity.  Sevens are perfection – bringing God’s people out of sin (and mortality) and into eternal life with their God alone.  Very similar, very kewl correlation!

Well, the next thing they said threw me for a LOOP – that of the three sets of three, ISRAEL SUFFERED THE FIRST SET ALONG WITH EGYPT.  Oh. My. Gosh.  It’s not hard to put 2 and 2 together on that – if the deliverance from Egypt is a ‘type’ of end times deliverance… we’re here for the first set of three judgments from Revelation, too.  That means we’ll be here for PART of the Tribulation.  So much for pre-Trib!  Precedence doesn’t support it!

One of the reasons I believed that the Rapture was pre-Trib was because it was promised in more places than I’m going to restate (see pt 1) that the Christ-followers will be kept from the WRATH that is to come.  And I (along with half of Christendom) took that to mean that we’d miss the Tribulation.  But I learned a thing or two about what’s considered wrath and what’s not.  And come to find out, wrath isn’t poured out until AFTER the first set of seven in Revelation.  Another blow to the pre-Trib stance.

There are only four other stances out there.  I’ve had to discard “Pre-Trib” stance completely, so that leaves “Pre-Wrath”, “Mid-Trib”, “Post Trib”, and “Amillenialist”.  Catholics and several other groups are ‘amillinialist’.  They don’t believe that there will be a Tribulation, that the world will face horrors untold, that there will be a judgment, etc.  Instead they believe that things will gradually get better and better, that the church will succeed in bringing peace and harmony to the world, and we’ll all live together in harmony.  Problem with that is the simple fact that stuff gets WORSE, not better.  Things decay, people grow old and feeble and die, things break down, they don’t get better.  So the very idea that the world will become perfect and incorruptible over time is just ludicrous.  Each war is more brutal, the weapons get bigger and more powerful, the crazies get more money and strength.  Amillenialists need a serious clue phone.  I can’t even THINK like that.

Post Tribbers believe that we will be here for the whole Tribulation (obviously).  We don’t get raptured out until the very end.  The problem with that is that the Bible says that we will be saved out of the wrath that is to come.  If we’re here for the whole thing, well… we weren’t saved out of the wrath, were we?  Not only that, but the Lord’s pattern of saving people OUT OF wrath (Lot in Sodom, Noah with the ark, Israel not experiencing the second two sets of plagues or judgment, etc.) would be broken, and that doesn’t happen with Adonai.  He doesn’t set up precedence just to ignore it.  It’s not how He works.  So not only does that stance contradict a WHOLE lotta scripture, but it contradicts the very nature of Yahweh, and to take that stance means I’d have to throw my Bible right out the window.  I CANNOT do that… choose that.  It’s not concievable.  I’d have to leave my faith in Yahweh completely, and I CANNOT do that.

Which is why I say to you that I have two choices: to be Pre-Wrath or Mid-Trib.  Of the five, they are the only two viable options left to us, if we are to continue in the faith in which we now stand.  And the reason I’m writing this at all is because a lady by the name of ‘Amy’ brought up the Pre-Wrath vs. Mid-Trib thing in the comments yesterday.  And I wanted to make sure you understand what *I* see as far as this goes.

A Pre-Wrath Trib stance is where the person believes that we will be taken out before the ‘Wrath of God’ is unleashed on the earth.  A Mid-Trib stance says that we will be taken out of the earth at the middle point of the Tribulation.  My stance at this point is Pre-Wrath, and I’ll tell you why.

The first problem with a Mid-Trib stance is that it holds that the Tribulation is 7-years long.  Based on the green verse up above, where it says the covenant is for seven ‘days’ (or years).  But the REST of that verse says that halfway through that seven years, the covenant will be broken.  So really the covenant is only for THREE AND A HALF years, and then…?  Anything goes.  The end could come earlier than planned – six years into the covenant, let’s say.  OR… things could drag out a LOT longer than the seven years.  The problem is that the Bible doesn’t TELL US the length of the Tribulation… only the length of the original covenant, which is broken and doesn’t continue.

The second problem with a Mid-Trib stance is that it’s predictable.  The Bible is clear that the rapture will ‘come like a thief’ – nobody will be expecting it.  If Solana’s ENPI started January 2007, then three and a half years later is June 30/July 1 of 2010.  Which is VERY expectable.  Although (and not to pretzel you around or anything, but) to be honest, Rosh Ha’Shana is also expectable – it’s a two-day feast that’s easy enough to mark.  Which is why I can’t entirely rule out a Mid-Trib stance – BOTH are markable times.  The Bible goes on in the same passage (1 Thess 5: 1-6) to say that those who are ‘sober’ and ‘vigilant’ (aka WATCHING) won’t be overcome like a thief in the night.  And those who are watching will know what to watch, whether Rosh Ha’Shana or the end of June 2010.

But the third problem with the Mid-Trib stance is the worst:  the rapture is slated to happen by Yeshua’s own mouth (“no man knoweth the day or the hour” Mt 25:13) during Rosh Ha’Shana – the Feast of the Day that ‘no man knoweth’.  Kinda kewl He gave us a heads up, without coming out and SAYING it.  BUT… Rosh Ha’Shana is always somewhere in September or October.  Which is NOT halfway through anything… it’s PAST the Mid-Trib point, which wouldn’t… make it… a MID-Trib rapture, would it?  It’d be a mid-trib-plus-three-months rapture, so that isn’t… exactly right, is it?  And when my Lord nails something, He nails it.

Which brings us BACK ’round to the Pre-Wrath stance.  It fits with Rosh Ha’Shana, it is before the ‘wrath that is to come’ that we’re promised to be kept out of, and it isn’t so ‘predictable’.

Honestly?  It doesn’t really matter anymore to me.  IMHO, if it’s a pre-wrath rapture, then it’ll be this Rosh Ha’Shana.  If it’s a mid-Trib rapture, it’ll be next Rosh Ha’Shana.  Either way, it’s kewl by me!  But if it doesn’t happen one of those… well, I’m going to have a SERIOUS problem, aren’t I?  I refuse to think about that, at this point.  It’s moot until nothing happens, and isn’t that what faith is – believing in something?  Scripture says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for”… I’m hoping for a rapture either September of THIS year or next.  I have faith that it will happen.  If I didn’t, it wouldn’t be faith, would it?  I refuse to think about the alternative – because for me there IS no alternative.

So anyhow, that’s what’s possible, why, and what I think.  I hope that helps clarify things for you.

Posted by annamatrix on July 14, 2009

https://annamatrix.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/1503/