You might’ve asked yourself, will the church go through the 7-year tribulation period and experience the devastating wrath and judgment from God between Revelation 6-19, or will the church be raptured beforehand? The church refers to the community of all true believers for all time, and not necessarily a building. My belief is that the church is not going to have to go through the 7-year tribulation period.
The Rapture in The Bible
The concept of the rapture is 1st found in Thessalonians 4:16-17 when believers at that church were worried that their deceased brothers and sisters would not be able to take part in the rapture.
So Paul comes along to assure them that they were not going to miss out on The Rapture when he says to them:
“For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.”
“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:”
“Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
Thessalonians 4:15-17
This word “caught-up” is where the idea of “The Rapture” comes from. It’s the word that means “to be snatched away” or to be “caught-up”.
There are 3 different basic views on the rapture:
The 1st is The Pre-Tribulation Rapture, and this is the idea that the church is going to be raptured before the 7-year tribulation period.
The 2nd is The Mid-Tribulation Rapture, and this is the idea that the church is going to have to go through the first 3 1/2 years of the tribulation before things get really bad and go into The Great Tribulation.
The 3rd is The Post-Tribulation Rapture, and this is the idea that God is going to allow the church to go through the 7-years of tribulation and at the end of the tribulation he’s going to rapture the church, but then the church is going to come right back down at the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ.
Why I believe in The Pre-Tribulation Rapture
The word church doesn’t appear in the book of Revelation from chapters 4 all the way through 19, but if you look at the first three chapters of Revelation the word church is mentioned 19 times. Letting us know that Jesus is addressing the churches, and how the churches should respond during this time, and how they should live during the church age (the age in which we live today).
But if you notice in chapter 4 and specifically in chapter 6 when all of the events of the tribulation begin, the church is not mentioned again until chapter 19, and even there we see the church not suffering but celebrating because there is going to be a uniting between us and Jesus Christ forevermore.