Dr. Couch, what do you think of Marvin Rosenthal’s Pre-wrath rapture position?
ANSWER: When you want Bible answers listen to those capable of truly exegeting
the Scriptures. Rosenthal has virtually no biblical training. Those of
us who have had years and years of strong theology, and hours and hours
of the biblical languages, are far better qualified to explain the
truth, and that is in this case, the fact is that the rapture of the
church is clearly a PRE-TRIBULATIONAL RAPTURE!
A close friend of mine and a fellow graduate
school graduate, Dr. Renald Showers, has done the final word on this
crazy belief in his book The Pre-Wrath Rapture View (Kregel). Get
the book. It will answer the issue once and for all. However I found
the Achilles Heal on the subject in Revelation 6:12-17 as clearly shown
in my Greek translation. This is the sixth seal, which is way up front
at the start of the tribulation and the beginning of the wrath. From the
Greek verses 16b-17 we read:
“Hide us from the presence of Him who is right now sitting on the throne
and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of “their” wrath [the wrath
of the Father and the Son] CAME, ARRIVED, IS HERE, and who is able to
continue to right now be left standing.”
and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of “their” wrath [the wrath
of the Father and the Son] CAME, ARRIVED, IS HERE, and who is able to
continue to right now be left standing.”
In other words at this point, at the beginning
of the tribulation, the wrath of God and His Son had already arrived,
whereas Rosenthal says the wrath comes further down in the book of
Revelation. He even foolishly calls in 6:17 the CAME as a future aorist
tense, which will in no way fly by the full context and the grammar of
the passage. In other words, Rosenthal has an agenda. He wants
desperately to put the church somewhere into the tribulation so it can
get “cleaned” up from its sins. This is the nutty view of “tribulation
sanctification,” which means Rosenthal does not understand “Positional”
sanctification of the believer, and the fact that this “Positional”
truth is what gets us to heaven, not some phony cleaning up by the pain
of the tribulation!
Why is it that people want to always go down
the bumpy back road and not stay on the main highway of clear, obvious
meaning of a text? It is because they have an axe to grind, an agenda
that somehow fits into their preconceived ideas. And, for some reason,
they hate like crazy the obvious pre-tribulational view that is so easy
to exegete and explain from the plain meaning of the Bible texts.
Thanks for asking,
Dr. Mal Couch
