What do you think of Marvin Rosenthal’s Pre-wrath Rapture Position?

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.”

    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

The Theocratic Kingdom

Dr. Couch, I have just begun reading George Peters’ massive work The Theocratic Kingdom. On two separate websites it is said Peters held to a prewrath position and then others say he held to a partial rapture viewpoint. What do you say? 

 

    When in graduate school for a course in eschatology with Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost I surveyed all of Peters’ prophetic propositions (hundreds), and, I got an A for the course for doing so. But it would take a monumental search to prove the point of what he held. I cannot remember! 

    But I would say that, as I try to remember, the rapture issue was not the first thought in his mind. Peters was focusing on millennial kingdom issues. He had been a flaming Lutheran amillennialist until he started reading the Bible (which most amills do not, it seems!). Since most of the “old guys” had early-on simply lumped the thirteen or fourteen rapture passages in with second coming passages, they flat missed this great teaching in Scripture! The light started dawning around 1840, and to our great surprise, hundreds of outstanding old scholars saw it by the late eighteen hundreds. It is impossible to escape the rapture passages. They have to do with Christ coming for the church and taking the believers home with Him. That is different than the Lord coming to judge the world and to reign over the nations from the Davidic throne in Jerusalem! 

    By finding some of the books of the old guys, I am shocked at how many held to the pretribulational rapture position. 

   Thanks for asking, 

   Dr. Mal Couch