Welcome to Rock Harbor Church's channel on Sermon Audio. We hope that this message is a blessing to you and it helps you in your daily walk with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. So please settle in and grab your Bibles. Here's our guest speaker with this message. Now, Leanda and I work with Voice of Martyrs, and once a year Voice of Martyrs has an international day of prayer. It actually, if you were paying attention, was last week. But last week was a little bit overloaded, the program, so we overloaded today's program. Instead. And so we're marking the International Day of Prayer this Sunday. My wife, Leanda, will be in the lobby. I think you probably saw her on the way in. Oh, I see she's sitting in the audience now. Okay, good. Do you wanna stand up and wave at the audience, Leanda? No, she doesn't. Only one of us in the family is a big ham, a big show off. And she'll be sitting out there, and you want to make sure that, well, let me go over a couple of things about Voice of Martyrs, first of all. And that is, they work with full-time workers in the country that already speak the language and already know the culture, because they've been raised there. Now, I have a son who works in Kurdistan, and he's cross-cultural, okay? He's an American, English-speaking person that went to Kurdistan, and he spent 10 years learning the language. He can speak it fairly well now, and he's got his wife and kids there, but it takes a lot of support to keep a transcultural worker in the field. And what Voice of Martyrs does is it specializes in native workers, you know, from the countries themselves. It helps build churches, it helps orphans and widows of persecuted families, it helps build schools, and it gives out Bibles, and They want you to commit to prayer. In fact, that's a t-shirt that they have. They would like you to commit to prayer. And there are prayer cards in the lobby on the table that Leanda will be sitting at after the service. And then lastly, okay, the news, for some reason, unknown only to themselves. Voice of Martyrs calls this a news sheet or a news thing. They don't call it a magazine. But that's not important. What is important is that you sign up and get it because it's free. You'll never get a bill, you'll never get anything asking you for money. Maybe you'll get an envelope in there that you can choose to send in if you wish, but it's very low pressure or no pressure. Now, I know many of you get this magazine already. Raise your hands if you get this magazine at home. All right, now, it's extremely interesting. It's sometimes a little bit graphic. In fact, this video today was less graphic than usual. They really sort of took it easy on you. Some of their yearly videos get quite sharp-edged, okay? And, you know, you sort of come out kind of traumatized almost, all right? I'm exaggerating a little bit there, but you know what I mean. Sometimes the videos are a little harsher than this one. But the magazine is extremely informative. You'll be inspired by the stories in it. and by the editorials written by the president of VOM. And once again, it's free. So we'd like you all to sign up. If you don't have any particular objection to it, if you don't want it, you just can't stand another piece of mail in the mailbox, then okay, fine, don't get it. But you will enjoy it, okay? And so that's the International Day of Prayer for Voice of Martyrs, that particular ministry. They're located in Bartlesville. Ever heard of that? Bartlesville, Oklahoma, all right. Now, all the big shots are away. Monica, okay. And Pastor Brandon and several others away in Israel and we wanna really pray that the Lord will bless them real good and bring them back inspired. and able to minister to us. Somebody asked me in my Sunday school class last week, when Jerusalem, when the temple was destroyed, okay? And I had a nice long answer, and I don't even know if I ever pressed the answer home. The answer is 72, but she had seen 70 sometimes, several times, and the reason is the siege began in 70, the rebellion began in 66 AD, And it took them two years to break into the city and to break into the temple mount. And so that gives you 72 before the temple was actually destroyed. But there's a footnote to that. Because there was a thousand zealots holding out on Masada, down by the Dead Sea. The Romans went down there. put a wall all the way around the rock that they were on, and built a ramp up the side of it. When you go to Israel, they're gonna take you to Masada, and you're gonna see that dirt ramp still there 2,000 years later, and that was 73 AD, and that was the final, final finish of the great Jewish rebellion against the Romans. And if you ever go to Rome, okay, and you go to the Forum, where they have a lot of ruins, One of them, not so ruined, is Titus' arch. And on the arch, on the inside of the arch, they show Romans coming out of the temple from Jerusalem. Now this is in Rome, get you, okay? and it shows them carrying the menorah, okay? I kid you not. Now that's in Rome. So don't let anybody tell you that the Jews weren't around 2,000 years ago in Judea or Palestine. There's proof all over the place, and one of the most dramatic proofs is in Rome inscribed for all time on Titus' arch. Now what are we doing this morning? Well, you can see up there we're going to talk about the rapture and the second coming. And I know that you've heard a lot about this. I hope to offer something a little bit new or maybe perhaps a little bit of background on it. And so we're going to attempt to learn a little bit more about this. And the first thing we have to do is turn on the remote. And let's see where we go. Ah, look at this. Very famous picture. You've all seen reproductions of it. And it's a picture of creation. God creating Adam. And it's from the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It's funny, I was just talking about Rome. And this is the single most reproduced piece of art in the world. in the history of mankind, okay? How many of you have seen pictures of these fingers touching? I think the movie Ben-Hur has them in some of the credits or at the beginning in the titles, okay? Well, it was painted by a fellow called Michelangelo who could be a candidate for the title the greatest artist in the history of the world, okay? At least he would be a candidate. And in the early 1500s, Pope Julian II commissioned the world's greatest artist to paint a part of his new palace, the Vatican. Now several things, Julian II was what you call a Renaissance Pope. The Renaissance Popes in the 14 and 1500s were not known for their devotion to Catholic religion. They were known for having bastard sons and daughters and putting them in to cardinals and bishops positions, wheeling and dealing and hobnobbing with kings and power brokers. And they had gathered a lot of tithes from all over Europe and built this fantastic new palace, the Vatican, okay. And if you wanna ask any questions about that, ask Steve Brazelton sitting back there, because he's an authority, him and Noram, on the Vatican, okay? And the Pope wanted Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with 12 apostles, but the artist had a better idea, persuaded the proud, powerful Pope to give him a free hand. And Michelangelo spent the next four years of his life laying on his back, on top of scaffolding, okay, which elevated him, and this is a big room, it's a large room, okay, it's, I don't know, 100 feet long and, you know, 30 feet wide or something, and it's got a domed ceiling with, I think, a flat part in the middle, all right? And the Pope wanted that all painted, okay? He had already asked other artists, in fact, a few that were known, Botticelli, for example, to decorate some of the walls, okay? So now it's the ceiling. Julian II, this powerful Pope, wants Michelangelo to put something up there, slap something up there. He worked in Fresco. You know what Fresco is? It's a... Oh, come on now. I don't even know what it is. It's the stuff you put on a wall and it's wet and then it dries out and it sets after a while. Well, while it's still wet or moist, you can paint on it. And that's what Michelangelo was working on. So not only was he laying on his back painting above his head, with paint dripping on his face occasionally. But he was also painting against time. You had to paint fast because his fresco would dry out and it wouldn't be so great to paint on after that. With paint dripping on his face and with the impatient Pope popping in every day. Now how do you like the alliteration in that sentence? The impatient Pope popping in every day asking, is it finished yet? Okay, and by the way, there's a great movie with Charlton Heston playing the part of Michelangelo, and I think it's Rex Harrison or somebody playing the Pope, and he does that in the movie. Poor old Michelangelo's up there painting at midnight or something, and the Pope is wandering through his big palace and pops in and says, hey, is it finished yet? For four years, all right? Michelangelo produced a series of masterpieces telling the story of biblical history, including creation and the last judgment. There you just got an art history lesson, okay? And here's the art, all right? This is at one end of the Sistine Chapel. By the way, I heard somebody say that they got to the Vatican and they didn't like all this stuff, so they kinda hurried through it. But you wanna hurry to the Sistine Chapel, and then if you look around, okay, you may not grasp what's going on, but a lot of people are looking up, and what you wanna do when you get to the Sistine Chapel is look up. and that's where Michelangelo spent four years of his life, okay? Painting in those panels. Notice some of the things here. It appears to be, there's no label for this, so I had to derive these titles myself. It appears to be Jesus in the middle there. He's supposed to be in the middle of the Last Judgment on the great white throne, and there's just a little trace of the white throne under his leg. What's the deal with the woman beside him? Well, one assumes that this is Catholic theology and Catholic teaching, so maybe that's the Virgin Mary beside him. She doesn't actually have a role in the Last Judgment according to the Bible. And you've got a crowd of people around him being ushered into his presence, and you've got basically two destinations. One is down. I'll leave you to guess which destination that is, okay? Notice that there are devils dragging the people down, okay, and harassing them. And notice that some of them, like the guy bent over there in pain, don't seem to be particularly happy about where they're going. whereas the other ones are headed up. And there are symbols there. You guys can look these up and tell me sometime that I can't understand. For example, there appears to be almost like a demon on the cross up there, but I don't think it's Jesus. There is a cross in the left-hand corner, and there appears to be a pillar. Now, halfway looks like a cannon, but it would be more likely to be a pillar up there. But those people are headed up. and generally speaking, they're happy, okay? And so that's people's idea of the last judgment, all right? Notice people being ushered into his presence on either side of the great white throne. Notice people going down to hell, others being helped up to heaven. Michelangelo didn't paint these naked people because he was a pervert, but because it was the Renaissance. And in the Renaissance, they rediscovered man, okay? I used to tell my history classes, during the Middle Ages, people studied God, they studied theology. How many angels, they would debate, could stand on the head of a needle, for example, okay? This was an important theological question in the Middle Ages, all right? But that's the kind of stuff they talked about. They concentrated on God, the Catholic Church, and religion, all right? Whereas in the Renaissance, they discover the study of man, okay? And so they're all about learning about man. his mind, but also his body. And some of these characters, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, did cadaver dissections, not for medical school, but to acquaint themselves with the musculature and the skeleton of a human being, so they could better paint him. because medieval art tended to be kind of flat and expressionless, you know? It was sort of always this kind of thing, you know? Jesus or Mary raising their two fingers in blessing, halos around them, angels around them. But in Renaissance art, you won't see the angels, you won't see the halos, you'll see very, very human figures, okay? And that's what Michelangelo was showing off. He was showing off. his knowledge of the human body. Now, if you're offended by the nudity, you're in good company because popes succeeding to Julian II had these figures painted over, okay? And then much later, hundreds of years after that, when they thought they were getting a little more enlightened, okay, the popes said, well, you know, Michelangelo was a great artist, let's not cover up his work, and so they had the coverings removed. And so when you go to the Sistine Chapel today, you see all these naked figures running around, and it's because Michelangelo wanted to show you that he had studied the human body, and that's what the Renaissance was about, okay? Now, this painting sort of classically typifies what people generally think about the Last Judgment. And if you took a poll and asked people, Okay, by the way, all of this stuff in yellow, don't believe this, okay? Like I'm gonna get so deep into it there that you're gonna think, okay, that's what he's teaching us. No, no, no, this is negative teaching, okay? Do not believe the yellow stuff. In fact, don't even look at it, all right? Just listen to me. If Jesus returns, there's gonna be one judgment for everyone, okay? All humanity's gonna be resurrected at the same time. Now that's all humanity, okay? And they're all gonna be judged with the living, all right? At the same time. That every single human being who has ever lived will be judged by Jesus or God on the great white throne. Every single human being, okay? We'll all be judged there. Don't believe this stuff, all right? Okay, there they will have their good deeds weighed against their bad deeds, all right? You know this stuff, you're familiar with it. This is what your family members and your friends tell you, right, that they believe. If you didn't make the cut, okay, did I read the previous one? If their good deeds outweigh their bad deeds, they may be admitted into heaven. If you didn't make the cut, devils would come up out of hell and very happily conduct you down to where Satan rules, and there they would torment you forever with flames and pitchforks, right? Okay? If you made the cut, angels would conduct you upward to heaven where you would spend eternity sitting on a cloud, strumming a harp, singing hymns, okay? Don't believe that yellow stuff, all right? This plan appeals to humans because it makes you responsible for your own salvation. You can work at it, you can earn it, okay? And it's something you could be proud of, you know, if you made it. And it strikes most people as being fair because if God is good and if he's fair, then he sends, you know, good people, generally speaking, up to heaven and bad people to hell. They don't know, though, that the God of the Bible is not fair, okay? Now, what do I mean about that? Well, he doesn't send all good people to heaven. He may send some if they believe in his son, the Lord Jesus, because nobody has enough good deeds to get into heaven. In fact, the Bible says all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. You've heard that 100 times, right? But it has a profound truth in it. You cannot make your way into heaven. Paul writes about that in the book of Romans. Martin Luther spent years whipping his back and praying and starving himself in order to achieve salvation and then he was teaching Romans and it just burst on him like a sun, okay? out of clouds passing by and the sun bursts on him and Martin Luther was just floored, he was just stunned at the grace of God, this unfair God who would save bad people up to the last minute if they cooperated and placed their faith in his son. They could be saved even though they had lived a bad life. Now that's not fair, is it? but God is not fair. What does he operate from? He operates from grace, okay? Not fairness or justice. And you better be thankful that he does operate from grace. We're all thankful because most of us here are Christians, and we've placed our faith in Jesus, and we know we're going to heaven not because of what we did, but because of what Jesus did. Now, what about this word rapture, okay? It's not found in the Bible. People will point that out to you. What is this rapture stuff? Don't tell me about this rapture stuff. It's not even in the Bible. Well, I got news for you. The word Bible is not in the Bible, okay? And Trinity, our most cherished doctrine. You know, the doctrine that we found our faith on, the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The word Trinity is not in the Bible, but Matthew chapter 28, verse 19 is in the Bible where we're told to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Holy Spirit. Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And if you were a Catholic priest, it would be, in nomine Padre, et Filio, et Spiritus Sancto, okay? And you see that in all the movies with Catholic priests burying people, okay, or baptizing them. So the word Trinity's not in the Bible, but the teaching is. Well, the same thing with rapture. Word rapture's not in the Bible, but, you know, The word rapio is in the Latin Bible. Now, Latin is not what the New Testament was written in. It was written in Greek. And the Greek word is, and you may have heard this before, is harpazo, okay? Harpazo, all right? I'm not pronouncing it right, by the way. Don't imitate that. And the interesting thing about rapture is it's not a nice word. It's a bad word, okay? It means somebody stole something. They raptured it, okay? They sneaked up and they caught it away. They stole it, all right? And that's what the rapture is. Now, Jerome, okay, was sent from Rome in the 400s, okay? And he became a saint in the Catholic Church, Saint Jerome. And he was sent with the task of translating the Greek New Testament Now, the Greek half of the Roman Empire, the eastern half, was quite happy with the New Testament the way it was. It was in Greek, they spoke Greek, that's great. But in Italy and Western Europe, they spoke many other languages, and they used Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Okay, now the Roman Empire had passed away, but the Latin was still used by the church, and it was used for another 1,800 years or so, all right? They spoke Latin. They used to say the mass every day or every week in Latin, right up till 1962. And then John XXIII and the Vatican II conference or something in 1962 made a couple of decisions modernizing the church, decided that the mass could be said in the vernacular, okay. And so you go to a church today, it'll be said in whatever the local language is, like around here a lot of Spanish, which almost sounds like Latin, by the way. Okay, but Jerome was sent with the job of translating the Bible, the whole Bible, from Hebrew in the Old Testament and from Greek in the New Testament, and he had to learn both the languages. So when he went, I think he stayed in Jerusalem, there was no Judea as such at that time, it was sort of wiped out. But enough people were still there to teach him Hebrew, and then there were a lot of Greeks around, and they could teach him Greek. And he learned both languages, translated the whole Bible, that's a big job, big work, into Latin. Now in Latin, in 1 Thessalonians chapter four, Jerome used the word, Rapillo, for caught up, okay? Now we borrowed rapillo from the Latin. We didn't like harpazzo. You don't wanna go around saying, hey, you're gonna get harpazzoed one of these days, okay? Jesus is coming to, you know, harpazzo you away. So we borrowed the Latin word instead, rapillo, and made it into rapture, as we did many other English words, borrowed them from Greek or Latin, okay? English language has tons and tons of Greek and Latin words in it and French words. and we made it into rapture, meaning captured or stolen away. So rapture's not in the Bible, but that does not negate the teaching. Now we're gonna look in a couple of minutes at the two passages, but first we're gonna answer a couple of questions, okay? If you believe in one judgment for everybody right at the end, one great white throne judgment, balances, some good, some bad, then you have a problem because you don't deal then with the tribulation. Which is like, how many chapters is that? What's four, no, six. Six from 19 is about 13 chapters in Revelation about the tribulation, okay? There are first of all seven seals, and seven trumpets, and then seven... Bowls, thank you, okay? 21 great, terrible things that are gonna happen to Earth and the people on Earth. And the question is, will we be there during that time, okay? And I submit to you that we will not, all right? Now, the rapture, the second coming, and the millennium are not any of those covered in a scheme of the end times that just has the last judgment as its single end event, okay? These four important events in the Bible are either ignored or explained away by both Catholic and most Protestant minister-teachers, okay? Typically, they conflate. I like that, that's a new word that's come, been born the last, you know, 10 years or so, conflated, like that other word existential, which is misused, okay, broadly. Anyways, so they confuse or conflate the rapture with the second coming. All right, now, can the rapture possibly be with a little bit of sort of oil to jam it into the, you know, this round shaped thing into a square shaped cutout, okay? Can it be jammed into the second coming, you know, pattern of things, all right? So 1 Thessalonians 4, 16, 17 are just another way of describing the second coming. Is that so? Yes, David, that's what all the churches have believed and taught for 1,900 years. If you're sitting here, you're an oddball, okay? But I submit to you, it's odd in the sense that throughout church history, there's been a sort of progressive, not revelation, but a progressive understanding of the scriptures. Okay, for example, in the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, we rediscovered salvation through grace, okay? Not our own works, but through grace. Not through the sacraments, but through grace. We talked about that with Martin Luther there just a few minutes ago. And there's several other examples. In the 1700s we discovered that Jesus wanted us to go into all the world. Who was the first missionary? William Carey went to India in the 1760s. And his senders, when he went to this church and said, hey, would you guys send me to India? They said, what do you wanna go to India for? I wanna give the gospel to the Indian people. And they said, Brother William, when God wants the Indians to be saved, he will save them, okay, without you. And so they had no vision for missions, but William Carey helped break that open to the point where we have the modern missions movement throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s, and it still exists today. There's still people that go from one country to another country on mission for Christ. Okay, so that's what's taught, but I beg to differ. Let's look at the two passages, but let's see what's going to, by the way, when I say the two passages, I mean 1 Thessalonians chapter four, where the rapture is found, and Revelation 19, where the second coming is clearly described, okay? Whoops, how'd that get in there? That's my wife there, the blonde on the side. Can any of you tell me, besides her, Who that is in the middle? That's Amir Sarfati, right. She is a big fan. If you come to her house, you know, if you go to my man cave, you might see the news or football games on, you go to her, the living room, and it's Amir Sarfati, this, and Jack Hibbs, that, and Billy Crone, this, and Brandon Holthaus, you know. She gets them off YouTube, one, you know, sermon after another. From these conferences, and that was the Futures Conference we went down to, Chino, a month ago or so, and she invited a friend, Sandy, to come with her, okay? And this is what happened. Leanda stands in line, and she buys books, she's read books, she's watched them on TV, on YouTube, hundreds of times, and she gets up to him, and Sandy decides, hey, maybe she'll go too, and not, well, Leanda's up there, so I'll just run up there too. And guess who he puts his arm around? And she is still miffed about that, okay? One thing is clear from Revelation 19, the second coming of Christ will come just after the end of tribulation. If you read the book of Revelation, okay, in chapter six, the seals begin, the terrible tribulation begins. And then it continues in 8 and 9 with the trumpets, okay, more terrible things. And then it ends in chapter 18, 19 with the fall of the great whore Babylon, and that's the end of the bowls, okay. And then comes the wedding feast, and comes right after that, the second coming of Christ, okay? And so that's pretty clear. Where the second coming of Christ comes in the chronology of things, that's pretty clear. It comes after the tribulation. So the question is? Where does a rapture come? Does it come with the second coming or does it come earlier? Now it can't come later because then you would get into the millennium and there's no room in the millennium. It just won't work if we're all gonna be there ruling that we're gonna be taken up to heaven. That doesn't work, okay, because the millennium is we're already glorified, we're already changed. So let's go back to the tribulation. The rapture is not clearly mentioned in Revelation. So there are different opinions about where, when rather, the rapture will take place, either before, during, or after the tribulation. It is the position of this church and its senior pastor, and I think I can safely say now the position of the entire pastoral team, that the rapture will take place before the tribulation. It is stated clearly in our statement of faith, but I have my own reasons for believing in the pre-tribulational rapture of the church, okay? Now did you get that mouthful, the pre-tribulational rapture of the church? That's the rapture before the tribulation, okay? Some of those reasons are, okay, number one, what do we preach to the world? We preach the gospel. What's the gospel mean? Good news, okay? Would it be good news if you had to tell somebody, you need to believe in Jesus, and then you're gonna get eternal life and a ticket to heaven, assured, okay, by his grace, not by your works, but by the work of Christ. You will be headed for heaven. Isn't that wonderful? That's a wonderful thing, that's good news. Oh, and by the way, before you go, you're gonna go through seven years of hell on earth. okay, before you get raptured or before you, you know, get to go to heaven. Okay, so I don't have only good news, I have some good news and some bad news. But the gospel's not called, you know, good news and bad news, it's called good news. And you wouldn't have good news if you had to tell people that they were gonna go through the tribulation. And you know, the Christians that go through the tribulation, there are, let me back up. I'm gonna take back Christians. There are believers that go through, that become believers in the tribulation, and they are martyred, okay, by decapitation, many of them. Imagine sharing that when you're out doing evangelism, okay, with somebody, you know? I've got good news for you, you know, believe in Jesus, you go to heaven, but you know, it's gonna be a seven year tribulation and you'll have your head cut off, okay? All right, so do you wanna become a Christian? No, I don't think so. Okay. I mean, really, that's what it amounts to, okay? If you look at the whole chapter of 1 Thessalonians 4, now I've opened up here, I didn't get it all copied out, but let me read you the verse immediately before the rapture passage, which starts in verse 15, okay? And, Actually, verse 13. And verse 12 says, may you walk properly toward those who are outside that you may lack nothing. And the rest of the verses right back down to verse one are all about sanctification, your Christian life, and living up to your Christian life, and your life coming in line with God's standards for your Christian life, all right? There is not a hint or a trace of any tribulation, all right? In that passage immediately before. And then, what does Paul say when he introduces the rapture, okay, in verse 13? What he says is, brothers, I would not have you to be ignorant, okay? I want you to know stuff, says Paul. I'm gonna tell you important stuff, all right? And guess what he's gonna tell them about? The rapture, and he does not mention even a hint of the tribulation. Now that's one of my reasons for believing in the pre-tribulational rapture of Christ. I don't think we're gonna be around for the tribulation. He would have mentioned something as important as the tribulation. because it would come immediately before the rapture, okay? If you're a post-trib rapture person, then the rapture comes right after the tribulation. But if it does, it's not mentioned in 1 Thessalonians chapter four, where Paul says, I don't want you to be ignorant. Okay, and then at the end, what does he say? He says, I want you to comfort each other with these words about the rapture, but not the tribulation, because it's not mentioned, all right? And would it be comforting to have to mention the tribulation to people? Does that fit your comfort zone? Okay, is that in your comfort zone, seven years of hell on earth? Probably not, right? Okay, and so Paul would not have said, hey, I'm gonna comfort you with these, you know, comfort each other with these words, all right? The post-tribulational rapture position is mostly a phenomenon of this, the North American church. Many people feel they haven't been persecuted enough, okay? We're just beginning to be a little bit persecuted, but we haven't experienced any real persecution compared to Rebecca there in the Voice of Martyrs video. And so we need to be persecuted, so we gotta go through the tribulation. And besides that, as a church, we need to be purified, okay? Well, you know, that's a phenomenon of the North American church. It's a peculiarity of us here that live comfortable lives as Christians in North America, praise God, it's nice that we do. I hope we're doing stuff to forward the missions and the kingdom in the rest of the world where they don't have these freedoms. Okay, so do we need a persecution to purify us? Well, It's not a scriptural concept, okay? Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 11 that he is jealously guarding and preparing the bride of Christ, okay, for that meeting with Jesus, all right? He's jealously guarding us, and we are purified by the blood of Christ, not by any tribulation, okay? Now Rebecca in the VOM video this morning, she would probably disagree with this idea that we need tribulation because she lost a husband and a child and things like this happen all around the world except in North America, largely, right? Rebecca's cup of persecution is full and she doesn't need a seven year tribulation to experience persecution. Now, I have a lot of other reasons, but finally, I'm just gonna wrap the reasons up with number four here. Persecution is man and Satan's wrath against the church here on earth, okay? It's man's wrath against the church, all right? Now, what is the tribulation by contrast, okay? Okay, but this persecution on earth is sporadic. It doesn't happen all the time. and it's limited, and it's local, okay? Persecution occurs here and there, here and there, here and there, around the world, okay? Revelation 3.10 says that Jesus saves us from the wrath to come, which is for those who dwell on earth, okay? And so, you know, it's gonna be people who are living on earth during the time of the tribulation who will experience God's wrath against them, okay? The great tribulation of Revelation is the Lamb's wrath. It actually says that in Revelation chapter six, I think. Okay, that they flee, they're fleeing from the wrath of the Lamb. Now if it's the Lamb's wrath, that's Jesus' wrath, right? And his judgment against a sinful world. Not against his beloved bride, the church. And Amir Tsarfati loves to say, okay, how many of you have been to a wedding lately? Have you seen any brides that were beaten up and bruised coming down the aisle? And you know, they're white dressed, ripped up and dirty and they're bleeding. Okay, you haven't seen too many like that? Well, Amir Tsarfati points out that no bridegroom would put his bride through the tribulation and then ask her to come up to heaven to marry him. Nor will I submit our Savior Jesus do the same thing. He won't do that. He's not gonna put us through the tribulation and then rapture us up to heaven to marry him. For these and other reasons, I believe in the pre-tribulational rapture of the church. Well, what is this crazy thing called the rapture? Let's read about it in 1 Thessalonians chapter four, verses 13 to 18. Paul wrote, now this is like a tremendous passage that is many times overlooked. You cannot overlook it though. And then your problem is where do you put it, okay? Well, I think we know where to put it before the tribulation. It fits in there very nicely, okay? Because in Revelation 19, the armies of heaven, that's the Christians up in heaven, come with Jesus on white horses down to the earth. Now, if you put the rapture then, okay, you have the church going up to heaven, but they don't have time for the bema seed of Christ, okay, the judgment for the rewards. They don't have time to examine their mansions in heaven. They don't have time to train to ride horses, okay? They're gonna be thrown on horseback and then taken right down in the armies of heaven following Jesus back down to earth. Do you see the, you know, the way it does not fit into that very well? But a lot of people are post, you know, post-trib rapture people, okay? They believe that the rapture's after the tribulation. It doesn't fit there. Because we're coming down out of heaven, we're not at that time going into heaven, but if we go to heaven before the tribulation, guess what? We're there for seven years. And all kinds of things can take place, and then at the end of the seven years, we follow him down to earth. So Paul wrote, I don't want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. I want you to have hope. He says, for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout and the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God. and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord, okay? Now, one more question answered before we compare it to the second coming, okay? And we're approaching the question, is the rapture the same as the second coming of Christ, okay? Well, here's the passage from Revelation. And you try and remember the one we just read. Christ will come in the air, we'll go up to meet him, and the dead in Christ will rise with us. And then we'll go to be with him. Okay, that's what we just read. And this is Revelation 19, the second coming. Now I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse, and he who sat on him was called Faithful and True. And in righteousness, he judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called Word of God. And the armies in heaven, clothed in linen, white and clean, followed him on white horses. Now out of his mouth goes a sharp sword and with it he should strike the nations. And he himself will rule them with a rod of iron. He himself treads the wine press and the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he has on his robe and on his thigh a name written, okay, which is, and let's see if we can get back. A name written. A name written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Sorry about that. Now let's compare that passage to 1 Thessalonians 4, okay? And a very casual comparison of the two would show you many differences. We believe that the rapture is before the tribulation, whereas the second coming of Christ is clearly after the tribulation. Two, there's no mention of any judgment before or during the rapture. But Jesus brings his judgment to the world and war it says also in Revelation 19 at his second coming. The rapture is described in wedding language in John 14, but the second coming is described in terrifying military language. Jesus will come to earth visibly to rule when he comes at the second coming. While he only comes to the air at the rapture, he does not approach the world. He approaches it, but he does not set foot in the world. At his second coming, Jesus will come as King of kings and Lord of lords, but at the rapture, he'll come as our beloved bridegroom. At the rapture, we go up, while at the second coming, we come back down. At the rapture, our bridegroom takes us up to heaven, while at the second coming, Jesus leads us back to earth as the armies of heaven mounted on white horses, which reminds me of a story. Two weeks ago, Don Perkins was standing here. Do you remember that? And he got all excited about the white horses. Do you remember that? And he named his white horse. Do you remember the name? It was Nelly, right? Okay. The strange thing is, that very Sunday in my lesson, I had got off on some tangent or something about the white horses, and I named mine, and I was reading a book about Alexander the Great, I named my horse after Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, okay? And that very quickly is the story. Sorry about taking time for that. There's some beautiful white horses. And there's Alexander on a Roman mosaic, okay, you know, which is obviously damaged. And for these seven reasons and many more, we conclude that the rapture and the second coming are two different events of the last time, separated by seven years of the great tribulation. And if we do have good news, it's that they can receive eternal life, people can receive eternal life by placing their faith in the Lord Jesus, but also that they will avoid the wrath to come of the great tribulation, because he'll come and get them before it breaks out. See, Jesus, the bridegroom's gonna rescue his bride before the wrath. Does that sound familiar? That's the name of a recent movie, right? Okay. Where will we be during the Great Tribulation? Up in heaven, okay, with our bridegroom, trying out our new mansions. He'll be judging our works for him to give us rewards. These might be like our wedding presents, and there'll be a wedding feast, and perhaps we'll be training to ride our white horses back down to earth, okay? And there are five kinds of crowns that we may receive. in heaven from Jesus' hands, okay? The incorruptible crown, the crown of life, the crown of glory, the crown of righteousness, and the crown of rejoicing. What do these crowns mean and how do we earn them? Ah, that's a sermon for another time, okay? What is this? This is blatant commercial advertising. This is terrible, okay? Who is this guy? I thought I would mention the Sunday school class, the adult Bible class that meets two doors over, okay? Just past Tastries, and they're meeting next service, okay? So if you have nothing to do, You can go, and I won't be there, obviously, I'll be here. The Gideons will be there, and you'll get a free New Testament, okay, if you go. And it's just two doors over, just past Tastries. You have to get there early because the seats tend to fill up, okay? And we are going to conclude then with another prayer and let you go. Heavenly Father, thank you for all your goodness. Thank you that your Son, the Lord Jesus, is coming to rapture us before the tribulation. We believe, to the best of our knowledge, and we pray that when we might live to serve you and to tell others that yes, they can receive Jesus as Savior and receive eternal life, but they can also avoid the tribulation, the wrath to come by receiving Him as Savior now while there is still time. And we thank you and we praise your name in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for joining us for another lesson. We hope that this message is a blessing for you and helps you grow towards a more mature understanding of God's Word. For more information about our ministry, we invite you to check out our website at rockharborchurch.net. Until next time, remember, keep looking up for our redemption draws near.