www.pre-trib.org 8
represent redeemed human beings, . . . the church is included and is thus
in heaven before the tribulation begins.
7
If they refer to the church, then this would necessitate the rapture and
reward of the church before the tribulation and would require a
chronological gap for them to perform their heavenly duties during the
seven-year tribulation.
Believers who come to faith in Christ during the tribulation are not
translated at Christ’s second advent but carry on ordinary occupations such
as farming and building houses, and they will bear children (Isa. 65:20-25).
This would be impossible if all saints were translated at the second coming
to the earth, as posttribulationists teach. Because pretribulationists have at
least a seven-year interval between the removal of the church at the
rapture and the return of Christ to the earth, this is not a problem because
millions of people will be saved during the interval and thus be available to
populate the millennium in their natural bodies in order to fulfill Scripture.
It would be impossible for the judgment of the Gentiles to take place
after the second coming if the rapture and second coming are not
separated by a gap of time. How would both saved and unsaved, still in
their natural bodies, be separated in judgment, if all living believers are
translated at the second coming. This would be impossible if the
translation takes place at the second coming, but it is solved through a
pretribulational gap.
Dr. John F. Walvoord points out that if “the translation took place in
connection with the second coming to the earth, there would be no need of
separating the sheep from the goats at a subsequent judgment, but the
separation would have taken place in the very act of the translation of the
believers before Christ actually sets up His throne on earth (Matt. 25:31).”
8
Once again, such a “problem” is solved by taking a pre-trib position with it’s
gap of at least seven years.
A time interval is needed so that God’s program for the church, a time
when Jew and Gentile are united in one body (cf. Eph. 2–3), will not
become commingled in any way with His unfinished and future plan for
Israel during the tribulation. Dr. Renald Showers notes that “[A]ll other
views of the Rapture have the church going through at least part of the 70th
week, meaning that all other views mix God’s 70-weeks program for Israel
and Jerusalem together with His program for the church. A gap is needed
in order for these two aspects of God’s program to be harmonized in a non-
conflicting manner.”
9
The pretribulational rapture of the church fulfills a biblical need to not
only see a distinction between the translation of Church Age saints at the
rapture, before the second coming, but it also handles without difficulty the
necessity of a time-gap which harmonizes a number of future biblical
7
Charles C. Ryrie, Revelation (Chicago: Moody Press, 1968), pp. 35-36.
8
Walvoord, The Rapture Question, p. 274.
9
Renald Showers, Maranatha Our Lord, Come! A Definitive Study of the Rapture of the Church (Bellmawr, N.J.:
The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, Inc., 1995), p. 243.