Charles Cooper explicates the doctrine of the final eschatological judgments. Amillennialists wrongly ignore specific aspects of the final judgment and end up focusing on generalities. This presentation was given last October in O’Fallon Missouri at an eschatology forum.
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I have been in the process of writing a book on Prewrath for some time. The past week I have been researching and studying Amos’ oracle of the Day of the Lord. It is eerie to see some parallels between the northern kingdom of Israel that he preached against and American Religion. They had a popular eschatology that presumed upon God’s holiness thinking they could placate God’s holy standards by their religious ritualism — and thus assumed that they were immune to any future judgment. The future for them was like looking through rose-colored stained glass windows. American religion has its own delusional external religious ritualism, and it is self-made.
I was directed this morning to a piece that encapsulated American Religion and thought to myself that Amos’ categorical message of righteousness still rings true today. Here is an excerpt of that article:
In the Brownian worldview [Dan Brown], all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.
The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.
These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.
But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.
For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both. (Read it all here.)
Dear Prewrath Rapture Dot Com:
I am writing you to let you know how much I appreciate the information on your website. I am no expert and am limited in Bible knowledge and theology as a layman. I am an engineer which requires me to be logical and analytical. I have studied several books and many articles on eschatology over the past 35 years. All come from a Pre-millennial perspective. I was brought up in a fundamental Pre-Trib environment since childhood in New England. I remember early on reading all about the Pre-Trib Rapture and thought it was great. But then I would read the passages of scripture dealing with the end-times in my Bible reading and something kept bothering me about exactly how the Pre-Trib scenario wasn’t that clear. There were too many assumptions and interpretations made elsewhere to make it work. I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I trusted the Bible scholars knew what they were talking about. In the early years I thought this was the only view. But the feeling of my wife was that why would God want to remove us during the entire tribulation when our witness would be needed most.
Because of my career in the Air Force and then the aerospace/defense industry, we moved around the country often and have been associated with many Baptist and Bible churches. Two had pastors with a Post-Tribulational view which started making us aware of the problems with the Pre-Trib view.
We were introduced to the Pre-Wrath view in the mid-90s by reading the writings of and listening to taped Bible studies of Marv Rosenthal who my parents loved to hear at Moody-Keswick Bible Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, back in the 80s-90s until he was disinvited. I then obtained books by Robert Van Kampen and it was his The Rapture Question Answered that really convinced me that Pre-Wrath made the most sense. In the past few months I’ve been reaffirming this position by reading the writings and listening to the lectures of Charles Cooper and others at Prewrathrapture dot com and a few other linked sites. You have written excellent articles in defense of the Pre-Wrath view.
The problem I see with the Western Evangelical Church today is that the people do not want to hear such hard teaching or break from there comfortable “orthodox” beliefs. Pre-Wrath does not “tickle their ears”, but Pre-Trib does. They want positive things that will help them deal with life and not worry about having to go through much of the 70th week. But we are commanded to not worry, but to trust Him to help us overcome and be faithful to the end of the age regardless of the circumstances. Christians 50+ (the majority now) like tradition. And all the favorite Bible teachers on radio and TV push Pre-Trib. To question that is “heresy”. And 9 times out of 10 they never heard of Pre-Wrath, especially here in the Dallas Fort Worth area which is a Pre-Trib stronghold including Southern Baptist churches (where we now worship) even though SBC doctrinal statement allows for different views. The situation I hear Marv talking about in his 2008 Pre-Wrath conference address is very true. Churches and organizations can’t change once they stipulate Pre-Trib in their doctrine. That creates all sorts of problems. Change in view will have to come from the bottom up – the grass roots. I am sharing the Pre-Wrath view with Christian friends at work and by e-mail with a few from the past. But I’m finding it very difficult at church and have to be careful. The pastor’s mentor was the late Dr. W.A. Criswell known for his Pre-Trib views. But the Lord lead us to this church for other reasons.
In His Service,
Chuck
Open up your Bibles.
There have been some interpreters of Matthew 24 that have wrongly viewed the martyrdom contained in verse nine as disconnected from the martyrdom of the great tribulation in verses 15-22. The grammar and context militates against such an interpretation.
In Matthew 24:5-14, Jesus describes mostly general events that will happen up to the end of the age. Then in verses 15-22, Jesus unpacks the martyrdom that he mentioned in verse nine.
Here are the reasons we know that starting in verse fifteen Jesus provides a parenthetical account of the martyrdom.
1) Jesus begins verse fifteen with “Therefore” (οὖν). This is a common discourse indicator, which in this case is giving an inference of what came before verse fifteen. In addition, the very use of “therefore” demonstrates that the audience before verse fifteen is the same audience after verse fifteen.
2) In verses 5-14 there is a general or “shotgun” description of events that will precede the end of the age. But in verses 15-22, Jesus focuses in on the monumental event that will be the cause of death for Christians: the “abomination of desolation” followed by the consequent persecution terror of the great tribulation.
3) Finally, this point is often missed, but the same Christian audience in verses 5-14, who will experience those events, is the same audience in verses 15-22 because Jesus uses the second person plural, “you” in both sections without any hint that he has two completely different groups of believers in mind.
S. P. Tregelles writes,
The Apostle James (Chapter 5) speaks of the evil characteristics of “the last days”; in contrast to which he says, “Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and the latter rain. Be ye also patient, stablish your hearts; for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” (7, 8.) This , then, shows what the kind of waiting for the Lord’s coming was which this Apostle taught: it was that in which “long patience” was needed. The expression, “the coming of the Lord draweth nigh”, is not one to be measured by mere interval of time, but rather with the intelligence of its absolute certainty, even though the intervening period might seem great.
….He does not make instantaneous [imminent] looking for the coming of the Lord the reason why such things should not be said or done. He does not say (as some now do), in speaking of things presently before them, “Unless the Lord come first.” (The Hope of Christ’s Second Coming, p. 24)