I am continuing my response to Pastor Bob DeWaay. This next part of his presentation is quite interesting. First, he notes this text:
And I said to him, “My lord, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” (Rev. 7:14)
He says that this body of believers who have come out of the Great Tribulation is “a church.” Notice the indefinite article. I will come back to that in a moment. At this point in his lecture, he says that he disagrees with his pretrib friends who say that there is not a church during the Tribulation. Indeed, DeWaay does affirm that there is a rapture of the Church before the tribulation, but he also identifies a church in Rev 7:14 who has just come out of a great tribulation. Here is the reason why he thinks “a church” is identified in Revelation 7:14. He asserts:
“[W]hat is the definition of the [word] ‘church’? ‘the called-out ones.'”
This is demonstrably false. The Greek word for “church” is ekklesia, ἐκκλησία, which means “assembly, congregation, gathering, church.” One will not find a credible Greek lexicon listing the meaning of this word as “called-out ones.” One authoritative Greek lexicon even has this to say:
Though some persons have tried to see in the term ἐκκλησία a more or less literal meaning of ‘called-out ones,’ this type of etymologizing is not warranted either by the meaning of ἐκκλησία in NT times or even by its earlier usage. (Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains. 2d, Accordance electronic ed., version 3.8. New York: United Bible Societies, 1989.)
Moreover, both D.A. Carson and Moises Silva actually use this very term as a paragon for a lexical fallacy. See respectively, Exegetical Fallacies; and Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics.
So these lexical facts undermine DeWaay’s theology of having “a” church in Revelation 7:14, as if there is another church raptured before the Great Tribulation. The Church is seen in Revelation 7:14, not because the word “church” means “called-out ones,” but because the rapture/resurrection occurs between the sixth seal and the seventh seal, consistent with Matthew 24.
He may disagree with pretribulationists with how to label these saints in Revelation 7:14: “tribulation saints” or “a church.” Don’t let that mislead you because DeWaay agrees substantially with pretribulationists that there is a rapture of the Church before the Tribulation. So consequently, DeWaay’s position blunts the warnings of Christ because he still affirms that there will be a rapture before the Antichrist’s Great Tribulation. And this is in direct contradiction to our Lord’s teaching in Matthew 24.
We do know for certain who these warnings apply to in the Bible: the last generation of the present Church—not, as DeWaay would like us to think, a second created church that comes along after the rapture.
His position cannot explain the real warnings that Paul and Jesus make for the Church. And to place them in a “possible other church” context is exegetically unsupported and diminishes the force of Jesus and Paul’s Biblical teaching.
