The following is one of the most devastating critiques of the pretribulation doctrine of imminence in our opinion. As you know, pretribulationism teaches that Matthew 24 does not apply to the church. They also teach that the warnings in the Bible about “watching” for Christ’s return requires that no prophesied event must occur before Christ’s return—i.e. imminence. However, George Eldon Ladd, in his seminal book, The Blessed Hope, reveals, to use his word, a “fatal” inconsistency in pretribulation theology.
He writes:
[Pretribulation teachers] have applied the commands of our Lord to watch in Matthew 24 to the Jewish remnant in the Tribulation. A. C. Gaebelein, interpreting the meaning of verse 43 and 44 says, “with these words of warning and exhortation to watch, our Lord closes the predictions relating to the end of the Jewish age. This warning will be understood and heeded by the Jewish remnant to which it is addressed. They are to watch for the Son of man; the church is to wait for the Lord” (The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. II, P. 217).
One of the most recent statements of a pretribulation rapture applies these verses in the same way. After quoting Matthew 24:37–42, English says, “The same circumstances that attended the time just prior to the judgment of the flood will pertain before the return of Christ in judgment upon the world. Business will be going on as usual. People will be occupied with the normal duties of life. . . . Then suddenly the Lord will come. . . . The allusion is most certainly to the time of the coming of the Son of man in power and glory. That coming is unquestionably after the tribulation. . . . This passage cannot be used as a proof text that the church will pass through the tribulation. It has to do with those who are on earth when Christ returns to earth—those taken will be those who have rejected God and his Christ; those left will be tribulation saints, Israel primarily, who will enter the earthly kingdom” (Rethinking the Rapture, pp. 49, 50).
Such admissions as these are fatal to the theory of an any-moment rapture and a secret coming of Christ which is based on the argument that the exhortations to watch require an any-moment return of Christ. If pretribulationists can apply these words without difficulty to the Jewish remnant in the Tribulation and yet admit that they are exhorted to watch for an event which will take place at the end of the seventieth week, although they “do no know the day or the hour,” then two results inevitably follow. First, if the exhortations do belong to the Jewish remnant, they do not apply to the Church. Jesus then did not exhort the Church to watch for an unexpected event. In this case, there does not appear either in the Gospels or in the Epistles or in the Revelation a teaching that the Church is to watch for a sudden, any-moment coming of Christ.
Secondly, if pretribulationists can apply the command to watch to anyone in the midst of the Tribulation whose end can be approximately known, then they cannot object to the application of these same exhortations to the Church on the ground that it is impossible for believers to watch for an event whose time can be approximately known. If the Jews can be told to “watch” for an event which will take place three and a half years after Antichrist breaks covenant with them, then Christians can be told to watch for an event which will not take places until the end of the Great Tribulation. In either case, it is impossible to build the teaching of a secret, any-moment coming of Christ to rapture the Church on these exhortations. The Blessed Hope, pp. 113–14.
