Transcription
This is the first of a series where we're going to be looking at the rapture from the perspective of the book of Revelation. And by the way, I do believe that there will be a rapture before the seals are open or any trumpets are blown.
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When it comes to things having to do with the Bible and Jesus and my spiritual life, I try to line everything up with scripture. This to me is sort of the bottom line for everything is that we need to see things in the word of God. Whatever we believe about Christianity or about our faith, we need to be able to find it in the scriptures. And one of the problems that I've had actually for a number of years, even before I started doing my end time Bible studies, was the typical pre-tribulation dispensational doctrine of esquetology. The problem that I had was one of of cognitive dissonance. I read the book of Revelation. And I hadn't actually studied it, but I read it and what I read in Revelation didn't line up with what I was being told as far as pre-tribulational dispensational esquetology.
I was taught that believers are going to be raptured into heaven. We're the bride of Christ. We're the church. We're going to be raptured into heaven on a day that nobody knows. And sometime either the day we're raptured or sometime after that, there's going to be a 7-year time of tribulation and wrath on the earth. And believers are going to be in heaven with Jesus. And we're going to be celebrating the marriage supper of the lamb. And then at the end of the seven years, we're all going to come back to the earth and, you know, fight in the battle of Armageddon. and after that Christ is going to set up his millennial kingdom. All of that sounded really good and people could point to certain passages of scripture that seem to support different aspects of that doctrine. However, it's not in Revelation. And that for me is something that's very disturbing.
Now, I realize for a lot of other people, they don't really care. They don't really care whether or not you can find this story in Revelation. But I care and it matters to me mostly because the book of Revelation was given to us as God's last statement about the end times. It's it's the final word. God gave this revelation to Jesus who gave it to an angel who gave it to John who gave it to the seven churches who were told don't tamper with the message. guard it, keep it, don't add anything to it. And then the message has come to us. And here we are at the end of the age. And it's important. It matters to us what the Bible says about these things because we're going to be among the people in all of history who are experiencing them. We need to get it right.
One of the problems that we have is something called cognitive dissonance where we can believe two things that aren't the same but and in fact they're kind of opposite opposing ideas and we believe them both at the same time. So we want to believe what we were taught about pre-tribulation, you know, rapture of the church, rapture of the bride, and we want to believe what we read in Revelation. Well, what happens is we end up with something called cognitive dissonance where we try to believe both at the same time. But here's the thing. Either what we're told about the rapture of the bride, only a single rapture on a day nobody knows where we're taken into heaven, seven-year marriage, supper of the lamb, and so on. Either that's correct and we can find it in the book of revelation or we have to look at the book of revelation, see what it says and believe what it says.
It's human nature to believe whatever we were first told about something. So if we're first told about a bride being raptured or the church being raptured, that becomes the grid that every other kind of esquetology has to go through. So we're hardwired to believe that you know what loving, godly, educated pastors and teachers have told us over the years. And if these loving, godly people who like know the Greek and the Hebrew, if they say certain things are true, like the bride is raptured and there's seven years of wrath and all of that, well, we we're inclined to believe them, we want to believe that that's true. And if along the way we should discover something that's like radically different from what we were told, we feel like like maybe we're wrong because these other people, they're smarter, they know more, they're closer to God, right? And many of us would rather just just let it go and just believe what we've been told by these people who are by and large wonderful, respectable, intelligent, educated, spiritual people. And we don't want to go down the path of something different. face the that inevitable freef fall experience that happens when something totally different is added to the story or added to the system.
When we actually discover that the story that's being told in Revelation doesn't match the rapture story that we've been handed, what that can lead to then is what I call this freef fall experience. This, oh no, what else isn't true? In addition, if we start going down a different path, our friends and our family who have strongly held beliefs about some other esquetology uh may decide to alienate us from their affections. We might even be kicked out or ostracized from a church that we're going to. So this cognitive dissonance between what I could see in Revelation and what people were telling me the end time story was from basically bits and pieces of Paul's letters mixed in with Daniel mixed in with the Olivet discourse and so on. You you piece together a narrative and it sounds convincing. it seems convincing and then you kind of uh insert selected passages about the beast and the mark of the beast and the four horsemen of the apocalypse and so on that you've taken from Revelation and you've kind of inserted it into the narrative and you end up with something that sounds really good but is it true or is it is it supported by scripture?
I didn't like the cognitive dissonance. I didn't like looking at Revelation and not seeing the bride story there. It bothered me and I only could see it like at the end of the book. And I'm like, how does that work? And so I embarked on a journey going through Revelation and I ended up with something that is totally different from what I had been taught, what I'd been told. This little series of Bible studies that I'm going to be doing is the story that I found in Revelation. I'm going to show you this story. And it's not a bridal story. It's it's actually a temple story. It's about how kings and priests and groups of sons are going to be brought into God's heavenly temple. It tells a very different story than the one that we've been given. And that's what I'm going to be doing over the next uh few videos.
So, I would like you to read the book of Revelation. It's 22 chapters. And I want you to observe what you see there. Okay? Don't try to interpret anything. Just observe what you see. If you see groups of sons who are royalty, kings and priests, and it's not just one group of sons that you find in the heavenly temple, but several, I just want you to notice that, and I want you to see if you can see anything about a bride being caught up or a seven-year wedding supper of the lamb. read through the book and just see if you can find those things in there.
This is the first of a series where we're going to be looking at the rapture from the perspective of the book of Revelation. And by the way, I do believe that there will be a rapture before the seals are open or any trumpets are blown. And that is very clear in the book of Revelation. But I think you're going to find that it's a very different kind of rapture. Do your homework. Let me know what you see and we'll see you on the next video. Till then, have a blessed day.
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