Sorry, Maggie

That's it. I've had it up to here.

I'm not kidding—I can't take it anymore. If I don't get this out of my system, I'm going to start banging my head against the nearest brick wall.

I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching videos from some of my favorite Bible teachers, and I routinely search for more—especially in the areas of Bible prophecy and eschatology (the study of the end times).

I'm happy to report that, although you may have to sift through a lot of junk to find it, there is a wealth of powerful, biblically sound teaching freely available on the Internet. In the process of searching YouTube, however, I never fail to run across a lot of videos posted by people who apparently have a seething, maniacal hatred for everything and everybody associated with the biblical doctrine of the pre-tribulation Rapture, which teaches that the Rapture will occur before the beginning of the seven-year Tribulation.

It seems the pre-trib Rapture pushes a few hot buttons out there.

Most seem to be of the post-trib persuasion, and believe that the Rapture is a grand U-turn (we go up, and then come right back down with Him) that will occur at the Second Coming at the climax of the Tribulation.

I sometimes catch myself watching some of these videos, because I honestly want to understand why they interpret Scripture the way they do. I am always open to hear why someone interprets a passage of Scripture a certain way, and I can honestly say that there are a few post-trib folks that I genuinely love as brothers and sisters in Christ and respect as fellow students of God's Word.

I just happen to disagree with them on a few points, that's all. They have a different view of certain biblical teachings than we pre-tribbers do, and have reached some different conclusions. But just as many pre-tribbers, they have done so in a sincere effort to honor God and His Word in the light they have.

That's all any of us can do. God bless 'em—none of us have all the answers.

But then there are others. There are a lot of vitriolic anti-pre-trib videos on YouTube with screaming titles that punch you in the face, something along the lines of the following:

EXPOSING the FALSE DOCTRINE of the Pre-Trib Rapture!!!

What the Bible REALLY Says About the Pre-Trib HERESY!!!

PROOF the Church WILL GO THROUGH the Tribulation!!!

MILLIONS Being DUPED by Pre-Trib Rapture CLAPTRAP!!!

Pre-Trib PANSIES—Start PREPPING for the TRIB, Dudes!!!

The Pre-Trib Fib: PSYCHOSIS or SATANIC DECEPTION???

Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

It's normally easy for me to completely ignore such videos because I know from experience that the people who make them don't know what they're talking about. YouTube has become a virtual mecca for such individuals, and you just have to learn to weave your way around them.

Trust me: One common tactic used by the people who make such videos is to confidently assure you that they are only going to look at exactly what the Bible says (as opposed to, say, the spurious theories of "false teachers").

Naturally, any thinking believer might reasonably ask:

"But isn't 'only looking at exactly what the Bible says' a good thing?"

Well, you'd like to think so, but it depends on exactly what you're looking at...and in many cases what you're not looking at. I have discovered that this line is often a tip off—a code phrase of sorts—because what it usually means is that they want you to passively follow along and only look at the verses of Scripture they show you, without reading or considering the context of the passage or any other related passages of Scripture (which just might reveal how shaky—or just plain wrong—their teaching is, heaven forbid).

If they can get you to just sit back and follow the bouncing ball, so to speak, then they can connect the dots they have carefully chosen to connect and lead you by the nose straight to the conclusion they wish to lead you to—and do so under the pious pretense of "only looking at exactly what the Bible says."

It's not just YouTube videos, either. A lot of false teaching out there uses the same basic tactic.

Luckily, there's an app for that:

That's our story and we're sticking to it

Nearly all of these death-to-the-pre-trib-Rapture videos have one thing in common, however, and this is what I simply refuse to put up with any longer. It drives me bonkers, and it's what motivated me to write this article: Almost all of them parrot the claim that the doctrine of the pre-trib Rapture sprang from a "prophetic utterance" given by an apparently unstable 15-year-old Scottish girl named Margaret MacDonald in 1830.

Then, as the legend goes, an Anglo-Irish evangelist named John Nelson Darby got wind of it, promptly twisted some Scripture around it, and then spent the rest of his inglorious career popularizing it among naive, biblically illiterate wimps within the Church who desperately hoped to escape the slightest wisp of the persecution the Bible promises all true Christians. Mwua ha ha ha ha (sinister laugh).

Proponents of the post-trib Rapture, at least the ones who make such YouTube videos, just keep regurgitating the same spiel over and over and over again, video after video after video in the hopes that people won't bother to do a little fact-checking and will just accept it at face value. When pressed, the more knowledgeable among them will typically refer you to the same books written by pro-post-trib authors who have been shown to have distorted—if not fabricated—historical facts to support their preconceived agendas.

So, you can't win with them. Discussions about the Rapture invariably elicit stubborn, spite-filled spasms of illogic with Scriptures neatly carved out of context and the furious pummeling of paper-thin strawmen. And to top it off, they feel compelled to mock, ridicule, and demonize pre-tribbers in ways that...well, let's just say that Christian charity usually gets left out of the loop.

There's just one problem with all of this, however. If you do decide to check out the yarn they spin, you discover something interesting:

It's not true.

As it turns out, it is easy to demonstrate conclusively from documented historical evidence—much of it in the written words of the people involved—that it is absolutely, unquestionably false. Period. Never happened.

All it takes is a thimbleful of intellectual honesty and a willingness to do a minimal amount of homework—which is apparently asking altogether too much from the people who make these venomous anti-pre-trib videos.

My goal here is simply to convey to you a sense of what actually occurred around the time period in question, along with some of the associated context. But to put things in perspective, we need to establish some doctrinal—not to mention a bit of historical—background.

Things that are different are not the same

First of all, understand that the doctrine of the pre-trib Rapture grows quite naturally out of the concept that God has separate programs for Israel and for the Church. It is not hard to see in Scripture that God deals with the nation of Israel and the Church as distinct entities.

After Israel rejected Jesus as their prophesied Messiah, God set Israel aside temporarily so He could take for Himself a people from among the Gentiles—people who would have faith in His Son without the need for tangible proof.

That last phrase refers to a time when the complete number of Gentiles (known only to God) has come to faith in Christ and are safely on board, so to speak. At that point He will turn His attention back to the nation of Israel and ultimately deliver her from her enemies during the Tribulation.

The Church—the body of Christ: It contains both physically Jewish and physically non-Jewish individuals (mostly non-Jewish). But once we repent and believe the gospel and are thus sealed by the Holy Spirit, we are neither Jew nor Gentile, spiritually speaking, but one in Christ.

At some point after "the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" and God is done putting together the Church, He will once again turn His attention to Israel to fulfill the final week (seven-year period) of Daniel's 70 Weeks.

Now, add to the mix verses that clearly indicate that Christ will remove His Church from the earth at some point via the Rapture (or the catching up, the catching away, the gathering together, the translation of the Church, the harpazo, or whatever you care to call it):

And so on and so forth. A hotly debated question then becomes whether the Church is removed before, during, or at the end of Daniel's 70th Week. In the minds of some, the question is whether or not there is even going to be such a thing as the Rapture—perhaps Jesus and the apostle Paul were speaking in a secret code and actually meant the price of matzah balls was going to rise.

Don't laugh...I've heard people teach things just about that stupid.

Regardless of how you view the timing of the Rapture, however, it is quite clear from numerous Old Testament prophecies that God would bring Israel back into her land once again and establish her as a nation. That's the only way Israel can be in place for her final deliverance at Christ's second coming—Church or no Church, Rapture or no Rapture.

Note that in both of the above passages from Ezekiel, the phrase from among the nations tells us clearly this is not a reference to Israel's return from their 70-year Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC. In the above passages, they are being gathered from the whole world.

Again, a clear indication that this does not refer to their return from the Babylonian exile, since they were "plucked up" again after the sixth century BC. They were "plucked up" and dispersed in the first century AD.

That is, not just from Babylon, but from the whole world.

These few verses are just a taste of a theme that runs through many of the Old Testament prophets: God said He would literally gather Israel back into her land and make her a nation once again, and that afterwards the Jews would never be dispersed again.

Not only that, but God promised to restore their original Hebrew language, which suggests it would be lost as a result of their dispersion—which it was. God said through the prophet Zephaniah that when He restored them to their land, He would also restore to them their "pure language."

The King James Version renders the underlined phrase as "For then will I turn to the people a pure language." A number of translations render it as "pure speech." In other words, God said that not only would He bring the Jews back into their land and make Israel a nation again, but that their native Hebrew language would be restored and would be the language spoken at that time.

"To dream the impossible dream..."

Well, that's terrific. Just one small problem, though. After the Romans sacked Jerusalem and demolished the Jewish temple in AD 70, the land of Israel essentially became a barren wasteland and the old city of Jerusalem lay in ruins—and little changed for nearly two thousand years. The idea of the Jewish people ever literally returning to their land to become a nation again faded into a fantasy that was all but abandoned over the centuries by the vast majority of Bible scholars. Not all, but certainly the majority.

And that's the rub. If Israel isn't back in the land—if Israel never becomes a nation again—then we're stuck. If we can't take a large number of prophecies about Israel literally, then we have no choice but to continue spiritualizing away, allegorizing, or seeking alternative interpretations of much of what the Bible says about Israel and the Tribulation.

As a matter of fact, if we can't take God's promises to Israel literally, why should anyone believe that there's even going to be something called the "Tribulation"?

Daniel's 70 Weeks may as well be Daniel's Hanukkah Wish List.

Without Israel back in the land, it all falls to pieces. Goodbye end-time prophecy, hello pulp fiction. We don't know what we can interpret literally and what we cannot. Maybe we can't interpret anything literally—maybe it's all a bunch of allegorical fantasy, and we are free to spin fanciful interpretations of what we think the Bible might mean.

Who knows, maybe Nero really was the Antichrist.

No? How about Ronald McDonald? Oh, wait...no, the Hamburglar!

In this game, everyone's speculative interpretation has to be considered just as valid as anyone else's. That's the rule.

That's where we were around the end of the eighteenth century. This was largely due to the reluctance of most Bible scholars to take all of God's Word literally, and in all fairness it was difficult to take all of God's Word literally under the circumstances because it looked for all the world as if Israel would never be a nation again...and believing something so preposterous required a level of faith that would have made Abraham green with envy.

Here's the thing: The Jews had been scattered all over the globe for over 17 centuries. Hebrew was a dead language. No other people group in the history of mankind has ever been restored as a nation in their original land—along with their original language—under such circumstances. Not one. Not by a long shot.

When it came to the Jewish people returning to their biblical homeland and becoming a nation again (a Hebrew-speaking nation, no less), you may as well have tried to convince people that the barren, icy expanse of the South Pole would one day be a balmy, sun-bathed paradise—inhabited by a group of people who spoke Phoenician.

But around the beginning of the nineteenth century, something began to change—there was something in the air, something new. Some might have called it a paradigm shift. So what shifted? What could have caused a number of Bible scholars to start taking a fresh look at Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel? What could have triggered the tectonic plate shift that was rumbling to life in the field of biblical eschatology?

As the eighteenth century came to an end, something happened that most Christians today are unaware of, and it caused that ice at the South Pole to start melting ever so slightly—and at the same time influenced a growing number of Bible scholars and teachers to start thinking inside the bagel.

The Little Emperor wants a bigger empire

In the spring of 1799, as the eighteenth century was drawing to a close, the Age of Enlightenment and the sweeping social change it engendered was underway throughout much of Europe. The French Revolution that had begun 10 years earlier was coming to a close, with its banner of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité flying high.

In 1797, French forces had embarked on an ambitious campaign in the Middle East that was intended to expand France's empirical reach and protect and promote French trade interests (and, with any luck at all, undermine those of l'Angleterre, their chief competitor in the global empire business).

Under Napoleon Bonaparte, the French had won a series of decisive victories, and had some initial success in Egypt. From there, it was on to the area of Palestine. The key to success of the next stage of the campaign was to take the port city of Acre (known as Akko today), which is just a few kilometers north of Haifa in northern Israel.

As the siege of Acre dragged on from March until May of 1799, Napoleon did something that some historians believe was little more than a publicity stunt intended to coax the Jews living in the region into rising up and aiding the French in their cause by fighting against the Turks.

On May 22, 1799, Le Moniteur Universel, one of the main newspapers in France, printed a brief statement to the effect that Napoleon had issued a proclamation urging the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under the French banner to aid the French in the re-establishment of Jerusalem.

Rumors began circulating that Napoleon was fully prepared to formally announce the establishment of a Jewish homeland—under the protection of the French—in the area then known as Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital.

Napoleon's plan was to take the walled city of Acre, and then continue south to Jerusalem where he would presumably make a triumphant entrance and officially issue his grand proclamation. In the meantime, he was no doubt hoping to drum up some support from the Jewish population against the Turks.

Now, all he had to do was take Acre.

Que catastrophe!

Unfortunately, Napoleon's attack on Acre turned out to be a classic example of Murphy's Law: Everything that could possibly go wrong for the French did go wrong—and Napoleon would never have the chance to issue his proclamation.

First of all, in an event that military historians agree doomed the attack before it even started, the Royal Navy captured French ships en route from Egypt carrying siege equipment that Napoleon needed to take the city (heavy cannons to blast down walls, and so on). The naval advantage enjoyed by the British also allowed them to continue their logistical support of Acre during the siege.

Not only that, but Napoleon greatly underestimated the gritty resolve of the Turkish troops who defended the walled city, with a generous amount of support from the British. Napoleon had anticipated that the Turks would capitulate in short order and that Acre would be under French control within two weeks. However, the Turks had received news of how French troops had brutally slaughtered large numbers of Egyptians months earlier, and this had steeled their resolve to defend their position to the death.

To that end, and unknown to the French, the Turks had sufficient time to build additional walls to protect the city, which proved instrumental in frustrating the French ground assaults—and the French had no alternative but to resort to ground assaults (basically bayonet charges) precisely because they lacked siege equipment.

The attack on Acre was nothing short of a catastrophe for Napoleon and his troops. By the end of May, with as many as eight failed ground assaults to their credit and their ranks reeling from the plague due to abysmal weather and poor sanitary conditions, the French under Napoleon finally conceded that the situation was hopeless. With the Little Emperor's dream of a Middle Eastern addition to his empire in tatters, the French marched their poor, whipped derrières back to Egypt.

What if...

OK, so why the history lesson? The point is that for a brief period of time, the word on the street was that for the first time since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, a major world power—a country that arguably had the muscle to make it happen—seemed to be prepared and in a position to help the Jews re-establish their biblical homeland. Needless to say, to the Jews that was a big deal.

To any student of the Bible, it was more than a big deal:

It was a game changer.

Bigger than the invention of the telescope in astronomy.

Bigger than the formulation of Newton's laws in physics.

Bigger than the discovery of DNA in biology.

Admittedly, the whole thing was somewhat overblown. Napoleon's personal correspondence reveals that he had no great love for the Jews. In fact, many believe he wanted to effectively destroy them by forcing them to assimilate to a greater degree into secular society. In other words, according to some, what Napoleon really wanted was to give the Jews just enough liberté to become a lot more French (and a lot less Jewish).

In all fairness, Napoleon actually did make some progress in improving the lot of Jews in France, at least for a few years.

But the homeland thing? Uhm...

Peut-être une autre fois. Maybe some other time.

The bottom line is that, in spite of a handful of legitimate efforts by Napoleon to help the Jewish people in Europe from 1799 to around 1808, the idea of a major world power helping the Jews establish a homeland in Israel was DOA. A flash in the pan. It died on the vine. Poof. Gone.

But the seed was planted.

Although it would be nearly another century before the Zionist movement would be officially established by Theodor Herzl in 1897 and another half century after that before Israel would become a nation on May 14, 1948, the seed of modern Zionism was planted in the blood-stained sands of Acre by Napoleon Bonaparte in the spring of 1799.

Now, maybe it's just me, but I think it's interesting that within twenty-odd years of this event, the doctrine of dispensationalism (which, among other things, teaches that God has separate programs for Israel and the Church) and the doctrine of the pre-tribulation Rapture (which grows naturally out of that idea) were fully developed. Both of these rely on literal interpretations of Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel, clearly differentiate between Israel and the Church, assume literal future fulfillments of prophecies related to both—and assume the future existence of a re-established nation of Israel in the land God promised Abraham in the book of Genesis (something that had long been dismissed as a pipe dream).

Coincidence? You will never convince me. I believe that Napoleon was simply the tool God used to plant that seed. Neither will you ever convince me that Napoleon failed in his attack on Acre just because the British captured his siege equipment. Or because some of his soldiers got sick. Or because the Turks had time to build a few extra walls.

It doesn't take a military historian to know why Napoleon's attack on the port city of Acre failed, and why his plan to establish a homeland for the Jews came to nothing as a result.

It wasn't God's time.

The point is that the Little Emperor's misadventures in the Middle East did not go unnoticed among Bible scholars in the early years of the nineteenth century. Although there were always a few who interpreted the Bible literally and as a result took a more futurist view of prophecy and its fulfillment, talk of the Jews being given a homeland by the French—even though it turned out to be little more than rumors and wishful thinking—no doubt kindled a fire under an increasing number of Bible scholars and motivated them to start taking a more literal approach to the Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel.

That is, it made a few people start asking some key what-if questions:

• What if God really does bring the Jews back into their land and Israel becomes a nation again?

• What if we can interpret the prophecies concerning Israel literally, instead of spiritualizing them away or commandeering them for the Church?

• What if God really does have separate programs for Israel and the Church, and both have distinct future fulfillments?

One of those "what-iffers" back then was a young British minister named John Nelson Darby.

"I can see clearly now..."

Born in London in 1800, Darby became a Christian around 1820 or 1821, and went on to become a minister in Ireland. In December of 1826, he suffered a serious knee injury after being thrown from his horse and was laid up for two to three months. During his convalescence, he essentially had nothing to do except lie in bed and pore over the Word.

According to his later writings, he was already beginning to perceive the distinction between Israel and the Church, as well as the future fulfillment of prophecies pertaining to both. By January of 1827, after a month or so with nothing to do but study the Word, Darby had worked out the structure of dispensationalism, and had come to the conclusion that the rapture of the Church had to precede the fulfillment of Daniel's 70th Week, which he saw as pertaining exclusively to Israel.

Although he fine-tuned his ideas over the next several years, the point is that he clearly saw the Rapture as preceding the Tribulation by early 1827 and he got it straight from Scripture. Darby later wrote that when he began to fully grasp that God's program for Israel and His program for the Church were separate and both had distinct future fulfillments, the idea that the Rapture must logically occur before the beginning of the Tribulation practically jumped off the pages of Scripture.

And just to be clear, Darby was by no means the first. A long and ever growing list of people have been shown to have taught it over the centuries, dating back at least to AD 373 (and arguably back to the apostle Paul in his two letters to the Thessalonians, where it can easily be inferred by any reasonably clear-minded person).

So much for the post-trib dog-and-pony show about how the pre-trib Rapture was concocted in 1830 by some ditsy, demon-oppressed young Scottish girl with a couple of screws loose.

Which brings us back to Margaret MacDonald.

What did she say?

Born in Port Glasgow, Scotland in 1815, Margaret MacDonald was but a young lass in the late 1820s when an outbreak of supposed manifestations of the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit was occurring in Scotland, including the speaking in and interpretation of tongues, the giving of prophecies, and so on. Alleged healings began to occur in early 1830, and one of these first healings involved 15-year-old Margaret. Around the same time, Margaret gave her now famous "prophetic utterance." She sent handwritten copies of her "vision" to a number of leading ministers of the day, although it wasn't actually published until 10 years later in 1840.

According to some sources, many of the charismatic meetings in Scotland were characterized by wild excesses and utter chaos, and news of the so-called outpouring of the Holy Spirit spread throughout the country. A number of prominent ministers came to Port Glasgow to investigate the movement, and opinions were mixed. There were those who embraced the movement enthusiastically, and those who concluded that it was not genuinely of God.

Among the latter group was John Nelson Darby.

After witnessing the bizarre and chaotic manner in which the Holy Spirit was supposedly operating within the movement, Darby was not impressed that it was biblical. In fact, he felt that these supernatural manifestations were likely of demonic origin and wanted nothing further to do with the whole mess.

Darby no doubt became familiar with Margaret's alleged prophecy not long after she began promulgating it in 1830. But he clearly gave no credence to it whatsoever, since he was convinced that the events in Port Glasgow were not true manifestations of the power or gifts of the Holy Spirit.

In Darby's view, they were at best sincere but eminently human efforts to reproduce New Testament phenomena that he believed had ceased when the canon of Scripture was complete (based on an interpretation of 1 Cor. 13:8–13), and at worst a satanic counterfeit designed to lure believers into seeking after mystical experiences in lieu of strict reliance on God's revealed Word.

(I might add that there are those who feel precisely the same way about the charismatic movement today, nearly two centuries later.)

In spite of this, post-trib advocates would still have us believe that Darby was inspired to use Margaret's ecstatic utterance as the foundation of his doctrinal teaching of the pre-tribulation Rapture, which he had already developed three years earlier entirely from Scripture.

Now, as if that didn't wrap it up and tie a bow on it, there is the text of Margaret's alleged prophecy itself. It is extremely confusing and jumbled, and most of those who have had the misfortune of analyzing it carefully have concluded that she doesn't even describe a pre-trib Rapture—she actually describes either a post-trib Rapture or some sort of partial Rapture. You can easily find it online and read it if you like, but be warned—it's a hard slog. Personally, I can barely make heads or tails of it. Her rapturous ramblings are so vague and muddled that it's notoriously difficult to figure out exactly what she is trying to say.

But no matter whether her alleged prophecy is from God, from demons, or nothing more than the ecstatic, semi-coherent ramblings of an excitable young girl who simply got caught up in the religious hysteria that surrounded her, there is one thing that it does not do:

It does not clearly describe a pre-tribulation rapture of the Church.

I believe the phrase I'm looking for is epic fail.

Sorry, Maggie...

I have always thought it somewhat ironic that if it weren't for post-tribbers, it's extremely doubtful that anyone who believes in the pre-trib Rapture would have ever even heard of Margaret MacDonald. I know I sure never heard of her—ditto for John Nelson Darby—until I was exposed to post-trib invective.

Personally, I haven't always been a rock-solid pre-tribber. I went through a long period of time when I really didn't care much about it one way or the other. Just being a born-again believer was good enough for me, and I was content to let the hardcore Scripture wonks wrangle over the rest of it.

Later, after I began to get more seriously interested in end-time prophecy, I went through a brief period during which I was all hepped up over the pre-wrath Rapture, where we'll go through the Tribulation up until the really gnarly part near the end. Only in the last decade or so, after much studying and growing in the Word, did I finally become convinced of the pre-trib view.

I think I just got sick and tired of not being sure about the Rapture, so I buried myself in the Word and made up my mind not to come out until I was sure.

And now I am.

Let me be clear, however: It's not as if I had this huge emotional investment in a particular view of the timing of the Rapture. My self-esteem and inner sense of well-being don't depend on being right about the Rapture (nor should anyone else's). As a general rule, I don't regard those who hold other views as Scripture-mangling heretics. It's not as if I were a card-carrying, lifetime member of the Pre-Tribbers Rule, Post-Tribbers Drool Club.

It's just that I know exactly what I believe and exactly why I believe it based on God's Word—as should all born-again believers.

And I say this in absolute honesty: I'd shout hallelujah and dump the pre-trib view of the Rapture in a picosecond if someone were to show me a clear, compelling, and contextually consistent scriptural basis for doing so.

A few have tried, but so far all have failed. Most rather badly, to be honest.

But I'm still willing to listen.

That is, until someone starts up with the dog-and-pony show about how the pre-trib Rapture was concocted in 1830 by some ditsy, demon-oppressed young Scottish girl with a couple of screws loose.

Sorry, Maggie...but that's when I stop listening.

Greg Lauer — AUG '13

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