The subtitle of my book is “The Tribulation has begun, and the Church is still here!” I’m guessing that sentence is a little upsetting for you. The idea that the Church might be here for a portion of the Tribulation period was very upsetting to me when I first encountered it. In 2006, my father was dying of cancer. I went to see him a few days before he passed away. He was at home with hospice care. I had some free time while at his home so I decided to check out his collection of Christian books. As I scanned his bookshelf one title jumped out at me: The Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church by Marvin Rosenthal.
Up to that point in my life, I had always believed what my Pastors told me, that the church would be taken to Heaven before this seven-year period began. After reading the back cover of Rosenthal’s book, I became unsettled. It was clear to me that his book would argue that the Church would be here for a portion of the Tribulation period. Even though this idea bothered me, because I’ve always been interested in the Rapture I sat on my dad’s porch and began reading. Once I started reading this book, I couldn’t put it down. In his book, Rosenthal made what seemed to be an airtight argument from scripture that the pre-Tribulation rapture was not Biblical. I was determined to find some fatal flaw in Rosenthal’s arguments, so I went online and tried to find rebuttals to his book. I found a handful, but none of them used the Bible to refute his arguments. They just re-stated the arguments for a pre-Tribulation Rapture.
I re-read Rosenthal’s book several times in the subsequent weeks. I then re-read all the passages in the Bible related to the Rapture and the Tribulation period. After a month of doing my own analysis, I came to know and believe that the Church will be here for a portion of the Tribulation, perhaps the first four or five years. The key to understanding the timing of the Rapture is to understand the timing of God’s wrath. The rise of the anti-Christ and the subsequent wars and famines are not God’s wrath, they are the wrath of the anti-Christ and the wrath of Satan. In Revelation chapter six, Jesus clearly tells us when God’s wrath begins, and it is some period of time “after” the mid-point of the Tribulation.
For many years, I considered what to do with my new understating of the Rapture. I eventually decided to write a series of fictional novels about a family who lives through this period in history. Wrath is book one in a three-part series. In my first book, I follow a fictional family in Texas who, like me, discovers the truth about the Rapture. Their story begins a few months before the start of the Tribulation period and follows their attempts to survive the rise of the ant-Christ and the subsequent wars and famines. Book two in the series is titled Wrath – Left Behind and follows those who are left behind and their struggle to stay alive until the second coming of Christ. Book three is titled Wrath – The Millennium and begins with the 1,000-year reign of Christ and ends with the Great White Throne Judgment, The Judgement Seat of Christ, and eternity.
