Es gibt einige unter uns, die lehren, dass wir alle entrückt werden, bevor die große Trübsal hereinbricht. Dies sind die falschen Propheten, vor denen Jesus uns warnt, dass sie besonders in den letzten Tagen auftreten werden. [...]
Jeder von uns braucht sein persönliches Pfingsten, die Taufe mit dem Heiligen Geist. Ohne werden wir in der Trübsalszeit niemals in der Lage sein, standhaft für Jesus zu stehen. ~ Corrie ten Boom, 1974
Dieser ganze Artikel über die Entrückung, Endzeit, Verfolgung der Gemeinde und darüber, wie man dieser Zeit trotz allem Gericht mit Freuden entgegensieht und durchsteht ist heutzutage aktueller denn je. Hier ist der ganze Text:
“The world is deathly ill. It is dying. The Great Physician has already signed the death certificate. Yet there is still a great work for Christians to do. They are to be streams of living water, channels of mercy to those who are still in the world. It is possible for them to do this because they are overcomers.
Christians are ambassadors for Christ. They are representatives from Heaven to this dying world. And because of our presence here, things will change.
My sister, Betsy, and I were in the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck because we committed the crime of loving Jews. Seven hundred of us from Holland, France, Russia, Poland and Belgium were herded into a room built for two hundred. As far as I knew, Betsy and I were the only two representatives of Heaven in that room.
We may have been the Lord’s only representatives in that place of hatred, yet because of our presence there, things changed. Jesus said, “In the world you shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” We too, are to be overcomers – bringing the light of Jesus into a world filled with darkness and hate.
Sometimes I get frightened as I read the Bible, and as I look in this world and see all of the tribulation and persecution promised by the Bible coming true. Now I can tell you, though, if you too are afraid, that I have just read the last pages. I can now come to shouting “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” for I have found where it is written that Jesus said, “He that overcometh shall inherit all things: and I will be His God, and he shall be My son.” This is the future and hope of this world. Not that the world will survive – but that we shall be overcomers in the midst of a dying world.
Betsy and I, in the concentration camp, prayed that God would heal Betsy who was so weak and sick. “Yes, the Lord will heal me,”, Betsy said with confidence. She died the next day and I could not understand it. They laid her thin body on the concrete floor along with all the other corpses of the women who died that day.
It was hard for me to understand, to believe that God had a purpose for all that. Yet because of Betsy’s death, today I am traveling all over the world telling people about Jesus.
There are some among us teaching there will be no tribulation, that the Christians will be able to escape all this. These are the false teachers that Jesus was warning us to expect in the latter days. Most of them have little knowledge of what is already going on across the world. I have been in countries where the saints are already suffering terrible persecution.
In China, the Christians were told, “Don’t worry, before the tribulation comes you will be translated – raptured.” Then came a terrible persecution. Millions of Christians were tortured to death. Later I heard a Bishop from China say, sadly: “We have failed. We should have made the people strong for persecution rather than telling them Jesus would come first. Tell the people how to be strong in times of persecution, how to stand when the tribulation comes – to stand and not faint.”
I feel I have a divine mandate to go and tell the people of this world that it is possible to be strong in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are in training for the tribulation, but more than sixty percent of the Body of Christ across the world has already entered into the tribulation. There is no way to escape it. We are next.
Since I have already gone through prison for Jesus’ sake, and since I met the Bishop in China, now every time I read a good Bible text I think, “Hey, I can use that in the time of tribulation.” Then I write it down and learn it by heart.
When I was in the concentration camp, a camp where only twenty percent of the women came out alive, we tried to cheer each other up by saying, “Nothing could be any worse than today.” But we would find the next day was even worse. During this time a Bible verse that I had committed to memory gave me great hope and joy.
“If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you; on their part evil is spoken of, but on your part He is glorified.” (I Peter 3:14)
I found myself saying, “Hallelujah! Because I am suffering, Jesus is glorified!”
In America, the churches sing, “Let the congregation escape tribulation”, but in China and Africa the tribulation has already arrived. This last year alone more than two hundred thousand Christians were martyred in Africa. Now things like that never get into the newspapers because they cause bad political relations. But I know. I have been there. We need to think about that when we sit down in our nice houses with our nice clothes to eat our steak dinners. Many, many members of the Body of Christ are being tortured to death at this very moment, yet we continue right on as though we are all going to escape the tribulation.
Several years ago I was in Africa in a nation where a new government had come into power. The first night I was there some of the Christians were commanded to come to the police station to register. When they arrived they were arrested and that same night they were executed. The next day the same thing happened with other Christians. The third day it was the same. All the Christians in the district were being systematically murdered.
The fourth day I was to speak in a little church. The people came, but they were filled with fear and tension. All during the service they were looking at each other, their eyes asking, “Will this one I am sitting beside be the next one killed? Will I be the next one?”
The room was hot and stuffy with insects that came through the screenless windows and swirled around the naked bulbs over the bare wooden benches. I told them a story out of my childhood.
“When I was a little girl, ” I said, “I went to my father and said, ‘Daddy, I am afraid that I will never be strong enough to be a martyr for Jesus Christ.” “Tell me,” said Father, “When you take a train trip to Amsterdam, when do I give you the money for the ticket? Three weeks before?”
“No, Daddy, you give me the money for the ticket just before we get on the train.” “That is right,” my father said, “and so it is with God’s strength. Our Father in Heaven knows when you will need the strength to be a martyr for Jesus Christ. He will supply all you need – just in time.”
My African friends were nodding and smiling. Suddenly a spirit of joy descended upon that church and the people began singing,
“In the sweet, by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”
Later that week, half the congregation of that church was executed. I heard later that the other half was killed some months ago. But I must tell you something. I was so happy that the Lord used me to encourage these people, for unlike many of their leaders, I had the word of God. I had been to the Bible and discovered that Jesus said He had not only overcome the world, but to all those who remained faithful to the end, He would give a crown of life.
How can we get ready for the persecution? First we need to feed on the word of God, digest it, make it a part of our being. This will mean disciplined Bible study each day as we not only memorize long passages of scripture, but put the principles to work in our lives.
Next we need to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Not just the Jesus of yesterday, the Jesus of History, but the life- changing Jesus of today who is still alive and sitting at the right hand of God.
We must be filled with the Holy Spirit. This is no optional command of the Bible, it is absolutely necessary. Those earthly disciples could never have stood up under the persecution of the Jews and Romans had they not waited for Pentecost. Each of us needs our own personal Pentecost, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. We will never be able to stand in the tribulation without it.
In the coming persecution we must be ready to help each other and encourage each other. But we must not wait until the tribulation comes before starting. The fruit of the Spirit should be the dominant force of every Christian’s life.
Many are fearful of the coming tribulation, they want to run. I, too, am a little bit afraid when I think that after all my eighty years, including the horrible Nazi concentration camp, that I might have to go through the tribulation also. But then I read the Bible and I am glad.
When I am weak, then I shall be strong, the Bible says. Betsy and I were prisoners for the Lord, we were so weak, but we got power because the Holy Spirit was on us. That mighty inner strengthening of the Holy Spirit helped us through. No, you will not be strong in yourself when the tribulation comes. Rather, you will be strong in the power of Him who will not forsake you. For seventy-six years I have known the Lord Jesus and not once has He ever left me, or let me down.
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him”, for I know that to all who overcome, He shall give the crown of life. Hallelujah!
Corrie ten Boom, 1974
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]]>It is one thing to conceive of the Spirit as a restrainer against the greater spread of evil in the sense of a kind of ‘common grace’ that may be more or less lifted during a time of divine judgement. That is one thing; but that is not all that dispensationalists want to say concerning this passage, i.e., 2Thes 2:7.
It is their view that the one that restrains is not simply the counteracting check of the Spirit against the domination of evil. No, they mean something much more than this.
In support of their theory of a pre-trib rapture, they must teach that it is not simply the Holy Spirit as restrainer of evil, but particularly His presence in the church as ‘indweller’ that is holding back the advent of the ‘Man of Sin’. [It happens that 2Thes 2:7 is the very the passage that Darby was meditating on when he received his revelation.]
Due to their view that the Holy Spirit only began to indwell believers for the first time at Pentecost, it is believed that with the removal of the church the Holy Spirit’s relationship to the believer in the tribulation will return to the same kind of relationship that He had to believers in the OT. This amounts to a kind of ‘reversal of Pentecost’ (their words). This means that after the rapture, the Spirit will revert to His former relationship of only dwelling ‘WITH’ tribulation believers, in contrast to His current work of dwelling ‘IN’ the body of Christ (based on a misinterpretation of Jn 14:17). According to Dispensationalism’s peculiar definition of the church, the Holy Spirit’s indwelling is restricted only to believers of this dispensation (the so-called ‘church age’). Their view forbids identifying tribulation believers with the church in any sense of the term. They are careful to distinguish between the church and so-called ‘tribulation saints’.
The saints that appear in the prophetic depictions of Daniel and Revelation are denied any identification as the church. Really! That’s their official position (hence the two peoples of God theory). This is why the OT saints remain in the graves for an additional seven years. This, since a number of writers have pointed out to the chagrin of ‘ever evolving’ dispensationalism that the resurrection of OT believers takes place at the end of the tribulation (Job 19:25-27; Isa 25:7; 26:19; Dn 12:1-2 etc.).
While I disagree that the HS did not ‘indwell’ the OT believer (impossible to the very nature of regeneration and many plain scriptures; e.g., 1Pet 1:11 “the Spirit of Christ which was ‘IN’ them”); it is also impossible to read John 7:39 without also recognizing that the Spirit was certainly ‘given’ in some new sense AFTER Christ was glorified. “But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; BECAUSE Jesus was not yet glorified.” This manifestly speaks of the power and revelation that came at Pentecost. Certainly the mystery of Messiah’s indwelling belongs to the greater mystery of the gospel that came to greater revelation in the days following the Lord’s post-resurrection glorification. How then, in view of Christ’s once and for all glorification, can we conceive that the Spirit once given (in this new capacity) can ever be retracted or reversed? This is exactly the case if ‘tribulation saints’ are no longer ‘indwelt’. Pre-tribulational Dispensationalism actually teaches, and must teach, that those that get saved after the rapture regress to a pre-Pentecostal relationship to the Holy Spirit. How is that possible now that Christ is once and for all glorified, the very basis by which the Spirit would be given? How can such a transitional epochal event be undone?
Now why do I labor this point? This is not just academic intellectualizing among scholarly specialists. Far from it; it is spiritual warfare. It’s not just going to all “pan” out! All lies are costly to one degree or another, and this is no exception. Why has this view (I think heresy) appeared only comparatively lately (since Darby’s time) on the radar of the modern church? Is it friend or foe? It is a disarming error that has further contributed to the sleep of the virgins! Though scripture shows that the elect remnant will rally and escape the fatal deception (Dn 11:32-33; 1Thes 5:4), the church’s current disunity and disarray over such issues has certainly helped to make sure that the day will come on an unsuspecting world as a thief (Dn 12:10; 1Thes 5:3-4; Rev 16:15)
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