Pronouncing the good fortune of the deceased Who had avoided the calamity: 'Blessed are you for you were borne away (to the grave) And hence you escaped from the afflictions!
Appears to me that Ephraim recognized there are two events with two different groups of people being able to avoid the Tribulation...The first being those Christians who went into the Rapture and and completely avoided the Tribulation and the second group who were experiencing the Tribulation and trying to hide from it...
Those in the graves at the time are those who missed the Rapture but died of old age, injury, sickness and murder...There is no time period given in the scriptures between the Rapture and the Tribulation...
But how can this be if the PTR is set forth in Scripture? We Catholics are told the Scriptures are "perspicacious;" that anyone coming to them in the spirit of truth will understand. How can it be that pretty much the entire professing christian world managed to look past 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and not understand its proper significance for 1800 years? And that epistle is likely the very first book written of what we now call the NT.
That's not a fair assessment since there were likely millions of Christian who refused to bow to the Catholic religion and who were as a result pretty much wiped off the face of the earth while their scriptures were confiscated and burned...The world was left with mostly Catholic teaching while for Centuries scriptures were kept from the lay Catholic...
While it's true that God reveals his truth in the scriptures to those who truly seek the truth by studying and searching the scriptures there are things in the scriptures that no man can understand, yet...Things that God has not revealed to anyone and will not reveal until the time is right...
God did not reveal to the Jews that they would reject the Messiah and he would ultimately create a Gentile church...That mystery wasn't revealed until it was revealed to Paul...At the same time, there was no real reason to reveal the Rapture until the end times came around to where it would apply...
The last time God told his people to get up out of Egypt and go back to the promised land was in 2nd Chronicles which is the last book in the Jewish Old Testament...It took over a couple of thousands of years for God to work on the Gentile church to fulfill that command and prophecy...
LOL. As laughable, unsubstantiated claims go, you've made a good one here.
I know asking you for proof of these supposed "Millions" who perished is pointless, as I know from experience people will believe the myth when it suits them, and the lack of evidence simply doesn't bother them.
But before 325 C.E., when Constantine legalized the practice of Christianty, the Church was poor and persecuted. Your laughable explanation grows even more pathetic when one realizes there is not support for the PTR among the Christians existing before then. (And you can spare us your Scriptural misreadings; the point being that if Paul or anyone explained there is some pre-trib "rapture" to any of the communities in which he lived and taught, that knowledge didn't pass into the next generations of Christians.)