Revelation 3:3 King James Version
3 Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.
That being said, if one has been warned not to present the preterist or partial-preterist view to me, please do not ping me again (no one has done this lately).
If this thread is not to your liking, please move on to another thread and may the Lord bless you the rest of this week.
And a clickable Youtube link here too - right-click to open in a new window so you can have FR open too (suggestion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nugiJ_Qer6M
No doubt there will be scoffers, just as prophesied.
If preterists and partial-preterists wish to exchange that among each other, best of luck.
bfl
bkmk
“I still think Christians need to be watching and expecting His Return”
True.
However, the (Biblical) idea of watching for Christ’s return is antithetical to the (unbiblical) idea of a sudden, signless rapture. That is, the “at any moment” (so-called “imminency”) rapture teaching contradicts the Biblical command to watch.
The false argument in the linked video is that “waiting” for Christ’s return is somehow incompatible with looking for specific prophetic events that must occur before the rapture. This can easily be demonstrated to be false. It is like saying that a child is watching and waiting for her daddy to come home from work, but she is not watching and waiting for the sun to go down or the sound of her father’s car entering the driveway. (This is the same illustration that the video uses.)
The argument goes something along the lines of we are waiting for Jesus not the anti-Christ. The problem here is that waiting entails going through things that are different from the rapture. In other words, of course the anti-Christ arriving is not what we are waiting for, it is one of the things we are waiting through. Big difference. Otherwise, it is not really waiting or enduring anything.
We cannot watch for an event that transpires instantly and is not preceded by signs to tell us that the event is about to happen. (We can wait for His return, but we would not be able watch for it without signs.) We also cannot “see the day approaching” if it is not preceded by signs.
There are specific signs of Christ’s return, and these signs will tell us that His return has become imminent. His return is now certain but not yet imminent. The specific signs Jesus gave us have not happened yet.
The idea that Jesus could come back in the lifetime of any believer (including Paul) is not the same as Him potentially coming back at any moment without any preceding signs.
The video also asserts that Revelation (3:10) describes being delivered from the great tribulation, but this does not necessarily mean being taken out of the world because Christ used the same language in John:
John 17:15 (NKJV)
I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep (teresa) them from the evil one.
God can and will “keep” believers during the Great Tribulation, but He may do so without taking us out of this world. Thus, He will keep us THROUGH the Great Tribulation.