Appendix D of A Prelude to the End of the World, by Brandon Wallis

Hard Questions

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These are the questions a study leader is asked most often, gathered where they can be found. Each is answered from the text as far as the text goes, and no further; where the answer is an inference, it is called one.

What happens to children at the rapture?

Scripture does not answer this question in a single verse, and the reader should know that up front. What it does give is the character of the Judge and a consistent pattern in how He treats those too young to know good from evil. When David’s infant son died, David stopped mourning and said, “…I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” —2 Sam 12:23, a confidence in reunion that makes no sense unless the child was with the Lord. When Israel’s adults were barred from the land for unbelief, God exempted “…your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil…” —Deut 1:39. God spared Nineveh in part for its “…sixscore thousand [a hundred and twenty thousand] persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand…” —Jon 4:11. And Jesus said of little children, “…of such is the kingdom of heaven” —Matt 19:14.

Every child is born a sinner (Rom 5:12), so this is not innocence. It is grace applied to those who cannot yet refuse it, on the merit of the same cross that saves the rest of us. On that pattern, this book holds that children below the age of understanding will be taken at the rapture with the church, and it labels the position what it is: an inference drawn from the character of God, not a text. “…Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” —Gen 18:25. He will, and no parent will find Him less merciful than they hoped.

What about people who have never heard the gospel?

Paul answers this in Romans, and his answer runs in two directions. No one is without light: “…the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” —Rom 1:20, and the law is “…written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness…” —Rom 2:15. Every man has enough light to know there is a God, to know he has sinned against Him, and to seek Him; and the pattern of Scripture is that God sends more light to the one who responds to what he has, as He sent Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10). Judgment is measured by the light received: the servant who knew his lord’s will and disobeyed is “…beaten with many stripes…” and the one who knew not, “…with few stripes…” —Lk 12:47–48.

But the other direction is the one Paul actually emphasizes. “…how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” —Rom 10:14. Scripture never says that ignorance saves, and it never offers a second road; it says God “…now commandeth all men every where to repent” —Acts 17:30, and it says the answer to the man who has not heard is a man who will go and tell him. The question is real, and God will judge every man justly by the light he had. But the church was not given the question to speculate on. It was given a commission.

Can people be saved after the rapture?

Yes, and in great numbers. John saw “…a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues…” and was told, “…These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” —Rev 7:9, 14. The two witnesses and the 144,000 (see Chapter 10) and the angel with the everlasting gospel (Rev 14:6) are all preaching after the church is gone, and the tribulation will produce the largest harvest of souls in history.

The harder question is whether those who heard the gospel and refused it before the rapture can believe after it. Paul says of those who follow the Antichrist that “…they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” —2 Thess 2:10–11. Many teachers read this as a door closed on everyone who rejected Christ before the rapture. The text does not say that. It says the delusion falls on those who refused the truth and “…had pleasure in unrighteousness” —2 Thess 2:12, and it does not fix the moment of that refusal. This book will not narrow what God has left open, and it will not widen it either. What it will say is this: no one should plan to believe later. The man who hears the gospel today and puts it off is the man Paul is describing, and the one sure way to be saved after the rapture is to be saved before it.

Can someone who takes the mark of the beast be saved?

No. This is one of the few questions in this book where Scripture gives a flat answer without qualification. “…If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God… and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone… And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name” —Rev 14:9–11. There is no exception clause, and none should be invented.

The reason is what the mark is. It is not a barcode or a chip taken by accident; it is the outward seal of an inward act of worship, an oath of allegiance to a man who has declared himself God. Those who take it are those “…whose names are not written in the book of life…” —Rev 13:8. Scripture speaks of it as a settled thing because it is one. This is also why no believer needs to fear taking it unknowingly: it cannot be received without knowing exactly whose it is.

Why does God allow the tribulation at all?

Because He said He would, and because it accomplishes things nothing else will. Daniel was told what the seventy weeks were for: “…to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness…” —Dan 9:24. The tribulation is the seventieth of those weeks, the last of the years determined upon Israel, and it ends with the nation looking on the One they pierced and being saved (Zech 12:10; Rom 11:26). It is also judgment on a world that has had the gospel for two thousand years and hated it: “And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity…” —Isa 13:11. And it is a trial of everyone left on the earth: “…the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth” —Rev 3:10.

None of this is God losing control. Every seal is opened by the Lamb, every trumpet is sounded on command, every bowl is poured out from His temple. The tribulation is the end of the age of grace being written in the same hand that wrote the beginning, and the same hand that keeps the church out of it (see Chapter 3). And even then, its purpose is mercy as much as wrath: the great multitude of Revelation 7 would never have come to Him any other way.

Is the rapture in the Old Testament?

Not as a doctrine. Paul introduced it as something new: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed” —1 Cor 15:51, and a mystery in Paul’s vocabulary is a truth hidden in earlier ages and now revealed (Eph 3:4–5; Col 1:26). The church itself is such a mystery, and so is its departure. A reader who goes looking for the rapture in the prophets will not find it stated, because it was not given to them to state.

What the Old Testament does have is patterns, and the reader should hold them as patterns. Enoch “…was not; for God took him” —Gen 5:24, and Elijah was carried up alive without dying; both were removed before judgment fell on others. Isaiah puts a resurrection and a hiding in sequence: “Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise…” and then, “…Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast” —Isa 26:19–20. That is the shape of the rapture, resurrection followed by shelter until the wrath is past, whether or not Isaiah understood it as one. God hid the doctrine and left the shape in plain sight.

Will people marry and have families in the kingdom?

Two groups live in the kingdom, and the answer is different for each. The resurrected saints do not marry; Jesus settled that: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” —Matt 22:30. But the kingdom is also populated by mortals, the believers who came through the tribulation in natural bodies and entered it at the judgment of the sheep (see Chapter 17). They marry, and they have children. Isaiah describes a land where an infant no longer dies in its first days and where the people “…shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the LORD, and their offspring with them” —Isa 65:23 (see also Isa 65:20), and Zechariah saw the city “…full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof” —Zech 8:5.

Those children are born as every child has been born since Adam, sinners in need of a Savior, and the kingdom does not change that. They must be born again like anyone else, under the best conditions the world has ever known: Satan bound, the King visible, the truth taught in every nation. That is why a rebellion is still possible when Satan is loosed at the end of the thousand years (Rev 20:7–8). The population that follows him is not resurrected saints; it is the unbelieving children and grandchildren of the mortals who entered, and their fall is the last proof that the problem was never the environment. It was the heart (see Chapter 18).