The Great Tribulation

David Chilton

Are we living in the Last Days? Are the signs of our times the Signs of the End? Is the Great Tribulation just around the corner?
For almost three generations evangelical Christians have answered these questions with an unequivocal "YES"!
In this challenging new book by David Chilton, all the prophetic passages of Scripture dealing with the End Times are re-examined with careful attention to every revealing detail. And his conclusions are nearly as startling as the prophesies themselves.
The Great Tribulation is the kind of sane, balanced, and easy to understand introduction to End Times theology that Christians have needed from a long, long time.

For centuries, Christian have sought to interpret the Bible's scriptural meaning - often erroneously assigning modern ideology to scriptural passages. This is perhaps the most comprehensive and easily understood writing available on this cataclysmic event "which so many Christians are awaiting." As Chilton proves however, it will be a long wait, since this event occurred in A.D. 70. This book is also an excellent tool for modern man in learning how Scripture interprets Scripture.

This Book in PDF

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

1. The Terminal Generation

2. Coming on the Clouds

3. The Coming of the Antichrist

4. The Last Days

5. The Coming of the New Covenant

6. The Four Horsemen

7. Vengeance for the Martyrs

8. The Book Is Opened

9. Jerusalem Under Siege

10. All Creation Takes Vengeance

11. It Is Finished!

PUBLISHER’S EPILOGUE by Gary North

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

By—Gary North

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies (Psalm 110: 1-2).

Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15:24-26).

The Bible teaches that Jesus shall reign over the earth. Once it begins, there will be no interruption of His earthly reign over this earth in history until death shall at last be conquered. But we know that death ends only on the final day, when Christ puts an end to Satan’s final rebellion, when the devil is cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:7-10).

The key kingdom question is: When will His reign over earth begin? Jesus was very clear about this. He told His disciples after His resurrection:

All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen (Matthew 28:18-20).

So, all power in heaven and in earth has already been given to Christ. Already! We know also that He is reigning with God in heaven.

And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all (Ephesians 1:19-23).

Is Christ the head of the church today? Paul said that He is. But what else is also true today, according to Paul? The passage is clear: Jesus Christ now rules the earth from heaven above. He is presently over all principality, power, might, and dominion. What are these? They are demonic spirits. Paul wrote in this same epistle: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

God is in control. Jesus is in control. All things are in principle under Jesus’ feet. It is true that in history, evil beings still have power. We as Christ’s people wrestle spiritually against them. The war between good and evil, between right and wrong, goes on daily in the life of every Christian and in the life of every society. But, in principle, life is stronger than death, for Jesus’ resurrection has proven this. The resurrection is more powerful than the cross. Light is more powerful than darkness (John 1:9). Good is more powerful than evil, for Christ now reigns from on high. The legacy of the “second Adam,” Jesus Christ, is more powerful in history than the legacy of the first Adam. Grace is more powerful than sin.

You believe this, don’t you?

Why Fear a “Great Tribulation”?

Why, then, should Christians believe that some great tribulation faces them in the future — a tribulation so great that nothing like it in history has ever occurred? Not all Christians believe that they will go through the tribulation, although post-tribulation premillennialist do. But if God reigns from on high, why should Christians expect anything worse than the “normal” holocausts of the twentieth century — the persecutions and genocides of Armenians, Jews, Russian kulaks, Ukrainians, and Cambodians? These were indeed terrible events, and there may well be more of them, but why should Christians expect that another event will occur that is fundamentally worse?

The answer is: they shouldn’t. Why not? Because the great tribulation is behind us. This is what David Chilton argues in The Great Tribulation. Jesus warned His people of a great tribulation to come in the very near future. In the chapter on the great tribulation in Matthew, Christ’s words are recorded: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34). We know from the parallel passage in Luke that the great tribulation would be the destruction of Jerusalem by an army, which turned out to be the Roman army:

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof draweth nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains; let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter there-into. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled (Luke 21:20-22).

David Chilton’s magnificent commentary on the Book of Revelation is appropriately called The Days of Vengeance (Dominion Press, 1987). This little book is a brief survey of those sections of Revelation that deal with the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Are You Looking Forward to Disaster?

It may sound strange to many readers that the great tribulation is behind us. This view has been quite common throughout church history, but over the last hundred years or so, many Bible-believing groups have adopted a different view: that the great tribulation will happen to Israel (or to everyone, including Christians) in the future, and probably in the near future. Most dispensationalists believe that the church will be ‘raptured” out of the world before the great tribulation takes place; post-tribulation dispensationalists and traditional non-dispensational premillennialists believe that the church will go through the great tribulation.

What the Bible teaches is that it took place in A.D. 70, and Christians did not go through it.

This book introduces readers to the theology of judgment: specifically, God’s judgment sanctions against Israel. The sanctions were curses. God gave blessings to the church and cursings to rebellious Israel, which had crucified the Lord and publicly called God’s judgment down on themselves: “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). God’s cursings on ancient Israel in A.D. 70 matched their crime, the crucifixion of Christ. This crime was the greatest (worst) in history; their punishment was also the greatest (worst) in history. To call anything else “the great tribulation” is to downplay the immensity of that generation’s crime.

Our Comprehensive Responsibility

I realize that this will disappoint many Christians. If the great tribulation is over, then the Rapture is not scheduled to take place prior to this tribulation. The rapture of the saints — the resurrection of dead saints and the instant transformation of those still alive on earth (I Corinthians 15:52) — gets delayed until the final act of history, when Satan rebels and Christ comes back to judge the world (Revelation 20:7-10). This means that until then, Christians will remain on earth as God’s delegated agents of judgment in history, preaching the gospel, applying God’s law to every area of life, and progressively subduing the earth to the glory of God (Genesis 1:26- 28). This means that there will be no earthly escape for church members from the progressively heavy responsibilities of exercising dominion.

Sadly, there are millions of Christians today who have adopted a philosophy of the future that teaches that most people will die and go to hell — and then be tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity (Revelation 20:14) — and nothing the church can do will be able to overcome their resistance to the gospel. The Holy Spirit will simply never change the hearts of a majority of mankind. They will inevitably perish. With over 5 billion people alive today, and with billions more to be born in the next 40 years, this is a pessimistic doctrine of the future. Yet today’s Christians prefer to believe in this horrible scenario than to believe in the growth of the church and the triumph of the gospel, for such a triumph would place tremendous responsibility on those who call themselves Christians. They really would rather see billions of people perish eternally than to admit to themselves that they, as Christians, will be called on by God to take responsibility in this world — in the areas that many Christians call “secular” —because of a world-wide revival.

We who call ourselves Christian Reconstructionists proclaim a future worldwide revival and the steady, voluntary submission of people to God’s law. We believe that Christians will steadily be given responsibilities in every area of life in a world that has run out of workable answers. God will give us these responsibilities, but not through revolution or tyranny. Instead, He will give us these responsibilities in history through the voluntary submission of those who have no other hope, and who (until that final rebel-lion of Revelation 20) will be willing to allow Christians to bear these social, political, military, and economic responsibilities.

We believe in revival. We believe in evangelism and foreign missions. So do all Christians. But we Reconstructionists have this unique outlook: we believe that these gospel efforts will be successful in history. When we call other Christians to intensify their efforts to spread the gospel, we offer them this unique motivation: their efforts will eventually prove successful in history. The gospel of Jesus Christ will not prove to be a failure in history. The power of the resurrection is greater than the power of the devil and his human followers to resist the most powerful message in man’s history: that Jesus Christ has borne the sins of man, and that evil has in principle been overcome. As time goes on, this gospel will triumph in history.

Mankind’s New Beginning

It is one of those oddities of recent intellectual history that perhaps the most succinct and perceptive comment on the Christian view of history is provided by a secular Jew who teaches law at Harvard University. In the Introduction to his book, Law and Resolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, published by Harvard University Press in 1983, Harold J. Berman makes a crucial observation on the centrality of the resurrection in Christian historical thought. He begins with an important insight into the Hebrew attitude toward historical time:

In contrast to the other Indo-European peoples, including the Greeks, who believed that time moved in ever recurring cycles, the Hebrew people conceived of time as continuous, irreversible, and historical, leading to ultimate redemption at the end. They also believed, however, that time has periods within it. It is not cyclical but maybe interrupted or accelerated. It develops. The Old Testament is a story not merely of change but of development, of growth, of movement toward the messianic age — very uneven movement, to be sure, with much backsliding but nevertheless a movement toward.

Berman then goes onto explain how Christianity adopted this view of linear time, but added a key new element:

Christianity, however, added an important element to the Judaic concept of time: that of transformation of the old into the new. The Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament, its meaning transformed by its fulfillment in the New Testament. In the story of the Resurrection, death was transformed into a new beginning. The times were not only accelerated but regenerated. This introduced a new structure of history, in which there was a fundamental transformation of one age into another. This transformation, it was believed, could only happen once: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was thought to be the only major interruption in the course of linear time from the creation of the world until it ends altogether (pp. 26-27).

The Great Tribulation shows that this transformation of the old order into Christ’s new order was decisively manifested in the public termination of the old order: the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple and its sacrificial system. This was the shaking of the foundations in history.

Modern Christians are almost totally unfamiliar with the events of A.D. 70. The eschatological view-points that predict the great tribulation in the future led to the neglect in popular Christian literature of the story of the fall of Jerusalem. David Chilton has performed a major educational service to the church of Jesus Christ in reminding us what a momentous event the fall of Jerusalem was. From the fall of Jerusalem until the future conversion of the Jews (Romans 11), which will inaugurate a period of unprecedented earthly blessings (w. 12-15), nothing else comes close as a public manifestation of Christ’s new order.

What we need to understand is that Satan is a great imitator. God defeated him at Calvary, but he still seeks to defeat Christians in their lives. God imposed a great tribulation on the old order of the apostate Hebrews, but Satan imitates God by imposing holocausts on mankind through his followers. Christ inaugurated a new world order, and so Satan’s followers now promise to bring us a new world order. The Marxists do, the Nazis did, and the New Age movement does. It is all a counterfeit. Accept no substitutes! Remember Christ's words: “But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come unto you” (Matthew 12:28). He cast out devils by the Spirit of God, so the kingdom of God had come to them. It is now our inheritance as members of Christ’s new nation, the church, for He told the Jews of His day: “The kingdom of God shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matthew 21:43). Christ’s new world order has come, and the fall of Jerusalem is proof. As Berman says of the resurrection: “This introduced a new structure of history, in which there was a fundamental transformation of one age into another. This transformation, it was believed, could only happen once: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was thought to be the only major interruption in the course of linear time from the creation of the world until it ends altogether.” The worst is over!

Table of Contents