The teaching that Christ will return for His church before the tribulation, is a fairly new one by history’s standards. It was pushed mainly in the 1800s by many Puritans and several prominent preachers such as John Darby and later C.I. Scofield. In my teen years, I attended a church that was a huge proponent of this pre-millennial doctrine. For years, I never questioned it. Why should I? It sounded so nice that I might escape physical death and be free from intense persecution. There were also, at the time, books and movies being made that touted this same view, so it had to be true, right? Of course, when I began studying the passages that supposedly support the idea of the rapture before the tribulation, I saw that such teaching was based more out of an ingrained system of thought, rather than out of genuine scriptural truth. Are there verses that could be plucked out of context and made to fit this view? Certainly. There are also many other passages that reveal something fa