Berean Manipulation

To the Berean-Minded Christian,

A pamphlet came into my hands this week, one sheet folded into six panels of close type, with no publisher on it, no address, and no date. Its four footnotes cite a magazine article from June of 1966 and another from April of 1963, so it is newer than its citations but older than some of the people who will read this. Its title asks What About the Pretribulation (Any-Moment) Rapture Theory?, and under the title, in parentheses, it puts the words What Saith the Scriptures. Under that it says what it is for. It calls itself A Pamphlet for Berean-Minded Christians.

That is you, and I am going to take its author at his word, which means doing to his pamphlet exactly what he asks you to do to everything else.

Let me say at the start what he gets right. His opening paragraph is useful, and I wish more of the men who agree with me had written it. He says there is only one court of appeal in matters of faith and practice, and that it is the word of God. He says men believe things because an outstanding man taught them, and then read their Bibles hunting for confirmation, and when the Bible will not supply it they call the place a difficulty and glide past. He even puts himself in the dock: “We must confess that this has been our experience also.” Every word of that is true, and it is the standard I am about to hold him to.

Before one line of argument has been offered, you have been handed a portrait of the man who is going to disagree with him: he believes a thing because an outstanding man taught it, he reads his Bible hunting for confirmation, and where the Bible will not supply it he calls the place a difficulty and glides past. The author sets himself inside the portrait, and that is the part that makes it go down without resistance. But the portrait is hung before any evidence is produced, and once it is hanging, agreement is Berean and disagreement is credulity. A reader who will not go along has been told in advance what his unwillingness proves about him. That is manipulation, preying on the word Berean.

While the pamphlet might succeed as a form of Berean device, it fails to demonstrate just opposition to the Pretribulation (Any-Moment) Rapture Theory. Every one of its failures can be checked by you with nothing more than the Bible in your hands. The fault its first paragraph warns you against is the fault it commits, in the very letters it chose for its own foundation.

A Test No Doctrine Can Pass

The pamphlet organizes itself around one question, and the question is the whole engine: “When did the Apostle Paul begin to preach the Pretribulation (Any-Moment) Coming of Christ?” He then walks Paul’s life in order, from the conversion to the last of the epistles, stopping at each stage to ask whether Paul could have preached such a coming there, and answering no, because at every stage there were events still standing between Paul and the end. At the finish he reports the result: “as far as the New Testament record is concerned there is no indication anywhere that he ever did begin to preach it.”

The claim is that silence in the written record disproves the doctrine.

Now go and look at the passage he builds his hardest argument from, and keep reading past the point where he stops quoting it. I am certain that, for a Berean such as himself, the stopping point was a simple oversight. Paul is steadying a church, and he names the trouble they face: “That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand” (2 Thessalonians 2:2). In the middle of steadying them he says this: “Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?” (2 Thessalonians 2:5). Then, in the next breath, “And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time” (2 Thessalonians 2:6).

Read those last two carefully. Paul taught this congregation something in person, by mouth, standing in front of them. He does not write down what it was. He writes down only that they already know it, and he leaves it there, and it has never been recovered from that day to this. The chapter the pamphlet leans on hardest shows, in the apostle’s own words, that the written record is not a complete record of what he preached; it is, nonetheless, the complete record of what the Lord desired us to have.

It is not one sentence, either. Take the first letter to the same congregation. “But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:1-2). And earlier in the same letter, “when we were with you, we told you before that we should suffer tribulation; even as it came to pass, and ye know” (1 Thessalonians 3:4). Three times to one church, in two letters, Paul sends them back to teaching they already had from him in person.

I can hear the objection, because it is the one I would raise. Then you can claim Paul taught anything you like and shelter it behind what he did not write. No. I am making no such use of it, and it would be a poor one to make. The silence does not prove my doctrine, but it destroys his test, which is a different thing entirely. A test that asks for the date on which a doctrine began to be preached, finds no date, and returns a verdict of false, is a test with nothing behind it. There is no verse that records the week Paul began to preach justification by faith. There is no verse that records the month he first taught the one Body. And there is no verse anywhere, in any book, recording the occasion on which Paul began to preach that the church would pass through the tribulation, which is the doctrine the pamphlet exists to defend.

We do not know what Paul told them. The Holy Ghost did not put it in the letter. 2 Thessalonians 2:6 is not a window into lost teaching. It is a locked door, and the author ran his whole argument up against it.

So before you go any further with me, fix this rule in your mind: do not let any man, including me, prove a doctrine false by pointing at a date the Bible does not provide.

The Rule He Broke Himself

Partway through, the pamphlet lays down a rule, and the rule is right. He writes that “A common error among many pretribulationists is to confuse this coming wrath with the period of the Great Tribulation.” He is correct. Subjects that sit near one another are not thereby the same subject, and a man who slides from one to the other has proved nothing.

Paul and Barnabas are on the return leg of the journey, back through Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, and at Lystra Paul had been stoned and drawn out of the city for dead (Acts 14:19-20). What they did in those towns is written like this: “Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). A freshly stoned man telling young disciples that suffering comes with the faith is not predicting the end of the age. He is stating the obvious.

The pamphlet does not read it that way. It lifts the sentence and sets it inside a question about the Great Tribulation, the one subject it had just warned you not to confuse with its neighbors: wrath is not automatically the Great Tribulation, it said, simply for standing near it. Ordinary tribulation is not automatically the Great Tribulation either, for the same reason. But the pamphlet broke its own rule when the ink was still wet on the page.

Read the three verses together and the sense is settled before any counting begins. They had “returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch” (Acts 14:21), which are the towns where the trouble had happened and where Paul had been left for dead. The work named in the next verse is “Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith,” and a man is exhorted to continue only under something that is pressing him to stop. The sentence says we must, and the we takes in the two men saying it, one of them walking back into the town that had stoned him. Then “when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord” (Acts 14:23), which is the ordering of churches in the present and not instruction about a week still future. The tribulation in that sentence is the tribulation those disciples were in, and the tribulation the man speaking had come through in their own street.

You do not have to take my word for the commoner sense either. Tribulation occurs twenty-two times in your Bible and tribulations four more, twenty-five verses in all. Sort them and they fall into four heaps, and the heap they fall into most is the ordinary affliction of ordinary believers: Matthew 13:21; John 16:33; Acts 14:22; Romans 5:3, 8:35, 12:12; 2 Corinthians 1:4, 7:4; Ephesians 3:13; 1 Thessalonians 3:4; 2 Thessalonians 1:4; Revelation 1:9, 2:9, 2:10. Four are Old Testament trouble, three of them the nation’s and one a man’s own: Deuteronomy 4:30; Judges 10:14; 1 Samuel 10:19; 1 Samuel 26:24. Three are judgment paid back on the wicked: Romans 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:6; Revelation 2:22. Four are the prophesied period, and they are Matthew 24:21 and 24:29, Mark 13:24, and Revelation 7:14.

He took a verse from the largest and plainest heap to settle a question that belongs to one of the smallest.

The objection to that is fair. A word’s commonest sense is not its sense in a given verse, and your sort is doing the work your argument needs. You have “When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days” (Deuteronomy 4:30), and you have filed that one away from the prophesied period. Both halves of that are true. Deuteronomy 4:30 does put the word in the latter days, and I have never said the Bible fails to use it of the prophesied period, since four verses plainly do. A word that has more than one sense is fixed by the passage it is in, which is what Acts 14 does for itself and what the pamphlet declined to let it do. The counting shows which sense is commoner. The chapter shows which sense is there.

The verse is not mine to misuse either. Acts 14:22 settles nothing about the seventieth week in either direction, and it promises no believer an escape from trouble. A man who quotes it for that has made my mistake in place of his.

The answer was inside his own chosen correspondence. In the two Thessalonian letters his argument depends on, the word occurs three times, and I am going to give you all three, since leaving one out is the charge I am making against him. “when we were with you, we told you before that we should suffer tribulation; even as it came to pass, and ye know” (1 Thessalonians 3:4), which is affliction already behind them. “your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure” (2 Thessalonians 1:4), which is affliction they were in as he wrote. And the third, which is neither: “Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you” (2 Thessalonians 1:6), trouble paid back on the men persecuting them. Not one of the three is the seventieth week.

And he read one of them exactly as I do. Of the opening of that second letter he writes that Paul is “associating the persecutions and tribulations of the believers with their being counted worthy of the kingdom of God,” which is present affliction, and he says so himself while citing the verses. The same word, read as present trouble in a chapter he quotes, becomes the Great Tribulation when he arrives at Acts 14:22. He did not have to travel to Lystra for a counter-example. He had one under his own pen.

The Verses He Sent You To and Did Not Read

The pamphlet reaches the years of Paul’s imprisonment at Rome, lists the letters written there, and then does something a man should only do when he is very sure. It sends you to go and look. “Let the reader go carefully through these epistles for there is no verse in them that would support the any-moment-coming doctrine.” Philemon, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians.

Go carefully through Philippians, then, as he asks.

“For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). One chapter later and half a page on, “Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand” (Philippians 4:5).

He names the epistle. He directs you into it. He does not put either verse on the page.

I am not going to make at hand prove more than it can prove, and a man is within his rights to answer that it means near rather than this hour. What Philippians 3:20 does say is where the believer’s looking is pointed, and it is pointed at a Person: we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. Whether the timing can be settled from those two verses is a fair question, and I am not resting the case on them. That a man was sent into a letter and told there was nothing in it bearing on the subject, and was shown neither verse, is not a fair report of that letter.

He does the same thing at the end of Paul’s life, and there it is sharper, because he has the verse in his hand and answers around it. He grants that Titus 2:13 is the blessed hope. He grants that believers are waiting for it. And then: “there is absolutely no statement that it would be fulfilled at any-moment.”

Look at what the verse says a man is to be doing. “Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:12-13).

Now let the Bible define its own phrase, which is the only safe way to find out what an old English expression meant to the men who printed it. Looking for occurs five times. Four of them are what you would expect: the blessed hope here, “a certain fearful looking for of judgment” (Hebrews 10:27), “Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12), and “looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (Jude 21). The fifth is the one that settles it, and it has nothing devotional about it at all.

More than forty men have bound themselves under an oath to kill Paul, and they lie in wait for him. Paul’s nephew gets word to the chief captain, and this is how he describes them: “and now are they ready, looking for a promise from thee” (Acts 23:21). A day had already been named: the Jews had agreed to ask that Paul be brought down “to morrow into the council” (Acts 23:20). What the more than forty lacked was not a day but the captain’s consent, and that consent, not any missing date, is the promise they are watching for.

Ready, and looking for, in the same clause, about the same men. They already knew the day. They did not know whether the captain would grant it, and that uncertainty, not an absent date, is what the word means in the mouth of the men who used it.

That is the posture Titus 2:13 puts the believer in. The pamphlet answers that no statement attaches an hour to the blessed hope, and that answer asks the wrong thing of the word. Looking for is not a man consulting a calendar. It is a man already made ready, watching, for something he is certain will come and cannot himself time, hasten, or compel. More than forty men stood in that posture over a prisoner and a captain’s word. The believer is put in it over “the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

The objection I expect here is the fair one. You have taken a word from a murder plot in Acts and carried it into a doctrine of the coming of Christ. I have taken no doctrine from Acts 23. I have taken the English meaning of a phrase from the way your Bible uses it, and I have then let Titus 2:13 say its own thing in its own place.

The Verse One Past Where He Stops

This is the passage on which the pamphlet’s case is strongest.

The Thessalonians had been shaken by the report that the day of Christ was at hand. Paul calms them like this: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). Two things first, and then the day. The pamphlet plants itself there, and if you are ever going to feel the force of its case, you will feel it at that verse. Any man who tells you this passage is easy has not read it.

The difficulty is a fair one, and I will not pretend otherwise. If the church is gathered to Christ before that day, why does Paul comfort a frightened church by naming two things that must happen first, rather than simply telling them they will be gone before either one does? Look at what he beseeches them by, in the same breath he raises the question. “Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him” (2 Thessalonians 2:1). The coming and the gathering together are named first, as settled ground, before the day itself is even in question. Paul is not arguing that the church will be gone. He is arguing that the day has not begun, and he proves it from its own named precursors, which had not happened. Whether that gathering and that day stand in the order this pamphlet denies is not settled by verse 1. What verse 1 shows on its own is only this: Paul had another ground to comfort a frightened church from, besides the one the pamphlet says he never preached.

The pamphlet handles verses 1 through 3, asks whether that fits the framework of Matthew 24, and leaves the chapter. It never reaches verse 7, and verse 7 is this.

“For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way” (2 Thessalonians 2:7).

Somebody is holding something back. He is holding it back as Paul writes. He goes on holding it back. Then he is taken out of the way, and the next verse says and then the man of sin appears.

I know what the trouble is with that verse, because it is the first thing I would raise. Letteth does not sound like holding back; it sounds like allowing. And if you go looking at where else the word occurs, the other two places do not help me: “he that letteth him go” (2 Kings 10:24) and “when one letteth out water” (Proverbs 17:14) both mean release.

Look back one verse. “And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time” (2 Thessalonians 2:6). Withholdeth occurs four times, and in the other three it is never anything but holding back: God “withholdeth the waters, and they dry up” (Job 12:15); the man “that withholdeth more than is meet” (Proverbs 11:24); “He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him” (Proverbs 11:26). Paul says the plain word first and the harder word one verse later about the same thing. Your Bible defines its own terms.

Second, Paul uses let that way himself, in a sentence you have read a hundred times without stopping: “Now I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto,)” (Romans 1:13). He meant to come and was prevented.

Third, try reading it the other way and watch the sentence fall apart. If the man were permitting the mystery of iniquity, then removing him would stop it. But verse 8 says the removal is what brings the man of sin out: “And then shall that Wicked be revealed” (2 Thessalonians 2:8). Read letteth as permission and that sentence has to run backwards.

So the chapter the pamphlet chose for its ground has a removal written into it, one verse past the point where the pamphlet stops, and the man of sin does not appear until it has happened.

The restrainer is not identified in verse 7. Paul had told them face to face and he would not put it in the letter, and the man who speaks past that silence with confidence is doing to you what this pamphlet did, in the opposite direction. I believe I have an explanation for this, but I am not going to prove a doctrine to you out of a name the Holy Ghost withheld. What is on the page is an order: something holds back, someone is taken out of the way, and then the man appears. That order is written, and it was not in his pamphlet.

The Court He Opened With

His first panel told you there is only one court of appeal, and warned you against believing a thing because an outstanding man taught it.

His last panel says the doctrine is to be rejected as “this novel nineteenth century doctrinal innovation.”

That is an appeal to the history of what men have taught, arriving at the end of six panels insisting that appeals of that kind settle nothing.

I am not going to answer him with a competing history, and I would ask you not to accept one from anybody else either. Whether a doctrine is old or new is not how your Bible decides anything, and the moment I start proving my case from the history of what men have taught instead of the sixty-six books, I have pushed away the court of appeal. Either the opening principle holds, in which case the closing sentence is beside the point and he should have struck it, or the closing sentence counts, in which case he has spent six panels destroying his own first paragraph.

One verse skipped is an oversight. Three consecutive verses are a pattern. He chose the Thessalonian correspondence for his ground, and in its second chapter he handles verses 1 through 3 and stops. He never reaches 2 Thessalonians 2:5, where Paul sends them back to what he had told them in person. He never reaches 2:6, where the withholding is named. He never reaches 2:7, where something holds back until it is taken out of the way, and the man of sin does not appear until it has happened. Three verses together in the middle of the one passage he chose, every one of them against him, and not one of them on the page he handed you.

I am not going to tell you what was in the man’s mind. I could guess, and you could too, but I would rather show you what is on the paper. The paragraph warning you about men who meet a difficulty and glide past it was printed on the front of a pamphlet that glides past three.

He asked for Bereans. The men at Berea “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11), and the thing they searched was the preaching of Paul and Silas.

What to Do With It

Then check this work also, and do it with the Bible open.

Read Philippians 3:20 and 4:5 and decide for yourself whether a man was told to go through that letter and report there was nothing in it. Read Titus 2:13, and then read Acts 23:21 and see what looking for looks like on men who meant business. Read 2 Thessalonians 2 straight through without skipping verse 7, and then read verse 5 and recognize that the apostle knew something he did not write down. Count the word tribulation for yourself. It takes an evening and a concordance, and no man can take the result away from you afterward.

And understand what is actually at stake in it, because it is not a date and never was.

The hope in Titus 2:13 is not a theory about a calendar. It is a Person, and the verse says so: “the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Whatever a man concludes about the order of events, the question that will not wait on his study is whether he belongs to the One who is coming. Paul put the whole of it into one sentence that requires no chart at all: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9). Settle that one first. The man who has settled it may study the rest at his leisure, and the man who has not may get the chart exactly right and be standing with those men, ready and watching, for a promise that never comes.

Pastor Thomas Irvin
Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

Note: this article engages a printed tract, “What About the Pretribulation (Any-Moment) Rapture Theory? (What Saith the Scriptures),” by Dr. Henry T. Hudson, a single folded sheet with no publisher and no date, whose footnotes cite sources from 1963 and 1966. All quotations from it are taken from the printed panels.