Episode Details

Dr. Kurschner described a salient point that contradicts the traditional pretribulation view concerning Jesus’s illustrations of Noah, Lot, and the thief, which refer to the second coming.

“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage—right up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot, people were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting, building; but on the day Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be the same on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, anyone who is on the roof, with his goods in the house, must not come down to take them away, and likewise the person in the field must not turn back.” (Luke 17:26–31)

“For in those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. And they knew nothing until the flood came and took them all away. It will be the same at the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matt 24:38–39)

“But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have been alert and would not have let his house be broken into.” (Matt 24:43)

The traditional pretrib interpretation views the gathering of the elect in Matt 24:31 as occurring at the end of the future seven-year period, where they see the elect as saved Israel and the wicked left behind having already gone through the trumpet and bowl judgments and about to face the judgment of Armageddon.

However, Jesus’s Noahic, Lot, and thief analogies in his end-time discourses that illustrate the great separation at Jesus’s second coming contradicts pretribulationism.

How so?

In those three illustrations, Jesus is teaching that, before his return, the world will be going on with their ordinary business, completely oblivious to impending divine judgment.

The pretrib interpretation, however, makes no sense and is contradicted by the fact that pretribs at the same time believe that the unprecedented wrath of God through the trumpet and bowl judgments occur before the battle of Armageddon. In other words, how can the world be going on with their ordinary business completely oblivious during the trumpet and bowl judgments? How would Jesus’s return at the judgment of Armageddon catch the ungodly off guard as a “thief.” It makes no sense.

Rather, what Jesus is depicting through his illustrations i