Posted: Nov 17, 2008, 9:03 PM CST
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north188.html
Should anything happen to remove Israel from the Middle East during the lifetimes of these people, then the expected Great Tribulation will have to be postponed, probably for centuries, until another State of Israel is established. The appearance of the State of Israel in 1948 would then turn out to have been an eschatologically irrelevant political event.
Should Israel ever be "pushed into the sea," these people will have to face what the rest of us began facing early in life: the prospect of our statistically inescapable physical death.... This belief in death-free living is the rarely stated psychological motivation behind American fundamentalism's unwavering support of the State of Israel.
... the Church Age will end with the Rapture of living saints into heaven. The millennial age, which will be marked by Christ's bodily presence, will not be a church age, but will be a restored Davidic kingdom. It will even involve the restoration of the Temple sacrifices – as memorials, however, not as redemptive sacrifices. As Scofield writes in one of his notes, "Doubtless these offerings will be memorial, looking back to the cross. . . ." (Scofield Reference Bible, p. 890n).
TIMING THE GREAT ESCAPE
According to Scofield's note to I Corinthians 15:52, the first resurrection of the dead will accompany the death-free translation of living Christians into their eternal condition. He writes:
The "first resurrection," that "unto life," will occur at the second coming of Christ (I Cor. 15. 23), the saints of the O.T. and church ages meeting Him in the air. . . . The bodies of living believers will, at the same time, be instantly changed (I Cor. 15. 52–53; Phil. 3. 20–21). This "change" of the living, and the resurrection of the dead in Christ, is called "the redemption of the body" (Rom. 8. 23; Eph. 1. 13, 14).
The crucial question is this: When will this event take place? It will take place before the beginning of the Great Tribulation, which will last three and a half years. In his note to Revelation 7:14, Scofield writes regarding the duration of the Great Tribulation, . . .
The great tribulation is immediately followed by the return of Christ in glory, and all the events associated therewith (
But how long before the 42-month Great Tribulation begins will the invisible second coming take place, the one that allows Christians to avoid death and the grave? Exactly 42 months. This is because this coming dispensation, according to dispensationalists, is the fulfillment of the prophecy of the seventieth week of Daniel (Dan. 9:24), a week of seven years. Scofield's note says:
When the Church-age will end, and the seventieth week begin, is nowhere revealed. Its duration can be but seven years. (
Ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, fundamentalists have lost their reticence in dating the end of the Church Age. They have rejoiced in the presumably fast-approaching fulfillment of Bible prophecy during which, in Scofield's words, "the people of God who will have returned to Palestine in unbelief." Why such rejoicing? Because, if a Christian can make it to the day, exactly three and a half years before this fulfillment takes place, he will not suffer death.
This is why fundamentalists send money to Jewish organizations that bring Russian Jews to the State of Israel. They want to speed up the process. One of these programs, "On Wings of Eagles," is sponsored by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein's International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. In 2002, he joined with Ralph Reed, the former political technician for Pat Robertson's grass-roots political training organization, Christian Coalition, to create Stand for Israel. Reed today is Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.
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