Before, or after?
16
2 Thessalonians 2:2 X 2:7-8
In Matthew 24:44 we read, “Therefore you also be ready, because the Son of the Man is coming at an hour that you do not suppose.” I take it that for there to be the element of surprise the Rapture of the Church must occur before the “abomination of desolation”. When the Antichrist takes his place in the Holy of Holies and declares himself to be god there will be precisely 1,290 days until the return of Christ to the earth. “An hour that you do not suppose” presumably requires a pre-‘abomination’ rapture—if the rapture is pre-wrath but post-abomination, only a fool will be taken by surprise, unless the Rapture happens immediately after the ‘abomination’ (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4).
We may begin with 2 Thessalonians 2:2. Some 15% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘day of the Lord’ (as in NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.); the 85% that have ‘day of Christ’ (including the best line of transmission) are doubtless correct. I remember one day in a Greek exegesis class, the professor stated that one reason he preferred the ‘critical’ text (that reads ‘Lord’ here) is that it fit better with his view of eschatology—the ‘Day of Christ’ is usually associated with the Rapture and blessing of the saints, while the ‘Day of the Lord’ is usually associated with heavy judgment upon the world and unrepentant Israel, including the outpouring of wrath just before and after the Second Coming of Christ, when He returns in glory to establish His Millennial Reign. The perceived difficulty here would appear to be that while verses 1, 6 and 7 evidently relate to the Rapture, verses 3-4 and 8-10 evidently relate to the Great Tribulation and the Second Coming. What to do? Look carefully at the Text. In verse 2, why would the Thessalonian believers be “disturbed”? Someone was teaching that the Rapture had already happened and they had been left behind—I would be disturbed too! So ‘day of Christ’ is precisely correct with reference to the content of verses 1 and 2. The trouble comes in verse 3 because a clause is elided; as an aid to the reader translations usually supply a clause, preferably in italics, to show that it is an addition, as in NKJV—“that Day will not come”. But that would put the Rapture after the revelation of the man of sin and the ‘abomination of desolation’—definitely not congenial to certain eschatological systems. An easy ‘solution’ would be to change ‘Christ’ to ‘Lord’ in verse 2, but that would put the Rapture within the ‘day of the Lord’—also not congenial. I submit that fine-tuning our view of eschatology is preferable to tampering with the Text.
If the ‘Restrainer’ in verses 6-8 is the Holy Spirit, then the Rapture happens before the ‘abomination’, and may be viewed as its ‘trigger’. I translate verse 7 as follows: “For the mystery of the lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He removes Himself.” Perhaps more literally, ‘gets Himself out of the middle’ (the verb γινομαι is inherently middle in voice). I would say that the Holy Spirit is the only one who satisfies the description. But if the ‘Day of Christ’ includes the Rapture, then verse 3 would appear to place the Rapture after the ‘abomination’. So where does that leave us? Although my own training was strongly ‘pre-trib’, I have moved to a ‘meso-trib’ position. If the Rapture follows immediately upon the ‘abomination’, then the ‘surprise’ factor remains untouched. If the ‘abomination’ and the Rapture happen within minutes of each other, then from God's point of view they form a single ‘package’, and the actual sequence is not important—for all practical purposes they happen at the same time.