Some of the Futurist Interpretation Has to Go, But the Main Outline of the Last Days Remains

 Richard Bennett is such a rich source of historical information and biblical understanding of the Antichrist and the Roman Church it can be a bit overwhelming.  

I've been hoping to find a discussion of how some elements of prophecy about the Antichrist have been fulfilled, including confirmation or disconfirmation of my speculation in the previous post about the meaning of the Antichrist's displacing of three "kings" of the Roman Empire in his rise to power.  So far I haven't found such a discussion either by Bennett or by Chris Pinto, the two of my sources most likely to cover such a topic.  

I mentioned but didn't name a well-known prophecy teacher in that post who sees this as yet future, as the whole understanding of the Antichrist is seen in the Pre-Trib eschatology.  But as I've been pursuing the identity of the Antichrist as Pope through the eyes of the Reformers, I'm finding that most of it is considered to have been fulfilled in the past, his civil power for instance having grown by stages in specific events down the centuries.    

Another question I have now as a result of rereading Daniel 11, has to do with the military movements of the Antichrist figure that are described starting in Daniel 11:36.  The prophecy teacher I mentioned sees this as yet-future too of course, leading up to the war of Armageddon.  But what I'm wondering in light of the Reformers' take on so many historical fulfillments of prophecy about the Antichrist,  is whether those movements can be located somewhere in history rather than in the future.  There were certainly military operations that engaged the Pope at various times.   But so far I don't know enough about these movements to speculate much myself.  Maybe something to do with Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, maybe something to do with the Crusades, but those are more or less wild speculations on my part.

I would nevertheless guess that a historical fulfillment is far more likely than a future fulfillment which would put it in the last three and a half years of the Tribulation peeriod.  So I am now taking much of the Book of Revelation to be about the identity of the Antichrist as already established in history, rather than about future events.  Not ALL of course if there is to be a final Antichrist-Pope who consolidates power in the world even greater than he had in the Middle Ages and makes even more martyrs of Bible believers than the Inquisition accomplished.  And this is still my working hypothesis.  Although Bennett and I think also Chris Pinto apparently see the historical fulfillment of so much prophecy about the Antichrist as a major argument against the whole Pre-Tribulation eschatology, I keep seeing it as simply telling us who this Antichrist is from historical facts, while there is still a final Pope-Antichrist to come.  Building on millennia of variations on this evil theme, he will be a satanically inspired terror to people who come to belief during the Tribulation period, but then finally killed when Christ returns at the end of the seven years.

At least I don't see anything yet that has required me to change my mind about the timing of the Rapture and the following seven-year Tribulation /Time of Jacob's Trouble when God finisihes His work with Israel, and the Day of the LORD when He judges the entire Earth.  Instead it seems to me that the Reformers have given us a very full understanding of the Mystery of Iniquity as embodied in the Roman Church and specifically the papacy.  The Last Act of the drama of Planet Earth will be Satan's Day as he possesses the final Pope and murders his enemies the followers of Jesus Christ with a bitter vengeance, before God pours out His wrath and destroys the whole evil system.  

I'm still listening to talks on this subject, by Bennett at the moment, and still not finding a full eschatology described that from what has been said should completely supplant the Pre-Trib scenario.  They do refer to the very end when Jesus returns, however, so maybe the idea is that history just continues until the end, perhaps with some signs as that end approaches, but that part is a guess.  

If that is the case there is no Seventieth Week of Daniel, no Great Tribulation, no Day of the LORD , and the Rapture must come at the moment Jesus returns.  That's a lot of prophecy that will go unfulfilled if so.  Also, the idea that the Rapture occurs when Jesus returns would make the idea of the Millennium impossible, understood as a thousand years when normal life plays out under the literal reign of Christ.  Maybe that makes them Amillennialists?  

All that requires stretching or throwing out a lot of scripture it seems to me.  The Book of Revelation pretty clearly describes a Millennium ruled by Christ, in which people live to be very old but are considered to be children still.  That's a picture of a restored Eden or Paradise on Earth, people living out normal lives, having children, etc., only under increasingly improving conditions, reversing the trend of life in this fallen world.  They will still be fallen people but under the reign of Christ, after the forces of evil were defeated at His coming, they are better able to pursue righteous living and it's a blessed and happy life in which death is put off and diseases and other sufferings minimized.  

There is no more papacy in that Millennium and Satan has been bound in chains and can't influence the people, until the very end when he is released and the fallen nature again asserts its ugly potentials.

It's a fitting scenario.  It completes many themes of the Biblical story that would otherwise be left open-ended.   

Likewise the Pre-Trib Rapture is fitting:  the Church escapes the Wrath of God as promised while the rebellious world is judged\.   There has to be a Day of the LORD.  It's been promised for millennia.  There has to be a Seventieth Week of Daniel when the story of Israel is brought to completion.  There has to be a specific Great Tribulation because Jesus prophesied it and nothing else qualifies that I know of.  Also, how do they explain the 144,000 of the twelve tribes of Israel?  Way too much has to be left o0ut if the entire futurist interpretation is scuttled.

And there is no reason to scuttle it.   I agree that it is hugely important to recognize the true nature of the Antichrist because the Church is in great danger since it's been abandoned, and the first order of business should be reintating this truth.  It is also needed to make sense of the end times picture;  we need the historical understanding of the papacy and the Mystery of Iniquity as the foundation for the Antichrist who brings evil to its perfect expression in the last days.  The Mystery of Iniquity is the same basic system that has existed throughout history, through all those empires we see in the Book of Daniel for instance, but also going back to Nimrod and the religion of Semiramis.  It doesn't just spring up during the Tribulation, it is a system of evil that reaches a pinnacle of perfection at the end but has always been in the world, going back to Babylon.  Even going back to the Fall in Eden, except the evil that grew from that point was rather rudely interrupted by the Flood so Satan started over in Babylon by inventing counterfeit Messiahs.  Now he's working to bring it all together as a global totalitarian system.

There is a fitting grandeur in this way of looking at it too..  

=================

A couple of references to historical discussions by Richard Bennett:

A Biblical Uncovering of the Pope and the Papacy 

.The Antichrist, Man of Sin, In our Midst.  Classic Reformed Eschatology

The Displacement of Three Seats of Power by the Antichrist as he Rises to Prominence.

Just heard a well=known pastor describe the Antichrist as understood in the popular current eschatological system,  by which he is an unknown personality who will appear in the future, remaining unknown until revealed just as he rises to power.  

How we need the truth about the Antichrist, known by the Protestant Reformers as well as many other Christians down the centuries as the Pope, to be reinstated in the thinking of the Church.  

But this pastor did remind me that part of the prophecy, which we get from the Book of Daniel, is that Antichrist rises up as a "little horn" from among the nations of the Roman Empire, displacing three of them at the very beginning of his career.  I think it was Richard Bennett in one of his Sermon Audio talks that I heard recently, who explained that the decree of Phocas that made the Bishop of Rome Universal Bishop over the whole Church, was done as the resolution of a conflict between four Bishops of the time: Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem.  So the Bishop of Rome did literally defeat or displace three other Bishops in order to gain the seat of power over all of them.  

Not nations but seats of power within the Church which was about to replace the Roman Empire itself, eventually acquiringd most of its characteristics including both religious and civil power over nations.  It acquired the vestments, the title "Pontifex Maximus,"  many of the rituals and superstitions of the Roman pagan religions including the rosary, evemtually also elevating "Mary" above Christ, like the Mother Goddess of the pagan religions back to Semiramus; and then by stages and the forgery "The Donation of Constantine" acquired its civil power as well.  

If the displacement of three Bishops is the correct understanding of the prophecy, someone will have written about it somewhere, maybe even one of the Reformers, but at the moment it just seems to me to be a reasonable guess.

Being a Bossy Arrogant Know-It-All as Usual.

We have to understand who the Antichrist is.   True Christians down the centuries knew he was the Pope.  The Protestant Reformers came to the same knowledge.  This idea that he is some future personality yet to be revealed is a terrible deception.  He has been in the world for at least fifteen centuries.   Today's evangelical churches are weak because of embracing false ideas such as this one.  We need spiritual strength now more than ever and we don't have it.  If we want it restored we will have to repent of our errors and sins but we have to know what those errors and sins are in order to repent of them.  God will give us whatever knowledge we earnestly desire and pray for.  

The falseness of Catholicism, the falseness of the Charismatic Movement, the seductions of liberalism, and other forms of apostasy, need to be recognized as deceptions and given up.  Ask God to show us.  He will.  

I also have no question but that women need to resume covering our heads in church after some six or seven decades of abandoning it.  The idea that the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 was telling us that women must cover our heads in church just because one or more of the pagan cultures of his day did so approaches blasphemy it seems to me.    The logic is spurious by which we impute to Paul a teaching given to Jesus Christ' s people  based on the habits of mere culture, especially when he appealed to divine and natural truths as his arguments.   This I've come to believe is one the great deceptions of the Church which has contributed to our current weak condition, is probably a main reason God has not given us the revival we so yearn for, and since it is about God's Creation ordinance of the ordering of the roles of the sexes it has probably had a strong undermining influence in the development of all the sexual aberrations now being treated as normal in the culture.   I wish I could shout this through a megaphone to all the churches.  But they'd ignore me anyway, defend the capitulation to feminism, call me a legalist and so on.  

Another great deception is The Great Bible Hoax of 1881 as I titled my blog on the subject of the foisting of bogus Greek manuscripturs on the Church by two Catholic sympathizers who violated their charge to do a minimal revisiono of the Authorized Version by introducing "new" manuscripts already recognized as false.  This fostered the abandonment of Biblical inerrancy by raising questions about biblical reliability,  made it hard to discuss the truths of the Bible because of all the different and inferior readings of the plethora of Bible versions that resulted, got pastors and churchgoers alike preoccupied with trivial differences in the meaning of words, made it hard to memorize Bible passages when everybody was memorizing a different translation, and just generally interfered with the necessary learning of the Word of God.  A satanic masterpiece of sowing confusion and doubt among God's people.  

If I'm wrong about any of this I'd like to know it but I'm convinced of it after many years of pondering.  

So far I still think the Pre-Trib Rapture thinking is correct, except of coruse for the misidentification of the Antichrist.  

Lord please help us, lead us to the knowledge we need, lead us to repentance of our sins and doctrinal errors, bring us revival.

Here's John MacArthur on the Pope and the Papacy from 2005.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1HdVMvm8wuw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> 

Don't know how to embed it so here's the URL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HdVMvm8wuw&t=74s

Brexit: Adjustments to the Prophetic Scenario Would be Necessary As We Close In on the Grand Finale

 Now I'm listening to Chris Pinto's radio show on February 7th titled "Brexit and Prophecy" in which he discusses the idea that Brexit throws a wrench into the Pre-Tribulation Rapture or the Dispensationalist eschatology.   I guess the idea is that the prophecy is so hard-wired it can't allow for any sort of deviation from it.  Supposedly the EU has to go forward without a glitch or the whole end times system fails.  

Clearly IT IS IN FACT GOING FORWARD.  The post I just up and in fact most of Richard Bennett's teachings, show that the EU is shaping up as the Holy Roman Empire (which in a sense never died anyway since it was carried by the RCC all along in spite of setbacks.)+

Pinto goes on to say he thinks the enormous influx of Muslims intto the west, which has been promoted by the Vatican, is designed to create an army of anti-Christian murderers to do the work of the Inquisition against Bible believers when the papal EU is fully in power.  Or as he put it, to be the agents of the next Holocaust.

There have been many setbacks to Rome's plots over the centuries, so there being another one in the form of Brexit doesn't to my mind call the final scenario into question.  They probably don't even need to reverse Brexit to bring about their plans.  Since when is national aw any kind of real obstacle to the power juggernaut of Rome?   

Pinto also mentions that  the late Irish preacher Ian Paisley, who called out Pope John Paul as the Antichrist in a session of the EU Parliament some years ago, and believed that the Parliamentary chair numbered 666 awaited the coming together of the finale according to the dispensationalist prophetic system I've also been supporting here.  he believed as I do that the Antichrist is the Pope and that didn't dissuade him from that end times scenario as so far it doesn't dissuade me either.

So Pinto is here laying out his eschatology in more detail, but it still doesn't amount to much more than throwing a wrnech into the Pre-Trib Rapture.  To my mind it doesn't undo it.  I've believed and have been growing in the belief, that the Pope is to be the final Antichrist within that very end times scenario.  I don't see how Brexit seriously unddermines that scenario, just as the identity of the Antichrist as Pope doesn't undermine it.  I continue to think that God gave us some special signs by which to mark Pope Francis for a special role in the line of Antichrists, and although because of his age it seems unlikely he'd be THE final Antichrist i still think it the most likely possibility.  The Popes have generally maintained an image of their right to rule in global affairs, and things are most certainly coming together in a way that legally favors papal rule over Europe, as I've been reporting.  The Day of the LORD has not yet come, there is still a Great Tribulation in our future, and the also-unfulfilled Seventieth Week of Daniel is its likely framework.  Global events with the occasional sidetrack like Brexit (there is still some sanity in the huiman race after all, among us weak vessels of clay)  still point to that Finale.  It looks very close it seems to me.   God said we aren't to know the time, that is in God's hand;  however we are always told to watch and wait and be ready which implies there will be signs we can watch for to give us at least the "season" to be ready for.  If any given idea urns out to be wrong then God will surely show us where we are wrong to correct our bearings, but to this point it looks like things are on track toward the Pre-Trib understanding of the Grand Finale, with the necessary adjustment that it is the Pope we should be expecting to fill the seat of the Antichrist.  He's already shown himself to be God in the templew of God according to the Reformers, so that part of the Pre-Trib scenario may also have to go, but there may be room for a literal second fulfillment.  Watch and wait.

I'm going to be listening to more of Pinto's radio shows and may come back to add my comments on them to this post.

It May Be Too Late But We Have to Try

 This is an extra post on the teaching I linked in the last one, Reformation History, Eschatology, WWII etc., because the churches so desperately need to know these things about the RCC that have so effectively been kept from us for at least a century.  My little blog can't reach anybody but I've got to write it here anyway and pray that God will spread it from whatever sources are available..  

https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=530111153203

Listen to the laws the RCC has in place that affect INDIVIDUALS, ALL OF US, everywhere, even in the United States where our own laws protect us from the kinds of encroachments on our liberty they intend to enforce when they get the power to do it.  And they already have a lot more power than we imagine, through their Concordats with various nations.  Even the US thanks to Reagan has diplomatic relations with the Vatican although they had been put to a stop because of their support of the Confederacy in the Civil War.  Reagan reinstated this relationship.  

Listen and weep, that's all I can say.  And besides weeping it may turn your stomach as it did mine to hear the power they already have over us, YOU AND ME.

American Christians are such a complacent bunch.  The wolves in sheeps' clothing are circulating among us and ready to pounce and we blithely accept them as sheep.  Listen to this talk please.  At least this one.  It's not really new to me I'm sorry to report, I just gave up on trying to talk about it and let it slip out of my mind.  You havew no idea, you have no idea, you have no idea.  

Lord please please give us revival, bring us back to the Reformation solas in all their power, and correct the many secondary deviations that have been crippling even the good churches so that You can bless us with a real outpouring of Your spirit before all this comes crashing down on this world.  Please grant us the knowledge we've been deprived of, and the zeal to change, and the repentance we need so that You will send us Your Spirit in power.  Please..  

European Union Shaping up as the Revived Holy Roman Empire and some Eschatological Implications of the Pope as Antichrist

 Window on Europe  is the title of a broadcast at Sermon Audio by Richard Bennett in 2003:  

In the first 25 minutes he talks about his personal experiences traveling in Europe with other evangelicals.  From 25 on he talks about the European Union, starting with its new Constitution,, bringing out its Catholic character, which was overtly recognized by the former Pope John, whom he quotes.  European Bible believers/ Protestants are worried about how this is shaping up because of course if the RCC ascends to its former power over the Holy Roman Empire of Europe, which it is believed is what is developing rapidly, they will be persecuted as they were throughout the Middle Ages.  Already the terms of the new Constitution are clearly totalitarian, far from incorporating the great liberalizations of European history.   The Vatican would wield both religious and civil power.

https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=117182031410

In other broadcast, this one in 2009, Papal Rome, The European Union, Antichrist, Prophecy, Jesuits  Pope John Paul is said to be preparing to be the Holy Rroman Emperor ruling over Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic.  \

Then there is  Reformation History, Eschatology, Prophecy, WWII, Facts About the Papacy (Antichrist) by Bennett and a guest speaker.  

https://www.sermonaudio.com/saplayer/playpopup.asp?SID=530111153203

It is not so much about Reformation History as Counterreformation history, meaning the work of the Jesuits in their neverending attempts to undo the Reformation, which include becoming teachers in Protestant colleges and tutors in royal families, where by interpreting everything through a Catholic lens they are able tu undermine the Protestant beliefs of the parents of the children in their charge.   The Jesuits have a reputation for being excellent scholars and teachers, so Protestant parents naively send their children to be educated under them, only to find them converting to Catholicism or just having their thinking so changed they no longer share their parents' belief.  

From there they go on to how it was the Catholic Oxford Movement in England that promoted the futurist eschatology that removed the idea of the Pope as Antichrist in modern thinking.  It is certainly true that most modern eschatology has dropped that Reformation understanding completely, now teaching an Antichrist who is to come who is as yet unknown but is expected to be revealed and to emerge into world prominence during the Tribulation period.  This is really a sad development, along with all the other ways the RCC has been getting a pass from evangelicalism in recent years. 

Also discussed in this audio sermon is the Vatican's involvement in Catholic nations during WW((, with Mussolini and Hitler and Franco and Salazar and Pavlik(?) in Croatia, supporting the persecutions and murders of nonCatholics.  In Croatia 700.000 Serbian Greek Orthodox believers were murdered.  So although the Inquisition is no longer in force its practices continue anyway, and if the global political situation continues in the current direction it will no doubt be openly reinstated.  It's been renamed, by the way, from The Office of the Inquisition, to The Congregation for the Doctrines of the Faith.  (I hope I got that right, my memory is good for about five minutes these days.) 

We definitely need a massive return among evangelical churches to the truths of the Reformation and the kowledge that it is the papacy scripture identifies as the Antichrist.  Bennett freequently mentions how we need revival in the churches based on a return to fundamental Protestant principles, especially the Protestant Gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

So far I haven't seen a complete eschatological system attempted by Bennett or others who recognize the Pope as the Antichrist.  Bennett objects to the futurist interpretation of the Antichrist but doesn't address other elements of futurist eschatology.  I don't recall if Chris Pinto does but I don't think so.  I think the general idea is that we have to do away with the whole system of thought  because the papacy is the Antichrist.

But as I've been arguing, there are certainly strong reasons to view the Book of Revelation in particular as describing future events.  The Antichrist most certainly IS to be a Pope, that Antichrist we see in the Book of Revelation, leader of the Harlot Church which is also clearly the Roman Church.  This figure will have civil and religious powers, WHICH THE PAPACY HAD THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES over the Holy Roman Empire.  A Pope is the perfect fit.  Most of the necessary framework is already in place, and the European Union is shaping up only too well to fit right into the papal ambitions.  As I mention above, the Pope would function as Emperor over the revived Holy Roman Empire, pretty much the position he held during the Middle Ages.   After the Roman Empire fell and the Caesars were out of the way, then the Bishop of Rome ascended to essentially the position of Emperior.  They invented a document called "The Donation of Constantine" to take civil power to the papacy.  

In 1798 Napoleon took that civil power away from the Pope, which is understood to fulfill the biblical prophecy of the wound described in Revelation, that was healed, and it was healed in 1929 when Mussolini restored civil power to the papacy.   All they need now is for the European Union to fall into line under the Pope's rule and from what Bennett has been saying in these talks I'm linking, that's well underway.

SO the way I am now looking at all this, the Rapture is still future and most likely shown in Revelation 4, and the Tribulation period is also future, a seven-year period of the outpouring of God's wrath known throughout the Old Tstament as the Day of the LORD.  Paul reassures the Thessalonian Church that the Day of the LORD had not yet come, which had been rumored among them, and that it can't come until the Man of Sin be revealed, who can't be revealed until an unnamed Restrainer is out of the way.  Because of his cautious way of talking about this Restrainer it seems pretty clear he is talking about a temporal power that could punish him and the churches, which makes Caesar the Restrainer since there were no more Caesars when the empire moved to Byzantium.  So the Antichrist was revealed centuries before the Reformation, and even more centuries before our time, probably in 606 AD when the Byzantine emperor resxolved a dispute among the four Bishops of the Day by making the Bishop of Rome Universal Bishop.

So Paul says the Day of the LORD won't come until the Man of Sin is revealed.  If he was revealed in the 7th century then that Day could have come any time afterward, but clearly it hasn't.  It is yet future, it fits Jesus' description of great tribultion that God would have to shorten or nobody would survive it, and it fits the Seventieth Week of Daniel that is also as yet unfulfilled.  

It does seem to me that the arguments for a Pre-Tribulation Rapture are pretty solid, the many promises the LORD makes to the Church that we will not go through God's wrath, and the fact that the Church is not mentioned or even hinted at during the Tribulation period when the seals are opened and God's judgments are poured out.  Tribulation in the sense of persecution the Church endures, but not the wrath of God.  So that part of Pre=Trib eschatology remains intact in my mind

BUT I do have one unresolved question and that is how to think about the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 when the fifth seal is opened.  That is, there were tens of millions of martyrs under the papacy during the 600 years of their persecutions of "heretics," and I find it hard to separate those from some future group of martyrs during the Tribulation.  I suppose if I can accept the idea of two different sets of believers anyway, why not two different sets of martyrs?  But it nevertheless remains a question, and one that could potentially undo the whole Pre-Trib point of view.

Rampaging Evil and Questions about the End Game.

 Evil is winning.  Sometimes it overwhelms me, in fact I don't know how I manage any hope for the world at all, must be delusional if I do.  Did you know that Antifa trains in Syria with Islamic terrorists?  Chris Pinto is the source of that kind of information.  No wonder I stopped listening to him for so long, I always cry my eyes out after hearing one of his radio shows.  How can it be that the people of God who have a direct conduit to the omnipotent Power, are so helpless these days?  How did we get into this situation where so many churches aren't preaching the true gospel and we can't even get prayer for revival organized to any effect?  

Pinto's show today is titled "For Such a Time as This," which evokes the theme of the Book of Esther.  The problem is it suggests that we HAVE some kind of provision today for such as this time we are living through and we don't.  He makes a good point that Esthe, who is often understood to represent the Church, was not called to preach the gospel as so many think should be the exclusive engagement of the churches, she was called to save her people from an evil murdering man.  She was able to prevail upon the king and the evil was put down.  What resources do we have for dealing with today's evil when the Church has been so weakened and fragmented?\

I also listened to his show of a couple months ago, "The Curse of Liberalism."   That one makes me sad for the many nice liberals out there who have no clue what they are actually serving.  The powers of evil have certainly done their job at depriving us of the necessary knowledge to counter such an influence, knowledge of history, knowledge of the forces arrayed against us.  Pinto is very good at penetrating even beyond the level of Marxism and Communism to the influence of the Vatican and the Jesuits, an influence so effectively camouflaged nobody would suspect it these days, though even just a hundred years ago there were many who kept the knowledge alive and sounded the alarm from time to time.   What would anyone care who was not a Protestant though?  The few Protestants who are at all aware of it, and that is certainly very few.   The knowledge of the Protestant foundations of America is thoroughly discredited by these very influences that need to be exposed.  

Nice liberals have no clue.  They actually think their nice compassionate motives are the only good and the other side is Hitler, or that there is a Right and a Left and a pendulum that swings between them, when the reality is in our time that there is only good versus evil and the good is not liberalism and the good is hamstrung.

Well, it does no good to sit here and cry about it.   I can pray but we need an army praying.   I can write too, but to what purpose?

Both Chris Pinto and Richard Bennett object to the Pre-Tribulation Rapture scenario.  Pinto mentioned  that he objects to the timing of the Rapture but I couldn't find a discussion of his reasoning about it.  I suppose it's that he thinks the Rapture doesn't occur until Christ returns but I'm not sure.  John MacArthur did a fine job of arguing that one down.

It took me a long time to come around to the Pre-Trib point of view and I still find it persuasive, although at least its understanding of the Antichrist is historically ignorant.  Much of the portrait in the Book of Revelation surely refers to thei historical Roman Church as THE Antichrist force in the world since Christ came.  That can't refer only to a seven-year period of revived Inquisition.  And that raises a question about the martyrs under the altar whose voices are heard when the fifth seal is opened in Revelation 6.  If the Church is in heaven then all martyrs before the Day of the LORD would have been Raptured as part of the Church, tens of millions of them.  Why would there be a separate class of martyrs at the hand of the same evil entity that are murdered only during the Tribulation period?  Could the martyrs already in Heaven still be crying out for God's justice.  I guess that's a possibility but it's not terribly convincing. 

Although I still find the general outline of the Pre-Trib position to be persuasive, such questions do suggest another take on it.  What's most compelling is the fact that the Day of the LORD prophesied in scripture is apparently still unfulfilled, the Time of Jacob's Trouble, if not the Holocaust, is still unfulfilled, and the Seventieth Week of Daniel is still unfulfilled, as is the Great Tribulation Jesus spoke of unfulfilled.  All these prophecies appear to be different terms for one yet-future outpouring of God's wrath.   The timing in the Book of Daniel is too precise to be relegated to rough generalizations, and a tTribulation that God would have to shorten in His mercy simply has not yet happened. 

So there are still unanswered questions.