Jesus on Whether There Will Be a ‘Gap’ between the Rapture and the Day of the Lord’s Wrath

Dr. Alan Kurschner talked about the temporal relationship between the rapture and the beginning of the day of the Lord's wrath and its implications. Prewrath eschatology teaches that the rapture and the onset of the day of the Lord’s wrath will happen back-to-back on the very same day. The day Christ returns, arriving on the clouds to resurrect and rapture his people, will be the very same day that his eschatological judgments begin to unleash on the world for an undetermined length of time. To be sure, the day of the Lord will not all happen in a single day, only its inception occurs on the day the rapture happens. God’s purpose is to deliver his people and then initiate his wrath on the same day. This same-day, two-fold event contains significant implications for the pretribulation notion of “imminence,” the belief that Jesus can return at “any moment.” Since Scripture teaches that prophesied events will happen before the day of the Lord—the celestial disturbance (Joel 2:30–31), Elijah’s coming (Mal 4:5), the apostasy and revelation of the Antichrist (2 Thess 2:1–4)—then they will, by necessity, take place before the rapture. Consequently, the pretribulation teaching of imminence is rendered invalid. The majority of pretribulationists believe the day the rapture happens will be the same day (or the next day) the day of the Lord’s wrath begins. So, this biblical reality of events happening before the day of the Lord becomes problematic for their theological system. Some pretribulation teachers, accordingly, recognize this salient implication that contradicts their eschatological theological system. But rather than move away from their position and embracing the prewrath interpretation, they feel the need to continue to defend pretribulationism. Their attempt to resolve this problem, then, is to posit a  “gap” of time—days, weeks, or months—between the rapture and the day of the Lord’s wrath. This schema then allows for the prophesied events mentioned above to occur during this “gap” before the day of the Lord but after the rapture. Thus, the pretribulationist aims to “protect” their teaching of imminence by using this interval argument. In this episode, Dr. Kurschner provided biblical support for the back-to-back nature of the rapture and the beginning of the day of the Lord’s wrath, militating against the notion of a gap of days, weeks, or months. He explained Jesus's teaching on this point as well as responded to a key pretribulation argument for the gap interpretation.