WWUTT 2570 Q&A Great Awakening Movie, Evangelizing Roman Catholics, Pre or Post-Trib Rapture

Psalm 104 and Opening the Friday Q&A

Have you heard about a movie coming out about the First Great Awakening? What are some resources we can give to Roman Catholics to help lead them out of the Roman Catholic Church? And pre-trib or post-trib?

The answer's when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible commentary that we may have the mind of Christ. Tell all your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky.

You're welcome.

Some information concerning our website coming up here in just a moment, too.

Uh-oh.

But first, opening with Psalm 104.

Yes.

Beginning in verse 31. May the glory of the Lord endure forever. May the Lord rejoice in his works. Who looks on the earth and it trembles. Who touches the mountains and they smoke. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.

I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him for I rejoice in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, oh my soul.

Praise the Lord.

Amen.

This is when we understand the text. We take questions from the listeners on the Friday episode and you can send those questions to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com or send us a voicemail. If you go to our website, which is under construction, but you go to www .wwutt .com.

Right now, you still have to add the three Ws. And click on like the contact us link or something like that. You've got the email address in there and then also the link to send us a voicemail. And we would love to hear from you.

You can record your voicemail from your phone or from your computer. So last week, I mentioned that the website was under construction.

Yes.

I've had a few people, two or three people now, have emailed me and have offered tips on making those corrections.

Oh, awesome.

To the different problems with the website, my coding and all this other kind of stuff. I appreciate it. That is helpful. It will save me time on looking up what I'm doing wrong. And so thank you.

Yes.

So when that gets back up and going, you can contact us.

It's up. It's just that I got to build the site. So you can get like basic stuff on there. The podcast link will even take you to like a feed that will give you the latest podcast.

Nice.

So there's some features on there that are pretty good. I just don't have the rest of it built yet, but that's where you can go. Eventually, I'm going to get to having like an archive on there. There will be like lists of all the episodes organized by book.

Yeah, that'll be beautiful.

10 plus years of podcast. I got to get all that in there. But anyway, I only vaguely know what I'm doing when it comes to building a website. I've done a few and I used to do it a lot more often, but I haven't done it in so long.

It's kind of like you forget some of that information.

Well, that and all the other stuff, like technology changes.

Yeah, right. The way that

So you got to keep up with it.

The way that websites are arranged. You know, sometimes you're WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. Oh, okay. It's called a WYSIWYG. Yeah. Okay. Sometimes the WYSIWYG varies from one website building site to another.

Evangelizing Roman Catholics and Leaving Rome

So anyway, yeah, just messing with all that kind of stuff. But I appreciate the input on helping me build the site. That's appreciated from people who know what they're doing better than I do. This next email actually also has to do with something we talked about last week.

This comes from Linda.

Okay.

And she says, Pastor Gabe and Becky, I listened to the recent Q &A where you spoke about how to evangelize a Catholic. And I want to share my journey away from Rome. So we talked about how we share the gospel with somebody who's Roman Catholic.

You had talked a little bit about your leaving Roman Catholicism and how you came into the truth of the gospel. Baptized shortly before we met. I remember that being one of the first photos I ever saw of you.

You were being presented in front of the church, being handed your baptism certificate after being baptized. You had the cutest expression on your face because you were definitely embarrassed by being up in front of everybody.

Yep.

I remember that.

I remember noticing that. I was like, that girl's kind of cute.

Oh, you're adorable.

So going on with Linda's email here, she says, what is my authority? That is what I had to decide. Rome or the Bible. Born into a Catholic family, educated in parochial schools for 12 years. I understand the brainwashing of Catholicism very well.

The scandals drove me to question it all, especially the murder of the Catholic nun in my hometown in 1980 and the subsequent coverup. I wonder if that's that documentary I watched. I can't remember the year.

It's been a few years since I watched that documentary. But the timeline in which all those things happened, it was a pretty thorough investigation of her murder. I remember seeing it in my recommended documentaries and I didn't think it looked interesting, but by the time I got done with the first episode, I was hooked and had never known about this case at all.

So I wonder if that's the same one that she's talking about there. A priest was eventually convicted, but it took 24 years.

Oh my goodness.

A local journalist wrote a book that divulged many secrets about the local Catholic church that included the occult and abuse of children. I remember that. How can anyone believe this is the one true church?

I prayed for wisdom and truth. And a lot of the molestation cases that come out with the Roman Catholic church these days. I mean, you gotta understand about that. This is a top-down problem. It starts at the top.

This is a true hierarchy where you have the Pope at the top. And then the cardinals and bishops and everybody else, cover-ups will go from the top down when it comes to Roman Catholicism. So when there was that story that came out, oh, when was this now?

When the story broke about the sex abuse scandals in the Southern Baptist Convention. There were Roman Catholic guys, especially like some of the social media influencers who were Roman Catholics, were coming out and saying, see, you Baptists are just as bad as we are.

Well, first of all, it was never as bad as it was reported as being. I won't go into all of that. But secondly, I knew this from the start. As soon as this story was published, I knew from the very beginning, everybody was going to assume, everybody who's not a Baptist is going to assume that this whole thing is structured the same way the Roman Catholic Church is structured.

Who's the guy at the top that we have to blame? And no, every Baptist church is autonomous. So we don't answer to somebody else. There is not a top-down cover-up unless it's part of a church network.

Inside the church.

Yes, there can be those cover-ups, but it's not gonna be a top-down organizational cover-up.

Worldwide.

Right.

So it was never as bad as what the Roman Catholic scandals have been. These have been really, really bad. And the numbers just keep climbing. They keep

They do.

Finding new scandals.

And

Well, I'm grateful for that.

Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, grateful that these people are being uncovered.

Yes.

A lot of them aren't even being removed or properly punished for the wickedness that they've done. So anyway, Linda goes on to say, I praise God that he answered my prayer to show me his truth. Walking away was not a momentary decision.

God dealt with me over a long period of time, a period of reflection as I sorted out the details. Now, let me stop there again to say, just kind of what we had talked about a little bit last week, these kinds of things may take a long time.

So if you're not seeing immediate results from having conversations with a Roman Catholic, don't be discouraged, keep praying. Keep having those conversations. Don't try to go in for the kill with your theological sword.

Yeah.

You just want to open

You're undoing what was done.

Right.

It was all knitted together. And with knitting, you have just every one of those stitches is a knot. So you have to just go back and unknot every one of them.

Slowly undo each one, little bit at a time. So Linda says, there are many truths taught, talking about truths in the Roman Catholic Church.

Oh, okay, yeah.

But they are mixed with many untruths called traditions.

Right.

They were added to substantiate their own goals throughout history. I was surprised to learn that the Assumption of Mary, 1950, and the Proclaiming Her Mother of the Church, 1965, were very recent additions.

The infallibility of the Pope was something many Popes tried to initiate, but was never successful until 1870. There are no scriptures that can validate these traditions unless you take them out of context.

So what is my authority? I believe God, not men. And Linda quotes Psalm 118, it is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.

And I want to share some of the things that helped me. Here were some of the resources that helped to bring her out of Roman Catholicism. Grace to you and John MacArthur.

Awesome.

You can't go wrong there.

Right.

Dr. MacArthur has helped me immensely in a lot of things as well. And I know he has for millions of people. She also mentions Mike Gendron. I think I pronounced his name right. I've seen several interviews with him, but I don't think I've ever retained if it's Gendron or Gendron.

Okay.

But anyway.

I'm not sure either.

Mike Gendron, he's been, he was in the American Gospel documentary.

Okay.

He's been on Kosti Hinn's podcast, talking there also about Roman Catholicism and some of the false doctrines that are there. Some of the things that you can do to help evangelize to Roman Catholics. And you can find his site.

I believe it's proclaimingthegospel .org. And that will get you to some of his resources there.

Nice.

Now, another one that Linda mentioned is a book by Dave Hunt. I've never read any book by Dave Hunt except his anti-Calvinism book.

Okay.

That's the only one I've read. And so I've always known Dave Hunt as just an anti-Calvinist guy for that reason. It wasn't until I came into Calvinism and then I'm reading like the rebuttals to it. And I'm like, yeah, reading Dave Hunt's, I was going, this isn't doing it for me.

So anyway, he wrote a book called, A Woman Rides the Beast. And this is about the Roman Catholic Church and the last days. So that book apparently exposing some things about the Roman Catholic Church, very helpful for Linda.

Okay.

So if anybody's curious about Dave Hunt, writing a book about that gives a detailed history of the Popes and the church is what you'll find in that book. Now, that does sound interesting to me. There was another one I learned about just recently that was a history of the Popes.

I may have already downloaded it onto my Kindle now that I think about it. Hang on, let me pull it up. I don't think it was a Christian book, but I saw somebody talking about it and at least providing a history of the Popes.

That sounded interesting enough to me. Can't figure out where I stuck my Kindle app.

Here we go.

Vickers of Christ, The Dark Side of the Papacy. That's what it is.

Okay.

Peter DeRosa, international bestseller. So I guess I'm in for a good read here.

There you go. Well, maybe. They've kind of changed what considers to be a bestseller.

Well, yeah, I think it was a bestseller a while back. Oh, okay.

And it might actually be a true bestseller.

I think it's a recent book. This one is Sin, Shame and Secrets, a true story of the murder of a nun, the conviction of a priest and the cover up in the Catholic Church. So that's about

That might've been the story she was talking about.

Right, that very thing she was talking about there. So this is by David Yonke. If anybody is curious about that story. And then, yeah, so she says, it's a local story that sparked my questioning of the true church that I had been raised in.

And of course she says, when we understand the text.

Aw.

Was helpful to her as well.

Wonderful.

Keep these in mind the next time someone asks this question. You are correct that each person's experience within the Roman Catholic tradition is different.

Yes.

My parents were not as strict as some families of my generation, but they did follow the church and its teaching. Thank you for your ministry. It has been a comfort as well as educational.

Aw.

Well, Linda, it was

Thank you.

A blessing to us to hear from you.

Definitely.

The Great Awakening Movie and George Whitefield

And thank you so much. This next one, oh, this comes from Ryan. So we've been talking about movies and things like that. We talked about the movie, David.

Yes.

We've talked about our entertainment choices at various times. So Ryan sends this email, Pastor Gabe and Becky, finally a movie to be excited to see during the Easter weekend. An important time in our nation's history and the Lord used George Whitefield and unbeknownst to Ben Franklin to spread the gospel before the Revolutionary War.

This is a movie that is called The Great Awakening.

Okay.

Now I've queued it up here. I think I've watched this trailer, but I've queued it up for us to see it together here. So here we go. This is the trailer for the film that's coming out this spring entitled A Great Awakening.

Okay.

Benjamin Franklin, your brother said he could use your help at his print shop. You have my blessing.

Gonna do good things, Pa.

Great things.

From the ocean

Now I hope that in playing this, I'm not gonna get flagged for having

You know, you probably will.

Having a song in here. Anyway, this is from Sight and Sound Films.

Runs through the valley

George Whitefield, you will be an extraordinary preacher. Remember the source of your power.

You don't believe the stories from London are true?

I am doubting Whitefield's claim that he can be heard and understood by so many. Without evidence, I won't believe it. Let us proclaim freedom to the captives whom the sun sets free. It's free indeed!

Have you ever heard a voice like that? The blast from heaven.

Benjamin Franklin. Reverend Whitefield, partnering with me would guarantee the maximum benefit to your cause. A match made in heaven. Or just a deal made in a print shop.

General George Washington.

Today, we stand in an even darker valley. The survival of this country must be our chief concern. This constitution cannot fail. We cannot let the sun set on this nation. You are lighting a powder keg, my friend.

When you follow him, you are led by love. Why can't I get through to you? I choose evidence over faith. Stop trying to change me! You have promoted the greatest awakening these colonies have ever seen.

The lightning bolt, George. I am just the lightning rod.

The salvation.

One tiny candle illuminates a thousand. Rise, O sleeper!

Awaken!

Well, that sounds pretty good to me.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

So that film is entitled A Great Awakening. Of course, it would be talking about the great awakening that happened in New England. 250 years in the making, it says. This year is the 250th anniversary.

Yes, it is.

Of the United States of America.

Whoop whoop!

So that is timely about George Whitefield and his open air preaching, the ministry that he did during that period of time. And it looks great. The trailer does look great.

It does, it looks very intriguing.

So it might be one of those movies that's up there with like Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce. He was a protege of John Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace.

Oh, okay, yeah.

And Wilberforce had ended the slave trade in Great Britain.

Oh, nice.

Have you ever seen this movie?

No.

Wow, we've never watched this together.

No, I don't do history.

This is a great film.

Like historical films usually because most of the time they're sad.

It's got its moments.

Exactly.

Yes.

Yes.

See, I've already pegged a lot of these.

It doesn't end sad though.

Okay.

It ends with the abolition of slavery.

Okay.

And yeah.

That's a good place to end.

It has.

A movie, that is.

I will say this too. I think the film Amazing Grace has one of the most moving endings that I have ever seen in a film.

Am I still gonna cry because it's so beautiful?

Might, yeah, you might.

Okay.

So not because it's sad.

Right.

But because it's so triumphant and good.

We'll see. If I'll watch it. For those of you who don't know, I do not like.

She does not do sad movies.

Sad movies.

No.

I don't like crying.

Because once I start, it's like, I can't stop. And it's just, I'm a blubbering mess.

So for whatever reason, I don't remember how I managed to avoid this, but out of the 17 months that we dated and were engaged before we got married, in that period of 17 months, did we just never watch a sad movie?

No.

Because I don't ever remember watching anything that left you really miserable after we watched it.

Right.

But then we got married and there's all these movies.

And he's just like, piling them on.

That did not go well for me.

No.

No, it did not.

I was not having very good nights when I would pick a sad film.

And he actually tried to pick a decent film.

Yeah.

And then it ended up sad because of how I interpreted it.

Yes.

And yeah, that didn't go well either. So he had to be super choosy with what he watches.

After that, I was like, okay, I got it. No sad movies. And there've been some films that I've seen without you that are just fantastic films, but I know that you won't make it through it.

Nope.

No.

Yep.

She's not gonna do the sad and tears.

Yeah, not yet. Maybe one day, but not yet.

It was just this past week, the students that I teach at the Christian school, I just recommended to them, Amazing Grace. There is in that film, because I said to them, are you guys familiar with Marvel movies?

So, you know, Dr. Strange?

Yeah.

Okay, he's played by an actor named Benedict Cumberbatch or Benedict Cucumberbatch, as I like to call him.

Okay.

Anyway, when you watch Amazing Grace, you get to see a very young Dr. Strange.

Oh, wow.

Because he plays the prime minister of England in that movie.

Neat.

That's a film that I will recommend. So we've talked before about how, like, I don't do any recommendations because I just don't know what will cause a person to stumble.

Yes.

And entertainment choices always are very subjective.

Yes.

But this is one that I plan to check out. I don't even mind plugging it. And Amazing Grace is another one that I can recommend that you would probably enjoy if you haven't seen it. All right, next email.

Pre-Tribulation or Post-Tribulation Rapture

This comes from Pam. Hi, Pastor Gabe. I am a recent discoverer of your YouTube channel and podcast and have become a huge fan.

Aw, that's awesome.

Flattery will get you everywhere, Pam. Happy to read your email. Your exposition of scripture has really opened my eyes and brought clarity to many theological questions I had previously struggled with in the past.

So I trust your ability to help me with my question. Okay, the pressure's on. Here we go. I am part of a women's Bible study on Sunday mornings. And this morning, the ladies got into a bit of a lively discussion about the rapture.

All of the ladies, except myself, fall into the belief that the rapture is after the tribulation and that we as believers will go through the same chaos and persecution as the world. Ever since listening to a teaching by John MacArthur on the subject, I have believed what he taught, which is that scripture supports a pre-tribulation rapture.

The women's argument was that endurance until the very end is what scripture supports and that the concept of a pre-trib rapture has only been around for less than a century. Am I wrong on this? And they are right.

Please help me to understand this, even if it means putting to rest the idea that scripture is clear one way or another. I know being prepared for whatever is to come is the most important thing, but I would love to hear your thoughts as I trust your understanding of biblical doctrine.

Thank you so much for your ministry and for your sound teachings. Well, I appreciate that, Pam. You know, when I was growing up, my dad really did not teach me much about eschatology. So the study of the end times is an area of theology that we refer to as eschatology.

And he taught me some things, he would say some things, but he wouldn't really like fix me on a particular position. The only thing that I would ever hear him teach on really was that he was not a dispensationalist.

And that's what John MacArthur is. So that's this view that there is a rapture than a seven-year period of tribulation, and then Jesus returns again. So my dad wasn't there, therefore I was skeptical of the view as well.

So it was already in me as I was growing up that I'm skeptical of dispensationalism. And I would say, though, that he didn't ever really tell me it was wrong. I would just hear him make critiques about it.

When I would listen to my teachers teach it, all the churches that we attended when I was growing up, every one of them without exception, was dispensationalist. So they all taught that there was a rapture of the church, then the seven-year period of tribulation in which the Antichrist is also revealed, and then the return of Christ again at the end to take up those who had been saved during the seven-year period of tribulation, God dealing with Israel and so forth.

And then those who were raptured come back, those who remain are taken up and the bodies are raised from the grave. We're reunited with our bodies and then we are forever with the Lord. So that's the view that I grew up listening to.

I spent more of my life in that view than I did in any other view. And yet when I heard my teachers teach on it, even I had trouble with it, though of course my dad wasn't dispensationalist, but I had trouble with just what they were saying.

Because then when they would open the scriptures to support their view, the passages they read, I didn't hear it. And I did not see anywhere, anything in scripture that said about the rapture what they were saying that it was.

I'm like, where is this timeline that you're talking about of there being a rapture of the church? A secret rapture for that matter. So oftentimes this is characterized as the secret rapture. Whenever you watch all of the end times, apocalyptic films in which people disappear.

They just poof, they're gone.

Yeah, and their clothes are left behind.

Right.

It might be, and there's so many different movies that I've seen. I may have seen pretty close to a dozen films that have had their own takes on the rapture. And it's been everything from a pile of clothes on the ground to like they're neatly folded with their shoes on top.

You know?

Okay.

I mean, there's been so many different interpretations of this. To the person completely disappearing and they don't leave anything behind.

Right.

But of course, everything's chaotic because cars are crashing, planes are crashing.

Yes.

Everything's malfunctioning and stuff's breaking because the people aren't there to run it anymore. They've all just kind of disappeared.

Right.

So this is the common Christian apocalyptic fiction from A Thief in the Night, which was probably the first film I saw. That one came out in the seventies. Then you also had the Left Behind movies. And then there were a bunch of other Christian B-movies that kind of espoused the same thing.

Yeah.

Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye who wrote the Left Behind series. This is exactly the view that they take. So this has been the majority view in Christian evangelicalism.

Right.

Now it's becoming less and less. It's becoming less common than it used to be. Amillennialism seems to be the view that's on the rise. And rather than a pre-trib, pre-rapture view, the one that's becoming the most popular is what's called a pre-wrath view.

And that's simply the understanding that the church gets raptured before the wrath of God gets poured out.

Oh, okay.

And along with the pre-wrath view is really the view that I take that the rapture of the church and Christ's return and pouring judgment out on the wicked are really the same event. So let me read to you here from 1 Thessalonians 4.

I'm gonna read from 1 Thessalonians 4 13 through chapter five, verse 11. And this is the most succinct and detailed description of Christ's return that we have in the Bible. And I'm saying that it's even more descriptive than Matthew 24, like the Olivet Discourse.

Because what Jesus is talking about there with his disciples is first the destruction of the temple. Now, can you read in that passage a description of the return of Christ? Yes, but what he's immediately talking about, the immediate question that he's answering is about the destruction of the temple and the judgment that comes on Jerusalem, which would happen 40 years later in AD 70.

That's the thing that Jesus is talking about. So if that is a sign, if that destruction is a sign of what will come later upon the world when Christ returns, okay, but you still have to read that interpretation into the answer that Jesus is giving to the disciples.

This passage right here from 1 Thessalonians 4 to chapter 5 is specifically about the return of the Lord. So this is what we have in this passage, starting in verse 13 of 1 Thessalonians 4. But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.

For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. So let me stop there for a moment. That's just two verses. But Paul is responding to a church that's concerned about their loved ones who have already died.

And they're wondering, have they missed the day of the Lord?

Right.

They probably have a very Greek understanding of death that when a person dies, they just are obliterated. They cease to exist. So since they're not alive with us, if the Lord returns, have they missed out on that day?

And Paul is assuring them that they're asleep. He uses the term asleep, so that they don't think of them as permanently dead and completely gone.