Keep hearing how "our blessed hope" refers to the Rapture as understood in the Pre-Trib end timnes framework. So distressing. Our blessed hope is the hope of being with Christ forever and that has nothing to do with any partiular system of end times theiology, it's all Christians blessed hope. Those millions who died in Christ before the raputre have the same blessed hope as those who will be raptured without dying.
The Pre Trib people have this habit of being so certain of their ssyuystem of thought they seem to have no way of answering any objections to it that hap;ppen to arise. And objections will always arise, there are always going to be questions. All they seem to do with them is pronounce them wrong, I haven't heard anything I'd call a real answer. Scripture for instance does here and there use the phrase "the wrath to come" as a description of what Christ died to save us all from. While there is reason to ubnderstand that some will be saved from the speicfi wrath of the Great Tribulation of the Day of the Lord, as in Revelation 3:10, the idea of 3escaping the wrath to come is not always presented in those terms, it is soemetimes a definition of what Christ died for us. But they don't seem to know this or they dobn't seem to want to address it from that point of vi3ew..
Since I'm on one of my lissues or peeves, I might as well add another. Another reference by a good teacher to that passage about the demon possessed boy the disciples weren't able to set free, which Jesus exp;lained as its being the sort of demon that required prayer and fasting to get it to leave. That is, that's what the King James says. the modern versions say only that it takes prayer and leave out the fasting. Martyn Lloyd Jones commented on it that the Fasting does not osccur inte earliest manuscripts. Mac Arethur doesn't mention the fasting at all, he just usess thje modern version that leaves it out.
A case of the destrubctive work of Westcott and Hort's preferred manuscripts that Burgon identified as corrupt but which are now enshrined as the legitimate line of Greek manuscripts over the line on which the King James was based. These older and supposedly better manuscripts are a trijan Horse in the Church, destroying foundations bit by bit because they are accepted as legitimate and superior to the Received Text on which the King James was based.
These bogus manuscripts which may be forgeries but are at least the wsork of early church heretics as Burgon understood it, destroy biblical inerrancy first and foremost although this isn't acknolweledged by many of the best exegetes. It should be but they come up with ways of rationalizing it away.
Who knjows why fasting was left out of the bogus line, but since it is left out we are to take it that it was added later and is therefore not what Jesus actually said. this is a pernicious destructive way of thinking but it prevails because Westcott and Hort are taken to be legitimate scholars instead of the maniuplating corruptors they really were.
So if youi want to get rid of a certain kind of demon you need to fast as well as pray but all we are allowed to think is that prayer is the onbly thing required.
