For when they shall say, Peace and safety; |
Fellow believers,
I used to think that it is at a time when the world is complacently enjoying peace and safety that Christ would come without warning, not even to believers. But I've since discovered that the "destruction" in I Thessalonians 5:3 is not really referring to the last day.
Most of us are familiar with I Peter 4:17: "For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God..." Implication: God's final judgment is at the least a two-step process: first against the apostate church, then the rest of the unsaved. This truth is implicit also in the sounding of the seven trumpets. We read about the first four in Revelation 8, where the term "the third part" appears ten times. As that term is also repeatedly used by God in Ezekiel 5 to warn of His upcoming judgment against Israel, these four no doubt represent the final tribulation for the church.
Now, the last verse of Revelation 8 says: "Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!" In that statement, God differentiates the inhabiters of the earth from the apostate church, and reiterates that the last three trumpets are to follow the judgment that has begun at the house of God.
Note that those three woes come in successive turn. Revelation 9:12 says, "One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter," and Revelation 11:14, "The second woe is past; and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly." Since only the seventh trumpet represents Judgment Day itself, we can infer that before Christ returns, God will have already started to punish this world. As in the case with the church, He will use Satan to do the work. No wonder we find in Revelation 17:16: "The ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire."
Looking at developments over the past year, I believe the fifth trumpet has sounded. As Revelation 9 reveals, God is now using locusts, a figure of evil forces, to torment "the inhabiters of the earth". Of those locusts, verse 11 says, "They had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon." Both Abaddon and Apollyon means destruction. And this evidently is the destruction alluded to in I Thessalonians 5:3.
Thankfully, God assures us that the locusts were commanded not to hurt believers (Rev. 9:4). Thus, the shattering of peace and safety last year may just be another development God had decreed so that the day of the Lord should not overtake us believers as a thief (I Thes. 5:4).