Revelation: When Does God’s Wrath Begin?

“For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thess. 5:9)

 God’s wrath is His retribution for sin. The Bible teaches that God displays His wrath in different ways. He obviously exhibits wrath when He sends people to hell, but He sometimes also pours out His wrath within the present world. Specifically, He will judge the world with wrath during the end times. We pretribulationists believe that the church will not experience the end-times wrath of God. Specifically, we believe the church will be raptured before God’s retributive wrath is poured out on the earth during the tribulation.

Some non-pretribulationists also hold this view. One example is Robert Gundry, who, in his 1973 book, The Church and the Tribulation: A Biblical Examination of Posttribulationism, argued that God’s retributive wrath will not arrive until the very end of the tribulation. Another example is Marvin Rosenthal, whose 1990 book, The Pre- Wrath Rapture of the Church, recognized that the church escapes from God’s wrath. He argued, however, that divine wrath does not arrive until after the midpoint of the tribulation. For Rosenthal, the rapture is “pre-wrath,” even though it does not occur until about three quarters of the way through the tribulation.

The question we must answer is, “When does God’s retributive wrath begin in the tribulation?” Pretribulationists believe the whole tribulation constitutes God’s wrath upon mankind. Although the severity of the judgments increases as the tribulation progresses, the entire tribulation is the outpouring of divine wrath. Marvin Rosenthal believed that it arrives after the midpoint of the tribulation, while Robert Gundry thinks it will arrive only at the very end.