Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 115:457 (Jan 1958)
Article: Salvation in the Tribulation
Author: J. Dwight Pentecost

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BSac 115:457 (Jan 58) p. 50

Salvation in the Tribulation

J. Dwight Pentecost

One of the questions most frequently raised by those antagonistic to the dispensational premillennial position is the question of salvation in the tribulation period. Allis is representative of our critics when he asks: “If the Church consists only of those who have been redeemed in the interval between Pentecost and the rapture, and if the entire Church is to be raptured, then there will be no Christians on earth during the period between the rapture and the appearing. Yet during that period 144,000 in Israel and an innumerable multitude from the Gentiles (Rev. vii) are to be saved. How is this to be brought about, if the Church has been raptured and the Holy Spirit removed from the earth” (Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church, p. 12)?

Allis feels that he has dealt a death blow to dispensationalism in the very asking of such a question, for, to him, there could be no salvation apart from the presence and ministry of the church. It is the purpose of this study to set forth what Scripture has to say concerning the fact and method of salvation in the tribulation period so that our position shall not be held up to ridicule.

Men antagonistic to the premillennial-dispensational position have, either in gross ignorance or in deliberate falsification of the doctrine, made accusation of the wildest teachings on this subject. Allis writes: “We have seen that the most serious objection to the claim of Dispensationalists, that the declaration that ‘the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ meant that it could be set up ‘at any moment,’ was the fact that this involved the ignoring of the definite teaching of Jesus that the ‘Christ must suffer and enter into his glory.’ It made the Cross unnecessary by implying that the glorious kingdom of Messiah could be set up immediately. It left no room for the Cross since Messiah’s kingdom was to be without end. It led to the conclusion that had Israel accepted Jesus as Messiah, the Old Testament ritual of sacrifice would have sufficed for sin…

BSac 115:457 (Jan 58) p. 51

The only conclusion which can be drawn from such a statement is this, that the Church required the Cross while the Kingdom did not, that the gospel of the kingdom did not include the Cross, while the gospel of the grace of God did include it…it is the question…whether the ‘godly’ Jewish remnant of the end-time will accept the Cross and preach the Cross or not….

“The ‘gospel of the kingdom’ was preached before the Cross, before the Church age during which the gospel of the Cross is to be preached; and its preaching is to be resumed, apparently without change or addition, aft...

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