By Dudley Ross Spears
If you can stretch your imagination for a second or SO, try to imagine that you believe the Lord will soon come secretly and steal His saints out of the world in a mysterious and miraculous way. Here you are, a faithful saint and suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, you are changed and transported into all the happiness you can imagine. You are in the glorious rapture. You have an immortal body.
Now, you learn that after seven years, you have to go back to the earth with the Lord to stop a great, bloody war that covers the earth. Not only that, but you must be again a mortal if you go into the millennium with Christ after He wins the war. Can you imagine the confusion you will experience. “But, Lord, I like it here,” you say – and why not tell the Lord that? But the Lord says, “Well, you have to march right back down to earth so that we can the win war and let the Jewish nation have another crack at accepting the kingdom.” “Well, how long will it be before we can get back into this place of happiness and back into this body that is immortal?” you might ask. “A thousand years,” the Lord replies. What a disappointment! You were headed in the right direction, nearly got what you had worked for all your life on earth, only to have to come back again. Such, my friends is an insult to the Lord and His purpose for man. But it is the consequence of a foolish speculation based on obscure passages by, unstable interpreters of the Bible.
Guardian of Truth XXVII: 19, p. 590
October 6, 1983