One of the most encouraging verses in the Bible for me is 1 Kings 19:4. “But [Elijah] went a day’s journey into the wilderness, sat down under a juniper tree: and requested  that he might die, saying, ‘I’ve had enough already, O LORD, take away my life. Things aren’t going any better for me than they did for my fathers.’”  Some might wonder why I find so much encouragement in this. It’s very simple. Elijah was one of the most used men of God in the history of the world, yet he was wired no differently than I am. He had the same emotional weaknesses that I have. As James states it, “Elijah was a man with the same passions that we have” (James 5:17-18). The LWB version says, “Elijah was an emotional basket-case just

  In Philippians 2:12 we read the startling statement, “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.“ This verse has led various professing Christians to take up rather extreme positions. Some insist that Christians must work for their salvation. They say that if we do not work hard enough, we will lose our salvation, or fail to obtain it in the first place. This is a tragic error that overthrows salvation by grace through faith alone (Eph. 2:8-9). Others treat this passage like it was a leper, nervous about being defiled by its “borderline heresy” and skeptical of the orthodoxy of any man who dares to quote it. Thankfully, most Christians do not

  INTRODUCTION One of the hotly disputed topics in the evangelical world today is the rapture. Will the church be removed from earth prior to the tribulation? Or will she go through the tribulation and suffer under the God-hating efforts of the antichrist? Intimately associated with this question is the question of the eschatological views of the early church fathers. Did any of them teach a pretribulation rapture? The answer to  this question is a resounding, Yes! Many of them did. The focus of our attention in this article is the Didache, also known as The Teaching of the Twelve. Though some scholars date this document to the early second century, most commonly it is dated to the first century, generally AD 70 to AD 100. This puts it in competition for the earliest Christian

THE RAPTURE DEBATE AND THE EARLY FATHERS One of the most heated debates in the church today is whether the rapture of the church occurs before or after the tribulation. Will the church be on earth during the tribulation? Will she suffer under the antichrist? This controversy involves several intriguing historical questions. For instance, is the pretribulation rapture a recent innovation? Does it have a demonstrable history prior to 1830? Did any of the early church fathers teach a pretribulation rapture? My investigations have convinced me beyond all shadow of doubt that some of the early church fathers did indeed teach a pretribulation rapture. There are numerous clear pretribulation rapture references in the early church fathers, and this body of evidence is growing. Recent research in the untranslated Greek writings of the early church fathers