For a brief season, at the end of the present age, in conjunction with the revolt against authority, God will remove the voice of the Spirit of God, the Presence of the Holy Spirit, from the cities of the world. Can you imagine anything more terrible than that?

Nothing worse can happen to a human being than to have God remove from him the convicting Presence of the Holy Spirit. This most horrible of fates will come upon the centers of civilization in the near future. This does not mean that the Holy Spirit will return to Heaven but that He will not be present in the cities of Antichrist.

Some have speculated that Christ will lift His Church out of the world and that by this means the Holy Spirit will be removed from the path of the man of lawlessness—the man who will attempt to exalt himself above the Lord God of Heaven. The idea is that the Holy Spirit will return to Heaven with the Church.

But the concept of the removal from the earth to Heaven of the Holy Spirit with the Church creates more problems of Scripture interpretation than it solves.

For one thing, the Old Testament Prophets do not speak of the elect being removed from the earth in order to facilitate the revelation of Antichrist; and the events of the last days are depicted in the Prophets of Israel.

Another of the problems of interpretation caused by the "removal of the Church" hypothesis is the consequences that this hypothesis has in terms of the statements made in the second chapter of Second Thessalonians.

In verse three of the second chapter, Paul states that the Day of Christ will not come, "except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition."

But if it is the removal of the Church that makes possible the falling away and the revelation of the man of sin, and (as Paul states) the Day of Christ comes after the falling away and the revelation of the man of sin, then the removal of the Church would have to come before the Day of Christ. If this is so, if the removal of the Church comes before the Day of Christ, then the removal of the Church cannot be the Day of Christ. According to the Apostle Paul, the Day of Christ will not come until after the worldwide apostasy and the revealing of the man of sin.

If the coming of the Lord and our gathering together to Him are not the Day of Christ, the Day of the Lord, then a defensible, coherent exposition of Paul's discussion in First and Second Thessalonians of the parousia, the coming of the Lord, is totally impossible.

In our day the doctrine of the Day of the Lord and the resurrection of the dead, that most important and basic doctrine of the Kingdom of God, has become a plaything for any teacher who chooses to make whatever he will of the teachings of the Apostle Paul.

We do not participate with those who rend the Scriptures in this fashion. Rather we look for an explanation that can be found in the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament, and that does not create the necessity for cutting and patching the other passages of the Gospels and of the Epistles that set forth the events of the closing days of the present age.

To be continued.