Did We Make an Error About the Great Tribulation?

In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call. Here is this week’s question:  Dear Dave and Tom, I enjoy your newsletter and your radio program, which I can hear on our local station, or if I can’t tune it in at that time, I make sure I catch the program on your website when it’s convenient.  You’ve helped me to check things out by searching the scriptures, so I’m wondering where you came up with the idea that there are three witnesses testifying in Jerusalem during the Tribulation.  I thought there were only two.  If that was simply an error, would you elaborate on the extensive evangelizing which takes place during that time period?  Thanks.  

Dave:

Where did this come from?  Did I make such a mistake?

Tom:

I believe in our September newsletter, Dave, but I’m not going to give you the whole credit, the whole staff—we go over this thing.  How that got by us, I couldn’t imagine.  Not that we’re not real busy, but still.

Dave:

Isn’t that amazing?  You read something and you are thinking what you are reading is what you have in your hand and you don’t see it on—I came up with three witnesses on the streets of Jerusalem?  Well, I guess we’ve got the two witnesses since somebody else is watching them or maybe that was the Antichrist as the third.

Tom:

And aren’t we thankful.  We got a number of letters on this, by the way, and not just this one.  That’s good, people are checking when we slip up and we’re just like everybody else, we slip up.

Dave:

It shows someone is reading it.

Tom:

But now we are pleading—what?

Dave:

Well, that was, I don’t know, it was a mistake.  It was a slip of my computer.  I intended to write 2 and I wrote 3.

Tom:

It was a slip of your staff.

Dave:

Yeah, how come you guys all let this go by?  Tom, you read it, didn’t you?

Tom:

Yeah, I did and I said, well, Dave must have another idea, I’ll have to check it out with him.

Dave:

Naw, nobody even questioned it and how many times did I read it.

Tom:

Dave, we have nowhere to go with this except we blew it.

Dave:

Yeah, that’s right.  I’ve done it several times.

Tom:

Now, he has something else he would like to know.  What about these two witnesses?  You know, when I went back over that, let me just throw in, I had read that numerous times but it really hit me and these two individuals go on for three and a half years.  How did I miss that the first couple of times?  They are a thorn, as it were, in the side of the Antichrist and they must be effective.

Dave:

You can’t stop them.  There is no power on earth that can stop them.  Bring up your tanks or anything else.  You can’t arrest these.  Who are they?  Of course people speculate, they say maybe this is Elijah and Enoch because they were taken to heaven without dying as far as we know.  I don’t know who they are.  They say they had to come back and die.  Well then, I guess those who were raptured will have to come back and die, too.  No, when it says it is appointed unto man once to die and after this the judgment.  That means not everybody but in general, that is, the general situation.  I believe that the apostles were the last ones appointed unto death.  They had to die because they were witnesses and they had a special testimony that they gave.  But these two men, I believe they are men, this is rather amazing, and the Bible doesn’t give us the details.  It’s going to happen and I guess they will be on CNN News every evening.

Tom:

If there is a CNN then.

Dave:

Yeah, if there is a CNN then.

Tom:

Which there may well may be.  World wide coverage if everything goes on, especially, look at all of the attention over the years — everything goes on in Israel, there’s a camera there.

Dave:

They are going to preach the gospel.  So, some people wonder how will anybody get saved and the church is gone in the Great Tribulation.

Tom:

Some connect that with the Holy Spirit, some have even said the Holy Spirit is removed.

Dave:

Well, the Holy Spirit indwelling the believers has been removed, but not the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is God, he is omnipresent.  No, Tom, I haven’t given much thought to this because any thought we would give to it would really be speculation.  The Bible doesn’t elaborate, it simply says there will be these two witnesses and they will be witnessing in the streets of Jerusalem and no one can stop them.  How they eat, who brings them food, what attempts are made to silence them, the Antichrist would surely like to silence them.  It must be a thorn in the side of the Antichrist.  Here’s the guy that controls the world and yet here are these two witnesses and they are testifying to the true God.

Tom:

Dave, let me up the numbers a bit.  We also have 144,000 Jews who are, seems the scriptures  indicate, that they are evangelizing.

Dave:

Now it doesn’t say that these 2 (Dave says 3 again) witnesses are testifying in Mecca.  It doesn’t say they are testifying in Washington, or Moscow or any other place.  Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is the key to everything.  This is where the future of the world will be played out and we can see that happening by the way the book, A Cup of Trembling: Jerusalem and Bible Prophecy is coming back into print, should be available very soon.  It gives you an awful lot of information about Islam, about the Muslim world and so forth.

Tom:

And certainly about what’s taking place from a prophetic standpoint in the Middle East.

Dave:

It’s all laid out in the Bible beforehand.  So Tom, this is embarrassing, we really goofed and of course, having written a few books, I think 30 some, I have seen that over and over and over.  You can go over a manuscript several times and you still find mistakes.  It’s amazing how well they do in the newspaper, for example.  I find mistakes in newspapers once in a while, but they don’t have time to go back and re-read it.  I don’t know how they do it.  But it was a proof reading problem; it was a slip of my computer.  There are not three witnesses, there are two.  Anyway, the two to whom I was referring are two, not three, although there may be many others in the streets of Jerusalem who are converted by these men.