Arnold Fruchtenbaum states:
Genesis 7:10 states that the waters of the flood began seven days after Noah entered the ark. . . . The flood did not come the same day that Noah entered the ark . . . Just as there was a period of time between Noah entering the ark and the start of the rain, so there can also be a period of time between the rapture and the start of the seven years.”*
That is not what Genesis 7:10 states. Further, perhaps Fruchtenbaum should not have omitted the very next verses!
“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month—on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And the rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. On that very day Noah entered the ark, accompanied by his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, along with his wife and his sons’ three wives.” (Gen 7:11–13)
Imagine that, Jesus was right after all!
The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. Then people will say to you, ‘Look, there he is!’ or ‘Look, here he is!’ Do not go out or chase after them. For just like the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage—right up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all. (Luke 17:22–27, cf. Gen 7:1–18)
Jesus, of course, knows the flood account better than pretrib teachers: The flood happened “on that very day Noah entered the ark” (Gen 7:13).
The deluge began the very day Noah and his family entered the ark and shut the door (Gen 7:1–18). Noah was told that he had seven days to corral the animals because the Lord warned, “in seven days I will cause it to rain” (Gen 7:4). At the end of the seven days “all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Gen 7:11).
It was the same day they entered, the flood began, not two days or five days or seven days later—the very same day.
Drawing from Jesus’s Noahic analogy we can conclude there will not be any “gap” of days, weeks, months, or years between the deliverance of the righteous and the unleashing of God’s wrath at Jesus’s return. It will be back-to-back events beginning on the same day—one of the main purposes for delivering God’s people is to protect them from his judgment.
To make sure Jesus is not misunderstood about this same-day truth, he marshals the episode of Lot and Sodom (see Luke 17:28–35).
*Fruchtenbaum, Arnold G. “Is There a Pre-Wrath Rapture?” In When the Trumpet Sounds, edited by Thomas Ice and Timothy Demy, 392.
For more on refuting the pretrib gap theory see:
Is There a ‘Gap’ between the Rapture and the Day of the Lord?
