Question:
65.3—Are there any people that can be saved during the tribulation and if so, where do they go when they die, to heaven or the new earth?
Answer:
65.3—No one will be saved during the tribulation who heard how to be saved and did not receive Christ as their Saviour before the rapture. We are told that “God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (see 2 Thessalonians 2:7, 11, 12).
Those who have never heard the gospel before the rapture can be saved during the tribulation period in the same way anyone is saved through all ages, through “the blood of the Lamb.” Some who are saved during the seven year tribulation period will not die and others will give their lives for Christ.
There will be 144,000 of the children of Israel and a great multitude of all nations who will be sealed from being hurt during the tribulation and will come “out of the great tribulation” and will serve God “day and night,” showing that they will be here on earth during the thousand year reign of Christ and on the New Earth through eternity (see Revelation 7 and 21:1).
There will also be those saved during the tribulation period who will be “slain for the Word of God, and for the testimony which they held” during the first three and a half years of the tribulation, and they will not be raised “until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled” (Revelation 6:9-11). During the second half of the tribulation period, the head of the revived Roman Empire, “the beast out of the sea,” will “make war with the saints, and to overcome them” (Revelation 13:7). Both of these groups of martyrs are mentioned in Revelation 20:4: “I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the Word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.”