I was introduced to Bible stories before I could even read. Once I learned to read, I began reading those same stories on my own, from a Children’s Bible, with my mother, before I ever started formal reading lessons. At a young age, I was given my own Bible and started reading it and trying to understand it. I didn’t attend church sermons until later, by which time I had already developed a modest understanding of the Bible. This was largely due to my parents—my mother was a Sunday school teacher, and my father was a minister—so my upbringing was unusual. As a result, I quickly recognized when certain doctrines weren’t biblical after hearing them. Some teachings, however, did mislead me, like the pre-tribulation rapture. Although I was skeptical of it as a teenager, I didn’t realize it was unbiblical until more recently. Understanding the various prophecies involved comprehensively is daunting. Nobody in church was interested in examining it. I did not become aware of the miraculous personally until my teens, a while after my baptism. My grandparents had been Pentecostal missionaries and told me stories of miracles when I was young, but my understanding before my teens of the power of God in my own experience was not from miracles as such but from frequent answers to prayer. I heard stories of such prayer answers in stories of George Muller too, who was famous for his faith and God’s provision in the orphanages Muller ran in my home town and nearby. God worked a miracle in my teens after my commitment to following the teachings of Jesus. Even now it is great to learn from such things, how deeply the miraculous from God can teach lessons. Later I learned to use faith miraculously from hearing Jesus’ teachings about faith. Later still I found the miraculous in a gift of interpretation given me in an Assemblies of God church. I realised the Cessationism of some people in my previous churches had been incorrect. Most people don’t have this kind of early and deep exposure to the miraculous and the Bible; for many, Bible knowledge isn’t a major focus in their education, and that’s fine since they don’t expect to teach or make important decisions based on it. They hardly even hear of miracles in the real miraculous sense. The issue arises when individuals with limited Bible knowledge try to teach or take on roles that require a deeper understanding. That's when problems emerge. Pretribulation rapture doctrine seems to be a result of inadequate knowledge among teachers.
