This is a session from the 2009 2nd Annual Prewrath Conference in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Roger Best, the “Prewrath Ambassador,” gives a talk on Jerusalem and Israel today as it relates to prophecy.
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It has been my observation over the years as well as current days, that false prognosticators have a favorite line they use to hedge their predictions: “I am not date setting, I am just providing the data.” Hal Lindsey has used this line when his prediction of the Second Coming of Christ in 1988 did not come to fruition. Many others have used this line. And there are some today who are doing that for a prediction of the Second Coming in 3-5 years.
It is sober that some actually have the chutzpah to think they can appeal before a holy God one day on this prophetic loophole.
Recently, I have been directed to some of Lindsey’s prophetic writings. All I want to say is that the greatest gift that the Church can have today as we move closer to the Lord’s Coming is: discernment. I am amazed that Hal Lindsey has an audience today and credibility still left after his failed prediction of Christ’s Second Coming that was suppose to occur in 1988. In The Late Great Planet Earth he wrote:
When the Jewish people, after nearly 2,000 years of exile, under relentless persecution, became a nation again on 14 May 1948 the “fig tree” put forth its first leaves.
Jesus said that this would indicate that He was “at the door,” ready to return. Then He said, “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34 NASB).
What generation? Obviously, in context, the generation that would see the sign–chief among them the rebirth of Israel. A generation in the Bible is something like forty years. If this is a correct deduction then within forty years or so of 1948, all these things could take place. Many scholars who have studied Bible prophecy all their lives believe that this is so. pp. 53-54
The man still plays fast and loose with Scripture and bamboozles God’s people with his sensational teaching. He has still not repented of misleading believers in 1988. Mark these men, and avoid them.
“Last week I remembered the words which Barack Hussein Obama made while still on the campaign trail. He said that one of the most melodious and beautiful sounds in the world is the Islamic call to prayer, which by the way rings forth from the minarets here six times a day. Last Tuesday as the Mullah was shouting out his statement that ‘there is no God but Allah’, for the 9:00 pm call to prayer, a Sunni Muslim man was on his knees in my home confessing to God his sin of rejecting Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Yes [he] received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. That is a beautiful and melodious sound as is the song of the angels rejoicing over this sinner that came to repentance.”
Please keep this missionary to the Muslims in your prayers.
I have been in the process of writing a book on Prewrath for some time. The past week I have been researching and studying Amos’ oracle of the Day of the Lord. It is eerie to see some parallels between the northern kingdom of Israel that he preached against and American Religion. They had a popular eschatology that presumed upon God’s holiness thinking they could placate God’s holy standards by their religious ritualism — and thus assumed that they were immune to any future judgment. The future for them was like looking through rose-colored stained glass windows. American religion has its own delusional external religious ritualism, and it is self-made.
I was directed this morning to a piece that encapsulated American Religion and thought to myself that Amos’ categorical message of righteousness still rings true today. Here is an excerpt of that article:
In the Brownian worldview [Dan Brown], all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.
The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.
These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.
But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.
For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both. (Read it all here.)