Failure to Reject Prophetic Speculation: No 6

Note: This is the sixth and final article on worldview concepts that Christians have failed to overcome. (First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth)

George Will called 1968 “perhaps the worst year in American History” and called the sixties “the most dangerous decade in America’s life as a nation.”[1] This is not surprising because of the continued escalation of the Vietnam War, the draft, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. These events occurred a year after the “Summer of Love,” which began in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and became the epicenter of the counterculture movement, including psychedelic music, a radical change in fashion, and a rapid transformation of sexual mores that affected the youth culture of that era.

The year 1969 is often regarded as a pivotal turning point for America. Abbie Hoffman named it “The Woodstock Nation” after the Woodstock Music & Art Fair that brought together half a million people for a three-day celebration of “peace and love” that happened in New York that year, when more than 500,000 music fans showed up for an outdoor concert. Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock,” later covered by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mentions getting “back to the garden,” a subtle reference to the Garden of Eden. The euphoria was short-lived, however.

The supposed “spiritual counter-cultural awakening” at Woodstock in 1969 dimmed quickly after the fiasco at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival—dubbed “Woodstock West”—remembered for considerable violence, including the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter and three accidental deaths: two by a hit-and-run car accident, and one by an LSD-induced drowning in an irrigation canal. Scores were injured, numerous cars were stolen (and subsequently abandoned) and there was extensive property damage.” Rolling Stone magazine termed the event as “rock and roll’s all-time worst day, December 6th, a day when everything went perfectly wrong.”[2]

Thinking Straight in a Crooked World

The nursery rhyme “There Was a Crooked Man” is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.

Buy Now

The final blow to the “happy nihilism” of the 1960s came on May 4, 1970, when the National Guard opened fire at an antiwar protest at Kent State University and four people were killed and later immortalized in the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young protest song “Ohio.” Two questions remain:

• Where did all the radicals go after the Kent State Shootings?

• Where did all the Christians go after the publication of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (LGPE) in 1970, a book that was the most popular non-fiction book of the 1970s?

The strategy shifted from “burn, baby burn” among groups such as the SDS and the Weather Underground to a long march through the ruling institutions. Instead of burning them down, they would infiltrate them and take them over. Roger Kimball captures the tactic well in his book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America: “The long march through the institutions signified in the words of [Herbert] Marcuse, ‘working against the established institutions while working in them’. By this means—by insinuation and infiltration rather than by confrontation—the counter-cultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed.”[3]

Before Saul Alinsky and his 1971 tactical book Rules for Radicals, and Herbert Marcuse, there was Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci considered Christianity to be the “force binding all the classes—peasants and workers and princes, priests and popes and all the rest besides, into a single, homogeneous culture. It was specifically Christian culture, in which individual men and women understood that the most important things about human life transcend the material conditions in which they lived out their mortal lives.”[4] Gramsci broke with Marx and Lenin’s belief that the masses would arise and overthrow the ruling “superstructure.” Gramsci theorized that no matter how oppressed the working classes might be, their Christian faith would not allow for such an overthrow. Marxists taught “that everything valuable in life was within mankind.”[5]

Prophetic speculators teach a similar worldview. Everything valuable in life will turn to dust with the arrival of the antichrist. Our only escape is to be raptured. The result is similar. A world left to the worst elements of society.

While these cultural shifts were occurring, what were Christians doing? Churning out end-of-the-world books. We have lost ground. LGPE was published 56 years ago! As a result, a generation and more has been lost to prophetic speculation that has gone to seed. One would have thought that after the “rapture” did not take place before 1988, Christians would have awakened from their prophetic stupor and applied Fahrenheit 451 to their pop-prophecy books. Instead, they doubled down with an explosion of even more books, articles, TV shows, and conferences.

Last Days Madness

In this authoritative book, Gary DeMar clears the haze of “end-times” fever, shedding light on the most difficult and studied prophetic passages in the Bible, including Daniel 7:13-14; 9:24-27; Matt. 16:27-28; 24-25; Thess. 2; 2 Peter 3:3-13, and clearly explaining a host of other controversial topics.

Buy Now

In 1999, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published Left Behind, which was released by Tyndale House Publishers from 1995 to 2007. What Lindsey didn’t accomplish with LGPE, Left Behind later achieved with 12 novels, expanded to 16, comic books, a PC strategy game titled Left Behind: Eternal Forces (2006), and five films. The bright spot in all of this is Kirk Cameron, who has recently stated that he has “left behind Left Behind.”

Here’s the video series that started it all for Kirk. It includes a 120-page study guide with outlines of each lecture, study questions, supplemental readings, and 15 additional articles on eschatology!

When 1988 came and went, the year 2000 became the new prophetic timeline claim: 6000 + 1000 = 7000. This meant that the thousand-year millennium was on the horizon based on the claim that God created the Earth around 6000 BC. A day was said to be a thousand years, and a thousand years a day (Ps. 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8). Many believe that since God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day (Gen. 2:1-3), God has a 6,000-year plan for mankind (4000 years BC, and 2000 years AD), followed by a 1,000-year reign by Jesus on earth (Rev. 20:4). It was said that at the end of 6,000 years of history, Jesus would return and reign for 1,000 years. Here’s just one example of this theory: “Considering almost 2,000 years have passed since Christ’s crucifixion (making a total of nearly 6,000 years—or six millennial days—from Adam), and at this precise juncture in human history mankind stands poised with the ability to blow up and blast out of existence all life on planet Earth, the 7,000-year plan is more believable than ever!” There you have it. Our future is set “to blow up and blast out of existence all life on planet Earth.” And if not that, it will be the “rapture or the church” before, during, in the middle of, just before God pours out His wrath, or after seven years. There is no escape from the prophetic quagmire.

There are more prophecy-related books today than ever before, written by people who have not paid much attention to the prophetic hype and failures of the past. The extent of ignorance about Bible prophecy is staggering. Anyone with a smartphone can create a video. The internet has enabled any and every end-time crackpot to become an expert on Bible prophecy. They know not what they are claiming.

Left Behind: Separating Fact from Fiction

What difference does it make what we believe about the end times anyway? DeMar addresses that question as well, showing how our point-of-view regarding end-times prophecies affects the way we live each day. In addition, DeMar answers skeptics who use failed end-times predictions to disprove the Bible. Giving us a different perspective on the end times, this approach to the Bible could revolutionize the life of the church.

Buy Now

Trickle-down Bible prophecy has infected the church. It is a slow cancer that has metastasized. Many Christians don’t realize they been infected. They can’t see the world in any way except through the matrix of Jesus must be coming soon because (1) people keep saying it, (2) they’ve never heard a viable biblical alternative, (3) the cure for Last Days Madness requires strong medicine, (4) some of the side effects can mean losing friends and family members, including being booting out of your church for questioning the popular but failed and unbiblical prophetic paradigm, (5) a shift in eschatology requires a shift in worldview thinking that requires a lot of work. It’s easier to believe in the “rapture” than to be required to apply a biblical worldview to all of life. But there is no other option.

[1] George F. Will, “1968: Memories That Dim and Differ,” Washington Post (January 14, 1988), A27.

[2] John Burks, “Rock & Roll’s Worst Day: The aftermath of Altamont,” Rolling Stone (February 7, 1970).

[3] Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 15.

[4] Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood: The Struggle for World Dominion Between Pope John II, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Capitalist West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 245.

[5] Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 245.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources