House of Cards

The history of failed predictions and projections by the End-Time Prophecy Industry has left many of its proponents and adherents holding empty bags. Not only has it predicted the return of Jesus within a “biblical generation” of Israel’s founding in 1948, but also a long list of related events that supposedly must precede it, none of which have yet to occur. It is well past time to discover what the Bible says and restore the Apostolic faith.

As a young follower of Jesus, I imbibed much of the popular approach to Bible prophecy, but in the decades since, it has become painfully clear that this interpretive school has missed the mark, and by a very wide margin. Sooner or later, it will collapse like a house of cards, blown down by the winds of History and Scripture.

[Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash]

We are seventy-plus years beyond the claimed start date of the Last Days and the “last generation,” yet there has been no tribulation, no Antichrist, no False Prophet, no Man of Lawlessness, no ten-nation European confederacy, no revived Roman Empire, no Rapture, no rebuilt Third Temple in Jerusalem, no new world religion, etc., etc. World events have not gone according to the populist playbook.

The European Common Market did not evolve into a ten-nation superpower that now rules the world from Rome. Instead, it became the European Union with well over two dozen member states, and its seat of government is Brussels, not Rome. Militarily, it is a paper tiger, and it is not about to morph into a global government, if anything, just the opposite.

The former Soviet Union would become “Gog and Magog” and attack Israel from the north. Instead, it collapsed under its own weight over thirty years ago, a pivotal event that none of the prophecy “experts” saw coming. A failure of that magnitude should have been our first clue.

At best, the prophecy “experts” are guessing, throwing darts at a board, perhaps hoping that one day they might finally get one right. In the meantime, they employ the shotgun technique, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Each time an expectation fails to materialize, the “experts” sharpen their pencils, redefine their terms, and recalibrate their chronologies. Like Silly Putty, a “biblical generation” has been stretched from 40 to 60 to 70, and now, to 120 years.

[Photo by Red Zeppelin on Unsplash]

CHRIST’S WARNING

Maybe we should reconsider the repeated warning of Jesus: “No man knows the day or the hour…the Son of Man is coming in an hour when you least expect him…Watch for you know not the day or the hour…take heed and pray, for you know not when the SEASON is (‘kairos’)… It is not for you to know times and seasons.”

It is high time to take HIS words at face value, and very seriously, and cease creating loopholes and sledgehammering them into his warnings and predictions.

None of this means that Bible prophecy has failed. It has not, but the popular approach has, and miserably so, beginning with its failure to understand that history’s most critical event occurred already in the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.

The “Last Days” began following his resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost, not the founding of modern Israel two thousand years after the fact - (Acts 2:17-22 – “I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh in the Last Days…”).

Jesus is the interpretive key that unlocks prophecy, not Israel or the Temple. God has one Messiah for all men regardless of their ethnicity or nationality, and one plan of salvation, one covenant, and one covenant community. The Nazarene alone is the real Temple in which God dwells, not another stone building “made-with-hands” in old Jerusalem.

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