With rockets soaring over the land of the apocalyptic prophets, many people have turned to end-times experts for insights. It seems that anytime a war breaks out or an earthquake is recorded on the Richter scale or famine sweeps through a third-world country, books predicting that the end is near are hurriedly readied for publication. Such books have little regard for the historical context of Bible prophecy and the failed predictions of past writers who were equally certain.
As we've seen, there is nothing new in any of this. Floods in the Midwest in the summer of 1993 led one Baptist minister to conclude:
Such comments are not unusual. Books long ago discarded by anxious Christians contain similar assessments of world conditions and their supposed relationship to end-time events.
Based on current events in the late 1970's and early '80s, Hal Lindsey wrote,
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and colition forces led by the United States sent troops to force him out, John F. Walvoord (died in 2002) revised his Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East, first published in 1974, to address how the Bible applies to
Based on current events coupled with Bible passages which he believed threw light on the state of affairs just prior to a so-called Rapture, it was Jerry Falwell (died in 2007) who boasted on a broadcast on December 27, 1992:
Like Falwell, Walvoord expected the Rapture to occur in his lifetime.
"Your Timing is Off"
Why is there so much speculation and error about when the end might be, whether the "end" has reference to the rapture, the return of Christ to set up His millennial kingdom, or the return of Christ to inaugurate the "new heavens and new earth" (2Peter 3:13; Rev. 21:1)? While there are a number of reasons why prophetic speculation continues unabated one reason stands above them all - fulfilled prophecy is being interpreted as if it were unfulfilled prophecy. This error was also made by the first-century Jews. When Jesus "came to His own...those who were His own did not receive Him (John 1:11). These unbelieving Jews did not believe Jesus was the fulfillment of centuries of prophetic pronouncements that are found in "the Law of Moses anf the Prophets and the Psalms"(Luke 24:44).
Let's look at a similar contemporary example. Some Jews today are still awaiting the Messiah. Like their first-century counterparts, they do not believe that the messianic prophecies were fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus in the first century. The messianic prophecies have been taken from their first-century fulfillment context and have been projected into the distant future as unfulfilled prophecy. In effect, present-day Jews are still awaiting the first coming of Messiah. In a similar way, many christians take prophecies that have been fulfilled --- either in the Old Testament events or in events following the ascension of Jesus --- and view them as still unfulfilled. They then manipulate these fulfilled prophecies and apply them to contemporary events. Their speculations are wrong because they are applying fulfilled prophecies to current events.
There are several articles on this website that present the time texts, ignored by dispensationalists, which speak of a near coming of Jesus in judgement upon an apostate Judaism that rejected its Messiah in the first century.
