Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heshmeyer, and no, the title of this video is not an exaggeration, it's not clickbait.

Today, we're actually going to explore how a dangerous misreading of scripture is leading some influential Christians to try to goad Israel and the United States into starting World War III. Now, the theology at hand is called dispensationalism, and many evangelicals today think that this is just Bible Christianity or just what Christians have always believed.

But the truth is that this form of Christianity is actually rather new.

Now, it's a nuanced theology but to sketch it out very roughly here, it's built upon the idea that God has two covenant peoples.

He's got Israel and he's got the Church, and they have distinct identities.

Israel is promised a physical Promised Land and the Church is gonna be taken up into heaven in an event that the dispensationalists call the Rapture.

Now, many American Christians, as I say, think that this is just what Christians have always believed or what Christians just believe today.

A large majority of the Christian world has embraced the worldview of the Rapture hook, line, and sinker.

People like John Hagee, Jack Hibbs, Greg Laurie, David Jeremiah, and Jimmy Evans are all teaching the Rapture as if it's 100% fact.

But this really isn't true.

I mean, in terms of global Christianity, dispensationalism is an extreme fringe and it's a new one too.

Belief in the Rapture and in dispensationalism more broadly really only traces back to John Nelson Darby in the 1800s and to the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in the early 1900s.

Now, I know some dispensationalists will try to find, like, a figure here or there that's earlier but key to this worldview is the idea that Christians have to support the nation of Israel, and on the surface, that looks harmless.

For instance, the New York Times best-selling dispensationalist Mike Evans argues in Why Christians Should Support Israel that we are commanded to support the nation state of Israel in Genesis 12.

Now, I just had a video recently looking at an exchange between Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson on Israel and in that I showed that when the New Testament talks about this, it says that God's promises in Genesis 12 apply to men of faith regardless of whether they're ethnically Jewish.

But today, I wanna focus on a different angle, a more immediately worrying one.

Are dispensationalists really being friends to Israel by goading them into war?

But before I do even that, I wanna thank our true friends over at shamelessjoe.com for your continued support for this channel.

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All right, so I mentioned Mike Evans and his book, Why Christians Should Support Israel.

Well, critically, one of the reasons that he gives for why we should support Israel is that when we support Israel, we are preparing for our Lord's coming.

In other words, in the dispensationalist scheme, Israel is kind of like the bait needed to trigger the apocalypse.

But what does that look like concretely?

In another of his books, Jerusalem Betrayed, Evans actually argues against what was then the ongoing peace process in Israel and he argues against the idea of a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians might someday peacefully co-exist.

And in contrast, he describes his own vision of the future this way, It's almost unimaginable but the fighting in and around Jerusalem and along the Jordan Valley will flow into the 200-mile-long rift that runs from the Sea of Galilee in the north all the way down to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Now, in addition to the indescribable slaughter in the Middle East, he says that there's gonna be a worldwide shockwave that will completely destroy all the great cities in the world.

Cities like Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York.

Now look, make no mistake, Evans is not trying to avert this bloodshed.

He is actively trying to cause it.

In his view, it is only once we've nearly destroyed all life on Earth that Jesus is going to return as the Messiah and usher in peace.

And so he tells us that he is sharing this so that we can participate in the prophecy, to help try to trigger Armageddon.

After all, he says prophecy is given not only so that we can understand our times but so we can be a part of God's plan.

To which I would say Jerusalem Betrayed indeed.

And dispensationalists like Mike Evans continue to seek positions of political influence from which they can encourage Israel to do things like annex the Golan Heights.

Which I happen to be one of the 25 evangelical advisors to the president.

Now, I've got 73 million evangelical Facebook followers.

By the way, this is the first time in history you had an evangelical secretary of state, an evangelical vice president.

So if there's anybody to blame for all this, blame us 'cause we're pushing this hard.

This is Bible land and it's sovereignty.

Now, Evans is not an outlier.

You can find plenty of dispensationalist speakers who dream of bringing about Christ's return through the outpouring of a lot of Israeli and Palestinian blood.

Now, one of the underlying issues here involves how we read the Bible, and particularly how we read Bible prophecies.

Dispensationalists will often defend their theological conclusions by explaining that they're just trying to take things literally, that they're rejecting spiritual or allegorical meanings to God's promises.

The dispensationalist does not spiritualize or allegorize away the meaning of scripture.

What he does is take the literal, historical, cultural background of the scripture and takes all these things- in consideration when it comes to interpreting the word of God.

I believe we should interpret the Bible literally, not figuratively, which is why I hold to the pre-millennial view of the end times.

And yes, I believe there will be a literal antichrist revealed to the world very soon.

Now, that is how dispensationalists understand what they're doing when they approach scripture.

But I do think it is fair to ask how much that's what they're actually doing.

How much do they actually take biblical prophecies literally?

The Bible tells us in Ezekiel 38 that eventually Libya, Sudan, Turkey, and Russia are going to join Iran in an attack against Israel on their northern hills, known as the Golan Heights today.

Here's the thing.

Ezekiel 38 doesn't literally say anything about Russia invading Israel.

You won't find Russia or Turkey explicitly mentioned anywhere in the Bible.

Rather, it describes how Israel will be invaded from the north by Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.

Now, even though this literally refers to a prince over two cities, dispensationalists read this instead as a prophecy about Israel being invaded by two countries like Russia and Turkey, basically on the grounds that these countries both happen to lie north of Israel.

Now, bear in mind, the nations of Syria and Lebanon actually border Israel to the north.

Russia and Turkey don't.

But no matter.

Whether you agree with this interpretation of Ezekiel 38 or not, it's simply not looking at the literal, historical, cultural background of scripture to understand what the words would have meant in the context in which they were written.

It is instead attempting to decipher a deeper meaning on a non-literal level that almost invariably happens to involve 21st century politics.

Well, how trustworthy is dispensationalism in interpreting bible prophecies this way?

Well, obviously I cannot prove to you yet that dispensationalist prophecies made today about tomorrow are false predictions.

But dispensationalism has been around long enough, we have a lot of yesterdays that didn't come true today.

There's a long accumulation of false promises and a long track record of false predictions.

Let's start with Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth.

Now, here is Hal Lindsey in 1980 attributing the massive success of his book to the fact that it could only come from God.

How many copies has Late Great Planet Earth sold?

It's over 18 million now, and it's in 31 languages.

Hmm.

That- that is, uh, by the way, that is something that is a sign of the times.

Only God could do something like that.

It's not that it's such a great book or so well-written, but it's that the information in it, I believe, is so important that God has blessed it.

The New York Times designated that the bestseller of the decade.

Hmm.

Which, uh, you know, when you take a book on Bible prophecy and- and God does something like that, that's a sign of the times.

Now, in his book, which came out in 1970, Lindsey acknowledges that many Bible students in recent years tried to fit the events of World War I and World War II to the prophetic signs which would herald the imminent return of Christ.

Their failure discredited prophecy.

So, as I say, a long track record of failure here.

But Lindsey argued that the problem is that all of those other authors just didn't have the faintest idea how to understand Bible prophecy correctly.

Lindsey was convinced that he did.

And judging by the success of his book, many evangelicals agreed.

And for Lindsey, one of the critical Biblical prophecies was Jesus's lesson of the fig tree in Matthew 24.

After predicting the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, Jesus's disciples ask him, Tell us, when will this be?

and What will be the sign of your coming and the close of the age?

Well, the first red flag here is that the apostles appear to be asking something of a muddled question.

They're asking about both the destruction of the temple, which we know was going to happen about 40 years, but also about the close of the age, and seemingly about Jesus's return.

And so when we listen to Jesus's response, we should heed St. Augustine's warning that sometimes the things that sound like they're gonna be about the last judgment and the end of the world are actually Jesus answering questions about the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem in the year 70, or even about Christ coming in glory through the church.

And that, by the way, is what it actually looks like to be sensitive to the literal, historical, cultural background of scripture.

You listen to what the words meant to the speaker and to the listeners at that time, which may not be what they mean to you today just reading them by yourself.

And that's true even when we listen to Jesus talking about the sun and moon being darkened.

Because as N.T. Wright has pointed out, you can find plenty of passages in the Old Testament that use that same language to describe God's judgment on individual nations.

Now, that matters because as Jesus is answering their questions, midway through this discourse, he then says to them, Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.

Now, if Jesus means the destruction of the temple, that prophecy came true.

If he means his glory in the church, it came true.

But if he means that the world is literally going to end within a generation, well, that didn't come true.

Well, dispensationalists actually opt for a different approach.

They say that when Jesus says, this generation, he doesn't literally mean the generation that he's speaking to.

He instead means some other generation, which happens to usually be one's own generation.

And so when he talks about the temple being desecrated and destroyed, he wasn't literally talking about the first century when there was a temple that was in fact desecrated and destroyed by the Romans.

Instead, they argue that Jesus is telling us that there's going to be a new temple that's gonna be built at the same spot on the Temple Mount, and then that temple is gonna be desecrated, and that temple's gonna be destroyed.

Now, this is part of a pattern of dispensationalist interpretation.

Rather than trying to read Jesus's words as applying to his time and place and audience, dispensationalists turn his words into a commentary about our time and place, in which we get to be the audience.

As the subtitle of Hal Lindsey's book proclaims, it's a penetrating look at incredible prophecies involving this generation.

You can see why this would be incredibly popular.

People are kind of narcissistic, and we care about what's happening to us right now.Okay, so how does Hal Lindsey handle Jesus' promise that this generation wouldn't pass away until his words had been fulfilled?

Well, quite simply, he applies it to his own generation in the 1970s and suggests that since a generation in the Bible is about 40 years, this means that the world is going to end within 40 years or so of 1948.

And sure enough, as 1988 approached, he's joined by others saying the same thing.

A NASA engineer named Edgar Whisenant published his own pamphlet, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, in which he claimed to have narrowed down the exact time of the r- rapture to between September 11th to 13th of 1988.

In fact, he thought he'd figured out all of the major upcoming world events, confidently declaring that we now know all the events of the 70th week of Daniel, three world wars, three raptures, three judgments, and all the events of the millennium and their dates, now we'll just sit down in front of the evening news and watch the events unfold.

But unfold the events did not.

Lindsey and Whisenant were completely and utterly wrong.

None of their predictions came true, and yet they just stuck at it.

Whisenant updated his predictions to say that the world would actually end in 1989, and then 1993, and then 1994.

But by the next year, this embarrassing string of false predictions gave way to a new craze among dispensationalists as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins released the first book of the wildly popular Left Behind series.

Now, this was an adventure series in which the protagonist has to navigate a world in which all the Christians have been raptured and the Antichrist is on the rise.

Now, they sold 42 million copies of their books, and Jerry Falwell described it as probably greater than that of any book in modern times outside the Bible in terms of its impact on Christianity.

In the series, for instance, the Archbishop of Cincinnati becomes

The amalgamator of nearly every religion on the globe save Judaism and Christianity.

So this is clearly the expression of a very particular form of evangelical Christianity.

And now while these books are obviously works of fiction, they're rooted in the actual theological beliefs of LaHaye and Jenkins, who believed that we have more reason than any generation before us to believe Christ may return in our generation.

And what was their basis?

The same discourse in Matthew 24, of course.

Now they insisted it doesn't seem possible Jesus had the disciples' generation in mind when he said that he was talking about this generation to them, saying this generation wouldn't pass away.

And so they instead offer three other possibilities what he could mean.

They acknowledge many fine Bible teachers thought it might mean the generation that lived during World War I. Then they suggested maybe it instead meant the generation that saw Israel become a nation in 1948.

And then they opened the door that maybe it was instead the generation that lived through the Six-Day War of 1967.

Now, they actually rebuked people like Whisenant for his 88 Reasons book, and they said that such speculations bring only harm and disillusionment to the body of Christ.

For their own part, they speculated that Christ would return sometime between the turn of the century and the first quarter of the 21st century.

And like all those who came before them, LaHaye and Jenkins were completely wrong.

And just like Hal Lindsey and Edgar Whisenant, they continued to have successful and lucrative careers in the world of evangelicalism by preaching about Bible prophecies and continuing to make unfounded and false predictions.

But don't worry, Mike Evans now says that Jesus is going to return soon, claiming that actually a generation is about 70 to 80 years.

So perhaps it's not too late for me to write my new book, 28 Reasons the Rapture will be in 2028.

Look, it's tempting to refer to these dispensationalists as false prophets as their predictions are repeatedly proven false, but I wanna be fair to them.

They're not claiming that they've got some new revelation from God.

They're just claiming that they understand what God has already revealed in scripture by using their dispensationalist system to interpret the Bible.

So they're not technically false prophets, but they are untrustworthy theologians and unreliable Bible teachers.

And the false predictions they're making about the end of the world are embarrassing, but they're only a symptom of a much deeper problem, namely dispensationalists' thorough inability to understand the Bible.

Insisting that you have to read Israel literally while reading Gog and Magog and the rest allegorically is an obviously bad hermeneutic that leads evangelicals to make Christianity look ridiculous by declaring that Jesus is going to return in 1988 and then '89 and then 2000 and 2025.

At the heart of this is a pretty basic misunderstanding involving God's promises to Israel.

Now to be clear, Christians agree that God blesses something called Israel because of his promises to Abraham, but the whole question is, what Israel is he talking about?

To whom do these blessings extend?

And the New Testament answers this directly.

St. Paul, for instance, shows how God's promises don't go according to the flesh, they go according to faith, so ethnicity doesn't matter for your salvation or your standing before God.

There is simply no reason for Christians to say humiliating things like

I as a Gentile, no, I'm not Jewish, wish I was, but I'm not, I as a Gentile have been grafted into the promises of God.

Now Greg Laurie there is referencing the imagery St. Paul uses in Romans 11 where it talks about how Gentiles will be grafted into the tree of salvation, but some Gentile Christians continue to act as if they're only second-class Christians, or worse, that they're fake Jews, and that the promises made by God to Abraham really only apply to ethnic Israelis.

And we see this not just from YouTubers or popular dispensationalist preachers.

We even see it from senators like Ted Cruz who uses a dispensationalist misinterpretation of Genesis 12 to encourage the US to support Israel to go to war with Iran.

I'm talking about the political entity of modern Israel.

Yes, and that is, that is-

You believe that's what God was talking about in Genesis.

Yes, I do.

So what is the real answer to the argument that scripture says we are to bless Israel?

How were those promises understood in the New Testament?

You're gonna have to click here to find out.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.