Prophecy Matters Blog

As one who watched the salad days of the Dispensational movement, the “Pre-Tribbers” of the years immediately following Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth release, and then having spent a number of years in mainline churches…I feel that I’ve seen quite a few perspectives on eschatology.

In those years just following the Six Day War, and the Yom Kippur War, Bible prophecy enthusiasts were so overwhelmed with anticipation, they just knew Jesus was coming back in the next five minutes. I well remember reading Lindsey’s book, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, as a high school senior, and wondering if I’d get the light turned out next to my bed before the Lord returned.

All that to say, the country’s best-known Bible prophecy teachers have spread the word well, but also incorrectly at times. A side-note: we should understand that Hal Lindsey wasn’t responsible for some of the conclusions certain readers jumped to.

As a person who lives somewhat in the Bible prophecy community, I am both frustrated by some of the teachers, yet thankful that they are much, much closer to the truth than their vicious critics, among them the Emergent crowd.

Bible prophecy teachers have gotten some things wrong, but their “wrong” is tiny compared to the planet-sized, speeding meteor of their critics.

What many people fail to grasp is that when a Bible prophecy teacher is wrong, it doesn’t mean the Bible is wrong. Prophecy critics love to pounce on the more sensational claims of some teachers and then present the futurist approach to prophecy as hopelessly flawed.

Which brings us to our present situation in the world: as prophecies from the Bible become more pronounced, fewer people are paying attention. This paradox is quite astonishing to watch unfold.

One of the major reasons fewer people “get it” (such as the rebirth of Israel) is because Christian leaders who are considered authoritative pontificate on the subject. In reality, they are presenting their bias and because Americans have somehow become conditioned to believe what spokesmen tell them, many people assume an “A-list” Christian leader is right.

Take John Piper, for instance. Virtually a celebrity among evangelicals, Piper dispenses his wisdom on any number of subjects. In a 2004 article by Bill Koenig, entitled “Influential Christian Leaders Speak Against Israel’s Biblical Significance and Her Land,” we learn just where Piper’s biased theology is taking him:

“So now we ask, is the so-called ‘Promised Land’ part of the inheritance and salvation that ‘all Israel’(v. 26) will receive? And if so, what does that say about the rights of Israel today to the Land?

“The promises made to Abraham, including the promise of the Land, will be inherited as an everlasting gift only by true, spiritual Israel, not disobedient, unbelieving Israel.

“Being born Jewish does not make one an heir of the promises neither the promise of the Land nor any other promise.

“Throughout the history of Israel, covenant breaking and disobedience and idolatry disqualified Israel from the present divine right to the Land. (See also Daniel 9:4-7; Psalm 78:54-61.)”

Wow.

Piper is simply wrong, on multiple levels. In Scripture, the Lord repeatedly tells the Jews that they will inherit the land for eternity; He speaks very forcefully about their unbelief and the punishments for that (such as in Deuteronomy). He also constantly and forcefully states that He will bring them back from their dispersions to the nations, and that He will plant them in their land again, in the last days of world history.

(You can read the entire article at www.watch.org/showart.php3?idx=62726&rtn=/index.html&showsubj=1&mcat=4)

Further in the article, Piper makes the huge error of stating that both Jews and Muslims claim the Holy Land through divine right. The Jews certainly do, but Muslims do not. Their Koran makes no such claim. Either Piper is uninformed, or he employs the same techniques Uncle Walter Cronkite did: fit the evidence to your bias.

Piper’s bias against the Jews of Israel compels him to say exactly the opposite of what the Bible tells us about the tortured history of the Jewish people.

Replacement Theology, the idea that God has replaced Israel with the Church, and has “transferred” her promises to the gentile Church, is simply wrong. It is also dangerous. In this abhorrent worldview, we are seeing an almost identical repeat of the teachings that led to the destruction of European Jewry by the demonic Adolf Hitler.

For this reason alone, if Martin Luther were alive today — the notorious anti-Semite lived in the 16^th century and today is the darling of many evangelicals — and he told me the sky is blue, I’d have to check for myself. The Bereans learned to test what they were taught, and we would do well to follow their example.

Piper’s arrogant bias compels me to say that he and other Christian leaders like him have nothing to say to me that will help me navigate through this world. If he’s wrong about Israel, what else is he wrong about?

And make no mistake; we are merely discussing John Piper. He has a lot of company in his wrong-headed views about Israel.

The biblical record is quite clear, and reaches from Genesis to Revelation: the Jews are God’s chosen people and His covenants with them are unbreakable…they are unconditional. That was the point of Genesis 15. Those “covenant-breaking” Jews that Piper likes to pontificate about have never broken the epic covenant in Genesis 15, and they never will.

How Christian leaders can miss this is beyond me. It is part of the great Paradox of our age: Bible prophecy heats up, and more people aren’t paying attention.

In large part, we can thank our leadership for this dismal, dismaying reality.

jim@prophecymatters.com