Posted on 10/07/2008 8:41:53 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
The pages of failed end-of-the-world prophecies could make up a whole new testament. Now there's the Rev. David Jeremiah, an East County mega-pastor and TV evangelist who says the end is coming, in the words of a familiar church song, “soon and very soon.”
In a new book that hit bookstores this week, Jeremiah offers 10 “prophetic clues” he says point to an imminent conclusion many Christians have clung to for 2,000 years – the Rapture (when the faithful will be summoned instantly into Heaven), followed by the Tribulation (a seven-year period of turmoil), Armageddon (the final battle of good versus evil) and the Second Coming of Jesus (to reign on Earth).
Jeremiah doesn't set a date in “What in the World Is Going On?” (Thomas Nelson; $22.99). But his urgency is clear: “His return is close at hand,” he writes, adding that Christians should be motivated “as never before to live in readiness.”
“I have no intention of setting any dates or saying this is when this is going to happen,” Jeremiah says, settling back on a couch in his office at Turning Point, his international television and radio ministry headquartered in Lakeside.
“All I'm saying is some of the things that the word of God prophesied would take place as we near this time are happening in ways you cannot contradict.”
The 67-year-old senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, where he preaches to 7,000 people at weekend services, says he was motivated to write this book after so many people kept questioning him about world events.
He reached out to other biblical prophecy scholars for their thoughts. Among them was Tim LaHaye, co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of Christian apocalyptic novels. In 1981, Jeremiah followed LaHaye as senior pastor of Scott Memorial Baptist Church, which later became Shadow Mountain.
The 10 signs Jeremiah settled on range from the emergence of Israel as the dominant country-of-residence for Jews and the rise in power of Russia and Iran to the world's reliance on Middle Eastern oil and the coming together of countries under the European Union.
“I'm not a sensationalist,” says Jeremiah, a grandfather and two-time cancer survivor who is a well-known speaker at evangelical venues like the Billy Graham Training Center.
“I would be the last person in the world to try to draw sensationalist truths from the Scripture,” he adds. “You can get a crowd if you know how to frame your stuff, but I'm past all that. I don't need to do that. But what I do know is this: This is a different day unlike anything that I've ever known, unlike anything the world has ever known. So what does that mean?”
What it means for him is that conversion efforts need to be jump-started like a battery in a long-idled sedan.
“We've forgotten that there's an urgency about what we've been called to do,” he says. He leans forward on the couch, as if to emphasize his impatience. “I think it puts an urgency and a seriousness into our walk.” Jeremiah is particularly tough on Islam in his book. Islamic terrorism is among the signs he says are pointing toward the end times.
“One of the most baffling and unsettling puzzles about Islam is the constant contention on the part of some Muslim leaders that they are a peace-loving people,” he writes. “Yet even as they make the claim, Islamic terrorists continue to brutally murder any person or group with whom they find fault.”
Jeremiah does not believe Allah and God are the same. He also believes that Islam hates Jews and Christians.
“Experts say that 15 to 20 percent of Muslims are radical enough to strap a bomb on their bodies in order to kills Christians and Jews,” he writes. “If this number is accurate, it means about 300 million Muslims are willing to die in order to take you and me down.”
His solution: convert Muslims to Christianity.
Jeremiah says he is not trying to be incendiary; he's just being true to his convictions. “I'm not intolerant,” he insists. “I just believe totally what I believe, and if I have to go along in order to get along, water down what I believe, I'll never do that.”
But Khaleel Mohammed, associate professor of religious studies at San Diego State University and a voice for moderate Islam, says Jeremiah isn't helping matters.
“It's not constructive in any way for the Christian or the Muslim,” Mohammed says. “Everything he is saying is so divisive.”
Mohammed also thinks Jeremiah's portrait is one-sided; after all, thousands of Muslim civilians have died in the American-led invasion of Iraq.
“I'm not denying there are Christians and Muslims agitating against each other, but I don't think it's religious,” Mohammed says. Still, he adds, the future lies in interfaith cooperation, a move the “old guard” on both sides is resisting. “They are just fighting against the tide. ... Among Muslims, you'll find preachers who are as nonsensical as Jeremiah.”
Scholars who study end-times prophecies say Jeremiah's book, and others like it, should be handled with care.
“I would say the odds are enormous, if not overwhelming, that he, like every other Christian prophet over the last 2,000 years, will be wrong,” says Richard Landes, associate professor of history at Boston University and director of the Center for Millennial Studies.
Jews and Muslims also have their doomsday beliefs, Landes says, but apocalypticism has been particularly rampant in Christianity. It was, after all, Jesus himself who forewarned his followers in the New Testament to “keep watch” and “be ready” for his return.
Ever since, Christians have watched for signs of the Second Coming, scanning the Bible for clues and codes, says Jon Stone, a religious studies professor at Cal State Long Beach.
Stone acknowledges there is a built-in audience for books like Jeremiah's. “I think people like to be in on a secret, to know something other people don't know,” he explains. “This is, by far, the biggest secret in terms of religious things.”
Jeremiah is planning a series of sermons at Shadow Mountain this fall on living with confidence in a chaotic world. He plans to tell the congregation, among other things, that this is the time for the faithful to hang together, to focus on the church and the Bible.
Jeremiah says biblical prophecy isn't a popular pulpit topic. “A lot of buddies of mine say they don't ever preach on prophecy because they think it's irrelevant. ... Well, if they read the Bible, they will find out that if you study prophecy, it gives you incredible insight as to how you should live your life today.”
He resists efforts to be coaxed into being more specific about when all this is going to happen. It's not about that, he repeats. “It is about the awareness of what the events that are happening in the world today mean and how we can look at it through the third lens of the Bible and make more sense of it than we would otherwise.”
I take it you didn't actually look at the Greek, and are just relying on the archaic language of the KJV to invent a doctrine.
If you are happy doing theology this way, then go for it. There’s nothing else I can say if you won’t listen to reasonable arguments from Scripture.
Doesn’t matter. The idea that all the disciples where from Judah is still not in the Bible. I'm not sure what driving this extra-biblical hobby horse of yours.
And whose version of the Greek are you referring to???
The King James translators looked at all the Greek that is available...You got something new???
There is no physical place called Armageddon. The correct meaning of the word is the sorrow of King Josiah.
It doesn't matter. There is no significant textual variance in the verses in question.
The King James translators looked at all the Greek that is available...You got something new???
KJV English was well suited for how the language was spoken 400 years ago. We do not speak that brand of English for the most part. The authors would be horrified to find out the erroneous interpretations that have suggested in modern days based on faulty understanding of KJV English.
That is why reliable modern translations, Like the New KJV, have modernized (corrected) these types of words and phrases. But apparently you wish to cling to unsupportable theories. Have fun.
Perhaps you should employ one yourself. The literal translation is Mount of Meggido. There is no such place. However, Meggido is where King Josiah was killed. The Mount part represents the nationwide sorrow that erupted after the passing of Israel’s most righteous king.
That is why reliable modern translations, Like the New KJV, have modernized (corrected) these types of words and phrases. But apparently you wish to cling to unsupportable theories. Have fun.
I don't know if you are trying to fool yourself or someone else...
1Co 15:52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
You see any archaic words in there??? NO??? Your arguement just left, without you...
BTW, the NKJB says exactly the same thing...
It’s too bad that historical revisionism gets used as a club against fellow Christians.
For 2000 years most Jewish converts to Jesus Christ have had no problem identifying themselves as Christians and members of His Church. That is until a small sub-group of believers, some being ethnic/cultural Jews, decided that a new name was needed for their sub-group. The invented the belief system of Messiah Judaism and started calling them selves Messianic Jews (even though most the adherents to this new fangled sect are not ethnic or cultural Jews). They gave the impression that somehow they (and they alone) were getting back to authentic, first century Christianity (oops, I meant) Messianic Judaism. They utilized many techniques to give this impression, such as the prominent use of those annoying transliterations of names from one language to another. (Question, do Chinese-speaking Messiah Jews transliterate “Yah'shua” and "Sha-ul" into Mandarin?)
And so, some of them apparently like to castigate anyone who questions the theological presuppositions and foundations of their innovations by labeling them prideful, anti-Semitic, and other similar unfaltering names, perhaps not realizing how prideful they themselves can appear by such tactics.
And so, rather than build up the one new man that Paul speaks of in Ephesians 2, the commonwealth made up of Jews and gentiles together without regard to past religious distinctions, we have this group of self-described Messianic Jews (mainly gentiles) who are attempting to rebuild the religious wall that Paul says has been torn down. Some of them act as if those Christians down through the ages (whether Jews or gentile) who have wished to be identified as the true sons of Abraham, the spiritual Israel of the Bible, are somehow encroaching upon their sacred territory. They have invented concepts like "gentile Christianity" to berate faithful followers of Our Lord down though the centuries.
They seem to forget the words of Paul, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." (Gal. 3:28,29)
I’m guessing you didn’t read the linked document.
Nobody except The Donald and Bridge players use the word "trump" anymore.
The Greek of that passage literally says, "... in the last trumpet (noun) he shall be trumpeting (verb) ..." which has been rendered in various ways by various translators. It could just as easily be translated, "... at the last trumpet which shall be trumpeting ..." It’s a matter of emphasis. The sound will be unmistakable and unavoidable. It is the last sound anyone will hear before being ushered in the presence of a Holy God for judgment day.
Resolved: the dispensational exegesis of any given passage is best ignored unless an amil/postmil/historic premil scholar can be found who agrees with it.
By you maybe...But that's not what the verse says...
But more accurately, it would be (if someone was so inclined to change it like you do) 'the last trumpeting of the trumpet'...It speaks of the last noise a trumpet makes, NOT the last trumpet...
If you can't expound on what the verse actually says, you are devoid of the meaning of the verse...
I was under the impression that children under a certain age would be raptured and then grow to maturity during the millennium. They would have a chance to accept Christ or reject him like everyone else.
“I was under the impression that children under a certain age would be raptured and then grow to maturity during the millennium.”
Where is there anything in Scripture to support a Rapture? Only in the minds of those who would like to think they will be taken out. Noah was taken through, not out. Same for us. Those taken out were taken to judgement. Same is true for those “taken out” in Matthew to support the “Left Behind” series of LeHay & Jenkins.
Well, I’m no expert. I’m sure that babies born before the rapture would go up. I can’t say about the ones born afterwards. I really don’t know.
That's exactly what the Greek says. The adjective "last" is used to modify the noun "trumpet", not the verb.
Check out the Greek and see for yourself.
Whether you call it a trumpet or a trump, makes no difference as long as you know what's being discussed...
We're talking about the 'last' of the sounds being trumpeted...
1Co 15:52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
The trump, the 'sound' will be the last sound heard...
The trumpet in this verse is a verb which combined with the others in the group are as follows...
G4537
σαλπίζω
salpizō
sal-pid'-zo
From G4536; to trumpet, that is, sound a blast (literally or figuratively): - (which are yet to) sound (a trumpet).
So to summarize, in the GREEK, you get this:
1Co 15:52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
This has nothing to with your idea of the 'last trumpet will sound'...
Trumpet in the New Testament has little to do with the Hebrew translated trumpet of the Old Testament...There commonality is of producing a loud sound...None of the Angels in Revelation are blowing tuba's or French horns...
In Revelation the emphasis is on the Angels and their number and then the sound they are making...
Rev 10:7 But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets.
AND
Rev 11:15 And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever.
There's the seventh 'trumpet'...And for those of you who somehow reject the Millenial reign of Jesus Christ, you can see the kindgoms of THIS world become the kingdoms of our Lord...Jesus will reign on earth for a thousand years...
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