I used to be very involved in End Times prophecy. I suppose this depends on how you use the word “Very.” I certainly read a lot and listened a lot back in my college days (40 years ago). Back then Hal Lindsey and Jack Van Impe were all over the place. This was before the Left Behind series jumped aboard (joke intended).

Back then I was generally Premillennial Pre-trib, although even then I found the Pre-trib view hard to reconcile with Scripture. Today, I describe myself as not having an opinion about the Tribulation and the Millennium. Perhaps this is less to do with my actual beliefs and more to do with the fact that I don’t really want to be in conflict with my many friends who really embrace Pre-millennial Dispensationalism (Pre-D). Or maybe it is because I just haven’t fully committed to an alternate position.

One thing back 40 years ago that bothered me and has irked me more and more as time has gone on has been the “Prophecy in the News” phenomenon. I see this done in two ways. First is that the End Times interpretation was invariably tied to the current geopolitical setting. Thus, in the 1970s, the Northern Kingdom MUST be the USSR, and the ten-headed beast MUST be the European Common Market. Well, that was back when those two political organizations existed. The role of the US tended to be a bit vague— strange since in the Cold War era, the US really fits the role of the “bad guy” much better than the European Common Market. Perhaps this reticence sprang from the fact that the culture, writers, and buyers of Christian Apocalypticism (soil, gardeners, and produce buyers) were predominantly American.

My second concern was that all the predictions tended to be pretty near term. From a marketing standpoint, it surely makes sense. Consider the Day-Age theory. This is the one that uses (misuses) the statement in the Bible to the effect that to God a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day (II Peter 3:8). Then they add belief that the Creation of the Universe happened in 4004 BC, and then mixes in some ideas of Genesis 1 and the 7-day week, and comes up with idea that there will be 6000 years of struggle followed by a 1000 year Millennial Kingdom. With those disparate ideas flung together, one gets the end of this time we live in as 1996. I knew people who really thought that made a lot of sense. However, since the age of the earth before Christ (even for Young Earth Creationists) is very uncertain, this logic doesn’t really work very well. I would make a lot more sense to try to apply that to a much more certain period of time, like the “Church Age.” However, saying that Christ is coming somewhere around 6,030 AD doesn’t really lead to book sales and speaking tours.

But there has been a bit of a newer trend that is even more problematic. That is the goal of some people to “Jumpstart the Rapture.” In the late 1800s and early 1900s this was done by trying to get a Jewish state set in Palestine (Check). In the late 1900s this involved some other things like trying to get Israel to set up a restored temple on the Temple Mount (Did not happen). However, in 2026, it appears in attempting to stir up war in the Middle East. My first thought on this is that the Middle East has no problem having wars without outside help, although that is hard to tell since they have gotten so much outside help in that area.

A bigger issue is that I cannot see how any Christian can believe that Christ’s calling to His followers is to start killing people or get others to start killing people. We are called to be Salt and Light, not Guns and Missiles. Frankly, I don’t see any evidence that we are called upon to “speed up Christ’s return,” or even that it is in our ability to do it. <Obviously, I disagree with those Mission folk who think that Matthew 24:14 is Christ’s way of telling us that doing missions “faster” will lead to Jesus returning sooner.>

I do think that a tree can, to some extent, be judged by its fruit. I think that we have ample evidence to say that the tree that is Evangelical Eschatology has given us some pretty bad fruit. Does that mean that DP (Dispensational Pre-Millennialism) is absolutely wrong? Not necessarily. I have seen some pretty bad takes that have come from the A-millennialist and Post-Millennialist camps. But the power of prophecy, in part, is in its mystery. Jesus did not tell us the day of His return for a reason. The Book of Revelation is meant to encourage faithfulness in difficult times and warn of the dangers of falling away. It isn’t meant to be about identifying what “Wormwood” actually is, and what day to expect it.

We often like to say that there is power in faith, and faith is, in part, empowered by uncertainty. God does not reveal Himself in a completely unambiguous, indisputable way, because there is something special about belief with limited direct evidence that demonstrates itself in action. How much more does this apply to our own futures. It is fun to speculate some details… but when people play with numbers and try to link obscure Bible passages together to come up with exact future scenarios, we have fallen in love with our own reasoning… and reason is something we are not all that good at (speaking about humans generally, not just Christians).

Am I saying not to have an opinion about future events? Absolutely not. There are things that Christ told us we can be confident about. Is it wrong to speculate about some other things that may not be all that well-grounded? No… nothing wrong with that generally. But maybe it would be good not to write a book series about it, join lecture circuits, and preach it on pop-Christian TV.

And maybe it would be good not to start bombing people thinking that God is up there happily working to get Armageddon going sooner than planned.