The Left Behind Series, ???????.

Quote: (My comments in parentheses.) Today, many Christians are confused. They are tossed too and fro with every new book that hits the market or every new fad end-time scheme introduced by some celebrity preacher. The popularity of the Revelation today is due to man’s insatiable curiosity regarding the future, the interest in the unknown tomorrow, which characterizes the restless human soul. To claim that in the pages of the Revelation we can see the signs of the present times and thus predict the tomorrows; to pull back the veil and claim to lay bare the future is to attract an audience, for that is the nature of man — fascination with the future! And that is the thrust of the scores of books always appearing, almost all of them claiming to be able to unravel and accurately predict the great world events about to unfold. Man reveres the past, but he is intoxicated by the heady wine of prophecy. The very claim, then, of these many books — that they can reveal to us things which are soon to come — helps to explain the popularity of those books on the Revelation. (Jesus said to "take no thought" for tomorrow!)

The most popular of the apocalyptic entrepreneurs undoubtedly is Hal Lindsey, the author of the sensationalist book The Late Great Planet Earth and other more recent titles. His combination of literalist biblical interpretation and outright scare tactics have resulted in gaining him an extremely wide readership. But — his predictions have continually needed readjustment in the light of deadlines which have come and gone without fulfillment! Also, according to the February/March 1980 "special report to the members of the 700 Club," entitled "Pat Robertson’s Perspective," the beast of Revelation was to have been the Soviet Union, which he believed was about to attack Israel "to gain unrestricted access to Middle East oil plus a land bridge to the mineral wealth of Africa." (Oh my gosh, it seems like WE are the ones that have attacked the Middle East for oil!!!!) The economy of Western Europe would be doomed by this and the world would then see the rise of a "counterfeit Messiah," a satanic figure "more malevolent than Adolph Hitler," who in 1980 was "approximately twenty-seven years old" and was being groomed for his sinister task. His nightmarish seven-year reign is the time of the "Great Tribulation," which supposedly will come to an end with the second coming of Christ, who will destroy the Antichrist at the battle of Armageddon. I do not hesitate to tell you that all such speculation, which purports to unravel the immediate future of world events out of the prophecies of the book of Revelation, are doomed to failure. None of them will come to pass! Church history is full of these schemes. Every generation, from the early church to the present, has been impacted by prophecies of that sort. I could write page after page, and go on and on, about all the end-time predictions that have been taught out of the book of Revelation that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, and often times were proven wrong almost before the ink was dry on the paper!