End Times Bible Prophecy: It’s Not What They Told You
By Brian Godawa
End Times Bible Prophecy: It’s Not What They Told You
1st Edition
Copyright © 2017, 2021 Brian Godawa
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.
Warrior Poet Publishing
www.warriorpoetpublishing.com
ISBN: 978-1-942858-31-7 (paperback)
Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001, except where noted as the NASB95: New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. (LaHabra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995).
Table of Contents
Are We Living in the Last Days? ii
Preface Please Read This. It’s Important. 1
PART ONE Why Prophecy Matters 5
Chapter 1 My Journey to the End of the World 7
Chapter 2 How Literalism Corrupts Bible Prophecy 16
PART TWO The Poetry of Old Testament Prophecy 27
Chapter 3 The Day of the Lord 29
Chapter 4 All the Nations 35
Chapter 5 Cosmic Catastrophes 39
PART THREE The Poetry of New Testament Prophecy 45
Chapter 6 The Olivet Discourse 47
Chapter 7 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! 50
Chapter 8 This Generation 64
Chapter 9 End of the Age / Last Days 70
Chapter 10 Birth Pains 81
Chapter 11 Abomination of Desolation 96
Chapter 12 The Antichrist and the Beast 106
Chapter 13 The Coming of the Son of Man 119
Chapter 14 The Return of Christ 141
Chapter 15 The Day and the Hour 148
Chapter 16 But What about…? 157
Appendix The Day of the Lord in 2 Peter 165
GET THIS FREE eBOOK! 170
About The Author 171
Bibliography of Books on Bible Prophecy 172
Get More Biblical Imagination 174
Are We Living in the Last Days? 175
Chronicles of the Nephilim 176
Chronicles of the Apocalypse 177
Chronicles of the Watchers 178
Video Lectures 179
Preface
Please Read This. It’s Important.
Writing about Bible prophecy and the end times is a very tricky thing. The study of end things is called eschatology, and many people tend to be very invested in their eschatological beliefs. When those beliefs are challenged, one is often met with hostility and broken fellowship. Those most committed to their views have spent long hours, sometimes many years, studying their particular view. Many prophecy writers and ministers have committed their lives and incomes to encouraging their followers to keep the faith in their interpretation. There is a lot of money being made in the commercial world of end times Bible prophecy. Those heavily invested would risk losing their reputations, audiences, and incomes if they changed their views or seriously considered other interpretations. Because of this entrenchment, open mindedness is not often rewarded in the world of Bible prophecy. Minority viewpoints are easily dismissed and frequently slandered as heresy.
Can’t We All Get Along?
I know—I’ve been in that position. I studied the Scriptures with diligence for years in search of answers to the questions about the last days. I ended up changing my eschatology several times during those years. I’ll tell you that story in chapter 1. But right now, I want to let you know that I am very aware that I am going to be treading on “sacred ground” for some of you. I want to be as respectful as I can. I have the desire only to address issues, not attack individuals. Because of that, I will not be making many references to specific authors, other than those relevant to my personal story or illustrative of a point.
The first half of my book focuses on proper Bible interpretation (hermeneutics), apart from any eschatological view. I explore how to understand biblical symbols, poetry, and literal versus figurative language in prophecy by interpreting the text within its ancient Hebrew context as the original writers intended. The goal is to read it through the eyes of an ancient Jew steeped in the Law and the Prophets, not a modern Westerner steeped in Twitter and online news trends. I will not be arguing for any specific view of the end times at that point. So no matter what view you have, you should have few problems with it. All views should be able to find common ground.
The Sensational Search for Significance
There is another sad aspect of eschatology these days that troubles me. It seems that the most sensational interpretations get the most “likes” and views on social media and increase the potential for making money. YouTubers, bloggers and podcasters are pressured into making fantastic claims, or they risk losing views and attention. Conspiracy theories abound and Christians are often the most gullible, being baited with what amounts to science fiction. They want more than mere Christian faith in their lives; they want to experience the supernatural. Don’t we all? They want proof that the Bible is true and that they are in the right. Bible prophecy gives them that affirmation. If we are living in the last days, if Bible prophecy is being fulfilled right before our very eyes, then our eyes give us that empirical certainty that our faith longs for. We are right. Yes, we have to be right. It’s happening right before our eyes!
It also gives us perceived significance. If we are participating in the last days, then we are the last generation, the climax of God’s timetable before the Second Coming. If these are not the last days, then we are just another generation of Christians who live and die without that particular significance we crave.
But we want to be important to God, even more important than all those who suffered and died in silence throughout the millennia. They were not the special generation that participated in anything other than living their Christian lives faithfully and spreading the gospel of the kingdom of God.
How our priorities have become corrupted.
Open Eyes, Open Minds
Yes, I do have a specific eschatology, and I will try to explain that in the second half of the book as I give a brief exegesis of the Olivet Discourse of Jesus. I am open to other interpretations and changing my mind. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. None of us has arrived at perfection. We Christians should always be humbly learning and adjusting our views as we grow spiritually. I have believed in all the major systems of eschatology throughout my life, and the only thing I am certain of is that they are all imperfect. They all have holes, anomalies, and weaknesses. My goal is to follow the truth wherever it leads me, even if it means giving up my cherished beliefs. So my goal is to follow the eschatology that has the least amount of holes and anomalies, the one that explains the most Scripture within its original, ancient context and intent—of which we will never have absolute certainty. In my opinion those who tell us that we can be certain are fundamentally wrong.
We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5:7). We are significant to God, not because the Antichrist may be alive in our generation, but because Jesus is alive through all generations!
Brian Godawa
If you find this book helpful or interesting, be sure to check out my novel series Chronicles of the Apocalypse which incarnates this eschatology in a dramatic, fictional narrative of the historical events.
Chapter 1
My Journey to the End of the World
I became a Christian in high school in the 1970s through a non-denominational church. It had basic evangelical goals: introducing the unchurched to Jesus Christ and building their fellowship. They avoided controversies as well as the nonessential doctrinal distinctions of denominations. My only concern was to share the wonderful good news that I had learned that freed me from a burdened life of trying to save myself through my good works. Based on the shed blood of Jesus on the cross for my sins, I was saved by grace, through faith, and that not of myself; it was a gift of God. That was pretty much all I knew, and that was pretty much all that mattered.
When I went to college my Christian roommate discipled me, and I grew in my faith and understanding of the Scriptures. I caught a vision for the “lost.” I became fueled with the desire to introduce others to Jesus Christ so that they too could find the forgiveness of sins that I had and come into a right relationship with their Creator. The gospel was for everyone. I began to learn the finer points of biblical doctrine and theology as well as the importance of a Christian worldview—a comprehensive way of seeing the world that informed my choices and actions.
The Beginning of the End
And then I read Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. Most people today are familiar with the wildly successful 1990s Left Behind fiction series that made end times Bible prophecy a topic of interest even in the mainstream secular world. Well, Left Behind wasn’t the first to do so, and it wasn’t even the most popular. That series of sixteen best-selling novels has sold more than sixty-five million copies and had dominated the New York Times best-sellers list for years. But The Late Great Planet Earth was one single book by Hal Lindsey, and it sold twenty-eight million copies alone by the time Left Behind came out. Hal Lindsey’s material literally changed the landscape of evangelical eschatology (the study of end things—remember that word, eschatology. It’s important). Of course he wasn’t the first to do so either. The belief system that Lindsey promoted is called dispensationalism, and that theology began in the early 1800s. But the point is that Late Great was immensely popular, greatly influential, and it changed my life.
Reading his book I was introduced to a new paradigm of Christianity. I no longer saw my existence on this planet as merely a Christian with a message of liberation for spiritual captives and a biblical blueprint for the reformation of our lawless secular culture. Rather, I saw myself as a Christian smack dab in the middle of the climax of history, one minute before midnight on the prophetic clock before all hell broke loose and Jesus returned to judge the world. Lindsey taught me that everything that was happening in the world around me had actually been foretold in the Bible. How exciting! But also, how urgent! I discovered a new aspect of the gospel message that included prophetic judgment on the world as a reason to repent and get right with God.
Lindsey’s eschatology was (and still is) centered around the nation state of Israel and the Jewish people. I had always treasured the story of Israel in the Old Testament and how it led up to the coming Messiah, Jesus. The Jews were God’s chosen people, but they rejected their Messiah. So Jesus opened his kingdom to all who would believe, both Jew and Gentile, with the new covenant. The ancient Hebrews and their geopolitical nation were part of my spiritual heritage in the old covenant, but not the focus of the new covenant of faith in Christ.
Lindsey introduced me to the idea that the Jews were still God’s chosen people and continued to remain at the center of God’s plan. The church of Jesus Christ was an historical parenthesis, or a temporary break from God’s dealings with the Jews. Yes, the church was important to God now, but only until he restarted that prophetic time clock to initiate the end of history when he would fulfill his promises to the Jews of Israel. In effect, there are two peoples of God—the church and Israel—but Israel was the original and irrevocable chosen nation. It was all about the geopolitical state of Israel.
This seemed to make sense to me. After all, the Middle East was embattled, as it always seems to be, and this made sense of all the irrational anti-Semitism of Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors. Didn’t God predict that the offspring of Ishmael would forever be at enmity with the offspring of Isaac? It seemed to explain why the Jews, after millennia of persecution, still managed to survive as a people and miraculously regain their homeland in 1948. It was clear to me that there was something special about Israel, something chosen.
According to Lindsey, this reforming of the nation state of Israel was the lynchpin to the whole prophetic system. Every generation in history has had its share of false prophets predicting the end of the world. But never before had the catalyst for the end of days been in place. That catalyst was Israel becoming a nation in 1948 with the approval of the United Nations. Didn’t Jesus say that his physical second coming would take place within a generation of all the things he prophesied in Matthew 24? So Lindsey concluded,
What generation? Obviously, in context, the generation that would see the signs—chief among them, the rebirth of Israel. A generation in the Bible is something like 40 years. If this is a correct deduction, then within forty years or so of 1948, all these things could take place.
Wow! It was now the 1980s and the final countdown to Armageddon was ticking away. I would be in the generation that would see the second coming of Jesus Christ. Well, not really. Actually we Christians would be the generation that would be protected from God’s wrath because we would be raptured to heaven before the final series of God’s judgments came on the earth. Jesus could come at any moment. We just had to be ready or we would be left behind to endure that wrath. Most everyone nowadays knows about the rapture—the removal of believers from earth to heaven. Even the secular world has made a TV series about it. But not back then. Back then it was a secret mystery that primarily sparked the imaginations and hope of millions of Christians. After that rapture, a period of seven years called the great tribulation would occur with a series of events surrounding the Antichrist—the incarnation of Satan as a false messiah of the world, an evil mirror image of Christ.
Bible Prophecy Charts Galore
Lindsey and others had proven to me that the Antichrist was “alive and well on planet earth,” expanding his power and influence to be soon revealed. He would deceive the world into thinking he was bringing peace; he would make a treaty with Israel and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. But then he would break that treaty, set up a statue of himself in the temple, proclaim himself to be god, and give everyone the mark of the Beast. God would commence with all kinds of judgments on the earth as depicted in the book of Revelation—earthquakes, plagues, famines—unlike anything in the history of the world. This Beast would ultimately join with a ten-nation confederacy to invade Israel in the final battle of Armageddon against God’s people. But of course Jesus would return at that battle, destroy Satan and all his minions, and establish a thousand-year reign on earth.
There are many more details of course, but that was the basic scenario. And, with minor exceptions, that storyline still exists today in the world of popular Bible prophecy. I memorized the Bible prophecy chart and told unbelievers that Jesus was coming soon and that there wasn’t much time to get right with God. It was an exciting time to be alive, to read the newspapers and see the unfolding of Bible prophecy. It seemed that every week something happened in the news that Bible prophecy teachers explained to me were fulfillment or setups for fulfillment of the last days. And it seemed pretty self-evident. I mean the world was getting worse and worse. Abortion on demand was murdering a million or more babies a year. Society was getting more immoral and more intolerant of Christianity. As America rejected its Christian heritage, it was going to hell in a handbasket. We were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I even had a friend whose family was not bothering to send their kids to college, since Jesus would probably return before it mattered anyway.
I thought that was a little extreme. But the urgency was part of the message. And I felt my God-commanded duty to preach it more and more. And I studied the Bible in light of the newspaper in order to show myself approved—a Berean, as the Bible called me. It was invigorating to my faith. I was getting the confirmation, the verification that my faith longed for. After all, if Bible prophecy was right in its predictions, then that proved it was God’s Word. Bible prophecy of the first coming of Christ persuaded those who believed, so Bible prophecy of the second coming of Christ would persuade more to follow Jesus.
You Mean There’s Another Way?
But then something happened. I found out that all this material that I had learned about the end times was just one interpretation of Bible prophecy, but it wasn’t the only possible interpretation. Not only that, it was actually one of the newer views of eschatology called dispensationalism. I had never heard that before. I had thought what Lindsey and others were doing was simply reading the plain language of the Bible, as if there was really no other legitimate approach. Bible prophecy was either true or false, but I never realized that there were entire systems of interpretation at odds with the dispensationalism of Late Great Planet Earth.
When I heard that a different system of interpretation called historic premillennialism denied the centrality of geopolitical Israel, I was shocked. When I found out that amillennialism interpreted many prophecies as figurative and poetic, I thought, “Only liberals don’t take the Bible literally.” And when I heard that there was a school of interpretation called preterism that considers last days prophecies to have been fulfilled in the first century of the new covenant, I thought, “Heresy!” Futurism (another term to remember in this book), is the belief that last-days prophesies are still in our future. Futurism had to be the only way to understand the Bible or you were denying the second coming of Christ!
But then I learned that all these other views had valid theological defenders who were godly, orthodox Christian scholars. And these views had been there through most of church history. Dispensational teachers dismissed other views, as if to protect their followers from being influenced by them.
But I felt betrayed by the dishonesty, not protected. Why would these other views be treated with such disrespect when they were the dominant views in church history until recent times? Majority views do not make something true, neither does the age of a view, nor the first in line. But that truth plays both ways. Just because the dominant view of Bible prophecy was currently this new dispensational view, that fact didn’t make it more true either. So I launched into the study of these various eschatological views because I wanted to be educated, not propagandized.
Everything Keeps Changing
Something else was occurring in my outlook. As the years went on, I noticed that these Bible prophecy teachers kept finding fulfilled Bible prophecies in each and every major geopolitical news event that was occurring. If you charted the radio shows, books, newsletters, blogposts and podcasts over the past fifty years, you would find manifold more fulfillments of Bible prophecies than there are actual Bible prophesies—and more altered predictions than any of them would like to admit. I saw that as the geopolitical scene changed, these prognostications would change, adjusted to fit the new “proof of Bible prophecy.”
In the 1970s, Islamic political involvement was virtually unknown on the world scene, and we heard almost nothing about Islam from prophecy pundits. Now, Islam plays heavily in the futurist prophecy scenario, some even saying the Antichrist will be Islamic. In the 1970s, the European Common Market (ECM) was about to get its tenth member to become the ten-nation confederacy against Israel, allegedly spoken of in Revelation and Daniel (Rev 12:3; 17:3; Dan 7:7). Later, the ECM had sixteen members and ultimately dissolved, so that interpretation had to be replaced by other “fulfillments.” But just because a viewpoint may have been wrong about some things in the past doesn’t mean it is wrong about all things now. Logically that is true. But if a system keeps changing its interpretations, doesn’t that imply an inherent problem with the system and/or its interpreters?
Most prophecy pundits avoid making hard predictions because they know the punishment for false prophets in the Old Testament was death (Deut 18:20-22). Of course the Old Testament is not applied in today’s church culture, but the principle remains that false prophets are condemned with the harshest of judgment. For all their belief in literally interpreting the Bible, prophecy pundits never quite say literally what they are predicting. They use hedging terms like could be and maybe, or they ask leading questions like, “Could this be what the prophet foretold?” or “It is very likely that . . . ” But making a myriad of implied predictions without direct claims is still making predictions.
Some of these nonprophetic prophesies have become too clearly wrong to deny. Lindsey made a documentary movie based on his book by the same title, The Late Great Planet Earth, using the dark and forebodingly authoritative voice of Orson Welles as narrator. In that movie he reaffirmed that the key to the whole prophetic pattern “has always been the rebirth of the state of Israel.” But he also made startling doomsday predictions as the birth pangs Jesus spoke of signaling his soon return. He claimed that the Jupiter Effect that was to happen in his near future of 1982 would involve the lining up of planets that would cause catastrophes on earth. He interviewed Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame who predicted that “by 2014, we would have 8 billion people, but we’re probably going to have a huge die off before we get there.” Ehrlich also claimed that “our natural resources will be exhausted by the year 2000.” Ehrlich also claimed in 1974 that the earth would soon be frozen over by global cooling in a new ice age. Now he says the world will be burned up by global warming within our lifetimes. Lindsey showed images of Ted Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter, while clearly implying that one of them could be the Antichrist (That movie can be seen in its entirety on YouTube). It wasn’t until decades later that the absurdity of these predictions were evident. But by then Lindsey’s devotees had long forgotten the false prophesies and supported his new predictions. I saw through the years that he continued to be wrong over and over again. Yet to this day he is still a noted Bible prophecy teacher.
Back in 1980, Lindsey’s not-so-subtle prediction that Christ would return by 1988 was exciting and inspiring, even hopeful. Now, almost two generations later than his “generation prediction,” thirty years past his deadline, that lynchpin devastates his entire system based as it was on the supposedly central prophecy of Israel’s national statehood. But many still teach this dispensational scheme, including the writings of the late Left Behind author Tim LaHaye. In order to maintain the legitimacy of the system, they reinterpreted a generation to be eighty years; and now it is a hundred years. They just keep stretching the years to keep the system plausible. These prophecy teachers are still talking the same way today they did fifty years ago, but what they are calling fulfilled prophecy is completely different from what they originally maintained. They just keep changing it to fit the news.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
I don’t have anything personal against Lindsey or LaHaye. The eschatology of Late Great was simply the narrative that I personally wrestled with over those years. This was my journey. But it all applies by analogy to today. Many modern Bible prophecy teachers are promoting the same system of interpretation with newly adjusted “fulfilled” prophecies and dire predictions to fit the current era. Sure, there are minor differences, but the big picture is still the same futuristic scenario of a revived Roman empire, the rapture at some point in time, the Antichrist, the mark of the Beast, the great tribulation, and geopolitical Israel’s centrality to God’s plan. Bible prophecies are still being “fulfilled before our very eyes” every week on prophecy podcasts and blogs, just like in the 1970s. Sadly, as I indicated earlier, the more sensational these claims, the more viral they become, creating a kind of Bible prophecy industrial complex. The storytellers have changed but the narrative remains the same.
It is not my goal to mock these prophecy failures. I am not going to name names and attack individual pundits in this book. Some of you may be following these individuals and their teachings. I don’t want to insult you or put you on the defensive. I want to address ideas not people and focus on God’s Word, not man’s newspapers. I want to let the Scriptures speak for themselves within their original, ancient Hebrew context. Like most of you, I believe that God’s Word is true and that whatever he prophesies to happen will happen. The question is what was God actually prophesying? Prophecies are often poetic, visionary and cryptic. Metaphors and symbols abound in the ancient Hebrew worldview. Could we have misunderstood what God was saying in the text? Is it possible that we have imported our own context onto the text, creating a pretext? These are the questions I began to ask myself as I studied other views of the end times and began to discover what I was being protected from. The revelations blew my mind.
If this entire system of eschatology is questionable, am I saying that Christ is not coming? Doesn’t 2 Peter 3:3-4 tell us that “scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing… They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’”
I’ll address the theology of that passage in the appendix of this book, but for now suffice it to say that nothing I am about to explain questions the promise of Christ’s coming. Rather, it questions certain interpretations of how that promised coming plays out. There is a difference between the Word of God and someone’s interpretation of the Word of God. Interpretation is what I want to question, not God’s Word.
And so it was that I began to question this dispensational eschatology of the end times. Though I considered other views to be wrong and still others to be heresy, I noticed that one view in particular delved into the time period directly after the book of Acts. It was the generation that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the holy temple in A.D. 70. In all my years of learning dispensational end times teaching, I never heard anything about this important time period in the life of Israel and the life of the church. It was like a black hole of historical knowledge. So out of my interest in history I studied it.
The scholars who explained this material stressed a way of interpreting the Bible that prioritized biblical context over our modern context. They explored the meaning of the bizarre symbols and images in the book of Revelation by finding their counterparts in the Old Testament, not in modern newspapers. It made sense to my evangelical focus on sola scriptura, the Bible as the first context of meaning and the final authority of doctrine. And that opened the door to a transformation of my understanding the Bible in its ancient Jewish and Near Eastern context.