Requiem for a false prophet

Hal Lindsey never failed to make failed prognostications

Hal Lindsey has died at the ripe old age of 95.

If your first reaction to this news is “Who was Hal Lindsey?” then I am both happy and sad for you. I am happy that you did not have to endure the repeated prognostications about the “rapture” and “the end of the world” that he propagated ad nauseum for nearly half a century. I am sad that you missed out on the hilarious entertainment value of such prognostications.

The flawed hermeneutic of dispensationalism that John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Ingersoll Scofield developed and systematized, respectively, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hal Lindsey popularized in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. His magnum opus, The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, was a runaway bestseller whose unfortunate influence on evangelical thinking on the end times is still felt to this day.

Lindsey, however, was neither a careful theologian nor a thoughtful biblical scholar. His writings were regurgitations of earlier dispensationalists simply delivered in a popular, easily readable style that appealed to the masses and made him a small fortune over the years. His pen has been relatively silent over the last decade but some of his final writings, published on (but, apparently, since removed from) the online news site WorldNetDaily in the early 2010’s, provided me with amply material for critique during the heyday of the original blogosphere. One column, published February 6, 2009, could just as easily have been written yesterday of fifty years ago. In it, Lindsey repeated the claim he had been making for four decades by then, namely, that “the end” was near.

Taking a step back and looking at the Big Picture, it is hard not to miss the fact that events are developing in concert with the ancient prophecies of Scripture.

The Prophet Isaiah foretold the "burden of Damascus" (Isaiah 17:1) in which the prophet predicts the overnight destruction of that great city in the last days: “At evening time, behold there is terror! Before morning they are no more. Such will be the portion of those who plunder us, and the lot of those who pillage us.” (Isaiah 17:14)

The Prophet Ezekiel predicts an alliance between Russia and an Islamic confederacy headed by Iran, or Persia.

Hamas continues to attack Israel with rocket attacks for the sheer joy of the violence of it all. Related to this, the Prophet Obadiah pronounced this verdict against Edom, who is one of the forefathers of the people of Hamas, saying, “Because of violence to your brother Jacob, you will be covered with shame, and you will be cut off forever.” Interestingly, the word translated as “violence” in this Scripture is the Hebrew word, chamac, pronounced “hamas.”

Of all the generations in history, it is to this generation that the prophecies of the last days are addressed. Previous generations looked for the signs given by Scripture, but only this generation can truly see them all come together at one time – which is itself a key fulfillment of prophecy.

The Prophet Daniel predicted these conditions: “And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, ‘Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.’” (Daniel 12:8-9) We are witnessing the “unsealing” of the end-times prophecies.

Charles Spurgeon, the nineteenth century “prince of preachers,” decried and belittled his contemporaries who engaged in what he called “exegesis by current events.” Lindsey was no contemporary of Spurgeon, but he was the unrivaled master of this dubious technique. Its fatal flaw should be obvious to any serious student of the Bible. It violates one of the basic rules of biblical interpretation, namely, that Scripture is its own best interpreter. The prophecies of Daniel which were “closed up and sealed till the time of the end” were, in fact, unsealed in the final book of the New Testament.

In the grand narrative of the Bible, Daniel and Revelation are two parts of the same whole. When John begins to “weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it,” he is consoled by one of the elders around the throne of God, who says to him, “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals” (Revelation 5:4-5).

The book that Daniel had been instructed to seal is now unsealed. The fullness of God's plan for the redemption of the world has been revealed in Jesus Christ. He is “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David” who “has conquered” the forces of sin, death, and hell through his life, death, and resurrection “so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”

Just what part of “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals” did Lindsey not understand? That he never did understand, despite being blessed with a life spanning nearly a century, is truly a tragedy.