By Jack Kinsella
“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:” (2 Peter 3:3-6)
The Apostle Peter’s second epistle was written as he was awaiting his martyrdom. Generally speaking, when a man knows he is about to die, there are two things that are universally accepted. The first is that he will share what is most important to him. The second is that he is telling the truth.
Even secular courts give great weight to a deathbed confession, on the grounds that a person who is about to die has no motive or reason to lie.
What was most important to Peter? Warning of what he called a “willing ignorance” about the approach of the last days, the return of Christ and the reclamation of the world.
There is no question that Bible prophecy can become a playground for liars and lunatics. Just look how many times Harold Camping has predicted the date of the Rapture. Then look how many times he was wrong and yet he STILL had people believing him.
Look how many false prophets claim to have direct revelation from God that either changes or adds to the Biblical record.
And yet they have no shortage of followers. It requires a “willing ignorance.”
Bill Koenig makes the point in his excellent “World Watch Daily” that roughly 100 million American church members have no understanding of Bible prophecy before pinpointing what I believe is one of the two main reasons why.
Koenig notes that of the twenty-five largest American church denominations, at least fourteen of them are supersessionist, meaning they adhere to the doctrine of replacement theology.
They believe that God abandoned the Jews after they rejected the Messiah and the covenant promises to the Jews were then transferred to the Church.
By this view, Israel is just another country in the Middle East. The Jews of Israel are not the Jews of the Old Testament, and even if they were, they are rejected by God and therefore worthy of rejection by the Church.
If the restoration of Israel is not a fulfillment of Bible prophecy (and it cannot be, according to supersessionism) then the entire prophetic timetable collapses, since all Bible prophecy for the last days centers around a restored Jewish state called “Israel.”
Since Israel is Jewish, is restored where God said it would be and follows the prophetic script to the letter (right down to being “born in a day”) arguing it is irrelevant to Bible prophecy is willing ignorance of the highest order.
The second reason that so many Christians deny Bible prophecy is fear. If Bible prophecy is true, then it means that the Lord will come back sometime within the lifetime of those who witnessed Israel’s restoration sixty-four years ago.
That would mean that time is rapidly running out. Unless it is all in the imagination of a bunch of Jew-loving crackpots who take some kind of demented joy out of believing in doomsday, which is evidently their preferred scenario.
This baffles me. The world is clearly on the brink of chaos and collapse. The probability of a global, total war is high and getting higher every day. Unless something happens to prevent total war, the result will be the annihilation of the human race.
No comments:
Post a Comment