"God Gave Me a Revelation About Imminent World Cataclysms. I'll Sell It to You for Only $5, Plus Postage and Handling."
Sept. 29, 2009
Recently, I was asked on a forum what I thought about a 1970s-era book whose author claimed to have had a vision from God regarding terrible events about to happen. That book made the author's reputation. The book is so famous that half of the wiki entry on the author is devoted to its prophecies. They did not come true.
This book is still taken seriously. Some of its forecasts were general: increasing sin. That forecast did not take special revelation from God. It took only the ability to read a newspaper. A lot of the sins have become prominent.
Examples. There will be earthquakes. There will be floods. Yes, there have been. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Topless women will appear on cable television. Yes, this has happened. If he had predicted the Web's free video amateur porn sites, that would have been impressive.
The book sold because of the cataclysms he predicted. They have not happened. This is par for the course in paperback Bible prophecy books.
I went to his website. He still sells the book, with a couple of extra chapters. It costs $5. There is no link to a free PDF of the book.
In the Bible, none of the prophets ever sold their revelations. They gave them away.
When someone says, "God spoke to me," I stop listening. When he says he will sell me a book about what God told him, I write him off as either a con man or a self-deluded man. There are a lot of both in Christian circles. They come and go.
I am not speaking of Hal Lindsey's Late, Great Planet Earth (1970). Lindsey has never claimed special revelation from God. I am speaking of a Hal Lindsey wanna-be. Like Lindsey, he has continued to write prophecy potboilers.
He never went as far as Lindsey did with respect to critics of his books. He has never accused those who do not share his view of prophecy of being anti-semitic. I was a target of Lindsey's accusation. I obtained a pre-publication copy of Lindsey's book. I then hired Gary DeMar, another victim, to co-author a book refuting Lindsey's book. The whole process took 30 days, which was fast back then, before print-on-demand technology. Our book was ready for the Christian Booksellers Convention, where his book was publicly released. You can read it here. Why anyone would want to imitate Lindsey baffles me. But this man did.
To claim that God has personally intervened in history to entrust to you a unique message for the world is to claim prophetic judicial status. Under the Mosaic law in Israel, if a man claimed to be a prophet and made a prophecy that did not come true, the state was requited to execute him (Deut. 13:5). This law reduced the supply of self-proclaimed prophets.
Predictions about Bible prophecies that are about to come true are always unwise. But they can be mistakes. They are part of what Gary DeMar has called Last Days Madness. Read this book for a long list of prophecies that have not come true.
Predictions based on a private revelation constitute false prophecy. Never, under any circumstances, pay any attention to these predictions or the person who makes them.
No prophet in the Bible ever sold the details of his prophecy. He announced it to the world, or to the person God told him to announce it to. No money was involved.
Predictions are legitimate. Explaining Bible texts is legitimate. But anyone claiming special revelation from God is not to be trusted. He is saying that he has access to insight from God, personally, that is closed to anyone who has not received a revelation from God. He is placing his revelation above the Bible and above the intellectual division of labor of the church (Rom. 12, I Cor. 12).
In the introduction to a later book by this man, written 25 years after the first one, he disclaimed special revelation from God. So, it was just another prophecy potboiler. It never sold the way his first book did. Over three decades later, people are still being deceived by that book. The man on the forum wanted my opinion of the first book, not the second. I gave it to him. I have removed the thread from my site. This way, I can write this without selling any more copies of his books.
In the Bible, we read of a self-confident man, Eliphaz the Temanite, who gave Job a piece of his mind. He claimed that he had received visions from a spirit. The spirit had informed him about human folly (Job 4:12-21). Eliphaz then told Job that Job was in rebellion against God.
At the end of the book, God told Eliphaz that He was furious against him for speaking against Job. He told him that he owed God animals, and that he should give them to Job. Job would sacrifice them on behalf of Eliphaz (Job 42:7-8). Eliphaz ate a large helping of crow.
Eliphaz had been very confident. He had received a vision. What was that vision worth? Less than nothing. He would have been better off if he had never been visited by that spirit. It is not clear if the spirit was lying or Eliphaz was misinterpreting. It did not matter. Eliphaz was in sin. He paid for his sin. He has come down through history as a big-mouth jerk who should have kept his mouth tightly shut.
So should a lot of others who have had visions from spirits.
I write this because some site members travel in circles where sensational books on prophecies are sold by sensation-seeking people. Some of these book-sellers claim special revelation. Ignore them. There is more than enough bad news.
This interest in Bible prophecy is a recent phenomenon in Christian circles. In the late Middle Ages, only revolutionary groups were interested in the subject. This refusal to correlate current events and Bible prophecy remained the case until the 19th century. For a history of this, read DeMar's article.
Note: We never get paperback prophecy books of sensationally good news -- not even green shoots. Yet the word "gospel" means "good news." Go figure.
If you want a Bible prophecy book on good news ahead, read David Chilton's Paradise Restored. I published it in 1985. It's free to download.
If, after you read the print-out, you want a hardback copy, buy it from Gary DeMar's American Vision.