Facebook and YouTube are filled with amateur prophecy pundits who are out of touch with failed prophecy claims going back many centuries. It worsened with the advent of dispensational premillennialism and its various incarnations. Even so, it’s hard for many Christians to reason outside the dispensational bubble. It’s all they’ve heard or known. The dispensational bubble is their protective home. Thinking outside the dispensational bubble results in prophetic danger. They are not equipped to deal with prophetic questions in a game of eschatological Trivial Pursuit.
A YouTuber claimed I was getting my information about Bible prophecy from TikTok. What a joke. I’ve been studying, writing, and debating the topic of Bible prophecy for more than 45 years. My time researching this subject does not make me right, but it does make me informed. In 1970, Hal Lindsey and Chuck Smith predicted that the rapture would occur before 1988. Edgar Whisenant gave 88 Reasons Why the Rapture is in 1988. Tim LaHaye stated that the World War I generation was the last generation before the rapture in the 1972 edition of his book The Beginning of the End. He later moved the goal post in the 1991 edition.[1] Henry Morris said, “The generation which sees all these signs (probably starting with World War I).”[2]
Last Days Madness
In this authoritative book, Gary DeMar clears the haze of "end-times" fever, shedding light on the most difficult and studied prophetic passages in the Bible, including Daniel 7:13-14; 9:24-27; Matt. 16:27-28; 24-25; Thess. 2; 2 Peter 3:3-13, and clearly explaining a host of other controversial topics.
Buy NowThe YouTuber stressed that God’s covenant with Israel is everlasting. Jesus proved that to be true by coming first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. 10:6). Paul said, “to the Jew first” (1:16). The first believers in Jesus were Jews (Acts 2:5). The Promise was for the Jews and their children (2:39-41). What else did Jesus have to do? Nothing. Jesus was emphatic: “It is finished” (John 19:30). Nothing was postponed or delayed. The prophecy clock did not stop. Jesus did not start the “church” as Plan B because God’s Plan A with the Jews failed. It was always about the remnant (Rom. 9:27). In fact, dispensationalism holds that Romans 11:26—“all Israel will be saved”—refers to a remnant of Israel in the aftermath of the post-rapture great tribulation.
The YouTuber mentioned Jeremiah 31:35-37 as evidence that God is not finished with Israel:
This is what the LORD says,
He who gives the sun for light by day
And the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night,
Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—
The LORD of armies is His name:
“If this fixed order departs
From Me,” declares the LORD,
“Then the descendants of Israel also will cease
To be a nation before Me forever.”This is what the LORD says:
“If the heavens above can be measured
And the foundations of the earth searched out below,
Then I will also reject all the descendants of Israel
For everything that they have done,” declares the LORD.
God was not and is not finished with Israel. Nothing is standing in the way of any Jew or Gentile coming to Jesus. Being back in the land isn’t going to save anyone! Today’s Jews in Israel are riding on a false hope. The same is true of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists, and everyone who does not name the name of Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
What did Jesus say in Matthew 24:29? “But immediately after the tribulation of those days THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED, AND THE MOON WILL NOT GIVE ITS LIGHT, AND THE STARS WILL FALL from heaven [ouranou/οὐρανοῦ], and the powers of the heavens [ouronōv/οὐρανῶν] will be shaken.” This seems to present a problem with the YouTuber’s prophetic views. If what Jesus said refers to the physical sun, moon, and stars during a future great tribulation after the “rapture,” then what is stated in Jeremiah 31:35-37 means that God’s covenant with Israel will end after the great tribulation.
If what Jesus said refers to the covenantal heavens and earth, the result is the same: the end of Israel’s exclusive covenant in AD 70 with the destruction of the temple and the end of that generation (Matt. 24:34). God has established an expanded version of the people of God made up of Jews and Gentiles. Jesus intimated as much in Matthew 21:43-44: “Therefore I say to you [chief priests and pharisees], the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing its fruit. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and on whomever it falls, it will crush him.” The covenants that were once exclusive to Israel are now available to the nations. The dividing wall was broken down (Eph. 2:11-22). Israel was not replaced; the covenant was expanded by grafting in Gentiles (Rom. 11:17) so that Jews and Gentiles in Jesus “are fellow-citizens and are of God’s household” (Eph. 2:19).
The YouTuber claimed that Isaiah 11:12 refers to the 1948 return of Jews to their ancestral land. This is not true. The phrase “second time” refers to the return of the 12 tribes from the Assyrian-Babylonian captivity, as described in Ezra and Nehemiah. The “first time” refers to when Israel “came up out of the land of Egypt” (11:16). Modern Israel is not mentioned in the prophecy, and there is no indication in the New Testament of Jews returning to their land as a fulfillment of prophecy. It’s another one of those “Bubble Boy Prophecies” that’s defined and confined by the dispensational system. It’s equivalent to answering “The Moops” instead of the Moors.
The YouTuber mentions Hymenaeus and Philetus in 2 Timothy 2:15-18 (also Alexander in 1 Timothy 1:18-20) as if Paul’s mention of them supports dispensationalism. They were not claiming that physical bodies had risen from the dead because all anyone had to do to prove them wrong was to look at some tombs of the departed saints. Mike Sullivan offers a helpful interpretation of why Paul referred to the teachings of Hymenaeus, Philetus, and Alexander as a cancer.
According to the teaching of Hymenaeus and Philetus, because Jerusalem and the temple still stood (in about AD 67) after the resurrection had allegedly already taken place, it irresistibly followed that “the sons according to the flesh” were now the heirs of the eternal kingdom and that Paul’s Jew-Gentile gospel of grace was a lie. The blasphemous error of Hymenaeus and Philetus was that the world of the Mosaic covenant would remain forever established after the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets had taken place and the new heavens and new earth (“the resurrection”) had arrived.
Hymenaeus and Philetus were most likely in league with the scoffers of 2 Peter 3:3-4, asking, “Where is the promise of His coming?” They were the antichrists mentioned by John (1 John 2:18, 22).
The YouTuber wrote, “‘this generation’ should be taken to mean the generation that is alive to see the beginning of the events described in Matthew 24.” Notice how the YouTuber added words to the verse. LaHaye and Thomas Ice did the same to get the exact needed result: “The [remove this] generation that sees these signs will not pass away until all these things take place.”[3] Jesus always used “this generation” to refer to His contemporaries (Matt. 11:16; 12:41, 42; 23:36; 24:34; Mark 8:12; 13:30; Luke 7:31; 11:29, 30, 31, 32, 50, 51; 17:25; 21:32), and it doesn’t mean any other generation than their generation. Jesus also did not say “this type of generation.”
If Jesus had a future generation in view, He would have said “that generation.” F.F. Bruce states that “[t]he phrase ‘this generation’ is found too often on Jesus’ lips in this literal sense for us to suppose that it suddenly takes on a different meaning in the saying we are now examining. Moreover, if the generation of the end-time had been intended, ‘that generation’ would have been a more natural way of referring to it than ‘this generation.”[4] D. A. Carson, among many others, states, “[This generation] can only with the greatest difficulty be made to mean anything other than the generation living when Jesus spoke.”[5]
The clincher is found in Matthew 24:33: “even so YOU too, when YOU see all these things, recognize that He is near, at the doors.” The YOU referred to those to whom Jesus was speaking, some of the same people He mentioned in 10:23. If Jesus had a future generation in mind, He would have said, “when they see.” The use of the second-person plural begins in Matthew 21, when Jesus was on the Mount of Olives. Even Jesus’ religious opponents comprehended His meaning. “They understood that He was speaking about them (21:25).
How many times over nearly 2000 years have Christians been told, “We are seeing these events come to pass in our day”? Jesus said we would always have tribulation. Almost every major war in the world was used as evidence that it was a sign of the last days. World War II was a significant example, marked by the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, who were perceived as potential antichrist candidates. So were Gorbachev and Kissinger. The same is true with technology, from railroads (Dan. 12:4) to barcodes, RFID systems, and AI. See Francis X. Gumerlock’s book The Day and the Hour for a 2000-year history of prophetic speculation.
The Day and the Hour
Throughout Christian history, bizarre fringe groups and well-meaning saints alike have been fully convinced that events in their lifetime were fulfilling Bible prophecy. In The Day and The Hour, Gumerlock spans two thousand years of conjecture on the last days, disclosing the dreams and delusions of those who believed that their sect was the 144,000 of Revelation 7; that the 1290 days of Daniel 12 had expired in their generation; that the "Man of Sin" of II Thessalonians 2 was reigning in their time; that a Rapture of the saints, a Great Tribulation, a Battle of Armageddon were just around the corner; or that a Millennial Kingdom was about to dawn.
Buy NowAs expected, the YouTuber brings up Daniel 9:24-27 with the obligatory 2000-year gap between the 69th and 70thweeks, where supposedly the antichrist is found, who allegedly makes a covenant with the Jews and then breaks it, and then unleashes hell on the world, including the murder of millions of Jews and the slaughter of billions of people around the world. We’re told that this is the way “all Israel will be saved.” It’s long past time to burst the dispensational end-time bubble.
[1] Tim LaHaye, The Beginning of the End, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1991), 193.
[2] Henry M. Morris, The Defender’s Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: World Publishing, 1995), 1045.
[3] Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice, Charting the End Times: A Visual Guide to Understanding Bible Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2001), 36.
[4] F. F. Bruce, The Hard Sayings of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983), 227.
[5] D.A. Carson, “Matthew” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, gen. ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, 12 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985), 8:507.