Gary discusses an economic statement made by a seminary professor surrounding economics and Revelation 6.
Prophetic speculation is popular. Who doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen in the future, especially if it’s bad and there’s a way to escape it? The rapture is the escape hatch for a troubling future. That’s why the rapture has been described by some as the Great Escape.
Charles Wesley Ewing, writing in 1983, paints a clear historical picture of how prophetic interpretation based on current events turns to confusion, uncertainty, and in some people unbelief when it comes to predicting an end that disappoints:
In 1934, Benito Mussolini sent his black-shirted Fascists down into defenseless Ethiopia and preachers all over the country got up in their pulpits and preached spellbinding sermons that had their congregations bulging at the eyes in astonishment about “Mussolini, the Anti-Christ,” and to prove their point they quoted from Daniel 11:43, which says, ‘And the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.’ Later, Benito, whimpering, was [shot and later] hung by his own countrymen, and preachers all over America had to toss their sermons into the scrap basket as unscriptural.[1]
Ewing mentions how Hitler’s storm troopers took Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, North Africa, and set up concentration camps where millions of Jews were killed in the modern definition of “holocaust.” Again, preachers took to their pulpits and linked these events to Bible prophecy and assured the world that Hitler was the antichrist and the rapture was just around the next bend. When the allies routed the Nazis and drove them out, sermons were again tossed out or filed away to be revised at some future date hoping peoples’ memories would fade.
The next end-time antichrist candidate was Joseph Stalin, the leader of godless Communism, a movement hell-bent on conquering the world. “But on March 5, 1953, Stalin had a brain hemorrhage and preachers all over America had to make another trip to the waste basket.”[2]
Failure to understand the timing of Jesus’ pronouncements about prophetic events and their time (e.g., Luke 13:34–35; 19:41– 44) can lead many astray. While fixating on the false doctrine of five different rapture positions, evil continues to make progress because the future is secondary to the church being taken off the earth.
The Rapture and the Fig Tree Generation
Since the national reestablishment of Israel in 1948, countless books and pamphlets have been written defending the doctrine assuring readers that the rapture could happen at any moment. Some prophecy writers claimed it would take place before 1988. We are far removed from that date. Where are we in God’s prophetic timetable?
Buy NowGary discusses an economic statement made by a seminary professor surrounding economics and Revelation 6. This professor said that inflation will be much worse during what he believes is a future “great tribulation.” Gary responds to both the economic and the biblical statements required by such a view.
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[1] Charles Wesley Ewing, “The Comedy of Errors,” The Kingdom Digest (July 1983), 45.
[2] Ewing, “The Comedy of Errors,” 45–46.