I’ve always said that prophetic views have real world consequences. This is especially true when it comes to popular prophecy beliefs and their relation to prophetic inevitabilities. When Jesus told His disciples that the temple would be destroyed before their generation passed away, He issued a warning. Leave the city. The final warning was when Jerusalem was surrounded by armies (Luke 21:20). The conflagration could have been escaped on foot (Matt. 24:15-21). That approaching judgment was not a worldwide event as so many prophecy pundits claim today—a prophetic inevitability that cannot be escaped. It must happen. It will happen. Even though many premillennialists hold this view, they support ministries that repatriate Jews back to Israel. As I’ve noted in previous articles and podcasts, as dispensationalists believe, the returning Jews await another holocaust.
Dwight Wilson, author of Armageddon Now!, who describes himself this way: “a third-generation premillenarian who has spent his whole life in premillennialist churches, has attended a premillennialist Bible college, and has taught in such a college for fourteen years.”[1] He argues that some noted premillennialists advocated a “hands off” policy regarding Nazi persecutions of the Jews during World War II. Since, according to dispensational views regarding Bible prophecy, “the Gentile nations are permitted to afflict Israel in chastisement for her national sins,” there is little that should be done to oppose it. Wilson writes, “It is regrettable that this view allowed premillennialists to expect the phenomenon of ‘anti-Semitism’ and tolerate it matter-of-factly.”[2]
Identifying the Real Last Days Scoffers
The judgment coming that the New Testament describes was leveled against Israel in the period leading up to the temple’s destruction in A.D. 70 (Matt. 22:1–14). It was this event that bred a generation of prophetic scoffers since nearly four decades had passed with no change in Israel’s situation. The temple was still standing, stone upon stone, when the scoffers began to ridicule the earlier predictions. Identifying the Real Last Days Scoffers is an eye-opening account of how today’s prophetic speculators are the real last days scoffers.
Buy NowWilson describes “premillenarian views” opposing “anti-Semitism” in the mid-thirties and thereafter as “ambivalent.”[3] There was little moral outcry “among the premillenarians . . . against the persecution, since they had been expecting it.”[4] He continues:
Another comment regarding the general European anti-Semitism depicted these developments as part of the on-going plan of God for the nation; they were “Foregleams of Israel’s Tribulation.” Premillennialists were anticipating the Great Tribulation, “the time of Jacob’s trouble.” Therefore, they predicted, “The next scene in Israel’s history may be summed up in three words: purification through tribulation.” It was clear that although this purification was part of the curse, God did not intend that Christians should participate in it. Clear, also, was the implication that He did intend for the Germans to participate in it (in spite of the fact that it would bring them punishment) . . . and that any moral outcry against Germany would have been in opposition to God’s will. In such a fatalistic system, to oppose Hitler was to oppose God.[5]
Wilson maintains that it was the view of a predicted Jewish persecution prior to the Second Coming that led to a “hands off” policy when it came to speaking out against virulent “anti-Semitism.” “For the premillenarian, the massacre of Jewry expedited his blessed hope. Certainly he did not rejoice over the Nazi holocaust, he just fatalistically observed it as a ‘sign of the times.’”[6]
Premillennialist James M. Gray of the Moody Bible Institute believed in the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Go here and here for a brief history of the document. Gray defended Henry Ford when Ford published installments of the Protocols in his self-funded Dearborn Independent newspaper. In a 1927 editorial in the Moody Bible Institute Monthly, Gray claimed that Ford “had good grounds for publishing some of the things about the Jews. . . . Mr. Ford might have found corroborative evidence [of the Jewish conspiracy] had he looked for it.”[7] If you want to read about a real worldwide conspiracy to take over the world, I suggest you read the Koran and Islamic writings and today’s Globalists. The reason The Protocols are often adopted as a conspiracy document is that people have been trying to control the world. It’s no less true today as we are seeing with the Great Reset. Yes, there are some Jews, for example the atheistic homosexual Yuval Noah Harari, but most globalists are not Jews. Many Jews today are secularists like many non-Jews. The late Davidd Chilton wrote a newsletter on this issue that I am unable to find.
As time went on, Gray was coming under increasing pressure to repudiate the Protocols as a forgery. Not only Gray, but Moody Bible Institute Monthly was being criticized by the evangelical Hebrew Christian Alliance for not condemning the manufactured Protocols. Gray grew indignant and once again voiced his belief that the Protocols were authentic. He did this in the Moody Bible Institute Monthly. Gray, of course, pointed out that “Moody Bible Institute had always worked for the highest interests of Jews by training people to evangelize them.”[8]
Even so, Gray went on to assert that “Jews were at least partly to blame for their ill treatment.” He supported this contention by referring his readers to an article written by Max Reich, a faculty member at the Moody Bible Institute. Reich wrote: “Without religion, the Jew goes down and becomes worse than others, as a corruption of the best is always the worst corruption.”[9]
Charges of “anti-Semitism” were not abated by Gray’s attempts at clarification. His views concerning the Jews remained. “By the beginning of 1935, Gray was fending off charges from the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, the Bulletin of the Baltimore Branch of the American Jewish Congress, and even Time magazine that persons connected with Moody had been actively distributing the Protocols.”[10]
Of course, Gray was not the only dispensational premillennialist who vouched for the genuineness of the Protocols and had rather negative (anti-Semitic) things to say about the Jews. Arno C. Gaebelein, an editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, believed that the Protocols were authentic, that they accurately revealed a “Jewish conspiracy.” His Conflict of the Ages[11] would be viewed today as an anti-Semitic work because it fostered the belief that communism had Jewish roots and that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 had been masterminded by a group of well-trained Jewish agitators.
At the same time Gaebelein was using anti-Semitic rhetoric, he had a thriving evangelistic ministry to Jews in New York City. Why the double mindedness? Dispensationalism expects both the persecution and salvation of the Jews.[12] This is why George Marsden could write that “fundamentalists between [World War I and II] could be both pro-Zionist and somewhat anti-Semitic, favoring the return of the Jews to Israel, which would lead eventually to their conversion; yet in the meantime especially distrusting apostate Jews.”[13]
Ten Popular Prophecy Myths Exposed and Answered
As a result of many failed predictions, many Christians are beginning to take a second look at a prophetic system that they were told is the only one that takes the literal interpretation of the Bible seriously. Gary DeMar has taken on the task of exposing some of the popular myths foisted upon the public by prophetic speculators.
Buy NowThe ultimate solution to what we are seeing in the Middle East is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead of making this clear to today’s Jews, too many Evangelicals have carved out a special redemptive space for Israel. “They are God’s chosen people.” Most Jews today are like any other people group without Christ, and this includes Muslims. In terms of Jesus Christ, today’s Jews and Muslims are on the same page about Jesus. Evangelical writers should stop with the special carve out for Israel. Today’s Jews need Jesus, and they should be told that. The same is true for Muslims. We will not see true peace in the Middle East until these two warring peoples embrace Jesus, put down their weapons, and embrace Jesus as the Great Reconciler.
[1]Dwight Wilson, Armageddon Now!: The Premillenarian Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1977), 13.
[2]Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 16.
[3]Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 94.
[4]Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 94.
[5]Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 94. Emphasis added.
[6]Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 95.
[7]Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan/Academie, 1983), 189.
[8]Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 189.
[9]Quoted in Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 190.
[10]Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 189.
[11]Arno Clemens Gaebelein, The Conflict of the Ages: The Mystery of Lawlessness: Its Origin, Historic Development and Coming Defeat (New York: Publication Office “Our Hope,” 1933).
[12]Timothy P. Weber, “A Reply to David Rausch’s ‘Fundamentalism and the Jew,’” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March 1981), 70.
[13]George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism: 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 187–188, note 15.