Hal lindsey who is the antichrist

With Satan out of the way, at least temporarily, the saints will enjoy the marvelous Millennium, an age characterized by good weather, peace, an end to crime, advancements in knowledge, and the absence of fear. At the end of this period, in a kind of last sporting gesture, God will give Satan one more chance to work his evil ways, and the Prince of Darkness will tempt and win millions of people who became Christians during the Tribulation and the Millennium but who nonetheless remained open to his appeals.

This army of backsliders will muster for one final battle with the faithful believers, at which time God will bring fire down upon the heretics, destroying them where they stand.

Satan and all unbelievers will join the Antichrist and the False Prophet in the lake of fire, where they will be tormented day and night forever. The earth will be destroyed by fire and replaced by a new heaven and a new earth, which will serve as the eternal abode of the redeemed. Since pre-millennial doctrine holds that deterioration in economic, political, domestic, and moral spheres will precede the Second Coming, many evangelicals, unsurprisingly, have felt that the end of the age is near.

The most important catalyst of the current boom in prophecy studies, however, has unquestionably been the political restoration of the nation of Israel. Pre-millennial doctrine presumes that the people of Israel will be in Palestine at the time of Christ's return. The Balfour Declaration, which permitted Jews to settle in Palestine, was widely viewed by pre-millennial fundamentalists as the fulfillment of Jeremiah "I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

In Jesus's discussion of the signs of the end, he told his disciples that "this generation will not pass away till all these things take place" Matthew He was apparently referring to the lifetime of his hearers, but since biblical literalists cannot concede that Jesus may have been mistaken, they conclude that "this generation" refers to those alive when the unmistakable signs of the end begin to appear. Since they regard the restoration of Israel as such a sign, they infer that we are living in the terminal generation.

The chief problem with this interpretation for several years was that Israel was supposed to be not simply in Palestine but in control of Jerusalem as well. When this came to pass, in , at the conclusion of a six-day war that seemed almost miraculous even to many non-believers, expectation within prophetic circles grew feverish. Today, so many pieces of the puzzle seem to have fallen into place that pre-millennial believers display enormous confidence in their interpretative ability.

Almost any scrap of truly bad news is hailed as another sign that we are in the homestretch of history, so that earthquakes, volcanoes, and famine, Russian aggression in Afghanistan, China's emergence as a world power, the rise of OPEC, the revolution in Iran, threats against Israel, unrest in Latin America, weakness of the dollar, increases in abortion, explicit sex on cable television, gay-rights parades, and any other perceived threats to the political, economic, or moral health of America and the world are greeted with an odd sort of self-conscious optimism.

In Hal Lindsey's book, There's a New World Coming, he observes: "As world conditions increasingly fall into the pattern that Jesus spoke of, it may sadden the believer but it should give us a sense of intense anticipation that we are indeed the generation that is standing on the brink of seeing the return of Jesus Christ to this earth!

We are not to wring our hands and say, 'Isn't that awful? It's good. That is a token, an evident token of our salvation, of where God is going to take us. Given the premise that the Bible has something to say about current events, only moderate imagination is required to identify Russia as "Rosh," a leading member of the northern confederation expected, in the prophetic literature, to attack Israel, or China as harboring the "Kings of the East.

Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean are more fanciful but so speculative as to evoke little more than curiosity even from true believers. Students of prophecy do, however, give serious attention to truly important problems, such as scouting out the Antichrist and identifying the Mark of the Beast, since this kind of intelligence may mean the difference between an eternity in heaven and an eternity in hell. As noted earlier, the consensus view of the Antichrist is that he will be a Satan-supported charismatic czar who will institute and enforce a political and economic dictatorship so complete that buying or selling will be impossible without his authorization, symbolized by some form of on the hand or forehead.

The ten-nation confederation that will serve as his power base is widely identified as the Common Market, whose giant computer complex in Luxembourg is said to be nicknamed "The Beast. And some believe that the laser-read computer code on supermarket goods is but one indicator that the Mark of the Beast is already in our midst, just waiting to be applied to humans.

With dozens of documents and photographs to back her claims, Relfe asserts that Olivetti, Lear Siegler, and NCR computer systems, Boss work gloves, Scotty fertilizer, McGregor clothing, shirts made in Communist China, shoes made in Italy, and parts for Caterpillar tractors have all been found bearing as their product code. Sears, J. Penney, and Montgomery Ward are said to use computer programs that call for as a prefix.

Further, Relfe states that when Anwar Sadat reopened the Suez Canal to commercial navigation in , he rode in a warship with emblazoned boldly on its bow, and that tanks built "for President Carter's Secret Service Force" were stamped with , as were metric rulers widely distributed in the U. And in Israel, she writes, is used as a prefix for Arab-owned vehicles, overseas telephone calls, and the national lottery, all as part of an effort "to 'educate,' prepare and condition the Jews to accept ',' which will be the number of their 'False Messiah' the Antichrist and his World Government System.

The False Messiah who is expected to turn these devilish developments to his own ends has been detected by earlier generations in the persons of Nero, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, and similar unworthies. In the s, he was thought by many to be embodied in Henry Kissinger, less because Kissinger displayed any singular talent for wickedness than because, like the putative Antichrist, he was a globe-trotting peacemaker who was gaining worldwide attention and adulation.

To feed this speculation, David Webber, pastor of the Southwest Radio Church and a longtime prophecy student, noted that in a numerological system in which A equals 6 the number of man, who was created on the sixth day and subsequently messed up a brand-new universe , B equals 12, C equals 18, and so forth, the numerical value of "Kissinger" is With the dimming of Kissinger's star, the world stage was ready for other likely candidates.

In , Relfe declared: "My prudent assessment is that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt is either history's nearest prototype or the real Mr.

Hal Lindsey, who predicted Sadat's assassination, declines to name a specific individual, but says he believes the Antichrist is a passionate humanist who "lives right now somewhere in Europe. These attempts to read the signs of the times are not fundamentalist equivalents of brain twisters and Double-Crostics; they lead to concrete directives for action.

David Terrell, a fanatical minor league radio-and-television preacher who does not accept the Scofield Bible's view of the Rapture, insists that the church will experience the Tribulation an opinion shared by Pat Robertson and has persuaded several thousand of his followers to move to rural areas in the South and Southwest precisely because he wants them to get through the seven-year period without having to buy or sell, and thus without having to receive the damnable Mark of the Beast.

Relfe, who believes the Rapture will occur midway through the Tribulation, recommends erecting a shelter, planting a garden on a small plot of land outside the city, and setting aside a bag of silver coins for every member of the family. In anticipation of the Beast, some Christians have borrowed money they never expected to pay back, because they were certain Jesus would return before the debts came due. Herbert W. Armstrong's empire suffered a serious blow when the end failed to begin in January of , as Armstrong had predicted, thus bringing hardship to many people who had given most of their assets to the church in the expectation of going to Petra, where such worldly possessions would be useless.

Belief will surely influence behavior in other ways as well. I doubt, for example, that people I have heard weeping and moaning in darkened auditoriums while itinerant doomsayers showed their slides will quietly accept any form of national identification card such as is used in some European countries and has occasionally been proposed for America. And I suspect that some supporters of the Southwest Radio Church or of Mary Stewart Relfe's ministry are unlikely to subscribe to cable TV, since both Relfe and SRC warn of a fiber-optics cable that can transmit sounds and pictures from one's home to a distant monitor, even with the set turned off.

More significant, one has to consider how pre-millennial theology will manifest itself in the activities of the Christian New Right, many of whose members accept its tenets. Secretary of the Interior James Watt has emphatically denied that his remark to a House Interior Committee "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns" implied that we should not be greatly concerned with long-range husbanding of natural resources.

But one is hard-pressed to understand why he raised the issue if that was not precisely what he meant. This book takes us on a fascinating journey through the dark side of the American religious psyche, from the earliest American colonists right up to contemporary fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey. Robert C. Fuller, author Bradley University Author Webpage. Forgot password?

Don't have an account? All Rights Reserved. OSO version 0. University Press Scholarship Online. Sign in. Not registered? Sign up. The Jesus Movement, a vast, amorphous revival and renewal movement among youth, had many faces churches, communes, coffeehouses, free newspapers, street ministries that shared an anti-institutional approach to religion and a fundamentalist theology.

They were unlike the counterculture, however, in that they pursued these ends not through drugs, but through Bible study and prayer. It bore little resemblance to the controversial communes whose residents turned their backs on this world to study the Bible and evangelize on the streets. It appeared next to the Bible in almost every movement commune, church, or coffeehouse, and was responsible for drawing in converts. For them, it was engaging fiction.

They found its fantastic elements appealing precisely because they offered escape from contemporary life, and certainly nobody was moved to action. Some readers recognized the book as both religion and speculative fiction.

One reader wrote that he discussed the book with his colleagues when he was in seminary i. For some, its sci-fi and fantasy elements were what made the book so bad. Readers made themselves partisans of their flag book, but did not engage with those outside their reading circles. To read and talk about these books was a way of publicly claiming a particular religious identity and membership in a community of believers. Indeed, the most striking fact about the 81 Amazon reviews I studied is the vitriolic debate between insiders and outsiders.

On Amazon, most of the reviews give the book either five stars the maximum or one star the minimum , with many expressing the fervent desire to award zero stars or negative numbers. Readers seem to fit into three groups: true believers who are keeping the faith, lapsed believers who have since reevaluated their commitment to Lindsey and his theology, and those who are full of contempt for Lindsey and his work. Those who disliked the book were equally impassioned.

Yet the author continues to be admired in fundamentalist circles. What does that tell you? Sometimes the book had the endorsement of church leaders. Churches, Lindsey maintained, either could not communicate the truth about Jesus in ways young people found compelling, or they were not seeking the truth at all.

I found that fear was often expressed in the Amazon reviews I analyzed. Many were concerned for their own salvation. For others, the fear was for the nation and the world.

The Cold War, environmental degradation, the arms race: They all contributed to a millennial panic that was ahead of the actual millennium. I can remember waking up from a nightmare about this. Some remember not fear, but excitement.