Field Guide to the Wild World of Religion: 2011 Edition. Pamela J.D. Dewey
did for me.’ (NIV)
Prophecy is a part of the Bible. Bible study will include a study of those prophecies. This is all good and right. But studying the endless speculations of supposed “prophecy experts” is not the same thing as studying the Bible. When someone becomes addicted to the teachings of one or several of these self-proclaimed experts, spending more and more money on their books and tapes, spending more and more time on their broadcasts and conferences, there is a real danger that such a student will have the illusion that he is “pleasing God” with all of this “effort” and “investment.” He may never realize that God would be much more pleased if he would invest that same amount of time, money, and energy on doing good to his neighbor, and spreading the full Gospel ... not just the shallow “gospel” of one more speculative prophetic scenario that is doomed to fail like all the others of the past 2000 years.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned His disciples what to do with the words He had taught them:
Matthew 7:21-24
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”
And Paul later put prophetic understanding in perspective also:
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
It is impossible to find a Bible passage that praises those who speculate on the meaning of obscure prophetic passages of the Bible. But there is much praise for those who will live out this kind of love in their life.
Personal note from the Author
My interest in failed End Times Prophecy scenarios is not just academic. At one time I was an avid member of a group that was a key player in the End Times Prophecy Movement, the Worldwide Church of God (WCG), led by founder Herbert Armstrong. I have seen first-hand the havoc that can be wrought in the lives of those who get swept up in such obsessions.
When my husband, George, and I first became involved with the WCG in the mid-1960s, three of the main evangelistic booklets distributed by the organization were titled 1975 in Prophecy, The United States and British Commonwealth in Prophecy, and Will Russia Invade America? The 1975 in Prophecy booklet insisted that Christ was going to return to the earth to set up His Millennial Kingdom by 1975, and that prior to this would be a time of terrible trouble called the Great Tribulation. The other booklets declared that the popular prophetic scenario of the time, in which Russia would attack America as part of End Times events, was incorrect. Armstrong was adamant that the final “Beast power” described in Revelation and Daniel would be a united Europe under the leadership of a German leader, and that it would attack and defeat America, taking many Americans to slave labor camps in Europe. Most issues of Armstrong’s monthly Plain Truth magazine included articles that reinforced these scenarios, as well as other articles presenting many other doctrinal and daily living concepts.
We became official members of the church in 1968, and at that point learned of a prophetic detail that was not publicized in the non-member literature we had been receiving. The Church taught that its members were going to be miraculously transported three and a half years before the Second Coming to a Place of Safety, which was strongly speculated to be the site of the ancient abandoned city of Petra in Jordan. (If you have seen the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Petra is the site of the pink buildings carved out of the cliffs at the end of the film.) There the membership would be in special “training” for their roles as leaders in the Millennium, after their physical bodies were changed to spirit bodies at the Return of Christ.
The proofs offered for all these details of prophetic fulfillments were based on reasonings that I now realize to be quite common in the past 200 years. What I was not aware of was that many of the same elements used in Armstrong’s speculations had been used by many other self-styled prophecy experts, with only minor variations, to prove that The End would be in 1844, 1864, 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1925, and many other dates. I was further unaware that even Armstrong himself had dogmatically announced in one of the earliest issues of the Plain Truth, in 1934, that the prophetic time period known as the Day of the Lord would begin in 1936, with the Second Coming to follow shortly thereafter.
I was totally naïve regarding religion when I began studying the literature published by Armstrong’s ministry. I had never read any of the Bible, and had no historical perspective on religious movements which had preceded Armstrong. As many self-proclaimed prophecy experts do, Armstrong would couch his writings in a way that made you feel you were asking questions and getting solid answers from the Bible. In reality, what was actually happening was that he was feeding you the exact questions he wanted you to ponder, so that he could give you the narrow, canned answers he had prepared.
Looking back now, I can see that the proofs offered for these prophetic predictions were utterly speculative—and often utterly fallacious. But looking around at the current crop of prophecy pundits, I see that many, if not most, of them are using the exact same tactics to this day. And they are successful in gathering followings in the same way Armstrong’s teachings drew me into his organization.
Prior to 1972, many members of the Worldwide Church of God made choices about such things as family finances based on the expectation that they would not need family finances after 1972! Many gave large amounts of money to Armstrong’s organization in the belief that they were helping support his evangelistic efforts “in the gun-lap of preaching the Gospel.” Over the years, some even took out loans or mortgaged their homes and sent the money to Church headquarters, at Armstrong’s urging, based on his speculations. When 1972 came and went without the Tribulation starting, and without any hint of fleeing to Petra, many in Armstrong’s group were bewildered. But most were pacified by the excuses given for the prophetic failures, and many continued to sacrifice their own family’s security to support Armstrong’s ministry. Thus we stayed on with the Worldwide Church of God until 1978. At that point a major shake-up in the leadership at the Church headquarters disillusioned us totally, and we left to become part of a split-off group formed by Herbert Armstrong’s son, Garner Ted Armstrong. (For further details about our personal experiences in the WCG, see the Afterword: Personal from the Author.)
In recent years, I have found our experiences in the WCG were quite typical of the experiences of many others who have been swept up by enthusiasm for prophetic scenarios which claim to offer readers, as Armstrong bragged in the title of one of his booklets, The Key to the Book of Revelation. After studying the materials of a wide variety of other self-styled prophetic experts, I am fully convinced that none of them have that Key. They just seem to have the Key to wasting the time, money, energy, and enthusiasm of naïve people. I am not judging the hearts of any specific prophecy pundits—I