I like free books. So I was excited when I opened a package that contained a book that I had not ordered. Apparently, I’m on someone’s list of notables, because Alfred A. Knopf thought I should have a copy of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. And since I had received an unsolicited copy, surely there were others who were equally blessed with a free copy. I can’t believe that anyone at Knop [...]

On Friday, February 2, 2007, ABC’s “20/20” broadcast a show on the sex-cult “The Family of Love,” known today simply as “The Family.” Prior to its new designation, it was known as The Children of God (COG), a cult founded by David (Moses David) Berg, who used sex as an intoxicant to keep the cult together. Berg once said: “I practice what I preach! And I preach sex, boys and girls. [...]

The “great prophetic disappointment” of 1988 and the fizzle of the Left Behind franchise doesn’t mean formerly “rapture-ready” Christians have abandoned a belief in the return of Christ, but it has led to a fundamental reassessment of the interpretive methodology that has been used to make repeated dogmatic arguments for an imminent end-time event. Many Bible-believing Christians who cut their tee [...]

The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins demonstrates that there has been a large appetite for end-time books, even after a long history of failed predictions made with certainty—from Oswald J. Smith (1889–1986) who in 1926 predicted that Mussolini was the dreaded antichrist**[1]** to Edgar Whisenant who was emphatic that the rapture would take place in 1988. Then it was 1989.[2] Twe [...]

While talk of the end times has been going on for more than two millennia, it was only in the 1970s that prophecy hit the top of the charts. “The single best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s was not The Joy of Sex or even The Joy of Cooking, but Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic pronouncement, The Late Great Planet Earth.”[1] It was named by the New York Times as the “no. 1 non-fiction bestseller of t [...]

I got another one of those nasty emails—all accusation but no substance. These types of emails generally come from people who have little regard for the history of biblical interpretation, use a system-approach to Bible interpretation instead of allowing the Bible to speak for itself, and believe they have been charged with protecting their idea of the Holy Grail doctrine. Here’s the latest instal [...]

Michael Ruse, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, devotes a chapter to the subject of eschatology in his book The Evolution-Creation Struggle.[1] He believes that the interpretive methodology of dispensational premillennialism is inexorably linked to the way its advocates defend their position on creation. Ruse isn’t the first to point this out. I’ve been making the same claim for [...]

Bible prophecy always seems to be in the news. Wars and natural disasters make it a perennial topic of discussion. While talk of the end times has been going on for more than two millennia, it was only with the publication of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 that the topic entered best-seller status. Estimates put sales of the non-fiction book at more than 30 million copies worldwide. [...]

“AN ULTRA-radical Muslim group banned in many countries will promote support for an Islamic superstate in a seminar in Australia this month. Christian critics claim that the seminar, to be conducted by the group Hizb ut-Tahrir, will be a recruiting ground for extremists. Hizb ut-Tahrir believes that the caliphate—a part of the world under Muslim rule that, at its peak, ran from Spain to Iran and b [...]

I received an email about some prophecy “expert” who knows who the antichrist and false prophet are. He says the current leader of Syria is the antichrist and the false prophet is the president of Iran. How many times have you heard so-called prophets pontificating how they know who the antichrist is? Friends, this has been tried before. To rehearse the history would be redundant and e [...]

The opening line of the “Marines’ Hymn”—“From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli”—commemorates the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the war with Tripoli when Marines took Part 1n the capture of Derna on April 27, 1805. There is a new war going on, a war over history. Keith Ellison (D. Minn.), the first Muslim Congressman, told the Detroit Free Press that he used Thomas Jefferson’s two-vol [...]

If we follow the materialists consistently down the materialist road, apart from biology and chemistry, there is nothing. No mind. No logic. No reason. No soul. No love. Even the conceptualization of these non-entities can’t be conceptualized using matter-only presuppositions. If something (a contradiction in itself) can’t be studied using a probe or a microscope, not only doesn’t it exist, it can [...]

Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, seems to have become the darling of the media. His articles pop up everywhere. His latest screed against religion carries the title “Atheists surely aren’t monsters.”[1] He begins by claiming, “Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to eviden [...]

Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle (14:3). After using Rome as His rod to smite Jerusalem, God later turns on Rome in judgment. Once again, Assyria is the model: “I send it against a godless nation and commission it against the people of My fury to capture booty and to seize plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets . [...]

“For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city” (Zech. 14:2). Six thousand Jews were murdered by Alexander Janneus (103–76 B.C.) during the Feast of Tabernacles in the early part of the first century B.C. Here’s how Josep [...]

Zechariah 14 opens with the promise that “a day is coming for the LORD when the spoil taken from you will be divided among you” (Zech. 14:1). No time is specified for when this event will take place. Should we look to our future for fulfillment or are there more proximate events that best fit the historical and theological context of Zechariah’s day? We know that four kingdoms would subjugate Isra [...]

Julie Haberle, 55, of Minnetonka, Minnesota, used to believe in evolution. Nine years ago she dismissed creationism as being “nuts.” After studying the issue, she has come to the conclusion that “evolution is just silly.”[1] It’s no wonder after reading how the highly controlled evolutionary model is defended. Consider the following: A study of the history of science will show that at times scienc [...]

The perception that there has always been a war between religion and science is of recent vintage. The myth finds its most formal statement in the nineteenth-century works of John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). White introduces his work with the claim that [...]

The war between religion and science has mostly been manufactured. The following is attributed to Luther and appears in his Table Talk series and is hardly representative of the scholarship found in 90 volumes of his published works. There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a [...]