March 16 Sorry Dave, Your Visions Aren’t Needed
I have received dozens of emails concerning the prediction made by David Wilkerson, pastor of Times Square Church in New York. Because several news organizations have featured his doomsday warnings, I thought I should comment on them. Here is what Wilkerson posted on his blog:
"I am compelled by the Holy Spirit to send out an urgent message to all on our mailing list, and to friends and to bishops we have met all over the world.
AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE - EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US."
After pulling the fire alarm, Dave gives us this dire prediction:
"For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires—such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago.
There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be looting—including Times Square, New York City. What we are experiencing now is not a recession, not even a depression. We are under God’s wrath."
I have a big problem with David Wilkerson's so-called visions. This is not the first time he has warned of calamity coming to America. He has a rather long track record of making these predictions.
I first read of his fetish for prognostication from a book he wrote entitled, The Vision. Published in 1974, it claimed that America was headed for calamitous horrors in the near future. Several times in the book, he said his visions would occur within the next decade. He also linked a number of current events to the end times. Here are some of his failed predictions:
Marijuana will be legalized.
Nude dancing in church will become popular.
We will see “Satan evangelists” witnessing to people.
Bands of homosexuals will roam the streets, raping people at will.
A new drug will cause teenagers to become more sexually active.
Environmentalists will come under heavy criticism.
Storms with huge hailstones will kill thousands of people and cause massive damage.
The U.S. dollar will collapse.
There will be a major famine in America.
Wilkerson was wrong because his forecasting was heavily tied to trends of the ‘70s. For example, the drug culture and the sexual revolution were both peaking as he wrote this book. One of his most glaring errors was predicting economic calamity right as the stock market was bottoming out in the ‘73-‘74 recession.
For the latter part of the ‘80s, I was on Wilkerson’s newsletter mailing list, and I remember him continuously spouting a stream of doom and gloom predictions. His forecast of immediate pending calamity continued into the ‘90s as well. Here is a quote from a prophecy dated September 7, 1992:
"I have had recurring visions of over 1,000 fires burning at one time here in New York City. I am convinced race riots will soon explode! New York City is right now a powder keg-ready to blow!...federal and State Welfare cutbacks will be the spark that ignites the fuse. Next year, New York City could have over 100,000 angry men on the streets, enraged because they have been cut off from benefits....Federal troops will have to move in to restore order. New York City will have tanks running down its avenues....Churches will be closed for a season because it will be too dangerous to travel about. Fires will rage everywhere."
I could go on, but my main concern is not the validity of Wilkerson's visions. What troubles me is the harm these personal predictions do to the end-time message. Here is a disturbing remark I found on a secular message board:
"A man of god. That's nice. I'm a man of my gods. And I can tell you, my gods have no plans to destroy the United States or the world. I can tell you that my gods assure me Wilkerson's god is just another tribal god and doesn't have the pull Wilkerson attributes to him. So I've given Wilkerson's words due consideration and filed them away appropriately, the same place I'm filing this thread - in a hole in the ground."
Even if David were a true prophet of God, I'm not sure his predictions are needed at this point. The prophecies in the Bible have never been wrong, and they provide a clear warning to everyone that the tribulation hour is near. The frequency of the birth pangs is the most unmistakable indication that the return of the Lord Jesus is coming soon.
One of these pangs is violence. Jesus prophesied that as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days just before His return. In the days of Noah, “the Earth was filled with violence" (Gen. 6:11).
Just this past week, we three major events confirmed the trend toward violence in the last days. On Sunday, an Illinois pastor was murdered while standing in his pulpit; on Tuesday, a man went on a shooting rampage in Alabama that left 10 victims dead; and on that the same day, a teenager killed 15 students at a school in Winnenden, Germany.
There is one good thing to take away from Wilkerson's visions. He confirms the validity of Bible prophecy. Despite his best effort to anticipate world events just a few years down the road, he failed miserably. The biblical writers blindly penned their prophecies thousands of years ago, and their work perfectly matches the events of our day.
“And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).
--Todd
Violence Trumpets Christ’s Return The prophet of all prophets, who just happens to be the very Word of God (John 1:1), foretold the human condition at the time of the first phase of His second coming. Jesus said, “And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man” (Lk. 17:26).
Those are strong words by Jesus, and they open for the student of Bible prophecy an avenue that runs directly to a signal around which can be built a case for how near this generation must be to the rapture. I write of the rapture, and not Christ’s second advent, because in this prophecy Jesus is talking about the first, not the second, phase of His second coming.
The first phase is the rapture; the second phase is the moment described in Revelation 19:11, when the King of kings, Jesus Christ, returns dramatically to earth to end man’s humanity-destroying war called Armageddon. Jesus prophesied that at the time of this first phase, the rapture, earth dwellers will be going about life pretty much as usual. It will be like in the days before the great flood. About those days, Jesus said: “They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all” (Lk. 17:27).
There were, like in our time, also some strange and sinful things going on in those days–things that finally brought God’s wrath and judgment and the destruction of all but the eight people inside the ark. The particular sinful matter that was going on in Noah’s day that I want to explore a bit is put forth in the following:
“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth” (Gen. 6:11-13).
The operative sinful characteristic is: “violence filled the whole earth.”
Violence has always been part of the human condition. Cain killed his brother Abel in the first murder. More than 15,000 wars have been the scourge of every generation since Noah and his family left the ark. Cain’s pre-flood slaying of his brother set in motion a visceral propensity within mankind to do violence to fellow humans.
Wars waged by the likes of the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Alexander’s Greek Empire, and the Roman Empire brought tremendous bloodshed down through the millennia. But it was the 20th century, with World Wars 1 and 2, the Korean War, the Vietnamese War, and others that continue into the 21st century that spawned the level of violence that equates to the worldwide violence of Noah’s day just before the great flood.
Murderous rage has exploded upon this late hour of human history in most every aspect. Killing rampages that used to be the aberrant acts of the rarely seen serial or spree killers now seem almost a part of homicide considered to be the norm. One specific form of violence that I sense strongly indicates a recently elevated rage that is like the satanic hatred of times just before Noah and the seven others went into the ark is that aimed directly at true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.
“An Illinois pastor was shot and killed, and two parishioners injured after an unknown gunman opened fire during Sunday services at the First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill. The gunman walked down the church aisle and briefly spoke to the pastor before shooting during the 8:15 a.m. service. Rev. Fred Winters used the Bible he was reading from to shield himself from the first round of bullets being pumped at him, a parishioner told FOX News. The gunman's .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol jammed after the fourth shot was fired. The suspect then started stabbing himself with a four-inch knife, Ralph Timmins of the Illinois State Police told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch… ‘We have no idea what this guy's motives were,’ [Rev. Mark] Jones said outside the church. ‘We don't know if we'll ever know that.’…” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,506820,00.html)
The murderous violence followed a church shooting July 28, 2008, in Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Two were killed in that rampage and seven were wounded. The motive was determined to be political. School shootings have also continued to escalate. >From the Columbine, Colorado, school shootings and the Jonesboro, Arkansas, school shootings to the mass murders at every level--lower grades to college/university levels--the lists of dead and wounded continues to rise, their perpetration mostly inexplicable in each case.
The latest such mass murder demonstrates that the seemingly demoniacal rampages infects the world, not just America.
“WINNENDEN, Germany — A teenage gunman killed 15 people, most of them female, on Wednesday in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart in southern Germany and ended in a nearby town, where he then killed himself after the police wounded him…” (Carter Dougherty, Victor Homola, and Stefan Pauly, “Teenage Gunman Kills 15 at School in Germany,” New York Times, 2009).
So many such instances of violent insanity are piling up that it is difficult to pick and choose which to use as example of end-times violence Jesus described. That fact alone is enough to validate just how much alike are our days and Noah’s.
Violence that is such a characteristic of this generation of earth’s inhabitants must certainly be a major indicator sounding from the end-of-days trumpet of warning. It is heralding the glorious prophetic truth that Jesus can at any moment step out upon the clouds of glory and shout, “Come up here!” (Rev. 4:1).
--Terry
***The American Apocalypse: Is the United States in Bible prophecy?***
Terry’s new book, “The American Apocalypse: Is the United States in Bible prophecy?” continues to stir interest in helping answer the questions so many have about the flood of issues and events overflowing their daily lives today. Yet, there remains so many to be informed about prophecy God gave through His Word, the Bible, just for such an hour in which we live upon this fallen sphere called Planet earth.
Thank you for getting a copy of the book. Please remember to write a review on amazon.com, so those thinking about getting a copy will understand what other readers are saying about the book’s contents.
Also, please consider getting a copy for your pastor and others of your church’es staff. God’s word says “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” (Hossea 4: 6) This is especially true in lack of teaching/preaching on Bible prophecy. “The American Apocalypse: Is the United States in Bible prophecy?” is designed to bring readers quickly up-to-speed on what is happening around them from God’s Prophetic Perspective.
Your pastor –and other Christians who are family and friends-- need to understand these troubling though exciting times. Christ’s shout “Come up here” must be near, based upon these times of signs. We pray that every Christian in America will begin looking up for their Redemption that is drawing near. (Luke 21: 28)
You can help in generating interest among fellow believers. We believe that your and our forewarning during this late hour is building Heavenly Tresures for Watchmen on the Prophetic Wall”.
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