Visions of the apocalypse

On June 22, the morning after American B-2s dropped bunker-busters onto Iranian nuclear sites, Jonathan Cahn stood in front of his church in Wayne, N.J., with some theological perspective. “The Bible clearly foretells, the prophet Ezekiel said … in the last days nations will come against Israel,” he said at the Beth Israel Worship Center, “and one of the nations he names is Iran.” Iran had never directly attacked Israel—until now. “We have crossed a prophetic line,” Cahn said.

Also, a demonic entity referred to in the Book of Daniel as the Prince of Persia is in a cosmic war with Israel’s Archangel Michael, he said. Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre is a reflection on earth of the battle in the spiritual realm. “We are living in prophetic times. Times foretold by Scripture,” he said.

God is in charge, and He’s using President Donald Trump. “We should thank God that the president is standing strong, because those who bless Israel will be blessed,” he added, referring to Genesis 12.

Cahn concluded by describing Trump’s announcement about the bombing, especially when Trump said, “and in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you, God. … God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.”

“Presidents do say, ‘God bless America,’” Cahn said, “but I have never, ever heard a president say what he just said.”

A lot of people, however, have heard Cahn’s messages. He’s one of the most popular end times preachers in the world, with nine bestselling books since 2012 and 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube alone. “When you look at what’s happening in the world,” he says on his channel’s intro video, “it’s easy to wonder, ‘What’s going on? And are things out of control? Is this what the Bible foretold? Is the End near?’”

Is it?

Christians have been looking for signs of Christ’s Second Coming since Jesus ascended into heaven. In the last 20 years, worrying cultural trends and astonishing technological advances have made prophecy staples—a totalitarian one-world government and systems of global surveillance—seem increasingly plausible. Rising anti-Semitism and conflict in the Middle East are “setting the stage,” as prophecy teachers say, for the apocalyptic timeline.

Meanwhile, the list of secular doomsday scenarios grows long. Adding to decades-old fears of a climate catastrophe and nuclear holocaust, credible people warn of rogue AI, another pandemic, worldwide economic meltdown, political destabilization, demographic collapse as birth rates plummet, and a war pitting the West against China, Russia, or North Korea.

Are we living in the end times? A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that about 40% of American adults think we are, a belief that fuels a massive market in prophecy-related books, podcasts, and websites. In a world changing in rapid and troubling ways, it seems like a reasonable question.

Is it the right question?

CAHN HIT THE NATIONAL STAGE in 2012 with The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future. The surprise hit claimed that major events from 9/11 to the 2008 stock market crash were “foretold” in the Bible. A string of bestsellers followed, offering the key to this, the mystery of that, or to unlock the other thing.

But Cahn isn’t saying Biblical writers predicted those events, exactly. He sees Old Testament Israel as a “type” of America: What happened to Israel explains and anticipates how God has or will treat this country. Cahn told me God reveals patterns to him: “The God of the Bible is awesome, amazing, and He weaves all events together. And we’re all part of it … we’re part of this mystery.”

Cahn’s interpretive approach goes back to Colonial days and includes some of America’s most revered theologians. His first “harbinger,” for example, is Assyria’s defeat of Israel’s 10 northern tribes in 732 B.C. because of their sins. He says that event foreshadows God’s judgment on America on Sept. 11, 2001. Similarly, many colonists saw a sacred destiny for the New World in the Bible, what one historian called the “Americanization” of an apocalyptic tradition that dates back to the early church.

Increase Mather and his son Cotton, perhaps the two most influential clergy in Colonial New England, were enthusiastic premillennialists. Both believed in the Rapture. Cotton tentatively predicted the Second Coming for 1697, then 1716, and believed that the New Jerusalem that descends from heaven (Revelation 21) could land in New England.

Russian, Chinese, and Mongolian troops participate in military drills in Siberia. Mladen Antonov / AFP via Getty Images

Interest in prophecy swelled in the 1730s during the Great Awakening, as Harvard historian Paul Boyer described in his 1992 book, When Time Shall Be No More. For example, Jonathan Edwards, a postmillennialist widely regarded as America’s greatest theologian, believed that the Reformation was the “Fifth Vial” of Revelation (“bowl” in modern translations) and that he was living in the Sixth. His grandson and Yale College President Timothy Dwight wrote that a failed British raid from Canada during the Revolutionary War was the fulfillment of a prophecy in Joel that God would drive invaders from the north back into a “land barren and desolate.”

Asked if a focus on the end times could create an unhealthy sense of expectation among believers, Cahn pointed out that the New Testament writers believed they were living in the last days and taught Christians to look for them. “That was 2,000 years ago,” he said. “So you deal with them.” Also, he’s not ­saying when Christ will come—no date-setting. “How long God takes, that’s His business,” he said.

Cahn was born into a Jewish home. “When I was 8 years old, I became an atheist because I didn’t see God in the synagogue.” As a teen he became interested in the Bible after picking up The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, an end times humdinger that became the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s (more on Lindsey below).

After a brush with death involving a Ford Pinto and a train at age 19, Cahn committed his life to Christ. Everyone I met that day at Beth Israel referred to him as “Rabbi Jonathan.” Online he’s always in a black suit and beard. The walls of the Beth Israel Worship Center look like the stone walls of Jerusalem.

Cahn said interest in prophecy goes up “anytime something [major] happens with Israel, or when there’s unrest in the world, or when it feels like an order is crumbling.” He’s sure these are the end times, he said, in part because of apostasy: “There has never been such an immense, colossal transformation of culture, of values, since the Christianization of Western civilization.”

But the biggest reason for his confidence is the existence of Israel itself: “So that is, you know, gigantic.”

An Israeli officer raises the national flag for the first time during the celebration of the birth of the Israeli state after its proclamation on May 14, 1948. Intercontinentale / AFP via Getty Images

ROME DESTROYED IT in A.D. 70, but in 1948 Israel was reborn. Ezekiel’s dry bones prophecy seemed, against all odds, fulfilled. And then in 1967 the Israelis gained control of all Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, in the Six Day War. For premillennialists, the Second Coming seemed very near.

The ’60s were already a turbulent time, between the sexual revolution, Vietnam, and the Cold War. Into this mix a California youth minister named Hal Lindsey dropped The Late Great Planet Earth (co-written by Carole Carson). Since 1970 it’s sold millions of copies to anxious or curious readers trying to make sense of the world. Lindsey combined intense Biblical imagery with breathless prose. He called the Rapture the “Ultimate Trip” and speculated that Ezekiel’s visions predicted amphibious assault vehicles and tactical nuclear weapons.

Chris Hall was a student at UCLA in the late 1960s. The atmosphere was “apocalyptic,” he said. “I used to wake up in the morning, and if we heard helicopter sounds, we knew, well, this is going to be an interesting day on campus.” He and his friends used to go hear Lindsey teach at the Jesus Christ Light and Power Company, a former frat house near campus, and later lived there.

“I recall, almost wistfully, the sense of excitement, intensity, and urgency we felt as Hal linked the Scripture to our world, our dilemmas, our questions,” Hall wrote in a 1999 Christianity Today article. “As Hal interpreted apocalyptic images from Daniel and Revelation, a new world opened up—­a world that God controlled, even in its worst moments, and promised both to redeem and judge.”

Lindsey was a good teacher, Hall said, but the book’s success changed him. “I’m not so sure it was a good direction.” Lindsey was married three times before he died last February. Hall became a church planter and professor, and is now amillennial.

The Late Great Planet Earth launched a flood of prophecy-­related books, movies, TV, and now online media, said Daniel Hummel, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (“dispensationalism” divides Biblical history into eras; proponents are known for elaborate timelines and charts). In contrast to the scholarly eschatology taught at places like Dallas Theological Seminary, “pop dispensationalism” was exciting and easy to digest.

End times thinking boosted evangelicals’ much-noted turn to politics in the 1970s, Hummel said. Prior to that period, dispensationalists focused on evangelism and missions: The end is near, so receive Christ before it’s too late. Politics or culture wasn’t important in comparison. As one premillennial leader commented in about 1900, Christians should “not attempt in this age the work which Christ has reserved for the next.”

But then conservative Christians, including many Catholics, noticed that the government, public schools, media, and other powerful institutions were increasingly hostile to Christianity. Conservative believers, Hummel said, sensed that “there’s a bigger conspiracy going on here to try to strangle the Church.” They named the ideology “secular humanism.”

National leaders, many with premillennial theology, mobilized accordingly. For example, Jerry Falwell went from preaching against political involvement in the 1960s to founding the Moral Majority in 1979. The culture was in crisis, they believed, and their plain-sense reading of Scripture told them to hold back the tide as best they could until the end to preserve their ability to spread the gospel. It helped spur evangelical involvement in politics on topics from religious liberty to schools to support for Israel that continues today.

Dispensational thinking probably contributed to Trump’s election, Hummel said. When the world seems to be getting worse, it feels like “every election is a potential existential moment for Christians and for the Church.” He added that your eschatology has a major effect on how you understand being “salt and light” in the world. Are Christians fighting a rearguard action while waiting for rescue or advancing on the enemy’s stronghold? Or is it something in between?

BRADFORD REAVES is pastor of Crossway Christian Fellowship, a small church in Hagerstown, Md. Last February he heard about Microsoft’s new quantum computer chip, the Majorana 1. The company promised that in a few years a single hand-held device would have more processing power than all the computers in the world today and lead to incredible breakthroughs.

Reaves had been using ChatGPT (he named his chatbot Gandalf) for organizing sermon notes and research. He asked Gandalf about quantum computing, and the conversations “made his blood run cold.” A quantum-powered AI, Gandalf told him, would evolve so fast that in a year it would achieve a “god-tier level of intelligence.” Humans would no longer be able to control it.

It’s easy to imagine how AI that powerful could supercharge surveillance capabilities such as China’s social credit ­system, for example. Gandalf said if the Antichrist uses quantum AI for global domination and deception, “it aligns directly with Biblical prophecy about the end times.” Reaves wondered if it could be the technology by which the second beast will generate extraordinarily powerful images and then force everyone to worship “the image of the first beast” (Revelation 13).

Reaves realizes that Gandalf was just reflecting back to him the articles and Bible studies he had loaded into ChatGPT. During the interview we asked Gandalf if it said those things because it wanted to please Reaves or because it really believed them. “I genuinely believe AI will play a central, sinister role during the tribulation,” Gandalf replied. “Brad and I both hold to a pre-tribulational, premillennial view.”

Last spring Reaves self-published portions of these conversations with Gandalf in The Beast System Unleashed: AI, the Antichrist, and the End Times. “AI may not ask for worship directly,” he wrote. “But it will offer answers, comfort, and solutions so compelling that worship will come subtly—­gradually—until it is complete.”

Reaves’ concerns update some 1970s end times fears about technology. Then some thought that the Antichrist would use credit cards, satellites, bar codes, and especially computers as tools in his totalitarian global government. Historian Boyer noted that in the 1986 book Computers and the Beast of Revelation, the author predicted that soon everyone will “have his own omnipresent guide and counselor, the friendly talking computer.”

Those fears reflected a secularized and technological version of the Apocalypse that has permeated the West since the mid-1800s. Nathan Pinkoski, a fellow with the Institute for Politics, Technology, and Philosophy, said that Karl Marx, for example, was “really preoccupied” with the Apocalypse. In a capitalist society people order their worlds according to the demands of technology, Marx believed. As technology advances, it drives society forward to a socialist utopia. It’s the communist version of heaven, the eternal state.

The secularization of the Apocalypse blew up, so to speak, in 1945 when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. “First you have the atomic bomb,” Pinkoski said. “Then you have the onset of television, then you have the onset of satellites [providing] our ability to capture [images of] the world as a whole.” In the midst of the Cold War, television arrived just in time to broadcast a vision of a global apocalypse.

The idea of a secular, technology-induced apocalypse is ­corrosive because it imagines a terrifying, cataclysmic end that with enough zeal humans might control but probably won’t. Quoting a friend, Pinkoski said a secular apocalypse is like a “theological lab leak,” an extremely powerful narrative about the future that has escaped its proper context. Instead of offering hope that encourages believers to act, it brings anxiety and paralysis. “And that’s the danger. That’s the distortion, right?”

Are we in the end times?

Nobody knows. Critics of connecting current events to Biblical prophecy charge that continually hunting for signs undermines the Church’s witness in the world and damages people’s faith. People are seduced by the illusion that knowing the future lets you control it. On the other hand, Jeff Kinley of the Prophecy Pros Podcast said, Christ Himself gave us signs, and when you add it all up, events seem to match Scripture. “I think there’s a remnant in the Church that’s really waking up to that,” he said. “And we haven’t had that probably since the ’70s with Hal Lindsey.”

In Christianity the Apocalypse is a paradox: both salvation and a catastrophe, comfort and a warning of coming and perfect judgment. Christians are supposed to pray for it, not fear it: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

C.S. Lewis noted that people cannot live in a perpetual state of crisis, but at the same time Christians must always take into account that Christ’s return could be very soon. We have failed to grasp the doctrine of the Second Coming, he wrote, if we do not live according to a line from poet John Donne: “What if this present were the world’s last night?”

“Ever since Jesus came, we’ve been in the last days,” said Dallas Theological Seminary professor Darrell Bock. He’s concerned that prophecy is too often a distraction, but emphasizes that an eschatological orientation offers true perspective. Many people have claimed to know the end times are right around the corner, Bock added. “And so far, the batting average is zero. But one day, someone will be right.”

Millennium primer

Debates over eschatology—the ­doctrine of “last things”—can be eye-wateringly complex, and each of the positions below has many variations. Sometimes they overlap in ­surprising ways. But the main issues are fairly straightforward. The constant tension involves a debate over how to interpret prophetic books and passages, and whether there will be an earthly “millennial kingdom” ruled by Christ.

When pieced together, certain Old and New Testament passages, especially Revelation 20, can be read like a series of predictions: Christ’s Second Coming will include a period of intense judgment; during this ­tribulation a satanic figure called the Antichrist will appear; after, Christ will bind Satan and set up a glorious thousand-year kingdom on earth (the millennium) in which God’s Old Testament promises to Israel are ­fulfilled; then, Satan will be released for a short time to provoke and lose one final battle at Armageddon; at the end of time, God will usher in the new heavens and the new earth.

Some of the early church fathers, such as Irenaeus, took this futurist approach. He patterned his timeline on the six days of creation: 6,000 years of history followed by the millennium as “the hallowed seventh day.” Variations on this approach are called “premillennialism” because it teaches that Christ comes before setting up an earthly millennial ­kingdom. Broadly speaking, things will get worse and worse until only Christ’s return can set things right.

Other church fathers, like Origen and Augustine, said no, Revelation and related passages should be interpreted allegorically. The Antichrist symbolizes evil, the millennium refers to Christ’s reign in the believer’s heart, and so on. This position is “amillennialism,” meaning, there will be no literal millennial kingdom on earth. Until Christ establishes the new heavens and earth, this fallen world will sometimes get better, sometimes worse.

Another approach gaining ground in recent years teaches that we are in the millennium now. Christ will return after the Church has triumphed over the world through Christ, i.e., after the millennium: “postmillennialism.” In this view, over the long term the world will get better and better until it’s ready for Christ’s return; it calls the Church to confront the culture with the gospel.

A central issue is the future of Israel. Premillennialists and post­millennialists believe God has a plan for Israel, but they have very different views of what that plan is. Postmillennialists see God’s plans for Israel as being worked out in the present age, and so they tend to be among the strongest advocates for U.S. support for Israel.

Premillennialists also support Israel. But they argue that God’s Old Testament promises to Israel have not yet been fulfilled but will be in the millennium. Therefore, Christians should be alert to God’s unfolding plan for the Jews as a nation in anticipation of the Second Coming.

Amillennialists see the promises to Israel as fulfilled spiritually through Christ to the Church, not to the Jews. God has an eternal plan, yes, but the Bible says nothing about the modern nation-state of Israel, so that looking for prophetic significance in current events is a mistake.

—Read D.C. reporter Carolina Lumetta’s companion story in this issue’s feature package on end times views, “Prophetic foreign policy,” along with her Washington Memo report, “Return of the red heifer.”