Cultish: The Road To Armageddon

The Fear of a Viral Apocalypse

The problem is that nobody knows what will happen if one of these micro-organisms escapes from a laboratory. Although they are unlikely to manufacture Frankenstein Monster for a long time to come, there is a terrible danger that they will unwittingly release a virus against which mankind would have no defense.

Could this be the curse which Isaiah predicted for those who transgress the law and break the everlasting covenant? DNA, pollution, famine, nuclear war. Man seems almost indifferent to the dangers ahead.

In a world of growing atheism, is science the only hope for mankind?

Introducing the End-Times Discussion with Hal Lindsey

Alright, welcome back ladies and gentlemen to Cultish, entering the kingdom of the cults. My name is Jeremiah Roberts, I'm one of the co-hosts here. As always I'm here with Andrew Songkran, the steeper sleuth of the show.

How are you doing man?

I'm doing well dude, that was a fire of an audio clip there at the beginning, wow.

Yeah, so what you just heard, and we know we are all in this together, that we are going through uncharted waters, unprecedented times. The current COVID -19 has currently thrown everyone's perceptions of what was going to take place in 2020 on a loop.

And we're all trying to make sense of it. And what you just heard there was a clip from a documentary in 1979 by Hal Lindsey. It was a documentary, The Late Great Planet Earth. And the reason that we played that is to kind of bring into the forefront the topic of the apocalypse, the end times.

In fact we're titling this episode, End Times Visions, The Road to Armageddon. And we are going to be talking about just different, how do we make sense of the apocalypse. So we have someone with us today who knows quite a bit about the subject at hand.

With us, if you have listened to any other content on Apology of Studios, he's been on a couple different times. With us is Gary DeMar. How are you, my friend?

I'm doing well. Yes, we're hunkered down here, but I'm always hunkered down, so this hasn't really affected me very much at all.

Okay, okay, well good deal. Just real quickly, can you just tell us just a little bit about the audience, just a little bit about yourself, what your background is, and what makes you somewhat of an expert on the subject at hand, given different issues of end times and things like that?

Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, and Prophecy Speculation

The first thing is that clip couldn't have been done in 1939. You might have meant maybe 1979? It sounds like it was Orson Welles.

Yeah, no, 1979 is when that documentary was done.

Yeah, yeah, I think you had said 1939.

Oh, might have been an issue with our audio there, but yeah, that's where the documentary was from.

Now Lindsey's old, but he's not that old. Well, let's see. I don't know how far back you want me to go. I'm a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary. I graduated from there in 1979, and I've been here in the Atlanta, Georgia area since then.

I have been with American Vision full-time since 1981, so that's going on almost 40 years. And I started out with dealing with Christian worldview issues. My first book I wrote actually was a three-volume work called God and Government, explaining how the Bible applied to every area of life and how government isn't synonymous with politics, that God is the governor of all things, and there's self-government, family government, church government, and civil government, self-government undergirding those three governments.

Whatever the individual does in terms of governing himself and his family and his world will be reflected in the family, the church, and the state. And I would go out and speak on this particular topic periodically, and invariably there'd be someone in the audience who would say, why are we bothering dealing with topics like this since Jesus is coming back soon, before this generation passed away?

Because Hal Lindsey had written a book in 1970 called The Late Great Planet Earth, and in that book he had made something of a prediction. He said the prophetic significance of Israel becoming a nation again was a key prophetic moment, and that it was based upon the Matthew 24 -32 and the budding of the fig tree.

And he saw the budding of the fig tree as Israel becoming a nation again, and that supposedly set the last days leading up to the rapture in motion. Now that's contrary to the dispensational system, but that's another thing altogether.

And then he said in verse 34 of Matthew 24 it says, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place, and what he meant by that was the generation that sees these signs. And the generation was 40 years, so you do the math, 1948 plus 40 gives you 1988.

So during the 1980s there was a big dust-up concerning the end times, and Hal Lindsey had called it the terminal generation. Chuck Smith, for example, came out and said something very similar, and even I think it was the Hale-Bopp comet that was coming and said that we were getting very close to the rapture, and it went on and on and on.

And now you look at where we are right now. Here we are, what, 20, 30, 32 years later. We're still here, and people are using the same Bible verses to make the same prophetic claims that have been made generation, generation, after generation, after generation, for going on 1 ,500 years or more.

So in order to deal with this within the Christian worldview context, I started dealing with this, and I wrote a book called Last Days Madness, and it kind of took off, and the more notoriety I had, Peter Lightheart and I had written a book in response to Dave Hunt called The Reduction of Christianity about how his end-time views, he had written a book called The Seduction of Christianity, and we wrote a book called The Reduction of Christianity because eschatology has implications to the culture in which we live, and he and others were reducing its significance by their end-time theology because supposedly we were always living on the precipice, some edge of prophetic history, and we could be raptured out of here at any moment.

Why bother with education and medicine and politics and economics and world affairs and so forth because it's all going to go up. Why polish brass on a sinking ship? Why rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Right.

Why End-Times Obsession Keeps Returning

So a question for you, Gary. Going back to Hal Lindsey, he wrote the book Late Great Planet Earth, and it sold. Tell us about a couple, just I want to lay this out. Tell us about how much of a reaction it was when Hal Lindsey released that book.

How many copies did it sell? And you can go into that, and you've talked about that in other interviews, but also maybe you could talk about, because it's relevant to today, what do you think it is the phenomenon between the almost, you call it an obsession with understanding, making sense of the end times because it seems like every single time there's some sort of catastrophic event, every single decade, you think about presidential elections, there's always a topic.

The things we've been through, September 11th, the Iraq War, the 2008 real estate collapse.

Y2K.

Yeah, Y2K, and now this issue. It always seems to be people will utilize that to bring in their apocalyptic visions. So tell us about the response that when Hal Lindsey released Late Great Planet Earth, and also just tell us what do you think it is behind just the psyche of just people in general that has them attracted to try and make sense of things like the beast in Revelation, no one will be able to buy or sell, the mark of the beast, 666.

What do you think? Maybe you could just talk to the audience about that.

Well, the Late Great Planet Earth, it was designated the most popular, what they called it, the most popular nonfiction book of the 1970s. It even beat out to The Joy of Sex, so that'll tell you how popular it is.

Wow.

27 million copies were sold, and that's a single volume. And you think of the Left Behind series, which is a multi-volume series. It's probably sold total of maybe 13 volumes around 100 million copies.

But the Late Great Planet Earth was one book. It was a relatively short book. It was very well written. Hal Lindsey had a co-author on it who really wrote it like a novel. And the end-time bad guy back then was the Soviet Union.

And the Soviet Union was agog, Ezekiel 38 and 39. So what ends up happening with this prophecy stuff is that it changes in terms of who the bad guys are, who the end-time bad guys are. Back in 1926, Oswald J. Smith wrote a book on the Antichrist, and he said it was Mussolini.

He fit all the basic concepts of what he believed was the Antichrist. And, of course, that didn't work out. And there's a story told that Oswald J. Smith, after Mussolini was killed, was executed and hung in the open square that any time he went somewhere, he'd try to buy back copies of the book.

And the book is really difficult to find. I've got two copies of it. But it ended up with this idea of a ten-nation common market. All the things that you're hearing today was in Oswald J. Smith's book on the Antichrist.

And, again, you had Adolf Hitler came on the scene. I mean, persecution of the Jews. I mean, if that didn't fit an end-time scenario according to modern-day prophecy speculation, then nothing did. So Hitler was the Antichrist.

And, of course, that didn't work out. The number of Antichrist figures, and it's not just in the 20th century. They go all the way back nearly all the way back to probably the 2nd or 3rd century. We published a book a number of years ago called The Day and the Hour, and it's a history of all the different aspects of prophetic speculation using the same passages that people are using today to demonstrate, to prove that their generation was the terminal generation.

For years, it was the Roman Catholic Church. It was actually written into Confessions of Faith, the Westminster Confession of Faith, called the papacy, the Antichrist. They eventually changed that. So what we're seeing today is nothing new.

What's new about it is how easy it is to get your message out. Here we are. You're in Arizona. I'm in the Atlanta, Georgia area. We're talking on a cell phone that other people can get to when you put it up online.

That didn't exist back in the 40s and the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and the 90s. So today you can disseminate these views without any critical analysis. Anybody now can get online and make a prediction or speculate about what's prophetic and what isn't prophetic.

Before, you had to write a book about it, and then you had to defend that book. Now I can write an article. Well, I will. I just wrote an article about the Mark of the Beast. I may publish it tomorrow or on Monday.

That's how quickly you can get this information out to people, and it's like a virus. It spreads like a virus.

Right.

Yeah, and a virus is something that's been on people's minds a whole lot of time. In fact, that's why we open up the clip with that section from the documentary, Late Great Planet Earth, where they're using the fears of a potential virus coming from a lab, which could be a fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah.

And that was back in 1979. And sure enough, here it is in 2020. That's part of something that's part of the current narrative, where people try and utilize that and say it's part of the current end times.

So one of the things I want to talk to you about, Gary, is that. And you can always obviously jump in. And if you have questions as well, too, is that our show is primarily focused in on cults. And one of the aspects, too, and again, we call this episode End Times Visions, The Road to Armageddon.

I'm not sure, Gary, if you're familiar with the author Richard Abanas. He wrote the book One Nation Under Gods, which is a history of the Mormon Church. But if you guys are watching this in video, this book, I don't believe it's published anymore, has the exact same title.

And in this book, it's not published anymore, but he kind of gives a timeline of people throughout, really, the last 2 ,000 years of history, as you were saying, tried to interpret current events. And especially talking about certain different cult leaders, this book was published around the late 90s leading up to the year 2000, which was really a big time where a lot of last day's madness.

I believe that's when you published your book. So talking about when.

Yeah, he wrote a book. He mentioned the Mormonism book, but he also wrote a book called End Times Visions.

Yes.

The Doomsday Obsession, which is a very, very good book, because a lot of the things that you're hearing from me from a historical perspective, he deals with in that book. So it's very good. One of the interesting things in that book is he takes apart one of Tim LaHaye's books.

The first edition of this particular book of Tim LaHaye's says the starting point for this was the First World War, the end of the First World War.

Yeah.

And then 40 years passed and nothing took place. And so he changes the date in the new edition without ever telling anyone that he changed dates. So, again, it's really sad. And unfortunately, a lot of new Christians, they hear these guys.

I can make last day's madness sound very biblical if you gave me the chance to do it. I could develop a scenario using all these Bible passages to do it. It's very easy to do if you leave out some very important things.

And unfortunately, most Christians aren't well schooled or studied in this. And by the way, you don't have to be a genius or a seminary graduate to get to understand what the Bible says about Bible prophecy.

It's not that difficult. But the prophetic speculators come across as experts that only they could have figured this out. And most of the people are too unschooled to do this on their own. If people have an open mind and really believe the Scriptures, I can go through something and just within a few minutes just point out a few things to them and say, if that's true, then what these people are telling you has got to be false.

And that's the end of the story. But no one, these guys cannot defend their position in a few minutes or so. They have to go through an elaborate system of charts and gaps here and gaps there. And it's amazing.

And by the way, I really believe that the reason a lot of people are attracted to it is because it's complicated. They say, look how marvelous God is, look how intricate this is, and look how he's worked all this out, and so forth and so on.

And my position is very easy to get across, and it's not that exciting. But people like excitement. People want to escape tragedy, so they created this doctrine called the rapture, where the church is supposedly taken off the earth before literally all hell breaks loose.

But who wouldn't be excited about that particular thing happening if it's true? They're going to be taken off the earth and be with Jesus forever. And while everyone down here, hundreds of thousands, actually millions of Jews are going to be slaughtered, and billions of other people are going to be slaughtered, but they were rescued by Jesus in something called the rapture.

That's like a science fiction movie that you're a part of and it's supposed to be true. But millions of Christians believe that, and so it's a hard road to hoe in getting them off of that end time bandwagon.

Cults, Doomsday Movements, and the Appeal of the Rapture

Yeah, in fact, one of the things, too, is that a lot of people who listen to our audience would be people who are new Christians. Let's just say we have a lot of people who listen who even less than two years ago came out of the New Age, and so they're a brand new Christian and they're trying to make sense.

And a lot of people, for example, who come out of the New Age, they tend to be attracted towards an end time sort of eschatology where the whole world's about to end right now. And part of the reason why I think that is is they're just a mindset where all the type of spirituality that they are in, they realize that, yes, it's true, it's satanic, and there's things that they're involved in they shouldn't be involved in.

And in a sense, but they end up taking a worldview where everything's the devil. It's almost like a reverse pantheism. And so because of that, I think that gets an end times vision, per sense, where that's just very, very attractive.

I think it's good to have you on, Gary, too, is so these people who are listening can understand that when they're trying to interpret current events, trying to make sense of, well, is digital currency now a part of the mark of the beast and trying to figure out current events?

This isn't the first time this has been done. There's a whole history going even going back past how Lindsay and late great planet Earth of when this has been done. But I want to just jump real quickly to an example of dealing with the world of the cults when it comes to end times and apocalypse things in your book, Last Day's Madness.

I found this really fascinating. A lot of people are not too familiar with that. But you had talked about both Ruby Ridge and the standoff that happened there and its connection with their understanding of the last days with how Lindsay and late great planet Earth.

And also you talk and it's obviously connected to Waco, Texas, and obviously it's connected to a lot, a lot of apocalyptic cults that took place in the 90s. Can you just tell the audience just a little bit about that and hope without given understanding for how the world, how end times plays into the world of the cults?

Well, that's the thing. If you if you if you look at cults, let's take let's take the major ones. Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventism isn't so much a cult as those those two are, because I guess they do use Ellen White a lot as kind of an interpreter of these things.

But they all they all started the Millerites, from which we get the Seventh-day Adventists and Ellen White. They all started as doomsday cults. Jehovah's Witnesses were originally called Millennial Dawn.

And if you've ever had a Jehovah's, a trio of Jehovah's Witnesses come to your house, it's almost all about the last days. That's that's their lead in to it all about how we're living in the last days.

The earthquakes and famines. Of course, the virus that we've been encountering for this for this period of time. And it's just it's it's easy to scare people to death. I grew up in the in the 60s and the 70s, and I remember when I was in college, it was the number of kids who had gotten involved in cults was was amazing.

They were almost kidnapped and brainwashed, and a lot of them were instilled with this with this fear. And it's my understanding that Ruby Ridge that the wife was was it was involved in the the last days and was reading some some how Lindsay material.

And it influenced them, I think, to a certain a certain extent. So and Waco is the same thing. I want you to think of David Koresh here. David Koresh has got all these people in his compound and federal authorities are surrounding them.

You could probably hear David Koresh say, I told you about this. This is what was going to happen. This is what all the things related to the to the end times, you know, the soldiers, the government and so forth and so on.

And then when the flames started licking up and so forth, this is I told you about this. And right. So this this is something that the people who are not well grounded are susceptible to. And it's, you know, it's still it's still prevalent today, but probably not as fantastic as a lot of a lot of other people were in the past.

But Vicki and Randy Weaver, they were they were treated like fringe political extremists who were tied to white supremacist, anti-Semitic and Aryan nation groups rather than believers in an imminent apocalypse.

And I think that was part of the problem. And I was I had a good friend, Gretchen Passantino, Bob and Gretchen Passantino. They're both deceased now. And we talked about this and somebody should have gotten a hold of the federal officials and told them, you're making a huge mistake here.

You're feeding David Koresh's exposition of the last days by surrounding them and bringing all this military in. Right. But you should have done this, backed off and brought in some negotiators. Then he wouldn't have had any he wouldn't have had any evidentiary reason to to continue his charade about the end times.

Mm hmm. Yeah. In fact, one. Yeah. Yeah. This is so good. And I think Waco has been one of the most things I was I was 11 years old when I watched the Waco scenario take place. I remember seeing it on TV like I grew up.

I grew up watching Westerns and like shows like Gunsmoke, a lot of the Clint Eastwood movies I watched with my dad. And but watching those movies, I always knew there's a willingness even as a young boy, I knew there's a willingness suspension of disbelief when I'd see someone get shot.

And I knew like in Gunsmoke, you knew that it was fictional. There's a level in which you're watching TV. No, that person isn't really dying. They're an actor. I kind of knew that. I remember, you know, this footage to Gary, because you saw and witnessed this is that the infamous footage of the ATF agent who's on the roof during the Waco raid.

And when they're knocking in the door, knocking in the window and you see him get shot and you see the bullet holes go through the the the the wall and you see him get shot, then he rolls off the roof.

The infamous footage I remember is 11 year old boy said there is a will. There's all of a sudden this cognitive dissonance where I knew I wasn't watching fiction. I was watching someone who actually got shot.

And thankfully, that's that person survived. They have a they had a bulletproof vest. However, there were four ATF agents who died, I believe six to eight branch civilians who were killed during that shootout.

It was the most amount of ammunition fire between two parties since the Civil War. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because it has to do with eschatology. The reason why I think the the standoff ended took.

I believe it was 50 something days. And the reason why that took place is because, as you were saying there, it had to do with David Koresh's interpretation of revelation. And so when he's teaching people these Bible studies, which in many accounts, there's many records that says sometimes David Koresh would teach up to 16 hours to his congregants as they learn about what the end of the world was.

So when he's talking about how the whole world is going to come upon them. And so when you see helicopters, tanks, ATF agents coming upon the compound, you're seeing the visual representation of everything that's been that David Koresh was exposed, was really exposing from or exegeting from the Book of Revelation.

So of anything, when you're dealing with a cult member, they have a unique identity that's given to them. So David Koresh, for example, he his original name was Vernon Howell. When he had his encounter in Israel, he changed his name to David Koresh, which had to do with his unique cult identity.

But when you go and approach someone like that, it immediately reinforces their belief. So, I mean, how much more could the U .S. government at that time could have reinforced that belief about the fact that they're living in the end of the world?

And everyone who follows that story knows how that ended in a fiery inferno.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. In fact, he was fascinated with the seven seals that are found in the Book of Revelation. And you've got Revelation five and six and eight. And here's what he said. He says, if America could learn these seals, they would respect me.

I'm the anointed one. I teach the seven seals. It's the fulfillment of prophecy. This is it. This is the end. They don't want to be bound by the truth. That's one truth that ties men into God. And that's the seven seals.

And the anointed one is the only one that could present it. And that's me. And one of the tactics of a cult is to keep people awake and teaching, teaching, teaching. And, of course, their resistance is broken down with all of that.

And then they create a kind of their own family. It was the same thing that Charles Manson did. Charles Manson was trying to create a race war. The goal was to go out into the community and kill all these people and blame it on racial prejudice and strife and so forth and to create a race war.

And he was influenced by a number of different things, probably not religious things, but he was fascinated by the Beatles, Revolution Nine and other types of things, Helter Skelter and the rest and the rest of it.

Now, I don't want to put modern day Christians in the same category as these guys, but I do want to say that Christians today, they don't take an active part in doing what the Ruby Ridge and Vicki and Randy Weaver did or David Koresh or the Mansons, Charles Manson.

But they their mindset, every time something comes up, you know, Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus, I can't wait. You know, Rapture's right around the corner. He's going to take us out of here. And what it does, it neutralizes the church, neutralizes Christians and the things that they see out there are a prophetic inevitability.

And so they're they're told, you know, that they're that the rapture is going to take it's going to take place. And, of course, they've been it's been on TV and radio books. You've got blood moons. You've got pink moons.

You've got all kinds of moons, this and that. And it's it's easy to get people mixed up in this because most Christians don't know their Bible very well. There was a survey that was done about a number of pastors who believe we're living in the last days.

And the passages that they cited were out of Matthew, Chapter 24, the Olivet Discourse. Well, anybody who knows anything about the Olivet Discourse knows that Jesus was not describing the end of the world.

He was describing the end of their generation and the signs, the signs actually not to pay attention to because they were common signs. The signs that they were supposed to pay attention to were theological signs.

And what's happened to the church? They've taken those wars and rumors of wars and famines and earthquakes in various places and false prophets and false teachers, false Christ and so forth. And they they've perpetuated that generation after generation after generation.

When Jesus specifically said that these things would be the lead up to the end of that first century generation. That because the topic of discussion there was. When will this temple be destroyed? Because Jesus said that this temple will be destroyed.

Not one stone here will be left upon another. Yeah. And they said that this this temple. Well, yeah, this temple. And he said, let me tell you what's going to happen to this temple. And what modern day prophecy writers have to do is to say, yeah, Jesus was talking about that temple.

But there's going to be a rebuilt temple. It's all going to happen again. And so you get Christians in this eschatological loop and they don't know how to get out of it because they don't think that there's any other way out of it.

Because they've never heard a more biblical, rational perspective on it.

Why Eschatology Shapes Christian Response to Government

Yeah. And one thing I just want to add in, too. And I want to kind of also we'll jump into more about laying a foundation of how do you actually properly make sense and interpret the different different eschatological passages.

And that's a very, very important thing. But one other thing to make note of, and you're probably familiar with this. I'm going to play a clip and you'll probably you resonate with Uncle Gary is that it's not just within the world of cults.

We're talking about that. But just especially in the last 30 to 40 years, you've seen it just among evangelicals in the Christian world. And there's plenty of people, even if you're listening to this, this we have a lot of people who even aren't even Christian who listen to this.

And you see plenty of people who are televangelists on TV who always talk about the end of the world. There's people today, people like Greg Laurie, for example. He's very prominent. And he's there's a lot of areas in which I actually respect the guy.

I really like him. There's areas in which he'll talk about current events and try and interpret it. But there's there is a truth to where there's nothing new under the sun. So what I want to do is I want to play an old clip from someone who is a known televangelist in the late 90s.

That's kind of when he had his show on Jack Van Impey. Yes, I'm sure you're familiar with him. So this is an event. If you are listening to this and you're a millennial, you are probably either almost born or a newborn baby.

Probably when you listen when this clip is going on or around that time. So this may have even this actually took place before you're born, probably. But just to give you an example, there always have been events that have captivated people's minds.

So Y2K, that was a really kind of big buzzword back right before the right leading up to the year 2000. The whole idea is that when everything turns the year 2000, it's going to make all these computers crash and the whole world system is going to collapse.

And people just all the different end times experts went crazy with that. And even leaving and even in end times visions, we were talking about leading up to the year 2000. There was a real significance with different cults and fringe topics, especially they found a numerical significance with the year 2000.

So but this is an infomercial of a tape of Jack Van Impey talking about the year 2000 and the Y2K bug and trying to really sort of exploit people's fears. During this time, so we're going to turn the back the clock.

We're going to play this clip. And Gary, you can give us your thoughts on this.

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I'm pretty sure that number is out of service by now.

So is Jack Vanepi.

Yeah.

Jack Van Impe, Y2K, and Manufactured End-Times Hysteria

So just give us your immediate thoughts. Hearing something like that, it's probably a turn back the clock for you. I'm sure you heard plenty of things like that during the year 2000. Just give us your thoughts right now on that video.

Well, it's interesting. I was in college and I became a Christian in the early part of 1973. And I remember, and I don't know all the specifics of this, but I remember in a dorm room I become a Christian, met some other Christians, and, of course, they were caught up in the end times.

And they played some of Jack Vanepi's. In those days, they were records. I don't know if your audience knows what a record is. But it's a piece of vinyl that has a single line all the way through it. And you put a needle, you know, the needle down on it and actually plays.

You get voice out of it. And we'd play these records, and he was talking about Bible prophecy. And I eventually tracked down the record. It was a long playing record. And it was about Russia. It was about the Gog and Magog prophecy that is in Ezekiel 38 and 39.

Now, remember, this was almost 50 years ago that he was looking at Russia at that particular time as the end time bad guy and the lead up to the rapture. So then now 30 years later, leading up to the year 2000, he's at it again.

He wasn't the only one. In fact, I have a very, very good friend who also believed that the year 2000 was going to be a big, big problem. But he wasn't basing it on Bible prophecy. He was just basing it on the nature of computers and so forth.

But I don't care what you pick. Pick anything in history. Pick any time period in history, and you will find someone attaching the end times to it. I have a library full of these books. And I know what I'll hear from people.

They'll say, well, it's different today. This is the same argument about socialism and communism. If we just did socialism right, everything would be okay. If we've just got communism, we're more consistent with our communism.

I hear the same thing with people. They'll say the difference is Israel being back in the land. And I say, okay, so you're telling me Israel being back in the land in 1948 is prophetically significant.

And they'll say yes. Now, for all those dispensationalists out there, let me speak to them directly. According to the dispensational system, there is not a single sign that precedes the rapture. And that would include Israel becoming a nation again.