Cultish: The Road To Armageddon

The problem is that nobody knows what will happen if one of these microorganisms 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?

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?

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, 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. Yes. 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.

In numerous books, 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 Day's 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. 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, they said it was the most popular nonfiction book of the 1970s.

It even beat out to The Joy of Sex, so that'll tell you how it's popularity. 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 tried to buy back copies of the book.

And the book is really difficult to find. I've got two copies of it. But in the end, 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 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. And 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, here 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 the 60s and the 70s and the 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 or 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.

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 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 Abanis. 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 publish your book. So talking about when...

Yeah, he wrote a book, you 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 and they, you know,

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 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. When 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.

And 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 while everyone down here, tens, 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 and millions of Christians believe that, and so it's a hard row to hoe in getting them off of that end time bandwagon.

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 2 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, 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 is the devil.

It's almost like a reverse pantheism. And so because of that, I think that gets an end -time vision, where that's just very, very attractive.

I think it's good to have you on, Gary, too, 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, even going back past Hal Lindsay in Late Great Planned 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 it, 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 Hal Lindsay and Late Great Planned Earth, and also you talk, and it's obviously connected to Waco, Texas, and obviously it's connected to a lot of apocalyptic cults that took place in the 90s.

Can you just tell the audience just a little bit about that and hopefully that will give an understanding for how end times plays into the world of the cults?

Well, that's the thing. If you look at cults, let's take the major ones.

Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh -day Adventism isn't so much a cult as those two are because I guess they do use

Ellen White a lot as kind of an interpreter of these things. But 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 their lead -in to it all, about how we're living in the last days.

They point out the earthquakes and the famines. Of course, the virus that we've been encountering for this period of time.

And it's easy to scare people to death. I grew up in the 60s and the 70s, and I remember when

I was in college, the number of kids who had gotten involved in cults was amazing.

They were almost kidnapped and brainwashed, and a lot of them were instilled with this fear.

And it's my understanding that Ruby Ridge, that the wife was involved in the last days and was reading some

Hal Lindsey material, and it influenced them,

I think, to a certain extent. And Waco was the same thing.

I want you to think of David Koresh. David Koresh has got all these people in his compound, and the 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 end times, 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 end. So this is something that the people who are not well -grounded are susceptible to.

And it's still prevalent today, but probably not as fantastic as a lot of other people were in the past.

But Vicki and Randy Weaver, 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 had a good friend, 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, which he should have done, just backed off and brought in some negotiators.

Then he wouldn't have had any evidentiary reason to continue his charade about the end times.

Go ahead. Yeah, this is so good. I think

Waco's been one of the most things. I was 11 years old when I watched the

Waco scenario take place. I remember seeing it on TV. I grew up watching Westerns and shows like Gunsmoke, a lot of the

Clint Eastwood movies I watched with my dad. 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. I knew, like in Gunsmoke, you knew that it was fictional.

There's a level in which you're watching TV. That person isn't really dying. They're an actor. I kind of knew that.

I remember, you know this footage too, 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 wall, and you see him get shot, then he rolls off the roof.

That infamous footage, I remember as an 11 -year -old boy, there was 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 person survived.

They had a bulletproof vest. However, there were four ATF agents who died, I believe six to eight

Branch Davidians who were killed during that shootout. It was the most amount of ammunition fired 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 standoff ended, took, I believe it was 50 -something days, and the reason why that took place is because, as you were saying, 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, it 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 David Koresh was really exposing or exegeting from the book of Revelation.

So if anything, when you're dealing with a cult member, they have a unique identity that's given to them.

So David Koresh, for example, 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 times 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 5 and 6 and 8. 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 can 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 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 to 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 9, and other types of things, Helter Skelter, 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

Ruby Ridge and Vicki and Randy Weaver did or David Koresh or Charles Manson, but their mindset, every time something comes up, you know,

Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, I can't wait, Rapture's right around the corner, he's going to take us out of here.

And what it does, it neutralizes the church, it neutralizes Christians. And the things that they see out there are a prophetic inevitability.

And so they're told, you know, that the Rapture is going to take place.

And of course, it's been on TV, it's in radio, books, you've got blood moons, you've got pink moons, you've got all kinds of moons, this and moons, that.

And 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 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'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 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.

And they said, 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 and 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.

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 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 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, we have a lot of people who 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. 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 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. Oh, yeah. 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 were probably either almost born or a newborn baby when this clip was going on or around that time.

This actually took place before you were 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 leading up to the year 2000.

The whole idea is that when everything turns to 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 it.

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.

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 back the clock, we're going to play this clip, and Gary, you can give us your thoughts on this. Rexella, to date, this is one of the largest demands in the history of our ministry.

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Have your credit card ready and call 1 -800 -918 -5577. Um, I'm pretty sure that number is out of service by now.

So is Jack Van Eppie. Yeah, yeah. 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 in 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 can't get, 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 Van Eppie'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 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 in the lead -up to the rapture.

So then now 30 years later, leading up to the year 2000, he's at it again.

Now, 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 just got communism, if we're more consistent with our communism. I hear the same thing with people, and 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, because dispensationalists, the most popular view, and this was

Al Lindsay's view until he changed it, and the rest of them out there, but a traditional dispensationalist cannot look for anything this side of the rapture as a sign, because the rapture was always supposed to be any moment, that the rapture could take place at any moment, which meant it could have taken place any moment in the 1st century, 2nd century, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, all the way up to today.

And in order to sell books and to make this thing fantastic, you had to break that principle of dispensational premillennialism, and you had to start saying this was a lead -up to the rapture.

Well, they just make stuff up. So I asked them,

I said, let's just take your view that you think Israel becoming a nation again, in 1948 was prophetically significant.

I said, show me one verse in the New Testament that says that. Show me one verse in the

New Testament that says the temple's going to be rebuilt. Chuck, you mentioned

Laurie just not too long ago. What's his first name? Greg Laurie.

I was listening to this talk he gave probably in 2018 called

America, Antichrist, and the End of Days. And he focused on the Antichrist, and he began by proclaiming that there are 100 passages in the

Bible that talk about the Antichrist. And I said, really?

I went through my Bible, and there are only four of them. There are only four verses in the entire

Bible that actually use the word Antichrist. And listen to this definition of Antichrist.

This is John writing in 1 John 2, verse 18, Now, audience relevance.

Who's he telling this to? Who's the first audience? He's not talking to us directly.

He's writing to a particular group of people, and what he's saying to that group of people, he calls them children.

Children is the last hour. Wait a minute. The last hour? I thought this Antichrist wasn't going to come until sometime in the distant future.

He hasn't even shown up yet. But according to John, it is the last hour, and just as you heard that Antichrist is coming, even now many

Antichrists have arisen, from this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not really of us.

So whoever these Antichrists were, according to John, at one time they were part of the

Christian community, identified as it, but then rejected it. And then you go back down to verse 22.

Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the

Antichrist. So here now we have the timing of the Antichrist.

It was the last hour, according to John. We have the number of Antichrists. There were many of them. We know something about what they did.

They were part of the original Christian congregation when they left, and then we have a definition of Antichrist, the one who denies that Jesus is associated with the

Father. This is the Antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. Then you go to chapter 4, and it says many, it talks about the verse 3 of chapter 4, every spirit that does not confess

Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.

And then you go to 2 John 7, and it says, for many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge

Jesus as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the Antichrist.

And yet Greg Laurie and other people talk about the Antichrist, build this composite

Antichrist figure, and he goes on to say, in fact, the Antichrist would be a very charismatic world leader, a great orator, very convincing, probably very handsome.

He is going to do things that no world leader has ever done before. He is going to solve the Middle East conflict. He is going to rid the world, at least temporarily, of terrorism.

He is going to be hailed as the greatest peace talker that ever lived. The Antichrist, he said, will even get the

Jewish nations and the Arab nations to sign a peace treaty that will pave the way for the long -awaited

Third Temple, of which the New Testament says nothing. The Antichrist will be a satanic superman, but it's all a mask hiding who he really is, namely the most evil man that ever lived.

The dominant force of the end times is going to be a confederation of ten nations led by an individual called the Antichrist.

Now what I read to you is what Greg Laurie said about the Antichrist. First, there aren't 100 passages in the

Bible that talk about the Antichrist. There are only four. And none of the things that he described as what this

Antichrist is going to be are found in the Bible. And yet this is what people believe because it's such a good story.

It sounds so convincing. But not if you read the Bible, you won't find this stuff anywhere.

And there will be a lot of people who are probably listening to this who are livid at this point because they can say, they can prove everything, they can prove that I'm wrong.

Well, go at it. I've been doing this for 40 years, and I haven't found anyone who has come up with a verse that says that Israel is going to become a nation again, and that's prophetically significant.

Nothing in the New Testament. The Old Testament talks about that, and Israel did become a nation again. There's not a single verse in the

New Testament that says the temple is going to be rebuilt. The Old Testament talks about the temple being rebuilt, and it was rebuilt.

And it was destroyed. The only thing the New Testament talks about is the destruction of the temple. There's nothing in the

Bible that says that the Antichrist is going to make a covenant with the Jews and then break it. They get that from Daniel chapter 9, verses 24 through 27.

And you don't find the Antichrist in there anywhere, and he's not making any covenant with Israel. And so this, you know, look, folks, this is what the majority of Christians and some of the biggest -named churches in the country believe, and it's built on a foundation of exegetical sand.

I hate to burst their bubbles, but that's the case. Yeah, Uncle Gary, like when you're talking right now, I know I've been quiet this whole time because I'm just gleaning off of you, like learning from this, because I'm just loving it.

I'm loving every second of this right now because March 16th, when President Trump gave his, you know, state declaration that we're in a national state of emergency, literally

I grew up as a premillennial dispensationalist, right? So I was having what I would call in this hour -and -a -half span,

I was having what I was calling P .T .S. dispy. And I'm not trying to be disrespectful to anyone who's a dispensationalist, but my mind immediately went to President Trump's been president for about three -and -a -half years.

Now we have another three -and -a -half years. It's going to be crazy, and it's going to be the end times. But this is what

I'm hearing right now is we have so many people who hold this eschatological foundation and belief, and right now,

Uncle Gary, I'm reading Through God and Government, and I love the book. It's so good. But I would like to hear you speak about the dangers that this has and how we can see this eschatological belief has let our government become tyrannical, right?

So how does this affect the individual, then affect the family, and then get us to where we are right now, to where we can't even leave our house?

You know what I mean? Like, what are the implications of actually taking this worldview to its logical conclusion?

Shouldn't we be concerned about what Jesus told us in Matthew 28, 18 -20? Literally, that we're to go preach the gospel, not to be scared of when he's going to return?

Shouldn't we just be going out there and doing the Great Commission of what we were supposed to do? When we don't do that, and we don't trust what

Jesus is saying instead of living in fear, how does that affect our society,

Uncle Gary? Well, I think the first thing is a little bit of perspective here. Like I said,

I've been working on this article on the Antichrist, well, actually the Mark of the Beast, and Pastor David Jeremiah called the

COVID -19 pandemic, and I'm quoting now, the most apocalyptic thing that has ever happened to us.

And I said, really? Not the Black Plague that killed 30 % to 60 % of Europe's population.

Two world wars, some 75 million people died in World War II, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians, many of whom died from deliberate genocide, massacres, mass bombings, disease, and starvation.

The economic crisis of the Great Depression, where people were literally killed.

They killed themselves because of what happened in the Great Depression. If anybody has time to do this, you watch the three -part series on the

Dust Bowl in the 1930s. And who's the guy? Woody Guthrie.

Woody Guthrie has this great statement there that he was,

I don't know if any of you know who Woody Guthrie was, but he was kind of, I think he was called the Dust Bowl troubadour.

He had all these songs that he sang about what was happening with the

Dust Bowl. I don't even know if people even know what the Dust Bowl was. It was almost 10 years long. And it was in the breadbasket, what was considered at that time the breadbasket of the

United States. And these people lived in some of the most horrific conditions you can imagine.

These dust storms came up probably 1 ,000 feet in the air, and they swirled in like waves.

And it did this maybe three or four times a month. It was terrible. Or the

Spanish flu that killed 50 million people at a time when the world population was less than 2 billion.

So let's put this in perspective. What we're seeing today isn't anything new.

What's new about it is how quickly we found out about it.

And that's a good thing because we found out about it. A lot of people are complaining we didn't find out about it soon enough, but the day's gone by.

We didn't find out about it until a year or so later, and it was way, way too late. But you're right.

What's happening is here we have those in the realm of politics who they believe that civil government is messianic, that it can solve our problems.

And given enough power, given enough influence, and given enough money, which they can create just with some keystrokes on a computer, that they'll fix anything.

They can fix anything. And anybody with a uniform and anybody with a position of power will become more and more tyrannical as they begin to see that they are incapable of doing what needs to be done.

And this is why you're seeing police officers, you know, going and arresting people who are just walking outside or giving fines to people when they're in their cars in churches and in outdoor service.

This is bad. Fortunately, there are lots of people now who are rebelling against this.

This is especially true, again, I don't know when this is going to be played, so we'll have to see what happens to the governor of Michigan become draconian in their abuse of governmental powers.

And look, I understand this is a bad thing, but the

COVID virus, the incidence of it in terms of world population is like four or five decimal points, four or five figures to the right of a decimal point in terms of the effect that it's having worldwide when you compare it to all these other things.

And I know there's some different things regarding this one, you know, the symptoms take longer and so forth and so on.

But the government, they feel their power, and because we live in something of a semi -socialistic state, that these people think that they can push the boundaries of this.

And we saw what the Democrats, what more they want the government to do with all this.

And people are beginning to say, we've had enough of this, we'll take our risks with it, we need to open up the economy.

And a lot of this is coming from Christians who are doing this, who understand the Constitution, they understand the

Declaration of Independence. I think it was the governor of New Jersey who said, well, he never really thought about the

Bill of Rights when he made his pronouncements about the things that he was going to shut down. I mean, that's scary stuff right there.

I developed my own little way to open up the economy with kind of a middler position here.

I think people could still take precautions. I mean, restaurants could open up and just cut the number of tables, for example, in half.

Take half the tables out or don't have anybody on those tables and bring people in and set them apart.

I mean, planes are flying. I'm going to be flying out to Idaho in a week.

People are still flying and they're cooped up in a small tube. So there's a lot of inconsistency with this as well.

But you're right. Christians don't know how to respond to a lot of these things because they've had their senses dulled and they don't know the difference between good and evil and they couldn't articulate a biblical governmental position.

And if you add into that that they believe that this was all prophesied in the Bible and we just have to sit back and wait for it to happen, it's the witch's brew of devastation.

Yeah, this is so good, Gary. One of the other questions I have, and in fact, it just,

I don't know. Maybe I coined the phrase. I can't remember. I just remember I had this thought one day where, you know,

I think I was actually reading your book, God and Government, and I thought to myself, I said, people, you know, it's weird that people always they don't want a

God who is all knowing, omniscient, sovereign, has commands. He says you need to follow or you're going to perish and they don't want to have anything to do with that God.

But all of a sudden. But then they get surprised when they get a state that is that has all those exact same characteristics of the attributes of God.

It's just done in an oppressive way. And in fact, I was just thinking about that when you're talking about the governor of Michigan and the fact that one, it's unjust because they're imposing things on others that they won't impose on themselves.

There is a video screenshot of the governor and she's going to list a $1 ,000 fine.

She signed a $1 ,000 fine for people who won't social distance. They won't, if anyone's caught being within six feet of someone else.

Right behind her is literally about 11 to 13 people, all scrunched up together, all like grimacing with that awkward.

I feel like if I was to stand a comedian, I feel like I could do a whole segment about those people whenever some sort of governor, even

Trump included, even conservatives, when they sign something, there's always those people who stand behind them with that awkward, weird smile that no one does in any other scenario except when someone's signing a bill.

But that's the element with it. One, they don't impose the standard upon themselves that they impose on others, so you see that.

But just an example, which she imposed a law which has no reasonable or logical sense with what's going on.

It's a coronavirus. They're talking about stay home. If you can, avoid the grocery stores.

Don't even go there if you can. I live in Arizona. That's what's been propagated to me. But what she did is that she made any shopping for gardening seeds, for seeds to grow a garden, she made that illegal.

So tell me, how is it making something to be self -sustaining where you can grow your own food, do not have to go to the grocery store if this is indeed a pandemic where one,

I can either contract the virus and not bring it back home, or maybe with that sort of scenario, it makes no logical sense.

So you see that carrying out. And it's mind -boggling to see the level of statism that comes out.

And I think that's one of the aspects, too, with why eschatology matters, that you see sort of this escapist mindset where you don't really try and combat these people who are trying to use statism as an oppression.

Andrew, tell me what's on your mind. Yeah, what's on my mind right now is there's a man, J .K. Van Balen, who argued that the cults are the unpaid debts of the church.

And I'd say right now tyranny is also an unpaid debt of the church because our job is to hold the government responsible for overstepping spheres of sovereignty.

And due to an eschatological position that many people hold, instead of actually going out, holding them accountable, proclaiming the law of God, we shrink back, and then this tyranny, it just grows larger and larger.

So from a holistic point of view, Uncle Gary, how should Christians be looking at this situation?

In the long run, is God disciplining our nation to get Christians to speak up? Where do you think this is heading, in a sense?

Well, I don't want to say, well, this is God's judgment on us, although we certainly deserve it.

In the Old Testament, we're oftentimes told what the judgment was and why it was coming.

I think what you find is that God lets us live in terms of the consequences of what we believe.

And in doing that, I'll give you a good example. Andrew Cuomo, who's the

New York governor, he said, let's see, how did it go?

He says, our behavior has stopped the spread of the virus. Now, if he had just stopped there,

I would have said, okay, I agree. Then he went on to say, God did not stop the spread of the virus.

So our behavior has stopped the spread of the virus. God did not stop the spread of the virus. And this is coming from a guy who supports killing unborn babies from the time they're conceived to the time that they're born.

And this is a guy who's a Roman Catholic who claims to be a believer in God.

I mean, it was his father who stood up and gave a speech way back when at Notre Dame University about how he and his wife were personally opposed to abortion, but they couldn't use that opposition to actually outlaw it in our country.

And that's where we are today, and that's where a lot of Christians are today. They're in the same way. Well, I can't impose my morality on other people.

Oh, really? So it's okay for everyone else to impose their morality on us, but we can't get in there and fight for what we believe is the proper morality.

But see, there were years ago where Christians did get involved. Christians changed so many things.

If you go back to the 19th century on polygamy, the Supreme Court on two particular cases appealed to the

Bible on these. Even Thomas Paine, who was a pain when it came to his belief about God in his book called

The Age of Reason, which was what was written after his book Common Sense, but in the book

Common Sense, he made a biblical case for opposing tyranny, a biblical case for opposing tyranny, because that's the only way you could have gotten

Christians to make up their minds. A biblical case had to be made for that.

The limitation of government, not all of our founders were Christians. I don't think you can make that case. But all of them lived under the umbrella of believing that we were sinners, that we manifest evil in our actions.

You can't empower too many people with too much power and authority.

Power needed to be limited, and that's why the Constitution of the United States is so small, so short, because it is a document of enumerated powers, and then the states still weren't satisfied with that, so they insisted on a

Bill of Rights, and what is the First Amendment to the Constitution, the

Bill of Rights? Congress shall make no law respecting and establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and it included the freedom of speech, to speak about religion.

It also included the freedom of the press. You could write about religion and almost anything, and the freedom to assemble, and then the fourth freedom, what we often miss, is that we have a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and so this is a grievance.

The Christians will say, we're just supposed to go along with what our government does. This is a reading of Romans 13 and also of Matthew 22, where it says, render under Caesar the things that are

Caesar's, and I said, yeah, it does say that. I said, are you telling me we live under Caesar? We don't live under Caesar.

We live under the Constitution of the United States, which is our Caesar, and so Christians need to understand the limitations of civil government.

Our built -in freedoms and protections in the Constitution itself, it is a document of enumerated powers.

We've gotten way, way away from that, and so Christians need to get back involved.

We don't want to force people to become Christians. We want to just get the civil government back to what it's supposed to do.

Limited government, state governments, amendments 9 and 10 to the Constitution, the things that aren't enumerated in terms of powers and authority at the national level reside with the states, and if the states don't have them, then they reside with the counties and the sheriff's department.

This whole virus thing should have been taking place at the state level. There are some states that are worse off than others,

New York, obviously, a port of entry, some places in California, some places in Florida, but there are some places out west where the virus isn't a big deal.

They shouldn't have had a nationalized shutdown of the economy. It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, this is really good, Gary, and there's so many great points, and just to go, even though we're bringing into the fact of government and how we run things just goes to show you that eschatology matters, and especially if you have an eschatology, which

I would argue for all intents and purposes sort of encourages a pacifism when it comes to engaging the state with how they oversee their bounds.

So rather than see something as fulfillment, oh, we're in the end times, come Lord Jesus soon, no, we actually need to combat that, saying no, you are being unbiblical, we need to combat that.

Those are some really good points to make. So I think what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up here, and Gary, we really appreciate you coming on here.

In the next episode, what we're going to maybe try and do is maybe have a primer and foundation, because some of you, this may be brand new to you, you may have never heard of this sort of mindset or way in which to interpret the

Bible as holistically to how do you make sense of current events. So maybe what we'll do is the next episode, we'll still talk about current events, maybe we'll have a little bit of a primer for how do you actually properly interpret passages like Matthew 24 or even passages in the book of Revelation about the mark of the beast and 666, because there's a foundation in which you want to do that.

Even like people, like we based the show after Dr. Walter Martin. He's kind of inspired us to do this show.

He doesn't share the same eschatology as us. We still have a tremendous amount of respect for him, but overall,

I think it's important that you need to have a proper, you always want to always be reforming your thinking, thinking through things properly.

So we're going to address that in the next episode. So all that being said, thank you all for listening.

If you guys want to follow more of Dr. Gary DeMar and his content, you can always check him out at AmericanVision .org.

You can check out a lot of his books like Last Day's Madness, there's quite a few other books too.

You can definitely check that out. So all that being said, thank you all for listening. As always, this program cannot continue without your support.

So as always, go to TheCultistShow .com. You can donate one time or monthly, and you can always go ahead and support us there.

So if you really enjoyed this episode, the challenge you're thinking, if you agree with us, comment on our social media, let us know.

And also if you disagree with us, let us know as well too. We always want to hear different contrasting points of view as long as it's done in a civil and cordial way.

Also, what we're going to try and do is, Gary, whenever you publish that article, let us know. We'll share it on our social media because by that time we'll probably have released these episodes, and you guys can interact and let us know what you thought about Uncle Gary's thoughts on current events and the role of the

Antichrist. So all that being said, thank you all for listening, and we will talk with you all in part two where we talk about end times visions and the road to Armageddon.