April 2007 Q & A
QUESTION: Enclosed is a booklet by Harold Camping titled, What Must I Do to Become Saved? I would appreciate your opinion about what he says.
RESPONSE: Harold Camping is a confused man who is leading many astray. He owns and controls everything that is said on Family Radio Network (40 + stations and 100 + translators). His unbiblical teaching goes out in 23 languages by short wave. Very little outside ministry is aired on his network. He believes that the church replaced Israel and that the Church Age ended in 1988; God is done with organized churches, we are to worship only in our homes, listen to Family Radio, and follow Camping. In these fellowships there is no authority except Camping’s teachings, no baptism, no breaking of bread.
In 1992 he wrote and self-published 1994?, which predicted that the world would end September 6, 1994. When that didn’t happen, he decided (as did Ellen G. White of the Seventh-day Adventists for 1844 and Charles Taize Russell of the Jehovah’s Witnesses for 1874, then 1914), that the date was right but the interpretation wrong. Then, in 2002, Camping published The End of the Church Age...and After. He says the Bible’s meaning is progressively revealed, and much previously unknown is now being revealed through him. The “end of the world” will now be 2011. So says his 2005 book titled Time Has an End: A Biblical History of the World, 11,013 BC - 2011 AD. He’s way off on the “BC” also.
His background is Dutch Reformed and his Calvinism dominates the booklet mentioned: You can’t know whether you are one of the elect for whom Christ died—you can hope you are, but there is nothing one can do about it. Admitting this hopeless fact is required for salvation. He says:
God...can save an elect individual at any time....The only requirement is [to] be under the hearing of the Bible. At the moment of salvation, God gives that individual spiritual ears and a new eternal soul. Thus, a baby [as Calvin said] can be saved as readily as a mature adult....At an appropriate time...God will cause this person to actually experience the wonderful fact of salvation [and] a new resurrected soul.
Under the heading on page 17, “What Must I Do to Become Saved?”, he responds: “I cannot do anything....I must patiently wait upon the mercy of God....It is entirely possible that I, too...could be one of those who are chosen by God to become saved.” He says that verses such as, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” don’t tell the sinner how to get saved. Why? “When God is speaking to unsaved people, He is speaking to spiritual corpses [but] one here, one in another place...begins to believe...finds in their life a strong desire to obey the Bible [because] Jesus [has] created within them a new soul [with] eternal life...because they had been chosen by God from before the beginning of creation.”
So the “good news” we preach to the world is not that anyone may believe on Christ and be saved but that maybe one was elected unto salvation. We can’t know for sure, but if we’re one of the elect, God will give us a new “resurrected” soul and cause us to believe and to love His Word.
Some of the most revered Christian leaders of today teach this same Calvinism but more subtly. We hear, from around the world, of Calvinism infiltrating evangelical churches and causing division. We also hear of many, including leaders, being rescued from Calvinism through reading What Love Is This? (See offering list.)
QUESTION: John Hagee says we should not witness to the Jewish people; God will take care of them. Is this biblical?
RESPONSE: Speaking at the last Pre-trib Seminar in Dallas, Hagee said he had never taught this. In fact, he has taught it a number of times. The Houston Chronicle (4/30/88, sec. 6, p. 1) quoted Hagee, “I’m not trying to convert the Jewish people to the Christian faith...trying to convert Jews is a waste of time.”
It only takes a few Bible verses to expose this serious heresy condemned by Paul in Galatians 1. The first Christians were all Jews. Peter preached the gospel on the day of Pentecost to Jews. The early Christians and apostles thought the gospel was only for Jews and preached “the word...unto the Jews only” (Acts 11:19). God had to give Peter a vision to get him to preach to Gentiles (Acts 10:9-16). In every town Paul entered, he first went into the synagogue, where he preached to the Jews, and only when they rejected the gospel did he turn to the Gentiles (Acts 9:20; 13:5, 14-46; 14:1; 17:2, etc.). Why did he always offer salvation to the Jews first? Because, as we are clearly told, “the gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation...to the Jew first...” (Rom 1:16).
QUESTION (Representative of several): I was listening to the Bible Answer Man when someone called in to ask Hank [Hanegraaff] about Dave Hunt. Please respond to what he said (from a transcript): “Dave Hunt has been a popular Christian author...and I think it’s ironic that his organization is called The Berean Call, because the Bereans were counted as being more noble by the apostle Paul because daily they examined the scriptures to see if what he was saying was so....If you examine...what Dave Hunt is saying...you will find out that he errs quite consistently in his interpretation of scripture.
“He, for example, will tell you that the great whore of Babylon in Revelation 17 (he wrote a book about it) is the Roman Catholic Church, so he is slandering an already vulnerable target....This statement is absolutely reprehensible. I’m going to point this out in a book that I just finished which is called, The Apocalypse Code....
“He is also a sensationalist. He was right about Y2K for all the wrong reasons...he imposed his dispensational theology, his rapture theory...on Y2K to come up with a particular interpretation of Y2K and I debunk that in a book that I wrote called The Millennium Bug Debugged...I wrote this book and came to the same conclusion, which was that Y2K was not going to be a big problem...but a lot of people were jumping on it and making all kinds of interpretations about it, but they were doing it [by] imposing their particular model of eschatology on the scripture as Dave Hunt did when he wrote A Woman Rides the Beast. So yeah, this is a guy that you need to be very careful with because if you test what he says in light of scripture you’ll find out that he gets it wrong more often than not.”
RESPONSE: Whenever Hank is asked about me, this is his standard response. It is slanderous. I gave a more detailed response 11 years ago (TBC Q&A May 1996).
The Roman Catholic Church is the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful institution in history and the world today. Yet Hank describes it as a “vulnerable target.” What?! I’m slandering it by identifying it as the whore in Revelation 17-18? The angel gives to John fourteen identifying characteristics that fit the Vatican (and nothing else) perfectly. This is how Luther and the Reformers and the thousands of true Christians down through history whom the RCC slaughtered (including even some Roman Catholic leaders) have always identified the “whore.” Of these martyrs, the great historian, Will Durant, wrote, “The Roman Church, they were sure, was the Whore of Babylon.” Einerius, an inquisitor appointed by Pope Innocent III 350 years before the Reformation, said of the Waldensian Christians, whom the RCC was attempting to exterminate, “They claim [that] the Roman Church is the whore described in John’s Revelation.” Even St. Bonaventure, cardinal and general of the Franciscans, in his Commentary on the Apocalypse, 300 years before the Reformation, called Rome “the harlot who makes kings and nations drunk with the wine of her whoredoms.” D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “I would not hesitate with the Reformers...to [say that the RCC] is, as the Scripture puts it, ‘the whore.’” When I tried to explain this to Hank and his staff many years ago, they accused me of inventing a new idea unknown in history. Their guffaws nearly drove me out of Hank’s office.
My book, Y2K: A Reasoned Response to Mass Hysteria?, was published before Hank’s. He says my Y2K book was based upon my “dispensational theology...rapture theory”? He only needed to read the back cover (“Dave Hunt argues that...Y2K has no direct relationship to biblical prophecy”), to realize that this is a baseless charge.
For the first 165 pages I quote the doomsayers, Christian and secular, who were predicting that millions would die. I analyze the problem from a purely technical and practical basis, quote the experts, top bankers, and IT managers who were not concerned at all, and explain why Y2K was not going to be any problem. I point out the folly of church leaders who were organizing Christians to store up food and water with which to rescue unsaved neighbors and thereby win them to Christ. The churches in our own town, led by a “Y2K Preparedness Committee,” were going to rescue Bend from disaster. This was the biggest thing in the church for months. I won’t name the popular Christian leaders who promoted this craze, nor those who accused me of causing a complacency that would kill millions.
It was not until page 166 that I dealt with Y2K from a biblical standpoint because so many Christian leaders were warning the inevitable computer crash would usher in a cashless society and the reign of Antichrist. Really? A cashless society would need computers, and so would the Antichrist to control the world. I pointed out the folly of trying to tie every apparent war or disaster to Bible prophecy and quoted the predictions of Christian leaders and prophecy teachers making Y2K a part of Bible prophecy. I wrote: “Sadly, each time a correspondence has been attempted between a current event and a specific biblical prophecy and the event failed to live up to that expectation (as in the case of the Gulf War), Bible prophecy was discredited....There is a great danger of the same disillusionment occurring again when Bible teachers link Y2K with Bible prophecy....Throughout this book we provide sufficient documentation to show that there will not be a general failure of computers on January 1, 2000. Yet a surprising number of Christians say that God has been confirming the worst Y2K disaster scenario to them by revelation and dreams.”
Only on page 182 did I chide Christians for being so obsessed with Y2K that they had forgotten their hope of heaven and instead of looking for the Rapture were spending their time, money, and efforts preparing to survive Y2K on earth. For the next 20 pages I show that the Y2K disaster predictions, far from fulfilling biblical prophecy, contradicted it. Then I go back to the technical reasons why Y2K was not going to be what the alarmists were saying.
I hope that Hank’s accusations that I was “right about Y2K for all the wrong reasons [and] imposed [my] dispensational...rapture theory...on Y2K to come up with a particular interpretation of Y2K,” as well as his claims relative to the “whore of Babylon” will at last be put to rest.
QUESTION: I’ve told unsaved friends that the Qur’an, Book of Mormon, etc., are false additions to the Bible. They asked me, “What is different about the many Old Testament books added to the Torah, and the New Testament to the Old?
RESPONSE: The Qur’an, Book of Mormon, etc., make no claim of being part of the Bible, contradict it completely, and obviously have different authors. The entire Old and New Testaments agree with, foretell and/or fulfill each other, and clearly have the same Author.