Armegeddon Now (Hardback)

On May 14, 1948, the state of Israel became a legal reality.  Friday the 13th, 1988, marked the 40th anniversary of the final day of non-Jewish rule in Palestine.  That should have led to either Armageddon or the Rapture, according to numerous proponents of dispensational premillennialism.  Nothing happened.

Forty years is an intriguing number of years, biblically speaking. It marks one biblical generation. It was this figure of 40 years that had led some dispensational leaders in the late 1970′s to forecast the Rapture in 1981: 40 years minus the seven years of Israel’s Great Tribulation, when the Church will be in heaven, according to pre-tribulational dispensationalism.  But the Rapture did not take place in 1981 either.

Had the forecasters paid more attention to Dr. Dwight Wilson’s 1977 book, Armageddon Now!, they might have avoided their subsequent series of embarrassments.  He warned his premillennial peers against making forecasts about the dating of Armageddon, and by implication, the dating of the Rapture.  His book surveys the history of such ill-fated prophecies. From 1917 on, premillennial authors repeatedly identified the Antichrist, the Beast, 666, and numerous other “literal fulfillments” of biblical prophecy.  None of these identifications proved accurate.

Now Dr. Wilson offers a new Introduction that updates his original book.  He gives the same warning: Christians should avoid making precise predictions about the contemporary fulfillment of Bible prophecies.