30 September 2015 A.D. Dr. Joel McDurmond on John Hagee, a False Prophet

30 September 2015 A.D. Dr. Joel McDurmond on John Hagee, a False Prophet

       

        McDurmond, John. “John Hagee: False Prophet (and the antidote).” American Vision. 29 Sept 2015. http://americanvision.org/12510/john-hagee-false-prophet-and-the-antidote/?utm_source=SocialWarfare&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare. Accessed 30 Sept 2015.

John Hagee: False Prophet (and the antidote) 

John Hagee made predictions (oh yes he did!—see below). John Hagee set dates. John Hagee’s predictions and dates have failed. He is now to be regarded as a false prophet on the same order as Harold Camping.

[NOTE: If you are among those who have now seen the light due to this latest sham and scam of Hagee’s false predictions and date setting built on Blood Moons, I invite you to learn the truth about Last Days Madness.]

I have previously written about this here and here. I have demonstrated first that Hagee did indeed make predictions and set dates, even though he tried to cover himself with disclaimers.

Second, I have demonstrated from Scripture how his interpretation of Joel 2 and Acts 2 cannot possibly be true. (Hint: Peter makes it clear that Acts 2 was the fulfillment then of Joel 2. There is nothing about it left to be fulfilled.)

Let’s rehearse from the previous article just exactly how Hagee set dates and exactly what he predicted:

Once the Russian alliance invades, however, as Hagee interprets, “God loses His cool. His anger and His wrath explode.” He jumps over to Ezekiel 39:2 to proclaim that God will destroy these armies Himself, leaving only one sixth of them alive. God is saying, “I am going to kill 84 percent of the Russian and Islamic military force that invades the nation of Israel.”

God will accomplish this via 1) a great earthquake that swallows “a significant part of that army,” 2) friendly fire between the armies of these nine nations, and 3) fifty-pound hailstones.

Not since God destroyed pharaoh and his army has God ever wiped an army out likes he’s going to wipe out Russia and Iran. It will take Israel seven months to bury the dead, and seven years to burn the weapons of war.

Again, he is saying this will occur sometime between April 2014 and September 2015. You think I’m stretching the truth? Just recall Hagee’s outstretched hand, pointing to that chart of four blood moons, saying:

When is this going to happen? . . . Jewish scholars say Joel 2:30–31, the text, is where the four blood moons appear with the sun, is the Gog-Magog War. NASA says sometime between April 2014 and September 2015 . . .

Now that is a specific as anyone needs to be. Joel 2:30–31 does not refer to just some obscure eclipse some day in the future, but to “the four blood moons” that “appear with the sun.” This is nonsense of course—Joel 2:30–31 says nothing about four blood moons—but Hagee’s point is that it does indeed, and that the four blood moons are the ones coming beginning year. He has tied the prophecy of Joel 2, and thus the Gog-Magog War, to the four blood moons, specifically, between April 2014 and September 2015.

This means, inescapably, that Israel must attack Iran, and that Russian and Company must invade Israel, and that Russian and Iran must be, per Hagee, “wiped off the map” sometime between 2014 and September 2015.

What do I think of that? I think Harold Camping was a lightweight.

But, Hagee will dissent, “I am not setting dates!”

Disclaimers and Waffles

In a couple places, Hagee stops to put in a very stern disclaimer. He wants to preempt guys like me. But pay close attention to what he says. His disclaimers are very craftily worded so as not really to be disclaimers.

The strongest disavowal he makes is this: “This is God’s prediction and NASA’s prediction. John Hagee is making no predictions. Are we clear?”

This is only to cover his rear, and will only persuade the most dedicated of his followers who uncritically accept his words without examining the substance of what he says. Such people are already raptured—intellectually.

What is he really saying? He is only trying to leave a trapdoor to evade responsibility for the clear predictions he made above. But you can’t have your bombs and explode them, too. And Hagee is actually exploding them. Yes, the dates are NASA’s, and yes, Ezekiel 38 is God’s Word. But Hagee is the one who has tied NASA’a dates together with God’s Word, interpreted the concoction to be an attack by modern day Russia and Iran, etc., and then published it. These are in fact Hagee’s predictions, and he cannot evade responsibility for them.

Elsewhere, he is just as clever: “This does not mean the rapture is going to happen between here [pointing to April 2014] and here [September 2015]. Why?”

Why? Because Hagee doesn’t set dates? Nope. “Because the rapture could happen before we get out of this building. This does say, ‘You’re running out of time.’”

Ahh, cute. But then he’s right back to bold predictions:

Here’s what we know for sure. . . . When it’s only happened three times in over 500 years, this is a massive demonstration from the heavens. All of the dates given by NASA—1492, 1948, 1967—deal with the Jewish people and Israel. We are about to receive a sign from God. . . . I am telling you this. Based on all I know about this book, and I have studied it every day for 54 years, there’s not one thing that has to happen before [the rapture] . . . we’re out of here. When you see these signs [pointing once again to the four blood moons] lift up your heads and rejoice! Your redemption draweth night!”

And so we’re back to the four blood moons being Mark 13 again, as well as Matthew 24 and Luke 21—Jesus’ Olivet prophecies of a return.

Hagee is not done. We are, he says, already seeing the unfolding of what he argues is about to take place between April of 2014 and September 2015:

Consider the scenario for the future. Iran is going to become nuclear sooner or later. When Israel hits Iran’s nuclear centers, this action is going to unite Russia, Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, etc., to retaliate and to invade the land of Israel according to Ezekiel. You see that happening right now on the television each night. . . . We are seeing the first stages of the Gog-Magog War in the media.

Need more?

The nations of Gog and Magog are uniting right now. The message of the four blood moons is this: God is going to defend Israel in His time. He is going to destroy the nations that invade Israel, and Jesus Christ the Son of God could come at any second, right now.

This is getting a little squishier. But then come the waffles:

I want to ask you just a simple question, because the Bible says, “No man knows the day or the hour that Jesus Christ could come.”

That’s right. No man knows. We’re not date setting here! But. . . .

When you have very credible science agreeing with a very credible prophet Joel, and Saint Peter in the book of Acts—I don’t think that in my lifetime I’ve seen a more obvious demonstration of the unity of those two ingredients—something big is about to happen. We may not be here to see that. The church may be gone. The church may see this and be taken after. But it’s for sure, the best scientific minds in the world are saying this is going to happen, and the best prophetic voices in the Word have said this is what it looks like when it happens.

If these are not predictions, I don’t know what is. Yet he says he’s making no predictions! Nonsense. Barack Obama could not prevaricate and tell bald-faced lies any better than this. “If you like your country, you can keep your country (if it’s still there after we blow it up).” At least conservative Christians don’t believe what Obama says. They shouldn’t believe Hagee, either.

Finally, I summarized the events Hagee predicted:

Conclusion

There is no way this man can deny he is making clear predictions. The whole blood moon hype would be little more than a curiosity were it left a generality. But someone of tremendous profile has gotten specific—very specific. Hagee has connected the four blood moons, April 2014–September 2015, by both clearly spoken claims and multiple, clear hand gestures to a chart bearing these dates, with the fulfillment of the prophecies of Joel 2 and Mark 13, the Battle of Gog-Magog (Ezek. 38–39), the return of Christ (Luke 21, Matthew 24, Revelation 19), and onset of the one-world government of “The Antichrist.”

In doing so, let’s be clear, he has interpreted those events within that time frame to include:

1. Israel attacking the nuclear sites in Iran
2. Russia leading an alliance of Arab springs states and others to invade Israel
3. America standing by watching, due to weakness
4. God destroying these invaders by divine power
5. Russia and Iran being “wiped off the map”
[6. I now see I should have added also the redemption of God’s people mentioned in Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21.]

This is to happen, according to NASA, the Bible, and John Hagee’s concatenation of the two, sometime between April 2014 and September 2015.

And he has repeatedly said that when we see the four blood moons, we should look up because our redemption draweth nigh. Again, this must take place between April 2014 and September 2015.

Folks, this is a false teacher. Period. Worse. He is a false teacher whose false teachings could help provoke warfare and the deaths of millions of people unnecessarily—and will persuade millions of Christians to sit by gleefully, consenting to those deaths.

Hagee should retract his statements and repent now. If he turns out wrong, he is under absolute moral obligation at least to confess his sin. He should also apologize publicly and then resign his pulpit. I hope he at least rethinks the seriousness of what he has actually claimed here, and that his claims clearly amount to very serious and dire predictions—even while denying making predictions.

If Hagee does none of this, his congregation should push to hold him accountable. If he persists, they should abandon him as a false and unrepentant teacher. All of his followers should.

Those were my comments made originally December 18, 2013, almost two years ago—before even the first blood moon had occurred.

Just to be sure, Hagee did not budge an inch even on the eve of his failure, September 27, 2015. In fact, he got even more candid. Calling the blood moon tetrad God’s “final, celestial, evangelistic effort” that Jesus is about to return for the Rapture, he admitted that he was setting dates:

Generally prophetic texts deal with something that might happen or could happen, but this was a situation where we could say “On this date, you can go out on your back porch, look up, and see a blood moon.” And when that happened, and people found it in the Bible, and saw it in the sky, and knew that it had been predicted by NASA, word spread across the earth like lightning, that this was a revelation from God.

It is now official. Hagee made predictions. Hagee set dates. Hagee’s predictions and dates did not come to pass. They failed. All of them. Not a single word of his prediction came to pass. Not one single word.

What will it take to break the bondage premillennial angst holds over so many American Christians? How many hypes have to fail? How many predictions have to fail? How many overt, outright, date-setting predictions like Hagee’s have to fail in absolutely every detail before Christians abandon these shysters and con men?

As I don’t see streams of disgruntled former members quitting Hagee’s church, or even asking questions, the outlook for this does not look good. To modify the pseudo-P.T. Barnum quotation, “There’s a prophecy book buyer born every minute.” There have been hundreds of dates set and predictions made throughout church history—literally hundreds. They all have one thing in common: they have all been wrong. And yet Christians, especially American Christians these days, keep giving them their full faith and credit, and their money.

If you are among those who have now seen the light due to this latest sham and scam of Hagee’s false predictions and date setting built on Blood Moons, I invite you to learn the truth about Last Days Madness. The vast majority of Bible prophecy was fulfilled in the year AD 70. What lies ahead of us is not a rapture or a great cataclysm. What lies ahead of us is a lot of Kingdom work to do by God’s Spirit. It’s time to leave the false prophets behind. Make the paradigm shift and get to it.