At a time when young people feel the pain of despair and aimlessness—perhaps more than at any other time—it’s doubly tragic that the New Evangelicals ignore the relevance of Bible prophecy.

At a recent conference, famed prophecy teacher Hal Lindsey explained that when he engaged in evangelism with students at UC-Berkeley (beginning in 1960), he knew before most that the culture had irreversibly changed, largely due to Marxist teachings from professors. It took decades for America to feel the savagery of this cultural change, but it is here now.

Lindsey also said that there was a lone topic that arrested the students’ attention. One thing that left them “spellbound.”

Bible prophecy.

Contrary to the popular view today—in which Hal Lindsey and others are mocked for “failed predictions”—once in our churches we understood that predictive prophecy is highly relevant. In fact, Lindsey says that “Prophecy authenticates the message.”

The message of course is the Gospel itself, now-more-than-ever desperately needed as America’s youth embrace what Francis Schaeffer referred to as a “theology of despair,” which has been fed to them by leftist change agents (incredibly) within the church.

When Brian McLaren (& Friends) denigrate the teaching of Bible prophecy, he is profoundly wrong.

Take, for example, the in-gathering of Jewish exiles into the region known as Palestine for 1800+ years. By returning to their ancestral land after long exile, which was predicted hundreds of times in the Bible by the Lord Himself (see Deuteronomy 30, for starters), the Jews themselves are a living witness to the majesty and power of the living God. It is historical, biblical fact, and available for all to see. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, as has been said.

This reality goes head-to-head with the New Evangelical thought, that man can shape and craft some sort of Utopian future. It is the tie that binds liberal scholarship of the past with the New Evangelical thought on “how to do church.”

For example, Oswald Allis wrote in 1950 that the school of thought in the seminaries that disbelieved in the unity of the book of Isaiah did so for one simple reason:

“This modern theory proceeds on the assumption that prediction of the distant future is impossible.”

Man does not like the idea that God alone can fix the human condition. Quite ironically and chillingly, many in the New Evangelical leadership loathe this idea, and it is often manifested in their view of the modern state of Israel. Simply put, they do not want to believe that an ancient people can be resurrected as Scripture said they would be. To accept this would be to bow in total to the Creator God, the Lord of History.

This they will not do.

But for the billions of tormented, lost souls in our world, would it help them to believe in such a God? What would happen to them if they believed that they could call on God and He would answer? (See Matthew 11:28, stated plainly by the Creator Himself.)

The critics of Scripture…to be specific, the critics of predictive prophecy…you do not have a credible answer to Isaiah 46, in which God tells us that He alone knows the end from the beginning, and that He has told us what is to come, and that He means to accomplish His purposes.

Many hundreds of astonishing promises/prophecies have already come true.

Won’t you call on God in your distress?