The greatest non-event of the millennium has just occurred. I refer
to the widely prophesied Y2K disaster. There was no disaster. There
was barely a whimper. (There was a glitch in a single U. S.
intelligence satellite and in the billing system of an Albany video
store. The upshot? A few teenage girls can loot copies of Drew
Barrymore’s “Never Been Kissed” without Big Brother’s surveillance.)
Not even in what we used to call Third World countries that
supposedly didn’t prepare for the non-existent disaster did the Y2K bug
bite. This fact is leading some to question whether many of the
billions of dollars spent in the United States to correct the
non-existent disaster were wasted; the statists who spent a bevy of
taxpayer-extorted funds are scrambling to justify their expenditures.
Was the money well spent? We probably will never know. We only know
that it was not well procured.
What we also know is that the Y2K doomsayers were wrong. Not
mistaken. Wrong. Very, very wrong. Egregiously wrong. Horribly wrong.
In the case of the explicitly Christian doomsayers, sinfully
wrong.
Sinfully wrong? Yes. While the secular doomsayers simply
capitalized on their profound lack of omniscience, a few Christian
doomsayers boldly claimed to enlist the sovereign, Triune God in their
predictive campaign of head-over-heels apocalypticism. It was, as we
shall see, their collusion hatched in Hell.
These prophets did not only counsel preparation for certain,
impending disaster — when, in fact, it did not come in any form. They
did not only deny that the problem could be fixed — when, as it turns
out, we are not fully certain it even needed to be fixed. They did not
only attack a fundamental mechanism of the free market (division of
labor) — when for years they had claimed to be rigorously biblical
free-market economists. They did not only counsel uprooting one’s
family to move to Y2K-friendly rural areas and resort to pre-capitalist,
poverty-inducing self-sufficiency — when those who followed their
advice stood to suffer profoundly if their predictions were wrong (or if
they were right, for that matter). No, it was not enough to jeopardize
people’s lives (under the pious guise of trying to save them).
In addition, they acerbically attacked those who refused to
jeopardize people’s lives, those that counseled moderation, like the
Rev. Brian Abshire and Mr. Walter Lindsay. They positioned themselves as
the only biblically faithful remnant, excoriating all Christians who
refused to follow them down the primrose path to huckleberry-picking
poverty. Their prophecies were unequivocal:
- The millennium bug will hit all over the world. Every society
will suffer the terrible consequences of the unofficial decision of a
handful of technologists a generation ago to save two digits on an
80-digit punch card. The ludicrousness of that decision will be visible
to all.
The prophets were wrong. Dead wrong. Sinfully wrong. The only
ludicrousness visible to all is their fateful decision to make
doomsaying a centerpiece of their new apocalyptic theology.
Nor have the prophets the luxury to opine, “Yes, we were false
prophets, but it was our false prophecies that spurred the languid,
in-denial humanists to action. We should be congratulated for our false
prophecies. We had to lie in order to wake people up.” The fact is, it
is not certain that doomsday disaster was averted by expensive Y2K
remedial action. In other words, we do not know if we wasted billions
of dollars just to pacify unfounded fears.
The Christian doomsayers were flying high, cocky and confident,
characteristically insulting, intransigent, imperious. The lead-dog of
the prophetic pack, an orthodox Calvinist, exulted:
- I am placing the Christian Reconstruction movement’s reputation
on the line. I represent this movement. … I have made yak (he meant
Y2K; perhaps the Y2K bug infected only his computer system) my personal
crusade. I am now widely identified as the doomsayer, which is correct.
Links to my site are posted all over the world, from Red China’s Web
site to the World Bank’s — even in the New York Times. So, if I prove
to be wrong, Christian Reconstruction will be pilloried. Those pastors
who are afraid I’ll be proven wrong are trying to separate their ideas
from mine on yak. But it will do them no good. When a representative
takes this strong a position on a widely known issue, he sets the
pattern for those who are part of his movement. That’s the way
representation works, for good or evil.
At the time, I publicly but gently (oh, so gently) reminded this
doomsayer that while he was betting the farm on a Y2K disaster, it was
his farm alone he bet. He was free to destroy his reputation, and he
surely has. He was not free to destroy everybody else’s. Biblical
representation is covenantal (Rom. 15:12-21); it is not speculative. He
may claim to represent whomever he wants to represent. But all claims
are not true. Saying it’s so don’t make it so.
True False Prophets
Even this does not get at the root of the grievous sin. A noted
Reformed pastor, well respected, said to me, “This man must be held
accountable for his grievous actions.” Indeed he must. How do we
determine what should be done? The answer is simple. We inquire, What
does the Bible say? Deuteronomy 13:1-5 declares:
- If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and
giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass,
whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which
thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto
the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your
God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your
heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and
fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall
serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of
dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away
from the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and
redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way
which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the
evil away from the midst of thee.
Even if a prophecy were fulfilled, if it seduced the saints away
from the Lord and the Faith, the prophet who issued the prophecy was
proven false and was to be executed. False prophets can sometimes utter
accurate prophecies. Accuracy is not an infallible criterion of divine
approval. The fundamental issue is ethical, not predictive.
Further, we read in Deuteronomy 18:20-22:
- But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name,
which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name
of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine
heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a
prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor
come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the
prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.
This is all simple enough. God’s prophets must pass two tests:
1) their word must never lead the saints away from God or the Faith, and
2) their prediction must come to pass infallibly. If they do not meet
these tests, they are not God’s prophets. “Thou shalt not be afraid of
him.” We must never be afraid of men professing to speak in the name of
the Lord, once we discover that they lie to God’s people. Liars are
evil. Liars in the name of God are reprehensible.
Showing Their Inconsistency
If we hold the historic Protestant view of revelation and the canon
of Scripture, we deny that prophets in the sense limned in Deuteronomy
survive the canonical era. In short, we don’t need prophets, because we
have the whole Bible. One Y2K false prophet assured his readers that
these laws relating to the tests of and penalties for false prophets
expired in AD 70. He offered no Bible verses to verify this, and his
argument did appear self-serving. It was especially ironic, since he
claimed to be a theonomist — advocating “the abiding authority of Old
Testament law.” Just not this Old Testament law about false
prophets.
The only explicit Bible verse to prove that prophecies will expire is
1 Corinthians 13:8. It doesn’t say when — that is a matter of hot
theological dispute. I hold (on admittedly less-than-explicit biblical
grounds but on more-than-implicit historical grounds) that there are no
biblical prophets today. But to assert that if there are no biblical
prophets today there can be no false prophets today is absurd. People
who claim to predict the future in God’s name but whose predictions are
wrong are false prophets. False not only in that they cannot be
genuine prophets, but false also in that their specific prophecies are
false. The fact that they cannot be true prophets in the biblical sense
does not mean they cannot be false prophets. There are false Jews (Rev.
2:9; 3:9), false apostles (2 Cor. 11:13), and false prophets (2 Pet.
2:1-3). The latest false prophets just happened to have latched onto
the Y2K issue.
The Great Prophetic Mind Meld
These prophets buttressed their false prophecies with the language
of “visible, predictable sanctions” — that is, God sends judgment in
history against the wicked, according to His Word. This I have never
denied; in fact, I hold this view tenaciously. Every Christian should
(Deut. 28; Gal. 6:7-9). But the false prophets did not merely embrace
the notion of “visible, predictable sanctions.” They held, in addition,
that they, the few, the anointed, the braggadocios, could specify the
where and when of God’s judgment (notably Jan. 1, 2000). In other
words, they implicitly claimed to read God’s mind. It is futile
to deny that this is what they were really saying. Note carefully:
anyone who declares that he knows when God’s judgment will fall,
though its timing has not been expressed in propositional divine
disclosure, is actually claiming to know what is only in God’s mind.
Were the false prophets really claiming to read God’s mind? You
bet they were. One wrote:
- When the stock market is going up, voters will accept anything.
Christians are like all the other voters. So, if you were God, and you
wanted your people to change, what would be the most effective way to
change your people’s minds? First, suck them into a booming stock
market with everything they have — their dreams for
government-guaranteed retirement, their dreams of government-funded
medical care, their dreams of equal time for Jesus someday soon. Then
smash these government-guaranteed dreams in one gigantic crash, all over
the world (Y2K) — a crash that will be remembered for a millennium.
The writer had God’s plan for the humanists all figured out.
How? Not by reading the Bible, but by reading God’s mind. He was a
prophet, pure and simple. A man who claims to read God’s mind is
claiming to be a prophet. And if his prophecies do not come to
pass, he is visibly proven a liar — he is even a liar for claiming to
read God’s mind, irrespective of his actual prophecies. He is a false
prophet. Incompetent economic forecasters (that is, most economic
forecasters) are simply bad predictors (remember Larry Burkett’s “The
Coming Economic Earthquake,” published about five years before the
greatest economic boom in American history?). Christians with websites
and mailing lists who forecast economic collapses by claiming knowledge
of God’s mind are false prophets — whether their prophecies come to
pass or not.
This, too, is a form of Gnosticism — “Hey there, you exegetical
yahoos. There are visible, predictable, divine sanctions in history.
And I just happen to know exactly when they’ll hit: Jan. 1, 2000. And,
I hasten to add, if you’ll just send me money, you can get a great deal
of product to weather the divine judgment on all the pagan yahoos. Check
and credit cards accepted.”
Beware the man who claims to probe the mind of God on matters beyond
propositional revelation, i.e., the Bible — particularly when he
arrives with hand extended, palm upward. He is Gnostic — no matter
under which theological banner he prophesies.
Oh, the Riches of Prophecy
Some of the Y2K-inspired false prophets commanded handsome sums by
scaring people into forking over hard-earned cash. Of course, there is
nothing inherently wrong in scaring people into forking over hard-earned
cash. Insurance companies do it every day. But there is everything
wrong with scaring people into forking over hard-earned cash by
employing false prophecies — claming to read God’s mind, which is
precisely what everybody who depicted the non-existent Y2K disaster as
certainly God’s judgment were doing. Getting rich off lying, we call
it.
Ruined Reputations Are Just the Beginning
A Y2K false prophet wrote in July 1998:
- I’m also laying the groundwork for handing out the blame. The
battle for the minds of men after 1999 will, to a great extent, be a
battle to assign and evade blame for the millennium bug. Christians will
be in a position to win this battle.
Yes, he plainly laid the “groundwork for handing out the
blame.” How helpful. There is now no chance that the false prophets
can evade blame, and I’ll gladly assign it. We Christians who stood for
the truth of Sacred Scripture by refusing to get caught up in false
prophecies are more than “in a position to win this battle.” We won
it. The battle against false prophets, that is. And it is a
battle. If orthodox Christians relentlessly excoriate the false
prophecies of Bob Tilton and Benny Hinn, but diffidently excuse the Y2K
wolfpack, they stand under God’s judgment (Deut. 1:17). Refusing to lay
the blame is not tolerant, but delinquent. False prophets must be
exposed.
What, then, specifically, should we do? The false prophets have done
half our work for us. They have ruined their reputations (as the one
cited above acknowledged would happen if he were wrong — and he
decisively was). Responsible Christians will never listen to them
again.
In Old Testament Israel, these prophets would have been stoned by now
(and not on millennium-celebratory Dom Perignon, either). They had
better be relieved that their efforts to install a Christian
commonwealth grounded in the civil laws of the Old Testament (the laws
prohibiting false prophets, of course, being the notable exception) have
not yet succeeded. (There is, I imagine, an up side to the incremental
advance of the kingdom of God after all.)
Should these false prophets be excommunicated if they refuse to
repent? Of course. Should they have been excommunicated three years
ago when they implicitly claimed to read God’s mind for the unwashed
masses? Of course. Will their churches refuse to take appropriate
action? Of course. Will they continue to lure the apocalyptic and
right-wing conspiratorial types who fall for almost every money-grubbing
apocalyptic scenario and conspiracy theory hatched? Of course. The
right wing is the world’s greatest market for false prophets.
Conversely, responsible, biblically orthodox Christians will publicly
repudiate these and all other false prophets, and move forward,
unwaveringly, patiently, persistently working to advance the kingdom of
God.
But as the recent Great Y2K Deception has shown, we have a massive
task ahead of us.
