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"THE PROPHET Zechariah quoted our Lord God himself, speaking of the land of Israel, that ‘two-thirds of it shall be cut off and die, but one-third shall be left in it. I will bring the one-third through the fire, will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name and I will answer them. I will say, "This is My people," And each one will say, "The Lord is my god."´"[1]
"Have you heard the news reports? Jews are returning to Israel. This is one of the predicted signs that Jesus is coming soon!"
"According to what you believe, what happens to the Jews living in Israel after the rapture and during the Great Tribulation?"
"I'm not sure I understand."
"You're excited that Jews are returning to Israel?"
"Yes. It's all part of God's prophetic plan."
"Why are you excited when two-thirds of the Jews living in Israel during the Great Tribulation will be slaughtered? This means that two of every three immigrants will be killed by the antichrist. Why not mount a campaign to get Jews out of Israel instead of encouraging them to return to their homeland?"
"I've never heard any of this before. Are you sure this is what Tim LaHaye teaches?"
"Absolutely."
* * * * * *
Tim LaHaye believes that the events of Zechariah 13:7–9 and Matthew 24 were not fulfilled in the events leading up to and including the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70. He and others believe that these prophecies await a future fulfillment during the Great Tribulation that follows a pre-tribulational rapture. While the Roman destruction of Israel's temple in A.D. 70, the slaughter of nearly a million Jews, and the enslavement of tens of thousands was horrible, it was not the Great Tribulation that is to come. LaHaye claims that Israel awaits yet another holocaust out of which a "remnant" will be saved. Here's what LaHaye's Prophecy Study Bible says on this issue:
Prior to Israel's conversion, Zechariah predicts that two-thirds ("two parts") of the Jewish people in the land will perish during the tribulation period. Only one third of the Jewish population will survive until Christ comes to establish His kingdom on earth.[2]
What many people who read LaHaye's The Remnant fail to grasp is that two-thirds of the Jews living in Israel today will be slaughtered, and for every three Jews who decide to make Israel their home in the future, two will be killed during the Great Tribulation. Only the "survivors of the Tribulation period will go up to Jerusalem annually to worship."[3] To make this point, Charles Ryrie writes in The Living End that the Bible predicts a future holocaust for Israel. "Jacob's trouble is that coming period of distress described by Jesus as He spoke to His disciples on the Mount of Olives. Jeremiah labeled it ‘Jacob's trouble´ and said it would be unique in all history (Jeremiah 30:7). Jesus called it a period of unprecedented tribulation (Matthew 24:21) this will be the time of Israel´s greatest bloodbath."[4] LaHaye and his associate Thomas Ice write about the "rescue of Israel" during this future period of tribulation. The rescue comes only after "Israel's greatest bloodbath" with no warning from Christians who believe it's going to happen. John F. Walvoord follows a similar line of interpretation:
The purge of Israel in their time of trouble is described by Zechariah in these words: “And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, saith Jehovah, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein. And I will bring the third part into the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried’ (Zechariah 13:8, 9). According to Zechariah´s prophecy, two thirds of the children of Israel in the land will perish, but the one third that are left will be refined and be awaiting the deliverance of God at the second coming of Christ which is described in the next chapter of Zechariah.[5]
According to LaHaye, Jews living in Israel "now number over six million."[6] If two-thirds of the Jews living in Israel at the time of the Great Tribulation are to die, this will mean the death of four million! In addition, there is continued immigration from the former Soviet Union and the "lost" Jews of Ethiopia, supposedly remnants of the tribe of Dan. Financial support is raised by Christian organizations like "On Wings of Eagles" to fund Jewish immigration whose efforts they claim is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. “´This is a biblical issue,´ says Theodore T. Beckett, a Colorado developer who founded the Christian-sponsored, adopt-a-settlement program. ‘The Bible says in the last days the Jews will be restored to the nation of Israel.´’[] Bishop Huey Harris of the First Pentecostal Tabernacle Church expressed the sentiment of many who hold to LaHaye's end-time remnant scenario: "What I'm seeing [in the return of Jews to Israel] is the Scriptures being fulfilled right before our very eyes. What's next? I'm looking for the church to be raptured, Jesus returning for the church . . . and Jews would receive him as their Messiah."[8] What Bishop Harris fails to mention is that before the Jews receive Jesus as their Messiah, sixty-six percent of them will be killed during the Great Tribulation. Why isn't LaHaye warning Jews now living in Israel about this pre-determined holocaust by encouraging them to leave Israel until the conflagration is over? Instead, we find those who hold to LaHaye's position supporting relocation efforts of Jews to the land of Israel that will mean certain death for a majority of them because it's a "fulfillment of Bible prophecy."
Eugene Merrill, following a position similar to that of LaHaye, describes how a future holocaust of the Jews is in view in Zechariah 14:2:
The restoration and dominion cannot come until all the forces of evil that seek to subvert it are put down once and for all. Specifically, the redemption of Israel will be accomplished on the ruins of her own suffering and those of the malevolent powers of this world that, in the last day, will consolidate themselves against her and seek to interdict forever any possibility of her success. The nations of the whole earth will come against Jerusalem, and, having defeated her, will divide up their spoils of war in her very midst.[9]
Zechariah is describing events in the first century, in the generation of Jews who heard Jesus' prophecy about the soon destruction of Jerusalem. The Jews living in Israel between A.D. 30 and 70 were repeatedly warned to "flee from the wrath to come" (Matt. 3:7) and to “flee to the mountains’ (Matt. 24:16) when they saw certain prophetic events take place in their day. The New Testament is filled with warnings about the coming A.D. 70 judgment on Judea with no encouragement for Jews to take up residence in Jerusalem. Peter warned his countrymen to be "saved from this perverse generation" (Acts 2:40). Many sold their "property and possessions" in anticipation of a coming judgment that would affect them in their day (Acts 2:45). In fact, there was a mass exodus from the city by those who understood the world-wide implications of the gospel message and the approaching destruction of what was the center of Jewish worship (John 4:21-24; cf. Acts 8:1). Those who remained in Jerusalem were given one last forty-year chance to escape the promised firestorm (Matt. 24:15).
The danger in LaHaye's futuristic view is obvious: When Jews are killed today, it's to be expected. It becomes a prophetic inevitability. Dwight Wilson, author of Armageddon Now!, convincingly demonstrates that a view similar to LaHaye's advocated a “hands off’ policy regarding Nazi persecutions of the Jews during World War II. Since, according to this prophetic position, “the Gentile nations are permitted to afflict Israel in chastisement for her national sins,’ there is little that should be done to oppose it.[10] Wilson writes that “It is regrettable that this view allowed premillennialists to expect the phenomenon of ‘anti-Semitism´ and tolerate it matter-of-factly.’[11]
Wilson describes “premillenarian views’ opposing “anti-Semitism’ in the mid-thirties and thereafter as “ambivalent.’12 There was little moral outcry “among the premillenarians . . . against the persecution, since they had been expecting it.’[13] He continues:
Another comment regarding the general European anti-Semitism depicted these developments as part of the on-going plan of God for the nation; they were “Foregleams of Israel´s Tribulation.’ Premillennialists were anticipating the Great Tribulation, “the time of Jacob´s trouble.’ Therefore, they predicted, “The next scene in Israel´s history may be summed up in three words: purification through tribulation.’ It was clear that although this purification was part of the curse, God did not intend that Christians should participate in it. Clear, also, was the implication that He did intend for the Germans to participate in it (in spite of the fact that it would bring them punishment)—and that any moral outcry against Germany would have been in opposition to God´s will. In such a fatalistic system, to oppose Hitler was to oppose God.[14]
Wilson maintains that it was the dispensational (premillennial) view of a predicted Jewish persecution prior to the Second Coming that led to a “hands off’ policy when it came to speaking out against virulent “anti-Semitism.’ “For the premillenarian, the massacre of Jewry expedited his blessed hope. Certainly he did not rejoice over the Nazi holocaust, he just fatalistically observed it as a ‘sign of the times.´’[15] LaHaye's The Remnant does not encourage anti-semitism or Jewish persecution, but it does expect it based on a misreading of the timing of certain prophetic passages.
The Bible shows that the events described in Matthew 24 were fulfilled in the first century and fell upon the generation of Jews who “did not recognize the time of [their] visitation’ (Luke 19:44) and crucified “the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor. 2:8). How do we know this? Because Jesus told us: “Truly I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation’ (Matt. 23:36 and 24:34). Jesus does not have a future generation in mind.
Unfortunately, by futurizing the Zechariah 13:7–9 prophecy beyond its first-century-context, Jews are always under a cloud of inevitable end-time judgment. Non-Christian writers are beginning to understand the implication's of LaHaye's "remnant theology":
Convinced that a nuclear Armageddon is an inevitable event within the divine scheme of things, many evangelical dispensationalists have committed themselves to a course for Israel that, by their own admission, will lead directly to a holocaust indescribably more savage and widespread than any vision of carnage that could have generated in Adolf Hitler´s criminal mind.[16]
It is time to recognize that many biblical prophecies have been fulfilled. Zechariah 13:7–9 is one of them. Those Jews living in Judea at the time after Jesus' ascension and fled the city before the assault on the temple were saved (Matt. 24:15–22). Forty years of preaching gave them ample time to escape the predicted slaughter.
[1].Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale Publishers, 2002), 342.
[2].Tim LaHaye, gen. ed., Prophecy Study Bible (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 2000), 991, note on Zechariah 13:7–9.
[3].LaHaye, Prophecy Study Bible, 991, note on Zechariah 14:9–21.
[4].Charles Caldwell Ryrie, The Living End (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976), 81. “A Bloodbath for Israel’ is the title of chapter 8. This title was revised and given the new title The Best is Yet to Come, but apparently not for Israel (90).
[5].John F. Walvoord, Israel in Prophecy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan/Academie, [1962] 1988), 108.
[6].Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice, Charting the End Times: A Visual Guide to Understanding Bible Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2001), 91.
[7].Ann LoLordo, “Evangelical Christians Come to Jews´ Aid,’ Atlanta Constitution (August 8, 1997), A8.
[8].Jayson Keyser, "American Jews Arrive in Israel," (July 10, 2002). An Associated Press story.
[9].Eugene H. Merrill, An Exegetical Commentary: Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1994), 342.
[10].Dwight Wilson, Armageddon Now!: The Premillenarian Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1977), Reprinted by the Institute for Christian Economics in 1991 with an updated foreword by the author.
[11].Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 16.
[13].Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 94.
[14].Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 94. Emphasis added.
[15].Wilson, Armageddon Now!, 95.
[16].Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1986), 195.
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