Book Reviews

Planet Earth, The Final Chapter

Hal Lindsey
©1998 Western Front Ltd.
294 pages, PB

Christ's pardon and the new birth is all you need to escape tribulation and stand ready before Christ. This is all the preparedness taught in Planet Earth.

In this book, Lindsey lays out the panorama of Bible prophecy. He narrates a blow-by-blow account of end-times events, fitting together the many events like a jigsaw puzzle so we can see the whole picture--up to Christ's second coming.

Lindsey argues that the whole church must be removed before God can work among the Jews again. This argument had always perplexed me. God has been at work among the Jews, bringing them into their land while the Gentiles and church continues at the same time. So why must that change now? Hal's reason: You must understand the dispensations. I bring up this line of thinking to help shed light on Hal's casual approach to readiness. His rigid dispensationalism seems to do away with preparedness so his believer never gets beyond the born again stage. (Not all dispensationalists are this rigid, however. They let their paper "guides" take a back seat to Scripture.)

End-times books frequently jump from the rapture into the millennial age, skipping the judgment. The reward or loss of it at the judgment is a major source of motivation for a believer's readiness. Why overlook it when talking about the end times?