JERRY JENKINS: BETTING ON PRETRIB ! by Dave MacPherson

     Maybe I should say that Jerry Jenkins is betting on fellow pretrib investors like Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice who seem to have put all of their money - and a lot of their spin - on their pretrib rapture roulette wheel.

     Since the 1830s pretrib gamblers have been addicted to numbers including the numbers of Bible verses which they think can be combined to "prove" a pretrib rapture.

     Even worse is their desire to predict dates for it, some of which have been based on occult things like the measurements inside Egypt's Great Pyramid and constellations in the Zodiac! (See my book "The Three R's" for massive documentation on such speculation which so far has created only losers.)

     The earliest pretribs gambled with only their British reputations (lawyer Robert Baxter had predicted the rapture would occur on July 14, 1835). Today's rapture robber barons and tribulational tycoons, especially in America, make millions of dollars with books, videos, films, music, and radio and TV shows - and often predict actual dates or, while playing it safe, merely talk about only "times and seasons."

     Jerry Jenkins has to know that Corrie ten Boom's 1974 "Logos Journal" article "The Coming Tribulation" (which labeled pretribs as "the false teachers that Jesus was warning us to expect in the latter days") revealed that millions of Christians were tortured to death" in China when the communists took over 1949 simply because they had been trusting only in pretrib rapture escapism that had been brought in by foreign missionaries! (And pretrib date-setting fizzles since then have caused many other such tragedies like the Chinese one!)

     Even so, Jenkins has long seared his conscience and kept on making fortunes with the same fund-raising fly-away fraud. And he's even jumped willy-nilly into the current worldwide discussion on pretrib rapture history, preferring repeating to researching.

     In the May 18, 2016 issue of "Christianity Today" Jenkins, while politely pilfering the rapture "cards" that hired guns like Thomas Ice like to misleadingly shuffle with, audaciously referred to "the fiction that the rapture is as recent as John Nelson Darby."

     (Pretribs often like to say "rapture" instead of "pretrib rapture" as if they have a monopoly on that word - something I found Jenkins doing in that same May 18 magazine. And if you say you don't believe in a pretrib rapture, the pretrib rapturally-correct "thought police" like to make the dishonest claim that you don't believe in a rapture at all!)

     In the same "CT" piece Jenkins "found" pretrib is some "17th-century expressions of the rapture" and listed some practically unknown names, but gave no quotes or sources.

     He undoubtedly wouldn't have labeled "Baptist Morgan Edwards" in 1788 as a holder of "a pre-tribulation rapture" if he had chanced upon a Google item titled "Morgan Edwards' Rapture View" in which "Dr. " Ice deliberately stopped his quotation of Edwards just BEFORE the sentence where Edwards tied his rapture to the second coming to earth in Matt. 24!

     Well, Jenkins can find out if Ice (whose "Ph.D" came from a tiny unaccredited Texas school that was fined for illegally issuing degrees, according to World Net Daily!) is operating with a full deck if he Googles "Pretrib Rapture Pride," "Walvoord Melts Ice," "Thomas Ice (Bloopers)," "Be careful in polemics - Peripatetic Learning," and "Pretrib was NEW in the 1830s." And Jenkins may need some additional tranquilizers when he Googles "Prof. Wm. L. Craig Leaves Tim LaHaye Behind!" and "LaHaye's Temperament."

     Right now stop and take a deep breath because you're about to hit a jackpot involving a famous hypocrite!
     Not only has Jenkins been gambling with countless numbers of trusting believers around the world with his 186-year-old pretrib delusion (which no Greek scholar before 1830 ever found in the Word - Google "Famous Rapture Watchers"), but for quite some time he has been a below-the-radar secret casino gambler himself even though he is the Chairman of the Board at Moody Bible Institute, a longtime evangelical icon that DOES NOT allow its students to gamble!!!
     Now that you're really awake, Google "Left Behind's Jerry Jenkins: Casino Hypocrite," "Jerry Jenkins Apologizes for His Gambling in Casinos," and "Jerry Jenkins Rebuked for Gambling" (Examiner, Oct. 28, 2013). By the way, one of Jerry's sons (one of the "chips" off the old block who has discovered the "sin" in caSINo) has followed in Jerry's noble footsteps and has a high-up position in a casino, as the above info brings out!
     It's obvious that multi-millionaire pretribber (and prefibber) Jerry knows how to spin the lucrative rapture wheel of fortune.

     But does he have the Vegas idea how soon horrendous world events could collapse his ill-gotten pretrib house of cards and shuffle him off the scene?