Later in college, I read a book that went over the same ground, nearly a century later.
The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, published in 1970, made essentially the same case, though with a different cast of characters and different current events. Remembering my grandmother’s book, I remained skeptical; but Lindsey’s book caused a sensation among young Christians. The book sold 15 million copies, its sales on a par with all 10
Left Behindbooks. It even dominated the
New York Times bestseller list of the 1970s, hailed as the “number one nonfiction bestseller of the decade.”
Many Lindsey fans expected Jesus to come back by no later than 14 May 1988. This was based on a misunder-standing of what Jesus had said to His disciples: “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door. I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:32–34).
Lindsey interpreted the fig tree to be a symbol for Israel. The budding of the tree supposedly referred to the founding of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948; thus, the generation in which this happened will not pass away until Jesus comes back. Since a generation supposedly is 40 years in the Old Testament, that would put the Second Coming no later than 1988. Furthermore, since Lindsey calculated that there would be seven years of tribulation first and that Christians would be “raptured” or taken up to heaven to escape the unpleasantness, 14 May 1981 was considered by many to be the beginning of the end.1 No later than that day, many Christians were expected to disappear, whereupon the unbelievers who were left behind would face seven years of the Antichrist and vials of wrath until Jesus returned to begin a reign on earth that would last a thousand years.
Of course, that date came and went. Nobody was raptured. Other dates were proposed. New candidates for the Antichrist were nominated. As the year 2000 approached, millennial fever heated up again, bolstered by the secular apocalypse promised by the Y2K bug that would crash the world’s computers and spell the end of our civilization. Meanwhile,
Left Behind, the first book in the series, came out in 1995, with the other books coming out yearly (two in the climactic year 1999).
It is interesting to speculate why end-of-time books, beginning with
The Late Great Planet Earth and continuing through each of the
Left Behind titles, managed to become secular bestsellers, while books about the Bible, salvation, and the Christian life cannot even find room on the Barnes & Noble religious shelves. The prospect of imminent apocalypse apparently is more exciting and more marketable than ordinary Christianity. ~
https://www.equip.org/article/when-truth-gets-left-behind/
