Hal Lindsey

Hal Lindsey
Born	November 23, 1929 (1929-11-23) Houston, Texas, United States
Occupation	Writer, Evangelist

Harold Lee "Hal" Lindsey (born November 23, 1929) is an American evangelist and Christian writer. He is a Christian Zionist and dispensationalist author. He currently resides in Texas.

Biography

He was born on November 23, 1929 to Percy Lacy Lindsey and Daisy Lee Freeman in Houston, Texas. Lindsey suspended his course of study at the University of Houston to serve in the Korean War, then worked as a Mississippi River tugboat captain.

He entered Dallas Theological Seminary in 1958 (with the help of Lt. Col. Robert Thieme, pastor of Berachah Church in Houston, which Lindsey had attended) where he studied with John F. Walvoord, author of the 1974 best-seller Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. He received a certificate in theology. With Jan, the second of his four wives, he worked with Campus Crusade for Christ and continued with them until 1969. He then helped a mission in Southern California which continued until 1976. He was also a frequent speaker and Sunday School teacher at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California. In 1969, he wrote his first, and most well-known book, The Late, Great Planet Earth.

Published in 1970 by Zondervan, The Late, Great Planet Earth became a bestseller. Coming on the heels of the Six-Day War, the book fueled the popularity of Dispensationalism and its support of ethnic Jews as the "chosen people of God". Many of Lindsey's later writings are sequels or revisions and extensions of his first book.

Lindsey hosted International Intelligence Briefing on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and serves on the executive board of Christian Voice.

International Intelligence Briefing was removed from the air on TBN for the entire month of December 2005. Lindsey claimed that this was because "some at the network apparently feel that [his] message is too pro-Israel and too anti-Muslim." TBN owner Paul Crouch, however, contended that "TBN has never been and is not now against Israel and the Jewish people." Crouch said that Lindsey's show was pre-empted for Christmas programming. Lindsey countered that this was the first time his show had been preempted for the entire month of December. TBN later admitted that a secondary reason for pre-empting the show was that it "placed Arabs in a negative light."

Lindsey resigned from TBN on January 1, 2006, and indicated that he would pursue another television ministry. His new program, The Hal Lindsey Report, is focused on Biblical prophecy and current events, and is carried on the Angel One and DayStar networks. In January 2007, Lindsey announced that he would be returning to the TBN network. The Hal Lindsey Report airs on TBN under his own financing.

He wrote in an essay on WorldNetDaily that Barack Obama was paving the way for, and demonstrating the world's readiness for, the antichrist, "Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him — a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib ... The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance."

Biblical Interpretations

In The Late, Great Planet Earth, Lindsey wrote that he had concluded, since there was no apparent mention of the United States of America in the books of Daniel or Revelation, that the USA would no longer be a major player on the geo-political stage by the time the tribulations of the end times arrived. Lindsey also interpreted from Revelation and prophetic texts that the European Economic Community, which preceded the European Union, was destined (according to Biblical prophecy) to become a "United States of Europe", with ten members, which in turn he says is destined to become a "Revived Roman Empire" ruled by the Antichrist. The European Union currently has 27 members.

A later book, bearing the title The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, implied that the battle of Armageddon would take place in the not too distant future, stating "the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it" and that the U.S. could be "destroyed by a surprise Soviet nuclear attack." The book strongly suggests that the 1980s would see the biblical events of tribulation and end times come to pass. The book was quietly taken out of print in the early 1990s, possibly due to the failure of Lindsey's apocalyptic predictions to come true during the 1980s.

Planet Earth - 2000 A.D., published in the early 1990s, states that Christians should not plan to still be on earth by the year 2000.

Lindsey's earlier predictions all assumed that the Cold War would continue indefinitely, and had eschatological significance; he explicitly identified Russia with the apocalyptic figure of Gog. He also assumed that the 1960s counterculture would eventually become the dominant culture, and become the source of prophesied "immorality" that would lead to the establishment of a false religion.

Bibliography

• The Late, Great Planet Earth
• Satan is Alive and Well On Planet Earth
• The Liberation of Planet Earth
• There's a New World Coming
• The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon
• The Final Battle
• The Terminal Generation
• Planet Earth: The Final Chapter
• Rapture
• Planet Earth - 2000 A.D.
• Apocalypse Code
• Blood Moon
• Vanished into Thin Air: the Hope of Every Believer
• The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad

See also

• Christian eschatology
• Unfulfilled religious prophecies
• Summary of Christian eschatological differences
• Christian Voice (USA)

External links

• Hal Lindsey's web site
• Hal Lindsey commentaries on WorldNetDaily
• The Hal Lindsey Report at Daystar Television Network
• The Hal Lindsey Report at Trinity Broadcasting Network
• Hal Lindsey at Rapture Ready
• Hal Lindsey at the Internet Movie Database
• International Intelligence Briefing at the Internet Movie Database