By Dr. Greg Bahnsen in Calvinism Today: 4, Vol. III, No. 2 (April 1993)
Talk of eschatology in evangelical circles today will inevitably come around to the issue of God’s plans for ethnic Israel (the Jews). Special reference is often made to the nation of Israel in prophecy.
One of the most popular preachers in southern California proclaimed in 1980 that anybody who was not aware that Jesus must – given the recent history of the nation of Israel – be returning soon very likely did not truly know Him in a saving fashion. For this preacher, the Jews had such an obvious place in the Bible’s end-time plans that only those with sin-blinded eyes could fail to see the signs of the times.
He was a Christian Zionist who had made a sizable financial contribution to the nation of Israel and predicted that Jesus would return prior to the end of 1982. His millennial position was conspicuously dispensational premillennial…