A Prophetic Itch

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” – Yogi Berra

This comment brought back another annoying little itch:

It remains my concern that, because the government of the USA has discounted biblical prophecy, US government officials seems to think that China (along with Russia) is the USA’s the biggest threat militarily.  – from a COGwriter post

Hmm, was following Bible prophecy ever tabled as an option in determining US foreign policy?  Not that I know of, but George W Bush claimed biblical prophecy was a reason for invading Iraq. But that was the GWB, not the HWA, version of biblical prophecy. If he had followed HWA, would he have blamed 911 on the Germans? Would he have been after Gerhard Schroder, not Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s famous speech, and watching the Pentagon conferences on television when I got home from school each day. So why did Kennedy stand up to Khrushchev instead of invading Cuba?

Because President Kennedy does not understand prophecy! – GTA, PT Dec 1962

Okay, invading Cuba would have been the preferred option, because GTA explains if the Soviets retaliated, the US would counterattack, and that wasn’t in the Bible.

But President Kennedy did not know exactly what Khrushchev might do in Berlin, in India, in Formosa, or elsewhere in the world should we attack Cuba. – GTA, ibid.

Had Kennedy allowed the planned invasion of Cuba, Castro may have fired a few missiles in self-defense. Whatever the Soviet Union would do, the US doesn’t retaliate, but pummels Cuba, prophecy remains intact, but lots of people on both sides are dead. But that didn’t happen, and Khrushchev backed down, and removed the missiles…

Well, in the very next article in the December 1962 Plain Truth, Dr Hoeh informs us that while the Cuban Missile Crisis diverted our attention, China was about to invade India. So the US should have considered China a military threat. Not against the US, but against a neutral nation. And back to the present, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are US allies, and each have issues with China. (Okay, in Taiwan, it depends on which way the political wind is blowing.)

Of course, HWA claimed his “master key” to understanding prophecy was British-Israelism. Do you know that under that paradigm Stalin invaded Israel? Yes, in 1939. But since Dr Hoeh didn’t tell us that Finland was Issachar until years later, we can let that one slip by. Besides, we’re only interested in the House of Joseph, not Uncle Joe.

HWA and his men have expounded hundreds of cases of his interpretation of Biblical prophecy that have failed miserably. For a final look, let’s go back to when it began, the years before World War II. In HWA’s one week of radio shorts in October 1933, he started with promises made to Abraham – his foundation for British-Israelism. The very first Plain Truth brought up world dictatorship. Then came the war, and everything seemed to fall into place, once earlier guesses were discarded and the key players were sorted out. Until the predictions started to belly-up.

What if FDR had set his foreign policy based on HWA’s predictions?

In 1939, Germany invades Poland, the UK and France declare war on Germany, and the US declares neutrality.

A war has started; the paradigm is that the US and UK would lose, what should FDR do in light of HWA’s spin on Bible prophecy? Perhaps he did make the right move, keep out of it! Then Japan attacks in 1941. Ooops. Germany declares war on the US, but the reason was that the US violated neutrality. You can’t remain neutral in a war while supplying one side. (Or both sides, if you consider companies like IBM and GM and their dealings in Germany).

So again, what to do if you “know” you’re going to lose? Die fighting, surrender, or seek peace?  Well, we know FDR chose to fight until the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. And that happened. Ooops again.

Even if our leaders “know” what a prophecy meant, how should they react? And HWA’s interpretations? He not only missed the mark on prophecies yet to be fulfilled, but ones that supposedly were fulfilled. Referring to a prophecy about Tyre in “The Proof of the Bible”:

This prophecy, much misunderstood, is not the challenge to the skeptic we assumed. – Herman Hoeh, “A new look at Ezekiel’s prophecy on Tyre”, GN, Dec 1980

HWA could not even correctly predict the past…