How many different recipes do you think a professional chef could make with just some or all of the five ingredients above--flour, sugar, eggs, butter and chocolate, along with a little bit of salt, baking soda, baking powder, and yeast?

Why, such a chef could concoct almost unlimited delicacies--everything from ...                    

      

Angelfood cake       to            Devil's Food Cake!  

And with just the addition of a few more accessories, such as nuts, sour cream, fruit pieces and flavorings such as vanilla,  you could fill many recipe books.

It is truly amazing that the same few ingredients, with merely the amounts, blending methods, and cooking temperature slightly adjusted can take so many forms, all the way from croissants to chocolate chip cookies, and from soufflés to cheesecakes.

By analogy, it is truly amazing to see the wide variety in the End Times prophetic scenarios that "prophecy chefs" have been cooking up for the past two hundred years, all using basically just a few of the same "ingredients"! They have merely slightly adjusted the amount of each ingredient, the blending method for putting these ingredients together, and the amount of "heat" they use in promoting their idiosyncratic scenario.

Why, it’s so easy, even a child can do it!

Unfortunately, most of these scenarios have been half-baked. And in spite of the culinary failures of the chefs who have gone before, new contenders for the Bake-Off rise up all the time.

 

Old-Fashioned Baking

 

If you have only recently started studying speculative prophetic scenarios, have picked a favorite "prophecy expert," and have been just amazed at how wise and clever he is to come up with all his explanations ... you may be surprised at just how little is "new" in his teachings. You may find that, just as a housewife out of sugar may run next door to borrow a cup to make cookies for tonight's dessert, he has just borrowed his ingredients from those who have gone before ... those who used the same ingredients to concoct a scenario that failed. And once you see how many such "experts" have tried to doctor up a failed recipe with just an extra teaspoon of this or that, or with stirring or baking it just a minute or two more, you may realize that your favorite chef's Amazing New Recipe ... may just be one more recipe for failure.

What are the "basic ingredients" which most self-appointed End Time prophecy "experts" whip up into their scenarios? Here are the most popular elements for the past 200 years. Not every contender will use all of these, but most have used several of them.
  

1. Attempts to correlate the chronology of the apocalyptic sections of the Book of Daniel with similar sections in Matthew 24 and the Book of Revelation.

2. Attempts to assign the identity of modern nations to nations mentioned in the prophetic passages in the Bible.
    A. Gog, Magog, Meshech and Tubal in the Old Testament are often assigned to Russia or the former USSR.
    B. The Roman Empire is often speculated to be prophesied to be "resurrected" as a modern combine of European nations.
    C. Prophecy speculators who subscribe to the "British Israel" theory often identify "Israel" with the U.S. and Great Britain, considering that the nation of Israel now in the middle east is actually made up of the descendants not of the northern tribes of the Kingdom of Israel, but of the southern tribes of the Kingdom of Judah.
  
3. Attempts to assign historical dates to key chronologies in the books of Daniel and Revelation. Various schemes for the start and ending of historical periods of 490, 1260, 2300 years and 2520 years are proposed.
  
4. An assumption that there is a "prophetic principle" according to which a symbolic "day" in a prophecy must be taken to be an actual year in fulfillment. This is based on the specific instance in the book of Ezekiel in which Ezekiel is ordered by God to perform symbolic acts which last a number of days, which foreshadow events that will actually last that number of years.

5. An assumption that there is another "prophetic principle" according to which, at times,  a "day" in prophecy is equal to 1000 years. This is based on the passage that says, "A day is with the Lord like 1,000 years." This principle is particularly assumed to establish that, just as God took six days to accomplish the Adamic creation, and then rested the seventh, the world is scheduled to have six thousand years-- six millennia-- of struggles under the rule of Man, and then will come the seventh millennium, the Millennium of God's Kingdom, when Christ and the Saints will rule over the earth and bring a type of "rest."

6. An assumption that Jesus' comments in the "Olivet Prophecy" in Matthew 24, regarding "wars, rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes" can be applied to the lifetime of the prophecy speculator as being a "unique" time of such elements.

7. An assumption that the presence of the Jews back in the area of Palestine indicates the "generation" in which The End will come. In the early 1900s,  the mere return of some of Jews to the area in relation to the "Balfour Declaration" was enough to fire speculation that the last generation had begun. In 1948 with the formation of the Jewish nation, speculation again suggested THIS was the "sign of the last generation." Then when the Jews took Jerusalem from Arab control in 1967, other teachers suggested THAT was the sign instead.

 

  

Fruits and Nuts and More

The above have been the "main ingredients" used by prophecy "experts" for the past 200 years to establish their scenarios. These have often been "spiced up," however, with a number of lesser ingredients. Many such "experts" have also incorporated one or more of the following into their speculations:

1. A belief that the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt have prophetic significance.
 

2. A belief that contemporary astronomical events are or may be in the near future either a fulfillment of a prophecy, or "signs" of the end. This would include things such as Haley's Comet and the more recent Hale-Bopp Comet, the so-called "Jupiter Effect" of the 1980s  that was predicted to cause great earth-wide catastrophes when "the planets lined up", eclipses of the moon in which it appears red, and unexpected meteor showers.
 

3. A belief that there are "hidden messages" in the Old Testament, either in the content or in the arrangement of the letters in ancient Hebrew. This would include the so-called "Bible Codes" as well as such speculations as that of J.R. Church in which the Psalms were postulated to have hidden references to modern events of the past century which would lead up to the End in 2000.

Church speculated that the number of each Psalm from 1 to 99 directly corresponded to the year in the 1900s. Thus the content  of Psalm 96 was viewed as having a hidden meaning related to the events of 1996, and so on. The Bible Codes theory, on the other hand, is based on the speculation that one can find actual "coded" messages by using the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, skipping a certain number of letters in a pattern, and using the resulting letters to make words and phrases which have "prophetic meaning."
 

4. A belief that current events clues can establish the identity of the "Beast" of Revelation.
 

5. A belief that the "Seven Churches of Asia" in the Book of Revelation are actually intended to be prophetic references to a sequential series of "church ages," leading up to the End.

Under these kinds of scenarios, the group that the prophecy speculator belongs to... or has founded... is most often viewed as being the "Philadelphian Era" (full of "brotherly love") of the Historical Church, destined to be either raptured to heaven or whisked to a "place of safety" before the Tribulation period.

And any who leave, or refuse to belong to, that group are often viewed as the "Laodicean Era" (full of a
 luke-warm attitude) of the Church, who are destined for suffering and martyrdom during the Tribulation.
 

6. Attempts to correlate passages in the Book of Ezekiel with current events and current world nations.
 

7. A belief that certain visionary elements of the Book of Revelation are not symbolic at all, but rather representations by John of glimpses he had into the actual physical future. Under this sort of scenario, John's description of  "locusts" is assumed to be his feeble attempt to describe helicopters, and some of the details of the plagues to come upon mankind are viewed as vivid descriptions of the aftermath of nuclear warfare.

 

There are a number of other typical ingredients which some "prophecy experts" mix into their recipes. But the above should give the reader a sufficient sense of how common--and long-lived--some of the elements are which are presented by many modern prophecy pontificators as fresh, amazing new insight that will allow the "Secrets of Bible to Be Revealed At Last!" Elsewhere on this Field Guide website these elements will be pointed out in the specific teachings of men going back to the early 1800s--men who dogmatically and bombastically claimed that their particular recipes using these ingredients were the sure Key to Bible Prophecy. A good place to start investigating these claims is the Overview of the End Times Prophecy Movement .

 

As the old saying goes, "Those who do not learn the lessons of failed prophecy are doomed to… keep using the same flawed recipes."

 

And as another old saying goes ... It's best to take ALL of these recipes with a grain of salt.

 

 

 

No, maybe a whole salt shaker would be best!

A BIG saltshaker! 

 

 

 

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, all original material on this Field Guide website
is © 2001-2011 by Pamela Starr Dewey.

Careful effort has been made to give credit as clearly as possible to any specific material quoted or ideas extensively adapted from any one resource. Corrections and clarifications regarding citations for any source material are welcome, and will be promptly added to any sections which are found to be inadequately documented as to source.

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Prophetic Recipe Collection

“So simple a child can do it!”