End Times part 1

The study of end times is called eschatology. All my life I've lived with this fixation on the rapture, tribulation, great tribulation, Armageddon, the second coming and the millennial.
Growing up in Southern Baptist Churches in Pueblo, CO, Albuquerque and Farmington, NM all the preachers except one preached this form of end times. It's called premillennialism. Most of the preachers when I was young didn't dwell on it.
My first encounter with this doom and gloom was a free pamphlet entitled 1975 in Prophecy. from a radio evangelist by the name of Herbert W. Armstrong. He had a nationwide broadcast and a college in California. All his material was free. There was a monthly magazine named The World Tomorrow, books and pamphlets.
This pamphlet laid out what is now being called Rapture Theology instead of premillennialism. Brother Herbie predicted the rapture would happen in 1975. I was reading this in 1965 at the age of twelve. According to him the world would end in ten years. It didn't scare me. It pissed me off. Why was my life going to end so soon?
The 1960's was a time of revolution. It's been said there was as much social change in that decade as the French Revolution. Civil rights, Vietnam, political assassinations, race riots, the space race, women's lib, the beat generation evolving into the hippies. Add Elvis, The Beatles and subsequent British invasion of music. Just about every preacher thought the world was coming to an end. They all started prediction the rapture was coming. None of them gave 1975 as the due date. After all Jesus said "No one knows the date and time."

By the time I reached high school I pretty well figured out that the rapture wouldn't happen in 1975. Then Brother Hal Lindsay wrote a huge blockbuster. By the time I left for college as a newly licensed minster of the gospel. I would have preached out of this book. The only problem was that he didn't come right out and say it, but the way he interpreted the Bible, the rapture would come in one generation after the founding of a new Israel. Do the math. Israel was created in 1948. A generation is forty years. 1948 + 40 = 1988. Golly Gee Brother Hal added 13 years to Brother Herbie's prediction.

Due to the success of LGPE everybody and their dog started writing rapture books. The most notable are the Left Behind series by Timothy Le Haye. He's put out novels, children's books, movies, even a board game. There's money in spreading doom and gloom.

The problem was that I grew up in what we today would call a bubble. I didn't know there was any other interpretation of Revelation and end times.

I went on to a typical Baptist college -- "forty miles from the nearest known sin." As Grady Nutt said.
Almost all of us preacher boys considered LGPE as next to the Bible in authority. In History of the New Testament (required as well as History of Old Testament), Dr. J. Iveloy Bishop was covering the trial of Jesus before Pilate. He asked a simple question when we got to the part where Jesus said, "My Kingdom is not of this world."
Dr. Bishop said, "If the kingdom of Jesus was spiritual then, why would he change it now?"
It was an epiphany. Clearly to me, He wouldn't. Rapture theology and the whole thousand years reign of Christ on earth fell apart like a house of cards. When I examined the timeline of rapture theology it became clear there was the second coming of Christ or the rapture, then the third coming at Armageddon, then after the thousand year reign, Satan would be released and he would have to come a fourth time to finally set the Great White Throne Judgement.

My dilemma was what should I believe now concerning the end times. All I knew was the premillennialism wasn't it.