What do you know about Jack Van Impe?
Question:
My grandma is always talking about Jack Van Impe and how he is the man to listen to on TV. I know that he talks about the rapture and he uses Scripture to back it like when Elijah was taken up. He talks about the tribulation period and whatnot. Also, he talks about Revelation and from my understanding Revelation has already happened.
I was wondering if you can give me some third party input on this guy because my grandma doesn't listen to me. I would appreciate it a lot.
Answer:
Citing scriptures, by itself, isn't enough to tell us whether a person is a good teacher of the Bible or not. After all, Satan quoted Scripture to Jesus during his temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4). Satan was misusing the passages to make them appear to teach things that were contrary to God's will.
Thus, to understand whether Jack Van Impe is teaching the truth or not, we have to examine what he is teaching. You already noted that he teaches premillennialism, which isn't taught in the Bible, so something must be wrong.
A while back I did a lesson where I took one teaching of Jack Van Impe and showed how he twisted passages by lifting them out of context and assigned arbitrary meanings to various descriptions found in the Bible. To prove the point, I took a satirical "football prophecy" that a friend wrote and made it sound as if it was from the Bible. See "Of Prophecy and Football."
I don't know if that will be sufficient to convince your grandmother or not. It is sometimes difficult to teach people in your own family because they tend to think of you when you were a small child instead of as an adult. It is the same problem Jesus encountered. "For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country" (John 4:44). Sometimes the best approach is to make one small point at a time to build up a reputation of speaking accurately in regards to the Bible.
Did you know "Jack Van Impe stated, with the utmost confidence on his television show, On the Edge of Eternity, June 22, 1994, that the Rapture would occur around the year 2000"? And yet there remains no sign of it.
Did you know that Jack Van Impe had prophesied that 2001 would be the beginning of the end of the world? "Jack Van Impe Ministries sponsors the largest Evangelical Christian program devoted to end-time prophecy. On his home page, he discusses his book "On the Edge of Eternity" in which he predicts that the year 2001 will "usher in international chaos such as we've never seen in our history." He predicts that in 2001, and the years following, the world will experience "drought, war, malaria, and hunger afflicting entire populations throughout the [African] continent...By the year 2001, there will be global chaos." Islam will become much larger than Christianity. (That would take a sudden growth spurt; Islam is currently followed by 19% of the world's population vs 33% for Christianity). A one-world church will emerge; it will be "controlled by demonic hosts." Temple rituals (presumably including animal sacrifice) will resume in Israel." [Interactive Bible, "220 Dates for the End of the World."]
Weldon Warnock had a good article on Jack Van Impe's belief that Iraq is a modern Babylon. It is called, "Iraq in Prophecy? Modern Babylon? Think Again!" Jack Van Impe is also a conspiracy theorist as the "Fake Television Evangelist I.Q. Test" illustrates.
