June 3 UPDATE: A good interview about the Harbinger and more thoughts about how the message is only going to fail.
Mike Huckabee did a radio interview with Jonathan Cahn back in March, in which Huckabee emphasizes that what makes the book important is its actual FACTS, indisputable facts. Whatever objections people have to the book or to Jonathan Cahn himself, there shouldn't be any doubt at all that the book is a revelation of portentous FACTS that occurred in America in connection with 9/11. These facts can only be interpreted as signs of God's judging the nation, starting with 9/11, but pointing to future judgment as well if the nation does not repent and turn back. This is not a book of opinion or speculation or theological vagueness, it's all about observed facts, that's what makes it an important book.Huckabee reported that the book had sold 60 million copies as of the interview, which is a staggering number.
Despite all its apparent success I continue to feel its impact has been compromised by Cahn's publicizing it on some very fringey charismatic venues. People will read and marvel at it but is it going to turn the nation back to God? See, I think it COULD HAVE, but I think that would have required that it not be associated with borderline heresies and even outright apostasies. Besides its being publicized in this way, there have been ecumenical prayer meetings based on the book's revelation involving some conservative politicians. Jonathan Cahn appeared at an ecumenical prayer breakfast convened to pray for the nation right after Obama's last inauguration. He gave a great talk and I hoped that would be enough, but in the end I think simply being in an ecumenical setting for the purpose of prayer is not going to be blessed by God.
God will not bless anything ecumenical, God will not bless anything but His true Church. For decades now Christians have been allowing compromises that can only defeat such a message as The Harbinger.
At the time of 9/11 itself only a very few Christian leaders dared to call it God's judgment, most across the nation were denying that God would have had anything to do with it. Then President Bush had that abomination of an ecumenical prayer meeting in the National Cathedral to pray for the nation. All I could do was cringe. The idea that God would hear such prayer shows a miserable loss of Christian perspective in this country. SUCH MIXING OF HIS CHURCH WITH UNBELIEVERS AND FALSE RELIGIONS ONLY INVITES GOD'S FURTHER JUDGMENTS ON THE NATION.
Then God showed Jonathan Cahn some pretty dramatic signs that the nation is under judgment starting with 9/11, but now I fear that message is also being vitiated by keeping bad company. DIDN'T GOD TELL US THAT HE WILL NOT BLESS WORSHIP OR PRAYER TO BOTH HIMSELF AND MOLECH? What is Jonathan Cahn thinking? How can his message survive such compromise? Well, I don't think it will. I think it's pretty clear that there are no signs of effective repentance as a result of the book, even if there may be some pockets of repentance here and there.
Really, it ought to be clear to the conservative Christians by now that their ecumenical joining in with the conservative factions of false religions over the last few decades HASN'T ACCOMPLISHED WHAT THEY AIMED TO ACCOMPLISH by such connections. Starting back at least with the Moral Majority, has the nation been getting any better in the areas that conservatives care about? NO! Isn't it obvious that things have only been getting steadily worse in the areas we care about?
WHY? Has God become deaf? Haven't the ecumenical political organizations been working hard enough? Hasn't there been enough ecumenical prayer? Oh Christian America! No, the problem is the ecumenism itself, that you are joining with Molech to accomplish goals that God will not bless for that reason.
Purify the Church, separate from the apostates and the false religions, strengthen the doctrines of the CHURCH, expose the false doctrines, and THEN pray for the nation.
Or The Harbinger like all the rest of the warning signs of national deterioration and judgment is just going to be a flash in the pan and the nation is going to continue going down. The book can even give a timetable for how that is likely to happen. Perhaps that's its only value now.
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My Very Last Post on The Harbinger?
The way things have been going I don't think The Harbinger is going to have much more of an impact than it's already had. I think this partly has to be due to Cahn's persistence in publicizing it through charismatic channels, which I do think is wrong, and likely to be a dead end as far as getting out the message goes if only because so many Christians object to him for that reason.I don't think this is a bad thing. I think the book is a solid demonstration that the nation is under God's judgment, but I don't think it's going to open many eyes to that fact, I don't think we are going to have a revival or much of a national turnaround at all, so I think it's mostly going to stand in the end as an indictment from God to that effect.
Perhaps there's a sort of spiritual irony involved here, that a message from God is getting bogged down in one of the apostate branches of the church. I may be reaching for it but it's not hard to see a metaphor for our present condition in this very fact.
Be all that as it may, I still find the book's message to be solid.
I think we could reduce the whole message of the Harbinger to its observation that a few American political leaders pronounced judgment on the nation when they quoted Isaiah 9:10 as if it were a message of hope following 9/11. To my mind this is the most indisputable fact in the book.
| Isa 9:10 | The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cut down, but we will change [them into] cedars. |
God knocked down our buildings but WE will rebuild. The verse was quoted by Tom Daschle and John Edwards in reference to 9/11, and its essence "We will rebuild" was written by Obama on a beam to be raised to the top of the new Freedom Tower which is to replace the World Trade Center. Others echoed the attitude but these three have the most official national status.
In its biblical context it is clearly a message of a nation's defiance of God's judgment through a great calamity, and by failing to see 9/11 as God's judgment on the US, and by failing to give the appropriate call to national repentance in a time of judgment, these American leaders aligned themselves with the very same spirit of defiance by the leaders of ancient Israel which is expressed in that verse. This defiance is the reason God says in the very next verse He is bringing the Assyrian adversary against them again.
We almost don't need any of the other harbingers in the book to make the case, but so obtuse are some of our "discernment" people that they actually fail to see how these statements are defiant of God or how they are a pronouncing of God's judgment against the nation.
So add to those words by the politicians the uncanny appearances in the wake of 9/11 of those other harbingers that echo the specific elements of Isaiah 9/10 and it looks to some of us like God has given us indisputable symbolic tokens of our defiance of Him that we cannot honestly deny. A sycamore tree destroyed by the attack on the WTC, a conifer brought in to replace it, fallen bricks and a hewn stone brought in to symbolize the rebuilding.
To me these few things are the essential message of The Harbinger that all by themselves put a seal of sorts to God's displeasure with America. There are other factors that deepen their implications, such as the fact that the felled sycamore was on the very corner of the property occupied by the WTC, in the courtyard of the very chapel in which George Washington prayed for the nation right after his inauguration. These factors and more are waved away by the critics as if any human being could have trumped them up.
So I still support this book. I don't, however, support Jonathan Cahn's associations with charismatics, some of whom are known apostates and not Christians at all. I think this damages his reputation and the prospects for his book.
There may be more to say but I'm going to stop here for now.
