c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Hal Lindsey, the prophetic author who wrote the 1970s best seller,”The Late Great Planet Earth,”that predicted the coming of the end of time as we know it, is undaunted by the year 2000.”I don’t think there’s anything special about the changing of the millennium,”he says.

Lindsey’s message _ that God is still in charge, even though the world seems to be spinning wildly out of control _ zeroed in on the anxiety at the heart of late 20th-century Zeitgeist.”The Late Great Planet Earth,”published first by Zondervan and then by Bantam, has sold 28 million copies and is still in print. It was a huge hit in both Christian and secular bookstores, leading some to call it the world’s most popular book about religion after the Bible.

Now, 13 books later, Lindsey continues to preach the same basic message he’s been preaching for a quarter of a century.”I believe this generation is going to see the climax of history as predicted by the prophets, ending with a war so great that only the personal return of Jesus Christ will be able to stop it,”he says.

For Lindsey and other students of Christian prophecy, the mother of all modern events was the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Looking primarily to the Hebrew Bible’s book of Daniel and the New Testament’s Revelation, Lindsey predicted that the Second Coming of Jesus would occur within a generation of 1948. At one time, he strongly indicated that the end would begin no later than 1988, although he now says a generation can last anywhere from 35 years to a century.

Over the years, current events have forced Lindsey to revise other details of his grand scheme. At first silent about Iran, he made room in later works for that country’s version of radical Islam. Surprised by the Gulf War, he began talking about a literal Babylon, which he had only seen as figurative before. Skeptical at first about the long-term prospects of the Soviet Union’s Glasnost, Lindsey later said Russia would do just fine in the role he had originally scripted out for the U.S.S.R.

Lindsey simultaneously says he isn’t perfect and that he hasn’t made any significant mistakes yet. And he insists he hasn’t changed his basic message.”That hasn’t changed, but it has continued to develop,”he says.”God called me and gifted me to speak on prophecy. I don’t see myself as infallible, and I don’t see myself as a prophet. I’m an interpreter of prophecy, and it’s something I’ve studied intensely.” But in the 1980s, Lindsey’s life and career took more twists and turns than even he could have foreseen. After two failed marriages and Bantam’s rejection of the third manuscript of a three-book deal, Lindsey was stalled.”I was dead in the water,”said the 67-year-old author.

Today, through his Torrance, Calif.-based Hal Lindsey Ministries he publishes two newsletters; leads regular trips to the Holy Land; and hosts”The International Intelligence Digest,”a weekly 30-minute TV program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and”Week in Review,”a 90-minute live call-in show airing on more than 70 Christian radio stations.

But the 1990s have also brought Lindsey new-found fame and fortune as an author and co-founder of Western Front Publishing, which bought out Lindsey’s Bantam contract and has published four new Lindsey best sellers in the past three years, including his first effort at fiction.

The six-year-old company plans to release three more Lindsey titles this year.

Lindsey, a former evangelist for Campus Crusade for Christ, never planned to be an author. But students who heard his spellbinding Bible studies and churchgoers who heard his frequent lectures, encouraged him to put his ideas in writing.

Only his deep faith in his message and God enabled him to produce”The Late Great Planet Earth,”he says.”Through an experience with God, he unmistakably told me I had to finish the book, and that he had plans for it beyond anything I could dream,”Lindsey says.

Lindsey maintained his confidence even after Moody Press passed on the project. When an editor at Zondervan told Lindsey they hoped to sell as many as 35,000 copies, Lindsey chided them for the smallness of their vision.”I believe the Lord has indicated to me it will sell well over a million,”he recalls telling the editor, who laughed.

Historian Timothy Weber says 1970 was a perfect time for Lindsey’s”pop-premillennialism.””It was an apocalyptic book for apocalyptic times,”says Weber, who is currently revising his University of Chicago Press study of American premillennialism,”Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming.””No one has ever had a bigger audience for prophecy teachings,”says Weber.

Lindsey’s books helped evangelical Christians cope with the anxieties provoked by Vietnam, Watergate, the youth revolt, the Cold War and global famine; they gave a distinctive end-times flavor to both the Jesus movement and the religious right; and they frightened untold thousands into faith in God.”It scared the hell out of them,”says Weber.

That’s fine with Lindsey, a former bartender and tug boat captain who still has a soft spot for the rough-and-tumble people he hung out with before he converted to Christianity.”I’ve always wanted to talk to the people who wouldn’t darken the door of a church,”he says.”I hope my books would lead them to a curiosity that would drive them to search out these things more carefully, and as a result, come to faith.”

MJP END RABEY