When it comes to prophecy, let's stick to what the Bible says

..."Do not go beyond what is written"... I Corinthians 4:6 (NIV)

While Christians should be interested in Bible prophecy (more than 25% of the Bible consists of prophecy), if we go beyond what the Scripture actually says, we may end up devoting more space and time to our speculations than to what the Bible says.

An example of this can be found at Look Up Fellowship, a blog of Jeffrey K. Radt. Mr. Radt is looking for the return of our Lord, and is a believer in Bible prophecy. I agree with him on this, and commend him for it. Unfortunately, he has the regrettable tendency to go off on tangents and find spiritual/prophetic significance in things that may not necessarily be spiritually/prophetically significant, and connections that may not exist.

For instance, the death of Cincinnati Bengals’ football player Chad Henry occurred in December 2009, when the sexual sins of Tiger Woods were in the news. Mr. Radt sees a connection:

Surely, the fact that we now have a 'Bengal' emerging in the news front-and-center after a 'Tiger' has garnered all our attention in the past few days is significant as is the fact that both are athletes.
... But boy oh boy if there isn't a CRYSTAL CLEAR SPIRITUAL THREAD TO ALL OF THIS folks, which demands we take notice and prayerfully consider the possibilities right away.

If "there’s a spiritual thread to all of this," it isn’t "crystal clear" to me. The fact that one is nicknamed "Tiger" while the other played for a team called the Bengals does not mean there’s any connection between the two. And I certainly don’t see any connection between these two news items and the name of a character named "The Tiger" in a play that had been presented in Los Angeles seven months earlier.

If you think Mr. Radt is stretching things with the above example, check out his posts--Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; and Part 5--on American Pie, the famous hit song by Don McLean from 1971-1972. As far as I can tell, the song is an elegy from someone who mourns the passing of a time when life was simple, and rock and roll was fun. Standard interpretations of the song’s lyrics may be found here; here; and here. Mr. McLean himself has refused to comment publicly on the song’s meaning, beyond saying that the opening lyrics refer to the death of Buddy Holly. Mr. Radt, however, insists that the song is a message from God. God, however, communicates to us through the medium of the written word in the Bible, not "their preferred method of communication," such as obscure lyrics of pop songs.

By the way, I must correct one of Mr. Radt’s more obvious errors. Mr. Radt asserts that it’s spiritually significant that American Pie was Don McLean’s only hit, but that’s just not true. His follow-up single, Vincent, hit #1 on the British chart, and #12 in the U.S.A. Dreidel hit #21 in the U.S. in 1973, and after 8 years away from the top 40, Mr. McLean had three top 40 hits in 1981: Crying; Since I Don’t Have You; and Castles in the Air. He also wrote And I Love You So, which was recorded by Perry Como and became Mr. Como’s last notable North American hit in 1973. If Mr. Radt is looking for possible spiritual/prophetic significance in a one-hit wonder, he might try In the Year 2525 from 1969, the only big hit for Zager and Evans.

And Mr. Radt is being downright silly when he attributes spiritual significance to the appearance of the record that American Pie appears on. The picture that Mr. Radt shows is that of a 45 of American Pie when it was reissued in the mid-1970s as part of United Artists’ Silver Spotlight Series, not as it originally appeared on United Artists when it was released in 1971.

It’s not surprising that Mr. Radt takes a keen interest in numerology. While it’s true that certain numbers in the Bible are significant, Mr. Radt insists on finding spiritual/prophetic significance in the wedding date of a less-than-significant pop star.

On the whole, Mr. Radt’s penchant for believing in and using extrabiblical sources of God’s supposed revelation has led him so far into "the domain of the ridiculous" (to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill) as to make his blog virtually useless for the purpose of seriously examining events in the light of Bible prophecy. This is why Look Up Fellowship isn’t on my blog list.

For an excellent book that contains warnings against extrabiblical and unbiblical speculation while upholding the proper study and use of Bible prophecy, I recommend Soothsayers of the Second Advent (1989) by William M. Alnor.