Hal Lindsey was born in 1929. He places his born-again birth date in 1955 when he started seeking God after being helped by an "unseen hand."
Lindsey had served in the Coast Guard during the Korean War and later was able to get a job as a tug boat captain in New Orleans. One foggy night when he was making the transit across the Mississippi River without any functioning navigation equipment, he felt the hand of God compelling him to steer sharply to the right. This saved him from certain collision with a steamship and probably from death. He began to re-think his lifestyle and began reading an old Gideon New Testament.
Within three years, he had enrolled in the Dallas Theological Seminary where he came into contact with the end-time teachings of the seminary's second president, John F. Walvoord. That doctrine holds that God will shortly fulfill His promises to the nation of Israel such that, after seven years of tribulation, Christ will return in physical form and set up a literal millennial kingdom to rule the world from Jerusalem.
Upon receiving his Master's Degree, Lindsey went on to work at Campus Crusade for Christ. It was during his tenure there that Israel triumphed in The Six-Day War over her neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In this global political climate, many people who were familiar with the Bible's depiction of an apocalyptic end-time war began wondering, 'What does it all mean?' The stage was set and the audience was in place.
When Lindsey's book, The Late Great Plant Earth hit the bookstores in 1970, it became a runaway best-seller for non-fiction.
The book was packed full with Lindsey's interpretations of scripture, and many of his predictions and explanations seemed plausible. But as global events have worked through history in the past forty years, many of Lindsey's predictions have fallen and he earned accusations of being a false prophet.
Perhaps the most obvious of these was his prediction that the European Common Market would grow to a league of ten nations, at which time it would represent the revived Roman Empire. This ten-nation economic entity would then be subdued and ruled by a diabolical "future fuehrer" or antichrist. The number ten was based on a scripture from the seventh chapter of Daniel that describes a beast with ten horns. At that point there were only six countries in the Common Market; today it is known as the European Union and has twenty-seven member countries. Clearly, the ten kings of Daniel's vision who arise from a single kingdom do not match with Lindsey's interpretation of that chapter.
Nevertheless, Hal Lindsey has remained a prominent media figure and commentator on Bible prophecy. He continued to write popular books and for over twelve years he hosted the International Intelligence Briefing on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. He now has a weekly webcast, The Hal Lindsey Report, that is rebroadcast by Daystar and the Inspiration Network, and gives his spin on current events.
