Jonathan Cahn (born 1959) is a Messianic Jewish pastor in New Jersey who traces his faith to having miraculously survived a train hitting him in his Ford Pinto. (A train hitting a Pinto? No wonder he deemed his survival miraculous. Those contraptions could blow up when hitting a pothole.)
After coming to belief in Yeshua (Hebrew for “Jesus”), Cahn has created an influential ministry, and has written books on prophecy and last-day events, including New York Times bestsellers. A few of his YouTube videos have had millions of hits. Though some deem him “America’s Prophet” or the like, “A Messianic Jewish Hal Lindsey” would, for two reasons, be a more appropriate appellation. First, he is approaching the kind of sales and popular acclaim that Hal Lindsey enjoyed decades ago; second, just as every significant prediction Lindsey made has failed, Cahn is on course for the same dismal record.
Why? Because whatever their theological differences, both he and Lindsey have bought into futurism, which sees the Middle East, especially the nation of Israel, as the focus of last day events. They basically use Old Testament passages, some conditional, to predict and interpret contemporary events involving Israel. Cahn, for example, has made two recent YouTube videos, using Ezekiel 38 and Zechariah 12 to predict and explain the recent conflict between the Jewish nation and Iran.
This kind of biblical interpretation for Cahn, however, is nothing new, nor is it limited to Israel, either. Years ago, Cahn claimed that Isaiah 9:10— “The bricks have fallen down,/But we will rebuild with hewn stones;/ The sycamores are cut down,/ But we will replace them with cedars”—was, actually, a prediction about the 9/11 terrorist attack. You know . . . the bricks falling down was, really, the Twin Towers collapsing.
With exegesis like this, what possibly could go wrong? Look at how well it worked for Hal Lindsey, whose exegetical perspicacity led to him to predict that the rapture, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the return of Jesus, would all happen by—1988. Cahn’s on the same path. For example, based on the law of Shemitah (Lev. 25:3-6), in which ancient Israel was to let the land lie fallow for one year every seven years—Cahn predicted a massive shaking in the American economy by 2016. It took quite the exegetical acrobatic to link Leviticus 25:3-6 to the United States economy in 2016, but “America’s Prophet” did just that. And (surprise of surprises), having worked its way out of the 2008 housing crash, the United States’ economy did fine up to and through 2016, thank you.
A modern-day Aaron?
Nothing, though, beats what’s coming. Now, please! This article is not about politics (which I am so sick of, anyway). One’s political views are irrelevant to my point, which is theological and spiritual, not political.
In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Cahn did a YouTube video called “The Mystery Behind the Trump Assassination Attempt.”[i] In it, he compares the shooting, and the blood spilled in it, to the blood used in the consecration of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood. “Also he took some of its blood and put it on the tip of Aaron’s right ear, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot” (Lev. 8:23; see also Exo. 29:20).
The blood was, first, to be put on the tip of the priests’ right ear. Trump got hit on the tip of the right ear, which of course bled. For Cahn this parallel—the blood on the high priest’s right ear, and the blood on Trump’s right ear—is prophetically significant. Playing the video of the assassination attempt, he says that in consecration service the “blood is first on the tip of the right ear. Second, it goes on the right hand. And that’s exactly the order in which it happened [with Trump]: the right ear and the right hand.”
Scripture also says that the blood was applied to “the big toe of the right foot.” Well, says Cahn, “as Trump goes down, his shoes are removed.” And then he explained that “the blood could now touch his feet, even though through his socks” and that “the order of the ancient concentration is first, the tip of the right ear, the thumb of the right hand, and the toe of his right foot”—exactly what, he said, happened to Trump.
People are looking for something, anything to put hope in.
There’s more. Cahn said that, after the anointing, the priest would hold the bloody sacrifice in his hand and wave it before the congregation. The obvious parallel? “Trump, he took his right hand, that had touched by the blood, and he waved his hand for the world to see” in the famous picture of his fist raised before the American flag.
Cahn’s not done. Only after the anointing procedure, he says, “could the priest be set into his office.” Amazingly enough, this sequential placing of the blood on Trump’s right ear, right hand, and right big toe happened, Cahn said, “on the last Sabbath before the nomination of Donald Trump to the office [his emphasis] of the presidency.”
One more (though he has more): the shooting happened in a town called “Butler,” and though I’ll spare you Cahn’s exegesis, he links the name “Butler” to the biblical term for “cup-bearer,” which also means (he says) the one who was supposed “to protect the ruler from assassination.”
We have a term in Yiddish, mishegaas (Google it), for this kind of stuff. Again, forget the politics. You could substitute Donald Trump for Jimmy Carter or Kim Jon Un—it doesn’t matter. What matters is what this mishegaas reveals about the human desire for hope, for salvation, for deliverance. Sure, Cahn believes in God, but God is invisible. We can’t see Him. But we can see human leaders, flesh and blood beings like us, some kind of Moses or John the Baptist who can lead us to the promised land.
Cahn knows that Jesus is our only Savior, but . . . Or that America is not the New Israel, but . . . Or that we cannot put our trust in the arm of flesh, but . . . But in such a tumultuous world, people are looking for something, anything tangible to touch and to feel and to put hope in, and the first place that they usually go, government leaders, is the last place that they will find it—a lesson that humans, even believers, never seem to learn.
Sure, we have our own seventh-day wackadoodles. My favorite, especially now after forty years at the General Conference, was the woman who claimed Jesus showed her in vision that Jesuits were murdering General Conference leaders by poisoning them at potlucks and then replacing them with doubles. When asked the logical question, “Would not their wives have sensed something amiss” (My goodness, George is acting and looking rather strange these days), she said that their marriages were so bad that wives couldn’t tell the difference between their murdered husbands and the Jesuit imposters.
That’s about the same class as Jonathan Cahn’s stuff. Except that “America’s Prophet” reaches millions hungering for hope in a world that does not offer it, cannot offer it, and is not supposed to offer it. And, of all people, the ones listening to Cahn and believing his nonsense should know this truth; but, having accepted futurism and the false narrative it presents, they have bought into his mishegaas, which can lead only to disappointment and greater deception.
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vKDJ072oVs