Prophecy News Watch editor brings the end times to the world’s doorstep

Prophecy News Watch editor brings the end times to the world’s doorstep

News story by Aaron Hedge | FāVS News

In both mission and lifestyle, Kade Hawkins is comfortable, a state that was evident when he recently walked through the gate to the outside dining area of Hayden’s Parallel 47. Clad in a navy blue polo and wraparound shades, he had his 14-year-old son Andrew in tow. They’d just come from a round of pickleball. They’ll compete as a pair at a national pickleball tournament in Farmers Branch, Texas — a swanky Dallas suburb, this November.

Hawkins is editor of a news aggregation service called Prophecy News Watch (PNW). PNW compiles stories from around the world that Hawkins says tie back to biblical prophecy. He also says it’s meant to keep Bible-believing Christians abreast of current events in concert with Christ’s command to watch until he comes back. 

Andrew tagged along with Hawkins because no one was home to be there with him. His mother, Shannon, was in Ireland, and “the rest of my kids are at Bible camp,” Hawkins explained.

Hawkins, Shannon and six of their eight children live in a 3,400-square-foot, $700,000, five-bedroom, 2.5-bath home in Coeur d’Alene. The eldest two Hawkins kids live in Florida. The family moved to Idaho years ago from a small town in British Columbia, after researching places that would be friendly to a home-schooling family.

“That knocked Washington out because they were a little more strict than what we wanted,” Hawkins told FāVS News. “Idaho has very liberal home-schooling laws.”

This easy lifestyle represents a nice income for a guy who works three or four hours a day, from a home office and sometimes travels internationally to break bread with Messianic Jews and give “prophecy updates” to end-times ministries. 

Apocalyptic content for a price

Reading PNW is a contrast to Hawkins’ at-ease demeanor. 

Solely staffed by Hawkins, and sometimes the kids “in exchange for a fee,” PNW goes out several times a week to 350,000 subscribers, who signed up for free. It’s almost solely funded by ad revenue. Readers of the main website are met with a banner ad boosting one of several rotating apocalyptic documentaries and books. 

One documentary is “Before the Wrath,” narrated by the Christian actor Kevin Sorbo, which claims to uncover new evidence that “reveals why the rapture must occur in the last days.” It can be purchased for $14.99. “Decoding the Future: A Life Changing Journey Through the Book of Revelation” is available in seven-DVD sets for $79.95. 

The world in crisis

Scrolling down, visitors are met with headlines that seem designed to anger his audience of Zionist Christians: “The Road to Another Holocaust Is Being Paved With Wokeness and Apathy,” “Democrats’ Abortion Convention Gets Boost from Evangelicals for Harris” or “From Global Financial Crisis to the Mark of the Beast in 10 Steps.”

Many themes that persist on PNW are built from the same end-times conspiracy theories that drove the violent mob that invaded the United States Capitol Building on Jan. 6, which was largely composed of dominionist Christians. These ideas continue. Leftists are using abortion to weaken American standing on the world stage. Fake Christians are abetting a satanic policy agenda. Globalists will use a financial crisis to implement a system in which no one will be able to participate in markets without swearing fealty to Satan.

He reflects honestly about it. Asked whether his publication inspires violence, Hawkins said, “Is that a real danger? I’d have to concede, yes.”

But he’s committed to his mission, saying he wants to inspire Christians to keep the faith rather than go to war. Readers are expected to bring a biblical lens to the publication, he told FāVS. If not, it’s just bad news — such bad news that it’s liable to make people do drastic things.

“There have been false prophets and dictators and leaders who’ve been doing that forever,” Hawkins said. “I don’t think we can stop it, and I don’t know if there’s a way in our reporting to change it.”

What’s yet to happen

As a young Christian, Hawkins became convinced that the Bible accurately predicted the present when he began studying the New Testament and saw current events reflected in the words he read. 

“Israel is probably the biggest one just because it’s so concrete and so relevant to today and everything going on in the world,” Hawkins said. 

He cited biblical passages alluding to a blooming of the desert (Israel exports flowers and olives), a people united by a common language (Hebrew) and a nation created in a day, which happened in 1947 when the United Nations partitioned Palestine, carving out new territory of a State of Israel during a bitter war over the territory. 

The present State of Israel was not fully formed until 1967, and is seen by experts and governments as an illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

One of the latest events in this line of seeming confirmations: during the pandemic, a Texas rancher shipped four unbranded, untagged red heifers to Israel. Some are planning to sacrifice one of them to fulfill a biblical prediction that, on the ashes of a red heifer, a third Temple would be built, one event believers in biblical prophecy say must happen before the end times.

Confusing the past with the present

Critics of prophecy, though, have argued that anyone can take a story from the Bible and try to make it come true, as perhaps the Texas rancher and the sacrificers-in-wait are doing. In fact, they say in the Bible prophets are always warning of immediate consequences for ongoing sins committed by God’s people and never something that would occur hundreds of years after the words were written.

Jay Rubenstein, a scholar of prophetic thought at the University of Southern California who reviewed some PNW headlines, said the site reminded him of kitschy televangelist shows he sometimes watched in the 1990s.

“[One], called ‘This Week in Bible Prophecy,’ was a news show with two hosts. They would cover what was going on in Iraq and say, ‘We can see this was Matthew 24,’ or whatever,” Rubenstein said. “There was another guy I liked called Jack Van Impe. His wife, who was this very breathy, blonde woman, would read a news story, and then Jack would interpret it, and she would go, ‘Ooh, ooh!’”

PNW echoes these shows. In PNW’s Facebook comments, readers respond to news stories with statements like, “This is difficult to completely understand but read it and you will see how easy it will be for the AntiChrist to take over!” Another comment reads, “Look at the world, it’s becoming another Sodom and Gomorrah.”

The fluidity of biblical prophecy

In an interview, Rubenstein explained the complex origins of two highly prophetic biblical texts: Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New Testament. Daniel was composed in two distinct parts, he said, separated by several centuries. Revelation was written much later by John of Patmos, who many scholars believe was John the Apostle. 

Rubenstein observed a pattern in these writings. Each author borrowed elements from earlier prophetic texts and reinterpreted them to fit their contemporary situations. This made it appear as if current events had been predicted by previous writings. According to Rubenstein, this same approach is being used today by those who believe biblical prophecy is directly applicable to modern events.

“What [people like Hawkins] are doing now is not that different from what the authors of Daniel did or what John of Patmos did, which is to take this prophetic tradition and then find ways to apply it to their own world,” he said.

But enacted or not, contrived or not, the situation in Israel is too incredible for Hawkins to believe that Bible prophecy is not being fulfilled before our eyes. 

“I would say the overwhelming evidence, historically, and even in our modern context, is speaking of events that were yet to happen,” Hawkins said.

From the perspective that the Bible is a reliable guide to contemporary events, Hawkins believes modern Christians need to be deeply informed about what happened in the Bible and, simultaneously, about current events. 

Hawkins goes to work for Chuck Missler

In his late teens, Hawkins helped plant a church, Riverside Calvary Chapel, in Vancouver, B.C. Shortly after that church was established, Chuck Missler recruited him. Missler, a former businessman, founded a Post Falls ministry called Koinonia House (KHouse). Missler wanted Hawkins to run a Canadian branch of his church, which he did for years in a small community called Cranbrook, about three and half hours north of Coeur d’Alene.

As a pastor, Missler was very concerned with current events and delivered weekly addresses called “prophecy updates.”

“He would do a Bible study, but the first 10, 15 minutes of that study would be devoted to, ‘Hey, are you aware of what’s happening in the news right now?’” Hawkins said of Missler, who died in 2018. “His motto was two-fold: You’ve got to know your Bible, but, then, you need to know what’s going on. And that always stuck with me. And I kind of fell more in love with the you’ve-got-to-know-what’s-going-on angle.”

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As part of his duties, Hawkins wrote a weekly newsletter for the KHouse membership about news events the ministry thought fulfilled biblical prophecy. He felt this was a needed service for a pastorate consumed with shepherding the flock and designing sermons.

But Missler’s ministry was rooted in shaky ground. The minister had a history flubbing business deals, misleading people about current events and became a colleague of one of the most notorious Christian hucksters in American history: Hal Lindsey.

‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ and the things that never happened

Missler got his start, after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1956 with a master’s in engineering and in the aerospace and computing industries. He worked for a time at Ford Motor Company and Western Digital before ascending to the peak of his career as CEO of Helionetics, Inc. This company developed state-of-the-art computers, lasers and lighting systems. Missler settled a high-profile lawsuit with the company in 1985 for $1.6 million after it accused him of trying to buy a company in which he held a financial interest. 

After leaving the business world for the prophetic world, Missler linked arms with Hal Lindsey, the author of the bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth.” That book interpreted biblical passages to predict that, in 1980, the Soviet Union would attack Israel as part of the “War of Gog and Magog” that was presaged in the Bible. Crucially, Lindsey predicted Christ would come to earth a second time — fulfilling the most pregnant prophecy of the Bible — in 1988.

Lindsey’s books continued to thrive, and prophetic works keep proliferating, with a veritable cottage industry of novels and books by figures such as Harold Camping, Tim LaHaye and Van Impe doing very well in the contemporary prophetic zeitgeist.

(One professor of religious studies — who said he didn’t want to be quoted directly because he thought this stuff is too complicated for one article — wrote to FāVS saying, “They were all nonsense and totally misunderstand the nature of prophecy.”)

Wait and see: Prophetic realities or ambitious theories?

Missler authored two books, one with Lindsey and another on his own, for which he had to issue new editions with attributions to authors he’d been accused of plagiarizing. And he was one of several Christian leaders promoting the Y2K scare. It said the worldwide power grid would collapse when computer systems failed to adapt to the 2000 switch because they were coded with only the last two digits of the year rather than all four. 

That catastrophe never materialized.

These failures of prediction are reasons why Hawkins is always hedging. He said Christians need to be careful how they interpret the Bible.

“When Jesus went to heaven, he said, ‘Watch,’” Hawkins said. “‘Keep watching, and I will return. From that point on, we really have been in a period of waiting. A great analogy that men can’t relate to as much in Matthew talks about the signs of the times being like birth pains, where a woman’s in labor. They increase in intensity, frequency, as you get closer to the event.”

But Hawkins is always on the fence, going back and forth, in an endless cycle of qualification. After making that cautionary note, he said the end of the world might be right around the corner.

“Boy, in the last hundred years, you compare it to all of modern history, and with AI now, it’s going to keep going that way,” Hawkins said. “Are we in the end times? Yes, but we have been for a while. So we take the words of Jesus — watch, be faithful, and wait.”

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