As It Is With Strangers By Susan Beth Pfeffer Pdf Creator
(The post formerly known as )Robert Frost speculates on the end of the world in a succinct poem, “Fire and Ice,” that outclasses so many longer works (including this one). Aside from poetry, many people will not read science fiction because “it’s so depressing.” This may be a reason that “Star Trek” is so popular, as it is one of the few futures that tries to be hopeful.Sometimes readers are just doing what is best for themselves according to the Romans 14 stress test. That is, sensitive individuals, believers of tender faith, and the like may simply know what is good and best for them. Doomsday stories are hard, stark: they can break hearts, and not just because God is largely absent. For those with stronger constitutions, a Things Go Boom story can point out where we as a species are going wrong and what, if anything, we can do about it.What got your host (that’s me) scribbling on this odd topic is the sheer work that goes into the suspension of disbelief, of immersing oneself in a story, and by extension, the effort that goes, or ought to go, into the author’s attempt to create a world to blow up.
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Rogue asteroids, exploding volcanoes, Acts of God, and the guy-with-his-finger-on-the-trigger-just-slipped-on-a-banana-peel theories may blow it all up, but why should the reader care?Consider the reasons why people dwell on end of the world stories:Entertainment. It’s spectacle.
It’s big, it’s cool, it’s a release for the thrill-seeker to watch the world’s end without the inconvenience of experiencing it. It’s no coincidence that doomsday stories that vaporize faceless crowds tend to be more popular and profitable ( Independence Day, anyone?). Ask these same people why they would not delight to watch the earth being born, Digory-and-Polly-in-Narnia style, and they’ll hastily reply that of course that would be good to see!
In the same tone of voice of the spouse who forgot your birthday, and is making some excuse about the present being hidden behind the car, and to fetch it the car has to be moved, apparently all the way to the store.Fear of death. Alternately, if Things Go Boom in a sufficiently extravagant manner, perhaps the end will be instantaneous and painless. The doomsday stories most likely to be labeled “depressing” are the ones that doom the characters to die of attrition.
Examples include On the beach, The road, What Niall saw, and the “Moon novels” of Susan Beth Pfeffer. Such stories dwell upon an internal logic that some people want to live as long as possible even if life is misery: “where there’s life, there’s hope.” Characters trapped on a dying planet may resort to hoarding and clannishness, rationalizing it as “times are different.” In such works religious people often are portrayed rather poorly. Corrie ten Boom and Victor Frankl may have seen real-life individuals “who gave away their last piece of bread,” but that philosophy is not always found in fiction.Also, in this category the line between hope and delusion sometimes gets blurred. A married couple in On the beach spend the last months of their lives planning a garden they will not live to see. Whether they are living Martin Luther’s observation that “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree” or simply hiding their faces from death is something the novel chooses to leave unanswered.Displacement. Aliens become substitutes for the stranger, the rival, the enemy, whoever that is from one decade to the next.
Klingons and Romulans and Borg, oh, my! Even inanimate objects will suffice.
One can “hate” the asteroid in Armageddon, for example, because it’s okay to hate the asteroid. (On a whim your host rented both Deep Impact and Armageddon for a weekend.
Your host preferred DI, by the way.)Distraction. Sooner or later, people get exhausted dreading all those killer rodent viruses, mosquitoes, flesh-eating bacteria, flu-of-the-week, melting icecaps, holes in the ozone layer, comet strikes, briefcase nukes, bad guys trying to light their shoes, Yellowstone’s super-caldera burps, Skynet/Borg potentials, and of course killer bees. Doomsday stories are the flip side of the man of the house turning off the football channel to watch a World War II film: “I just wanted to watch something I knew we would win.”Extinction (of the earth, not of us). Subdivided into categories of Academic Curiosity and Disillusionment.Disillusionment arises from the notion that the earth is a condemned house that needs to be torn down. Whether anyone escapes largely depends upon overlap with other categories such as Prophecy. Curiosity arises from an assent that the house is burning down but it’s not our house.
Characters can lift off from the doomed world and watch its destruction from a safe distance (classic Christian rapture fiction, classic Star Trek).Modern rapture fiction may fall into either category, but any novel ( When worlds collide) or film ( Deep Impact) that evacuates the chosen to a safe haven will do.Extinction (of us, not the earth). This is the thinking behind the otherwise insightful book The world without us. How would the earth respond if humans simply vanished?
Not “dropped dead,” since the corpses would pollute the ecosystem. Just vanished: bodily removed by the Kanamits, the rapture, or the Enterprise. Some parts of the earth would heal. Other parts would flood, burn, melt down into radioactive sinkholes, or drain into the whirlpool of garbage—plastic can’t sink—that even now roils in the far Pacific like a toilet that can’t stay flushed. In the last chapter, the writer argues that all we have to do to see Eden restored is to stop having children, to graciously go extinct, as if humans are not really native to this world and should be weeded like any invasive plant. (Amazon.Com readers almost melted down, themselves, at that: “God promised that humans will never go extinct!” being among the politer protests.)Sin (ours).
Things simply must Go Boom because of humanity’s fallen nature. See the classic A canticle for Leibowitz.Sin (throughout creation). Things Go Boom regardless of which species acquires sentience: that sentience itself is the trouble. See the classic Planet of the Apes film series. Sometimes overlaps with Dystopia, in which the world does not end but the “other” is in charge.Depersonalization.
People find it easier to visualize the end of the world than the end of themselves. It is the individual’s fear of death, fear of growing old, fear of getting really sick, fear of outliving your money, your family, your church, or your wits. If the world goes Boom, you don’t have to worry about what you, personally, will need for the next 50+ years of your life.This theory is popular among economists. They argue that Westerners buy on credit and save so little money because the discipline required to manage money derives from one’s ability to visualize the future and then to visualize oneself living in it. The theory is that those who see the future as too distant or otherwise unreal cannot plan for it.Prophecy (inevitable).
Different from disillusionment. Sometimes the prophecy is secular (say, when scientists predict that a meteor called “Aphosis” might hit earth in the 2020s), sometimes New-Age (say, the Mayan calendar), and sometimes religious (say, Jack Van Impe). Televangelists Jack & Rexella Van Impe (pro-Rapture, pro-animals-go-to-heaven) endorse the Mayan calendar’s 2012 date. Based on that calendar, JVI predicts the Christian Rapture in 2012 followed by 7 years of tribulation, with doomsday in 2019. JVI interprets it as that the Mayan calendar doesn’t “end” so much as predict a cataclysm, and that that calendar has already had several of them, one of which he says was Noah’s Flood.
That sets him apart from most of the other rapturists, a lot of whom were betting on 2007 for the departure day. Where prophecy meets fiction, people may read Things Go Boom stories for rehearsal, for advice, for pointers. Stories become handbooks.Message (also called Prophecy, negotiable). The future can be changed (The book of Jonah, Terminator 2, and A Christmas Carol ). Our world faces imminent catastrophes, some of which do not necessarily rise to the level of all life being wiped off the planet, but are nonetheless scary beyond what we like to acknowledge at a rational level.
Keeping doomsday scenarios in mind on a more abstract level (e.g., in our history, literature and entertainment) may inspire people or help mobilize them, to keep the boat afloat or at least make an effort to patch the hole.Once upon a time, Westerners had to pay the garbage truck to take old newspapers; now fundraiser recycling bins inhabit our parking lots. Until recently, lead was everywhere; now lead is banned from gasoline, paint, and from grocery store cans—staggeringly, the latter ban was not achieved until 1993.
We know more about nutrition nowadays. And then something else “too big” comes along and knocks our baby steps out from under us. Sometimes we learn to walk and realize we have tied our shoelaces together. (The switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs may save a few coins in the electricity bill—but if you drop and break the bulb, it releases poisonous mercury into the room, carpet, and fabrics and can cost money to clean up. This is progress?)The feeling of being overwhelmed makes us wonder whether our bit makes a difference. And that is “mere” calamity; sin adds so much to the mix.
Fiction offers the satisfaction of detecting an “unsolvable” problem and then either solving it before the end of the story, or closing the book and being so thankful that it’s not us.Note that in the Message category, the characters sometimes advertize a political message: both Life as we knew it and One second after chastise politicians. Also, the Message category tends to include an expositional character whose job is to blow a trumpet a lot. “Someone should have prepared! Someone should have known! Tech speak geek speak prophecy! Message, people! Pay attention to the Message!” The story, in other words, can get heavy-handed.
On occasion such views (of the characters) even influence the outcome in the sense of, say, the characters treating food and goods as as renewable or non-renewable resources e.g., should we farm or should we migrate. However, as no party or philosophy can make the sun shine or the rain fall, the reader needs to be alert for such distractions.(As to your host’s observations on Things Go Boom, no one seems to pay attention to water.
Where are we going to get water? There’s a crisis that could qualify as natural, supernatural, man-made, or all of them together. But it probably won’t be marketable as a manly action movie.)Now that we know why fictional Things Go Boom, we return to the original question: why should the audience care?Well, because the storyteller cannot destroy a nothing. He needs to blow up a Something. The reader needs to care about the Something that is being blown up.
Otherwise, they both might as well watch a lightning display on a distant horizon: spectacular, but without risk or reward or context.There are two popular techniques to make readers care about the world soon to Go Boom: make your own world, or use a world already in service. Less commonly, one encounters a world-within-a-world set in the aftermath of a super-catastrophe that the narrator cannot clearly describe or remember.
(See What Niall saw, The road, and Part 1 of Canticle for Leibowitz.)Life as we knew it and Deep Impact start with a world just like ours and then break one thing. All other consequence flows from that one ruined thing. Readers have little difficulty identifying with such stories, since the settings are familiar and character responses tend toward the realistic rather than the fantastic.The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings are examples of a created world which C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien had to form, breathe upon, and populate before proceeding to blow it all up. If an imaginary world contains non-human species, the author also must create “point-of-view” characters with whom the audience can identify. It need not be restricted to human characters, but the POV must have relatable human characteristics.
The purpose of all this extra work of world-building is much the same as with a prefab world: by the time the author gets around to destroying the world, the reader has to care that it’ll be gone. “See, I have watched my mother’s death,” declares Tirian of Narnia.
“It were no virtue, but great discourtesy, if we did not mourn.” Tirian is comforted and overjoyed to realize that all which was good in Narnia came into the afterlife with him. For the author, that requires building yet another world, one without the defects of our reality.The Left Behind series, as it does with so many other things, tries to have it both ways.
It creates a new world after the old one Goes Boom but struggles to make that Edenic world both realistic and fantastic, or either realistic or fantastic. The Edenic world, called the Millennial Kingdom by the characters, is preceded by seven years of history during which the old, existing world gets blown up real good. This existing world is purported to be just like our world, thus no world-building ought to be needed. In the world of LB, the United Nations rules all, abolishes nations’ currencies, buys news outlets to promote itself, nukes defenseless cities at will, and makes treaties with “little Israel.” An Israeli scientist who lacks Galadriel’s magic ring independently invents her miraculous plant fertilizer, and Israel becomes the wealthiest nation on earth by growing cereal grains. Russia and Ethiopia become sufficiently annoyed by said cereal grains that they drop nukes on Israel in numbers like unto a locust plague (fortunately, no Israeli loss of life was recorded, God having performed a miracle to deactivate the nukes). A rabbi is spoken of as being eligible for a Nobel Prize (in which category?) for making a checklist of what his fellow Jews should look for in the Messiah. Every child on earth vanishes, but aside from a few hysterics behaving badly the world recovers nicely in two weeks.
(No one actually looks for them.) A villain tells the world press that the children are vaporized (“like someone striking a match in a room of gasoline vapors”), and the parents react to this minor mystery solved by going back to work, remarrying, selling the big house with its unnecessary extra bedrooms, and buying gold while the market is good. And that’s before the fantastic elements of plagues and judgments rock the world until it is utterly destroyed. Other than that, though, it’s just like our world. It’s uncanny, really. Well, maybe not.Having blown up that Tribulation-world, the authors of Left Behind go on to build an earthly Millennial realm supposedly modeled on Eden, populate it with mortals and immortals side by side, let them mingle for a thousand years and then blow it all up and create a third realm, the New Heavens and New Earth in ten pages. To paraphrase that planet-wrecker James T. Kirk, “Where’s the terror of blowing it all up?
The suspense? The fun!” Here we have a Built-and-Boom story that is, well, lightweight.To make the audience care about Things Go Boom, the storyteller has to create a world that is “heavy” and believable.
How does one build a world? There are authors, directors and professors who make a living at this, but for our purposes, we can restrict the list to a few manageable elements.The creator must decide if his world will be realistic or fantastic. He must decide how realistic to make his fantasy, how fantastic to make his reality. The creator must decide what will be retained from existing worlds, what must be invented, and what will be absent.The creator needs characters, an environment for them to live in, and a belief system to explain them or, alternately, to explain their adversaries. When a character “comes alive,” he often surprises his creator, and the author must decide if the world should be changed to accommodate the character, or if the character can be said to be sent by his creator to change the world. It should be noted that many storytellers actually come up with the character first, then have to create a world to be his home.
Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stories all sprang from the simple sentence, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” But what a world Tolkien had to create to support that sentence!The creator has to decide how long the characters will live. Do any of the characters have health problems? Would the narrators sacrifice themselves for the sake of children, pets, friends, enemies? Will the narrator be among the first to die or among the last to die? The doomed narrator—a child or other person who can neither survive unprotected nor contribute survival skills—tends to live in a short book because the character’s life is cut short.
Longer books may feature a narrator such as a retired soldier or some other person with survival training. That’s not a flaw, unless the readers cannot identify with this hero-person. The larger flaw with such narrators is when hero types crowd out better-trained survival types: One second after focuses on the retired soldiers, while the off-the-grid hippies and Tinfoil Hat recluses remain an untapped resource. In contrast in Life as we knew it the chief survivalist is a mother who has absorbed Great Depression penny-pinching skills from her grandparents.
To feed her family, she knows which flower bulbs to eat from the garden. Both are among the doomsday novels with pets in them.The creator must decide what coping mechanisms the characters will employ. For example, Left Behind, On the beach, and Panic in the Year Zero! Enforce strict routines and gender roles. In the first and second, the dad does not even lose his job.
In the third, the dad does not even lose his suit and hat. The world may be ending, but Dad will be impeccably attired and clean-shaven to meet this end! His wife and children, including adult children, will be deferential to his authority.
It may not stop the rain of death, but it calms Dad and gives him a feeling of having protected his family, however fleeting that feeling might be. Alternately, gender roles can be used to tear a family apart as in Pfeffer’s “moon series”: Life as we knew it, The dead and the gone, This world we live in, Shade of the moon.Finally the creator has to decide what he will and won’t attempt. As of this writing, One second after is almost too new for review, but an immediate reaction is that a doomsday novel takes a big risk when it skips the crucible known as Winter. This novel also includes a teenaged pregnancy conceived after the disaster. In contrast, in LAWKI a teenager is punished for dating because of the parent’s terror that it might lead to pregnancy and another mouth to feed. In A Canticle for Leibowitz the author decides not to explain how the nuclear war was begun.
In The road, the author goes one step further by refusing to explain what disaster actually happened. Thus “the Man and the Boy” could be living ten years after Life as we knew it or ten years after Canticle or Niall, and we would never know it.To build your very own world, it helps to understand the existing one a little. Such understanding itself may be shaped by the author’s belief system, and by extension, the experts upon whom he chooses to rely for his history lessons. Some Christians will not read a secular work because of the book’s starting point of old earth, evolution, and so forth. Others who do not have a Romans 14 stumbling-block response might browse the more digestible secular hits such as the world-building trio of Guns, germs and steel; A short history of nearly everything; and The world without us.
The “humans should go extinct because we’re bad for the earth!” comment in World we have already noted. Short history lacks motive, though to be fair modern humans are its audience not its subject, and Guns fails to take into account either peer pressure or belief system as agents of culture.A created world needs at least as much cohesion as the real one, and often a little more. (Writer’s proverb: “The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.”) To the extent that one can, a creator often borrows from our world what works. We can poke a stick at, say, Middle-Earth and build, and Tolkien’s work would stand up to the scrutiny. The same theme of music as an accompaniment to creation appears in the Bible, The Silmarillion, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The magician’s nephew. The fictional Canticle for Leibowitz and Babylon 5’s “Deconstruction of Falling Stars” draw upon real-world instances of holy men preserving knowledge and civilization after a great fall.Tolkien called fictional universes “Secondary Worlds” as opposed to the Primary world in which we live.
Tolkien argued that an author shows respect for his Secondary World by making it internally consistent through character, language, geography, and timelines that fit together like puzzle pieces. When this is done properly the creation “comes to life” and becomes believable. In a bit of a mystical turn, Tolkien believed that creating fictional Secondary Worlds helps us to understand better our Primary, divinely created world and the God who created it. But this is Tolkien’s personal belief and does not necessarily reflect his religion as a Roman Catholic. More on Tolkien’s views on world-building can be found in his The monsters and the critics.Building a world, in other words, is harder than it looks. But your host believes in giving points for degree of difficulty attempted. (The post formerly known as ) Left Behind: Kingdom Come, the Final Victory (c2007) discussion topics(Added August 2007) Discussion topicsDiscussion topic: Do you believe in an earthly Millennium?
If yes, what version? (Examples: pre-millennial dispensationalist-rapturist leading to tribulation then millennium; post-millennium leading to rapture and tribulation, etc.) Do you believe in a literal 1,000-year reign, an unspecified finite, or a never-ending era? The “Peaceable Kingdom”? How many resurrections do you believe in? How many judgments?
Who participates in any or all, and why? How does Left Behind: Kingdom Come, the Final Victory conform to and deviate from your interpretation of the end times?Discussion topic: After the Rapture, the once 12-year-old Raymie Steele skips over his formative teen years to adulthood.
Some readers liked this idea, in that “children” like Raymie, Bahira and Zaki did not lose their childhood trust and wonder when they became adults. Other readers found this plot point puzzling, even creepy. (Sample quotes included, “Did God conclude that our human birth-and-growth process was a glitch in the system that He deleted from the next software release and hardware upgrade?” and “Does God have template personalities to plug into our unformatted hard drives/dry husks?” See also Montgomery’s Anne’s House of Dreams and the theological debate raised by the subplot about whether Anne and her dead baby would recognize each other in Heaven.)Personality shapes and is shaped by experience, habits, education, talents, travel, memories, hopes and dreams, choices, and relationships. What would it be like for the 12-year-old Raymie, or an unborn child, to skip their formative years and emerge into our view as adults?Related: The novel is structured in a certain way for a certain reason. From Volume 12, page 355:“If God did not allow Satan one more chance to deceive the nations, all the people who are born and live during the millennial kingdom would be exempt from the decision to follow God or follow Satan. By releasing him one more time, all people are given equal standing before God.”Children who died or were raptured before an “age of accountability” are exempt from this “equal standing” requirement.
They have been to Heaven and received their glorified bodies and minds. They never made a decision and indeed cannot make a decision.
They are forever fixed as belonging to Jesus, because He claimed them when they were too little to claim Him. What do you think about the series’ decision to grant this exemption, particularly in light of this new volume portraying a millennial kingdom full of children?Discussion topic: The characters cite Zephaniah 3:9 as source for the novel’s plot point that the characters can speak pure Hebrew. One could posit that an earthly Kingdom of God heals the disunity of Babel, among other things. The TLB footnote to Genesis 11 comments, “Language is the basis upon which science feeds upon itself and grows.
Kid Power Susan Beth Pfeffer
Babel was the beginning of an explosion of knowledge, nipped in the bud because of wrong motives and wrong use of the knowledge gained. Similarity with today’s world is significant.”Babel was only three generations after Noah. Why were the people of Babel building a walled city as an expression of unity?
Who were they walling out? Their own relatives! (Trivia alert: Genesis 9:28-29 states that Noah lived for 350 years after the Flood. The Scofield Reference Bible, c1917 (“SRB-1917”) dates the Flood as the year 2348 B.C.
And Babel as 2247 B.C. By Scofield’s reckoning, Noah was alive at the time of Babel.
Was he locked out too? Or was he locked in? The characters should have asked him.)Many Biblical scholars argue it is Pentecost which fulfills Zeph. The argument is that the prophet said “pure speech,” not “Hebrew language.” “Pure” speech would be “purity in speech,” i.e. No lies, no faithlessness (supported by verse 13). This is why Pentecost did not turn humans back into monolingual speakers. Instead, languages became additional instruments to spread the gospel.
It was not only about tongues being loosed, but about ears and hearts being opened. The talking was important, but the listening was equally or more important. When strangers believed at Pentecost, they were restored to one family: the family of God.
The sundering of minds, hearts, and family begun at Babel was ended. And for believers, the Spirit prays for us, in groanings too deep for words ( Rom. 8:26), surely a “pure speech” or possibly the purest form of speech.Discuss the novel’s decision to have the characters speak Hebrew. How would the story have been different if they spoke “a pure speech” in the sense of being incapable of deception, of words that are spoken only in right use?Discussion topic: Rayford wonders why the Jewish people must sacrifice animals in the Millennial Kingdom. Jesus answers by quoting Col.
9:26b, 28a; Heb. 10:1, 4, 12-14. In between these verses, King Jesus adds, “But in these restored, physical sacrifices in the temple, there is a reminder of sins every year, just as the celebration of My supper is in remembrance of the price paid of My body and of My blood. My chosen ones i.e.
The living Jewish inhabitants must continue to present memorial sacrifices to Me in remembrance of My sacrifice and because they rejected Me for so long” (pages 22-23).(We call this version of Jesus, “King Jesus,” because He is an earthly king in the novel, and because we need to distinguish Him from the Jesus-of-the-Gospels. The title may sound slightly flippant, but it isn’t intended to be. The character Chaim used the term in Volume 12, page 269.)The SRB-1917 footnote to Ezekiel 43:19 (page 890) states: “Doubtless these offerings will be memorial, looking back to the cross, as the offerings under the old covenant were anticipatory, looking forward to the cross. In neither case have animal sacrifices power to put away sin ( Heb. 3:25).”Non-dispensationalists, such as amillennialists, reply that Ezekiel 46:13-15 describes a lamb and cereal offering with oil (i.e., Lamb, loaf/body) that are offered up every day, forever. Do you consider this a reference to the holy feast, when believers all over the world approach the Lord’s Supper? When Gentiles partake of the body and the blood, do we do it to remember that we too rejected Christ for so long?
What are our motives for partaking of the holy feast?Consider Hebrews 10:17-18, which says that where there is forgiveness of sin, there is no longer any offering for sin. Isn’t the whole point of Hebrews 10 that the new sacrifice is superior to the old, and therefore Heb 10:3 was written down to show what the sacrifice of Christ has replaced?
31:34 says God will remember their sin no more. If so, why would Jewish citizens of the Millennium “bring it up again in conversation,” so to speak, at the altar every day?What about the Dispensational belief that converted Jews are not part of the Church? The SRB-1917 footnote to Hosea 2 (page 922) states:”That Israel is the wife of Jehovah (see vs. 16-23), now disowned but yet to be restored, is the clear teaching of the passages. This relationship is not to be confounded with that of the Church to Christ ( John 3:29, refs.). In the mystery of the Divine tri-unity both are true. Speaks of the Church as a virgin espoused to one husband ( 2 Cor.
11:1, 2); which could never be said of an adulterous wife, restored in grace. Israel is, then, to be the restored and forgiven wife of Jehovah, the Church the virgin wife of the Lamb ( John 3:29; Rev. 19:6-8); Israel Jehovah’s earthly wife ( Hos. 2:23); the Church the Lamb’s heavenly bride ( Rev. 19:7).If the Bride of Christ is a “virgin,” and the Bride of Christ consists of those who are born again, born of the Spirit, born from above ( John 3:5-8), this would seem to mean that believers have died to sin ( Rom. 6:3-8) and are born again as spiritually pure, or virginal. The novel, and Scofield, could be interpreted to be saying that this does not happen with converted Jews, only with Gentiles.
If a Jewish believer was baptized into Christ, baptized into His death, “became like Christ in newness of life, a new creation” would not this person be a member of the virginal Bride of Christ? Don’t Jews get “born again,” or do they do so in a way that looks different than it does on Gentiles?Why do the novel’s Jewish characters have to sacrifice animals instead of (or, for all we know, in addition to) partaking in the Lord’s Supper? Didn’t every Gentile who entered the tribulation alive also reject Jesus their whole lives? Additionally, Tsion says that every Jew who made it alive to the Millennial Kingdom will “know the Lord” (page 33). The novel states that Passover will continue to be observed—with no lamb, because the Lamb is among them. Otherwise Mosaic law is to be observed (pages 26-27).
Why?Did King Jesus answer Rayford’s question? Did King Jesus answer your questions?Discussion topic: Kenny is willing to wait 2-3 years until his 100th birthday exonerates him.
But is the team really so inept that they cannot solve this problem any other way? If Kenny cannot depend upon family and friends, then in theory this would be an opportunity to bring back Hattie Durham: she witnessed so many conspiracies (some as perpetrator, some as victim) that she might have identified patterns or even suspects.
Who would you recommend that Kenny go to for guidance?In the series, saved characters receive the seal of God on their foreheads. 22:4 reminds us that the blessed have The Name on their foreheads in Eternity.
In Volumes 4-12, these signs are physical and visible to other believers. Why doesn’t Kenny have a Saved Seal?Discussion topic: What is your impression of the Millennium Force as a team, in terms of their mission statement, and in terms of their priorities? Compare and contrast the Millennium Force to their parents’ Tribulation Force.Discussion topic: Like the MF, TOL suffers from infighting and a lack of focus. Most or all of TOL’s characters are runaways from believing households, and at times they appear to treat their cult as merely a form of teenage rebellion against parents and King Jesus.
What does the novel do or fail to do to explore why children from good families grow up badly? Did you or someone you know misspend your youth and turn to God as an adult?
What is your reaction to the plot point that all “bad kids” die young without a chance to turn their lives around as adults?Related: Where are the children of the Goats? Both volume 12 and volume 16 insist that all living humans attended the Sheep and Goats Judgment. The idea that King Jesus would doom small children because their parents were Goats would not be consistent with Volume 1, in which children were raptured regardless of the “Saved Status” of their parents.
However, if these children of the Goats were spared, where are they?(Until the reader was more perfectly informed by later details, it was reasonable to suppose that COT was an orphanage. Chloe and Cameron were promised many children to compensate them for their separation from Kenny. Chloe and Cameron were not Kenny’s babysitters or schoolmarms but his parents. A like compensation would make them parents to more children.
However, as the novel progresses, it speaks of “day care” services and children bringing their parents to the guest appearances. No mention is made that Rayford, who built COT’s campus, ever built COT any dormitories.)If Goat orphans (born and unborn) were spared, who raised them? How much do they remember and understand? What was their reaction to when they heard about TOL? (All TOL who identified their parentage are children of Sheep.
Their parents are alive!) Should the novel have included a few characters who identified themselves as children of the Goats?Discussion exercise (optional): As much as believers enjoy a good Bible story, even devoted fans of the series have called it excessive to devote dozens of pages to reprinting the Bible narrative of four Hebrew heroes of faith. It reminds readers of Matt. (The post formerly known as ) Volume 16-called-13 ( Left Behind: Kingdom Come, the Final Victory, c2007) spoilers(Added August 2007)Spoiler: Why are we covering “Left Behind: Kingdom Come, the Final Victory” out of order, and why do we call it “Volume 16-called-13”?Answer: This is the first time that your host has seen a volume as soon as it was released. New readers will acquire either this last volume or the first one, and we’ve covered the first one.Some readers count the three “Countdown: Before They Were Left Behind” prequels as volumes 13, 14, and 15.
Other readers do not count them, making “KC” Volume 13. As there are two candidates for “Volume 13” but one candidate for “Volume 16,” we refer to KC as Volume 16. (Introductory sections)Spoiler: How does this book begin?Answer: The book opens with The Lord’s Prayer ( Matt. 6:9-13, NKJV & NIV translation), the NKJV text of Rev.
20, and several authors’ notes.The Millennium is the time in which Christ reigns for “one thousand years.” An editorial note (pages xiii-xv) cites the rapturist interpretation: specifically, that Christ lives and reigns on earth during a literal 1,000 years. “Not many details are provided about Christ’s millennial kingdom in Revelation 20, except the final order of last-days events, the windup of history as we know it, and the length of the reign.” There are passages in both Testaments that the authors consider applicable to this period. (Trivia alert: when the authors do not cite a Bible verse to support a world-building detail, your host may attempt to locate a verse.)The authors clarify that this kingdom is not Heaven.
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They call it a foretaste of heaven, with Christ on an earthly throne surrounded by believers. “But as newborns come along, obviously, they will be sinners in need of forgiveness and salvation.” The authors take a specific stand that unsaved people will die not merely in their hundredth year, but on their hundredth birthday, thus exposing the deceased as unbelievers (page xiv). (Trivia alert: the unattributed verse Isaiah 65:20 will be one of the defining Scriptural references of the novel’s plot.)The authors ask the reader “to see the Millennium as yet another of God’s efforts to reach the lost” (page xiv). The authors predict that sin will invade the Millennial Kingdom as it invaded all previous Dispensations. Only Heaven will always be populated with only believers.The note concludes, “It should be plain from our treatment of this great future period that we are the opposite of anti-Semites.
Indeed, we hold that the entire Bible contains God’s love letter to and plan for His chosen people. If Israel had no place within the future Kingdom of God, we could no longer trust the Bible” (page xv).Next is a roll call of characters. A map of the Holy Land shows east-west demarcations between the lands allotted to the returned 12 Tribes of Israel. (Trivia alert: the land is assigned by instructions from Ezekiel 47:13—8:29.)The novel reprints and revises most of Chapters 20-21 from “Glorious Appearing,” (Volume 12, pages 355-397).
This section featured the judgment of the Sheep and the Goats, the welcome of the Old Testament saints, and the reunion of Rayford Steele with his son, daughter, son-in-law, and former wives Irene and Amanda. In Volume 16, any narratives related by the non-Steeles/Williamses are deleted. The resulting narrative flows purely from Rayford’s point of view. (Trivia alert: many readers call Rayford “the voice of the series,” so this is a way of showing that he is still a voice in this sequel.)An authors’ note (pages xxxix-xl) titled “The 75-day interval,” cites to Daniel 12:11-12. Reference is made to the temple of Ezekiel 40—46. The authors state that God will build that temple in the first 30-day interval. (Trivia alert: in the novel, the desecrated Third Temple stands empty until Day 30, when it is destroyed.
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The Fourth Temple is completed on Day 75, but in a different location. The text is unclear as to whether construction started on the Fourth Temple while the Third was still standing.
See pages 10-11.)The latter 45-day interval is interpreted as a time of preparation for the temple and the kingdom. (Trivia alert: In Volume 12, pages 359-60, the authors state that “the Old Testament saints” will be resurrected during the 75-day interval. Chaim states that these righteous dead “were technically justified by faith,” but since they died before Christ, they did not count as “the dead in Christ.” Thus these O.T. Saints were not resurrected at the time that dead Christians were resurrected and did not go up in the rapture.)The longest editorial note is titled “The Millennial Kingdom.” See next spoiler.Spoiler: What else do the authors want the audience to know about the Millennial Kingdom?Answer: This section (page xli-xlvi) describes a new world. The moon will shine as brightly as the sun shines now. The sun will shine seven times brighter than it shines now. (See Isaiah 30:26.) “People will have to wear sunglasses any time they are outside, twenty-four hours a day” (page xli).
They will have to get.