Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
TF: 788,400 moments so dear

TF: 788,400 moments so dear

Last updated on: June 27, 2011 at 6:54 pm by Fred Clark

TF: 788,400 moments so dear 2011-06-27T18:54:53-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Tribulation Force, pp. 398-399

Buck and Tsion Ben-Judah arrive at Tsion’s home where the former rabbi’s nameless wife wails, “Our lives are ruined!”

That’s technically true. Tsion’s broadcast will certainly entail some big changes in the Ben-Judah household. He worked for decades to establish a position as a distinguished scholar and a respected figure within Judaism and he just left all that behind him, burning his bridges with a very public rejection of both Judaism and scholarship.

But Mrs. Ben-Judah also seems to be overlooking the more urgent part of her husband’s message, i.e., the world is ending. The next seven years will be a nonstop stream of death and destruction, an evil madman will rule the whole earth with an iron hand, and then, precisely seven years from today, God will destroy everything in an orgy of wrath.

So yes, it marks a change in their life that her husband will no longer have a place of honor in the faculty dining room, but that faculty dining room — along with the faculty, the university, the city, the nation and everything else she has ever seen, everywhere else she has ever been or heard of or read about — will be gone in six years, 364 1/2 days anyway, with the intervening time marked by earthquakes, hail, demon locusts, famine and oceans of blood.

That kind of puts Tsion’s loss of tenure into perspective.

The phone rings. It’s Elijah. All those years they’ve been setting a place for him at the Seder and he never once showed up, but now he’s calling the house. I guess being on television really does change things.

Tsion answered the phone and motioned for Buck to pick up the extension in the other room.

Tsion Ben-Judah just became Buck Williams’ favorite person in the whole world. Share your telephone with Buck and you’ve got a friend for life.

“This is Eli. I spoke to you last night.”

“Of course! How did you get my number?”

Again, “How did you get my number?” is a legitimate question, but perhaps not the first thing most of us would ask when a biblical figure from the Iron Age calls. But then Tsion is probably nervous and a bit frightened. He was just on TV describing Daniel as “the greatest of all Hebrew prophets,” then his phone rings and he finds out that Elijah and Moses want to have a word with him. Oh, and they can breathe fire. I’d be scared too.

Elijah says he called the number Tsion gave out on the TV and the student who answered gave him Tsion’s home number. “Somehow I convinced her who I was.”

I can’t help but wonder what that means. Did he “somehow” convince her that he was, indeed, the prophet Elijah, returned in the flesh nearly 3,000 years after the sweet chariot swung low for to carry him home? Or did he simply convince her that he was one of the anonymous fire-breathing street preachers from the Western Wall? Either way, that was surely an interesting conversation and one I’m sorry we readers didn’t get to hear.

“I rejoice with you, Tsion my brother, in the fellowship of Jesus Christ. Many have received him under our preaching here in Jerusalem. …”

The authors have decided to try to make Elijah sound authentically “biblical” by having him talk like the King James translations of the formal introductory parts of Paul’s epistles. Elijah didn’t talk like that. Even Paul didn’t talk like that. Just because he wrote formal salutations in his letters doesn’t mean he went around shaking hands with people and introducing himself in person that way:

“Hi, I’m Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“I’m sorry, ‘Paul’ was it?”

“Yes, Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for …”

“Good to meet you, Paul, I’m Bob. From accounting.”

The character of Elijah in this story apparently watches TV and knows how to use a telephone. There’s really no need for him to sound like the NKJV.

I also don’t want to read too much into a single preposition, but you may be wondering why someone would say “under our preaching,” rather than the more normal-sounding “through our preaching.” I suspect that if you attended Tim LaHaye’s church then the peculiar choice of that word would make more sense. In some circles it’s a common idiomatic reminder of who is expected to “submit” to whom. I have many friends and acquaintances who speak this way, sometimes telling me of what they’ve learned “under” their pastor’s teaching and never quite recognizing that the biggest thing they’re learning might be who is “under” whom.

Elijah and Moses have apparently outgrown the venue of the Western Wall courtyard and they’re looking to begin their stadium tour.

“We have arranged for a meeting of new believers in Teddy Kollek Stadium. Would you come and address us?”

“Frankly, brother Eli, I fear for the safety of my family and myself.”

“Have no fear. Moishe and I will make clear that anyone who threatens harm to you will answer to us. And I think our record is plain on that account.”

Don’t worry, Tsion, Elijah is saying, you’re a made man — anybody threatens you and I’ll go all Mount Carmel on him.

Even without the fire-breathing, that’s a pretty serious threat coming from Elijah. And if anything, Moses is even scarier. This is plagues-of-Egypt Moses, we’re talking about here. Red Sea Moses. Just ask Korah, Dathan and Abiram if Moses is someone you want to mess with. Oh, wait, you can’t ask Korah, Dathan and Abiram because “the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up … so they … went down alive into Sheol and the earth closed over them.” As Proposition Joe would say, that guy has more bodies on him than a Chinese cemetery.

So I buy that “Eli’s” threat is a credible one, but hearing him talk all gangster like that gives me this incongruous mental image of two bearded old men in sackcloth and aviator shades.

Thus we come to the end of Chapter 17 and the action seems to be picking up a little bit. Buck is set to accompany Tsion on his stadium evangelism tour, and Rayford is about to land in New Babylon to witness the construction of Nicolae Carpathia’s equivalent of the Death Star. It’s refreshing, after nearly 400 pages of aimless flights and phone calls, to turn to the next chapter with the sense that, finally, something may be about to happen.

And here, instead, is what one finds on the next page, page 399 of a 450-page book, the first words of Chapter 18:

Eighteen months later.

Didn’t see that coming.

On the positive side, this story had been mired down in a whole lot of nothing for hundreds of pages and it clearly needed something to jolt it back to life. Flashback can also be a powerful narrative device, and one could even argue that the episodic story that LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are trying to tell here is particularly suited to being told in that way.

It’s almost as though 90 percent of the way through typing this book Jenkins suddenly realized that and, after spending 400 pages slogging through every commute, meal and phone call, he decided that telling this story through the characters’ memories would be a way to focus mainly on what was actually memorable. But then, being the lazy novelist that he is, he didn’t go back and rewrite those 400 pages, he just abruptly lurched ahead 18 months to allow for a different narrative approach in the last 50 pages.

This spasm of a time-skip is incredibly jarring for the reader. We have just finished reading about the day of the big treaty signing — the event that starts the final countdown ticking. According to the rules of this story, the universe has exactly seven years remaining. And then, suddenly on the next page — “Eighteen months later” — the universe has exactly five and a half years remaining.

Here on page 399 we can’t yet know whether this jarring shift in Jenkins’ approach to telling this story will turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, the approach he’s taken up until this point has not worked at all, so we can figure that any change in that approach — even one executed as artlessly and clumsily as this one — is bound to be an improvement. But then on the other hand, that belief is based on the assumption that these books couldn’t possibly get any worse, and after more than 800 pages of this series we’ve come to realize that this is never a safe assumption.

As we’ll see in the pages ahead, this leap forward in time doesn’t lead to a series of vivid flashbacks, but mainly to a series of dull conversations in which characters tell us second-hand and past-tense about key scenes that we will never get to see for ourselves.

But on the positive side, again, at least we’re spared 18 months of cab rides, cookies and phone calls. For that much I’m grateful.

Left Behind

Previous Post

June 26, 2011

Something close 2 nothing

Next Post

June 28, 2011 A bipartisan enemy of the people

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which Psalm is a prayer of repentance after David's sin with Bathsheba?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Psalm 24 Psalm 7 Psalm 51 Psalm 23