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
NRA: When I get to the border

NRA: When I get to the border

Last updated on: September 16, 2014 at 4:01 pm by Fred Clark

NRA: When I get to the border 2014-09-16T16:01:10-04:00 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.

Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 244-246

Tsion lay on the floor beneath the seats. Buck pulled up to two uniformed and helmeted guards at a lowered crossbar. The one on the driver’s side of the bus signaled that he should slide open the window and then spoke to him in Hebrew.

“English,” Buck said.

“Passport, visa, identification papers, vehicle registration, any goods to declare, and anything on board you want us to know about before we search should be passed through the window or told to us before we raise the gate.”

Buck Williams coolly explains that he’s just an innocent American businessman, innocently driving across the border in the dead of night in an old school bus carrying innocent “foodstuffs, gasoline, oil and water.”

This is the plan. Tsion will hide under the seats, where border guards would never think to look. And Buck will calmly reassure the authorities that he’s not smuggling anything — especially not the fugitive they’re all looking for.

That should work, right? I mean, these guards are just the Israeli Defense Force, and what does the IDF know about policing border crossings and checkpoints?

“Anything else?”

“Anything else?” Buck repeated.

“Anything else we need to see, sir! You will be interrogated inside, and your vehicle will be searched over there.” The guard pointed just beyond the building on the right side of the road.

“I have some clothing and some blankets,” Buck tells the guard. “Those are the only other things I am carrying.”

In the most legalistic sense, Buck wasn’t technically lying until he got to that word “only.” But for the rest of this chapter he tells one lie after another in his efforts to keep Tsion Ben-Judah hidden from the guards intent on capturing and killing him.

I’m perfectly fine with the ethics of that. I don’t have any weird Kantian qualms about lying in such a situation. In fact, I’m happy to describe lying in this situation as an ethical obligation — to say one ought to lie to people with guns who are intent on killing innocents if they learn the truth. But it’s surprising to find the authors seeming to agree with me here. Back in the first book, Buck agonized over what he would do if the Antichrist himself asked him direct questions that might put the lives of his friends in danger. He was determined not to lie, even to the Antichrist, even if that potentially meant the death of every member of New Hope Village Church’s congregation.

That’s changed. But it doesn’t seem that Buck and the authors have developed a more mature understanding of the ethics of lying to tyrants. It seems, rather, that they’ve simply forgotten they used to think otherwise.

So here goes nothin’. Buck pulls the bus over to the side as instructed, parking it where it can be searched by the guards while he goes inside to be “interrogated.”

Tsion reached past Buck’s chair and grabbed his ankle. Buck took it as encouragement, as thanks, and, if necessary, farewell. “Tsion,” he whispered, “your only hope is to stay as far in the back as possible. Can you scoot all the way to the back?”

Let me commend Jerry Jenkins on his restraint here. He refrains from having Tsion scold Buck for suggesting that their “only hope” is anything other than the power of Jesus’ name. As a relatively new convert, I guess, Tsion hasn’t yet fully mastered all of the sanctimonious lingo.

Jenkins swiftly makes up for this by giving his heroes one last chance to display their respective piety to one another before the guards take charge:

“Tsion, Michael’s wife said something to me when I left. I didn’t understand it. It was in Hebrew. The last two words were something like Y’shua Hama-something.”

“Y’shua Hamashiach means ‘Jesus the Messiah,'” Tsion said, his voice quavery. “She was wishing you the blessing of God on your trip, in the name of Y’shua Hamashiach.”

“The same to you, my brother,” Buck said.

“Cameron, my friend, I will see you soon. If not in this life, then in the everlasting kingdom.”

That last sentence undercuts and reverses everything that LaHaye and Jenkins were trying to do with all that praise-chorus Hebrew in the previous bit. It shows that, despite the authors’ claims otherwise, Tsion Ben-Judah does not really believe in Y’shua Hamashiach, but in Y’shua H. Christ.

“Pie in the sky when you die” is not a Jewish idea, even if you say it in Hebrew.

We’ve been told that Tsion became a born-again Christian because his research on the identity of the Jewish Messiah led him to conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was that Messiah. But it seems, rather, that Tsion instead stopped believing in that Messiah. Tsion doesn’t think that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah at all — he thinks that Jesus is the pseudo-Lutheran, vaguely neo-Platonic “Messiah” of otherworldly white American evangelicalism. And that is a very, very different thing than the Messiah of the Hebrew scriptures. (It’s also a very, very different thing than the Christ of the New Testament.)

The otherworldly American “Messiah” has a kingdom, but “not in this life.” There’s nothing Jewish about that idea, no matter how much Tsion or the authors try to dress it up with the Hebrew phrases they learned from an old Lamb album.

The guards were approaching, obviously wondering what was keeping Buck. He shut off the engine and opened the door, just as a young guard approached. Buck grabbed a water can and shouldered his way past the guard. “Been having a little trouble with the radiator,” he said. “You know anything about radiators?”

Distracted, the guard raised his eyebrows and followed Buck to the front of the bus. He raised the hood and they added water. The older guard, the one who had talked to him at the gate, said, “Come on, let’s go, let’s go!”

Jenkins’ narration rarely gives us a clear picture of the scene staged before us. This is a border crossing, with guards. But what does it look like? Is there a fence, a wall, a turnstile? And how many guards?

I realize that Jenkins is the brand-name leader of a popular “Writer’s Guild.” He gets paid top-dollar for writing instruction, coaching and editing, and I wouldn’t want to overstep my bounds by presuming to give writing advice to such an esteemed and wealthy artist. But if I had to give one piece of writing advice to Jerry Jenkins it would be this: Play some Dungeons & Dragons. That would force him to learn how to sketch out a scene like this one for his readers. In a game of D&D, you can’t get away with telling the players that “You come to a, like, large space with a bunch of, like, monsters in it.” The game requires brevity and precision. Players need to know what they see, who’s there, and what they’re dealing with.

It took me several readings of this chapter to figure out what Buck is seeing here, who’s there, and what he’s dealing with. And even now I’m not 100-percent sure, but I think what we’ve got is just the two guards, a young one and an old one.

So, then, it’s two-on-two. A fair fight. The authors may have torturously discussed their ethical qualms about lying to the Antichrist, but they haven’t indicated any such moral reservations about the righteous use of violence.

I don’t mean lethal violence, necessarily, but something like the “Feet. Hat” maneuver from Spies Like Us seems called for here.

This is, after all, a stock set-piece from action movies, and in a substantial percentage of those movies, the scene ends with the two guards tied up, wearing only their underwear, while the heroes escape wearing their uniforms.

In those movies, the guards are tied up, not killed, because in most such stories an aversion to unnecessary killing is part of what makes the Good Guys the Good Guys. That’s not true here in the moral universe of Left Behind. Here the category of “innocents” does not exist, and mass-slaughter of the infidels is portrayed as the epitome of Christ-like behavior. That’s the culmination of history in these books — the ultimate answer to the question “What Would Jesus Do.” In the not-final volume of the series, The Glorious Appearing, the authors tell us that WJWD is this:

The great army was in pandemonium, tens of thousands at a time screaming in terror and pain and dying in the open air. Their blood poured from them in great waves, combining to make a river that quickly because a swamp. …

Given that this violent killer Jesus is the spiritual and ethical lodestone for Buck and Tsion, it’s odd that they don’t at least consider trying to overpower these two guards.

That might not seem practical. These guards are trained soldiers, after all. And while Jenkins only mentioned that the guards were “uniformed and helmeted,” I’ve been through border crossings and check points run by the IDF, and what I remember most isn’t the uniforms and helmets, but the huge automatic rifles they all carried at the ready.

Asking a feeble bookworm like Tsion to overpower a heavily armed soldier seems like an implausible plan, but remember that our heroes don’t have a plan — they’re stepping out on faith and awaiting God’s miraculous deliverance.

And again, keep in mind that our heroes, like the authors, aren’t coming from a Sermon-on-the-Mount perspective here. They worship a muscular, violent Jesus, so you’d think they’d be expecting a muscular, violent miracle. After all, the Bible is full of stories in which stepping out on faith and awaiting God’s miraculous deliverance meant miraculously overcoming a superior foe in battle. That happened for both of Buck and Tsion’s good friends — Moishe and Eli, as well as for Abraham, Joshua, David and scores of others in the Bible.

If Shamgar could slay 600 Philistines with an ox goad, then why shouldn’t Buck and Tsion be able to overcome a couple of guards with, say, a tire iron?

I briefly expected something like that here. Buck manages to draw the guards over to inspect the radiator with him. Jenkins has been telling us, over and over, that the bus has been running hot and the radiator is ready to blow. I briefly thought that’s where this was leading …

“Been having a little trouble with the radiator,” he said. “You know anything about radiators?”

Distracted, the guard raised his eyebrows and followed Buck to the front of the bus. He raised the hood and they added water. The older guard, the one who had talked to him at the gate, said, “Come on, let’s go, let’s go!”

I was, momentarily, surprised and impressed by the way Jenkins set this up. Buck would yank the hose, directing the hot steam into the faces of the two guards, allowing him and Tsion to tie them up and make their escape. This “rattletrap,” this “less-than-desirable conveyance” that Buck had been complaining and worrying about ever since they hit the road would prove to be the providential tool of divine deliverance. The very thing Buck had most resented — the old school bus’s faulty radiator — would turn out to be the thing that God planned all along to use to see them safely across the border. What had seemed belabored and repetitive in the past two chapters would turn out to be an unexpectedly thoughtful (if heavy-handed) use of foreshadowing.

But, nope. None of that happens.

“Be right with you,” Buck said, aware of every nerve in his body. He made a huge noise, slamming the hood. The younger guard moved toward the door, but Buck passed him, excused himself, put one foot on the steps, and tossed the water can into the bus. He thought about “helping” the guard search the bus. He could stand with him and point out the blankets and cans of gas, oil, and water. But he had already come dangerously close, he feared, to making them suspicious. He came back off the bus and into the face of the young guard. “Thanks so much for your help. I don’t know much about engines, really. Business is my game. America, you know.”

Because nothing throws off suspicion quite so much as reassuring others that they have no reason to be suspicious, no sir, no reason for suspicion because there’s nothing suspicious here at all.

Left Behind

Previous Post

September 16, 2014

I'm looking for some grace to pull me through

Next Post

September 17, 2014 I'm not quite as bad as you think I am

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 name means "the mother of all living" in Genesis?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Eden Eve Sarah Mary