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NRA: A piece of bread would buy a bag of gold

NRA: A piece of bread would buy a bag of gold

Last updated on: May 31, 2016 at 4:35 pm by Fred Clark

NRA: A piece of bread would buy a bag of gold 2016-05-31T16:35:56-04:00 Fred Clark

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Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 336-337

Jerry Jenkins once worked as an editor for Moody magazine, overseeing reporters and other editors the same way that Buck Williams oversees his staff at Global Community Weekly. That’s a bit worrisome when we look at how Buck treats his staff, represented here by the character of Verna Zee. First he lies to her, now he’s screening her calls, and later in this chapter he threatens to destroy her personal life if she attempts to report a story he wants to keep buried.

I hope that isn’t indicative of how Jenkins treated his staff back when he worked at Moody, but it’s not reassuring that he went on to write novels like this one, in which that magazine’s offices and the rest of Moody Bible Institute get destroyed by a nuclear bomb.

Then again, maybe Buck’s horrible mistreatment of his staff isn’t based on Jenkins’ former career as a magazine editor. Maybe this portrayal of Christian leadership is based more on Tim LaHaye’s current career as the senior pastor of an evangelical church.

Buck’s encounter with Verna at the memorial service for Bruce Barnes seems to be his only interaction with anyone from the magazine for the past month. Has Global Weekly been meeting its deadlines? Has it published anything at all in the past few weeks? We readers have no idea. All we know for sure is that Buck has no idea:

Buck was busy with Donny Moore, learning the incredible features of the new computers, when he heard Loretta on the phone.

“Yes, Verna,” she was saying, “he’s busy with someone right now, but I’ll tell him you said Steve Plank called.”

Buck excused himself from Donny for a second and mouthed to Loretta, “If she’s at the office, ask her if my checks are there.”

Buck had been away from both the New York and Chicago offices on paydays for several weeks and was pleased to see Loretta nodding after she had asked Verna about the checks.

This is Buck’s one and only concern regarding his role at the magazine: collecting his paychecks. And for Buck that means physically collecting his physical, paper paycheck. Even though this book was written in 1997 and set in the near-future, Buck does not have direct deposit.

Even today, in 2016, some Rapture Christians and “Bible-prophecy” fans refuse to have their wages deposited directly. Because of the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast. Direct deposit looks, to them, too much like one of the wiles of the cabal of international [Jewish] bankers whose nefarious scheming is preparing the soil for the imminent Antichrist’s coming OWG. Maybe Nicolae Carpathia himself isn’t directly involved in the creation of direct deposit, but they’re certain that Jonathan Stonagal is, so they’re sticking with paper checks, thankyouverymuch.

This sort of vigilant watchfulness about any potential form of the coming Mark of the Beast shapes much of the culture of Rapture Christianity. Over the years it has led to reluctant late-adoption of various digital conveniences — from scannable supermarket coupons to ATMs and debit cards. After these new technologies become saturated throughout the culture for a decade or so without the Antichrist showing up to embed chips in everyone’s forehead, these Rapture Christians eventually come around and belatedly adopt them, shifting their Mark-of-the-Beast fears to some other real or imaginary form of digital commerce.

But 20 years ago, when this book first came out, direct deposit was still new enough to seem to them a credible candidate for the Mark. A 1996 bill mandating that federal payments be available through direct deposit by 1999 had just been signed into law by the president, so the same Rapture Christians busily calculating elaborate numerologies to make William Jefferson Clinton add up to 666 were quite concerned that direct deposit was a sign of the End Times.

Here is wisdom. Or not.

This obsessive concern about Mark of the Beast business plays such a large role in the day-to-day culture of Rapture Christianity that it’s a bit odd to have seen so little mention of it thus far in the Left Behind series. Most fictional Antichrists jump right in 666-ing everybody’s right hand and forehead in their first 100 days in office, but thus far in this story, neither Nicolae nor the members of the Tribulation Force seem to have given the matter much thought.

Here, finally, more than 300 pages into the third book, Buck vaguely muses that it’s something he should probably start thinking about:

One thing he had seen in Bruce’s printouts, and which had been corroborated by Tsion, was that he needed to start investing in gold. Cash would soon be meaningless. He had to start stockpiling some sort of financial resource because, even in the best-case scenario, even if Verna became a believer and protected him from Carpathia, he couldn’t maintain this ruse for long. That relationship would end. His income would dry up. He would not be able to buy or sell without the mark of the beast anyway, and the new world order Carpathia was so proud of could virtually starve him out.

By “investing in gold,” I assume, Buck really means stockpiling gold. As in collecting bars of the stuff and stocking it somewhere in actual piles. Investing in gold doesn’t usually mean that. Investing in gold simply involves placing a bet that the price of gold is going to go up. It means, in other words, wagering that other people are soon going to start “investing in gold.” It’s not an effective hedge against coming chaos and uncertainty or a useful way of preparing for the collapse of civilization. It is, rather, a gamble that a significant number of one’s fellow citizens might fearfully and mistakenly believe that it would be, and an effort to cash in on their panic.

Since the coming Mark of the Beast will rule out the possibility of cashing in, investing in gold wouldn’t do Buck any good.

I’m not sure why he imagines that stockpiling gold would be any more helpful. The scripture that Rapture Christians have in mind when they talk about stockpiling gold for the End Times isn’t actually scripture from the Bible — it’s a line from a Larry Norman lyric: “A piece of bread would buy a bag of gold.” That’s a haunting image, but it seems to me that Buck is interpreting it backwards. If, in the coming days of the Great Tribulation, “a piece of bread will buy a bag of gold,” then one shouldn’t be stockpiling gold, one should be stockpiling bread.

Here is the passage from John’s Apocalypse about the Mark of the Beast:

He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.

That’s Revelation 13:16-18 in LaHaye’s preferred New King James translation. The “he” there is the second beast, the beast from the earth. This is the beast with two horns, like a lamb, and a voice like a dragon, not the first beast, from the sea, “having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name.” That first beast, of course, is the one that’s like a leopard, with the feet of a bear and a mouth like a lion. (Here in Left Behind, Tim LaHaye simplifies all of this by just bundling both beasts into “The Antichrist” — a word and figure that don’t actually appear in John’s Apocalypse. This, again, is what LaHaye refers to as “a literal reading” of Revelation.)

In premillennial dispensationalist folklore, this is all a prediction of the coming regime of the Antichrist in the late 20th early 21st century. The pertinent bit here is that during the seven-year reign of that Antichrist (see Daniel) it will be impossible for anyone to “buy or sell” anything without accepting this blasphemous Mark of the Beast.

What that means for Buck and for his Tribulation Force friends is that he’s going to need to avoid official Global Community commerce and conduct all of his dealings on some underground black market for “Tribulation saints.” Stockpiling gold, Buck imagines, will put him in a position to buy and sell on such a black market.

That seems dubious. After all, the only people who will be exchanging anything on this black market will be other Tribulation saints — other underground Christians who, like Buck, will be fully aware that only five years remain before the end of everything. They will need many things to survive and endure those five wrath-filled years — stockpiles of food, fresh water, fuel, off-the-grid shelter, maybe some ammunition.* Gold bars or gold coins don’t seem like they’d be particularly useful — even as underground currency. When a third of the waters are poisoned by Wormwood, it seems unlikely that anyone who has access to water is going to be eager to trade that away for a heavy pile of shiny metal.

I don’t think Buck or the authors has given nearly enough thought to the sort of things he should be doing to prepare to survive the Great Tribulation. He’s already two years in and he’s only vaguely musing about maybe some day soon starting to put together “some sort of financial resource.” Buck is failing prepper school.

On the other hand, there’s something refreshingly innocent about this. Jerry Jenkins may have Buck dimly pondering “investing in gold,” but he hasn’t presented this as a charge to his readers — urging them to start “investing in gold” to prepare for the End Times. LaHaye and Jenkins are desperately trying to sell lots of books, and study guides, and video series, and even Left Behind-logo T-shirts and coffee mugs. But they haven’t gotten on board the whole End Times survivalist grift.

Jim Bakker is out there selling five-gallon buckets of bomb-shelter rations. Glenn Beck and the rest of right-wing talk radio have made a fortune duping their listeners into “investing in gold” before the coming apocalypse. But Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, to their credit, haven’t tried to cash in on that particular gravy train.

That’s partly due to their pre-Trib Rapture theology, which insists that their born-again Christian readers won’t need to prepare for the Tribulation because Jesus will whisk them away to Heaven before the End Times really start to get End Timesy. And if you’re not a born-again Christian, they don’t want you to start stockpiling food or gold to prepare for the Tribulation — they want you to get born-again so that, like them, you’ll be raptured and escape before it happens.

This plays out strangely in these books. They don’t show us Rayford Steele preparing to survive the Great Tribulation because they want readers to prepare for it the way Irene Steele did — avoiding the Tribulation entirely by getting raptured before it starts. The problem with this, though, is that Irene’s story is boring. Her story is over before all the exciting adventures [sic] of these books even get started. It’s much more attractive, exciting, thrilling to be like Rayford and Buck. The whole series seems to suggest that it’s preferable to, like them, be left behind.

That’s not intentional, and every little bit the authors seem to realize the problem, inserting some template expression of remorse from our heroes. But those statements ring hollow when stacked against the overwhelming thrust of the books, which is that it’s way cooler to be like Rayford than to be like Irene.

I remember being terrified watching A Thief in the Night in the youth group room at our church. Nobody who watched that movie ever thought it would be cool to be like Patty — certainly not in the way that LaHaye and Jenkins gleefully express how cool they think it would be to be like Rayford and Buck. So the message of Donald W. Thompson’s movie was perfectly clear: Get saved, now, before the Rapture comes and you get left behind. The message of the Left Behind series is a bit more muddled. It seems to suggest that getting saved before the Rapture is boring, so the best plan is to wait until after the Rapture and then get saved, because then you’ll get to have cool adventures and share cookies with pretty girls in your Range Rover.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

* I’m picturing Loretta and some of the nameless “other elders” from New Hope Village Church sitting around a campfire somewhere in the wilds of Upper Peninsula Michigan some time shortly after the Fifth Trumpet Judgment unleashes a horde of demon locusts from the bottomless pit. Loretta slowly turns the crank as one of those gigantic demon locusts is roasting on a spit. A little gamey and a bit sulfur-y, perhaps, but it’s protein — and a nice change of pace from the canned and dried foods in their bunker.

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