by Tim LaHaye
“I’m with you, D—ah, Captain.”
At Palwaukee Albie stayed in character and informed the in-residence tower man that the procurement of the chopper and the fuel for the fighter and Gulfstream should all be kept under the same GC order number. Greasy haired and short on sleep, the big man seemed as thrilled as he had been hours before to be doing his duty to the GC and particularly to the deputy commander.
“Did you see the news, sir?” the man said. “The wonderful, wonderful news?”
“Did I ever,” Albie said. “Thanks for your kindness. Now we must be off.”
“My pleasure, Deputy Commander, sir! A pleasure indeed. If you ever need anything else, don’t hes—”
Buck was left to nod to the man. Albie was off to the freshly refueled jet, and Rayford to the chopper.
David searched and searched for Annie, unable to raise her on the phone and not willing to holler for her over the midafternoon crowds. Finally he rushed back to his office, flipped on the TV so he could catch Carpathia’s final remarks, and got on his computer to be sure the new safe house was accessible.
He called Rayford, who filled him in on everything since they had last spoken. “I can trust Albie, can’t I, David?”
“Albie? He was your find, wasn’t he? We’ve been working fairly closely lately. I think he’s the best, and you and Mac always said he was. Anyway, he’s one of us now, right?”
“Right.”
“If you doubt him, check his mark.”
“Apparently you don’t insult Middle Eastern men that way.”
“Hey! Captain! You’re talking to one.”
“Would someone checking your mark insult you?”
“Well, I suppose if you did, after knowing me so long. I mean, I don’t think you ever have.”
“If I can’t trust you, David, who can I trust?”
“I’d say the same about Albie, but you’re the one who needs to feel right about it. We’re getting in pretty deep with him, looks like.”
“I’ve decided to take the risk.”
“That’s good enough for me. Let me know when you get to the Strong Building. You going to try to put down inside the tower?”
“Not with this load. I’ll keep the chopper as inconspicuous as I can so it won’t be seen from the air.”
“The most you’d have to worry about would be satellite shots, because no planes are flying low enough to shoot anything meaningful. But if you get unloaded and can determine before daybreak that the chopper can be housed way up inside there, you’d better do it.”
“Roger.”
“I’m unlocking everything in the place for you. I’d get in, get settled, and stay quiet and out of sight.”
“We need some black spray paint.”
“Can do. Where should I ship it?”
“Kankakee, I guess.”
“You got it. Rayford? How is Tsion?”
“Chaim and Buck are the banged-up ones.”
“But they’re going to be all right, right?”
“Looks like it.”
“Tsion is the one I worry about. We need him on-line and doing what he does best.”
Rayford guessed he was halfway to the safe house. “I hear that, David. I just hope we can transmit out of the new place like we could out of the old.”
“Should be able to. When the day comes for Mac and Smitty and Annie and me to get out of here, we’ll come and set up the greatest communications center you can imagine. Hey, you’ve got your laptop, right? I sent you a list I found, made by a woman named Viv Ivins, Carpathia’s oldest confidante. It shows the ten kingdoms with their new names, but it also has a number assigned to each one. There has to be some significance, but I can’t decipher it, at least not yet.”
“You haven’t put one of your fancy computer programs on it by now?”
“Soon, but I don’t care what it takes or who figures it out. I just want to know what it means and whether there’s any advantage to our knowing it.”
“We’ll take a shot at it. For now it’s going to be great to be back together, all in one place, getting caught up with each other, getting acquainted better with the newcomers, and reestablishing some order.”
“I’ll know when you get in. I’ve got my cameras on.”
With his computer set, David wanted to return his attention to finding Annie. There were a thousand reasons she might be hard to locate, but he’d rather not consider any of them. He stood and stretched, noticing that the TV picture had changed. The network had switched from a wide shot of the receiving trilogy of Leon, Viv, and Nick and now moved in on Nicolae.
He had stepped down a few rows and looked directly into the camera. In spite of himself, David could see why the man was so riveting. Besides the rugged, European handsomeness, he really sold the care and compassion. David knew he was insidious, but his smarminess didn’t show.
The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the Global Community, your Supreme Potentate, His Excellency Nicolae Carpathia.”
Nicolae took one step closer to the camera, forcing it to refocus. He looked directly into the lens.
“My dear subjects,” he began. “We have, together, endured quite a week, have we not? I was deeply touched by the millions who made the effort to come to New Babylon for what turned out to be, gratefully, not my funeral. The outpouring of emotion was no less encouraging to me.
“As you know and as I have said, there remain small pockets of resistance to our cause of peace and harmony. There are even those who have made a career of saying the most hurtful, blasphemous, and false statements about me, using terms for me that no person would ever want to be called.
“I believe you will agree that I proved today who I am and who I am not. You will do well to follow your heads and your hearts and continue to follow me. You know what you saw, and your eyes do not lie. I am also eager to welcome into the one-world fold any former devotees of the radical fringe who have become convinced that I am not the enemy. On the contrary, I may be the very object of the devotion of their own religion, and I pray they will not close their minds to that possibility.
“In closing let me speak directly to the opposition. I have always, without rancor or acrimony, allowed divergent views. There are those among you, however, who have referred overtly to me personally as the Antichrist and this period of history as the Tribulation. You may take the following as my personal pledge:
“If you insist on continuing with your subversive attacks on my character and on the world harmony I have worked so hard to engender, the word tribulation will not begin to describe what is in store for you. If the last three and a half years are your idea of tribulation, wait until you endure the Great Tribulation.”
EPILOGUE
“Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”
Revelation 12:12
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JERRY B. JENKINS, former vice president for publishing at Moody Bible Institute of Chicago and currently chairman of the board of trustees, is the author of more than 175 books, including the best-selling Left Behind series. Twenty of his books have reached the New York Times Best Sellers List (seven in the number-one spot) and have also appeared on the USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists. Desecration, book nine in the Left Behind series, was the best-selling book in the world in 2001. His books have sold nearly 70 million copies.
Also the former editor of Moody magazine, his writing has appeared in Time, Reader’s Digest, Parade, Guideposts, Christianity Today, and dozens of other periodicals. He was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 2004.
His nonfiction books include as-told-to biographies with Hank Aaron, Bill Gaither, Orel Hershiser, Luis Palau, Joe Gibbs, Walter Payton, and Nolan Ryan among many others. The Hershiser and Ryan books reached the New York Times Best Sellers List.
Jenkins assisted Dr. Billy Graham with his autobi
ography, Just As I Am, also a New York Times best seller. Jerry spent 13 months working with Dr. Graham, which he considers the privilege of a lifetime.
Jerry owns Jenkins Entertainment, a filmmaking company in Los Angeles, which produced the critically acclaimed movie Midnight Clear, based on his book of the same name. See www.Jenkins-Entertainment.com.
Jerry Jenkins also owns the Christian Writers Guild, which aims to train tomorrow’s professional Christian writers. Under Jerry’s leadership, the guild has expanded to include college-credit courses, a critique service, literary registration services, and writing contests, as well as an annual conference. See www.ChristianWritersGuild.com.
As a marriage-and-family author, Jerry has been a frequent guest on Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio program and is a sought-after speaker and humorist. See www.AmbassadorSpeakers.com.
Jerry has been awarded four honorary doctorates. He and his wife, Dianna, have three grown sons and six grandchildren.
Check out Jerry’s blog at http://jerryjenkins.blogspot.com.
DR. TIM LAHAYE (www.timlahaye.com), who conceived and created the idea of fictionalizing an account of the Rapture and the Tribulation, is a noted author, minister, and nationally recognized speaker on Bible prophecy. He is the founder of both Tim LaHaye Ministries and The PreTrib Research Center.
Dr. LaHaye speaks at many of the major Bible prophecy conferences in the U.S. and Canada, where his prophecy books are very popular.
Dr. LaHaye earned a doctor of ministry degree from Western Theological Seminary and received an honorary doctor of literature degree from Liberty University. For 25 years he pastored one of the nation’s outstanding churches in San Diego, which grew to three locations. During that time he founded two accredited Christian high schools, a Christian school system of ten schools, and San Diego Christian College (formerly known as Christian Heritage College).
There are over 59 million copies of Dr. LaHaye’s 50 nonfiction books, some of which have been published in over 37 languages. He has written books on a wide variety of subjects, such as family life, temperaments, and Bible prophecy. His fiction works include the Left Behind series and the Jesus Chronicles, written with Jerry B. Jenkins. LaHaye’s other fiction series of prophetic novels consist of the Babylon Rising series and The End series. Dr. LaHaye is the father of four grown children, grandfather of nine, and great-grandfather of eleven.
TEST YOUR PROPHECY IQ
Will the mark of the Beast be an embedded chip or something like a global ID card?
See answer at the end of this section.
THE TRUTH BEHIND THE FICTION
THE PROPHECY BEHIND THE SCENES
When you think of Satan, what comes to mind? Visually, you may think of the horned creature in the red suit and pitchfork that is depicted in Halloween costumes, cartoons, serious art, school mascots, and even as a brand of home repair products (Red Devil). Under this guise, the idea of Satan is mischievously “devilish,” more a master prankster than a fearsome evil force. In Are We Living in the End Times? Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins make this assertion:
The Word of God tells us he is an immensely powerful, utterly malevolent spirit being who lives to murder and deceive mankind. He will do everything he can to usurp the worship and glory that belong to God alone—and we do mean “everything.”
Master of Illusion
Human beings love to be fooled. We know that magic is the art of illusion—rabbits out of hats, wands turning into silk handkerchiefs, and right on up to the most elaborate illusions with elephants and airliners and the Statue of Liberty—but we still cannot believe our eyes.
One of the things that has made motion pictures so popular is the use of special effects. Today, the effects are so realistic and so finely crafted that it is often hard to find the boundary between the real and virtual worlds. The promises for future developments are both exciting and chilling. Every advance for good seems to be quickly matched by those who only want to exploit the dark side of our nature.
Most of us are pretty gullible. That makes us easy victims for the illusions of magicians and the lure of a virtual world. It also makes us vulnerable. We can be fooled with much more serious consequences. The hard-won savings of the elderly are lost to home-repair scams. We get caught up in get-rich-quick schemes. Even worse, we can be drawn into behavior and thinking that betrays our Heavenly Father.
Far worse than the best of the slick hucksters is Satan himself—a master of disguise and illusion. In fact, he wants “to supplant God and to be worshiped as God” (Are We Living in the End Times? p. 265).
The Great Lie
Paul speaks repeatedly about the upside-down, paradoxical nature of the world in which we live. On the side of truth and eternity, he notes the ultimate irony that we must die to self and live in Christ in order to really find ourselves. In the battle of good and evil, he talks about the appearance of lies as truth, darkness as light, night as day.
In Left Behind, Pastor Billings, in the recording he prepared before the Rapture, said, “Scripture indicates that there will be a great lie, announced with the help of the media and perpetrated by a self-styled world leader.”
The Indwelling
The Left Behind series presents the idea that Satan will indwell the Antichrist at the midpoint of the Tribulation. The Indwelling and Desecration represent the position described by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in chapter 21 of Are We Living in the End Times?
[W]hile nowhere in Scripture does the Bible ever explicitly say that the Antichrist is indwelt by the devil, that has been the conclusion of many Bible scholars who have carefully compared the predicted events of Revelation 12 and 13. They believe that after the devil is defeated by the angelic forces and forcibly ejected from heaven at the midpoint of the Tribulation, he enters the body of the Antichrist and in God’s temple declares himself to be God.
Living with the Lie Today
We are already living in times of great confusion. Satan has always been trying to disrupt the advance of God’s kingdom. One of his roles is that of “accuser.” His efforts and his lies will only intensify. The greatest lie is his attempt to mimic Christ, to be worshiped as God. We see increasing evidence of people claiming the name of Christ but living and believing contrary to Scripture. Such are the victories of Satan.
The need to be wary of false teachers—those caught in the lies of Satan—is very serious, as we see in 2 Peter 2. You’ll want to read the whole chapter. Here is the end of this dire warning:
For you are a slave to whatever controls you. And when people escape from the wickedness of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and then get tangled up and enslaved by sin again, they are worse off than before. (2 Peter 2:19b-20, NLT)
So, when Satan and his adherents are at their most beguiling, appearing to be innocent and truthful, it is then that they pose the greatest danger to the truth of the gospel.
IN THE MEANTIME . . . since the Left Behind series was first published.
Going hand in hand with Satan’s deception is the danger of apostasy among believers—the drift from true belief to a counterfeit but apparently genuine faith, or the denial of faith altogether. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins write about this extensively in Are We Living in the End Times? (particularly in chapters 6 and 13). In an article for the Left Behind Prophecy Newsletter (2003–2009), Mark Hitchcock wrote about “End Time Apostasy.”
There are a handful of New Testament passages that tell us that spiritual deception and apostasy (falling away from the faith) will be one of the defining characteristics of the last days: 1 Timothy 4:1-3; 2 Timothy 3:1-13; 2 Peter 2:1-22; 3:3-6; and Jude 1:1-25. First Timothy 4:1 says, “But the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.”
After the graphic description in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, we are told to expect apostasy to get worse as the church age progresses. The general progression will be in a down
ward direction. “But evil men and imposters will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13). In other words, as this extended period of time known as the last days unfolds, these perilous times of apostasy will become more frequent and intense as the return of Christ nears. The brief book of Jude, which is placed just before Revelation, describes that terrible apostasy and false teaching that will infiltrate the church and prevail in the days before the events of Revelation are unfolded.
A recent poll of 35,000 U.S. adults by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals some very disturbing trends among American evangelicals. Among other things, the survey, which was called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, found:
Most Americans agree with the statement that many religions—not just their own—can lead to eternal life. Among those who are affiliated with a religious tradition, seven in ten say many religions can lead to eternal life. This view is shared by a majority of adherents in nearly all religious traditions, including more than half of members of evangelical Protestant churches (57%).
[Editor’s note: Since the survey cited here, research by the Pew Forum, the Barna Group, and the Gallop Organization all show that this trend is only getting worse.]
Did you catch that? Over half of evangelical Protestants believe that there are other ways to God and eternal life other than through Jesus Christ. The narrow gate to eternal life through Jesus Christ is the heart of the gospel. Jesus Himself made it abundantly clear that He is the only way to God (Matthew 7:13-14; John 14:6). If people can be saved by means other than the death and resurrection of Christ, then the cross and empty tomb become a mockery. God’s sending of His Son becomes a needless, futile, unnecessary act instead of what it really is—the only hope for sinful people separated from a Holy God. The only bridge from earth to heaven.
But it’s no wonder that many today are confused and that American evangelical Christianity is in a free-fall. Churches focus on experience and rarely teach the Bible or sound doctrine. Believers in Christ need to be tolerant in many areas of our lives (personally, socially, and legally), but we cannot be doctrinally tolerant when it comes to the essentials of the Christian faith.
