Was the Bible Left Behind? III
I am doing a short series of blogs on the movie Left Behind (and behind it the series of novels by that name) and its view of the Bible in general and the Book of Revelation in particular. In the first blog I shared some positive elements of the Left Behind phenomenon and promised to start dealing with what I perceive as the flaws in the thesis, which can be very convincing to the uninitiated. In the sequel I talked about the tendency of those following the rapture theology to jump from text to text in the Bible rather than following an approach of careful reading of the texts most directly and clearly addressing the question.
When you read through the New Testament carefully you will find that there are four passages which address the issue of the end-time deception. They are Rev 13:13-14, Rev 16:13-16; 2 Thess 2:8-12, and Matt 24:23-27. In each of these four texts you will find the same basic language and scenario; signs and wonders are used to deceive the people of the world, and there is some representative of an anti-Christ. Interestingly enough, not one of these texts is mentioned in the movie, even though the movie claims to portray this very end-time deception.
In the movie the deceptive anti-Christ is a political figure who is hostile to Christian faith and seeks to gain his ends through economic and political means. The deception of the anti-Christ is a hypnosis in which people do not see what is actually going on. Only true Christians see what is actually happening. This is very different from the biblical picture of the anti-Christ and of the end-time deception found in the four clearest passages. When read carefully the startling collective message of these four passages is that the end-time deception will have a Christian face. Unlike the cold-hearted political calculations of Nicolae Carpathia, the anti-Christ of the Bible will be a spiritual leader more than a political or economic figure.
We have already looked briefly at the text in 2 Thessalonians 2. So I will begin with Revelation 13. The anti-Christ figure of Rev 13 is a beast that comes up out of the sea (Rev 13:1-5). In many ways this beast is a clear counterfeit of the life, death and ministry of Jesus Christ (for a more detailed look at the Christ counterfeit of the sea beast read my book, What the Bible Says About the End-Time, pages 109-119). In fact, the three enemy characters of this chapter (dragon, sea beast, and land beast) function as a counterfeit "trinity," offering a parody of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Christ counterfeit is most obvious in verse 3: "And one of his heads was, as it were, slaughtered to death. . ." There are many Greek words for death, dying and killing. This is not one of the most common. What is interesting is that the very same Greek word is found in verse 8, "the Lamb which was slaughtered from the foundation of the world." There is an unmistakable parallel between the description of the sea beast in verse 3 and the description of Jesus (the Lamb) in verse 8. "And the wound of his death was healed" (13:3). In the final crisis of earth’s history there is an entity whose very character is based on a parody of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The end-time deception has a Christian face! In Rev 13:13-14 the land beast brings fire down out of heaven in order to deceive the world to follow the first beast, the anti-Christ of this text.
The second end-time deception text is Rev 16:13-14. The dragon, beast and false prophet here are the same characters as the unholy trinity of Rev 13. The three frogs that they send out deceive the world by means of the signs that they do. This text is on the same subject and uses the same language as Rev 13. What is interesting for our purposes is that these three frogs are the "spirits of demons" (Rev 16:14). They are portrayed in the story as three evil counterparts to the three angels who give God’s message in Rev 14:6-12. There are two world-wide messages in the last days, one represents the true gospel, the other is a counterfeit of that gospel. The end-time deception has a Christian face!
The climax of this deception is associated with a place called in Hebrew "Har-magedon." I have elsewhere argued that this phrase is a reference to the showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (on the main web site click the button labeled "What is Armageddon?" for more). There Elijah brought fire down from heaven to earth in order to prove to the onlookers that Yahweh was the true God and not Baal. Rev 16 tells us that the Mount Carmel experience will be replayed at the end. Once more there will be a showdown between the true God and the false. Once more fire will come down from heaven to settle the issue. But one thing will change this time. The fire will fall on the wrong altar (Rev 13:13-14)! In the end-time deception the eyes and ears will deceive. The five senses will tell us that the truth is false and that the false is true.
In Left Behind the deception was a sort of supernatural hypnosis. Unbelievers saw what was going on, yet they didn’t see. They were mesmerized by the charisma of the anti-Christ. On the other hand, the believers in the movie saw the deception with their own eyes and were convinced that the evil lay in the political realm and that safety was in the church. Yet this is the opposite of the picture in Revelation. In Revelation the deception is a natural thing. It appeals to the five senses, what we can taste, touch, see, hear and smell. In Revelation the unbelievers see and are convinced. It is what they actually experience that deceives them. They don’t need to be mesmerized, the anti-Christ is manipulating reality itself. On the other hand, it is the believers who don’t see what they expected. It is the believers who are led to question their own understanding. Their only hope is their trust that the Word of God is true, no matter what their eyes see or their ears hear. This will become even clearer in the last end-time deception text, Matt 24:23-27, which we will cover in the next blog.
The antichrist is alive and well and being broadcast into 200 nations of the world. Many, many thousands if not millions of Christians have been deceived already and many more will follow him. He has his prophetess at his side and his face is "more stout" than others, for it is the face of a Boar or pig. They are ALMOST the REAL DEAL, for they appear to be ALL ABOUT ISRAEL, for they are "confirmed" by professional Prophets who prophesy for money and their wallets are FAT. They look to MEN for confirmation. You can find them on sattelite.
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