Left Behind Movies and Novels Are in Error
By Marcel LeRoy

 

Many of the Left Behind series of religious novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins made the New York Times bestseller's list. The movie "Left Behind" is making the rounds around the country. They are now being produced into a series of motion pictures with video releases. Fiction it is. Biblical teaching it is not. As fiction — what a plot! A vindictive God battles against a superman antichrist for the souls of men. The time frame is a future seven-year tribulation in which this vindictive God rains all sorts of horrors on the followers of Antichrist. A gigantic burning mountain and falling stars kill hundreds of thousands. Fire burns up one-third of the earth. The horrors continue. By the end of 3-1/2 years, three billion people are killed.

The series is not fully released but LaHaye has already told us the outcome. Cataclysmic killings continue. Finally, a worldwide earthquake wipes out all the cities, mountains and islands. And you know what? Whatever people were left cursed God. The Antichrist character sure has dynamic influence.

The superman Antichrist gets his comeuppance. He is thrown into the lake of fire to be tormented forever. That is not half of it. All those deceived by Antichrist — the majority of the world's six billion inhabitants — are thrown into the lake of fire. Antichrist went down fighting, but he won! He won the battle for men's souls. Antichrist got the majority.

Left Behind is breathtaking drama, but Bible teaching it is not! It is revisionism. It disowns the historic Protestant teaching expounded by Martin Luther, Calvin, Chemnitz, and other Reformation reformers that Antichrist was not an individual but a system — Papacy. It embellishes the Catholic Jesuit counter reformation concept of the Book of Revelation put forth between AD 1580 and 1595. No Protestant embraced the secret rapture seven-year tribulation literalism before 1829. It did not even become popular among Christians until after World War II.

Historic Evangelical scholars believed Revelation was symbolic, not literal. Mountains are symbolic of nations (Isaiah 2:2-4), stars symbolic of teachers (Jude 13) and earthquakes symbolic of revolutions (Rev. 11:13 KJV margin). The best is symbolic of Antichrist which is a church state system — Papacy (Rev. 13:1-3).

Over against this flawed concept of Left Behind, Scripture clearly teaches , and we teach accordingly, that the kingdom of Christ on earth will remain under the cross until the end of the World, Acts 14:22; John 16:33; 18:36; Luke 9:23; 14:27; 17:20-37; 2 Tim. 4:18; Heb. 12:28; Luke 18:8; that the second visible coming of the Lord will be His final advent, His coming to judge the quick and the dead, Matt. 24:29, 30; 25:31; 2 Tim. 4:1;2 Thess. 2:8; Heb. 9:26-28; that there will be but one resurrection of the dead, John 5:28; 6:30, 39, 40; that the time of the Last Day is, and will remain, unknown, Matt. 24:42; 25:13; Mark 13:32, 37; Acts 1:7, which would not be the case if the Last Day were to come a thousand years after the beginning of a millennium; and that there will be no general conversion, a conversion en masse, of the Jewish nation, Rom. 11:7; 2 Cor. 3:14; Rom. 11:25; 1 Thess. 2:16.

According to these clear passages of Scripture we reject the theology of Left Behind, since it not only contradicts Scripture, but also engenders a false conception of the kingdom of Christ, turns the hope of Christians upon earthly goals, 1 Cor. 15:19; Col. 3:2, and leads them to look upon the Bible as an obscure book. So beware of the Left Behind series. It is fiction!


Mr. Marcel LeRoy is a confessional, Lutheran layman who frequently writes articles for Christian News. We thank him for his kind permission to reprint this article.

March 26, 2001