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The Third Millenium, by Paul Meier
Thomas Nelson, 1993
311 pp.; $12.99, paper

Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins
Tyndale House, 1995
468 pp.; $12.99, paper

The End of the Age, by Pat Robertson
Word, 1995
374 pp.; $12.99, paper

You have miraculously made it onto the last flight out of L.A. before a kilometer-wide flaming meteor hits. Every link to your adult life—your home, job, friends, assets—will soon be drowned by a mile-high wave, melted by nuclear reactors gone bad, and shaken by earthquakes that exceed Californians' worst nightmares. You find yourselves at a crowded terminal in Albuquerque where you watch on TV while the President shoots himself in the head. You meet Dave, a nice Christian NBA star, who takes you to the home of Charley, an ex-coach and savvy investor who is now a multimillionaire.

How do you possibly cope with this much chaos and trauma? Where do you start? What do you do?

You have a Bible study. An inductive one, with "hearty laughter" accompanying the questions. "Open the Bible to the very last book. That's Revelation . …Now turn to chapter eight."

"It is surreal," admits one participant.

So begin the adventures of Carl and Lori, our escapees from L.A. It turns out that Charley is an amateur prophecy expert and that Revelation predicts these amazing current events accurately—so accurately that Carl and Lori become Christians.

Such is the premise of Pat Robertson's novel, The End of the Age. And this ex-presidential candidate and head of cbn and host of The 700 Club is not the only evangelical leader who has taken up the sport of end-times novels. Paul Meier, a psychiatrist and cofounder of the Minirth-Meier Clinics, has written The Third Millennium, and Tim LaHaye, best-selling Christian author and husband of Concerned Women of America founder and head Beverly LaHaye, has partnered with Moody's writer-in-residence, Jerry Jenkins, on an end-times series, the first of which is Left Behind.

Imagine the ultimate press conference where evangelical leaders come clean on what they really think about the press, government, the state of the church, men and women, evil, the future, and other world-view items. That is what I believe we get in these novels. Stellar leaders of institutional evangelicaldom let down their guard in the name of telling a good yarn. Opinions that would carry a hundred qualifications emerge unedited in the voices of the various good guys.

Revelation applied
All three books take place in the very near future with America playing a central role, at least in the beginning (in End of the Age and The Third Millennium, the Antichrist is the President), and all three share the view that Revelation tells us pretty much what is to happen. Still, they differ in interesting ways.

In Robertson's End of the Age, after the meteor and the President's suicide a semi-alcoholic ex-actor VP takes over. He has an adulterous, bisexual wife who has been to India (a very bad sign in the book); she works with her friend Tauriq Haddid, a Hindu entrepreneur and arms dealer, to get Mark Beaulieu chosen as the new vice president. Beaulieu comes from a monied family, "loathes the free-enterprise system" and "Western Civilization," drives a Porsche, and is so good-looking and charming that he is elected to Congress. Did I mention that Beaulieu had been to India as a Peace Corps volunteer?

The President is soon bumped off, and Beaulieu not only becomes President but proposes a one-world government, which all the nations, except for Israel, think is a wonderful idea. Soon Beaulieu, as supreme dictator, wants to rule the world from "New Babylon," along with his homosexual, philandering, liberal bureaucrats. Yes, the cashless society and the mark of the Beast and one-world religion come into play, as well as the persecution of Christians. Eventually, Beaulieu decides he has been patient enough with Israel and attacks, which is a mistake. God destroys his army, the tables are turned, Jesus returns.

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September 1 1997, Vol. 41, No. 10