Billy Graham Views the End Times

Most of us have more than a passing interest in the future and what it holds for us. We have an even deeper interest in changing the future when it appears threatening.

It was that kind of thinking that Scrooge went through as the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come visited him. He asked, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be only?”

It is also that kind of thinking that we must do when we read Billy Graham’s latest book, Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“I hear the approaching hoofbeats of the distant horsemen,” writes Graham, referring to the four horsemen of Revelation 6. “I hear their warnings and I have no choice but to deliver them.”

The four horsemen are among the most dramatic images of the most dramatic Book of the Bible. Graham names each one. “The first horse has to do with counterfeit religion. The second deals with war and peace. The third has to do with famine and pestilence. And the fourth represents the trauma of death and the suffering of Hades.”

War, famine, disease, death, and suffering are as old as human suffering. But the circumstances surrounding them have changed immensely. The ancients lived under the fear of bows and arrows, swords and spears. We live in times when one brief decision can alter civilization worldwide for generations to come.

As Graham writes, “I have become more deeply aware of the enormous problems that face our world today, and the dangerous trends which seem to be leading our world to the brink of Armageddon.”

These are not scare tactics of a preacher who wants quick responses to his sermons, but the agony of a man who has been friend and confidant of the past seven United States Presidents and has discussed these enormous problems with heads of state and religious leaders worldwide. Not only that, but in his worldwide preaching missions, Graham has mingled with more people searching for God than perhaps any man in history.

Thus Graham is an evangelist, but he is also an international diplomat, respected widely in the Third World and even in the Soviet power structure. He says, “There is something ominous in the air, and my bones, like John’s, vibrate with the horror and hope of it.”

“I started writing this book two-and-a-half years ago, after going to some of our major universities,” Graham told us. “I wanted to stress the point that the future of the world does not belong to the Communists. The future belongs to the Sovereign God.”

Graham is thoroughly convinced that “the world will not be destroyed with atomic weapons.” There is a future, but the quality and direction of that future depends on us. Most of all it depends on our relationship with God.

“This book is a call for repentance and a call for hope,” says Graham. Many books about Revelation stress the horror of the future. Graham stresses the hope of the future, a hope that is bound thoroughly with our willingness to repent of sin, nationally and individually. It is a book mixed with warning and hope.

“The judgment of the four horsemen is in part conditional,” Graham says. This is to say that God’s judgment, as described in Revelation, is going to happen, but it may be postponed by our repentance.

“God’s ultimate judgment on this world is inevitable,” Graham writes. “But … when we hear the hoofbeats of the four horsemen approaching, God would have us listen to their warning and repent before it is too late. In His grace He may be pleased to turn aside His judgment for a time, just as He has done in the past.”

Approaching Hoofbeats is setting new records in book buying. Released late last fall, there are already 542,000 copies in print, with more than half sold. In January it was on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, B. Dalton, Publishers Weekly, Walden Books, and Bookstore Journal. Thus far it is selling better than any other book Word Books has ever had. Currently people are buying about 800 copies daily.

Word Books is so sure it will do even better that it initiated a television ad campaign, the first in its publishing history, aired the first week of March in Nashville, Fresno, Grand Rapids, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

If Graham kept the royalties from this book, he would be a wealthy man overnight. But he has arranged for all royalties to be given to a follow-up program for Amsterdam 83, in the same way he gave the royalties from Angels, an earlier book, to the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

“Like John,” says Graham, “I am an evangelist whose one goal is to proclaim new life in Christ. But there is serious trouble ahead for our world, and in the Apocalypse there is both warning and wisdom for the troubled days ahead.”

Graham is probably one of the few, if not the only person, who can sound that warning worldwide and be heard by people of all walks of life in every nation.

Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Billy Graham (Word Books, 1983, 240 pp., $11.95); reviewed by V. Gilbert Beers.

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