Left Behind Series by Jerry B. Jenkins

First published:Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, 1995; Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind, 1996; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist, 1997; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides, 1998; Nicolae High, 1999; The Underground, 1999; Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed, 1999; Assassins: The Great Tribulation Unfolds, 1999; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession, 2000; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne, 2001; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World, 2001; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon, 2002; Armageddon, 2003; Glorious Reappearing: The End of Days, 2004; The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to the Earth’s Last Days, 2006; Kingdom Come: The Final Victory, 2007. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House

Genre(s): Novels

Subgenre(s): Apocalyptic fiction

Core issue(s): Apocalypse; good vs. evil; redemption; revelation; salvation

Principal characters

• Rayford Steele, the protagonist, airline pilot and leader of the Tribulation Force
• Irene Steele, Rayford’s raptured wife
• Chloe Steele Williams, Rayford’s daughter
• Buck Williams, reporter
• Chaim Rosenzweig, a Jewish botanist
• Tsion Ben-Judah, a Jewish rabbinical scholar, a former student of Rosenzweig
• Joshua Todd-Cothran, the head of the London stock exchange, an influential financier
• Jonathan Stonagal, an American financier who owns a genetic engineering company
• Nicolae Carpathia, antagonist, leader of the World Community, Antichrist
• Leon Fortunato, Carpathia’s publicist
• Peter Mathews, pope then head of the Global Community Faith
• Viv Ivins, Carpathia’s facilitator; her name contains 666 in Roman numerals (VI VI VI)

Overview

Much of the power of the Left Behind series is in its immediacy. It brings the biblical prophecies of the end-time, starting with the Rapture of believers and continuing through the Tribulation (time of troubles) and the rule of the Antichrist to the triumphant Second Coming of Christ and then to a contemporary setting.

In Left Behind, a seemingly ordinary day is disrupted when millions of people unaccountably vanish, leaving chaos in their wake. Their one common characteristic is their Christian faith. As the media try to explain away the disappearances of a group of Christians, protagonist Rayford Steele, an airline pilot who witnessed the weird effects of this event during a flight, seeks answers in the Bible and discovers that this event is the prophesied Rapture, the first major event of the end-time that will culminate in the triumphal return of Jesus Christ. However, before that return, all those left behind will endure seven years of disasters known as the Tribulation. Biblical prophecy, if correctly interpreted, provides a roadmap for those seven years. In Tribulation Force, a small group led by Steele forms an organization named Tribulation Force to resist the evils that will overtake the earth before Christ’s return.

By Nicolae, the social dislocation caused by the Rapture leads a new group of questionable people to emerge as leaders. At their head is Nicolae Carpathia, a handsome Romanian business tycoon turned politician who has risen to the Romanian presidency in spite of his relative youth. In fact he is the Antichrist, created by immoral genetic experiments to be a cat’s-paw of Satan, facilitating his battles against God and his followers. After a ritualistic show of humility, Carpathia is made secretary-general of the United Nations.

Once in power, Carpathia transforms the United Nations from a loose alliance of nations into a despotic world government that he dubs the Global Community, with himself as its supreme potentate. He arranges for a crony, Cardinal Peter Mathews, to be named pope, because the previous pope disappeared in the Rapture. Mathews then becomes head of a new ecumenical church known as the Global Community Faith, which is later renamed Mystery Babylon One World Faith. Carpathia also moves the headquarters of the Global Community to a new city built on the ruins of Babylon in Iraq, which he calls New Babylon.

Steele becomes pilot of Carpathia’s personal airplane, giving him access to Carpathia’s inner circle. As his faith in Christ grows, Steele becomes uncomfortable with this role, but he decides it will be useful for the Tribulation Force to have a mole in Carpathia’s organization.

Alarmed by Carpathia’s rise to power, Jewish botanist Chaim Rosenzweig assassinates him in Assassins. However, the seeming triumph proves illusory, for after lying in state for three days, Carpathia rises from the dead in The Indwelling. Satan has reanimated his corpse and is now the animating force within him.

This apparent miracle enables Carpathia to sweep away the few remaining pretences of democracy or Christianity in his regime, and he decrees that henceforth all humanity should worship him as a god. He orders that golden statues of him be erected in every city and town and that everyone bow down and worship these statues three times a day. The penalty for refusing to do so will be death by the guillotine. Furthermore, in The Mark, all loyal subjects must accept the Mark of the Beast, a biochip implanted under the skin, which will allow its wearer to interface with the electronic money system that Carpathia has decreed to be the only legal system of commerce and finance.

As a result of these decrees, those who remain faithful to Christ are forced into hiding. However, Carpathia refuses to leave them alone, ruthlessly pursuing them wherever they go and killing many when they refuse to recant their faith and worship him. No matter how many people he and his cronies behead, burn, or otherwise martyr, however, new recruits appear to join the Tribulation Force and the rebels against Carpathia’s Global Community.

As the years of the Tribulation progress in successive volumes, God metes out a series of plagues on the earth. There is the terrible Wrath of the Lamb earthquake, which devastates vast areas and kills millions. An interdimensional pit opens, and out swarm monstrous demonic “locusts” whose stings bring unendurable pain combined with an inability to die. People break out in sores; meanwhile first the seas and then all bodies of fresh water are polluted, turning into an undrinkable reddish mess like blood. The sun’s energy output suddenly increases by a third, making temperatures unbearably hot. Darkness covers Carpathia’s capital of New Babylon, while the Euphrates River dries up so that a vast army from the nations of the East can march overland toward Israel.

Throughout all this spectacular evidence of God’s power, Carpathia’s followers persistently harden their hearts against God, cursing him and reasserting their allegiance to Carpathia. The desperate rebels, led by the Tribulation Force, take refuge in the ancient city of Petra, but Carpathia sends his Global Community Unity Army to pursue them and attack their redoubt, slaughtering most of them. By the book Armageddon, Steele is the only surviving member of the original Tribulation Force.

Meanwhile, Carpathia’s glorious capital of New Babylon is utterly destroyed, leaving a desolation inhabited only by vermin and bound demons. All around the world, the Global Community’s electronic banking system breaks down because of the destruction of the central computers. Carpathia’s followers begin to lose heart, and Satan emerges from Carpathia’s reanimated corpse to berate his inner circle for their weakness. They renew their pledges of faithfulness to him, swearing to destroy the forces of Satan’s ancient enemy (God).

As the various forces gather around Mount Meddigo for the final battle, the entire world falls into utter darkness. Earthquakes shake every continent, while meteors like burning hailstones batter all surviving structures. Then, in Glorious Appearing, the heavens open and a bright light pours down on all the earth. Throughout the world, people everywhere see the sudden triumphant return of Jesus Christ, now clad in glory as the second person of the Trinity, the true sovereign of the Earth. The terrified forces of the Global Community Unity Army, faced with incontrovertible evidence of who is indeed the true master, seek to kill themselves, as if that would place them beyond the reach of divine wrath.

The archangels Michael and Gabriel capture Carpathia and his false prophet, Leon Fortunato, and bring them before Christ for judgment. Stripped of Satan’s indwelling power, Carpathia goes in one moment from suave and handsome man to a yellowish, moldering corpse. Confronted by Christ, Carpathia acknowledges that he has wasted the talents and abilities that God gave him and has led millions to destruction by his deceptions. Fortunato whines and snivels, trying to place the blame for his own misdeeds on Carpathia’s deceptions, but to no avail. An interdimensional pit opens at their feet, and the archangels toss them into Hell.

Then Satan is rousted from hiding to do battle with Christ. Satan manifests as a monstrous lion, then shapeshifts through various horrible forms, but is unable to defeat Christ. He too is cast into Hell. The earth is beautified and returned to its original Edenic nature. The dead in Christ, as well as those who were taken up in the Rapture, now return in glorified bodies to walk among the surviving faithful of the Tribulation. Animals all become tame and offer themselves in limitless supply to be slaughtered, while every fruit tree bears heavy crops that replenish themselves as soon as they are picked. The Millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, has begun.

In the series’ last volume, Kingdom Come: The Final Victory, the world’s believers enjoy Christ’s perfect kingdom on earth, but despite this new utopia unrepentant unbelievers remain. Free will still demands that—even during Jesus’ thousand-year reign—people actually choose to live in Christ, and not all do. Those devoted to Satan are planning to mount a new offensive as the millennium draws to a close.

Christian Themes

The Left Behind series can be understood only within the framework of evangelical Protestant eschatology, or the study of the end-time, particularly in terms of premillennialist dispensationalism, the theory that the thousand-year reign of Christ will be preceded by a series of Tribulations and that God has given Jews and Gentiles separate relationships with him, known as dispensations. Almost from the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, there has been a recurring intense interest in the biblical prophecies related to the triumphal Second Coming of Christ and the final judgment, which Christianity considers to be the culmination of human history. The wave of interest in the end-time that gave rise to the Left Behind series began with Hal Lindsey’s 1970 publication of The Late Great Planet Earth, which set a premillennialist understanding of the end-time prophecies against a backdrop of Cold War fears of Soviet aggression. In response to its popularity, Tim LaHaye, a conservative Baptist preacher who had written a number of inspirational books, began to write nonfiction dealing with biblical prophecy. He became increasingly interested in writing a fiction series dramatizing the premillennialist interpretation of prophecy. By the time he was ready to write Left Behind, the Soviet Union had fallen and the Cold War had ended, leading him to place different interpretations on several prophecies Lindsey had understood as referring to Soviet Communism. However, the basic concepts of a Rapture, a Tribulation, and a triumphant Second Coming with subsequent judgment of the righteous and unrighteous remained unchanged.

Sources for Further Study

Capps, Charles. End Time Events: Journey to the End of the Age. Tulsa, Okla.: Harrison House, 1997. A discussion of end-time events with a heavy emphasis on Old Testament precursors and prefigurations, based on the idea that the souls of the dead are not conscious until the Second Coming.

DeMar, Gary. End Times Fiction: A Biblical Consideration of the “Left Behind” Theology. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2001. A criticism of LaHay’s novels from the perspective that the prophecies of Revelation actually refer to Nero’s persecutions of the early Church, the “preterist” interpretation of prophecy.

Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: “Left Behind” in Evangelical America. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sociological study of responses to the Left Behind series among Christians and non-Christians.

LaHaye, Tim, and Thomas Ice, eds. The End Times Controversy: The Second Coming Under Attack. Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House, 2003. A collection of responses to the preterist criticism of the Left Behind series, collected by LaHaye.

Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991. Discusses the development of dispensationalism and premillennialism in the context of the history of evangelical Protestantism.

Noel, Ted. I Want to Be Left Behind. Maitland, Fla.: BibleOnly Press, 2002. A rejection of the pre-Tribulation Rapture theory that supports an otherwise premillennialist interpretation of Revelation.