The Left Behind Complete Set, Series 1-12

by Tim LaHaye

“Captain Steele, sir, could you tell me one thing? Could you tell me that you’re not keepin’ this from me because you think I’d blab it all over?” Rayford stood. “Loretta, come here.” She stopped and stared at him. “Come on now,” he said. “Come right over here and let me hug you. I’m young enough to be your son, so don’t be taking this as condescending.”

Crowd: “Too late!”

Loretta seemed to be refusing to smile, but she did slowly approach Rayford.

If I didn’t think you were doin’ this with my best interests in mind, misguided as y’all are, I’d throw you out of my boardinghouse.” That made everybody smile. Everybody except Loretta.

Buck was last in line as the five of them filed into the sanctuary and stood by Bruce’s coffin. At first Buck felt guilty. He was strangely unmoved. He realized he had expended his emotion during the memorial service. He knew so well that Bruce was no longer there that he largely felt nothing by simply noting that his friend was, indeed, dead.

To Buck, it seemed Verna looked both surprised and disappointed to see Chloe hobbling in with him. Chloe must have noticed too. “Am I not welcome here?” she said. “Of course,” Verna said. “If Buck needs someone to hold his hand.” “Why would I need someone to hold my hand?”

Great comeback, Buck

“What happened to the new Verna?” Buck asked. “There was no new Verna,” she said. “Just a slightly mellower version of the old Verna.”

“So,” Chloe said, “your moments of vulnerability, your admitting that you had been jealous of Buck, and your realization that you had been inappropriate in how you talked with him, that was all, what, made up?”

Like communism, it was just a red herring

It just seems to me your life depends on who knows or doesn’t know that you’re harboring Tsion Ben-Judah.” “That’s something you think you know?” “I saw him in church this morning!” “At least you thought you did,” Chloe said. Buck flinched and looked at her. So did Verna. For the first time, Buck saw a flicker of uncertainty on Verna’s face.

I’m all for Chloe taking point in this conversation, but I think it’s important to point out that our heroes’ plan involves gas-lighting a woman with an ethical journalism complaint.

Verna sat down resignedly.

But did you hear what Rayford said Bruce believes is coming next?” “An earthquake, yes, I know.” “Will that convince you?” Verna turned in her chair and stared out the window. “I suppose that would be pretty hard to argue with.”

Buck and Chloe followed her out toward the front door. “Our private lives, our beliefs, are none of our employer’s business,” Buck said. “For instance, if I knew you were a lesbian, I wouldn’t feel it necessary to tell your superiors.” Verna whirled to face him. “Who told you that? What business is that of yours? You tell anybody that and I’ll—”

Ooooh, so that’s why Verna is so mean! And she hates Buck so much, because he’s a man. And lesbians hate men. /s Ugh, seriously? I thought the nineties were better than this. I can’t say I’m surprised, though.

“Buck! I had no idea Verna was a lesbian!” Chloe said. “You had no idea? Neither did I!” “You’re kidding!” “I’m not. You think that little revelation was of God too?” “I’d sooner think it was a wild coincidence, but you never know. That tidbit may have saved your life.”

A week and a half later, as Rayford was preparing to head back to New Babylon to resume his duties, he got a call from Leon Fortunato. “You haven’t heard anything from the potentate’s woman, have you?” “The potentate’s woman?” Rayford repeated, trying to let his disgust show.

“You know what, Leon? I’ll sleep tonight.”

In New Babylon, the mighty New Babylon, Leon sleeps tonight...

Buck had already had his tongue-lashing by phone from Steve Plank about having allowed his passport and ID to fall into the wrong hands in Israel. “They tortured that Shorosh guy within an inch of his life, and he still swore you were just a passenger on his boat.” “It was a nice big, wood boat,” Buck had said. “Well, the boat is no more.”

Not to make light of torture, but Plank’s response about the boat is objectively funny

In his personal journal Bruce frequently mentioned his dream that they work together, researching, writing, and teaching cell groups and house churches. Eventually it was agreed that Amanda would not return to New Babylon until after Rayford got back from his flight to Rome. That would give her a few more days with Chloe to plan a ministry similar to what Bruce had outlined.

Just in case you were worried Amanda or Chloe might be near the action and excitement that’s sure to be a cliffhanger ending

We are one faction that doesn’t buy into the one-world faith routine.”

But what about the others? It could be really interesting to see Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Mormon, Buddhist, Satanist, Rastafarian, Pastafarian, Eckankar, and pineapple pizza lovers from around the world uniting for their religious freedom against a one-world religion.

Buck did the writing, but he assigned reporters from every Global Community Weekly office still standing in several countries to interview local and regional clergymen about the prophecies in the book of Revelation. For some reason, his reporters—most of them skeptics—went at this task with glee. Buck was faxed, modemed, phoned, couriered, and mailed dispatches from all over the world. His cover story title, and the specific question he wanted his reporters to ask religious leaders, was “Will we suffer the ‘wrath of the Lamb’?” Buck had enjoyed this self-assigned task more than all the other cover stories he had ever done. That included his Person of the Year stories, even the one on Chaim Rosenzweig. He had spent nearly three days and nights, hardly sleeping, collating, contrasting, and comparing the various reports. He, of course, could detect fellow believers in some of the comments.

Buck himself had talked to Mathews. His view, echoed dozens of times, was that the book of Revelation was “wonderful, archaic, beautiful literature, to be taken symbolically, figuratively, metaphorically.

I guess this is an attempt to skewer real-life Christians who don’t take the literal interpretation of Revelation. Sort of like LaHaye and Jenkins saying, “See! Look how your arguments sound, now that they’re in the mouth of an evil Pope. Aren’t they ridiculous?”

“But,” Buck had asked him, “are you not aware that this idea of fearing the ‘wrath of the Lamb’ is a doctrine still preached in many churches?” “Of course,” Mathews had responded. “But these are the same holdovers from your right-wing, fanatical, fundamentalist factions who have always taken the Bible literally. These same preachers, and I daresay many of their parishioners, are the ones who take the creation account—the Adam and Eve myth, if you will—literally. They believe the entire world was under water at the time of Noah and that only he and his three sons and their wives survived to begin the entire human race as we now know it.”

See, we can just take whatever Evil-Pope says, invert it, and assume that it’s part of LaHaye’s beliefs

“I don’t care to be too specific, at the risk of offending those few who still like to refer to themselves as Catholics, but the idea of a literal virgin birth should be seen as an incredible leap of logic. The idea that the Holy Roman Catholic Church was the only true church was almost as damaging as the evangelical Protestant view that Jesus was the only way to God. That assumes, of course, that Jesus was, as so many of my Bible-worshiping friends like to say, ‘the only begotten Son of the Father.’ By now I’m sure that most thinking people realize that God is, at most, a spirit, an idea, if you will. If they like to infuse him, or it, or her, with some characteristics of purity and goodness, it only follows that we are all sons and daughters of God.” Buck had led him. “The idea of heaven and hell then . . . ?” “Heaven is a state of mind. Heaven is what you can make of your life here on earth. I believe we’re heading toward a utopian state. Hell? More damage has been done to more tender psyches by the wholly mythical idea that—well, let me put it this way: Let’s say those fundamentalists, these people who believe we’re about to suffer the ‘wrath of the Lamb,’ are right that there is a loving, personal God who cares about each one of us. How does that jibe? Is it possible he would create something that he would eventually burn up? It makes no sense.”

More ideas we can cross off, because Evil-Pope said them. I get the feeling that sentence in the middle where Matthews refers to God as “her” was a sore spot.

Early that morning, before the door was unlocked, Buck picked up the shrink-wrapped bundle of Global Community Weeklys and lugged them inside.

Lugged *it* inside. He’s lugging the bundle, singular, not the magazines, plural. I usually don’t mind the grammar mistakes, but this one stuck out to me for some reason.

Buck turned to the extra-long story inside that carried his byline. Characteristic of a Buck Williams story, he had covered all the bases.

Also amusing to Buck, if anything about this cosmic subject could be amusing, was that one of his enterprising young reporters from Africa took it upon himself to interview geological scholars in a university in Zimbabwe. Their conclusion? “The idea of a global earthquake is, on the face of it, illogical. Earthquakes are caused by faults, by underground plates rubbing against each other. It’s cause and effect. The reason it happens in certain areas at certain times is, logically, because it’s not happening other places at the same time. These plates move and crash together because they have nowhere else to go. You never hear of simultaneous earthquakes. There is not one in North America and one in South America at precisely the same time. The odds against one earth-wide geological event, which would really be simultaneous earthquakes all over the globe, are astronomical.”

Gee, I wonder what the cliffhanger ending of this book is going to be. I could be anything really, but LaHaye and Jenkins want you to know how unlikely a global earthquake would be, and that they did their scientific research.

Carpathia’s Suite 216, an entire floor of offices and conference rooms. Rayford had never understood its address, as it was not on the second floor at all.

This is gonna be a dumb numerology thing, isn’t it?

“I mean it, Verna. If you ever want to talk about this stuff, you can come to me.” “With what your religion says about homosexuals, are you kidding?” “My Bible doesn’t differentiate between homosexuals and heterosexuals,” Buck said. “It may call practicing homosexuals sinners, but it also calls heterosexual sex outside of marriage sinful.” “Semantics, Buck. Semantics.”

LaHaye and Jenkins decided to toss this little gem in at the eleventh hour of the story.

By late morning Chicago time it was early evening in Iraq.

Narrator is suddenly very concerned with keeping the timelines synced up. Tick tock.

By listening in on his bugging device, he soon found out.

This is definitely the replacement for the news info dump — Rayford spying on Carpathia from the cockpit.

In the approximately two hours it took to fly from New Babylon to Rome, Rayford would get a lesson in new-world-order international diplomacy.

Carpathia checked with Fortunato on the flight plans of Hattie Durham. Fortunato told him, “She is on some kind of a multi-leg journey that has a long layover in Milwaukee, then heads for Boston. She’ll fly nonstop from Boston to Baghdad. She’ll lose several hours coming this way, but I think we can expect her tomorrow morning.”

“We are learning more and more about our brilliant young journalist,” Carpathia said. “He has never been forthcoming about his ties to my own pilot, but then neither has Captain Steele. I still do not mind having them around. They may think they are in strategy proximity to me, but I am also able to learn much about the opposition through them.” So there it is, Rayford thought. The gauntlet is down.

Fortunato sounded disgusted. “They’ve got the whole nation of Israel up in arms again,” he said. “You know it hasn’t rained there since they began all that preaching. And that trick they pulled on the water supply—turning it to blood—during the temple ceremonies, they’re doing that again.”

This is the exact kind of info we would have gotten through a news report in the last two books.

If those two rascals do not immediately purify the water supply, we will see how they stand up to an atomic blast.”

I think Russia tried that already, and they lost their entire air force

“As you know, the ten ambassadors voted unanimously to fund abortions for women in underprivileged countries. I have made an executive decision to make that unilateral. Every continent has suffered from the war, so all could be considered underprivileged. I do not anticipate a problem from Mathews on this, the way he might have protested were he still pope.

“And, Leon,” Carpathia said, “are we at a point where we can announce sanctions requiring amniocentesis on every pregnancy, along with an abortion requirement for any fetal tissue determined to result in a deformed or handicapped fetus?” “Everything is in place,” Fortunato said.

Rayford was nauseated by Carpathia’s obsequious deference to Mathews.

Buck had not seen Hattie Durham in real distress since the night of the Rapture. He, like most other men, usually saw her only as striking. Now the kindest term he could think of for her was disheveled.

They ate in silence, Buck noticing that Hattie’s eyes were full of tears. Despite that, she ate quickly and was done before the rest. She grabbed yet another tissue and blew her nose.

Loretta began. “Hattie, what’s troubling you the most just now?” Either what Loretta said or how she said it unleashed a torrent of tears.

Rayford already gave me the standard right-wing, pro-life position. I don’t guess I need to hear that again.” “What do you need to hear?” Buck said, feeling very male and very insensitive just then.

Ironically, “Very Male and Very Insensitive” is the title of Buck’s biography

Buck wanted to say something but knew he couldn’t communicate at this level. He looked into the eyes of the women, who intently watched their guest.

We have ideas about what you should do about your baby, and we have ideas about what you should do about your soul. But these are personal decisions only you can make. And while they are life-and-death, heaven-and-hell decisions, all we can offer is support, encouragement, advice if you ask for it, and love.”

We are going to love you anyway. We’re going to love you the way God loves you. We’re going to love you so fully and so well that you won’t be able to hide from it. Even if your decisions go against everything we believe to be true, and even though we would grieve over the loss of innocent life if you chose to abort your baby, we won’t love you any less.”

The kind of love you can’t escape with an address change or even a restraining order.

Hattie burst into tears as Chloe rubbed her shoulders.

She had already “unleashed a torrent” of tears, so I guess Hattie bursts into even more tears than that.

Hattie tried to smile. “I feel foolish,” she said, “like a blubbering schoolgirl.”

Did Hattie get possessed by a British ghost for a second?

The other women didn’t protest. They didn’t tell her she looked fine. They simply looked at her with love. For a moment Buck wished he was Hattie so he could respond.

And to be looked at with love by that many women

“So, what are you saying, Nicolae? You’re going to wage war on the fundamentalists?” “In a sense I am.

I would like you to cooperate in forming and heading an organization of elite enforcers, if you will, of pure thought.” “How are you defining ‘pure thought’?” “I foresee a cadre of young, healthy, strong men and women so devoted to the cause of the Global Community that they would be willing to train and build themselves to the point where they will be eager to make sure everyone is in line with our objectives.”

“We would call them the GCMM. The Global Community Morale Monitors.”

She had a lot of questions about just what it was these women did with their time. She was intrigued by the idea of Bible studies. And she had mentioned her envy of having close friends of the same sex who seemed to really care about each other.