Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; pp. 254-258
Safely beyond the Israeli border crossing, Buck pulls over and asks his friend Tsion Ben-Judah to explain how he managed to elude the security guard who inspected their bus.
“I told you the Lord would make a way somehow,” Tsion said. “I don’t know if young Anis was an angel or a man, but he was sent from God.”
The young security guard, it turns out, did find Tsion’s unimaginative hiding place under the seats. In the back of the bus, Anis grabbed Tsion by the shirt collar and pulled him close:
“He whispered hoarsely to me through clenched teeth in Hebrew, ‘You had better be who I think you are, or you are a dead man.’ What could I do? There was no more hiding. No more future in pretending I wasn’t here. I said to him, ‘Young man, my name is Tsion Ben-Judah.’
“Still holding my shirt in his fist and with his flashlight blinding me, he said, ‘Rabbi Ben-Judah, my name is Anis. Pray as you have never prayed before that my report will be believed. And now may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine upon you and give you peace.’ Cameron, as God is my witness, the young man stood and walked out of the bus. I have been lying here, praising God with my tears ever since.”
So the miracle in this miraculous escape turns out to be a border guard who was willing to look the other way. That’s not, in itself, terribly unusual, but in this case the guard abetted their smuggling for religious reasons, rather than for the usual reason of bribery, and I suppose that part is unusual enough to kinda sorta qualify as providential.
Anis, you see, is one of the Tribulation Saints — part of the “great multitude” of converts to Christianity that Tim LaHaye says that the Bible foretells during the post-Rapture Great Tribulation. LaHaye has said he believes more people will convert to Christianity (his kind — the real, true kind) after the Rapture than during the 2,000 years (and counting) of Christianity before the Rapture occurs. This, he says, is based on a “literal reading” of Revelation 7 (with literal bits and pieces from, like, Joel and Matthew literally pasted together with it).
Here’s the relevant text in Revelation 7:9-17. Read it for yourself and you’ll find it contains the phrase “great multitude” and a reference to a “great ordeal,” so obviously it couldn’t possibly have any other meaning than what Tim LaHaye says it means.
(If you’re a baseball fan, it might help to understand LaHaye’s idea of End-Times conversions by thinking of the Rapture as being like the trade deadline in baseball. Teams can still make trades after that deadline, but the players will all have to go through waivers. So too, people can still be “saved” after the Rapture, but they’ll have to go through tribulation.)
This subject of religious conversions during LaHaye’s Great Tribulation is interesting. LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins insist that in the universe of Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist there remain three — and only three — religions in the world. The majority of the world is governed by the Antichrist’s one-world government and faithfully accepts his one-world religion, the EBOWF, even if no one seems to have any clear idea of what that brand-new religion says or means or entails.
In Israel, the sole remaining sovereign nation outside of the OWG, a militant form of post-apocalyptic Judaism seems to be the official state religion — lethally enforced by the Israeli government’s death squads. This “Judaism” also seems to be a brand-new religion in that it apparently shares very little with the religious tradition bearing that name in our world. It’s an oddly Christocentric form of Judaism that seems to be almost exclusively preoccupied with rejecting Jesus.
The third religion, of course, is Real, True Christianity — a subversive, underground religion in both Israel and the OWG. The great End Times “soul harvest” means that there will be billions of converts to RTC. These converts are coming to the faith through huge evangelistic rallies conducted at stadiums all over the world, after which they’re joining local churches that meet every Sunday, inviting ever more new members each week for public services.
But it’s still a secret, underground religion.
What about all the other religions and the billions of adherents they had before the Rapture? All gone. The Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Pagans, Episcopalians, Shintoists, etc., all quickly abandoned that stuff to embrace the EBOWF.
The author’s explanation for this mass conversion seems to be that, prior to the Rapture, these thousands of diverse religions all taught something that was not real, true Christianity. The EBOWF also is not real, true Christianity. So converting from one form of not-RTC to another form of not-RTC, the authors assume, couldn’t be that big a deal for any of these non-Christians.
In arithmetical form, that logic looks like this:
A ≠ X
B ≠ X
Therefore, A = B.
But wait — if “Judaism” is also a version of not-RTC, then why aren’t the Jews all converting to EBOWF just like the Muslims and Mormons and the rest?
Well, the authors explain, because prophecy. At the end of the Great Tribulation, somebody is going to have to get slaughtered on the plains of Megiddo, so the Jews will have to stay Jewish for the prophecy to be fulfilled.
So, OK, if you’re trying to keep track of all these End Times conversions, here’s how the authors set it up for us: Most Jews stay Jewish, but some convert to RTC; most of Everyone Else converts to EBOWF, but some convert to RTC.
The authors don’t allow for any of the other apparent possibilities: Judaism (or “Judaism”) is now the only legally acceptable alternative to the EBOWF, so couldn’t we expect that at least some of Everyone Else might convert to Judaism instead of to the Antichrist’s amorphous one-world religion? (For that matter, with Israel as the sole remaining sovereign nation outside of the Global Community’s OWG, shouldn’t we expect to see political refugees streaming into Israel at the very border crossing Buck just passed? After all, the GC/OWG just nuked Cairo, so you’d think people would be fleeing somewhere.)
And what about atheists? Maybe they’re just a sub-set of Everyone Else. But there are places in this series where the authors seem to subscribe to the popular fundie theory that atheists are secretly believers — they’re all just pretending they don’t believe in God because they’re angry with God over some perceived injustice. And if the authors are going with that theory, then shouldn’t the divine abduction of all of their children and the tribulations of the Great Tribulation make a lot more people angry with God, swelling the ranks of atheism?
Anyway, the providential presence of RTC-convert Anis allowed Buck and Tsion to slip through the fingers of the IDF, but now they face another hurdle — “the border crossing in Egypt.”
That’s what Jerry Jenkins calls it. Perhaps he’s just economizing because that’s shorter than “the border crossing in the district of the Global Community that used to be the nation of Egypt.” Or perhaps he’s completely lost track of his own world building and forgotten, yet again, that no nations or national boundaries are supposed to exist anymore.
Either way, readers will be as excited to learn that this border-crossing subplot means going through customs twice.
Half an hour later Buck and Tsion pulled up to the entrance into the Sinai.
There’s an “entrance” to the Sinai?
The border leaving Israel was lined with barbed wire but, apparently, the entrance into (the area of the GC formerly known as) Egypt — a half-hour drive west of the Israeli border — has it’s own miles-long wall of barbed wire too.
Still tired from belaboring the previous border crossing for too many pages, Jenkins can barely muster the energy to write a second such scene. The set-up here is eerily similar to the earlier border — young guard, old guard, building, crossing-gate. (I picture a Monty Python title card, reading “A Different Border Crossing. Definitely Not in Bolton.” And I imagine the Egyptian older guard being played by the same actor in a slightly crooked false mustache.)
“This time,” Jenkins types, “God merely used the carelessness of the system to allow Ben-Judah to slip through.” He explains:
Apparently the Egyptians were used to simply rubber-stamping whatever the Israelis had approved. You couldn’t get to this checkpoint without going through the previous, so … it was usually smooth sailing.
Buck and Tsion sidestep these bored bureaucrats by literally side-stepping them. Buck goes into the office to get his papers checked and Tsion just doesn’t. He goes around the side of the bus and waits, eventually getting waved through without anyone realizing that his papers were never examined.
This still gets dragged out over three pages — three pages that are every bit as thrilling as the experience of going through customs in real life. The highlight of those pages, for me, is the way that Buck exuberantly celebrates his miraculous deliverance throughout, even when nothing particularly miraculous is happening:
As his papers were being processed, the guard said, “No trouble at the Israeli checkpoint then?”
Buck nearly smiled. No problem? There’s no problem when God is on your side. “No, sir.”
And:
“Very good then, Mr. Katz. All the best.”
All the best is right! Buck thought.
For good measure, Buck also repeats his International Harvester “joke” — enjoying it every bit as much as he did the first time he told it.
As Buck and Tsion finally drive across the entry to the Sinai, they worry that the two guards will eventually compare notes and realize that no one checked Tsion’s papers. If that happens, Tsion fears, they may “give chase.”
“I trust the Lord to deliver us, because he has promised he will,” Buck said. “But I also think we had better be as prepared as possible.” He pulled off to the side of the road. He topped off the water in the radiator and dumped nearly two liters of oil into the engine. He filled the gas tanks.
“It’s like we are living in the New Testament,” Tsion said.
Yes, it reminds me of that scene in the book of Acts where Paul and Silas tune up their motorcycles before the big car chase with Agrippa’s police force.
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