Doomsday

Once upon a time, there lived a group of believers who were persecuted by mean people and God came made the bad guys pay by melting their eyes and rotting their flesh and everyone else lived happily ever after, the end. Deux ex machina in a manner I would only expect from the Scripture: this is the Glorious Appearing in a nutshell.
If there is anything I worry about after reading this book it is that, perhaps, the authors imaginations for anything more than blood and gore is severely lacking. The characters are “perfect” Christians— those who have had troubled pasts but found themselves in Jesus. The characters lack depth because they are nothing more than puppets who say “praise the Lord,” “Amen,” and “Jesus spoke to me” in every other sentence and fall to their knees in front of their Lord in truly dramatic fashion more than a few times through out the course of the book. Every waking moment is spent discussing prophesies, conducting Bible studies and, praying. Then, once Jesus arrives, all the characters ever seem to say is, “He spoke to me in [insert native language here], wow”— whatever little depth we see in the characters is their love for the Christ. After the Glorious Appearing, the Believers are indestructible and the rest of the plot almost has no meaning. For example, we are not worried when a group of Believers walk around GC troops in Jerusalem because we know nothing horrible could happen to members of the tribulation force. There was nothing to look forward to because we knew exactly how the story would end. Someone mentioned in their post that we read and listen to stories where we know the ending all the time. Those stories are circulated within a culture to reaffirm certain beliefs. This story, within the “born-again” Christian community would have been a success because it reflects what they believe. However, when I read it, I feel like the outsider who would be sent to the pit of fire. Perhaps only believers would be able to truly appreciate the novels in a way the authors intended.
Finally, I feel like it is hard to criticize Glorious Appearing without criticizing the Christian God, the Christian view of God, or the Christian’s view of good Christian behavior. This is partially because the second half of this book has been lifted out of the Book of Revelation complete with the Jesus’ verbatim dialogue. Also, I find that what I disliked most about the characters made them perfect Christians. If I were to tell a “born-again” Christian that I did not like the Left Behind series, they would probably tell me to find God first: basically, I feel that there is no non-religious way to enjoy this book and a lot of it has to be taken on blind faith.