The books Left Behind say that Christians will disappear suddenly when Christ returns, and that unbelievers will be left behind. But, what does the Bible say?

By G. Brent McGuire

Planes dropping out of the sky. Chaos on the roads. Newborns vanishing amid delivery. Missing corpses.

These are the amazing scenes in the opening pages of Left Behind, the first in a series of novels about what will supposedly happen at the end of the world. This series of novels has earned for their creator and author -- Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins some $20 million in royalties. What is perhaps more fantastic than the plots of the books themselves is the fact that millions of Americans actually believe that the scenario described in Left Behind is Scriptural. The website for the Left Behind book series http://www.leftbehind.com/ claims that Left Behind has become "the all-time best-selling Christian fiction series.” As refreshing as the popularity of a religious -- even Christian -- book may seem, Christians should, nevertheless, "test everything" (1 Thess. 5:21). The question, then, is: How much of the Left Behind series is truly Biblical? And how much is simply fiction? We must always remember, as the old hymn tells us, that the Lord God is our guide and that he guides us through his Word.

Why is it that some writings, and not others, became part of the New Testament canon?

By Jeffrey Kloha

“The Bible did not arrive from heaven by facsimile!.”

That statement by the fictitious “canon expert” Leigh Teabing in The DaVinci Code, is meant to startle and shock us. But should it?

Actually, the author, Dan Brown, got at least this one thing right. It may seem that the Bibles we have grown to love through constant use have always looked the same. Yes, there are many translations, but no matter the version or publisher, the same 66 books always appear in the same sequence. But it may be surprising to many to learn that this familiar form of the Bible did not exist until 1804.

(To see this the rest of this article in English, go to http://www.lcms.org/graphics/assets/media/Lutheran%20Witness/Witness%20Sep06.pdf
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