A New Old Genre: Pre-Apocalyptic Gainland

[strangewind]

If one thinks of world history as one that has been punctuated by numerous "mini" "Last Days" (i.e. the birth pangs leading to the End of Days), I seem to see a pattern in the record.

Prior to expulsion from the Garden, Adam and Eve received warning from God not to sin and therefore reap a dramatic form of destruction.

Prior to the worldwide flood, God warned the earth through Noah, who spent decades working on the vast, world-saving vessel.

Prior to the Exodus, God sent Moses to warn Pharoah of the devastation that would come to his nation should the Egyptians disobey and continue to oppress the Hebrews.

Prior to the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah, angels were sent to redeem any who would flee the cities. Prior to the destruction of Ninevah, Jonah was sent to prophesy against them (a great example of repentence that leads to redemption, by the way).

Prior to the Babylonian captivity, God sent 400 years worth of prophets to warn of it. Ezekial was dismissed as not literal.

Jesus warns us of the End Times, as did Isaiah and Ezekial and many others before His Incarnation.

All of these warning periods are strange, wonderful, familiar and frightening days. Lacking the terror and destruction of the actual cataclysm, they certainly don't lack for drama.

I'm sure these "grace" periods have some high-falutin' theological name, but because they come before a "type" of post-apocalyptic wasteland, I call them "pre-apocalyptic gainlands."

I like to think about the strange, pregnant days before catastrophe, and their potential to warn and redeem, even as they are shot through with risk and rising social disorder.

I guess my question is this: what does it mean to be warned? How can one comprehend a warning if they do not yet see the reality? If one does not trust in the Lord prior to the End of Days, how might he misunderstand the clear warnings? How might he dismiss those warnings to his friends, "disprove" them to his co-workers?

[Jeff Gerke]

Cool question, strangewind. And I'm always intrigued by discussions of patterns in Scripture. I like finding them, myself.

I think you're right. I think it's almost impossible to understand the warning, especially for unbelievers. I think the only way to have a chance of hearing and comprehending God's warning is to 1) be aware of God's acts in history as recorded in the Bible and 2) be daily in touch with Him through meditation and prayer.

Maybe the safest, wisest solution is to assume that any warning from God is His last and we'd better get right with Him right now!

Jeff

[strangewind]

It does become somewhat circular at first blush, though. Don't get me wrong: when I read, for example, 2nd Chronicles end-to-end, or make it through one of Jeremiah's litanies of condemnation, I really do get a full measure of God's patience before unleashing wrath.

But what I can't, and may never, puzzle out is this: if one is an unbeliever* but would heed warnings if you understood that prayer and scripture were critical to even knowing about a warning, how then can that person be condemned? I guess the short answer is that "Ignorance of the Law is no defense."

On the other hand, Ezekial makes it clear that the wicked who repent have their sins forgotten, while the righteous who forget that they've been credited and fall into sin are in no better shape than the wicked, so clearly there is a mysterious bridge that takes a man from unrighteousness to holiness. And though I know that Christ Himself lay Himself down as that bridge, I still don't grasp the inner workings.

I wish I had insight, but, alas! The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can understand it?

I wish I could. I'm really trying to accurately convey a lost man receiving warnings that he does not heed.

How can I have a character who is blind to clear warnings without the reader saying "Hey, bozo! Don't open that door!"

The character is a deep and complex sort of fellow, an unbelieving thinker. I don't want him to come off like some bimbo in a slasher movie, with every reader frustrated with the fact that this otherwise smart guy can't hear God's voice in the form of conscience. Alternatively, I don't want God's clear and compassionate warning to be so obscure to the reader that they sympathize with the character to the detriment of the story.

In short, I don't want the reader either saying: "That book was annoying. The guy in it was supposed to be thoughtful and wise, if a bit hapless and distractable, but he ended up ignoring all the obvious warnings and serving only to advance the plot." OR "What a bait and switch! All through the book, this guy kept making rational, thoughtful decisions, but was punished at the end for not paying attention to really ambiguous warnings! That author gypped me!"

*A little footnote here, totally unrelated. I've noticed in my reading of the Old Testament, that the modern idea of an "unbeliever" is completely foreign. It was a social given that one would "believe" - the only real question is what the object of that belief was. The ancients, even the ancient pagans, had more cultural awareness of the fundamental human response to a supernatural God (or "god") than we do today.

[Jeff Gerke]

This is a good dilemma, strangewind. It sounds like something readers would resonate with.

If you want to show the character receiving clear warnings about something but continuing on his destructive path nevertheless, give him a good reason for not heeding the warnings.

Let him hear them clearly. Put someone in his life who says, "Dude, don't you see what this is?" And have him actually consider it. But then have him bring out (in his mind) the reason he's been going down this path. Maybe it's the anger he still feels over the wrongful death of his kid sister. Maybe it's the guilt he still feels over a bad choice he made that led to someone else being terribly hurt, and he feels like he still owes penance. Maybe it's bitterness toward a group over how his ailing mother was treated when she was dying.

Whatever it is, he'd bring it out and look at it. He'd put it on the virtual scales and weigh it against this new thing. He'd be evaluating--consciously or not--whether the tug of wisdom to heed these warnings is greater than the familiar tug of holding on to that old anger or whatever. If not, if perhaps he's got too much of his life and reputation bound up in maintaining the old anger, then he'll stick with it, silly as it may seem to others.

People stay the same until the cost of doing so becomes too great. If the cost of holding onto the old way ever becomes higher than what he's willing to pay or endure, he'll finally think about changing.

This is closely related to your character's inner journey, which you can read about in Tip #3 here: www.wherethemapends.com/writerstools/writers_tools_pages/tip_of_the_week--01-10.htm.

Jeff

[strangewind]

Whoa. That's intense. I actually had Tip #3 sort of in the back of my mind (though I hadn't read it since earlier this fall - the tips are really terrific. What you call tips a lot of consultants call "billable services.")

Something you wrote triggered something in my mind. Would you agree that setting up this "failing to heed while maintaining reader sympathy" problem means that, to a degree, you write the character's process and motives for "placing scales over his eyes?"* In real life, we fail to heed warnings for a lot of non-deliberate reasons, but in fiction, it can be helpful to watch the character almost consciously attach blindness to himself.

Am I tracking properly?

Even if I'm not, you've been incredibly helpful. Thank you!

*Just to clarify: I'm not suggesting that an unbeliever's lack of vision is something that he consciously sets out to attain, but in fiction, that lack of vision can be better illustrated by showing the process by which a blindness may be furthered.

[Jeff Gerke]

The reasons he allows to convince him to stay on the wrong path may or may not be known to him. He may not realize why he's acting the way he does. That's part of why God escalates the situation--He'll keep bringing exactly the right kind of pressure until the hero finally gets it. Bringing the character to that informed moment of choice is what great fiction is all about.

Jeff

[Teskas]

I have been tinkering with a minor secular character who has no religious upbringing or environment, and wondering how to engineer a transformation within him I need to achieve for the story line. Introducing a prophetic character as a foil to his secularism seems easier than trying to show the journey solely as an intellectual or interior event.

Thank you, Strangewind, for raising the subject, and, Jeff, for the advice.

[strangewind]

Another possibility is to place a completely falsely religious person as foil. Sometimes a hard-edge pharisee can provide a believable "reluctant witness" to the secular. Just a thought.

[newburydave]

Guys, I don't know if it's too late to get into the discussion but in Thessalonians Paul says that our response to the truth is what makes us believers or unbelievers in the end.

2Th 2:3-13 (NLT)
(3) Don't be fooled by what they say. For that day will not come until there is a great rebellion against God and the man of lawlessness is revealed—the one who brings destruction.
(4) He will exalt himself and defy everything that people call god and every object of worship. He will even sit in the temple of God, claiming that he himself is God.
(5) Don't you remember that I told you about all this when I was with you?
(6) And you know what is holding him back, for he can be revealed only when his time comes.
(7) For this lawlessness is already at work secretly, and it will remain secret until the one who is holding it back steps out of the way.
(8) Then the man of lawlessness will be revealed, but the Lord Jesus will kill him with the breath of His mouth and destroy him by the splendor of His coming.
(9) This man will come to do the work of Satan with counterfeit power and signs and miracles.

(10) He will use every kind of evil deception to fool those on their way to destruction, because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them.

(11) So God will cause them to be greatly deceived, and they will believe these lies.
(12) Then they will be condemned for enjoying evil rather than believing the truth.

(13) As for us, we can't help but thank God for you, dear brothers and sisters loved by the Lord. We are always thankful that God chose you to be among the first to experience salvation—a salvation that came through the Spirit who makes you holy and through your belief in the truth.


What I get from this it that the lost make a deliberate decision to take pleasure in Evil and that persistent decision short circuits their understanding and believing the truth that can save them. I feel that it is a moral journey from unawakened sinner to Lost soul.

The ones who are saved make the opposite choice to love and believe the truth and forsake the "Pleasures of sin".

My experience is that the outward proclaimation of the truth is only effective when the Spirit of God speaks it to the heart.

Reference the preflood statement by God "My spirit will not always strive with man." This indicated that there was a limit to how much rejection God would put up with before he sent judgement.

So the inner journey could include a persistent knocking on thier hearts door by the Spirit of God with the truth and the rejector persistently making conscious decisions to ignore the truth of the gospel so he can continue to take his pleasure in unrighteousness.

Eventually this chain of decisions makes his heart so hard that he can no longer hear the entreaty of the Spirit.

Hope this helps

[mongoose]

If people are looking for stories of un-believers being drawn to Christ, I thought Ted Dekker's "Heaven's Wager" was excellent.

The man knew what was right, or at the least, had the witness of his wife and child to consider, but chose to do what would benefit himself/his family instead. Step by step he did things that were more obviously wrong, more obviously rebellion against the law and against God, until it was clear he was deliberately running from God. But then God . . .

I won't give the story away. It's a very good read, and one of the best instances I've seen of an author showing what spiritual warfare is really about from the perspective of a spiritual warrior and that of her target.