Book review: Revelation: The Way it Happened

Posted on Monday, May 30, 2011 in Book Reviews | 0 comments

by Lee Harmon

★★★★

I’m travelling today, on my way back from my son’s wedding in Texas! May life be good to you and your wonderful wife, Ken! Mary Catherine is a treasure.

Seems like a good time to take a break from writing, and reprint a review of my own book. This review was posted on Amazon by reviewer Lee Halstead, and I appreciated it because it appealed to me as an honest appraisal by the type of Christian I hoped to reach with my book. I’m gratified to be able to present a side of Revelation that many people may not have considered. Here is a link to Lee’s reviews.

Every Christian should read this book

As a new Christian 30 years ago, I was taught the evangelical Christian theological concept of “dispensationalism” and heard the usual interpretations of The Revelation and “end times” regarding the rapture, the tribulation and the second coming of Christ. I read Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and was satisfied with his explanation as it never occurred to me that his explanation (or any others) was merely his interpretation and that he could be wrong. As I grew in age and as a Christian, after reading The Revelation several times, many things began to bother me about what I had been taught and learned about it and I began to question popular “end time” teachings. I have hoped and prayed for an explanation that made sense and was excited to find this book. Author Lee Harmon has written it from the point of view of a Jewish Christian named Samuel and his teenage son Matthew, who live during the time of and have received a copy of The Revelation from John, its author. Samuel and Matthew discuss The Revelation verse by verse with much Jewish and Roman history, culture and events woven in. A fascinating and thoughtful read, it presents a possible and common sense explanation of The Revelation. I also have read Steve Wohlberg’s “End Time Delusions”, and highly recommend it, more for it’s history of dispensationalism than anything, as I do not agree with a lot of Wohlberg’s explanations for The Revelation. But his thorough and exacting history of dispensationalism and how it came to be incorporated into modern Christian beliefs should not be missed by any Christian. I am still digesting the content of these books and coupled with the knowledge we simply cannot know the future, I have just decided not to take a firm position as to being a “futurist, historicist or preterist.” Instead, I am choosing to focus instead on living as a disciple of Christ in the present, as Christ said to.

(reprinted with permission)

More about this book can be found at http://www.thewayithappened.com