August 2026

It’ll Be More Blessed to Be “Left Behind”! A Review of a Paper by Clifton Emahiser

The past few weeks have been difficult, and I had been compelled to miss a few podcasts, which I really hate having to do. Aside from some health issues I have had to address, for which I should be limiting the time I spend sitting at my desk, on the afternoon of Wednesday July 29th the computer I had used every day for the last eight and a half years needed to be rebooted, and it never came back on. Once I get the time, I am sure I can fix it, but in the meantime it was a lot quicker to replace.

Then on Wednesday August 7th, not long after 5:00 PM, the main Christogenea website suddenly went offline. The server was the victim of a purposeful hacking, and while a couple of things are going to remain unexplained, an exploit had been published for some of the software used by the server, and that exploit allowed a hacker a way into the system. The hacking was perpetrated through a sophisticated set of scripts, and while the target might have been random, which is less likely, to get past the firewall the hackers must have significant internet resources. But it is easier to move on and rebuild than to sit around and cry about what had been done, so by Friday afternoon Christogenea was back up and running on a new and better server. Doing that, I also took many additional precautions with the hope of making another hacking attempt even far less likely.

So this week I have decided to offer some lighter fare, and present and critique a paper by Clifton Emahiser, the title of which is a stab at a popular book series which had been published for a decade beginning in the late 1990’s, and generally titled Left Behind. The book series capitalized on the evangelical belief in a so-called rapture, a heresy which was evidently developed by John Darby, and later popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, as well as books such as the Left Behind series. So here in the American South we often see these corny rapture bumper stickers, stating things such as “Warning in Case of Rapture This Car Will Be Unmanned” or “Your Choice: Rapture Ready or Left Behind”, among a hundred other childish and pretentious sentences.