Book review: Time’s up, America
Times up, America
Nothing in Christian teaching is more obscure, complicated, or confusing to me than end-times teaching. While I know about some of its significant elements, I’m not sure about what they mean or how prominent they are in biblical teaching. While I’ve heard of the Battle of Armageddon, the Tribulation, the Rapture, and the Anti-Christ, I’m still not sure exactly what the Bible teaches or means with these terms. Although I’ve read the Book of Revelation numerous times, I’m still not sure of the exact sequence of the various trumpets and seals, how the beast and the dragon relate, and the relationship of the seven bowls and seven plagues. When someone asks me, “Are you pre-millenial, post-millenial, or a-millenial?” I usually answer, “Neither! I’m pro-millenial.”
One of the problems in understanding end-times prophecies, of course, is that they seem to be scattered in various places around the Bible. There’s no end-times book in the Bible. Even Revelation starts out with messages to seven real, existing churches in the first century.
Steve Griffith’s book Time’s up America (Allard Press, 2024, 276 pages) is a carefully-researched survey of end-times, biblical prophecy that answers several of these concerns. Steve, a personal friend, was a banking and management executive and served in a senior management position with a major U.S. transportation company before retiring. He has read extensively in writings about the end times and has written a book (his fourth on the end-times) that puts in coherent order prophecies from Revelation, as well as the books of Matthew, Galatians, Daniel, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 and 2 Peter, Jeremiah, Joel, and many other books of the New Testament and Old Testament Bible.
His book includes in its first part an exposition of some basic Christian principles from the Bible as well as an indictment of America: “God’s Current Judgment of the United States.” For example, one of the chapters is entitled, “God-sent Delusions Now Present in America and the Western World.” Because of America’s slide into depravity, Griffith believes that the time indeed is up for the United States and that the end times are just around the corner.
However, the book is not only about the United States; rather, in the predictive part of the book he includes many of the countries of the world, especially Israel, Russia, and European countries.
Griffith includes maps of the world showing the growth of Anti-Christ’s kingdom at various points in the Tribulation. The book includes a careful, step-by-step exposé of events during the Tribulation. One of the great accomplishments of this book is that it places in a coherent order the many events described in the Bible pertinent to end times.
In more than one place Griffith appeals to the reader to submit to Christ, the eventual victor of the entire narrative. This is a message from which we can all benefit—regardless of our beliefs about the end times. The end is coming, both for our own lives and for the world. We, like the women in Jesus’s story (Matthew 25:1-13), can choose to be ready or face the consequences.
