Book Review: Countdown to the end

By Banji Ojewale

The book, Countdown to the End: Revelation of the Great Tribulation and the Antichrist (Part One) by W.F Kumuyi, published by Life Press Limited is about the end time of which critics have had more than a few plausible reasons to defy the erroneous claims, predictions and so-termed prophetic declarations made by their prophets. Such efforts on eschatology, condemned as mercantilist, also do little to prepare the reader for this impending event of all human events since creation. Yet these affirmations of the truth of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and warning of the calamity awaiting the unrepentant at the return of the Son of God ought to form the goal of all literature on the looming gloom.

Now these writers on the last days ignore the core message; they opt for pseudo erudition by appending specific dates to the occurrences predicted in the Holy Bible. Thus, thrust deep in a fruitless dates and number game, they fail the key duty of employing Jesus’ teaching about the future to evangelize. It is a tragic waste of given opportunity! I’m glad to report that after carefully reading Pastor William Folorunsho Kumuyi’s end time book, Countdown to the End-Revelation of the Great Tribulation and the Antichrist (Part One), I can vouch for the cleric’s fidelity to biblical facts. He perfectly understands that “no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation.”

Those who came before Kumuyi, including vocal members of a US-headquartered sect with a foothold in Nigeria, have ignored this warning and littered their doctrine with presumptuous time-lines detailing how and when the world would drop on us. First it was 1878. Later they gave us 1881. Then the group’s caucus said 1914 would witness the end of the world. When that failed, they proposed 1918. 1925 followed with the world still standing. More projections for the landing of Armageddon were slated for 1975. Repeatedly, they brought upon themselves avoidable ridicule.

Kumuyi’s book has escaped these flaws and pitfalls of a date-centered enterprise because he is conscious of the Lord’s wise counsel: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” The result is a clean unadulterated book deriving its assertions exclusively from the Holy Bible. So in the entire 240-page presentation, you have only one identified secular reference (the ancient Greek historian Herodotus). All others are biblical allusions. There is little room for fictional extrapolation, storytelling or support from ex-biblical sources.

But there is plenty of space for evangelism, profuse expository teaching and illumination on abstruse end time symbolism found notably in the books of Daniel and Revelation, which is why Kumuyi hardly leaves a chapter without an altar call, as it were.

From the first chapter, Pastor Kumuyi, the General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry popularly called Deeper Life Bible Church, makes it clear that the book isn’t addressing conditions in the world predating the Rapture. It is a post-catching-away-of-the-believers undertaking. The countdown he speaks of means the events that would lead to the Great Tribulation under the Antichrist culminating in the cataclysmic Armageddon and the great Age of the Ages when Jesus’ Glorious Kingdom will come into effect with the abolition of death and sin. This first part of the volumes ends with Satan’s Antichrist and false prophets performing misleading miracles.

The Church in its redeemed state under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, will not be in the world when this full array of the Antichrist power is at work because, Kumuyi declares solemnly: “There is no country that declares war against another without first withdrawing its Ambassadors. Similarly, before God declares war and pours out His wrath upon this world, He will take all His ambassadors out of it.”

 

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