THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS CHRIST

An exhaustive analysis of biblical underpinnings in end-times prophecies.

Toney’s brisk, authoritative debut searches the Old Testament and New Testament for the scriptural bases of prophecy, parsing various predictions from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, the apocryphal book of Esdras, and the like not only for their bearing on Christian eschatology, but also for their more immediate application to the present day. Toney’s underwriting contention is that “This is the strongest indication that we are living in the latter years.” This lends pointed intensity to his attempts to sort out the various textual clues as to the exact timing of Revelation events, namely the prophesied rise of the Antichrist as a secular world leader, the rebuilding of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the war in which the Antichrist seizes control of the world, the second coming of Jesus, and the population-decimating battle of Armageddon. Those events are followed by Christ’s thousand-year rule, then the final defeat of the forces of evil and the Day of Judgment. Toney uses his formidable textual knowledge as a guide to which key signs and events should stand out in the news of the day (the precise geopolitical maneuverings necessary to bring about World War III, for instance). But his most interesting work in these pages is deductive rather than inductive: he does some intriguing reading between the lines, as in the case, for instance, of Revelation, which stipulates that two “witnesses” shall lie dead for three days—to the great rejoicing of the entire world. How could the entire world learn of the event in so short a time, Toney wonders, if not through 21st-century communications technology? Elsewhere in Revelation, one-third of all the world’s sea creatures will supposedly die—attributable, Toney maintains, to the rain of rocks (a battery of meteorites striking the Earth) also mentioned in Scripture. These and other insights, however debatable, will fascinate Toney’s fellow end-times enthusiasts and spark many a verse-quoting debate.

A meticulous reading of Scripture that maps out the world’s future.