Okay, I’ve finished it – though I skimmed quite a lot.
Honestly, I hate to be mean to the guy. He seems so sincere (except that the visions ring very, very false to me). Saying bad things about his book seems like kicking a puppy. The bits where he’s NOT having visions aren’t too bad as a whole imo, but there’s no way these visions are true. For one thing they’re so self-aggrandizing.
My husband would tell me I’m too gullible and trying to be too nice, and that this guy is a died-in-the-wool charlatan. And he might be right about that. Sometimes people do lie most audaciously. But I prefer on the whole to believe that the author believes what he says and that he’s just deceiving himself.
His visions of hell aren’t very graphic at all, and in the book, hell doesn’t seem all that bad to me. There’s no reason to suppose that it goes on forever, or that it involves torment worse that people often suffer here (which can certainly be bad enough). The thing is, neither his visions of heaven nor his visions of hell seem believable.
It’s the tradition of many people groups (and likely his) to exaggerate things for effect. Now that I think of it, it’s also my mother’s tradition. I’ve had what I suppose you’d call visions, but possibly as a reaction to my mom’s stories (which I just took at face value when I was a kid), my own tradition is NOT to exaggerate. I tend rather more toward understatement.
Still, I could see how you could take those, add a vivid imagination and a healthy dose of good intentions and come up with a much more impressive story than I would tell of my own experiences. And I know and realize that my own experiences may well be colored by my own “real life” experiences and I may be interpreting them (and embellishing them) wrongly. So I try to stick to the bare facts and then add my understanding of them as nothing but my understanding of them.
Bottom line – I think he’s exaggerating, fantasizing, and misinterpreting. He doesn’t seem to have a financial motive, or at least it doesn’t show in his book if he does. That’s a good thing, because if he did, I’m afraid he’d be disappointed in the revenue he’s likely to get from this writing.
I could go on to exegete how many of the things he “saw” are out of sequence for a dispensationalist such as himself. But that would be rather overplaying it. The book isn’t serious enough to merit that much effort.
His worry that heaven is empty but hell is full was one of the things that eventually led to my pondering to the point of realizing that something was very wrong with my soteriology. Yes, given ECT or Anni, and given the narrow gate and difficult way that lead to salvation, and given the general worldliness of most of the western church world, this brother is absolutely right about the fate of most “Christians.” BUT I knew there was something wrong, as Abraham was promised numberless children, and Jesus’ death had to be more successful than that.
Universalism is the only interpretation of scripture that draws everything together and makes sense of all the so-called tensions and contradictions in the Bible. When once one realizes that yes, Jesus did mean what He said: “If I be lifted up, I will draw ALL people to Me,” all the conundrums just evaporate. It is the missing piece that makes the entire machine functional. Without this, so many, many things simply don’t work.
But don’t worry, WT. Everything will all be all right. Heaven will (imo) be rather scarcely populated for a while. Those of us who (we pray) are given the honor of running our races well and being among the elect, will also turn and strengthen our brethren, as He has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. New little brothers and sisters will soon be arriving. Abba is perfect in love, and He will make it all good.
Love in Jesus, Cindy