Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong J Kim from Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. We have a very special guest, two authors for Battle for Heaven and Earth, and this is a very special program. Our guests are Mr. Jerry Jenkins and Mr. Mark Yarbrough.

Jerry Jenkins is the author of more than 200 books with 73 million copies sold. He is best known for the Left Behind series and novels based on The Chosen. He is a long-time leader in Christian publishing and education, and he teaches writing through the Jerry Jenkins Writers Guild.

Mr. Mark Yarbrough is the President of the Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas and a professor of Bible exposition. He is the author of several books, including How to Read the Bible Like a Seminary Professor, and speaks widely on the grand narrative of Scripture. Thank you so much for being with us.

Mark Yarbrough: Great to be with you.

Jerry Jenkins: What a privilege. Thank you.

Inseong J Kim: Share with us a little bit about each of you and then about this amazing book.

Jerry Jenkins: This book was Dr. Yarbrough's idea. He invited me to join him and help him with the fiction side of it because it's the story of Scripture in novel form, which might sound strange to people. We've actually invented some characters and some dialogue, but we're sticking close to the Scripture and the account of what happened even before creation. We are covering the fall of Satan in eternity past, the creation of the world, and the fall of man. That's basically the scope of this novel.

Mark Yarbrough: It really does start, like Jerry said, with taking what Scripture does reveal about the fall of Satan. We don't get all of the details of that, obviously, but there are some very important passages that give us a picture of what happened in the heavenly realms before creation.

That led to the fall of Satan, a rebellion that took place, and as he was cast out of heaven, the connection between that and his presence on earth. Obviously, by the time we get into Genesis chapter three, he is there. It opens up the door for a variety of discussions about the unseen realm. There's a lot of talk about that today, and so it covers the fall of Satan, Genesis chapters one and two, the beauty of creation, and then something that impacts every one of us, and that is the fall of the sin of humanity.

Inseong J Kim: This book is coming out with a publication date of November 3rd, 2026. Intense research with 368 pages. I remember the Left Behind series; what year was it, the 1990s, right?

Jerry Jenkins: The first one came out 31 years ago last month in 1995. It still astounds us that the series is still selling to this day, which is really unusual in the publishing world. I just feel blessed that the Lord has used it to change so many lives.

Inseong J Kim: It might sell more because it looks like whatever was in the movie might come true in the near future.

Jerry Jenkins: People are always asking when they think the rapture is going to occur, and of course, nobody knows. Scripture is clear that we're not supposed to be setting dates. Even Jesus said he didn't know, but only the Father knows when.

Yet we're supposed to watch and wait as if it could be today. We think that almost all the prophecies of Scripture prior to the rapture have been fulfilled, and so the next thing on the prophetic calendar would be the rapture. But God has a different economy of time. To him, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day. So, if he waits one more day, that could be a thousand of our years. While it could be today, it could also be hundreds of years from now.

Inseong J Kim: With the transhumanism, with the AI, and the genie being out of the box with gene editing and everything going on, we are living in a different time.

Jerry Jenkins: It feels like we're living in the last days, and it certainly seems like something's coming soon.

Inseong J Kim: Why does this question about where evil came from resonate today?

Mark Yarbrough: That's a question that every generation has asked. If God is good, why is there evil? That's a great question, and when I am privileged to talk with non-believers and non-Christians about that a lot, Scripture gives us insight into that.

The origin of evil is tied to the evil one, Satan himself. In the novel, we use the name Lucifer as the personal name for Satan. Scripture seems to indicate that he was a cherubim, an angelic being. We get a glimpse into this from Isaiah chapter 14, Ezekiel chapter 28, and other scriptures that reference this as well.

He made a choice. We don't know all of the details of things in the heavenlies, as Scripture chooses not to give us all of the details, but we can imagine what that was like. As an angelic being that was close to God, Scripture says that pride came upon him and he wanted that worship that was only designated to the Creator. He wanted that worship for himself, and that's what led to sin. That's what led to a rebellion, and that's why Scripture references him as the father of evil and the father of all lies from the beginning.

This novel really opens the door for the great theological questions that all people ask about why the world is the way that it is. Why does my family sometimes have the problems that we have? Why do we have problems in this world? Ultimately, it is at the feet of Lucifer who led us there.

Inseong J Kim: My program is Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow and we cover a lot of history, but this is real human history even before the creation of the world. Not many people talk about it or want to know the spiritual world. These days, we want to improve ourselves and hear stories about the spiritual world in self-meditation or self-improvement, but they don't talk about the spiritual part that this dark side exists.

Jerry Jenkins: That's true. I think one of the fascinating things for me to learn in this from Dr. Yarbrough was just the idea that we often think of angels as these heavenly beings and, hopefully, we have guardian angels that watch over us. But to realize that from eternity past, they had free will. They had the power to choose because a third of the millions of angels in heaven rebelled and followed Satan and were cast out.

That's something I think not enough people think about. As they read this, we want them to identify even with angels and say, "We have free will, too." We can choose to serve God or we can choose to go our own way and let pride take control, and that's the danger.

Inseong J Kim: Definitely because of the fallen and damned, they want to take as many as they can to take the human with them. That is the spiritual battle we are experiencing these days.

Mark Yarbrough: It opens up the door for them to step into the story. Our goal was never to change Scripture. When we write, the literature of the Bible is very true; it's historical and real. Jerry and I believe that the Bible is the Word of God. But the type of literature, when it tells much of the material in story form, is called narrative literature.

Narrative literature invites the reader into the story and to imagine what it must have been like. Some of the great preachers of the Christian tradition, when talking about the Gospels, would say things like, "Can you imagine what it was like to get into the boat with Jesus?" You're helping individuals understand what it would have been like because these were real moments.

What we really attempt to do is to just imagine what it could have been like. We frequently use the phrase, "is it plausible?" We never wanted to change the storyline of what is presented, but in that plausibility, as we describe it as something like this, I think a non-believer is really able to connect with that. Adam and Eve were real people. This creation really took place from the God of the universe as the thesis statement of the Bible says: in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. What would it have been like to be Michael and Gabriel to be there and watch that happen?

In this novel format, in biblical fiction, it is an invitation to the reader to even emotionally connect with this storyline and imagine what it could have been like. I think that's very motivating for people, especially for non-believers, to be able to connect with the biblical storyline.

Inseong J Kim: When we talk about the spiritual realm, we often talk about it hypothetically, but we have observed historically the evil manifesting in human beings. That's what we are encountering in our time, too; it's worse than what an animal would do. I think because of the many Christians in America, we don't deeply experience the spiritual battle here like in Asia. Sometimes Americans are naive about how we encounter the spiritual part of Eastern religions that can come with a darkness.

Jerry Jenkins: I think you're right that this may really appeal to the non-believing world for that very reason. There seems to be a fascination with supernatural fantasy. We believe this is supernatural, but we're seeing an unseen world that was introduced to us years ago by Frank Peretti with books like This Present Darkness. We say this is not fantasy; this is real. This is what the Bible talks about. Hopefully, people who are interested in what they think is supernatural fantasy will check this out, just the same way they did Left Behind when we were at the end of a millennium and people started thinking about the end of the world. If we can exploit that same interest in what they think is fantasy and find out that it's based on actual Scripture, I think it could have a really broad impact on non-believers.

Inseong J Kim: What drew you to tell the story of this war in heaven, something Scripture only briefly touches on? I went through the Bible briefly; there are more names of God written in the Bible than this darkness of spiritual war that we don't know about.

Mark Yarbrough: We stepped into that with reverence and awe, wanting to portray what Scripture does say and to stay within the boundaries of what it doesn't say but gives us some insight into. We really went after describing the deception that the evil one did. We certainly see that in Scripture, where he led a group astray and as they rebelled against God, it really was a war. Scripture talks about it that way.

Even at the end of Genesis chapter three, as Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden because of sin, there's a cherubim that is there with a flaming sword. In the book of Daniel, we see that angels could be detained. That's a mysterious thing. Paul says in the New Testament that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but there's this unseen realm where there is a war taking place. We wanted to describe that as a very real battle in the unseen realm.

The thing that we didn't ever want to lose along the way is that the hero of the Bible isn't an angel, it isn't Adam, and it isn't humanity. The hero is God. God was already at work in his sovereignty as Scripture itself reveals. When we wrote this in an imaginative way, we wanted to ensure that the reader understands that even though there is a battle that is raging, God's still in control. We're trusting his sovereignty even in the midst of circumstances that we're not fully able to explain. That's one of the great comforting things that the Bible teaches: that God is in control and that his promises will one day come to pass. He's good at his word and he's going to keep it. There's even hope in the midst of Genesis chapter three, which really is a very dark chapter because it deals with the arrival of sin. There are a lot of theological themes that we wanted to cover, and we did so in this novel. We hope and pray that those who read it will certainly see that and it will get them to ponder what the Bible has actually said.

Inseong J Kim: This generation is really curious about how this whole universe existed and whether there really were beings existing before the creation. We are all fascinated by these stories, so I think this book will help many in the young generation as well.

Jerry Jenkins: That's our hope and that's what really appealed to me about this project. I've written about eternity future because the Left Behind series is all about the prophecy of the end times, and I've written about the first-century Holy Land by novelizing The Chosen TV series. But this goes way back thousands of years before to eternity past. I think you're right that that will intrigue people, and that's our hope.

Inseong J Kim: Are we thinking about movies coming out of this book too, sometime?

Mark Yarbrough: We sure hope so. I think there are some really interesting things about this one. It's more than just a novel. Because it deals with the heavenlies as we wrote it, there are actually moments where the angels sing and there are full complete songs in the novel itself. Those have been produced; some of our artist friends we brought in for that, so there's going to be a full soundtrack that is released with this novel.

In many ways, it is very visual. It paints a lot of pictures. It gives you thoughts of what Scripture says about heaven and what it might look like and how the angels actually existed. It was a fun study to say, "What does Scripture say about angels and how would they be described?" I think there's an incredible opportunity for a lot of wonderful things that are happening right now, giving individuals an opportunity to engage with the Word in a different way. We'd be tickled if we would have the opportunity to have this on the screen or on Broadway to be able to use this music to teach people.

Inseong J Kim: That would be incredible because in Genesis chapter three, suddenly Satan shows up, so we don't know where he was before. That's a question a lot of people ask because the Bible does not really clearly describe it, but I think this book gives us a little bit of the revelation of how we can imagine.

Jerry Jenkins: It does say that he was a cherubim and that he was a worshiper. He really was one of the stars of heaven; he was the most attractive and dynamic. So, what happens to a character like that who's given free will? Pride begins to take over and that's what we speculate on is what that would have looked like and how that would have taken place.

Inseong J Kim: The end time will be the full manifestation of this darkness on earth that I think is preparing today.

Jerry Jenkins: There's a lot of added value to this novel. We have QR codes in the back that link to Mark's teaching on these passages so readers know where he got the idea for a lot of this. Also, as he mentioned, the music; he's written 10 original songs that are in the novel itself and then will be released on their own. That's something really unique for fiction, and especially for Christian fiction, so this should be really added value.

Inseong J Kim: Very exciting. I think God is revealing what is coming and preparing us through this book.