Former Navy Corpsman and end-times novelist J.L. Robb got hooked on the first book he ever read as a kid—the New Testament book of Revelation.
“After I got out of college, I drifted away from God for about 10 years, but I just never forgot that story,” Robb says. “It’s a phenomenal story, and most of the churches don’t teach it for various and sundry reasons. I’m not exactly sure why. I’ve heard, ‘too much symbolism, too much fear-mongering.’ But the very first paragraph in the book of Revelation says, ‘Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy. And blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it because the time is near.’ To me, that pretty much says that this could be the most important book in the Bible because it is the final act in God’s great play, which is an amazing event.”
Robb also views Revelation as a love story.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, it’s not a love story,'” he says. “You haven’t read the last two chapters. It is a love story.”
It was actually a pandemic that led Robb to read Revelation as a 10-year-old child. Sent to live with relatives when the world was dealing with polio and the Cold War, he and his cousin became enthralled with the happenings of Revelation.
“In 1952, I was 5 years old, and there was a polio epidemic that was worldwide, and it was real bad in North Carolina,” he says. “So my parents packed me up and sent me down to South Georgia to live with my aunt and uncle and cousins, and I lived there for a year. They had few books, but the Bible was one of them. My cousin and I would listen to Bible stories from my aunt, and she read a lot about prophecy and things like that. She believed in that. And then when I got [to age] 10, my cousin and I read the book of Revelation, and it used to just scare us to death. We loved it! We thought it was talking about atomic bombs.”
Today, Robb writes about the end times because he wants to reach people who do not believe the world will end in God’s timing and plan. He describes his seven-book series, The End, The Book, as “Jihad terrorism meets the Bible Belt.”
“This is not a Bible-thumping series,” he says. “I don’t have a whole lot of Scripture, but I do have one at the beginning of every chapter because I’m going for people who do not believe this story.”
His series is all about “the possibilities of Revelation,” he says, not its certainties. “This is what could happen; not what’s going to happen, just what could happen. But in books five and six, I have a coronavirus called the Las Vegas virus, and it’s doing to the world exactly what is going on with the COVID virus.”
Click here to listen to Charisma Connection with J.L. Robb.
