Literature / Left Behind

"For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord."

— 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, The Bible (NKJV)

While not quite the first — Salem Kirban's more out-there 666 was published over 20 years earlier — Left Behind is one of the most famous Christian End Times series as far as public recognition goes, at least in America. Written over the course of a decade by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind and its sequels offer a fictionalized version of future history and the dramatic end of the world, as understood by the Premillennial Dispensationalist Christian tradition. 20 Minutes into the Future, millions of Christians suddenly disappear without a trace, as the ancient cosmic war between Good and Evil speeds toward its culmination, and a new regime unlike any other seizes power over the globe. Of those left behind in a world of descending darkness, who will succumb, and who will struggle for the light?

The good guys are a rotating group (due to the inherent high mortality rate associated with living in the End Times and fighting the Prince of Darkness) of 4-5 who call themselves the Tribulation Force. The bad guy is Nicolae Carpathia, The Antichrist, the most evil of all Evil Overlords.

At first, the Tribulation Force consists of: Rayford Steele, the unofficial leader and a pilot who planned on cheating on his wife (Irene) with a flight attendant (Hattie) because of how his wife's preaching annoyed him; Chloe, Ray's college-age daughter; Cameron "Buck" Williams, an adventurous, street savvy newspaper reporter who eventually marries Chloe; and Bruce, the pastor who brings them all together. Thus united, they launch a crusade to convert the world and protect the converts while waiting through seven years of judgments between the Rapture and the Glorious Appearing of Christ at the end of the world.

The completed story sequence includes sixteen novels in all, of which twelve are the main series, chronicling events from the Rapture to the Glorious Appearing. They are followed by a trilogy of prequels (dealing with the birth of the Antichrist and the various signs leading up to the Rapture), as well as the sequel Kingdom Come, which shows the millennial kingdom of Christ on earth and the final battle against Satan and his followers in the far future. (For the individual plot summaries of each of the novels, see the Recap page.) In publishing order, they are:

• Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days (1995)
• Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind (1996)
• Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist (1997)
• Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides (1999)
• Apollyon: The Destroyer is Unleashed (1999)
• Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist (1999)
• The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession (2000)
• The Mark: The Beast Rules the World (2000)
• Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne (2001)
• The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon (2002)
• Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages (2003)
• Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (2004)
• The Rising: Antichrist is Born (The first prequel novel; 2005)
• The Regime: Evil Advances (The second prequel novel; 2005)
• The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye (The third prequel novel; 2006)
• Kingdom Come: The Final Victory (The sequel; 2007)

Additionally, there is Left Behind: The Kids, a Young Adult series spanning forty volumes, which is set in the same continuity and follows a different group of younger protagonists on a quest related to but separate from that of the main Tribulation Force. For a list of the titles in this series, see again the recap page.

Left Behind has also been made into three direct-to-video films, the first of which saw a brief theatrical release the week after the video hit the stores. It's also spun off into graphic novels, a series of young adult novels (with teen protagonists experiencing these events in their own way), and even a PC game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Incidentally, the PC game gained criticism from Jack Thompson, who claimed it was incompatible with basic Christian doctrine (on account of all the killing) and that it encouraged religious bigotry. Others disagreed with this, even going so far as to call it malicious misrepresentation, though ultimately the game received mixed reviews.

A reboot film of the first book, Left Behind (2014) was released in theaters on October 3, 2014, directed by Vic Armstrong and starring Nicolas Cage, Cassi Thomson, and Chad Michael Murray. It covers only the first half of the first book, though it expands on that half by making the story an airline disaster film. Though the film didn't perform well, a sequel titled Left Behind: Rise Of The Antichrist has been filmed and released in 2023, with Rayford Steele recast as Kevin Sorbo.

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The series as a whole provides examples of:

In General

• After the End: ...well, after the first end. The second end is still a while away. And not really an ending.
• Anyone Can Die: Except for one person, Rayford Steele, all of the people we get to know end up dying in various painful and/or messy ways.
• Apocalypse How: a level 1 (global Depopulation Bomb) followed by a level X (the annihilation of the entire physical Earth and its firmament, and the creation of the new Heaven and new Earth.).
• Artistic License – Economics:
  • A near-miraculous (almost literally in this case) fertilizer is invented by an Israeli scientist, and the exact chemical formula is kept secret as a matter of national security by the Israeli government. It is put to work making vast tracts of Israel into super-productive mega-farms, turning it into a produce export powerhouse. This ignores the fact that a) Israel being able to produce as much food as the state of New Jersey is not going to cause as big a wave in the international market as the authors think, and b) even if it does, such a continuous bumper-crop on the market would likely depress food prices, quickly rendering the return on the investment in such a project minimal, and other nations would likely enact protectionist import policies on Israeli-grown foodstuffs to keep their own farming industries from collapsing and dragging those nations into economic ruin. It also never occurs to anyone to attempt to reverse-engineer the fertilizer. More profitable for the state of Israel would be to produce and export the fertilizer itself, or to allow others to produce it under paid license agreements. However, according to the authors the Book of Revelation says that the desert will bloom, and so go the books.
  • There is hardly any significant economic upheaval following the Rapture. With the massive gluts of Rapture-abandoned property flooding markets, disruption of supply chains due to mass bereavement, the utter destruction of some industries (anything child-related) combined with the explosive need for others (grief counseling and fertility services), combined with the political unrest as a huge chunk of the population disappeared with no explanation, countries should be on the verge of collapse, yet life goes on completely normally for Our Heroes.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • One book describes large ships sailing the Jordan River. In reality, the River Jordan has an average depth of 6 feet and only small pleasure crafts can sail on it. For most of the river's length it is more a small creek than a river.
  • Upon arriving in Penn Station in New York City, Buck walks for miles and miles and miles, until he's ready to drop from exhaustion, finds a bicycle, counts it as a miracle from God, and rides it for miles more before arriving in Midtown Manhattan. Problem One: Penn Station is in Midtown Manhattan. Problem Two: The island of Manhattan is only 13.4 miles long (Penn Station is about three miles from its southern tip) and 2.3 miles wide at its widest point. There aren't a lot of places in it that require traveling miles and miles and miles to reach.
  • New Babylon is built upon the ruins of the original Babylon... which is in the middle of a desert. In real life? Babylon is actually only a stone's throw away from Hillah - a city of almost 500k.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • When Russia and Ethiopia tag-team Israel (despite both being Christian nations who have no reason whatsoever to do so), they launch fighter jets and nukes. In tandem. The Enola Gay, when dropping the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima, flew at a height of approximately 32,333 feet, more than six miles above sea level, just to stay out of the blast zone, and even at a range of 18 miles from Ground Zero was still hit by the bomb's blast wave; fighter jets as described in the novel do not have that kind of range. Using nukes on the same area that you are also using your air force to bomb means that you would essentially be nuking your own planes. Not to mention that bombing a city at all after you nuke it would be a needlessly redundant waste of resources.
  • LaHaye and Jenkins tell us that Russia used "almost its entire nuclear arsenal" on Israel. Russia has over 4,000 nuclear devices, enough to destroy every country on the planet. Israel is the size of New Jersey. Granted, Israel explicitly needs a literal divine intervention to survive this (and fortunately for them, they also get one), but even so, it's a silly level of overkill as far as the Russian strategists are concerned.
  • Carpathia, upon his ascension to the UN, suggests that all countries on Earth give up all their military materiel and turn over 1/10th of what's left to the UN to serve as a global army. Everyone accepts this. Just ignore the fact that the UN has been pushing limited disarmament for decades with not much success. Also, ever since the UN was founded there has already existed a clause in the UN charter (chapter 7, art. 43) establishing a UN military force... and it's been ignored ever since the UN was founded.
  • At the end of Book 2 and the beginning of Book 3, Nicolae finally does something properly evil by launching World War III. This takes the form of WWII-style bombing raids dropping 100-megaton nuclear bombs on such targets as hospitals and airports, leaving the cities looking like London during The Blitz. The largest human-caused explosion ever was the Tsar Bomba atomic bomb test, which was a "mere" fifty megatons, but which still destroyed small buildings hundreds of kilometers away. Dropping a single 100-megaton nuke (never mind a bombing raid's worth) would reduce the cities to glass craters; targeting individual buildings would be pointless. Also, the bomber problem mentioned above would be orders of magnitude worse.
• Artistic License – Religion: You have to be in a very specific branch of Christianity to agree with the authors' interpretation of The Bible.
  • In-universe, the Christian denominations that don't hold to that particular teaching of the End Times get left behind. However, there are some surprising exceptions, like the Catholic congregation in South America whose priest believes in the Rapture.
  • Combined with Artistic License – Linguistics, in The Rising, the authors have a curious etymology for Lucifer's name, from Latin lux, or lucis (light) and ferrum (iron) — in other words, Iron (or Iron-hard) Light. They may have the language and "light" part right, but, in fact, most Christian scholars can tell you that Lucifer actually came from lucem ferre — Light-Bearer. See here.
  • The depiction of Judaism is just... bizarre. Characters explicitly identified as world-renowned religious scholars are blown away when they hear the bare tenets of Christianity, and none of them bring up any of the many real-world reasons that Jews don't believe Jesus was the (or a) messiah.
  • The 144,000 that emerge during the Tribulation include the likes of Tsion Ben-Judah, who was married up to that point. The Book of Revelation states that the 144,000 are all virgin males.
• Artistic License – Sports:
  • Rayford spent his childhood as a soccer player and was praised for being simultaneously the team's top scorer and best defender. Not impossible by any stretch, but given that by the time kids make it to their early teenage years, they have a preferred position and have developed in it, it is most likely that Rayford would play box-to-box midfielder rather than defender, which would be the position that best suited his purported defensive and offensive acumen.
  • Rayford quit playing soccer simply because he did not enjoy watching it, which would be fair enough if not for his criticisms of it. Namely that professional players all play for 0-0 draws, is an oft-repeated and so-far-off-base comment compared with reality (0-0 draws do happen, but they are rather rare, and are often hated by fans of the game even more than by detractors), and given this book was written and released the very year after Arsenal FC in England finished an entire season undefeated by playing a very offensive game (admittedly something not widely circulated in America at the time, as the game hadn't yet caught on), these are facts that were easily searchable during the time of writing.
  • Rayford was described as the best natural athlete his coach had ever seen, naturally gifted in ability and able to play football, basketball, and baseball as well as being a sprinter and distance runner without effort. Given his soccer background, it has some weight in reality, as players need to have endurance for 90+ minutes of running and be able to sprint when needed, but very few soccer players could ever hope to match actual sprinters in ability (there are mutterings here and there, such as in 2015 when there was talk that Arsenal defender Hector Bellerin could potentially beat world record holder Usain Bolt in a 100m race), and regardless, when it comes to track and field, by the time of high school, most runners have settled for either distance or sprinting, very rarely both, as being good at both means one isn't great at either. In addition, in most high school athletic schedules, baseball and track-and-field take place in the same period (spring), and while small enough schools allow students to play multiple sports in one period, most schools only allow a student-athlete to play one at any given time.
• As the Good Book Says...: Bible verses aplenty, enough so that the last book in the series had to be published with a special copyright notice.
• Audio Adaptation: Gap Digital produced Dramatic Audio presentations of the twelve main books in the series.
• Author Avatar: The authors combine very obvious author avatars in the heroes (Rayford Steele for Tim LaHaye and Buck Williams for Jerry Jenkins). This leads to the authors getting things very wrong due to a limited understanding of reality. For example, Williams, supposedly "really physically fit", is about ready to pass out after a two-mile walk through the streets of New York - something that the overweight Jenkins probably would find uncomfortable, but many would find a relatively average, if a big lengthy, walk.
  • Although it's worth mentioning that it's more severe with Buck, since Buck is Jenkins' avatar, and Jenkins is the one who does the actual writing.
• Author Filibuster: The authors are not afraid of parachuting a 30-page sermon into the plot.
• Author Tract: The books are a narrative way for the authors to communicate their end-times theology, wrapped up in an Airport Fantasy package.
  • Each book takes a moment and makes you read a section aimed at the people of the earth to encourage them to accept Christ, but this is a very thinly veiled tract aimed at any readers who aren't already Christians.
  • Also an author tract for their belief in Once Saved, Always Saved theology, as in the Tribulation period, it is said that Christians who have the Seal of God on their foreheads are incapable of losing their salvation and would never choose to take the Mark of the Beast.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In the case of Marilena Carpathia, it's the desire to have a son. Too bad she gives birth to the Antichrist.
  • In Assassins, when Leon Fortunato asks about whom David admires, he replies that he admires his Father. Leon expresses his desire to meet Him someday. Leon does met David's Father at the end of Glorious Appearing, just not the father he thought.
• Because Destiny Says So: Why did Russia (and Ethiopia) attack Israel? Because it was written that they would (well, that's how Tim LaHaye interpreted it, what was written was pretty vague on the details). Why would just about the entire world suddenly agree to follow one religion after so much bloody strife? It's written that they would. Not even a handwave that The Antichrist is using mind control powers (which it is established early on that he has) to make it happen. These people do these things solely because it's been foretold.
  • The Antichrist as well as The Other Light believe that they're fulfilling prophecy of Satan taking the place of God. Never mind that those same prophecies say that they're destined for failure. Also a bit of Screw Destiny because they sure don't want God, the Jews, or the Christians to win.
• Big Bad: Nicolae Carpathia, Antichrist, leader of the Global Community and the Other Light, throughout much of the book series.
• Bizarro Apocalypse: The series details the steady destruction of the Earth in the apocalypse foretold (kind of) in the biblical book of Revelation, but having the events written down doesn't make them any less bizarre. All Christians on the planet vanish, followed by various judgments including a plague of demonic stinging locusts (whose victims are incapable of dying to ease their pain), massive shifts in weather, a huge earthquake, invisible-to-nonbelievers demon horsemen who slay a tenth of the remaining population, solar flares... and that doesn't include the actual Antichrist who gets possessed by Satan himself halfway through the Tribulation (and celebrates by riding a giant pig), or the part where Jesus shows up and slaughters an entire army by speaking. After that, humans and animals live together tranquilly, rivers have turned to milk, the survivors can live to be hundreds of years old (but without their youth), and humanity has collectively abandoned relationships and sexuality to spend eternity worshipping Jehovah.
• Black-and-White Morality: On the macro scale, the Tribulation Force is capital-G Good, while the Global Community is Evil. However, there are increasing Shades of Conflict on the lower level: many if not most Global Community enforcers are little more than Unwitting Pawns who have no idea that their regime is literally Satanic, and some of them (such as Krystall) are actually good people who are trying their sincere best to do the right thing.
• But Not Too Evil: The original members of the Tribulation Force are all people who, prior to the Rapture, did not have the proper set of beliefs to be taken up by it, and hence they are left behind, only coming to believe after the event has happened. However, they are all only "sinful" in very minor ways which require little repentance. For example, Buck, despite being a highly successful, go-getting, globe-trotting Intrepid Reporter, remained a virgin until his marriage well into his thirties despite not having any particular reason to remain casually celibate beforehand. Rayford, on the other hand, was married and had a faithful wife but harbored a crush on a coworker, though the only time he tried to act on it was when the Rapture happened.
• Caught Up in the Rapture: Kicks off the plot, complete with Empty Piles of Clothing, and the story proper follows those who were - well, left behind.
• Character Shilling: Characters like Buck and Rayford are presented as being at the top of their game, career-wise, being a fabulously well-known globe trotting journalist and a respected Ace Pilot, respectively. However, we do not so much see them be good at their jobs as see other characters telling them that they are.
• Children Are Innocent: Young children get an automatic ticket to heaven in the Rapture, ignoring (or answering, in universe) the Real Life question of whether children are actually innocent or not.
• Closet Gay: Buck's new boss Verna has concealed her lesbianism, which he manages to guess (with some help from God ... maybe). What follows is a potentially uncomfortable scene where the protagonists implicitly threaten to out her if she tries interviewing Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah.
• Colon Cancer: A whopping three colons in Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: The books Left Behind and Tribulation Force each had a five-issue adaptation.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Buck Williams' informant Dirk Burton is played as one in both the novels and the movies. He surprisingly turns out to be right, as is competing investigative reporter Eric Miller when he is working on a piece about the coming one-world government that he and his wife get murdered for.
• Corrupt Church: Enigma Babylon One World Faith, which consists of the Roman Catholic Church combined with other sects of Christianity that would not hold to fundamentalist doctrine as well as other religions. It would be dissolved by the midpoint of the Tribulation with the deaths of Peter Mathews and Nicolae Carpathia, only to soon be replaced by Carpathianism after Nicolae's "resurrection".
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Joshua Todd-Cothran and Jonathan Stonagal...until Nicolae executes both of them. Prior to becoming the President of Romania, Carpathia himself personified this trope, as anyone who stood in his way was killed or bribed into submission.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Due to Artistic License – Economics and the authors generally not thinking about it very hard, our heroes aren't bothered by the kind of economic upheaval you might expect when billions of people disappear, nor the anguish when every child on Earth vanishes.
• Deus ex Machina: Justified — after all, the whole series is basically about God causing stuff to happen.
• Devil in Plain Sight: Carpathia is literally this.
• Divine Conflict: God vs. Satan, living out what was foretold in the Book of Revelation. Of course, Because Destiny Says So, God trumps Satan even at the Final Battle.
• Earth Is Young: The movie version of Left Behind uses plain simple Type A. The Bible is literal truth, nothing to argue about. Critical thinking doesn't exist in this setting, and it works both ways. Protagonists who spent their entire lives with a secular worldview don't seem to feel any need for an explanation of how young earth creationism can possibly be true. In return, the rapture actually happening doesn't seem to give anyone else the idea that evangelical Christianity might be true after all.
• Empty Piles of Clothing: What people in the book series and all adaptations find at the time the Rapture takes place.
• Famous-Named Foreigner: Nicolae Carpathia is named after the infamous Romanian Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the Carpathian Mountains.
• The Film of the Book: The 2000 film of the first book was a mixed bag. While not exactly great cinema — its reception was overwhelmingly negative, while the books were successful — it deals with some of the novel's plot inconsistencies and unrealistic character behavior. It also, out of the sheer fact of being a movie, avoids one of the pitfalls of the series' writing: the stupendous lack of descriptions anywhere.
  • This was followed by the Movie Multipack release of Left Behind II: Tribulation Force and Left Behind: World At War, both covering the second book.
  • The 2014 movie covers only the first half of the first book, with Left Behind: Rise Of The Antichrist covering the second half.
• Fox News Liberal: The many Jews who convert to Christianity serve this purpose. They prove the validity of the authors' beliefs by joining but do so without demanding answers to the longstanding issues that have prevented real-world Jews from accepting Jesus as the Messiah of the Hebrew Bible. Not that they had much time for such questions, though, when their lives were on the line on the day of the Lord's coming.
• The Fundamentalist: As the premise of the books is that "The Bible is literal truth, the end", every Saved character becomes one of these.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns: The game Eternal Forces depict the Tribulation Force being armed with M16/M4s, while the GC peacekeepers are armed with AKs.
• Happily Ever After: The Saved populace, naturally including our protagonists, all get to take part in the Millennial Kingdom and go to Heaven forever. Everyone else... not so much.
• Hide Your Children: Every child under age 12 or so vanishes in The Rapture. This also extends to children in the womb.
• Instant Expert: All of the protagonists somehow start acting like people who've lived in the evangelical bubble all of their life immediately on conversion. Rayford and Chloe, whose wife and mother, respectively, had been an evangelical, and Bruce, who was an assistant pastor, would likely have some baseline knowledge of Christian culture. Buck, not so much.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: Rather literally embodied by Irene, Rayford's wife, whom Rayford is considering leaving because of her holier-than-thou personality, and Hattie, his attractive flight attendant, with whom he is considering starting an affair. Later on, it's just a general "If you want to follow God, don't be sexual" implicit message.
• The Moral Substitute: To other Airport Fantasy books.
  • It has its own moral substitute in the form of Christian Nation, told from a secularist POV and with the roles reversed.
  • The Last Days Trilogy tells the same story as Left Behind but preaches a pre-wrath Rapture instead of a pre-Tribulation Rapture.
  • For those who prefer the preterist interpretation of the Book of Revelation, The Last Disciple series by Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer has you covered, with its story sticking closer to the latter end of the 1st Century AD.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: In the Left Behind universe, "good" is defined as "consistent with God's will" (or, to put the same thing another way, God's will is by definition always good). This blog post gives us an idea of how incidental characters might view the main characters.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: Interesting variant: The authors believe the prophecy used in these books is also completely true in the real world, which makes the characters' praises of how everything in this story is happening exactly as predicted by the prophecy.
• Religion Is Right:
  • The Aesop of the series is that if you do not accept Christ as your Lord and Savior, you will be left behind to suffer the Tribulation on Earth, followed by an eternity of damnation if you die during the Tribulation without accepting Christ then.
  • In Kingdom Come, it's accept Jesus Christ and you'll get to live past 100 years of age and straight to the end of the Millennium; deny Him when you reach 100, and you'll die and go to Hell.
• Satan: In this series, the devil is a bad guy. No doubt about that.
• Second Coming: It's all about Jesus' return.
• Take Over the World: Nicolae Carpathia's plan, via the One World Order means.
• Title Drop: It's not an uncommon phrase, so the idea of characters being "left behind" verbatim is used pretty liberally throughout all of the books.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: No specific year is given, emphasizing the "It could happen any minute" message. The first few books are still dated by the lack of cell phones and widespread internet access, though, and the last book doesn't fare much better, featuring cell-phone implants and portable fax machines.
• Unreliable Narrator: An unintentional example. Buck and Rayford both boast at great length about how great and beloved they are in their narration, and then act like complete tools to everyone around them. This gets worse after their conversions.
• The Unseen: Post-Rapture, no one who got into Heaven, or even Heaven itself, are ever seen or even heard from again. With the story focusing solely on what happens on Earth.
• World War III: Plays a major part in the series, as it is part of prophecy. New York, Washington, D.C., London and parts of Egypt are destroyed in the process.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Inverted in that the bad guys are prophesied in the Bible to lose, and that every knee must bow before Jesus and every tongue must declare Him as Lord.
  • The Dramatic Audio presentation of Glorious Appearing turns the humiliation of the Antichrist, the False Prophet, and their demonic cohorts into a Kneel Before Zod moment.
  • One of the most jarring, unrealistic aspects of the series is how not one person in the world even tries to fight fate. In fact, just the opposite: the protagonists voluntarily go to work for the Antichrist and help bring about his goals because they believe the Antichrist has to win (in the short term) for his prophesied end to occur.

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The book series and related Dramatic Audio presentation provides examples of:

A-C

• Absurdly Bright Light: Jesus emits a very bright shadowless light upon His arrival from heaven in the book Glorious Appearing.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Potentate Carpathia, meet Chaim Rosenzweig's uber-sharp blade. Unfortunately, Carpathia gets better... and things get a hell of a lot worse from there.
• Accomplice by Inaction: In Jesus' judgment of the "sheep and goats" near the end of Glorious Appearing, Jesus judges the "goats" (most likely GC and Carpathia loyalists) for doing nothing good for "the least of My brethren" (contextually talking about the people of Israel), saying that what they didn't do for them, they also didn't do for Him. In other words, they're just as guilty as if they were actively coming against the Jews and Christians themselves, and doing that to the Jews means you're also doing that to Christ.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Nicolae Carpathia, of all people. While his characterization throughout most of the series rarely gets any more sympathetic than Smug Snake at best, and approaches Complete Monster territory at worst, he honestly realizes that he was wrong at the very end when put on trial before Jesus and regrets his sins. But at the same time, by then it's far too late for him to be forgiven... and he accepts this gracefully and enters Hell without either begging or kicking and screaming like the other villains, in the knowledge that he deserves it. He's a tyrant who has caused the deaths of millions of people, but the way he chooses to die (after also seeing everything he ever worked for and believed in not only destroyed but proved misguided and evil in the first place) can make him come across as at least somewhat of a Tragic Villain.
  Nicolae did not protest, did not beg. He merely lowered his head even more and nodded. (...) "I confess that my life was a waste. Worthless. A mistake. I rebelled against the God of the universe, whom I now know loved me."
• Alien Invasion: One of the theories mentioned by one of the characters about the disappearances that took place in the Rapture. It's treated as being just as bonkers (in the eyes of the unsaved) as the Rapture being the cause for the disappearances.
• Alliterative Name: Mainyu Mazda.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Floyd Charles desires Hattie Durham, who instead wants Rayford, who initially considers beginning an affair with her until the Rapture happens and he loses all desire for Hattie. Also, Hannah Palemoon pines for David Hassid, who already has a girlfriend.
• Alphabetical Theme Naming: The three fallen angels are named in alphabetical order: Ashtaroth, Baal, and Cankerworm.
• Alphabet News Network: Global Community Cable News Network.
• Ambiguously Gay: Guy Blod's voice sounds stereotypically gay in the Dramatic Audio of The Indwelling.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: What Tsion Ben-Judah believes is going to happen around the time of the Bowl Judgments in The Remnant when poverty is rampant and law and order have become relics, with common citizens arming themselves for fear of thieves, rapists, and terrorists and no longer having any trust in the Global Community protecting them (even the Peacekeepers have resorted to extortion). The authors also try to portray the world as being chaotic and dangerous in the immediate aftermath of the Rapture, but they don't really succeed.
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: Tsion Ben-Judah gets to witness Revelation chapter 12 being played out in full detail in the heavens in The Indwelling.
• And Knowing Is Half the Battle: At the end of the first novel, Buck confirms to Bruce, Rayford and Chloe that Nicolae Carpathia is in fact the Antichrist foretold.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: The Dramatic Audio presentation of Glorious Appearing has the sound of a crowd cheering wildly as Michael locks Satan away in the bottomless pit for a thousand years. However, Satan does get out in time for the Final Battle.
  • Prior to that, in the middle of the Tribulation, there were 3 1/2 days of rejoicing when the two witnesses were killed by Nicolae at the start of the Global Gala, which abruptly ended when they were resurrected and taken to heaven in a cloud, according to The Word of God.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: In the prequel novel The Rising, Marilena Carpathia wishes to become a mother. Enter Viviana Ivansova (Viv Ivins), who makes the following proposal to her: join our group and swear loyalty to her lord, and she will have the baby she so desperately desire. Marilena should have read the fine print about what her son would become in the future.
• Anti-Climax: The Other Light battle versus Jesus Christ in Kingdom Come. It took less time in that book to be over than the Battle of Armageddon in Glorious Appearing. Chaim Rosenzweig even Lampshades this fact.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Surprisingly, many characters readily agree that the mass disappearances weren't caused by space aliens, and that the mere idea is just absurd.
• Archangel Gabriel: Shows up to give Tsion Ben-Judah a few visions, most notably in the seventh book.
• Arc Number: Carpathia sure has a thing for 216.
• An Arm and a Leg: In The Kids series, Lionel Washington's arm is trapped behind a boulder, forcing him to amputate it.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • After Chloe is captured by the GC, among the things the GCNN report is that she was expelled from her university for making threats against the faculty, aborting two fetuses (with another daughter dying under unknown circumstances), and naming her son Jesus Savior Williams.
  • Tsion Ben-Judah. Earned the ire of his fellow Israelis by declaring that Jesus is the Messiah, wanted in the murders of his wife and stepchildren, and accused of "fleecing his flock" for millions of Nicks.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence Applies to anyone who was raptured or martyred, as you are given a glorified body. Of course, this means that in your glorified state, you cannot fall in love, neither sire or have children. But for those who have been raptured and been with the Lord during the Tribulation, nothing else quite compares to it.
  • By the end of the Millennium, all naturals who are believers are given glorified bodies.
• Astral Projection: In The Indwelling, Tsion Ben-Judah experiences something like this (twice) when he finds himself taken up to heaven to witness Revelation chapter 12 taking place — the woman clothed with the sun giving birth to the Child that would rule the earth from God's throne, and Satan and his angels being cast down from heaven.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The ideas for non-American names leave something to be desired. A Chinese woman named Ming Toy? An Amerindian woman named Hannah Palemoon? (Google "Princess Pale Moon" to see the problem...) A Jewish man named Tsion ben-Judah? And of course, "Nicolae Carpathia", which veers into self-parody.
• Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: The GC Unity Army has overrun Jerusalem, Buck Williams and Tsion Ben-Judah have been slain in battle, and the Unity Army is poised to overrun Petra in Armageddon. Then Jesus arrives. Curb-Stomp Battle ensues.
• Attempted Rape: In Kingdom Come with an unbelieving under-100 "natural" (who was part of The Other Light) and a female "glorified" in the hopes of siring a child that may be able to live past 100 years of age without becoming a believer. God foiled the attempt by having the would-be rapist die in her arms and then be incinerated. Given that "glorifieds" are not able to sire or have children, this would have proved to be pointless.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Jesus rewarding the Tribulation Martyrs with a martyr's crown.
• Babies Ever After: Kenny Williams and Ekaterina Risto become a baby-producing couple for the rest of the Millennium.
• Back from the Dead: The resurrection of the dead for the final judgment.
  • Carpathia resurrecting Fortunato (with a blasphemous biblical allusion to boot), Eli and Moishe being resurrected by God, and Carpathia resurrecting himself (actually being indwelt by Satan).
    Carpathia: FORTUNATO, COME FORTH!
• Badass Army: The 200 million horsemen sent to slay those that do not have the Seal of God on their foreheads. Not just badass, but also downright scary as far as their appearance, and invisible to everyone but believers in Christ.
• Badass Bookworm: By the end of the series, Abdullah Smith is quite the bookworm indeed. Ken Ritz is also one.
• Badass Family: The Steeles as the Tribulation goes on, and by extension, Cameron Williams.
• Badass Israeli:
  • Tsion Ben-Judah, an old religious scholar who might not be an action hero but is certainly brave nonetheless, even standing up to the Antichrist himself;
  • David Hassid, a hacker who becomes a key member of the Tribulation Force and saves the heroes several times through his cool thinking;
  • Chaim Rosenzweig, The Professor who makes the desert bloom and assassinates the Antichrist with a homemade sword.
• Badass Preacher: Tsion Ben-Judah in Armageddon when he decides to help defend Jerusalem and preach to the Jews about Jesus Christ during the Battle of Armageddon
  • Eli and Moishe also qualify.
• Bad Boss: The climax of the first book centers around Nicolae shooting two of his financiers for the sole purpose of demonstrating his "power." He then brainwashes everyone in the room into forgetting what they just saw. He has a legitimate motive (though it seems secondary at the time) in removing them from the picture, and as it is revealed in the next book, taking over their assets. However, the "power" display itself that he touts so much is still mystifying.
• Beat Still, My Heart: In the Dramatic Audio version of the book Armageddon, Nicolae Carpathia holds the still-beating heart of a Global Community loyalist that he personally murdered for calling him "impotent".
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Kenny Williams in Kingdom Come suggests this as a recruiting tactic for The Other Light that they should use against those who are evangelizing for the cause of Christ — that they should become upstanding citizens who simply don't agree with what the other side believes rather than try using drugs and wild parties. Of course, Kenny is also fully aware that The Other Light is destined to lose regardless of what they do.
• Beauty Is Bad: Although not invariably true (at least some of the lesser bad guys are more or less explicitly unattractive), this is played completely straight with the main villains.
  • Nicolae Carpathia is invariably seen as extremely attractive and handsome, whether by people who hate him or worship him. Which makes sense, given that he was genetically engineered by the Luciferian conspiracy to be a sort of minor superman.
  • In the case of Lucifer-Satan, rather than the Big Red Devil stereotype, Left Behind goes with what the Bible actually says and describes him as a wonderful angel of light. His appearance is so awe-inspiringly beautiful that even the devout old Bible scholar Tsion Ben-Judah immediately wants to worship him when he sees him in a vision and has to be brought back to his senses by a good angel.
• Being Evil Sucks: You're pretty much boned if you take the mark of loyalty and worship the image of the Antichrist. Not to mention that you will be subject to God's retribution in the form of his bowl judgments.
• Berserk Button: It runs in the family in regard to Marilena Carpathia and her son.
  • In The Rising, Marilena does not take it well that her son calls her a catea, which means "bitch" in Hungarian.
  • Call Nicolae "impotent" at your own risk. Depending on whether you're reading the books or listening to the Dramatic Audio, you may end up with a broken neck or your heart ripped out of your chest Mola Ram-style.
• Big Applesauce: Since the Antichrist's plan so heavily involves the UN, New York is a major setting, which is made all the more jarring given the glaring errors that crop up in the books regarding the city's physical layout. In the first book, Buck (who is described as being "in great shape"), has to walk a bit through Manhattan. The journey is described like the Bataan Death March, when in reality it's less than two miles.
  • He walks until he's ready to collapse from exhaustion and then he finds an abandoned bike and considers it a sign from God. In less than two miles.
• Big Blackout: A supernatural version, as one of God's Bowl Judgments causes New Babylon to be so dark that, even though they still have power, none of Nicolae Carpathia's loyalists can see any form of light save for Nicolae's faint aura. The believers in Christ, on the other hand, can still see with the illumination level of a low-powered chandelier. The blackout lasts for a whole year until an angel of the Lord illuminates the city long enough to warn God's people to get out of New Babylon before it is destroyed. Even worse for Carpathia's loyalists is that, during the blackout, they also suffer pains and sores for which there is no relief.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Attempted and failed with Nicolae Carpathia in the Dramatic Audio version of Glorious Appearing when Jesus just goes on and on speaking The Word Of God while the Unity Army troops die.
  Nicolae Carpathia: And someone SHUT HIM UP!!!
  • Gabriel, on the other hand, is more successful in his attempt, as he does this to Carpathia himself when he and Fortunato are brought before Jesus.
    Gabriel: My King, I accuse in your presence, those who have worked against your love and grace. Those who have established themselves from old as your enemies! Those who have sought to defile your created ones!
    Carpathia: They are my created ones!
    Gabriel: SILENCE! (Carpathia shuts up) Your time has not yet come!
• Bilingual Dialogue: While Buck is at the Wailing Wall for the first time with Tsion watching Eli and Moishe preach, Buck and Tsion hear them in their respective languages. Buck later confirms this with Tsion after asking around the crowd. One man says that they are speaking Spanish, while another says they are speaking German, and a third person hears them in Dutch.
  • Played straight with Jesus Himself, as the believers hear him speak to them in their own languages; Rayford in English, Chaim in Hebrew, Chang Wong in Mandarin Chinese, Abdullah in Arabic, with Mac jokingly saying that Jesus "worked a bit of West Texan...the language of Heaven."
• Blackface: In Glorious Appearing, Mac McCullum had his skin tinted dark to disguise himself as a Global Community officer of a different race so that he could go into Jerusalem to find Buck Williams. At that point, nobody on either side of the conflict either notices this or even cares to be offended by it.
• Black Market: Inverted with the International Commodity Co-Op, which caters to underground Christians, helping them survive the final years of the Tribulation.
• Blasphemous Boast: Nicolae Carpathia in the Dramatic Audio version of Armageddon, right after confessing that he is the Antichrist.
  "I will ascend into heaven! I will exalt my throne above the stars of God! I will ascend above the heights of the clouds! I will be like the Most High...for I AM THE MOST HIGH!"
• Blasphemous Praise: The worship Nicolae Carpathia demands and gets from the people during the latter half of the Tribulation, with Leon Fortunato as the High Reverend Father of Carpathianism proclaiming him as "our lord and risen king".
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: In the book series, the seas and springs of water turn to blood due to God's judgments. However, during the Bowl Judgments, believers in Christ are miraculously able to get fresh water from the bloody springs.
  • Earlier, the Two Witnesses are able to turn water to blood and vice versa, which squicks Carpathia out during his failed speech at Teddy Kollek Stadium when his mouth starts to run dry and he asks for water.
  • Chaim Rosenzweig as Micah the prophet is also given this ability.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: The lead characters of Left Behind: The Kids bond together when their parents were either raptured or killed, with Judd Thompson Jr. and Vicki Byrnes becoming a married couple before the Tribulation ends.
• Book Burning: Or rather, Bible burning, as the furnace inside the giant Carpathia statue constructed in New Babylon is fueled by onionskin paper found in Bibles. Otherwise, the Antichrist doesn't seem to be doing much to keep people from reading God's Word.
  • In Left Behind: World At War, Nicolae actually wants people to read the Word Of God...with shipments of Bibles tainted with anthrax!
• Brainwashed: Carpathia's preferred method of gaining allies and resources, via his Compelling Voice. Can make people think they saw something different than what actually happened, among other things.
• Briar Patching: Rayford pulls this off with the Potentate at the end of Nicolae. Carpathia knows that Rayford is a believer and wishes to be at the meeting of the 144,000 at Teddy Kollek Stadium. But Rayford convinces him that showing up would be to his advantage.
  Rayford: The enemy has been known to imitate miracles. Imagine the audience in Israel if you were to do something like that. Here are people of faith coming together for inspiration. If you are God, if you could be the Messiah, wouldn't they be thrilled to meet you?
  Carpathia: If you are suggesting that it only makes sense that the Global Community Potentate bestow upon those guests a regal welcome second to none, you may have a point... Captain Steele, schedule that flight.
• Broken Bird: Prior to becoming the head nurse at Brigham Young Hospital, Leah Rose had quite the checkered past. From a broken household to a teenage drug addict who slept around, aborted a pregnancy and nearly killed herself several times before she finally cleaned herself up, got her GED and after getting married, her husband put her through nursing school and the pair adopted two boys. After their children were taken in the Rapture, she and her husband tried to kill themselves. Her husband succeeded. She didn't. In the end, she became a believer.
  • Abdullah Ababaneh (Smith) gets the honorable mention. He starts off as a Muslim, but when his wife Yasmine and their two children Bahira and Zaki become Christians, they leave him following one argument too many. This drives Abdullah into a state of depression where he loses himself in booze and women, even though he wants his family back.
• Broken Pedestal: Nicolae Carpathia increasingly becomes this to those who once believed him to be a noble character, showing more and more what an evil sot he really is. Even Jesus calls him out on it, saying that all his God-given abilities could have been used for good, but he chose to use them all for serving Satan.
• Bros Before Hoes: Rayford invokes this against his own daughter, when he sides with her boyfriend Buck in an argument.
  • Even squickier when one realizes that this "argument" involved Rayford somehow presciently being aware that Buck is not, in fact, engaged.
• Bury Your Gays: Just after (accidentally) outing herself, closet lesbian and Straw Feminist Verna Zee gets killed by the Wrath Of The Lamb earthquake in the book Nicolae, though there were Christians that died in the earthquake as well, including the New Hope Village Church secretary Loretta and parishioners Donny and Sondra Moore, none of which were gay. In the prequel novels, the Antichrist villain Nicolae Carpathia has his two biological fathers, who were both gay, killed off.
  • Ultimately, those among the people who have not repented of their sins and received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior are sent to their judgment.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: From Desecration, the exchange with Carpathia and Fortunato.
  Fortunato: (re: Hattie's death) Holiness, I called down fire on your enemy just yesterday.
  Carpathia: You cooked a harmless woman with a big mouth.
  • The way Carpathia said it in the Dramatic Audio seemed to suggest that it was rather excessive for such a person.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: Buck's reaction upon finding out that Mother Doe is in fact Chloe...and that she is pregnant with their child.
• Butt-Monkey: The Antichrist's Dragon has at least one moment per book where he looks like a stupendous idiot.
  • Hattie Durham counts as well.
• Calling Your Attacks: In Desecration, Carpathia asks Morale Monitor head Loren Hut on how would he deal with dissidents. When Hut responds that he would shoot them in the head or chest, Carpathia insists that he empty his nine-round clip into the offender, starting with both hands, feet, knees, and shoulders. When they finally declare that Carpathia is indeed God, they should be executed with the final bullet to the head, followed by the immediate beheading of the head from the body.
  • Ironic Echo: Carpathia later executes Walter Moon this way when Moon fails to have Tsion Ben-Judah removed from the GC networks.
• The Cameo: In the end of Kingdom Come, we see The Beast (Nicolae Carpathia) and the False Prophet (Leon Fortunato) in the Lake of Fire screaming "JESUS IS LORD! JESUS IS LORD!"
• Cassandra Truth: The prophecies concerning the coming judgments in Revelation were treated as religious ramblings by the general public during the Tribulation until they actually happen, such as the Wrath of the Lamb earthquake. Even after they happen, though, there are some survivors who stubbornly insist that it isn't God behind it all and persist in continuing to live in their sins.
• The Cavalry: Or as one character puts it, the "Calvary cavalry", which is Jesus Christ leading His army of saints from heaven in Glorious Appearing. However, Jesus does all the fighting with only the Word Of God as His weapon while the army following Him does all the praising.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: A pretty effective one in Kingdom Come. Jesus is the proverbial head of state, the Levite priests oversee the rebuilt Temple, and the 11 apostles act as the civil governors with King David as their leader.
• Chaste Hero: Raymie Steele in Kingdom Come. His being a "glorified" renders him permanently unable to seek any sort of sexual relationship. In fact, any child that was Caught Up in the Rapture will end up coming back as a Chaste Hero.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Rapture tape Pastor Billings made three years before the Rapture. It would be instrumental in bringing about Rayford and Chloe's salvation.
  • In the prequel novel The Regime, it's Chaim Rosenzweig's synthetic fertilizer (The Eden Project). Later, in Tribulation Force, it is used to secure a seven-year peace treaty with Israel.
  • Chaim Rosenzweig is seen working on a pet project to make the world's sharpest handmade blade in Assassins. Turns out this is the murder weapon that does in Nicolae.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Ken Ritz. Most people don't know that he graduated Salutatorian in his high school class, or studied at the London School of Economics, or the ideas he had would eventually become the International Commodity Co-Op, or the fact that he stashed at least 80 percent of his earnings at Palwaukee Airport, thus making him a virtual millionaire. Rayford's reaction to this little revelation is priceless.
  Rayford: Did I mention the annual dues for being a member of the Tribulation Force?
  • Tsion Ben-Judah. No one would ever think that the former student of Chaim Rosenzweig would convert, or that his cyber-classes on the Messiah would lead thousands to Christ.
  • Cendrillon Jospin, as it is through her death that the believers discover her connections to The Other Light.
  • Irene Steele is a minor example. She DID warn Rayford about the Rapture.
  • Viv Ivins in the prequel novels. She did convince Marilena to become mother to the Antichrist.
• Claimed by the Supernatural: It's both the 144,000 of the twelve tribes of Israel and the Tribulation saints who have put their faith in Jesus Christ that are sealed with a cross on their foreheads that only other believers can see. This mark means that they forever belong to God and nothing and nobody can remove them from His protective hand. Chang Wong, who was already a believer when the Mark of the Beast was forced upon him, had both marks during the time he operated as a mole inside New Babylon. During the Millennial Kingdom, "naturals" who become believers before their 100th birthday belong to God forever and are supernaturally protected.
• Comm Links: In Kingdom Come, citizens of the Millennial Kingdom (mostly naturals) had cell phone implants that allowed them to communicate with each other over long distances
• Composite Character: In the Dramatic Audio version of Armageddon, GC officer Anita Sanchez is one for two female officers (a Hispanic and an African-American) working in the San Diego headquarters where Chloe Williams was incarcerated.
• Convenient Miscarriage: Hattie Durham is carrying Nicolae Carpathia's child in the early part of the series. However, she is also suffering from being poisoned and fears that the child will be killed. As it turns out, she ends up delivering an undeveloped stillborn child which was soon after disposed of to prevent further contamination, though the Tribulation Force doctor who does the delivery contracts the poison and ends up dying.
• Cool Plane: Carpathia's personal plane as world dictator, the specially designed Condor 216. The Condor is an immense supersonic airliner — something like the Concorde or its scrapped American successor, the Boeing Sonic Cruiser, but closer in size to an Airbus superjumbo.
• Cozy Catastrophe: Crashed airplanes, gridlocked highways, mass disappearances, and political upheaval everywhere, but the trash is still getting collected, airline flights are uninterrupted, and it's safe to walk the streets at night.
  • The aforementioned Slacktivist got a lot of comedy mileage out of the scene where Buck calmly buys a Land Rover (from an equally calm dealer) in the surburbs of Chicago—a few minutes after the atom bombing of downtown Chicago.
  • It seems to get more cozy right on the day of Jesus' second coming, at least for the believers. Conveniently, the world's economic system crashes with the destruction of New Babylon on the same day that Jesus comes. Everyone on Carpathia's side who isn't in Carpathia's Unity Army, and isn't so determined to go forward with destroying the Christians and Jews in Petra and Jerusalem, is in a world-wide panic, and those who have lost their fortunes are committing suicide by the droves.
    • This ultimately leads to Screw the War, We're Praising the Lord, when the people in Petra end up paying little attention to the Global Community Unity Army completely surrounding them and more to Jesus coming from the sky to slay all their enemies with The Word of God.
• Crapsaccharine World: The viewpoint of Christ's Millennial Reign within the Other Light faction, given the 100 years of age limit imposed on unbelieving "naturals".
• Crapsack World: Descends into this, but later gets turned around. It gets bad to the point where the population depletion is so severe that there are hardly any service workers around to deal with things that need repairs and service.
  • It degenerates back into this during the Millennial Kingdom with the rise of The Other Light, with order maintained by Jesus and the promise that the forces of evil will be dealt with once and for all...which Jesus delivers on spectacularly at the Anti-Climactic Final Battle.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: When Chang Wong meets an elder, he is reprimanded for wearing a hat in the elder's presence. He apologizes, saying that he is covering up a disgrace (the Mark of the Beast he was forced to take). However, in China, it is disrespectful not to be wearing a hat in the presence of an elder or at a formal occasion.
• Crisis of Faith: Irene Steele experiences this before switching to New Hope Baptist Church.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • When Jesus comes into the scene, he slaughters Global Community troops en masse just by speaking the Word of God. He's unstoppable, as evidenced in the Dramatic Audio presentation of Glorious Appearing where the Antichrist armies launch rockets at Him with no success.
  • The Satan's army vs. God battle in Kingdom Come was over in an instant. All that preparation and the Other Light gets smoked into ashes in seconds!

D-F

• Damsel in Distress: With as many times Hattie has been captured by the GC, she could give Princess Peach a run for her money.

• The Day of Reckoning: Final day of the Great Tribulation sees the destruction of the Unity Army, the deaths of Baal, Ashtaroth and Cankerworm, Carpathia and Fortunato's Angel-assisted swan dive into the Lake of Fire, and Satan chained up and tossed into the bottomless pit for 1,000 years.
  • The final day of the Millennial Kingdom has Satan released from his prison, where he joins up with The Other Light forces which had surrounded Jerusalem. Jesus emerges from the Temple and simply says "I AM WHO I AM" and instantly incinerates the invaders. With Satan effectively humbled for the final time, Jesus chastises Satan for his iniquities from time immemorial, and ultimately sends him to join The Beast and the False Prophet in Hell.
• Dead Guy Junior: Kenny Bruce Williams (Buck and Chloe's son) is named after their compatriots Ken Ritz and Bruce Barnes, both of whom died as martyrs during the Tribulation.
• Dead Guy on Display: Eli and Moishe, after Carpathia gun the both of them down during the Global Gala. Three and a half days later, both prophets are resurrected and taken to heaven.
  • Nicolae Carpathia himself had his body put on public display during his wake in New Babylon when on the same day it would be "resurrected" by Satan indwelling him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Plenty to go around, especially from the protagonists. Ken Ritz and Mac McCullum top the list. Nicolae Carpathia (post-indwelling) can snark with the best of them.
• Deal with the Devil: The signing of the treaty that allows the Global Community to have licensed use of Chaim Rosenzweig's synthetic fertilizer formula for seven years in exchange for peace among the nations for Israel in Tribulation Force is seen as the very thing that initiates the seven-year Tribulation period, which according to Eli and Moishe is the final "week" of Daniel's "70 weeks" prophecy.
  Eli and Moishe: Thus begins the last terrible week of the Lord!
  • Lampshaded in the text itself.
  A covenant had been struck. God’s chosen people, who planned to rebuild the temple and reinstitute the system of sacrifices until the coming of their Messiah, had signed a deal with the devil.
  • Marilena's offer made with Viv Ivins to become the mother of Nicolae Carpathia could also be seen as this.
• Death's Hourglass: While lacking the actual timepiece, citizens of the Millennial Kingdom know that "naturals" who stay unbelievers by the time they reach 100 will instantly die and go to Hell.^note This appears to be based on a literal reading of Isaiah 65:20, which states that living to 100 will be considered perfectly ordinary in God's kingdom. This fate can only be averted by accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. The Other Light faction sees God Is Evil because of this and has prepared for that contingency by having their teachings passed down to the next generation of its converts so that the generation that gets to confront God and Jesus by the end of the Millennium will be "assured victory" when Satan is released. Unfortunately for them, it didn't go as they hoped.
• Defiant to the End: Carpathia is this when he stands before Jesus...until Jesus casts Satan out of him.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The following line may not have seemed quite so redundant in 1996 when Tribulation Force was written, but certainly does today:
  "Buck...had secretly studied the feasibility of producing an anti-Global Community Web site on the Internet."
• Designer Babies: Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist of the series, was a designer baby of a project funded by Jonathan Stonagal, with his genetic makeup being the hybrid sperm of two intelligent men (both of whom were gay) impregnated into a willing host, Marilena Carpathia. Of course, Jesus in Glorious Appearing reveals that it is God who gave Nicolae the gifts of beauty, wisdom, intelligence, and personality, dismissing the idea that it all came from science.
• Despair Event Horizon: From the Rapture to the fall of New Babylon, those who lost the will to live usually end up committing suicide.
• The Devil Is a Loser: Carpathia pre-indwelling manages to be calm, collected, and careful in his quest to bring the world under Satan's palm. Post-indwelling, with Satan actually present, he rapidly spirals down into maniacal spite and general loopiness. Not to mention his overall strategy of using the Biblical prophecies to know where and when Jesus will appear for him to fight, then bringing the exact army to the table that those same prophecies claim Jesus will mop the floor with.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Happens in the sixth book when a believer tells the False Prophet off to his face, and he not long after lampshades this trope. It later turns in a delayed Do Not Taunt Cthulhu when the guy who did it and his wife are killed.
  • Since this means he gets to ride out the rest of the Tribulation in the comfort of heaven before coming back with Jesus anyway, this might qualify as a Thanatos Gambit.
  • In the fifth book, Chaim Rosenzweig does this to the aforementioned False Prophet during the meeting of the 144,000 Jews. When Fortunato demands to be addressed by his proper title, Chaim responds by calling the Supreme Commander 'Supreme Nincompoop,' and gets away with it.
  • In Armageddon, a Global Community loyalist calls Nicolae "impotent" for not having the stones to kill him himself for speaking his mind, and Nicolae responds by personally ripping out his heart.
    • Mac in Glorious Appearing would have loved the opportunity to call Nicolae the "Supreme Impotentate" if he were in Jesus' place and had the Antichrist at his mercy.
• Different World, Different Movies: The books apparently take place in a world where almost nobody has heard of the Rapture (since nobody outside the protagonists and a tiny handful of people like them even mention the resemblance), which means that they take place in a world where they were never written, or at least where they failed to attain the same success.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Chloe's comment to Buck trying to explain the reason for his calling a car by a girl's name in The Mark.
• Dirty Cop: Captain Sullivan of Scotland Yard, who was under the employ of Joshua Todd-Cothran.
• Dirty Coward: Despite all of his showboating, Leon Fortunato shows his true colors when Jesus arrives on the scene. He tries to plead his case to Jesus. It does not work.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Although more of a fake Dragon in Peter Mathews vs. Leon Fortunato.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Russia attacked Israel because it was hogging the new agricultural super growth formula they'd developed, and they try to get it by launching a massive nuclear strike at Israel.
• Distant Finale: The last chapter of Kingdom Come, with the final battle between God and Satan being a Curb-Stomp Battle that's over in a single page.
• Divine Ranks: Lucifer in the series claims that God is merely the oldest of the angels. Jesus makes it very clear that Lucifer is mistaken about this, and God is everything Christian theology has ever claimed he is.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: Chang Wong is able to have direct access to the Global Community television network feed so that he can interrupt its programming with messages from Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah (and later Chaim Rosenzweig) that are Biblical warnings and pleas for the undecided to come to Christ. This leads to a series of deaths among the Global Community's top brass when they fail utterly to get Tsion and Chaim off the air. Even almost the entire Global Community broadcast crew gets slaughtered in their failure, making Nicolae Carpathia muse that the only person left to run the network is a janitor when the jacked signal is finally cut off.
  • A supernatural version of this occurs in Desecration, when an angelic face appears onscreen to recite Revelation 14:9-13.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Or rather, Do Not Piss Carpathia Off.
  • Also, do not tempt God into destroying you during the Tribulation.
• Doomed City: So long, New Babylon.
  • Also Doomed Hometown, as members of The Place flee Chicago before it gets nuked.
• Doomed Moral Victor: Krystall, Nicolae's secretary. She used to be a true believer in the Global Community and Nicolae personally, but then loses faith in him when she sees firsthand how different Nicolae actually is from his saintly public image. However, because she has already taken the Mark of the Beast by then, Krystall herself is doomed to Hell no matter what she does. Many people would probably either despair or rage against God if put in this position, and perhaps stay with the bad guys just because they would seem to have no better option. Yet Krystall still chooses to help Rayford and the others in the Tribulation Force, so she can at least help save others who aren't damned like she is. And dies for it, when GC security finds out.
• Dragged Off to Hell: The fate of both Nicolae Carpathia and Leon Fortunato as they are pushed by Michael the archangel into the Lake Of Fire in the book Glorious Appearing.
• The Dragon: Leon Fortunato
  • Viv Ivins also has a minor role.
  • Jonathan Stonagal and Joshua Todd-Cothran start out as this at first, until Carpathia executes the both of them.
    • Jonathan Stonagal actually started off as The Chessmaster, financing the project that led to Carpathia's birth.
  • Ironically, this is one of Satan's many aliases.
• Driven to Suicide: From the Rapture to the end of the Tribulation... most of them were unbelievers or those who backed the Global Community, particularly more so when they've taken the Mark Of The Beast only to realize it's a point of no return.
  • Following the destruction of New Babylon, those who lost their fortunes commit suicide in droves.
  • Steve Plank's assistant Vasily Medvedev commits suicide when Plank decides to become a martyr.
  • Jim Hickman's likely fate when he accidentally caused his co-worker Ramon Santiago to be killed by Nicolae by spilling the beans about what was overheard from Carpathia's offices.
  • Chang Wong contemplates suicide when he sees that he has been forced to bear the Mark of the Beast despite being a believer, but David Hassid talks him out of it.
• Drugs Are Bad: Pretty much how it's depicted in the series, the few times it appears. The Middle Eastern former black marketeer Albie sees that his whole hometown of Al Basrah has been given over to drugs in the Tribulation period. During the Millennial Kingdom, The Other Light seduces young people who were below the age of 100 to wild parties where hashish is used to sway them to joining their side against God. In the latter instance, Kenny Bruce Williams comments that the Other Light would end up being too wasted to put up any sort of fight against God at the end of the Millennium.
• Drunk with Power: Post-indwelling, Carpathia is one step away from being Murdock-level insane...until Lucifer, of all people, calls him out on that during the battle of Armageddon.
• Dying Curse: According to T.M. Delanty, upon finding out that his brother Samuel was killed while escorting Hattie Durham, Bo Hansen got wasted in a bar, pulled out a gun, cursed Nicolae, God and the world, and killed himself.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Marilena Carpathia (yes, Nicolae's mother) has one in the prequel novel The Rising. Already weakened by the poison from earlier, she kills the fake doctor sent to kill her with his own revolver. However, he fell on top of her, jamming the poison-filled syringe into her chest, thus killing her..
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The Tribulation saints go through a lot of hardship in order to earn their happy ending with God.
• Earthquakes Cause Fissures: God and Jesus' natural disaster of choice. If you want to kill a ton of condemned and unbelievers en masse, or cause massive property damage, earthquakes are the way to go.
  • During the battle of Armageddon, one particular earthquake renders the entire Earth flat, while at the same time, causing the city of Jerusalem to rise 300 feet from the ground.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: What takes place at the end of Kingdom Come when the old earth passes away.
• Easily Forgiven: In Kingdom Come, Kenny's friends, family, and girlfriend, who know that he plans to secretly infiltrate The Other Light, believe, on specious evidence, including the word of a known traitor and liar, that he had really left the faith. They all turn against him. When the matter is resolved, everything immediately returns to status quo ante, complete with Kenny picking up where he left off with his girlfriend.
  • Carpathia (post-indwelling) publicly forgives his assassin. Since Chaim Rosenzweig has been officially declared dead (his body was not found when his staff was gunned down), that allows any GC to kill him without penalty from Carpathia.
• Easy Evangelism: Played straight with the Tribulation Force, but subverted with just about everyone else. Rayford's decidedly haughty attempt at evangelism to his copilot in book 2 is a prime example of the latter. One third of the population of the Earth disappears, specifically including all children without exception, and the possibility that divine intervention might have been involved is just completely out of the question.
  • Also played straight with the Enigma Babylon One World Faith, a global religion engineered by the Antichrist. Essentially, anyone who is does not hold to the "true" Christian faith gets rolled into one big spiritual group, and does so willingly. Never mind that there are a variety of traditional, theological, and dogmatic differences between these groups which would be irreconcilable with regard to joining together into one diverse-but-united faith under a central authority.
  • Also played straight with the believers in the Millennial Kingdom, to the point where one would have to be a complete idiot to not see that (1) God and Jesus Christ are pretty much real and (2) any "natural" who remains an unbeliever by the time they reach 100 years of age will instantly die and go to Hell. It's the Other Light faction that has to work hard to convince people of their beliefs.
• Easy Logistics: A literary example. The Antichrist's plan involves forming a One World Government, redistributing governing districts from nation-states to several arbitrary regional divisions, mashing all global religions into One True Faith, turning all public and private media worldwide into a single Propaganda Machine, disarming the nations of the world by retiring ninety percent of their armed forces and the destruction of ninety percent of their equipment, turning the remaining ten percent over to the command of the new Global Community, relocating the United Nations from New York to a newly established and rapidly developed city in the Iraqi desert, and rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. This plan is begun, implemented, and accomplished in only a few years, administrated by only a few people, despite the mind-boggling complexity that such global re-organizing would involve.
• Egopolis: United Carpathian States and a minor example, Carpathia Standard Time.
  • Not to say that God and Jesus are not entirely guilty of this trope. Valley of Jehoshaphat, Ozase.
• Elephant in the Living Room: The presence of God and Jesus Christ in the Millennial Kingdom for the Only Light believers, and pretty much for anyone born and/or raised in the Millennial Kingdom.
• Elite Mooks: The Morale Monitors for the Global Community, The Only Light for The Other Light.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: The Antichrist's full name is Nicolae Jetty Carpathia. Jetty. This might explain what drove him to evil. This was discussed in one of the prequels as referring to "jet black".
  • This is also an example of a Meaningful Name, as if you assign each letter a value according to the standard A=1, B=2 scale, they add up to 216, which is 6 cubed (6*6*6).
• Endless Daytime: In the Millennial Kingdom in the book Kingdom Come, there's still a morning and an evening, but the only difference is that the evening sun is less brighter than the morning sun.
  • Also in the "new heavens and new earth", there is no night.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The books deal with a rather literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, which is all about the apocalypse and the coming of the New Kingdom.
• Enemy Civil War: Even the Global Community is not immune to rebellion among its own ranks, as Enigma Babylon leader Peter Mathews plots against Nicolae Carpathia and the United African States ends up attempting to secede from the one-world government. It all gets straightened out by the battle of Armageddon, and Carpathia's Unity Army still gets seriously owned by Jesus.
• Escort Mission: In Desecration, George Sebastian is assigned to Greece to get Georgiana Stavros and Marcel Papadopoulos out of there. The mission goes FUBAR when Georgiana turns out to be a GC decoy, who kills Marcel, Lukas Miklos, and Kronos, while capturing Sebastian.
• Et Tu, Brute?: In the book Assassins, Enigma Babylon leader Peter Mathews was killed in this manner by the ten subpotentates when he was invited to attend a Nasty Party where he was killed with Feather Flechettes from an ice sculpture made in his image. As it turns out, Peter's death was foretold by Scripture in the Book of Revelation, speaking of the "ten horns of the beast" that would hate the whore, that would "eat her flesh and burn her with fire", as Peter's body was then cremated under the cover story that he contracted a contagious disease.
  • Jonathan Stonagal, The Chess Master behind the creation of Nicolae Carpathia, also gets this from his own creation when he and Joshua Todd-Cothran were simultaneously murdered by Carpathia during the appointment of the ten regional subpotentates.
• Euphemism Buster: In The Remnant, when Steve Plank as Pinkerton Stephens turns down taking the Mark of the Beast and accepts the alternative of death, the Global Community staff person working at the mark application site was just about to refer to the guillotine as the "loyalty enforcement facilitator" when Steve interrupts and refers to it as "the guillotine".
• "Eureka!" Moment: Played straight with both Rayford Steele and Buck Williams, who recognize the signs which leads to the Wrath of the Lamb Earthquake...which leads into an Oh, Crap! moment.
  • Rayford gets a second one when he notices what he originally thought was a smudge on Mac's forehead is in fact an image of a three-dimensional cross - the Seal of God, which identifies one believer from another, despite the fact that one cannot see it on their own forehead.
  • At the end of Assassins, David Hassid has one when upon watching a surveillance video that Rayford was not the one who murdered Carpathia.
  • After Chloe gets captured in Armageddon, she reminds her father about the trip to Red Rocks in Colorado. Rayford is stumped, but it's Mac who realizes the hidden meaning behind Chloe's words. She is telling them that the San Diego safehouse is compromised and that the believers there should relocate to Petra.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Nicolae turns this trope on its head when he and Viv orchestrate the murder of Nicolae's mother...before he was ten.
  • It could be argued that Nicolae wasn't involved in that, since Viv Ivins had to inform him of her death. However, his apathy toward the situation is astounding. "How does that make you feel?" "Hungry."
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Carpathia's relationship with Viv Ivins. She did basically raise him after he orchestrated his mother's death. But Viv did piss Carpathia off by sitting on his throne in ''Desecration''. Fortunately, Carpathia let her slide on that offense.
  • In the Dramatic Audio of Glorious Appearing, though, Viv Ivins gets killed by a hailstone, and Nicolae just casually shrugs off her death.
  Fortunato: (after Viv gets splattered by said hailstone) Excellency...I am so sorry.
  Carpathia: Yes. Terrible loss.
  • And he was on the verge of directing an intruder to take her instead of him in The Rising.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Nicoale Carpathia's But for Me, It Was Tuesday reaction to Leon Fortunato killing Hattie Durham in Desecration, described as "cooking a harmless woman with a big mouth", seems to suggest that for whatever standards Nicolae had for killing people, even that seemed to be rather pointless and unnecessary for Leon.
• Everything Is Online: The Tribulation Force always has at least one living Smart Guy who can erase any incriminating records, falsify any reports, and hack into anything digital, even security cameras in a condemned building halfway across the world.
• Evil All Along: In-universe, nobody but those in the Tribulation Force and those who once have been in Nicolae Carpathia's close circle of associates really know just how evil Nicolae really is, and that he is working for his "father" Satan. Of course, after Nicolae is indwelt by Satan, the facade slowly cracks and everyone gets to see the true Nicolae underneath his original public persona.
• Evil Empire: The Global Community. In the minds of the Other Light in Kingdom Come, Christ's Millennial Reign.
• Evil Mentor: Of the spiritual variety. Carpathia, Fortunato and Viv Ivins share the same spiritual guide - Satan himself.
• Evil Power Vacuum: With the fall of Nicolae Carpathia and the Global Community at the end of the Tribulation, mankind finally has peace with Jesus Christ at the helm of the Millennial Kingdom. 93 years from the start of the Kingdom, however, the Other Light rises as La Résistance to bring evil back into the world, waiting for their leader Satan to be released from his imprisonment so that they can finally defeat God at the end of Millennium. Of course the citizens of the Millennial Kingdom knew from Scripture that it was eventually going to happen...and in the end it was also going to fail.
• The Evils of Free Will: The assumption made of God by the Other Light faction in their If It's True manifesto by His not allowing "naturals" to live past 100 years of age as unbelievers.
• Exalted Torturer: God, given that he sets all events in motion, forges all destinies, and that even the things the ostensible villains do are ultimately his responsibility. After all is said and done, he tortures everyone who is not a specific denomination of Christian, regardless of those people's potential virtues, in a lake of fire for eternity. Not that God or Jesus Christ enjoy it, as Jesus sadly watches the Antichrist, the False Prophet, and all those who rejected Him throughout the ages go to their appointed doom.
  • Speaking of those "potential virtues", the Bible does say that there's a way that seems right to a man, but its end thereof is death.
  • To quote Jesus speaking to Astaroth, Baal, and Cankerworm from the Dramatic Audio:
  "Like My Father, with whom I am One, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but justice must be served, and death is your sentence."
• Expecting Someone Taller: King David in Kingdom Come gets this kind of reaction even from the likes of Tsion Ben-Judah.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: The aforementioned "Eureka!" Moment regarding Buck Williams in the Dramatic Audio of Nicolae.
  Buck: Can't uh...the wind...you think...(cue "Eureka!" Moment) Oh, no! (drives off)
• External Combustion: In the first book of the series (and its film adaptation), Alan Tompkins was killed by a bomb planted inside his car.
• Face Death with Dignity: Any believer who becomes a martyr in the Tribulation.
• Faith–Heel Turn: The mob of remnants who visited a GC-backed Miracle Worker outside the safety of Petra. Many end up taking the Mark of the Beast in order to save their own lives against an incoming swarm of poisonous vipers, but the false teacher kills them all anyway.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Attempts to assassinate the Antichrist in the book series result in this due to the Word of God stating that only Jesus Christ is able to defeat him.
• Faking the Dead: In The Mark, Mac McCullum, David Hassid, Hannah Palemoon and Abdullah Smith pull this off by crashing a plane via remote control overloaded with guillotines and biochip injectors in order to avoid taking the mark of loyalty.
  • In The Mark, Hattie comes close to killing herself, but is rescued by Rayford and Albie. She ends up ultimately faking her death to escape the Global Community.
• Fallen Angel: Ashtaroth, Baal, and Cankerworm are three spiritual beings that are named as such by Jesus.
• Family Business: Rayford's dad wants his son to follow in his footsteps. Rayford, however, has other plans.
• Famous-Named Foreigner: Jenkins has said in his book, "Writing for the Soul", that one of his tried-and-true ways to create a foreign character's name is to take the given name of some historically important native and append the name of a notable geographical area as a family name. One little problem: Romania doesn't use family names terribly much. Instead, you usually see patronymics. Guess what "Carpathia" isn't?
• Fantastic Racism: Mostly among the "naturals" against the "glorifieds" in the Millennial Kingdom, particularly among those who belong to the Other Light faction. Not that they can directly act upon those beliefs through violent means. However, one of them did foolishly try to rape a female "glorified" and got killed by God in the attempt.
• Fatal Family Photo: Subverted, as it is not a fatal photo. In Kingdom Come, Rayford requests a picture of the original Tribulation Force at an end-of-the-Millennium party. He is the only member out of the core group who is a natural, while Bruce, Cameron and Chloe are glorifieds. Even Rayford is as shocked as to how old he is.
• Faux Action Girl: Ming Toy. When she is introduced, a lot is made of her experience as a prison guard with combat skills — but from then on, she pretty much divides her time between office work and babysitting.
• Faux Affably Evil: Nicolae Carpathia initially seems to be the humblest, most empathetic Son of Satan you'd ever meet, and comes across as a Well-Intentioned Extremist at worst. However, this is all entirely an act; in truth he's a completely self-centered sociopath and a two-dimensional thug. The movie version of Nicolae actually appears to be more genuinely Affably Evil, although still a ruthless megalomaniac.
• Feather Flechettes: In the book Assassins, the razor-sharp feathers from the winged ice sculpture of Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews are used as murder weapons by the ten subpotentates at a Nasty Party that was held for the High Priest of Enigma Babylon.
• A Fête Worse than Death: The Global Gala in the book Assassins was purposely arranged to take place in Jerusalem around the same time that the Two Witnesses in the Book of Revelation were supposed to end their prophesying, with Nicolae Carpathia making a public spectacle of killing the Two Witnesses by his own hand to enforce the law of the Global Community. (It also served as an opportunity for Nicolae to quietly dispose of Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews through a private little Nasty Party held in his honor.) In fulfillment of what the Word of God says, the bodies of the Two Witnesses were left in the street unburied for 3 1/2 days while the people celebrated their demise, but then they were dramatically resurrected and brought up to heaven in a cloud. At the same time, an earthquake caused a tenth of Jerusalem to fall and seven thousand people have died.
• Fidelity Test: Inverted with Rayford, as Irene does not test his faithfulness. He was more than willing to cheat with Hattie while away in London. God, however, decided to wreck those plans.
• Final Battle: The anti-climactic Satan's Other Light army versus God battle near the end of Kingdom Come. It only takes a few pages as God just smokes Satan's entire army into ashes in seconds. At least during the Battle of Armageddon in Glorious Appearing Jesus allowed His enemies to fire their guns uselessly at Him before He just killed them by speaking the Word of God.
• Final Confession: After Jesus casts Satan out of Carpathia, the defeated Antichrist acknowledges that Jesus is indeed Lord.
  Carpathia: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who died for the sins of the world and rose again the third day as the Scriptures predicted...I confess that my life was a waste. Worthless. A mistake. I rebelled against the God of the universe, whom I now know loved me.
  • He still gets tossed into the Lake of Fire.
• Final Guy: Rayford Steele survives the Tribulation by the skin of his teeth.
• Final Solution: Nicolae Carpathia's reference to the battle of Armageddon in Armageddon being one for dealing with the Jews in Israel.
  • Fitting in with what The Bible teaches, this could also apply to God's judgments and the Final Battle.
  • Interestingly, in Armageddon, Nicolae Carpathia alludes to "the final solution" that was attempted on the Jews during World War II that failed to destroy them completely, succeeding only in giving back their homeland Israel, during his private conference with the ten subpotentates where he reveals himself to be the Antichrist.
• Fire From Above: Aside from earthquakes, Jesus also can use fire to decimate and destroy. It is also how New Babylon met its fate.
  • Leon Fortunato is also quite fond of using fire to kill those who don't recognize Carpathia as God, as Hattie found out the hard way.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: How Tsion, Buck, and the Jewish rebels in Jerusalem tell Carpathia what he can go do with his ultimatum in Armageddon.
• First-World Problems: After the disappearance of 1/4 of the world's people followed by mass death and destruction, Rayford and Buck complain about long lines and traffic jams caused by said disasters. The Slacktivist blog had a field day with this one.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: This affects almost everyone on the planet and it isn't at all Played for Laughs. The authors seriously suggest that the majority of the world's population won't really care about all the explicit miracles.
  • It helps to consider that in fundamentalist Christianity, the usual conceit is that knowledge that God (a) exists, (b) is all-powerful, and (c) deserves infinite glory and fealty, is hardwired into every human being. Only Nay-Theist-level spitefulness can account for such heavy unwillingness to follow him, even after apprisal of the threat of perdition. (Whether dystheism can be animated by anything besides spite doesn't seem to enter the picture.)
  • It's also worth noting that Jesus warned that, "If they would not listen to Moses and the prophets, they would not listen even to a man come back from the dead." Thus, to those in hardened moral rebellion, no sign will convince them, because they don't want to believe.
  • By the time of the Millennial Reign, nobody has any excuse for not believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. And those that choose not to believe in Him won't live past 100!
• Flat Joy: In The Remnant, Nicolae Carpathia loyalists realize that their world leader is now a cruel heartless dictator who demands worship at every turn. Mentioned in the story is a mandatory parade held by Carpathia loyalists that turns out to be entirely mirthless, as they simply go through the motions of praising Carpathia.
• Flaunting Your Fleets: Happens in the final chapter of the book Kingdom Come, as The Other Light grows to such massive numbers near the end of the Millennium that they start parading themselves and their weapons around.
• Food Interrogation: In Armageddon, Global Community officer Jock Ashmore tries to break Chloe Williams after she's been captured by ordering a breakfast — just one breakfast — and then proceeding to eat it before her, saying that if she's willing to divulge any information about the Tribulation Force and their whereabouts, she would be given a breakfast to eat as well.
• Foregone Conclusion: It can be a bit tough to care about the deaths of the protagonists when it's made explicitly clear from the start that at the end of the tribulation, the Antichrist will lose and they'll all come back to Earth anyway. Also in Kingdom Come, the Other Light attempts to build a resistance force in order to overthrow Christ at the end of the Millennium when Satan is loosed from imprisonment, despite that Scripture says it will end in failure...as it eventually does by the end of the book. The characters who earnestly believe this, and see the evidence before their eyes, are still so worried about dying. Like Buck, who worries so much that Nicolae might kill him if he speaks against or associates with him, even after his conversion. Given that he also knows that there's seven years of plagues and disasters coming up if he isn't killed, he'd be better off taunting the Antichrist.
• Foreshadowing: Book two opens by telling us "The odds are, only one of the four members of the Tribulation Force will survive the next seven years." Guess what happens. Go on, guess.
  • One character, Verna Zee, is depicted in her initial appearance (in Book 1) as wearing "sensible shoes", which is UK slang for being a lesbian. She is later described off-hand (in Book 2) as militant. Guess which character comes out as a lesbian in Book 3?
  • Moishe tells Carpathia that "a sword shall pierce your head, and you shall surely die." Guess how the world leader gets whacked?
  • Albie's death in Armageddon is foreshadowed by Mainyu Mazda getting an M tattoo for the next person he has killed, saying that sometimes he even gets them in advance.
  • At the end of Kingdom Come, Chaim tells Rayford that when the time comes for the Final Battle to take place between God and The Other Light, that God will not need an army to fight. Take a wild guess as to how Lucifer and The Other Light made out.
• Forgot I Could Change the Rules: Nicolae Carpathia is an expert in this trope. Case in point; in Desecration after negotiating with Micah (Chaim Rosenzweig) in lifting Bowl Judgement No.1 (the plague of sores on those who took the mark), he sends the GC after the Jewish Remnant.
• For the Evulz: World War III breaks out as a simultaneous but ultimately ineffectual attempt at rebellion against the Global Community. After the initial retaliation, Carpathia orders several nuclear bombings of various cities, seemingly at random, for no particular discernible reason except because he can and he has an excuse. There might be an element of Because Destiny Says So (because WWIII is prophesied to happen) but has little other than general evilness to motivate it outside of that.
• For Your Own Good: Mr. Wong is so determined for Chang to 'make proud,' that he even goes as far as to conspire with Walter Moon to have his son drugged and taken to the mark application site where Chang is given the Mark of the Beast. Fortunately for Chang, he was a believer and still had the Mark of God on his head.
• Fox News Liberal: We get the occasional sympathetically intended character who aren't WASPs steeped in premillenial dispensationalist Christian culture. But in case of conflict between their own supposed culture and belief systems and the believes of PMD Christians, they always agree with the PMD's. Tsion Ben-Judah, the PMD-Jew, is probably the worst offender.
• Frame-Up: Buck Williams is framed for the murder of his associate Alan Tompkins, who was killed by a car bomb. Nicolae Carpathia helps clear Buck's name from the incident by ultimately having the architect of the crime Joshua Todd-Cothran murdered along with Jonathan Stonagal.
• Frank's 2000 Inch TV: A team of computer experts were able to project images onto a screen several stories high for all the people at Petra to watch and read in the later books.
• From a Certain Point of View: In Desecration, Nicolae undergoes a polygraph test, with Suhail Akbar overseeing the questioning. When it is obvious that Carpathia had blatantly lied throughout the test, he tells Suhail that "the truth is what I say it is...I am the father of truth."
  • Although some of his answers concerning his loyalty to the people serving under him could be considered the actual truth given that he is The Antichrist and that all he really cares about is being worshiped. The only reason he would need to care about anybody under him is to have worshipers, but Chaim as Micah does point out to Carpathia that he worships himself, so with that in mind, everyone under Carpathia is expendable.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Nicolae Jetty Carpathia, natch. He started out as a businessman running his own import-export business. Then he gets into politics, serving in the Lower House of the Romanian Parliament, and ascends to President of Romania (thanks to Leon Fortunato, who had blackmailed Carpathia's predecessor to step down). After the Rapture, he is tapped to become the Secretary General of the United Nations, which he will change into the Global Community, with himself as the Supreme Potentate and ultimately, The Beast.
  • Leonardo Fortunato also fits this trope. Former businessman/kingmaker to Nicolae Carpathia, later the Supreme Commander of the Global Community. After Carpathia's resurrection, he is made the Most High Reverend Father of Carpathianism, ultimately becoming the False Prophet that The Bible has foretold.

G-I

• Ghost City: Chicago was left a ghost city in the book series after World War III and the Sixth Seal Judgment, and was mostly ignored by the GC due to fake reports of it being full of nuclear radiation until The Remnant. While the Tribulation Force was headquartered in the Strong Building during this time, Chloe Williams found survivors of an underground church group called The Place and helped them to escape the city before it was nuked.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: In the Dramatic Audio version of Soul Harvest, one of the Christians on board a cruise liner in the middle of the ocean barely has time to lead the people in a prayer of salvation before a giant wave of water caused from the impact of a giant mountain crashing into the seas (one of God's Trumpet Judgments) reaches the ship.
• Give Me a Sign:
  • The Seal of God, which identifies the believers from one another. Once you become a believer, you are pretty much safe for eternity.
  • The Sign of The Son of Man, which is a cross made out of lightning, and has the ability to heal the sick and injured.
• Global Currency: With the one-world government being set up, Nicolae Carpathia standardizes the currency of the world, first reducing it to the Euro for Europe and Africa, the Yen for Asia, and the Dollar for the Americas and Australia, and then finally reducing it to just the dollar, renamed the Nick (after himself). It quickly allows for him to get the world's governments under his control with a semi-communist approach to government.
  • Eventually, the "mark of loyalty" utilizes a credit system that makes all cash simply pieces of paper or bits of metal, and the currency is done away with.
  • In Kingdom Come, we are given a little quip about how the protagonists are wondering what currency the Millennial Kingdom will be run on, but the mystery is never shared with the readers. Though it appears there is no currency, and everyone gives and does out of the goodness of their hearts.
• Global Warming: In The Remnant, one of God's Bowl Judgments is this on a scale that is very lethal to both the undecided and those who have taken the Mark of the Beast and worshiped Carpathia's image. It causes the polar ice caps to melt, raising the sea level and causing the dead carcasses of sea animals from a previous Bowl Judgment to wash further inward. It lasts until God causes a supernatural Big Blackout in New Babylon with His next Bowl Judgment.
• A God Am I: Nicolae Carpathia fancies himself this after Satan takes control.
• God-Emperor: Nicolae Carpathia claims to be this during the Tribulation, and Jesus Christ is simply this during the Millennial Reign.
• God in Human Form: Jesus, only here He returns in his true form. Nicolae Carpathia only claims to be this in the second half of the Tribulation, but is really indwelt by Satan.
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: Said verbatim by Mac while he discusses the plan to escape New Babylon with David and Hannah to avoid taking the mark of loyalty.
  Mac: "...Well, forgive the painful subject, but we recently lost our cargo chief. She would have prohibited that much weight on that particular plane, but me bein' a veteran, I thought it would handle it. Flyin' it remote and also broadcasting from it remote, I start hollerin' about a weight shift, cargo rolling, hard to control, Mayday, mayday, goodbye cruel world."
• Good Is Not Soft: Both God and Jesus didn't have any second thoughts about sending those who took the Mark of the Beast and the undecided to be tortured in Hell forever, although that didn't mean they really enjoy it.
• The Good King: Jesus Christ, as He restored the world after it was devastated during the Tribulation.
• Gorn: Several deaths have a hefty amount of detail, and this goes into up to eleven territory when Jesus shows up and his very words cause entire armies to explode in rivers of gore.
• Gory Discretion Shot: In Armageddon, Chloe William's televised death was purposely blanked out on the screen by the angel of the Lord.
• Government Conspiracy
• Grandpa God: The series' depiction of God in the form of Jesus Christ, based on the Book of Revelation. Notably in the Dramatic Audio version of Glorious Appearing, it doesn't stop Naomi Tiberias from commenting on how handsome He is.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Hebrew is what everyone is speaking in Kingdom Come, though for the sake of the readers it's all translated into whatever language the book is published in.
• Grow Old with Me: Kenny Bruce Williams and Ekaterina Risto in the book Kingdom Come grow old throughout the entire Millennial Kingdom period as a married couple, as do all naturals who become believers before their 100th birthday. By the time the Millennium ends, even the longest-living naturals who become believers revert to the prime of their adult youth as they receive their glorified bodies.
• Happily Married: Buck and Chloe Williams may have their disagreements, but they are very happy together.
  • The marriage is now platonic as both Buck and Chloe are glorifieds in Kingdom Come.
    • This goes along with what Jesus said in Scripture that those who are worthy of the resurrection "will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be like the angels in heaven".
    • Their relationship pre-marriage was largely platonic as well, with neither party seeming interested in physical intimacy of any significant degree beyond occasionally holding hands or sharing cookies.
  • For the short time they were married, Rayford and Amanda were very happy.
  • Subverted big time with Sorin and Marilena Carpathia, as their marriage was one of convenience. Marilena wanted kids. Sorin didn't, which made her easy pickings for Viviana Ivansova - the future Viv Ivins.
  • Judd Thompson, Jr. and Vicki Byrnes of Left Behind: The Kids also became a couple, as did Ming Toy and Ree Woo in the main series, and Kenny and Ekaterina in Kingdom Come.
  • Other existing happy couples among the Tribulation Force members include Dwayne and Trudy Tuttle (both of whom died in Assassins), and George and Priscilla Sebastian.
  • The same can also be said of Jesus Christ and His bride, the church, when they return to Earth after the Tribulation. Of course, Chang Wong in the Dramatic Audio version of Glorious Appearing jokingly refers to those who became believers after the Rapture as being "the balcony" (where Rayford would go whenever he was late for church).
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Once you've accepted the Mark of the Beast, you're doomed no matter what. This also happens to Nicolae himself. Although he seems to be honestly repentant at the end when confronted with his sins, Christ judges that it's too late for him to change his ways.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Chaim Rosenzweig is torn between his friendship with Tsion Ben-Judah and his loyalties to Nicolae Carpathia. It is only after assassinating Carpathia and fleeing Israel that Chaim puts his faith in God.
• Heel–Face Turn: Most named characters, unless they are part of Carpathia's inner circle, come round and are saved.
• Heel–Faith Turn: Leon Fortunato attempts this to Jesus after both he and Carpathia are captured in an act of self-preservation. Unfortunately for the False Prophet, Jesus considers him long since sold out to Satan and Fortunato is "sentenced to eternity in the lake of fire."
• He Knows Too Much: At the climax of the first book, Nicolae executes his two co-conspirators right in front of a UN meeting, with Buck present. He then brainwashes everyone to imagine that it was a murder-suicide by one of them, and that Buck was never there. This should send up alarms in the heads of normal men, as the last reporter to cross Nicolae only took the ferry halfway to Staten Island. But when Buck is called before Nicolae to explain himself, he acts like a petulant child (and gets away with it).
• Hell: Where the undecided, the condemned (i.e., those who decided to follow Satan and the Antichrist), and those who come against the Jews and Israel during the Tribulation end up. It's also what follows the Horseman of Death during the Fourth Seal Judgment that takes place concurrently with the Third and Fifth Seal Judgments.
• Hellish Horse: Nicolae Carpathia's mount in the Battle of Armageddon was referred to as "the horse from hell", though it pales in comparison to the description of the horses that the 200 million man army from the Sixth Trumpet Judgment ride upon, matching their description from the Book of Revelation.
• Hell Seeker: Hattie Durham is one briefly, after deciding that she does believe in God and the Bible, but doesn't believe she deserves to go to Heaven. She comes around eventually.
• Heroic BSoD: Tsion Ben-Judah, Chaim Rosenzweig, Buck Williams and Rayford Steele each experience this during the Tribulation. Subverted with Bo Hansen, as his case was lethal.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Aplenty, but it's somewhat negated when the victims know they won't be gone for long. The most admirable characters are those willing to hold out during prolonged suffering.
• High Priest: Enigma Babylon Pontifex Maximus Peter the Second was the first. He was then replaced by Leon Fortunato, who became the Most High Reverend Father of Carpathianism.
  • And both were replaced by Jesus Christ, who is both King and High Priest.
• High Times Future: It's implied that drugs have been legalized during the Tribulation period in the series due to the One World Government allowing such vices to be legalized — Albie's hometown of Al Basrah has been given over entirely to drugs by the time he visits it to seek out the service of a Middle Eastern black market dealer for an undercover job. The status of drugs is unclear during the Millennial Kingdom period, although the hills of Jerusalem are dripping with wine, and there's mention of hashish parties held by the La Résistance group The Other Light in order to sway new members to join the group.
• Hollywood Atheist
• Holy City: Jerusalem, despite the fact that Nicolae Carpathia hosts the Global Gala at that location and soon after his death and "resurrection" makes his "triumphal entry" into the city to defile the Temple.
• Honorary Uncle: Tsion Ben-Judah is this to Kenny Williams.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: In Apollyon, one of the Trumpet Judgments is a swarm of demon locusts that infect people without the seal of God on their foreheads with a maddening delirium that lasts for five months. Even more disconcerting is the Ominous Hebrew And Greek Chanting that the locust swarm engages in while they sweep across the globe in search of victims.
• Hot God: Jesus gets this from Naomi Tiberias in the Dramatic Audio version of Glorious Appearing when she comments to Chang Wong on how handsome He is.
• Humiliation Conga: Mostly within Glorious Appearing, where Carpathia finds himself unable to prevail against Jesus Christ in the battle of Armageddon, and is only further humiliated when he is forced to kneel before the Lord before he gets sent to the Lake of Fire. Of course, the believers are basically surprised that Jesus is more sad than dancing with unbridled glee at having the Antichrist at His mercy.
  • In Mac's case, however, he would be sticking it to Carpathia were he was in Jesus' place.
  Not such a big man now, are you? Where's the sword? Where's the army? Where's the cabinet, the sub-potentates? Now you're only the supreme impotentate, aren't you?
• Hyper Competent Sidekicks: The Global Community communications people. Things like communications and even the Internet, which get rebuilt to privilege robustness to throughput on Carpathia's orders, are done well enough that they operate through the Tribulation, and even the Battle of Armageddon and its aftermath.
• I Call It "Vera": The Saber Handgun Rayford acquires from Albie. Carpathia later uses a Saber to gun down the Two Witnesses.
• I Choose to Stay: Ming Toy undergoes a dangerous mission to rescue her and Chang's parents in her native China. She finds her mother, but sadly Mr. Wong died as a martyr. Mrs. Wong decides to remain behind while in China. She does get some reassurance from an angel, saying that her mother will survive the Tribulation.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: In Apollyon, Bo Hansen and Ernie attempt to steal Ken Ritz's wealth he had stashed at Palwaukee Airport following Ritz's death. Their attempt at robbery was thwarted by the arrival of the horde of demonic locusts. Only Rayford and T.M. Delanty were spared because they were believers.
  • After executing both Todd-Cothran and Stonagal, Nicolae is the sole inheritor of both their estates. When the children of both men dispute the claim, Nicolae simply pays them off under the condition that they do not contest the will.
• I Have Many Names: Both Jesus and Satan have plenty of those.
• I Know Your True Name: The demonic miracle worker in The Remnant tries to pull this trick on Mac McCullum after he slays the defectors from Petra with deadly snakes, but it doesn't work.
• Illegal Religion: Christianity as well as all other religions except for Carpathianism become illegal to practice during the latter half of the Tribulation when Nicolae Carpathia is "resurrected" and proclaims himself to be God.
• I'll Take That as a Compliment: The following exchange between Rayford and Ken in the Dramatic Audio of Apollyon after refusing to take Hattie with them:
  Ken: Little spitfire hung up on me. Gotta like her spunk, though. She is a gorgeous thing, ain't she?
  Rayford: (chuckles) Ritz, you've got to be on the feminists' Top 10 Most Wanted List.
  Ken: Really? Hey, save me a copy when that comes out. I want to send that to Mom.
  • We also have this exchange between Mac McCullum and Annie Christopher in the Dramatic Audio of Assassins:
  Annie: And for the record, Captain McCullum, I can't stand working for either of you. Personnel has a standing request from me, demanding that I be reassigned. The Director of my department is condescending and unbearable...
  Mac: I can see that.
  Annie: ...and the captain of the Condor is unbearably sexist.
  Mac: Why, thank you.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: Goes beyond this with the "glorifieds" in Kingdom Come, since they won't even have the desire for sexual intercourse.
• Immune to Bullets: Petra and its inhabitants are supernaturally protected from the GC. Rockets and missiles fired by the GC literally go through the believers' choppers and other aircraft to the point that it's routine for the believers.
  • In Glorious Appearing, with The Sign of the Son of Man during the Battle of Armageddon, the believers are nigh invunerable to bullets...and everything else. Rayford and the other believers defending Petra have some fun with this, goading the Unity Army into attacking them, but with no success from the latter.
  • In the same book, Mac's chopper is rigged with grenades. Mac's faith pretty much saved both him and his chopper when the grenades go boom.
  • Jesus Christ Himself is also immune to whatever the Unity Army throws at Him and the army of saints...especially missiles.
• Incessant Music Madness: "Hail Carpathia" becomes musical torture for Chloe Williams when she is held in custody by the Global Community in the book Armageddon. She counters this somewhat by singing "Fail Carpathia".
  • Chloe gets even in this area when she sings a bunch of Christian hymns in her solitary confinement cell, which annoys the GC guard.
  • Any Christian believer that goes to the chopping block in the latter half of the Tribulation that Faces Death With Dignity by singing hymns unto God, much to the irritation of Nicolae Carpathia and the GC forces.
• Inconvenient Summons: In Glorious Appearing, with Jesus summoning the last remaining quarter of humanity to the Valley of Jehoshaphat for judgment (who at that point are mostly GC and Carpathia loyalists), some are pulled out of various things they were doing just for the sake of being judged.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Jesus Christ, the angels, those with glorified bodies.
• Indirect Kiss: Buck removing a cookie crumb from Chloe's lip and licking it off his finger. Phew, get a room!
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Subverted slightly with Chaim Rosenzweig's driver, Jacov. In Apollyon, Jacov is known to fall off the wagon. Chaim even fired him at one point, but rehired him out of pity. He becomes a believer at the meeting at the 144,000 Jews, and is later found inside a bar. Instead of getting drunk, he is preaching to the patrons inside when Chaim and Buck find him afterward. After Jacov proved to his boss that he wasn't getting drunk, Chaim's response is very deadpan, but hilarious.
  Chaim: Oy. I wish you were drunk.
• Informed Ability:
  • All of Buck's characteristics. He is billed as an amazing writer, but all of the examples of his writing are clumsy analogies. He is (we're told) an investigative reporter, who neither investigates nor reports anything; he's supposed to be worldly wise (before his conversion), but he's a 30-year-old virgin; he's your actual globetrotting journalist, "among the top 3% of air travelers in the world", but washes his underwear in the sink because he doesn't realize hotels provide laundry service; he's a sophisticated world traveler — who happens to be headquartered in New York, the international-cuisine capital of the planet — but can't order in a restaurant in Tel Aviv because he cannot begin to imagine what an Israeli restaurant might have available.
  • Now, on the subject of Carpathia, we're told he's a great speaker, but though his speech at the U.N. does get a lot of applause it is clear to the reader that his speech, which consists of reciting a lot of uninteresting trivia about the U.N. and also reciting a list of every member nation, has nothing to gain people's enthusiasm since it doesn't contain any actual opinion for people to agree with, apart from a general "Peace is good, mkay?" Maybe this is intentional, to really show off his (possibly supernatural) speaking skills — i.e., the script is terrible, but Carpathia speaks it with such intense passion and flair that he can build enthusiasm anyway.
• Informed Flaw: TV or narrations keep telling us that after all the good Christians have been raptured, crime has risen spectacularly among the remaining godless hordes. Yet we never really see any of that (Rayford and Chloe's house is burgled once, but that's about it), the characters never act like they don't feel safe, and the entirety of humanity is unbelievably enthusiastic and accepting of Nicolae's message of peace, unity and brotherhood.
• Insane Troll Logic: When Chloe and Rayford Steele discuss whether the mass disappearances was caused by God gettin' his Rapture on, there is much logic of the insane troll kind.
  • Rayford insists that it's the Rapture, because "there is no other explanation." Thing is, he never provides any actual evidence that the laws of physics allow an omnipotent god to exist; instead he acts as if that's self-evident.
  • He says it can't have been caused by some plan from the Russians, because while the Soviets would have been blamed if it'd happened in the olden days, there doesn't exist any Soviet threat anymore. However, any reader can understand that if it's caused by the Russians, then the facts that Russian children are gone too proves that it was no attack but some experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
• The Insomniac: Nicolae Carpathia becomes this for the latter half of the Tribulation after Satan indwells him.
• Instant Cultured: Once the protagonists, and for that matter the horde of unnamed new worshippers at their church, convert they seem to become instantly knowledgeable about the authors' beliefs regarding the Bible and how Christians should act. While this is justified in the case of Rev. Bruce and perhaps Rayford (who both have at least tangential prior exposure to such religious communities,) it's rather odd to see Buck out-debating a bishop using Bible-quotes, not to mention him and Chloe 'dating'. These two people were supposed to be a globe-trotting jet-set reporter and a secular Stanford student a week ago, yet they treat hand-holding as a deeply intimate act that should not be rushed.
• Intrepid Reporter: Cameron "Buck" Williams, as he stumbles onto the Stonagal conspiracy. His plot arc ultimately ends up a subversion, however, with the bad guys managing to successfully suppress his story about their schemes.
• Invisible to Normals: The 200 million horsemen army in the book Assassins is invisible to everybody but believers in Christ, but are nonetheless dangerous to those who aren't believers, as they have been unleashed to slay a third of the remaining world's population around the time of the Sixth Trumpet Judgment (believers not included).
• Ironic Birthday: In Kingdom Come, Cendrillon Jospin's parents realized that their child would not become a believer by her 100th birthday, which in the Millennial Kingdom period means an automatic death sentence to Hell, so they celebrated her birthday before the day that she would die. She still went to Hell nonetheless.
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): In Glorious Appearing, the Valley of Jehoshaphat (also called the Valley Where Jehovah Judges), formerly known as the Mount of Olives. Also in Kingdom Come, the country of Osaze (meaning 'Loved by God') is the new name for Egypt.
  • The reformed world under the Global Community (formerly known as the United Nations):
    • United North American States (North and Central America, Greenland and the Caribbeans)
    • United South American States (South America)
    • United Great Britain States (Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales)
    • United European States: (Most of the countries in Europe, save for Britain)
    • United African States (Africa)
    • United Carpathian States (formerly United Holy Land States, consisting of the Middle East)
    • United Indian States (The Indian Subcontinent, half of Southeast Asia)
    • United Asian States (China, the Korean Peninsula, Japan and Mongolia)
    • United Russian States (Russia)
    • United Pacific States (Australia, Oceania and Hawaii)
• It's Not Porn, It's Art: Guy Blod, a sculptor working for the Global Community, decides an appropriate memorial for the late Antichrist would be an enormous, highly-detailed metal nude. He reacts this way to "Tribulation Saints" who find the statue unsettling. (No one else cares — by this point in the series, all television is either porn or Gorn. Even the news.)
• It Won't Turn Off: One of God's angels takes over the airwaves in the book Desecration to deliver a message from Revelation 14:9-13 to those who have taken the Mark of the Beast and worshiped Carpathia's image.
• Ivy League for Everyone: Buck Williams attended Princeton, while Chloe Steele attended Stanford.
• I Want My Mommy!: A dramatic one by Kenny Bruce Williams in the Dramatic Audio version of Armageddon when he learns from his dad that his mom has died and went to be with Jesus.
• I Warned You: Rayford can't say that Irene didn't warn him about the Rapture. However, after surviving the Tribulation and reuniting with his wife, Rayford tells her (and Raymie in the Dramatic Audio) that she is permitted "one cosmic-I-told-you-so."

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• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Elena and her GC buddies pull this several times on George Sebastian. But George is ex-military and is capable of taking the pain. He even mocks their techniques in the Dramatic Audio version of Desecration by saying that they watch too many movies.
• Karma Houdini: Russia fires all its nukes at Israel and is not blasted to oblivion by the USA and pals. Subverted before long, though, when the global disasters of God's judgments strike them as hard as everyone else, ruining the country anyway.
• Karmic Death: Loren Hut, the leader of the Morale Monitors. After failing to kill Chaim Rosenzweig (who was going by the name Micah), simply because Chaim was protected by God, Carpathia guns Hut down, but not before Hut tells Carpathia off.
• Kick the Dog: Nicolae using World War III as an excuse to randomly nuke cities in America, England and elsewhere in the world For the Evulz, killing tens if not hundreds of millions of people. And then holding a tearful speech to the world about how War Is Hell. Prior to this, the most evil thing he had been seen doing was to kill Stonagal and Todd-Cothran, who were deeply corrupt men themselves, which made it sort-of possible to read him as a sort of Well-Intentioned Extremist who really did want world peace. After this performance, though, there are no doubts that he is evil through and through.
• Kill the God: Pretty much the aim and goal of both the battle of Armageddon and the Final Battle with Satan and the Other Light army in the book series. Neither of them turned out as the ones with those goals had hoped.
• Kill It with Fire: Try to harm the Two Witnesses of the Most High, this is the end result.
  • The Other Light army at the end of the Millennium in Kingdom Come get instantly smoked by God pouring down fire from the heavens.
• Kneel Before God: Nicolae Carpathia's humiliated bow before Jesus Christ in Glorious Appearing. Of course, Nicolae is left powerless to resist after Lucifer is cast out of him. Lucifer, on the other hand...
• Kneel Before Satan: In the prequel novels, Satan takes Nicolae to the desert, where he remains for 40 days and 40 nights without food and water. Unlike Jesus, who resisted the temptations (i.e., turning stones into bread, throwing himself from the highest building and bowing down to Lucifer), Carpathia falls to all three temptations.
• Kung-Fu Jesus: Jesus Himself. He just speaks The Word and people die.
• La Résistance: First the Tribulation Force, then the Other Light in the last book. The Other Light rebels against God because they see Him as evil for not letting "naturals" to live past 100 years of age as unbelievers.
• Large and in Charge: Rayford Steele. Billed at 6'4" in the prequel novels, and goes on to lead the Tribulation Force.
• Large Ham: Everyone has their moments in the Dramatic Audio, but Nicolae Carpathia (post-indwelling) takes the cake when he executes Walter Moon for failing to get Tsion Ben-Judah off the air in Desecration.
  Carpathia: (BLAM) Hold out your other hand, Walter. (BLAM) Ah, the foot. (BLAM) The other foot. (BLAM) The knee. (BLAM) Is Ben-Judah still on the screen? Oh, why, yes he is. (BLAM) Still there! (BLAM) Oh look Walter, he's still there! (BLAM) Walter...you have many times stated your devotion to me. I can only assume that the appearance of Ben-Judah on our network must certainly be causing you as much discomfort as it is to me. Therefore, I want to do you a favor. (BLAM)
  • Honorable mention goes to once again, Carpathia (pre-indwelling) as he resurrects Leon Fortunato following the Wrath of the Lamb Earthquake in reference to Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.
  Carpathia: Leonardo Fortunato...you have served me well. And you will continue to serve and give testimony to the power of Nicolae Carpathia. Leonardo Fortunato, you have served me well, and you will continue to serve me. Leonardo Fortunato, you will sleep NO LONGER! You will...arise! LEONARDO...LEONARDO, COME FORTH! LEONARDO...COME FORTH! LEONARDO...I COMMAND YOU...COME FORTH!
• Large Ham Title: His Excellency, Global Community Supreme Potentate Nicolae Carpathia. What a mouthful.
  • Supreme Commander, and later, Most High Reverend of Carpathianism, Leonardo Fortunato
  • Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews, aka Peter the Second. Counts as a Meaningful Name, as no Catholic Pope has taken the name Peter, as according to Catholic belief that Peter was the first pope of the church.
  • Both Jesus and Satan have some pretty interesting titles.
    • Jesus: Some of which include Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Root of David, Faithful and True, I AM, Wonderful, Counselor, Bright Morning Star
    • Satan: He has less titles than Jesus. His titles are Lucifer, The Devil, God Of This World/Age, Prince Of The Power Of The Air, The Serpent Of Old, The Dragon.
• Laser-Guided Karma: An early example occurs in the first book, when Rayford refuses to ride on a bus the airline sent to pick up the pilots from the plane to the terminal, because he couldn't accept such a favor while his passengers have to walk maybe a mile at most. Rayford's co-pilot does accept and very slightly mocks Rayford for refusing. He dies so soon afterwards, Rayford has barely had the time to accept, without question or hesitation, two other privileges the airline gives to pilots: Avoiding the line for the pay-phones, when everyone wants to call their families to see if they didn't vanish, and a helicopter ride home to avoid the total gridlock on the roads that the book describes to such detail.
• Last Villain Stand: Carpathia, Fortunato, and The Unity Army does this in Jerusalem...until Michael catches up to them. Cue Oh, Crap! from the two bad guys.
• Left Hanging: The fates of a dozen or so minor characters from the beginning of the book onward, though considering where those characters were, they could be summarized by the major events that took place. The destruction of New York City, for example, took care of the fates of those who have worked for Global Weekly, with one possible exception, as there was an "Aunt Marge" mentioned at the rewarding of the martyred saints, who may or may not be Marge Potter. The fate of Viv Ivins, a major supporting character in the later books, is not mentioned, though given what happens in Glorious Appearing, she obviously doesn't live to enter into the Millennium.
  • Viv's fate is mentioned in the Dramatic Audio presentation of Glorious Appearing, as she is killed by a giant hailstone.
• Light Is Not Good: Lucifer, when he takes on his pure form after departing from Nicolae Carpathia. The Other Light faction also see God in the same light as the Christians see Lucifer, hence the name of their group.
• Like a God to Me: In a conversation Leon Fortunato has with David Hassid in the book Assassins, Leon asks David who he finds to be the most inspirational person that he idolizes, and David answers "My father", saying that "he's like God to me". Leon says that he would want to meet him someday, and David says there's a very good chance that Leon will, face to face.
• Like Reality, Unless Noted: Zig-Zagging Trope. Much of the action in the books operates like reality, but sometimes ignores other postulates the book has already set up which would affect them. For example, the trains and planes still run on time post-Rapture after a very brief initial panic, or the Antichrist takes control of all world media, business, and nations, yet these things still seem to run as though they were still independent organizations.
• Literal Metaphor: The authors take a good deal of things from Revelation literally, such as with the Two Witnesses that cause flame to come out of their mouths and devour their enemies from their description in chapter 11.
  • One minor exception to this literalism is with Jesus and "the sword that comes from His mouth"...the said sword being The Word of God. It does have the literal effect of slaying His enemies.
• Living Statue: Carpathia's massive image, which is heated by onionskin paper.
• Locked Out of the Loop: The second reason, besides the Flat-Earth Atheist infestation, why Easy Evangelism doesn't happen. The main protagonists have a detailed step-by-step prophecy of what will happen in the next seven years, but whenever they can be bothered to try to convert someone, they tend to use the same speeches as evangelists do now. They don't say the next 4 things their divine prophecy predicts, and then come back after those things have happened.
  • And then there is Hattie. Buck wanted to impress her, so he offered to introduce her to Nicolae. When she actually seems more impressed by Nicolae, Buck explicitly loses interest in her. After learning Nicolae is the Antichrist, Buck tries to persuade Hattie not to go on a date with him... by telling her he thinks she's "not that kind of girl". You'd think that telling her Nicolae is the devil (or at least into murder and corruption) might be more persuasive.
• Loophole Abuse: In Desecration, in the interrogation conducted on him by the Global Community using a lie detector computer program, when Chang Wong was asked about his loyalty to the Potentate (meaning Nicolae Carpathia), he answered the questions "truthfully" and passed with flying colors, given that the Potentate he was thinking of was Jesus Christ.
• Loose Lips: Jim Hickman was spoken of as being this by Mac McCullum in The Mark when he accidentally lets slip to Nicolae Carpathia sensitive information shared in confidence by Nicolae to his close associates in the Global Community top brass, which leads to Ramon Santiago's death and Jim's own suicide.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: How Rayford (and the author) sees his late wife Irene vs. the Other Woman Hattie Durham.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Mac's, Abdullah's, David's, and Hannah's plan to escape from New Babylon to go underground with the believers in The Mark is to remote-pilot a jet airplane over Tel Aviv and then crash it into the Mediterranean Sea with a load of biochips, injectors, and guillotines on board to make it appear that all four of them died in an accident.
• The Man Behind the Man: Satan
• Manly Tears: Rayford literally breaks down in tears in front of Jesus as He tells Rayford all about his faults and triumphs.
• Mark of the Beast: Featuring a variant in which the numbers of each region of the Global Community are based on a mathematical equation involving three sixes.
  • The mark itself plays off two different translations of Scripture: the biochip implant part refers to the mark being in the right hand (as in the King James Version), while the tattoo of the region code or NJC (Nicolae's initials) refers to the mark being on the right hand or the forehead (as in other translations).
  • Mainyu Mazda, a Middle East black market dealer, has a fake mark with a number that isn't his regional code or any of the regional codes...yet he's still evil in that he cares only about collecting bounties for the disloyal.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": During the 'sheep and goats' judgement, the reactions of the unsaved and those who had taken the Mark of the Beast when Jesus condemns them to the Lake of Fire for not caring for "the least of My brethren", referring to Israel. Basically saying that if you're not a friend to Israel and the Jews during the Tribulation, you're going to Hell.
  Jesus Christ: Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and you did not take Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick and in prison, and you did not visit Me. Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me. You will go away into everlasting punishment.
• Meaningful Name: Jenkins has a thing for them. The heroes have super-manly names like Buck Williams and Rayford Steele. How good he is at this lies with the reader...
  • Verna Zee, Buck's theoretically-snippy boss, can be shortened to Ms. Zee — "Missy".
  • Jonathan Stonagal's name ("Stone-a-gal") is a play on Rockefeller.
  • Carpathia's other Dragon aside from Leon Fortunato, Viv Ivins. Remove the "n-s" and you have Viv Ivi, or VI VI VI, the roman numerals for 666. This one is notable in that VI VI VI isn't the Roman-numeralish for 666, it's the Roman-numeralish for "six six six". The Number of the Beast isn't "six six six", it's (per Revelation 13:18) "six hundred sixty six" — which in Roman numerals would be DCLXVI. Thus, a more fitting name might be Declan Xavier.
  • More of a Meaningful Number, but Carpathia's obsession with the number 216 comes from 6 x 6 x 6 = 216. Also in a later book, each of the Ten Kingdoms is assigned a number and while the numbering system is never explained, each number can come from some mathematical combination of three sixes.
  • Nicolae Carpathia is a clear reference to Nicolae Ceausescu, the last Romanian dictator. It also references the Nicolaitans (a heretical sect of Christianity) in the Book of Revelation.
  • When the first book opens, the married Steele is sexually fixated on a woman named "Hattie Durham". As Fred Clark points out,
  Eldridge Cleaver could have written volumes trying to unpack all the Southern sexual myths crammed into that name.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: In the book Kingdom Come, Abdullah Smith points out to Sarsour the futility of Satan's and The Other Light's plan to overthrow God by telling him that even if Satan has a chance of winning, he wouldn't be able to resurrect all the people who died as martyrs for The Other Light because God hasn't given Satan the power to do so. Which is an odd statement because on at least three occasions, Satan or his minions did resurrect people.
• The Meddling Kids Are Useless: Buck and Rayford get into danger, but they don't affect the actual events or main plot much at all, given that they've been prophesied to happen in one specific way.
• Million Mook March: Jesus' army of saints, surprisingly. Also the 200 million horsemen that sweep across the globe during one of God's Trumpet Judgments, looking for those that do not bear the Seal of God on their foreheads to slay.
• Miracle Food: God rains down manna for the people of Israel to eat during their time in Petra in the last half of the Tribulation. In Glorious Appearing, He also provides so much meat for Ezer Borstein to butcher that he's basically giving it away free of charge.
• Mistaken for Cheating: In Tribulation Force, Buck and Chloe have barely started seeing each other, and Chloe sees Buck's secretary Alice Nelson outside his apartment with a ring on her finger and speaking with her fiance on the phone, making her assume that Buck was her fiance and that he was two-timing her. In the first-part movie adaptation of the book, Chloe was greeted by Ivy Gold at the apartment and ended up assuming the same thing of Buck.
• The Mole: Carpathia had conducted a smear campaign against Amanda White-Steele, showing her that she was in fact on the GC's payroll. Hattie, however, tells Rayford that his late wife was not a mole and that she truly loved him.
• Motive Rant: Carpathia confesses to Leon and the 10 subpotentates that he is the Antichrist in Armageddon. After giving an Unreliable Expositor mini-lecture on what first caused Satan to rebel against God, he declares his own aims:
  Carpathia: Am I Antichrist? Well, if he is Christ, then yes! Yes! I am against the Christ who was falsely crowned by the pretend creator. I will ascend into heaven! I will exalt my throne above the stars of God! I will ascend above the heights of the clouds! I will be like the Most High! (...for I AM THE MOST HIGH!)
• Murder by Cremation: Suhail Akbar sends the two pilots who bombed Petra (which had failed due to God protecting the city and the people) to be incinerated alive. He does sedate them before barbecuing both men.
  • Subverted by Carpathia's attempt to barbecue the Jewish Remnant in Petra, as they were protected by God.
• Murder-Suicide: What Jonathan Stonagal's and Joshua Todd-Cothran's murders by Carpathia were made out to be through Nicolae Carpathia's brainwashing the participants of the United Nations meeting, except for Buck Williams being protected by God. Chaim Rosenzweig later learns the truth when he becomes a believer.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Tsion Ben-Judah's reaction in Desecration when he realizes he has given away the location of where the Israeli Jews would flee to according to what the book of Revelation says about the matter (the deserted city of Petra), fearing that he has messed up God's plan. He gets some reassurance from one of the Tribulation Force members that God may have intended for Tsion to let slip the location of where the Jews would flee to in order to lure Nicolae Carpathia's forces into a trap God has set up for them, which is all according to the Word of God.
• Mythology Gag: Nicolae Carpathia had the rest rooms of his underground bunker in Jerusalem empty out its fecal material in a holy place called the Cradle Of Jesus...similar to what Jehu son of Jehoshaphat from 2nd Kings did with a house of Baal after he was done slaying the worshipers of Baal: turn it into an outhouse.
  • In Desecration, Carpathia mocks Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey by riding through the Via Dolorosa on an enormous pig that he later sacrifices in the Temple.

N-P

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Nicolae is the first name of a Romanian dictator, and Dracula being associated with the Carpathian Mountains.
  • Not to mention that "Old Nick" is one of Satan's nicknames.
  • If you're part of the Global Community, Jesus Christ certainly qualifies...although it won't do you any good.
• Nasty Party: In the book Assassins, Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews of Enigma Babylon One World Faith is invited to a private party hosted by the ten regional subpotentates of the Global Community to show him a massive ice sculpture made in his honor. However, in playing out what the Book of Revelation says about the "whore that sits on the beast", the ten subpotentates use that party as a united opportunity to kill Peter Mathews with sharp ice feathers from the sculpture, eventually causing Enigma Babylon to fold with the Pontifex Maximus' death and to soon be replaced with Carpathianism following Nicolae Carpathia's death and "resurrection".
• Neutrality Backlash: The world during the Tribulation period in the series isn't a place for anyone to claim neutrality. If you don't get killed by Nicolae Carpathia and the Global Community for not being loyal to him (and even if you are loyal, you're still screwed no matter what), God will send you to Hell for not taking His side in the cosmic conflict.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: How Rayford feels about Irene after the Rapture.
  • Also counts with Hannah Palemoon and David Hassid.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Every time the heroes' backs are against the wall with no way out, all that needs to happen is for them to pray and God will grant them whatever ability is needed to extract them from their predicament.
  • In the first book, Buck manages to escape Carpathia's hypnosis at the UN by praying to God, who also conveniently rewrites Carpathia's memory to erase any instance of Buck not behaving exactly as intended.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nice job getting the Greek Co-Op wiped out, George!
• Nightmare Face: Steve Plank, post-Wrath of the Lamb. Yeesh.
• The Night That Never Ends: One of God's Bowl Judgments plunges New Babylon into perpetual complete darkness that no one except for believers in Christ (and Nicolae Carpathia with his Power Glows) can see their way through. (To say nothing of the Carpathia loyalists also having incurable pains and sores.) It is only lifted near the time of Jesus Christ's Second Coming, when an angel of the Lord warns believers to get out of New Babylon before it is destroyed.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Not outside of marriage, at least. Try telling that to David Hassid and Annie Christopher, the unmarried Christian couple in New Babylon with the relationship they don't want people to know about.
• No One Could Survive That!:
  • Steve Plank survived the Wrath of the Lamb Earthquake...although he ended up terribly mangled in the process.
  • Inverted with Leon Fortunato, as he did not survive said quake. Carpathia, however, has other plans.
• Nostalgic Narrator: In the Dramatic Audio version of the book Glorious Appearing, a grown-up Kenny Williams (the son of Buck and Chloe Williams) narrates some of the events that took place in the book from sometime in the future.
• Not What It Looks Like: Chloe goes over to Buck's apartment and sees his Global Weekly office co-worker Alice outside it talking on the phone to her fiance while delivering stuff to Buck's apartment. Chloe assumes from that that Buck is Alice's fiance and was playing her for her affections all along. It takes a private talk between Buck and Chloe to straighten the whole matter out.
  • This also gets carried over into the bouquet of flowers that Chloe assumed Buck had sent her, which she then threw into the trash after witnessing the previously-mentioned assumption. It turns out that the flowers were sent to Chloe by Hattie Durham as a joke.
  • Kenny Bruce Williams goes through this in Kingdom Come when he was secretly infiltrating the Other Light faction to see what they were planning to do, with an Other Light plant working at the Children of the Tribulation daycare center planting false evidence about Kenny to frame him as a traitor.
• The Nudifier: Hinted at in the first book when people are removed from their clothes during the Rapture.
• Nuke 'em: So long, London and D.C. Bye-bye, Chicago.
  • God pouring out fire from the skies to instantly incinerate Satan's The Other Light army is a real big Nuke 'em moment.
• Number of the Beast: Nicolae Carpathia's favorite variant is 216, which is 6x6x6.
• Obi-Wan Moment: Any believer who decides to become a martyr. Overlaps with Face Death with Dignity.
• Oddly Small Organization: The Tribulation Force itself, and also the "Gang of Four" conspiring to set up the One-World Government.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Steele's first landing at O'Hare during the Rapture is built up immensely, but actually occurs between chapters.
• Off with His Head!: Done through guillotines (referred to as "loyalty enforcement facilitators") on the general populace to enforce the law of taking the "mark of loyalty" during the Tribulation.
• Oh, Crap!: Plenty from both sides. The "Eureka!" Moment regarding Buck and Rayford in regards to the Wrath of the Lamb Earthquake is one major example.
  • Rayford's reaction when The Rapture hits, and he realizes that Irene was right.
  • Leah Rose's reaction in regards to the 200 million demonic horsemen which slay the unbelievers.
  • Buck's reaction when he sees Hattie confront both Carpathia and Fortunato in Desecration.
  • In the Dramatic Audio of Glorious Appearing, the reactions of Fortunato and Carpathia when the Archangel Michael corners them.
  • Assassins has Leon Fortunato recognizing that he was set up by Sub-Potentate Rehoboth.
  • The mother of all Oh Craps comes from Lucifer himself in Kingdom Come. After Jesus decimates The Other Light on the final day of the Millennial Kingdom, Lucifer "looked about him and slowly lowered his sword. He appeared to had something to say and even drew breath to say it, but fell silent." Even he knows that he is oh so very screwed.
  • Marilena Carpathia, when she realizes that she has been left to die.
• Older Than They Look: Once the Millennium starts in Kingdom Come, all the naturals who enter this time period (either believers or children of believers) experience decreased aging similar to the first several generations of mankind in the book of Genesis, with the children becoming young adults by the time they reach 100. However, naturals who remain unbelievers by the time they reach 100 will instantly die and go to Hell. It's not explained how those who were already adults, including those who were already at advanced age, experience this decreased aging at the same rate as the children who enter the Millennium. By the end of the Millennium, however, the longest-living naturals (who at that point are all believers) end up really showing their age.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The demonic locusts chanting "Abaddon." Very creepy in the Dramatic Audio.
  • In the Dramatic Audio version of Assassins, the Two Witnesses ominously chant "Jerusalem" as they are resurrected.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig. Specifically in the movie where he helps strategize against the oncoming Russians. He's a botanist for crying out loud!
  • Lampshaded when Rosenzweig points out he is a botanist, not a physicist, when asked to explain the sudden decrease of solar intensity.
• Omniglot: Nicolae Carpathia is capable of speaking every major language on earth.
• One-Hour Work Week: Buck spends zero time actually doing his job.
• One World Order: Carpathia's Global Community unites all of the world's governments into a single nation.
• One Hit Poly Kill: Carpathia kills Stonagal and Todd-Cothran with one bullet.
  • This despite the fact that the bullet in question is described several times as a hollow point, which expands on impact and could not travel through one skull to another, even if it weren't just .38 ammo. .38's aren't that big and do not have that much firing power, a far cry from the hand cannon described in the book. That... and there is literally no way a hollow point bullet could kill two people.
  • Jesus uses the Word of God to slay the Global Community army en masse.
• One True Faith: There's the pantheistic mishmash of all world religions called Enigma Babylon One World Faith as the official one-world religion, but there's also Christianity (as defined by the books' authors and the Tribulation Force characters), Judaism, and Islam (which in the book series ends up being a minority religion), which all become illegal to practice even when Enigma Babylon is replaced by the Luciferian-type state religion of Carpathianism around the midway point of the Tribulation. In the Millennial Kingdom, Christianity becomes the official one-world religion, though dissidents are permitted to practice the beliefs of the Other Light despite the fact that (1) it's totally in error when it comes to believing Satan is going to defeat God and Jesus by the end of the Millennium and (2) those who remain unbelievers in God and Jesus Christ by the time they reach 100 will instantly die and go to Hell.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Tsion, Buck and Rayford are grievously injured in the Battle of Armageddon. Rayford survives. Tsion and Buck are not as lucky.
• Only I Can Kill Him: More like Only I Am Can Kill Him, as nobody can defeat Satan and the Antichrist except for Jesus Christ, as The Word of God dictates.
  • Both Rayford and Hattie obsess over killing Carpathia for reasons of their own. Chaim succeeds in doing the deed, but Satan has other plans.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Albie, the black arms dealer who later becomes a believer. Also Razor.
  • Some bit part characters are only known by nicknames such as Walkie-Talkie and Vest Chest.
• Organization with Unlimited Funding: Subverted. While the book is highly criticized for turning the Secretary-General of the United Nations into a global king, there is one surprisingly realistic touch: The UN's budget is very limited so Carpathia has to pay for many of his actions out of his own pocket rather than rely on some magically limitless amount of money.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: After being indwelt by Satan, Carpathia no longer needs to eat, drink, or sleep because Satan's power keeps his body in top physical shape.
• Persona Non Grata: In the eyes of the Global Community, it's Rayford and Chloe Steele, Buck Williams, Tsion Ben-Judah and Chaim Rosenzweig.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Jesus, who can kill many people at the same time just by speaking The Word Of God.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The Tribulation Force is supposed to be the Resistance to Carpathia's One World Government. Their track record after seven years is precisely one assassination attempt, not counting Hattie and Chaim. Buck and Rayford's rolls as moles in Carpathia's organization serve only a narrative function as witnesses for the audience to the global events of the tribulation rather than any particular kind of functional espionage.
  • Buck and Rayford each have a cushy job working for the Antichrist. They virtually never try to exploit this fact. Worst Freedom Fighters ever.
    • More like The Pirates That Won't Do Anything Unless The Lord Directs Them To. Not that it has stopped some from trying to do their own thing, like Rayford's assassination attempt.
    • Also justified in the fact that they can't fight fate: what's going to happen in the Tribulation according to The Word Of God is going to happen regardless of what anybody does; all they can pretty much do is help new people become believers and to help existing believers stay alive until Jesus comes or their time comes.
• Place of Protection: The city of Petra during the latter half of the Tribulation, due to God's protection from Global Community forces.
• Playing Sick: Chaim Rosenzweig pulls this off beautifully. He fakes having a stroke, and gets around in a wheelchair, all in order to assassinate Nicolae.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: In the third prequel, when the elect are raptured, their glorified bodies are all the same age, 33, no matter where on the -0.75 through +969 spectrum they were in their Earthly lives. This comes from Augustine's claim that one's glorified body will be just like one's 33-year-old body was or would have been, barring anything crippling and/or hideous. It derives from Jesus being 33 when he was crucified.
• Point of No Return: Take the mark of loyalty and worship The Beast's image, you find yourself vulnerable to the Bowl/Vial Judgments and ultimately your soul is condemned to Hell. Become a believer in Christ, your place in Heaven is assured. Survive the Tribulation, you can live until the end of the Millennial Kingdom.
  • Getting saved during the Millennium prior to your 100th birthday also guarantees that you'll live to the end of the Millennium.
• Poke the Poodle: While Nicolae Carpathia in the Left Behind books does eventually commit evil such as ordering London nuked and demanding the executions of those who refuse to worship him as god, he gets only passing mention to such atrocities and instead focus on his Poke the Poodle moments such as him dating the hero's former love interest and treating her with respect, or "forgetting" Rayford's new wife's name. As Fred Clark on his Slacktivist page states:
  So far, though, it's hard to take him seriously. He's bumbling through the first stages of his master plan, getting himself hopelessly bogged down in details that seem less evil than simply arbitrary and weird. For example, Nicolae plans to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. That might be considered evil if he were doing it just to desecrate the Islamic holy site currently sitting there in an effort to start a deadly war, but instead he's carefully negotiated an amicable (if ridiculously implausible) solution to this age-old conflict. [snip] Or consider Nicolae's grand scheme of relocating the United Nations headquarters to an as-yet-unbuilt city in the Iraqi desert. That's capricious and foolish, but not so much evil as just terribly wasteful and inconvenient.
  • If there is a heroic inversion of this trope, then the main characters often play it, (see The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything above.) A lot of their resistance consists of observing Nicolae and internally disapproving, or little gestures designed to embarrass or inconvenience him rather than disrupt his plans or harm him.
• Power Glows: Nicolae Carpathia in the book Armageddon gives off a burnt-orange glow while he and most of his Global Community cabinet are stuck in New Babylon during the Fifth Bowl Judgment that causes complete darkness throughout the whole city.
  • Jesus Himself, as He is "the Light of the world".
• Pass the Popcorn: In the Dramatic Audio presentation of Glorious Appearing, Rayford Steele plus the entire population of believers in Petra, who was now made near-invulnerable by God during the battle of Armageddon, were like this when they were watching the Antichrist's armies getting decimated by Jesus Christ. Rayford even mentions that all he needs now is the popcorn.
  • And due to their beliefs about the Rapture, the series' intended audience believe they'll be sitting back in Heaven and enjoying the show while all this goes down.
    • Biblically speaking, that's what some Old Testament battles Israel had with other nations ended up turning into with God taking over the battles.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: In the Dramatic Audio, George Sebastian delivers one to Elena right before the coup de grâce. Double points for George as he delivered it Good News, Bad News style.
  George: "Well, Elena, the good news is...I'm not dead. The bad news is...you are!" (SNAP)
  • At the end of Kingdom Come, Jesus does this to the invading TOL forces.
  Satan: CHARGE!
  Jesus: I AM WHO I AM. (cue epic pwnage of the TOL forces via firestorm)
• Pretty in Mink: It's mentioned that Amanda wears a fur coat.
• Principles Zealot: The protagonists refuse to lie, even to the Anti-Christ. It's a bit undermined by several cases of them telling falsehoods due to bad writing, divine interventions that prevent any negative consequences of not lying, and liberal use of From a Certain Point of View.
• Propaganda Machine: The Global Community-controlled media and press, leading to the creation of Buck Williams' Voice of the Resistance publication The Truth. Interestingly, the Global Community acquisition of all press and communications also includes Christian-related media such as the Christian Broadcasting Network and Trinity Broadcasting Network, which makes you wonder what became of the televangelists who were left behind.
• Public Execution: The Global Community televises the execution of Chloe Williams, although Caleb the angel interferes with its broadcast by blanking out the screen at the time of her execution.
• Punch-Clock Villain: A good deal of the Global Community armed forces not situated in the Holy Land at the time of the battle of Armageddon, because without any resources coming from New Babylon to make sure they're paid (all because said city is destroyed), they might as well quit even though they face a court martial for doing so.
• Pursued Protagonist: The Tribulation Force, both the core group and the later members.
  • Also count for the rest of the believers.

R-U

• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Enoch Dumas and his flock of streetwise urban dwellers.
• Raised by Grandparents: In the prequel novels, Rayford's parents are old enough to be his grandparents, as someone mistakes his parents for being his godparents, so this is a subversion of this trope. Slightly subverted again when Rayford helps raise Kenny during the Tribulation.
• Race Against the Clock: In the Dramatic Audio version of Glorious Appearing, a Global Community agent threatens the network broadcast crew to cut the signal of Chaim Rosenzweig's message by giving each member, starting from the top brass down, sixty seconds to get the signal cut before they are murdered.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Jesus to Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet in Glorious Appearing.
  • Jesus does this to Satan yet again in Kingdom Come, right before sending him into the Lake of Fire.
  • In Assassins, Carpathia himself does this to Eli and Moishe before gunning them down during the Global Gala.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: President Gerald Fitzhugh. He sees that Carpathia is a threat once he loses his power to the American Subpotentate and teams up with his English and Egyptian counterparts to force Carpathia out of office. It does not work, and Fitzhugh winds up getting killed.
  • In Left Behind: World At War, Fitzhugh futilely attempts to take Carpathia down with him when he has a guided missile head straight for the Global Community office.
• Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: The members of The Other Light are all physically teenagers and young adults recruiting others of the same age range.
• Red Herring: Several of them, though not necessarily intentional on the part of the author, who writes as a "process of discovery" meaning that he throws in elements he thinks might be interesting and sees where they lead. This can land in some What Happened to the Mouse? moments among those which do not pan out. He believes that this makes for a more organic and believable story-telling experience, though whether it enhances or detracts from the quality of the writing is a matter of some debate and taste.
• Reign of Terror: The Global Community regime ruthlessly executes anyone who refuses to take part in the mark of loyalty system.
• Rejected Apology: Leon Fortunato's attempted Heel–Faith Turn was rejected by Jesus before he was thrown into the Lake of Fire along with Nicolae.
• Reluctant Ruler: Since Fortunato taught him out to feign humility, Carpathia offers token resistance to the role of Secretary-General of the U.N. Only when he accepts does things go downhill.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Steve Plank, thought to have been killed during the Wrath of the Lamb Earthquake, is pretty much alive...yet horribly disfigured, and going by the name Pinkerton Stephens.
  • Buck says this in the Dramatic Audio when people see that he is still alive.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Carpathia exploits Rayford's relationship with Hattie by attempting to have the both of them killed when he meets up with her once again. However, Buck had taken Rayford's place when it became clear that Rayford wasn't going to arrive in time and rescues Hattie, killing a GC mook in the process and making a fast getaway with Ken behind the wheel.
• Restart the World: The old heavens and earth pass away, to suddenly be replaced with a new heavens and earth at the end of Kingdom Come.
• Rightful King Returns: The whole point of Jesus' second coming in the book series.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Buck Williams in the book Armageddon was ready to go on this when his wife Chloe was captured by the Global Community and then transferred from San Diego to Illinois while she was drugged, but Rayford Steele and the Tribulation Force contingent in San Diego had to talk him down and let God handle her fate.
• Robbing the Dead: Some opportunists in the first book of the series have been doing this to the graves of those who have been resurrected in the Rapture.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Most of humanity dies in various disasters, including actual giant rocks falling out of the sky; many of them get sent to Hell.
• Romance-Inducing Smudge: This happens early in the series, when Chloe is eating a cookie and has a bit of chocolate on her cheek. Buck leans over and wipes it off with his thumb, then eats it on impulse. Since the two have become hilariously repressed fundamentalist Christians, this is treated as a huge sexual milestone in their relationship. (Third base comes with chocolate.) Cookies later become a romantic symbol for them, almost to the point of creepy ridiculousness.
  • Almost?
• Satan Is Good: The viewpoint of the Other Light faction in Kingdom Come, claiming in their manifesto that God unfairly treated one of His angels and befouled his name and reputation by casting him out of His presence. They are wrong, however.
• Say Your Prayers: The Christian on board the cruise liner stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with no power leads the crew in a final prayer of salvation just before the Giant Wall of Watery Doom hits it in the Dramatic Audio version of Soul Harvest.
  • A woman in New Babylon who took the Mark of the Beast is left desperately saying prayers to God during the supernatural Big Blackout caused by one of God's Bowl Judgments in Armageddon, despite the fact that she's utterly screwed.
  • Chloe Williams leads an unsaved woman in a prayer of salvation right before her execution in Armageddon.
  • Even earlier, Demetrius Demeter and Lukas Miklos' wife also lead incarcerated people in prayers of salvation in The Mark.
• The Scapegoat: Thanks to Leon Fortunato, Rayford Steele is pinned for Carpathia's murder, despite evidence from Walter Moon showing that Chaim Rosenzweig was the real assassin.
• Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale : Happens all the time. Geographic distances are wildly exaggerated or ignored, things happening across a continent can affect the local city but things affecting the local city could be completely ignored in the suburbs, the given explosive payload of bombs are way off from their described effects, the amount of time it takes for a global reorganization is ignored to get that reorganization to happen on schedule with prophecy, etc.
• The Scourge of God: Seal Judgments, Trumpet Judgments, Bowl Judgments...take your pick.
  • The Bowl Judgments affect those who took the mark of loyalty and worshiped the Antichrist's image.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Feebly attempted by Buck when Nicolae offers him a job in his inner circle, based on Buck's out-of-nowhere concern for journalistic ethics. Of course, Buck denies Nicolae in person, having been flown from Chicago to New York first class, driven to the meeting in a limousine, and having had lunch at an exclusive Manhattan yacht club, all on Nicolae's dime. Subverted when after all the posturing he takes the job anyway.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Nicolae Carpathia, full stop, especially before he is driven to become ruler of the world. Stonagal and Todd-Cochrane help direct him along that path with their own money, used to bend the rules.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Again, Nicolae Carpathia, post-indwelling.
  • Josuha Todd-Cothran gives a real sinister example when he is confronted by Alan Tompkins in the first novel. From the Dramatic Audio:
  Todd-Cothran: Captain Sullivan, if one of your men was to come to my office and harass me about anything, what should I do?
  Sullivan: Mr. Todd-Cothran, sir, you do whatever you need to do.
  Todd-Cothran: What if I was to...kill him where he sits?
  Sullivan: Sir, I'm sure it would be justifiable homicide.
  Todd-Cothran: What if his name happened to be Alan Tompkins?
  Sullivan: Uh...I...I'd come over there and dispose of the body myself.
• Screw the War, We're Partying: In the book Glorious Appearing, the people in Petra were like this when the Global Community Unity Army has them completely surrounded, totally outgunned, and ready to overrun the place. Somewhat justified in that God has made them nigh-invulnerable to enemy fire at that point...and also in that Jesus was going to come and save them in a literal Deus ex Machina.
• Screw Your Ultimatum!: In Armageddon, Carpathia issues the following to the defenders of Jerusalem: by the count of three, if there is silence for fifteen seconds, then that means that the defenders will surrender to the GC. The defenders' response: shooting their guns into the air, Tsion and Buck included.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Satan during the Millennial Reign. Some people who are part of the Other Light subsect The Only Light believe that Satan purposely sealed himself away so that he will be powerful enough to overthrow God (whom the Only Light members believe don't exist despite visible evidence to the contrary) and those that will follow Him. As keeping with what the book of Revelation says, Satan does get released to lead the Other Light army at the end of the Millennium, only for his entire army to be smoked to ashes by God in seconds, and for Satan to be cast into the Lake of Fire.
• Second-Face Smoke: George Sebastian's captors in Greece do this to him in their interrogation in the book Desecration. George thinks that his captors have seen too many movies.
• Secret Relationship: David Hassid and Annie Christopher have this kind of relationship in the series while they're both working for Nicolae Carpathia in New Babylon, with the additional secret being that they're also Christian believers. Unfortunately, Annie was killed during Carpathia's "resurrection" in The Indwelling when Leon Fortunato called down lightning to slay the disloyal among the gatherers at the funeral.
• Seeking Sanctuary: During the latter half of the Tribulation, believers of the world seek out Petra because it is the only place in the world that Nicolae Carpathia's forces cannot touch since it is under the protection of God.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Satan knows of the same Biblical prophecies as the protagonists do, and is actively trying to do the things he's prophecised to do to trigger the Second Coming so he can have his fight with Jesus. That those same prophecies say Jesus is going to easily win that fight no matter what doesn't seem to bother him.
• Sharpened to a Single Atom: Chaim Rosenzweig's blade, which he uses to skewer Carpathia's head with while Playing Sick in Asssassins.
• Shining City: The New Jerusalem at the end of Kingdom Come.
• Shout-Out: Mac McCullum comments in Glorious Appearing that Nicolae Carpathia would be Zorro if he added a hat and mask to the ensembler he wore at the battle of Armageddon.
• Show, Don't Tell: Just look at this excerpt, for instance. We are told that Nicolae Carpathia "spoke earnestly, with passion, with a frequent smile, and with occasional, appropriate humor", not shown this. We are told that it is a "touching scene", rather than shown why. We are told that Carpathia has a "grasp of history" and "photographic memory of dates and places". We are told that he spoke "with electricity and power". It should be noted that two-thirds of Carpathia's speech is simply reading out the names of every country in the United Nations, before then proceeding to name all the UN agencies and random facts about them. Instead of actually writing a speech that was genuinely captivating and inspiring, the authors simply resorted to Take Our Word for It.
• The Siege: The Global Community Army tries to lay siege on the Christians at Petra and the Jews at the Temple Mount in Jersualem...only to be decimated by Jesus upon His return.
• Significant Anagram: Chaim Rosenzweig as his alter ego Micah, which really is an anagram of Chaim.
• Slipping a Mickey: Chloe Williams in Armageddon drank a milkshake with a drug in it that put her to sleep, enabling the GC to transfer her from San Diego to Illinois.
• Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter: Both Nicolae Carpathia and Leon Fortunato have separately challenged God to strike them dead to prove that He is truly God. Of course, God doesn't respond to either of their challenges, since they are permitted to live only to face judgment at the end of the Battle of Armageddon by Jesus Christ before they are sent to the Lake Of Fire.
• Smug Snake: Nicolae is pretty clearly supposed to be seen as a purely evil but still scarily charismatic and competent Chessmaster (not unlike Star Wars' Emperor), but he actually comes off as trying too hard without really knowing what he's doing. His subordinates, namely Leon and Peter Matthews, are more deliberate Smug Snakes.
• Soiled City on a Hill: New Babylon, by virtue of destiny, becomes this.
• Some Call Me "Tim": Buck's real name is Cameron Williams, of which he goes by in Kingdom Come, and Mac McCullum first name is Montgomery. Also, Gustaf Zuckermandel Sr. and Jr. go by Big Zeke and Zeke respectively. Annie Christopher's real name is Angela and Hattie's short for Harriet
• The Something Force: The Tribulation Force in the main book series, the Millennium Force in Kingdom Come.
• Spiteful Spit: Mainyu Mazda in Armageddon, at Albie's thought that the region mark he has is an authentic "mark of loyalty", though he still serves the GC by collecting bounty for the disloyal.
• Spoiler Title: Many of the books in the series, but perhaps the most obvious is Kingdom Come: The Final Victory.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: The angel Anis, who appears in a few places throughout the entire book series.
• Stealth Pun: The cellular phone implant during the Millennium in Kingdom Come. It gives new meaning to the term "a ringing in your ears."
• Straw Feminist: Verna Zee, who is also a lesbian. The authors mean for her to come over as such. But she doesn't really display much feministic behavior, she just doesn't adore Buck like everyone else seems to. Which is a death sentence of course.
  • Also Chloe in the first book.
    RAYFORD: ...I want to see when Hattie can join us for dinner. That's all right with you, isn't it?"
    CHLOE: As long as you don't expect me to cook or something sexist and domestic like that."
• Strawman Political: Particularly Hollywood Atheist; also abortionists.
• Stupid Evil: Nicolae, Leon, and Satan follow Biblical prophecies to the letter throughout the entire series, despite the fact that said prophecies end with them getting their asses royally handed to them by Jesus and God. Because Destiny Says So. In one particularly egregious moment, Indwelt!Nicolae claims he will have a "surprise" waiting for Jesus when he descends from Heaven for Armageddon. That surprise? The exact same army the Bible specifically describes being there and then being absolutely destroyed when Jesus comes down. Built in due to You Can't Fight Fate.
• Super-Senses: Being Born Again gives Buck a kind of Truth-O-Vision at the end of the first book/movie; he, and he alone, can see through the Antichrist's veil of deceit with the shooting incident at the United Nations, and knows what really happened.
  • It also happens in Assassins, where Buck realizes that Nicolae Carpathia had just hypnotized the audience into not caring about the coming announcement of Pope Peter the Second's death at the Global Gala.
• Super-Speed: In Glorious Appearing, the Remnant in Petra make a divine-assisted mad dash from Petra to Jerusalem. Hilarious in the Dramatic Audio as both Rayford and Mac joke about Abdullah being passed by pedestrians on foot.
• Sweet and Sour Grapes: Two of the main protagonists are offered jobs by the Antichrist, jobs that, were they offered by anyone else would seem like dream jobs. The characters are reluctant to take those jobs, rightly seeing them as tests of temptation before them. After some initial reluctance, they take the jobs anyway, as they feel that taking them was "God's will."
  • In any other story, the following rationalization would be Foreshadowing of some kind of Face–Heel Turn, even if we didn't already know that the Big Bad was capable of mind control. In this story, it's considered valid.
  His job was ferrying Nicolae Carpathia wherever he wanted to go, and for some reason, Rayford felt compelled to sublimate his wishes, his desires, his will, and his logic. God had laid this in his lap for some reason, and as long as he didn’t have to live a lie, at least for now he would do it.
• Take Your Time: In book 3, Buck is on the phone with Chloe when the latter wrecks her car and the line goes dead. Buck still has time to faff about taking calls from his father and other inconsequential things before he finally rushes off to find her.
• Tattooed Crook: Mainyu Mazda, a shady Middle Eastern black market dealer, tattoos himself and the victims he has killed with an M, and when Albie pays him a visit to discuss having the GC's meeting place in Al Hillah bugged for money, he is in the process of getting another M tattooed on himself, saying that sometimes he even gets them in advance.
• Teen Genius:
  • Chang Wong, computer nerd recruited by the bad guys (but used as the good guys' mole) before he is even done with high school.
  • Naomi Tiberias, Chang's romantic interest is also a whiz in her own right, as she runs the Petra tech center.
• Textual Celebrity Resemblance: In the original text, Carpathia looks like a young Robert Redford. The update says that he looks like a young Brad Pitt.
• The Theocracy: The Millennial Kingdom government, which consists of God as ultimate ruler, Jesus as the ruler of the world, King David as the ruler of Israel, and the apostles as the rulers of the twelve tribes of Israel. It's surprisingly the most benevolent theocracy that existed, as God and Jesus Christ did not forbid freedom of speech or freedom of religion, allowing those who would not become believers in Christ to live either as unbelievers or as members of the Other Light for only 100 years before they die and are sent to Hell.
• There Are No Global Consequences: God miraculously destroying Russia's military and vacuuming up 20% of the global population has absolutely NO effect on day-to-day life after the first few hours of panic.
  • That's nothing. In the last couple of books, you get two or three huge asteroids hitting the Earth, the oceans turning to blood, and the sun suddenly blasting out tremendous waves of heat and light powerful enough to reduce metal buildings to slag (the Global Community Palace is reduced to a metal shell when this happens). The only people that survived are the True Believers and Nicolae (who is immune), and people who managed to get to a shelter within the first few minutes. Every forest on Earth should have been ablaze, virtually all animal life that was exposed to the sun during that period should have been fried (we see one unfortunate dog that didn't get to shade in time die horribly, so we know that animals aren't immune), and virtually all of humanity would have been doomed. The oceans (which were turned into blood previously; killing everything in them, including the plankton that all life on Earth depends) would boil and evaporate, leading to massive hurricanes striking everywhere. The atmosphere would be rendered unbreathable. Asphalt roads would liquefy. Rock might turn to lava. The list goes on and on. And yet a few months after that blazing solar storm, which came after the seas of blood, global earthquakes, and the asteroids, Carpathia still has enough infrastructure (all the world's cities are still standing after that because we hear them all report about New Babylon) to create the biggest army the world has ever seen, and equip each every one with a horse to ride on. Maybe there would have been enough people left over, but I doubt anyone thought to save that many horses when they were fleeing for cover. After that one event, that should have been no need for Jesus to come back to slay the remaining unbelievers at Armageddon. Every single one of them would have been dead or dying.
  • Interestingly, this is both averted and exaggerated in the same series. The books seem to claim that only a tiny fraction of adults have the necessary beliefs to be raptured, but then exaggerates the consequences as if they represented a huge chunk of society. Entire parking garages full of abandoned cars, planes falling out of the sky (the entire crew was evangelical?), and most amusingly, a completely abandoned row of cabs at O'Hare airport. Of all the stereotypes they hit in this book, the foreign Sikh/Hindu/Muslim cabbie is the one they avoid.
    • The sheer number of plane crashes that blocked runways is especially odd. Rayford's flight to London is diverted to Chicago, despite the fact there are crashed airliners (plural) on that airport's runways. That a large number of flights are still diverted to this airport suggest all other airports are worse. It's as if every PMD-Christian pilot was trying to land his plane at the exact time of the rapture.
    • The pilot of a Concorde, bound for the US from France, reports that his flight "lost nearly fifty" passengers in the Rapture. Concorde carried exactly 100 passengers. As Fred Clark puts it, "LaHaye and Jenkins would have us believe that nearly 50 born-again, evangelical Christian millionaires were visiting Paris and were willing and able to spare no expense to return to New York City as fast, and in as much luxury, as humanly possible." However, there could have been children on board that were raptured.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: A couple of thermobaric missiles and a 'daisy cutter' is indeed overkill, as said payload is dropped onto Petra on Carpathia's orders. Too bad it doesn't work out the way he had hoped.
  • Which has absolutely nothing on Russia launching every single nuclear and conventional weapon it had against Israel, a country which (in real life) is smaller than Massachusetts.
• Thermal Dissonance: All over the place with the Tribulation Force and believers in Christ during the lethal Heat Wave caused by one of God's Bowl Judgments in the book series, as vehicles and structures owned and used by them are protected from the high temperatures.
• Thousand-Year Reign: What Kingdom Come is all about.
• Throwing Out the Script: In Apollyon, when Chaim Rosenzweig is asked to appear on TV to give his explanation for the sun giving out only one-third of its sunlight due to one of the Trumpet Judgments taking place (though Chaim isn't convinced that it is the hand of God at work), he is given a script by the Global Community that has him parrot the party line's explanation of some scientific cosmic disturbance causing the phenomenon that even Rosenzweig as a botanist can see through. He chooses to appear on TV but speaks his own mind instead, almost directing people to Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah's website before being pulled off the air.
• Time Skip: A few of them right in Kingdom Come. It starts off at the beginning of the Millennium, then jumps to 93 years later where it stays for most of the story, then it jumps right to the end of the Millennium.
  • Several time jumps are evident in the main storyline and prequel novels.
• Together in Death: Dwayne and Trudy Tuttle at the same time in Assassins, Buck and Chloe Williams about a year apart in Armageddon, and Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah with his wife. Fortunately, since they're Christians, they also get to come back with Jesus.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Events occur that would cause Richard Dawkins or other hard-core atheists to spontaneously convert to some form of religion, yet somehow the non-believers depicted in the series refuse to see it, even when it becomes too evident to just be dismissed.
  • Nicolae Carpathia fulfills Scriptural prophecy about himself to a T without any deviation, thinking that he's going to succeed against God and Jesus Christ despite growing evidence that he isn't.
    • The Other Light in Kingdom Come somehow manages to outdo him. They have Nicolae's unfortunate example to learn from, along with the scriptures predicting they will build up a massive army under Lucifer to make war on Christ and the Father on the last day, only for said army to be disintegrated in a second by divine lightning. Armed with this knowledge, what does the Other Light do? They build up a massive army under Lucifer to make war on Christ and the Father on the last day and expect to succeed. And...
  • The Only Light subsect of the Other Light faction in Kingdom Come, believing God and Jesus don't exist despite the contrary evidence.
• Toppled Statue: In Desecration, protesters at the Temple Mount destroyed the golden Nicolae Carpathia statue just as it was about to be erected inside the Jewish Temple itself, signaling the coming downfall of the self-proclaimed king of the world 3 1/2 years later.
• Totally Radical: Some of the lingo used by the characters reveals the eras that the authors grew up in.
  "Well, sir, I don’t know what to tell you, but it is a pity you’re not getting the services of the new pilot. I know him and he’s tops."
• Translator Microbes: Subverted in the series. Though the Antagonist is the Anti-Christ and has the power of mass-hypnosis, he still speaks nearly every major language and will give speeches in all of them. Consecutively.
  • Played straight with the Christian characters when preaching, though, in that the Holy Spirit makes it so that everyone hears the sermons in their own languages.
• Trash the Set: The Abomination of Desolation (Carpathia defiling the rebuilt Temple with pig's blood and placing his image and throne inside the rebuilt Temple) in Desecration.
  • God Himself destroying the desecrated Temple in Kingdom Come.
• Trilogy Creep: Was originally planned to be one novel, then was changed to a trilogy, and ultimately ended up being thirteen books, not counting prequels or spin-offs.
• Truth Serum: Chloe Williams was given one by the GC while she was incarcerated in a Statesville, IL prison in the book Armageddon. However, with God's help, Chloe was able to not give the GC any answers regarding the Tribulation Force.
• Try Not to Die: In the Dramatic Audio of Apollyon, after going through the escape plan to get Tsion, Chloe and Buck out of Israel, Rayford asks for some more advice from Mac. Mac's response: "Don't get shot."
• United Europe: Most of continental Europe becomes the United European States during the time of the Tribulation, with Greece and Romania becoming part of the United Carpathian States.
• United Nations Is a Superpower: And with Nicolae Carpathia taking the helm and becoming its Secretary-General, it evolves into a tyrannical One World Order.
• Utopia: Jesus Christ's Millennial Reign in Kingdom Come is a utopia for "naturals" as long as they obey God's laws. They have all the amenities of the technological world (Sort of: the book was written in 2007, but with a few exceptions the tech level is firmly stuck in the mid-90s, when the series began), have eternal life, perpetual sunshine, no war or violence. Even non-believers can live for a hundred years in perfect health.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Carpathia seems to be promising this, and this is God's motivation for every last thing he does.

V-Z

• Variable-Length Chain: The Archangel Michael has one for binding up Satan before tossing him into the Bottomless Pit in the book Glorious Appearing.
• Veganopia: In the Millennium Kingdom, everyone is a vegetarian. It was only at the wedding feast at the beginning of the Millennium that the meat restriction was lifted for that event.
• Vehicular Sabotage: In the Dramatic Audio adaptation of Glorious Appearing, some GC hooked up grenades to Mac McCullum's helicopter in the hopes that it would blow up when he takes off in it. The sabotage fails to destroy the helicopter, though, thanks to Mac's faith in God.
• Video Will: The taped message Pastor Vernon Billings leaves behind for his church to distribute in case the Rapture happens, which Rayford Steele receives a copy of from Bruce Barnes, explaining what has happened and what to do in case it happens.
• Villain Ball: Several minor bad guys seem to do their evil business the old-fashioned way, ignoring the opportunities the Rapture presents. Like the burglar who robs Steele's house instead of one of the many abandoned homes where the families where Raptured, and stealing a child's bike (every child on the planet has vanished, remember?). Or The Omniscient Council of Vagueness who stages a faked suicide when killing Buck's insider. This is within two days tops since more than a billion people worldwide vanished without a trace, which suggest a much better way to cover up the murder.
  • Perhaps the most extreme example is Carpathia's plan which consists of fulfilling every step of prophecy wherein he ultimately loses... in the hopes that he will somehow win at the end. Same thing with Satan.
• Villain Override: The Indwelling.
• Villain Song: Nicolae Carpathia's own self-indulgent national anthem "Hail Carpathia", which gets twisted by Buck Williams into "The Villain Sucks" Song "Fail Carpathia".
• Villain with Good Publicity: Carpathia has the entire world eating out of his hands from Day One.
• Voice of the Resistance: Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah himself and Buck Williams' online publication The Truth during the Tribulation; The Other Light's If It's True manifesto during the Millennial Reign.
• Was Too Hard on Him: An extreme example. God or Jesus Christ didn't enjoy bringing the final judgement to the wicked, as Jesus sadly watches the Antichrist, the False Prophet, and all those who rejected Him throughout the ages go to their appointed doom.
• Wartime Wedding: If you count the seven-year Tribulation period as being a war, then the few weddings that took place during that time would count: Tribulation Force members Rayford Steele and Amanda White, Buck Williams and Chloe Steele, amd Ming Toy and Ree Woo. (Judd Thompson Jr. and Vicki Byrnes of the Young Tribulation Force would also count.) Rayford's marriage to Amanda lasts for about three months at the most, as Amanda dies in a plane crash during the Wrath Of The Lamb earthquake, and Buck's marriage to Chloe lasts until a year before Jesus Christ's glorious appearing at the Battle of Armageddon, when she is captured and put to death by the Global Community. The only bright spot of Buck and Chloe's wedding is that they have produced a son, Kenny Bruce, during the years they were married.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We're told that Russia emptied their arsenals at Israel. We're told that the attack failed completely. We're not told how things went for Russia afterwards, now that they had shown their willingness to use nuclear force and were unable to retaliate.
  • Another element that gets buried with no resolution is the document Bruce Barnes was working on before his death, that the Tribulation Force spend a lot of ink, paper, and money trying to print out.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When it comes to anything Hattie-related, Rayford does some very reckless things. Leah Rose and Albie call him out on that.
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: In Glorious Appearing, when Chaim Rosenzweig realizes that the Lord won't appear exactly seven years after the signing of the treaty between Israel and the Global Community to the exact hour, he predicts that the Lord's coming will happen around midnight Israel time. And sure enough, that's what happens, when the Global Community Unity Army try to storm Petra around that time and find themselves temporarily immobilized by a supernatural blackout that occurs for about a minute before the Lord's appearing in the sky with His heavenly army.
• Where Are They Now: In Kingdom Come, we see the fates of the extended members of the Tribulation Force.
• Widowed at the Wedding: In the first book, the Rapture takes place at the same time that a couple is getting married, and the groom (who is a Christian) is the one who gets taken up, leaving the bride without her husband. Technically he's only Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence, but imagine how crushed she would feel to see her husband mysteriously vanish leaving only his tuxedo behind, not to mention confused if she didn't know there was such a thing as the Rapture.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Carpathia, hands down. Once fully indwelt, he becomes Drunk on the Dark Side, and Satan himself gives Carpathia a pretty deserved "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• With Us or Against Us: Ultimately, it comes down to two choices - join God or Satan through the Global Community in the Tribulation and The Other Light in the Millennium.
• Words Can Break My Bones: Jesus' words when He arrives at the Battle of Armageddon, consisting of proclaiming who He is and reciting Bible verses, slays all his enemies at once. Then again, what do you expect from the One who is called The Word Of God, which Scripture says is "sharper than any two-edged sword"?
• World-Healing Wave: A rather slow one, as God and Jesus spend a few months restoring the earth to its former beauty following the end of the Tribulation to make it new for the Millennial Kingdom.
  • Also possibly played straight in Glorious Appearing, when a nearly devastated Jerusalem is instantly restored and void of any dead bodies littering the streets after Jesus gets rid of the Global Community.
• Worst News Judgment Ever:
  • Every child on the planet has just disappeared, along with a great many Christians. The planet is plagued by horrific plane crashes and car accidents as a result. The Pope himself is gone, and the Catholic church has fallen into disarray. What stories do Global Weekly consider the most important to cover? A convention of Jews in New York, and a recent recall election in Romania. This stuff wouldn't be front page material on a slow news day.
  • There is a throwaway line that retcons that those events were covered in the previous issue (as if they wouldn't still be news a week later).
  • "Ladies and gentlemen, we have an urgent news bulletin! A minor reporter from the Midwest whom you have never heard of and who nobody but his 3 friends really care about is feared dead following a "mysterious car bombing"! In other news, all children in the entire world vanished last night. Experts say it was likely the result of "excess electromagnetism" or some shit, so in other words we have no idea and it could happen again to all of us at any second. In sports news..."
  • The fact that Air Force One is getting a new pilot is big news. Despite the fact that the pilot of Air Force One is, you know, an Air Force pilot and wouldn't be hired off the street. While arguably a prestigious position, even aviation magazines probably aren't going to be covering this event in light of everything else that's happened to that point.
• You All Meet in an Inn
  • At The Party: The Global Gala, located in Jerusalem.
  • At The Stadium: The meeting of the 144,000 witnesses at Teddy Kollek Stadium, organized by Eli and Moishe.
  • At The Temple: The dedication of the rebuilt Temple in Kingdom Come.
  • At The Western Wall: Buck and Tsion's meeting with Eli and Moishe. Buck is hearing them speak in English, whereas Tsion is hearing them in Hebrew.
  Eli: I am Eli. This is Moishe.
  Buck: (to Tsion, whispering) English?
  Tsion: (to Buck, whispering) Hebrew.
• You Are in Command Now: After Chloe is executed by guillotine, Lionel Whalum takes over running the Co-Op until the Glorious Appearing.
  • At the end of the Millennial Period in Kingdom Come, Jesus returned the Kingdom to His Father and became "subject to Him (God) that subjected all things under His (Jesus) feet."
• You Can See That, Right?: In The Remnant, Mac McCullum sees the Archangel Michael beckoning him to come down to the river near a water dam in India. He asks his companions Abdullah Smith and Albie if they also see him, and Abdullah says it's probably a "cowboy marriage" (he meant "mirage").
• You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good!: What Jesus pretty much says to the Antichrist in His "The Reason You Suck" Speech to him before he is sentenced to the Lake of Fire: every blessing God gave him was wasted for serving Satan.
• You Have No Chance to Survive: See Your Days Are Numbered below.
• You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With: After Satan indwells Carpathia at the end of The Indwelling, he makes the following promise:
  Carpathia: There are those among you, however, who have referred overtly to me personally as the Antichrist and this period of history as the Tribulation. You may take the following as my personal pledge...the word tribulation will not begin to describe what is in store for you. If the last three and a half years are your idea of tribulation, wait until you endure the Great Tribulation.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In the prequel books, Marilena Carpathia, the mother of Nicolae Carpathia, was killed off when Nicolae, still a child, was old enough to be cared for by his mentor Viv Ivins. His two biological fathers, who were living together off payments from the corporation that funded the genetic project that brought forth Nicolae, were later killed off.
  • Also pretty much applies to anyone in Nicolae's circle of advisers in the Global Community.
  • Carpathia tries to pull this on Rayford and Hattie. It does not work.
• Your Days Are Numbered:
  • Conversed with Nicolae Carpathia and Buck Williams in the Dramatic Audio version of the book Desecration.
  Nicolae Carpathia: Your days are numbered, my friend.
  Buck Williams: As are yours, "my friend".
  • Anyone who takes the Mark of the Beast and worships his image in the series is also in the same state.
  • Literally the case with the Two Witnesses, as their days of prophesying end after 1260 days.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Plenty in the series.
  • Nicolae threatens to kill Tsion Ben-Judah during the meeting of the 144,000 after his bottle of water turns to blood, but is stopped by the arrival of Eli and Moishe.
  • Carpathia kills the Two Witnesses at the midpoint of the Tribulation, but God revived them and returned them to heaven.
  • Chaim assassinates Carpathia soon thereafter... for all the good it ultimately does.
• You Watch Too Much X: George Sebastian thinks that his Global Community captors have watched too many movies when they do things like blow smoke in his face to get him to talk in Desecration.
• Zip Mode: In Glorious Appearing, Jesus does this on a massive scale to what's left of the human population, transporting them from around the world to the Valley of Jehoshaphat near Jerusalem for the Sheep and Goats judgment.

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