It’s a match made in heaven (or that’s what Thomas Nelson Publishers must believe). In 3:16: The Numbers of Hope, one of the world’s best-known and best-loved Christian authors takes on the world’s best-known and best-loved Bible verse. Max Lucado has authored over 50 books, with sales exceeding an incredible 50 million copies in print. His books are regularly on the New York Times list of bestsellers and continually dominate the Christian charts (where he has had up to eleven books present at one time). 3:16 is as close as we could expect for a sure-thing bestseller. An unparalleled marketing campaign will all but guarantee it. It is no coincidence that the book will release on 9/11, allowing people to contrast numbers of despair with numbers of hope. The book will also stand as the centerpiece of a major global ministry initiative launching on Palm Sunday, 3/16/08. This book is going to make a splash.

On the one hand, Hanegraaff does a very good job debunking the popular dispensational end-times scenarios set out by the likes of John Hagee and Tim LaHaye. Hanegraaff exposes the embarrassing problem faced by dispensationalists who claim to interpret the Bible literally, and who cannot make good on that promise. While John (Revelation 1:3; 22:10) tells us that the things recorded in his apocalyptic vision are soon to come to pass, dispensationalists are forced to tell us that “near” and “soon” don’t really mean “near” and “soon.” Instead, dispensationalists tell us, these things don’t come to pass until the end of the age—a rather embarrassing problem given their insistence that they take the Bible (especially prophecy) “literally.”