As a Thief in the Night
By Roger K. Young
Synopsis: This book is about the signs of the times and the calamities that will occur prior to the coming of Christ. It uses scriptures and teachings of the prophets, together with the author’s speculation, to form a picture about the coming events. It also focuses on physical and spiritual preparedness. This is an expanded version of Young’s original work, and was printed in 2003.
Strong Points: The author often considers multiple possible interpretations of passages, which allows the reader to expand their view a little bit to possibilities. A good selection of scriptures and a fairly good selection of prophets’ teachings are recruited to build the author’s case. Interesting scriptural exegeses were presented, clarifying prophecies of Daniel as they relate to the political history of the Greek/Macedonian influence up until the time of the Maccabean revolt. The sections about spiritual preparedness are motivating. It has a few helpful charts which are useful for getting an understanding of the proposed timeline. This book is an interesting addition to the end times section of the LDS person’s library.
Weak Points: The format of this book is terrible! It is printed on 8.5 x 11 inch paper as though it came off of a computer printer. The author makes extensive and overzealous use of bolding, underlining, and double-underlining of text for emphasis. It is used so much that it is really quite distracting and made the whole thing look messy. Please, for emphasis simple italics work fine. Citations within the book were not very consistent, sometimes incomplete, or even missing. I often thought that the author extended himself a little too far with his predictions; he seemed to think that the Second Coming was impending within the next ten years or so, yet here we are in 2017 (the time of this review) with still much left to occur. There were some interpretations which, while interesting, seemed a little dubious to me. For instance, Young believes that the Gulf War in Iraq/Kuwait was part of the predicted events of the Book of Revelation, and that many of the events spoken of in Revelation have already occurred. Overall, I think Crowther’s Prophecy is probably a better guide to future events.
Interesting: 4/5
Must Read: 3/5
Overall: 3/5
Pages: 223
Selected Quote: “In the early 1800s Satan also began to set up another one of his ‘spiritual kingdoms’ on earth. In circumstances somewhat similar to the restoration of the Lord’s kingdom, the re-establishment of this final, evil spiritual kingdom was brought about in and through a political kingdom in which man of the tenants of this spiritual kingdom already flourished. The evil Spiritual Kingdom of Satan in the last days is one that is based upon the philosophies and tenants of Satan as described above, which is politically known throughout the world as tyranny, communism, Marxism, and fascism.” (p. 24).