My friend's little brother accidentally wound up on a mailing list and has since received multiple copies of The Sign by Robert Van Kampen. Since I'm a masochist atheist I grabbed one of the copies (sadly it is missing the "beautiful, full-color end-times chart") and subjected myself to reading it over the past couple of weeks.
On the one hand, it provides a lot more clarity than I've seen from other sources (mostly internet nuts) about what some end times believers think is happening or will happen soon. Spoiler alert! The Antichrist will be a resurrected Adolf Hitler! On the other hand, it is extremely repetitive, citing the same pieces of scripture over and over and over again. It could probably have been 100 pages shorter and still communicated the same wacky information.
It's amusing to me that the author claims to be a strict literalist in his interpretation and that they spent a supposed 9,000 hours researching and ironing out apparent inconsistencies, but one of the biggest apparent discrepancies - namely, the "mysterious gap" between the 69th and 70th "week of Daniel" - is simply hand-waved away. It's hard for me to reconcile biblical calculus that predicts events occurring with claimed accuracy down to the day, and sometimes hour, with key date(s) being estimated as "between now and someday".
As an outsider, one might think that as believers encounter more and more mental gymnastics to support belief in biblical prophecy that this would lift the veil a little and reveal the underpinnings to be hackneyed bronze age mythology. However, it never ceases to amaze me how strong the cognitive dissonance can be when it comes to mainstream (or, in this case, fringe) religious beliefs.
I rate it 1 out of 10 and would not recommend it to anyone. The TLDR version is Hitler is coming back so make sure you don't dress immodestly in the meantime.
