Randy Alcorn - Deadline

This is a work of fiction. While it contains many factual details which are the product of careful research, it intermingles these with fictitious settings and persons. The newspaper portrayed in the novel is a composite of various newspapers around the country. It is not a depiction of any single paper. While many of the things described at the newspaper have in fact happened, they have involved different people in different places, and have been adapted and interwoven. All of the books characters are likewise fictitious.

As to those events and dialogues in the afterlife, it should go without saying that these are fiction! The information, direct and indirect, Scripture provides us about the world to come is substantial, with just enough detail to help us envision it, but not so much to make us think we can fully comprehend it. I believe God expects us to recognize the limits and flaws of our imaginations, but to utilize them nonetheless. To his followers Jesus says heaven, not earth, is our real home. That eternal home, which has always been a source of great encouragement and daily perspective to Gods people, has in the modern western world become so eclipsed by the here and now that many believers virtually never give a thought to the realm where their true citizenship resides. But what could be more natural and healthy than to think about home and the relationships and sustaining values it represents? As C. S. Lewis said, It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.

Secular bookstores are now burgeoning with accounts of afterdeath experiences and interactions with angelic beings, many of them unbiblical and misleading, some fatally so. If those who believe the Scriptures fail to reverently exercise our God-given imaginations where the Bible opens the door for us to do so, we will leave all portrayals of the eternal realm in the hands of those unconcerned with fidelity to Gods Word. This, it seems to me, justifies the inherent risks in attempting to portray the other side of death in a way more consistent with biblical truth.

I have therefore taken biblically revealed truths and developed (hopefully not distorted) them in a speculative (hopefully not reckless) fashion. I have carefully studied the biblical accounts of the afterlife and sought only to include concepts and portrayals which conform to or at least do not violate any biblical teaching. While much herein is extrabiblical, I have sought never to be unbiblical, though peoples different backgrounds and interpretations will naturally result in considerable disagreements.

While the experience that awaits us will inevitably prove many of my after-death depictions inaccurate in the details, and all of them woefully incomplete, I have sought to fuel and govern my imagination by the Scriptures. To the extent I have failed in this task, I ask the readersand more importantly, Godsunderstanding and forgiveness.

It is of paramount importance that the readers mind and imagination be submitted to the Word of God as its sole and final authority. This novel lays no claim whatsoever to divine revelation. I have received no such revelation, and even if I claimed to have done so, the only proper response would be to skeptically scrutinize it in light of the Scriptures.

Not only do I not claim infallibility, I specifically and emphatically claim fallibility. Any readers who take issue with my portrayals should not be distracted from contemplating the realities of eternity but all the more encouraged to study the Scriptures to determine what is true (Acts 17:11).

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