Jerry B. Jenkins has been writing books for more than 50 years. By his count, The Battle for Heaven and Earth is No. 216. Yet when Dallas Theological Seminary President Mark M. Yarbrough first approached him about the project, Jenkins’ instinct was to try to talk him out of it.

That didn’t last.

The more Jenkins heard about Yarbrough’s idea to tell the story of Scripture through fiction, the more interested he became. The result is The Battle for Heaven and Earth, a novel that reaches back to Lucifer’s rebellion, creation and the fall of humanity.

King Kulture spoke with Jenkins about writing the book with Yarbrough, why believable villains matter, the problem with bad Christian storytelling, what decades of enormous sales have taught him and how he thinks about the influence of Left Behind more than 30 years later. King Kulture also spoke with Yarbrough in a separate interview about biblical fiction and where imagination has to stop.

You’ve written more than 200 books. Why did this story need to be told?

I get asked a lot to help people with their books, obviously after doing Left Behind and The Chosen novels, and most of them I just can’t work into my schedule. I’ve got plenty of my own ideas and things to do.

I was actually asked by Mark Yarbrough to consult with him on this and maybe point him to a writer or two. My recollection is I tried to talk him out of this because it’s so hard and the industry is tough right now.

But the more I heard about his idea, the more I loved it. I’ve seen a few other novels about angels and things like that, but him being a theologian and a scholar, something I’ve never been accused of, I was really intrigued by the idea of trying to tell the story of Scripture in fictionalized form.

That sounds like a strange thing to do, but we both believe in the veracity of Scripture and want to tell that story as accurately as possible, while having the literary license to invent characters and dialogue and imagine what things could have been like.

That’s what appealed to me, so I agreed to come alongside. It’s been great fun. I don’t think I’ve been as excited about a project since Left Behind.

If we come back 10 years from now and this book has done everything you hoped it would do, what happened?

Well, I’ll probably be in heaven.

Mark wants to do the entire Bible, and this one only takes us through the beginning. The whole Bible would take dozens of books. I’d have to be doing those from heaven, I guess.

What we really hope people take away from this is that there’s real interest in the unseen world. We know there was a rebellion in heaven, but I don’t think we think a lot about the angels having free will and freedom of choice.

I think there’s a story there for us because we tend to lean toward our own wills too, and pride takes over. Here I am a senior citizen, and I still battle wanting my own way and catching myself saying, “If I were God, here’s how I would do this.”

We’re hoping people will be urged back to their faith, back to church, back to the Bible and Scripture, and seek out for themselves what Scripture says.

How does writing a book with somebody else actually work? What does each of you bring to it?

This has been unique. A lot of people will see my name on here with a theologian and scholar the way they did with Left Behind and Dr. LaHaye. But the difference is that with Dr. LaHaye, it was his idea and he kept me on track theologically, but I did all the writing. Every word of the Left Behind series I wrote.

With this one, Mark is actually writing that first rough draft. He’s not a novelist or fiction writer. He’s brilliant and he’s creative. He writes music. He’s an amazingly creative person, but he’s not a fiction writer.

That’s what I bring to the table. I come along and turn it into a novel.

When we disagree, I tend to defer because I’m not a theologian or scholar. I’m a writer. I was raised in the same tradition and believe the Bible is the Word of God, but it’s his idea and he has full veto power over every word, which is the way I want it.

We don’t disagree on much. Usually when we do, it’s just me saying, “I never thought of it that way. Why is it that way?” He explains it, and I get it.

Was there anything you wanted to put in the book that one of you finally said, “No, that’s going too far”?

There were a few places where I found his original idea a little cheesy or gushy. I think he was trying to think like a novelist, and I was saying understated is even better. Less is more.

I’d say, “Tell me what you’re getting at, what you’re trying to say here, and let me take a run at it.”

That’s probably the only place we had that. I don’t remember anything specific other than style.

Lucifer doesn’t start out as some cartoon version of evil. We watch pride slowly twist things that were originally good. Why was it important to tell it that way?

There’s sort of an irony in the definitions of fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is obviously made up. Nonfiction has to be true. But to be successful, fiction has to be believable, and nonfiction has to be unbelievable.

You see a nonfiction book about somebody who claims they’ve been to heaven and back or died and came back to life, and something really off the wall becomes a bestseller. With fiction, you tell a story that doesn’t ring true and people say, “That would never happen. That doesn’t make sense.”

That’s the challenge.

I felt that way about Lucifer when I was writing Left Behind, too. I didn’t want it to sound like a comic book with just highlights. I wanted character development. I wanted people to identify with the characters and really believe they could be there.

With Lucifer, I wanted the reader to be able to identify with that character even though he’s a supernatural being. That’s where those conversations come in where Gabriel and Michael are talking to him and trying to understand what’s wrong. He’s not happy about something, and they’re puzzled.

I think that makes him much more identifiable to the reader.

He doesn’t go around saying, “I’m evil.” He talks about freedom and takes things that sound good and twists them. Is that how you think evil usually works?

That’s really exactly the way I was thinking.

One of the things I teach writers is that villains don’t see themselves as villains. They don’t call themselves villains. The biggest mistake a beginning writer can make is to have the villain come on the scene and virtually have the mustache they twirl, the cape and the dark hat.

They think they’re right. Oftentimes they have a background that, in their mind, justifies what they’re doing. Maybe they were abused as a child. Maybe somebody did them wrong. They say, “I’m going to make this right. This is what should happen.”

You want to have a good bad guy, for lack of a better term.

That’s where Lucifer was too. He’s seeing all this worship of God and thinking, “Am I being forced to do this? Do I have to do this? Why can’t some of this praise come to me?”

He starts imagining that worship and singing being directed to him and becomes addicted to that. That’s what he wants.

If God knew this was going to happen and could have stopped it, why didn’t He? Does the answer in the book make sense to you personally?

It does, I have to say. It would be really interesting to hear Mark’s answer to this too.

I’m not sure that question is going to be answered until we get to heaven. It’s the question so many people ask. People who deconstruct their faith or leave the faith, or consider themselves atheists or agnostics, ask: If God is behind this, did He create evil? If He knew it was coming, why didn’t He stop it? If He’s all-powerful, why does He allow people to suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people?

I’m not sure we answer the question. In one sense, we give God the floor.

He’s saying it’ll all come to light in the end. I think it’s a question we’ll still be asking when we get to heaven, and I’ll be eager to hear the answer myself.

Right in the middle of everything going wrong, God tells Michael, “See My beauty.” Why was beauty important enough to put right there?

That was one of Mark’s ideas, and I was fascinated by it because at that point we’re finally starting to really relate to the angels.

We’re starting to identify with Michael. God is asking him to fight on His behalf, and that’s tough. He’s seeing setbacks and struggle. He’s frustrated.

Then God is telling him, “See My beauty. Don’t dwell on the negative.”

I think that’s a message for all of us. It’s hard in this life because we face so many trials. My own son is on the front lines with The Chosen, and I had to counsel him that now that he’s on the front lines, he’ll face more opposition than he’s ever felt. They’ve seen illness, disease, tragedy and setbacks in their own family.

We need to focus on the bigger picture and believe God is sovereign, that He’s in control, that He knows about this. He’s still our fortress and our shield.

Again, we won’t understand it all until heaven, but we want to focus on the positive.

Do Christians sometimes care so much about getting the message right that they forget the story has to be good?

Yeah, I think that’s been the problem with Christian storytelling for a long time.

A lot of us talk about it and complain about it. Why does it have to be so cheesy?

When I was a kid, I grew up in a fundamentalist church where you didn’t even go to movies. Then you come of age and say, “Well, I could see a Christian movie.” You’ll hear people see a Christian movie, and it may be the worst storytelling and the cheesiest thing you’ve ever seen, and they’ll say, “That’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.”

Well, it may be, but you realize they’ve never seen Schindler’s List. They’ve never seen Gone With the Wind. They’ve never seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or some of these greats.

The story has to work. You have to make it so people are magnetized and addicted to turning pages and continuing to see. I always teach writers that you want setups that demand payoffs. They have to make sense.

For so long we’ve had things that look like church-basement videos and then people praise them.

People tell me all the time, “We’re going to try the same model your son did with The Chosen. We’re going to crowdfund and get people behind it.”

I tell them that’s a great model, but it isn’t the model that worked. It’s the quality of the production. It has to be good to work.

Quality will always win out.

You’ve spent your career telling stories to regular people, not just church people. What do Christians still get wrong about trying to reach the rest of the culture?

I think the biggest error is not understanding where your audience is coming from.

I think one of the secrets to the success of Left Behind was that Dr. LaHaye kept telling me, “I want to reach the uninitiated as well.” So how do we do that?

I wish I could take credit for this, but I think I stumbled onto it: Have credible skeptical characters.

The other side isn’t a caricature where the good guys all use Christian platitudes and lingo and the bad guys all swear and do the wrong things.

There are people who were left behind who are as nice, wonderful and generous, or even better people, than some of those who were taken. The ones who were taken weren’t better people. They were forgiven people.

Make sure not all the skeptics come to faith and grow up to marry Christians and have kids who become missionaries. We always had this sort of pie-in-the-sky response where everything works out for the good guys.

I wanted somebody to speak for the skeptic. If they’re reading about the Rapture and saying, “You’re saying God is behind this? This is chaos and death. How can God have anything to do with this?” I want characters to ask that question and force my believing characters to answer it with credibility.

That’s one of the biggest mistakes: We make caricatures out of the other side.

You’ve had a level of success almost nobody who writes books ever gets. What has that taught you about what sales can tell you and what they can’t?

That’s been a tricky thing for me.

People assume with all the books I’ve done and as successful and visible as I’ve been that I was called to write. Actually, I wasn’t called to write. I wanted to be a writer, and I love being a writer. But when I was young, I felt called to full-time Christian work.

I was willing to give up writing and my dream of being a sports editor someday so I could be a missionary or pastor or whatever that meant. A counselor told me, “Don’t be too quick to give up the writing because God often equips us before He calls us.”

That has proven true.

I succeed when I finish writing a book and send it to the publisher. I can’t make it a bestseller. I can’t make it get good reviews. I can’t make it pay me big money. All those things have happened in my career, but my view of success is almost antithetical to society’s view.

It’s not about the number of sales or income. It’s answering the call you’re called to.

Books that don’t sell, I’ve still obeyed. I’ve still done what I’m supposed to do. Maybe only a few people are affected by them, but that was the purpose.

Have you ever looked back at something you wrote that was a huge success and thought, “I wouldn’t write that the same way today”?

Well, I hope so, because I want to be a lifelong learner.

My goal has always been to make each book better than the previous one, which gets harder and harder. This book we’re talking about today is my 216th. The bar keeps rising.

People ask whether I cringe when I look at something I wrote 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t, and here’s why.

Would I write it differently today? Absolutely. I’ve learned enough over the decades that I should write it a lot better.

But I take comfort in the fact that I wrote the best book I knew how to write at that time. I took everything I knew then and wrote the best book.

Today I might say, “I wouldn’t say this. I’d change that.” But I think that’s a healthier way to look at it than cringing over what you’ve done before. Know that you did the best you could at the time.

Your son Dallas has become a storyteller in his own right with The Chosen. Has he taught you anything you didn’t already know?

Oh, yeah. I learn a lot from Dallas.

We’re in really separate disciplines, but he may consult me on a story problem and say, “We’ve got the character to this place and want to get him here. What would make sense? We don’t want a coincidence or a deus ex machina where God just miraculously gets the person there.”

So we talk through those things.

When I see him talk about creative imagining and plausibility, when you’re working with Scripture you never want to violate Scripture and you never want to add to or take away from the Gospel. But he’ll introduce characters and dialogue that don’t exist in Scripture and say, “This is what it could have looked like.”

I think people give him literary license, and they do the same for me when I’m writing.

He’s often talking about bringing his five loaves and two fish and letting God handle the multiplication. The results aren’t his job.

That’s really what I learned in being called to full-time Christian work rather than being called to writing. If I were called to writing, I might live and die by bestsellers and sales figures. But the results aren’t up to you.

Looking back more than 30 years later, is there anything about the end times that you see differently now than when you started Left Behind?

I’m not sure I see anything different prophetically. Again, I’m not a scholar or theologian, but I was raised in that tradition and I believe in a premillennial, pretribulational Rapture.

I remember Dr. LaHaye was really married to the idea that the Rapture was going to happen soon. He would say, “I believe the Rapture is going to happen in my lifetime.” I used to tease him and say, “Well, then it’s going to have to happen soon, isn’t it?”

He’s been gone 10 years now.

One thing I’ve learned is that I think all the prophecies that need to be fulfilled before the Rapture have taken place, so it could be today. We’re supposed to watch and wait expectantly, and I do that.

But I’ve also learned that God’s economy of time is totally different than ours. Scripture says a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. If He in His mercy waits one more day, that could be a thousand of our years.

I’m not going to sell everything I own, go up on a mountaintop and wait for the Rapture to happen today, even though it might.

Every time I see what’s happening on the news, I think we’re closer than we’ve ever been. It seems like something’s about to happen. It could be soon, but it could be another millennium.

Those books helped shape the way millions of Christians think about the end times. Do you feel a personal responsibility for what people do with those ideas?

It’s amazing to me, the staying power of that series.

I just got sales statistics the other day. Here we are 31 years later since the first one came out, and we’re pushing the 64 million mark in unit sales.

I still hear from people almost every day who say they came to faith through it, or somebody in their family did.

It’s an unspeakable privilege. People ask what it’s like to have a phenomenal international hit and all the means that come with it. That’s great and it’s wonderful, but it pales in comparison to people saying they literally went from death to life or from darkness to light.

People tell novelists all the time, even secular novelists, “Your book changed my life.” When they told Dr. LaHaye and when they tell me, they mean it literally.

Nothing can compare with that.

How much should what a Christian believes about the end times affect the way they vote, the policies they support or the way they look at what’s happening in the world?

I’m sort of not a political animal. I’m a conservative. I make no apologies for being pro-life. I think that makes sense, and I think that’s biblical. I see a lot of negative issues on both sides of the aisle nowadays.

I believe the Bible tells us we’re to support Israel and pray for peace and pray for Israel. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with every decision they make militarily or politically.

One of the reasons I never tell how I vote is there’s no value in me alienating potentially half of my constituency.

I’m trying to teach writing. I’m trying to fulfill my call to full-time Christian work by writing Christian books. If somebody disagrees with me politically, they could say, “I’m never going to read your books again.” It’s irrelevant.

And I’m not talking about that just from a marketing standpoint.

Some people say, “If I don’t believe in a pretribulation or premillennial Rapture, does that mean I’m not saved?”

What we’re supposed to do is confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised Him from the dead. That’s how you get saved. The other stuff is peripheral.

It’s fun to talk about. It’s interesting to study. But it doesn’t make or break your salvation.

Is there a point where looking for prophecy to come true turns into trying to help make it come true? Where’s that line for you?

I think there are people who say, “We need to do this. We need to accomplish this so that God will do this.”

We’re not going to impact what God does. God’s going to do what God’s going to do.

I don’t think there’s anything we can do to help facilitate it. What we need to do is facilitate telling people what’s coming so that they’re not left behind.

Have you ever seen people take Left Behind or the theology behind it somewhere and thought, “That’s not what we meant”?

You see people go to extremes.

What’s funny, and this happens with The Chosen as well, is when there’s criticism, people will say people are substituting Left Behind or The Chosen for the Bible or for their church.

That’s not what we hear from people at all.

I still hear from people almost every day saying Left Behind sent them back to church, back to their faith and back to Scripture. Dallas is hearing the same thing about The Chosen.

We want people back in Scripture. Study this for yourself. Get to know Jesus for yourself.

We just want to be facilitators of that.

The Battle for Heaven and Earth: A Story of Scripture Novel by Mark M. Yarbrough and Jerry B. Jenkins is scheduled for release Nov. 3 from Thomas Nelson. Pre-order the book on Amazon and pre-save The Battle for Heaven and Earth: The Soundtrack.