The Last Friend of God.
Decades after persecution and loss drove him into hiding, one old preacher received a vision from God--in one week, his city will be destroyed. Walter Barnes abandoned his pulpit long ago and has watched as the church he loved faded into silence, giving an increasingly violent world over to its own devices. Now judgment is coming, but like Abraham, Walter has made a wager with God. If he can change the heart of the city, then mercy will have its day. His journey will lead him from the broken streets to the steel citadels of a city that has forgotten him and his faith, forcing him to confront the choices that have haunted him for years. And the clock is ticking.
Perspective by Peter:
I volunteered to review this novel for the author. I am glad I did as this is a wonderful read. Engaging, compelling and confronting, even challenging to our faith and being a Christian, yet all the while being very entertaining.
Johnson also has a very competent and efficient use of the English language. This enables the novel to flow well and is a joy to read. It does not hijack any of the plot or characterisation, pace or flow. You would not know that this is his debut novel.
I was expecting to be tense while reading about the world that Johnson has created here as I have been in similar novels, but I was not. I hate reading about the world as it would be without Christ and where Christianity has been eradicated. But if this is going to be our future reality based on Revelation, it would be foolish to bury one's head in the sand and not read about this just because it is distasteful or offensive to one's faith. Johnson's world-building depicts a very humanistic world with the pursuit of all things pleasurable, especially of the sexual kind and its perversions that are practised, promoted and seen as normal. Johnson also depicts other perversions like this, and it is a very sadomasochistic basis. And just like we see today, it is all under the umbrella of being free to do what we please and not care about the consequences or the detrimental effects it has on others or ourselves.
Johnson also depicts a very selfish, self-focused society, corrupt, deceitful where there is a distinct and wide division between the rich and the poor. This division is based on the Hindu caste system,
This even affects how the city is physically built and laid out,Westernized version of the Hindu caste system, though it was presented in much more vague and positive terms. The original doctrine taught that humanity is divided at birth into specific classes, determined by one’s position on a sort of sliding scale of spiritual enlightenment and evolution.
This idea, repurposed and adjusted for consumption by the Western mind, had mass appeal among the wealthy for obvious reasons. If you were born into wealth, it was because on some spiritual plane you deserved. And if your wealth was of your own making, it was because you had evolved beyond others to achieve it. As for the poor, well, they must reside on a lower spiritual plane, and to provide them aid would simply doom them to more suffering until they were ready to evolve beyond their present limitations.
The Outer Rim—as it was known—was where the wealthy and upper-class resided. It hugged the left edge of the map like a crescent moon or a cartoon mouth opening to eat the town. You could set out west from the City center, and as long as you kept moving, you would eventually find different ground beneath your feet and new, cleaner smells in your nostrils. The streets were smooth and black, freshly paved each spring and free of debris, as if they were never used. The homes there are beautiful, the people civilized and educated. The Outer Rim was where life was still happening, where art and culture still existed. Poor Circle, the middle ring on the map, was where life went to die. But it was home for Walter. The broken, undriveable streets lined on either side by collapsing structures that used to be homes or shops, the occasional brown patch of grass, the boarded up storefronts, all of this was home. These were his people. He knew them and was known by them.
There was one area of the City that Walter simply would not visit, known as the Red District. On the map, it would be the dead center, the circle within Poor Circle. It was the heart of the City, and the only other area besides the Outer Rim that had any sort of functioning economy, though the goods and services traded there would not appear in any ledgers or W-2s. It was the area of the City that everyone spoke of either in hushed tones or drunken whoops, the area toward which the violent, addicted, perverted, and desperate gravitated. The place where every desire, no matter how strange, is embraced and monetized. Walter had known many who had vanished, and when asked about, the only answer given was a discreet mention of the Red.
This forms a solid background that we find Walter in. It is very real and I found myself feeling the distaste, the oppression and the evilness as Walter did. Even more so through the characters of Lola. She personified what the poor go through. She would work as a servant in one of the rich homes in the Outer Rim by day and then be a prostitute in the Red District by night, working in a night club, Unleashed. Even these two jobs brought in very little money, leaving her chronically tired, malnourished, living in a barely furnished flat that was in a constant state of disrepair. All this to survive and provide for her 10-year-old son, Marco. This type of life resulted in a shortened life expectancy and most of these people would die with many medical conditions and deficiencies that rob them of their health. Reading about Lola, you also see that this life creates a toxic environment that would be a fertile ground for depression, anxiety, helplessness, and hopelessness and where suicide is seen as the norm. Your body is left as it is found, no burial, no ceremony. All dignity is gone. All the values that make us human are denied and oppressed.
And as we have seen in real life, there are those who prey upon the weak, the poor, the disadvantaged. Enter Marcus Cutter, the ruling Mafia-type criminal lord who runs Unleashed, deals in crime and drugs and has his henchmen/thugs exact his rule over those who dare to challenge or try to undermine him. He is ruthless, corrupt, uses those in the Poor Circle and the Red District as his means to his ends, to build his empire all the while coming across as if he is the saviour of them. He does this through these tactics and in promising a revolution against the oppression of those of the Outer Rim. His target to do this is by targeting Mayor Bobby Sapp. Bringing him down would provide a means to run his revolution against this regime and replace himself as ruler and provide a "better" service for those in the Poor Circle.
Running through all this is Walter Barnes. In his nineties, he is a shadow of his former self, not just physically, mentally, emotionally but especially spiritually. He is the only one holding onto his faith in God, hence, the title of the novel. He is the Last Friend of God.
Being such means he is the enemy of all. But this happens when he instigates the mission God gives him. Up until then, no-one knew of his faith in a long-forgotten and rejected God. Since walking away from his ministry as Pastor when Christianity was eroded from within the Church and from without, about 50 years ago, he was just a mild-mannered, elderly gentleman who helped those he could and became a handyman, nicknamed Fix.
Most everyone on the streets knew him, though they all referred to him only by his nickname, Fix. That was fine by him. He’d been called much worse.
With the Bible banned in this humanistic society, Walter could only rely on his memory of the Scriptures and over time, he found himself remembering less and less of these. His own Bible had become too aged and worn to survive a soaking from a burst pipe. So he became reliant on prayer.
Prayer had long ago become the one thing Walter believed he could not survive without. He knew it was the only thing that had kept him these many years. The walking was good for his health, along with the manual labor and government-issued vitamins seniors were provided in lieu of the social security programs of the past. But it was prayer that motivated him to walk. It called to him each morning, pulling him out of bed and into his shoes. The desire to be alone with his thoughts and his God.
This was the last and only connection he had to God. It sustained him and kept him from succumbing to the sin and depravity around him. If only Christians today could experience and behave the same! We are still too reliant on ourselves and the resources we have at our disposable. How many times do we pray fervently and persistently only in times of dire circumstances and desperation? We are encouraged to pray without ceasing and to rest in Him giving all our concerns to Him not just when we run out of resources or come to the end of ourselves but in all things.
Such daily supplication on Walter's part prayed directly into the will of God concerning his city. God is not mocked and when his creation turns their back on Him, and sink into sin and depravity, He only allows this for a time before He exacts his judgement and punishment on them. We have many examples in the Bible. Johnson has based this novel similar to on the story of Abraham in Genesis 18: 20-33 where Abraham pleaded with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find 50 decent and good people. God agreed. So it was the same with Walter.
God showed Himself to Walter 3 times, the first as a young boy, the second as a phlebotomist and the third as a homeless man. The first time to present His plan of Judgement of the sin and depravity of the city. He showed Walter that in 6 days, the city would be destroyed with fire and brimstone, but if Walter could find 50 good and decent people the city would be saved. Over these days when no-one responded, he pleaded with God for 20 and when this did not happen, he pleaded again for 5. God relented. It was at this point that I was not convinced that Walter would find those 5!
I can imagine the impact of this mission had on him. Where do you start when everyone is either given over to their sin, they are feeling so helpless and hopeless or have grown up not knowing anything else apart from this sin and behaviour? Being in tune with God and determined to find these people to save the city, he became alert to all options. His first few attempts at witnessing failed. No response. His immediate contacts either did not know how to respond or showed resistance to anything outside their reality. However, one showed up in the form of New Age guru, Juno Ray. Unbeknownst to Walter, Juno is having her own crisis of faith and purpose.
After all her research, meditation, embracing false religions and the preaching of such, she released she was still unhappy and unfulfilled with life. After reading the banned Bible, she finds Solomon's All is Vanity theme (Ecclesiastes 1),
The name King Solomon was only vaguely familiar, like a fairytale from her childhood, but she couldn’t bring any details to mind. She was intrigued by him—a person of seemingly unlimited resources surrendering himself to a life of seeking, of learning. He claimed to have explored everything under the sun and concluded that it was all vanity and vexation of spirit and that the only choice was to serve God and keep his commandments. Which god and which commandments, she had no idea. That wasn’t important. There was no god. There was only this life and the goal of making it as enjoyable and spiritually profitable as one could, living the best life possible. But this man, so much like her, had seemingly enjoyed all life had to offer—riches, wisdom, pleasure, and yet he found it all to be empty in the end. Vanity of vanities…all is vanity. For the first time in decades, Juno Ray slowed down long enough to consider her own pursuit and the emptiness she’d been hiding beneath it for so long.
And as God worked on Juno's heart, Walter found a member of his family, long forgotten and dismissed as having died decades ago. Hope sprung in Walter as he thought this family member would be the answer to finding these 50 people. But all he encountered was more resistance and painful memories of how he lost this family member, his wife, and his church. And then confronted with his own sin: of being silent against the last 50 years of sin and depravity and not professing God and Jesus for who They are and their plan of Salvation. And thrown into the mix, this family member was high up in the hierarchy of the Metropolitan Community Centre that Juno Ray is head of.
What follows in the second half of this novel is where Johnson ties all the plot arcs together. The end result is one action-packed finale and it is more than satisfying. It shows the power of God unto salvation.
This is one faith-strengthening novel. Johnson successfully shows how our relationship with God needs to be especially as we are moving very close to a version of what he has depicted in this novel. I found it very confronting the online and televised debate seen worldwide between Walter and Juno. It showed how we need to know our Bible, its tenets, and its doctrines but above all, we need to know and show the God of this Bible and not be afraid or ashamed of God and His Word. We need to be in a relationship with Him and to know him.
It also shows what can happen when we are obedient and submissive to God. When we let go of ourselves and allow Him to move. It is up to Him to deliver His message to the people. We are His hands and feet, His mouthpiece. He will do the rest.
The most poignant moment for me was at the culmination of these three plot arcs when Walter has a final revelation of what he must do and what his quest was really about! I did not see this coming and the biblical truth of it is not profound but powerful and simple. I pray readers will find this and appreciate it as well.
I am hooked on Johnson's writing now. I look forward with high anticipation for his next novel. He has a passion for God and His Gospel and it shows strongly in this novel. I am very much convinced that this novel is Spirit-guided.
Let this novel challenge you, uplift you, strengthen your faith while it entertains you on a deep level.
Highly Recommended.
The three ratings below are based on my discernment:
World Building 5/5
Characters 5/5
Story 5/5
The two classifications below are based on the booklet, A Spiritual System for Rating Books by David Bergsland:
Spiritual Level 5/5
Enemy Spiritual Level 2/5
Overall Rating: 4.4/5
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Congratulations, Paul!
If you like this novel from my review, you might also like a similar novel about the same:
Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth by James D. Sanderson and its Reader's Guide:
What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?
Will we Christians choose to follow Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will that look like?
'Those Who Dwell Upon The Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Over time their tiny community grows into a full-blown movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?
Before the end times comes the bad times - the Troubles. How will we as Christians respond?
The Reader's Guide is a companion to the novel, 'Those Who Dwell Upon The Earth'. It provides background, literary analysis, critical thought, insights, author information and questions for group discussion.
You can investigate this novel by clicking on the images below:
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