"Clarence Larkin...describes a possible timetable for the end of the world including the...Great Tribulation." -Your Pain Is Changing You (2014)

"Fundamentalist pastors like Clarence Larkin theorized that the 7th day...corresponded to the millennial reign of Christ when Christians would finally enter into true rest." -The True Bible Timeline (2021)

"The Lord told me to go fetch the book The Greatest Book on Dispensational Truth in the World by Clarence Larkin...it is not the whole world that goes through the tribulation." - How to Live in the Millennium (2017)

Are we currently living in the Millennium? When does the Great Tribulation start? Will there be rapture?

In 1920, Baptist pastor, Clarence Larkin (1850-1924) answers these questions and more in his famous book "The Greatest Book on 'Dispensational Truth' in the World."

Clarence Larkin was a Bible teacher and author whose writings on Dispensationalism had a great impact on conservative Protestant visual culture in the 20th century, His intricate and influential charts provided readers with a visual strategy for mapping God's action in history and for interpreting complex biblical prophecies.

In introducing his book, he explains:

"While the Bible is a revelation from God, it is not written in a superhuman or celestial language. If it were, we could not understand it. Its supernatural origin however is seen in that fact that it can be translated into any language and not lose its virility or spiritual life giving power, and when translated into any language it fixes that language in its purest form. The language however of the Bible is of three kinds. Figurative Symbolical and Literal."

About the author:

Larkin was born on October 28, 1850, in Chester, Pennsylvania, and died on January 24, 1924.

He became a Baptist and was ordained as a Baptist minister two years later, going directly from business into the ministry. His study of the Scriptures led him to adopt many of the tenets of the premillennialist theology that was gaining favor in conservative Protestant circles in the Gilded Age. He began to make large wall charts, which he titled "Prophetic Truth," for use in the pulpit. These led to invitations to teach elsewhere. During this time he published a number of prophetical charts, which were widely circulated and contributed articles for the Sunday School Times.

In 1918, he completed Dispensational Truth, but high demand for the work led him to produce a greatly expanded edition of 1920. Larkin was an advocate of gap creationism.

Notable works

Rightly Dividing the Word; The Book of Daniel; Spirit World; Second Coming of Christ; and A Medicine Chest for Christian Practitioners, a Handbook on Evangelism.

The Greatest Book on "Dispensational Truth" in the World contains dozens of charts and hundreds of pages of descriptive matter. He spent three years designing and drawing the charts and preparing the text, which remains in print. It is a thoroughgoing defense of premillennialist dispensationalism that draws on the major themes found in the works of figures like C.I. Scofield, William Eugene Blackstone, and John Nelson Darby.

Like C. I. Scofield, he postulated seven separate dispensations—the current being the "Dispensation of Grace," "Church Dispensation," "Ecclesiastical Dispensation," or "Parenthetical Dispensation." This position held that the church age filled a "gap" in the timeline of biblical prophecy.