This is boom time for End Times believers

13 Nov 2001

Elizabeth Nickson
National Post, November 9, 2001

Honeyman Dave Harris was tossing my winter wood off his truck at my feet last Saturday afternoon, while I shivered on the porch and watched. Now, Dave was a school teacher and he reads four newspapers a day, so he has his opinions and they stream uncensored from his mouth. He is a conservative so I can listen without suppressed fury and I usually do, even when it's freezing outside, and this year I was rewarded when he mentioned the Antichrist and I remembered the Tribulations. "Holy crow, Dave! Bin Laden's heralding the End Times!" I cry. "Look at the parallels!" Dave is a bit more of a rationalist than I am, so he set his jaw and was polite, but I was in a fit of excitement because the End Times, the Tribulations and the Rapture are a fascination of mine.

I have to admit that sometime in late September I opened the Bible my Prairie school teacher grandmother gave me, in a fortune-telling kind of a way, and came upon the passage: "Babylonia, you are filled with pride, so I, the Sovereign Lord Almighty am against you! The time has come for me to punish you. Your proud nation will stumble and fall, and no one will help you up. I will set your cities on fire and everything around will be destroyed."

Yipes. But who among us has not had such fantasies in recent months? The drumbeat of doom has sounded particularly loud and this is the kind of message a fundamentalist would take seriously, if he were to use the Bible for fortune-telling, which of course, he would not.

Just outside the circle of light drawn by the people who make the trains run on time and the modernist intellectuals who scold them lies a seething mass of people who ignore the whole lot of us and believe we are fast approaching the time Christ will return. Estimates run up to 100 million on the North American continent alone who so believe, another one or two hundred million in evangelized Africa and South America. If you scratch an evangelical, no matter how otherwise sane, he or she will tell you in strictest confidence that yes, we are either there or fast approaching the time when Christ will return. Even quite serious Catholics have been known to express such beliefs, and no matter how their press or pastors or priests deny that these beliefs run unchecked, the End Times belief fuels devotion. As Jerry Jenkins, the co-writer of the Left Behind series of novels, says, "I know more than ever what it means to live in the light of Christ's imminent return." In his case, it means floods of royalty cheques because, if you count Christian bookstores, which The New York Times does not, his series on the Rapture, written with Tim Lahaye, has outsold every fiction book ever written, even Harry Potter.

In 1997, The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin proposed there are hidden coded texts recording all of history in the Hebrew textus receptors of the Torah. The Bible, claimed Drosnin, can be seen as a 3-D hologram with the surface text as the outside layer and the hidden texts found at equidistant letter spacing on the inside layers. Various computer programs were made available to search for hidden code terms in the surface text of the Bible or Torah. This book was so popular, the number one best-selling non-fiction book on The New York Times best-seller list in 1997, that a group of scientists and mathematicians at Cal Tech found it imperative to test Drosnin's theories and send round a petition to others like themselves inviting them to join in saying The Bible Code was absolute rubbish.

Too late. Drosnin and his colleagues sparked a flood of speculation, which boils down to this, more or less, because measurements in this field are inexact: World War III will start immediately after the abomination of desolation in the Temple around February 1, 2006. That means the peace treaty of prophecy will occur on 19/20 September, 2002. Jesus will come to reign on the Earth 1,290 days after the abomination of desolation, on 13/14 August, 2009. The fulfillment of prophecy of Yom Kippur will occur on 27/28 September, 2009, and the fulfillment of Succoth after the judgment of the peoples of the Earth will occur on 2/3 October, 2009, and run for eight days.

Osama bin Laden is the Angel of the Bottomless Pit or the Destroyer mentioned in Revelation 9:11, a demon or unclean spirit from the depths of Hell, who creates the world crisis we are seeing now that will result in the rise to power of the Antichrist, who many believe is the Satanic Christ, Russian President Putin. The Antichrist will appear to be a good man, to be the saviour of mankind, and he will initiate One World Government through the United Nations. Then the Tribulations will start and every modernist plague will run unchecked: disease, economic ruin, famine, nuclear holocaust and so on. There are as many theories of how this will play out as there are words on this page. And if you are in any doubt that these suppositions or theories are not crackling like runaway fire through the Internet, have a read of Revelations 18, the Fall of Babylon.

Now think. If educated Christians can take these signs and weave such dreams of slaughter and despair, what can poverty-stricken Muslims, with no education but a Holy Book written eons ago, dream up? And then you see just how bin Laden and his demonic crew are manipulating the minds of the innocent. Apocalypse is meaty fare, especially for those with little to eat.

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