HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #38

Chapter Thirty Seven

 

“We’re back!” Joyce cried joyfully as she looked about her in wonder at the lushness of the landscape, so perfect even in its imperfection. The scene embraced her participation in it, the colors more vivid in their multidimensional hues than anything she could have experienced on Earth. This is so real! Joyce thought with pleasure. The presence of God was everywhere, joyful in His radiance. “Oh, thank you, Wisdom! Will I ever have to go back to Earth?”

“Earth?” She asked with a grin. “What Earth? No. You’re a spiritual being for good now, but you might be going back periodically as you serve at Jesus’ side. But it’ll be your choice and you can return here – home – whenever you wish.”

“Can I see my Sammy now? Oh, where’s Earl? How beautiful this all is!”

“Slow down, darling!” Wisdom responded with a rich laugh. “No, you won’t have to go back this time. You can stay here forever, if that’s what you want to do. There’s a very big event coming up that you’re an important part of. We’ve been waiting for you to come back to it, the marriage of Jesus with His Church. As for Earl, he’s right beside you now, and Sam’s running our way with Earl’s Alicia in hand. Go ahead – merge.”

Without conscious effort, Joyce merged into Earl so that their togetherness was complete. Although they still retained their individuality, they were open to each other’s internal thoughts and emotions, becoming one in a sense that was impossible in the material world. They hugged each other and opened themselves to their former spouses, weeping without restraint in the emotion of the moment.

“Come,” Wisdom said after allowing them time to understand and appreciate their new lives together. “About that event- it will be happening now. For that you’ll be merging with a great many more Christians, those who comprise the spiritual Church. Don’t worry about that, Earl,” She said in response to his brief flash of negativity at this new revelation. You four are a special component of that Church. You’ll be operating together as a unit, so your interaction with others won’t be quite so close. Close enough to experience the mutual love, but not so close as to evoke thoughts of invasion. And wait ‘till you see your bridegroom!”

“Will our marriage be romantic, like between men and women on earth?”

“Yes, but more so. Much more. Jesus Himself gave you the tiniest of hints of that joyful occasion in the Gospel of John, Chapter 2.”

“Oh! I – we – know what it says! We don’t have to remember. It’s imprinted in our beings! Can I recite it?”

“Of course. Go for it!”

“’And the third day there was a marriage in Cana, of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there. And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage. And when they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatever he saith unto you, do it. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he saith unto them, Draw some out now, and bear it unto the governor of the feast. And they bore it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not from where it was (but the servants who drew the water knew), the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine and, when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana, of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.’

 

Wisdom spoke in response. “Besides the obvious fact that, being Jesus’ first miracle in His incarnation, it also was very important, there are a number of nuances in this passage. Do you recognize some of them?”

“Oh, yes! The wedding too, place on the third day, a reference to Jesus’ statements elsewhere that He would rise again on the third day, meaning the third thousand-year period since His resurrection.”

“Yes. Which, according to Psalm 90 and 2 Peter 3:8, would be the sixth millenium after the creation of man, the beginning of the Millennium. That also is why Jesus waited four days to resurrect Lazarus, for His incarnation, death and resurrection was in the fourth millenium, and in raising Lazarus He was prophecying His own resurrection.”

“And then there is the mention of His mother. I think You were there too as His divine Mother.”

“You’re right again, darling. I was there overshadowing Jesus’ earthly mother Mary, and it was a beautiful moment of anticipation for both of us.”

“Did it bother You that the Catholic Church gave all the credit for motherhood to Mary?”

“Of course not! Mary is a very special daughter-in-law to Me, too. I love her very deeply. She did indeed suffer along with Jesus at His crucifixion. And, of course, now that she’s among us and knows her true place, she’s an obedient and loving daughter. She really can’t wait for the marriage!

“Will we individuals, as just components of the Church, be able to participate in that romance?”

“As you already know, your individuality in the spiritual realm doesn’t imply the isolation that it did down in the material world. You are far more integrated into each other here than you were down there. Yes, to answer your question. Most happily, each of you, in the different circumstances that prevail here, will fully participate in that romance.”

“How can we, as created beings, marry God? Wouldn’t that sort of confer godhood upon us, too, being one with Him and all that?”

“Good question, and the answer is that yes, you as spirit beings will automatically partake of godhood. Whan Jesus merges into you,” Wisdom replied, “you will partake of His substance, elevating you into godhood. Beyond that, creation is a circular process, as you will have the ability to appreciate in the greater dimensional reality you will have in your marriage to Jesus. I’ll remind you that throughout the history of mankind, special people already have contributed under My supervision to the creation of Jesus as the Word of God in Scripture.”

“What are we going to do as Jesus’ bride?”

Wisdom laughed at that. “Oh, you have no idea,” She said. “I won’t spoil the excitement by telling you everything, but I will point out to you, as if you didn’t already know, that mankind has trashed the earth in a very big way. Somehow mankind managed to uglify the beauty We created beyond all rational expectations. The giant plastics industry turned out to create a huge mess; your playing with atoms didn’t work out too well, either. I could go on and on, but you already know all that, having lived there during the most profound destruction of the land, which included the greatest battle ever waged by man. You also saw the beginning of what We are doing to correct the trashing of your planet, something that you yourselves will become intimately involved in as the Wife of Jesus.”

“Oh? What would that be?”

“The planetoid that We brought close to earth – Our most direct method of participating in the battle of Armageddon – managed to perform some rather extensive cleanup work in the process of getting rid of so many evil little men and women. The catastrophe that We brought to bear on earth was planetary in scope, creating enormous earthquakes, and tsunamis, and windstorms. The water movement lifted up and deposited a brand-new system of strata. The earth movement created brand-new and pristine landmasses. Best of all, much of that plastic trash, much of those ugly chemicals, much of that radiation, is now down in the earth’s mantle where it belongs. But there’s still more of that disgusting trash still around. You’ll be busy creating and implementing means of cleaning that up and using the Millennium survivors to do the physical work. And then, there’s the restoration of Mars as well.”

“What about Venus and the rest?”

“In their own time, dear. You’ll have plenty to keep you very happily occupied.”

They came up to a quiet little stream. Looking down, they saw a large trout moving placidly up the middle. “Look!” Joyce exclaimed. “It’s smiling at us!”

“Yes!” Alicia said, laughing. “It’s that way everywhere here. I’m so glad that now we have a chance to experience this wonderful life together!”

They topped a rise and looked down into a bowl that contained an innumerable company of fellow Christians. Somehow they knew where and how to interact with them so that together they became a new entity whose features rivaled Wisdom’s own beauty. The amazing thing about this self-understanding was that they all were intensely aware of their composite Persona, just as they understood Wisdom.

“Jesus is about to join us,” Wisdom told them. “Let the music begin.” Accompanied by a thousand harps, and angelic choir sang the prelude to the Wedding March.

“Who is going to give us away?” came into Wisdom’s attention.

“It is my very great privilege, as your loving Mother-in-law, to perform that exceedingly welcome task,” She responded.

“Oh!” The gasp of awe was shared within the entire Church as she saw Jesus enter her assembly. What followed was a ripple of passion, like an electric shock, that permeated the Church as she saw Jesus in Truth and Light. The communal passion welled up into a romantic yearning for Him that transcended the earthly experience of imprinting between mates.

The marriage ceremony was performed by the Father Himself, His own perfect features visible to the Church for the first time. As they said their vows in giddy anticipation and were finally pronounced Man and Wife, Jesus turned to His new Bride and kissed Her deeply on the lips. With that He entered Her space and merged with Her, causing every element of Her being to glow with delight.

“It is finished!” the Father pronounced. “You are now Man and Wife, each God and together God. Welcome to the Godhead. Our Trinity is now a Quaternary!”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #37

Chapter Thirty Six (continued)

The drastic cutback of life repeated itself throughout the Earth. On the other side of the world from America a young girl named Jana happened to live in one of the rare and widely-scattered enclaves of human habitation where survival was possible. Her own continued existence was either a miracle or an odd freak of nature gone berserk. Born into modest but comfortable means nine years before the beginning of the Great Destruction, she was a toddler when the Wave came. Her mind mercifully blanked out most of the events of that day, but throughout the rest of her life she was constantly subjected to flashbacks of overwhelming terror that she was helpless to resolve. The certain knowledge that they would return to torment her kept her in a shy and humble prison of fear. The image that she most dreaded was the morning on the seashore, where she was playing on the ground with her mother in sight and the water close at hand, its gentle lapping just one of the many mild background noises. Then the ground beneath her began to shake and great cracks opened up everywhere. In one terrible moment her mother was gone, lost inside the voracious mouth of soil that had suddenly turned into a hungry monster. But it shook so badly that Jana couldn’t think beyond the terror. She could only stare without comprehension at her loss, the tense ground shivering in rage. The shaking went on and on, it wouldn’t stop, and she could see, again without understanding, great palls of smoke where red liquid gushed out of the ground to engulf houses and screaming people and turn trees bright red and sometimes white before they vanished. These images burned themselves into her mind, storing themselves for nightfall, when they would return during unguarded moments to torment her. Much later the shaking stopped, and she sat where she was, on an island of undisturbed ground, numb with shock. Not a soul came to her aid; she could see a few others but they were either quite still, like herself, or slowly and awkwardly reassembling themselves.

After a time Jana became aware of the intense, oppressive silence, and that was when she turned her head toward the coast and screamed in fright, for the sea was gone. Instead, the land continued out from the shoreline, brown mud and rock that dropped gently but steadily down into a plain that extended out to the horizon, as far as the eye could see. She stared at this new land in disbelief, her terror so extreme that she was unable to move. She was still staring when her mind dimly recorded motion on the horizon, a movement so vast that it was beyond the power of her brain to put it into the proper perspective. A dark line, glints of silver, marching across the plains below, expanding, a dark wall advancing upward, blotting out the sun. It moved faster now with the shortening distance, looming upward, filling the sky, filling the valley as it rushed headlong toward her. Roaring, peaking, cresting up, engulfing clouds, ripping them into streamers and wisps, the hurting pressure of her ears tightening in pain, the air exploding, lifting, hurtling headlong toward the town, spanked from behind, thrust faster, tumbling, overtaken, shaken, engulfed.

Jana hit something, flattened into it and continued to swirl and churn in the crushing grip of violently moving water. Every day thereafter she would vividly remember that first desperate gulp of air as the tree to which she clung tossed about on the restless water, traversing mountains that suddenly turned into valleys and then back into peaks. She would often wonder but never come to fully understand what freak motion of water or indentation in the ground over which it surged prevented it from falling down upon her and crushing out her life, as it did with the rest of her village. She wouldn’t realize that she was badly injured until several hours later. Only when the water deposited the tree and her with it scores of miles inland from her village, and the adrenalin subsided to be replaced by pain, did she understand her state.   Her left eye was damaged beyond healing from the blow of the initial contact with the tree that saved her life. Even in the sorrow that comes from remembered violence and loss she possessed the vanity of a pretty girl. She grieved over her damaged face, but was later able, with clever arrangement, to cover the empty eye with her hair.

Very soon after she returned to the ground she was seen by an aimlessly wandering man, a kind person who picked her up and carried her with him in his search for his village or someone he knew. They were very lucky; his village, being situated on a high plateau, was spared the violence from shaking and water that had destroyed hers. Although much of it was severely damaged, some shelter still remained and there were people who remained alive, with whom they could share experiences and talk out their fears. Jana was given to an elderly lady, old enough to be her grandmother, but she was also kind, and gently nursed her back to health. Jana remained with the old lady, a time when dark, murky clouds extended down to within a few feet of the ground and very little sunlight penetrated the gloom. It became cold and there was very little food to eat. The tiny village subsisted mostly on rats, who had become fat on the death that stalked the land. This unpleasant fare was washed down with stale, rank-smelling water from the marshland to the west.

In spite of the hardships and discomfort of attempting to survive in a world that suddenly had marginalized mankind, Jana was given a precious gift. The old lady with whom she lived was a devoted Christian, and every night at bedtime she was in the habit of imparting to Jana a portion of her knowledge of God.

Far below the turmoil on the surface, the earthmotion yanked at the underground communities scattered throughout the earth, where the majority of political movers and shakers now resided. The terrific heat from the moving crust-mantle boundary surged upward through layers of rock that were turning soft and in some locations molten, themselves merging into the boundary and becoming part of it. The effects, which were strongly influenced by latitude and crustal depth, were felt unequally. The pressure of moving ground drove the nearly plastic red-hot walls of the Malaysian shelter inward toward each other, squeezing the long-dead community inside into a soupy pulp that was forcefully mixed into the surrounding rock. The meltdown of the reactor generated an insignificant little belch. News of this disaster never reached the other communities. From the very first there was a sharp rise in electrical activity that rendered electromagnetic communication impossible. Earthshocks made a joke of the alternate laser communications, their violence completely overwhelming the optimistically-designed damping mechanisms. Then when the winds came and the lands were breached with water the ground was immediately swept clean of sensors.

The European governmental community located in Belgium was particularly ill-sited, having found itself covered by water to a depth of a mile and a half. The extreme pressure forced water down the cracked heat-exchanger pipes that were exposed on the surface, creating colossal jets of deadly liquid that sprayed into the shelter, uprooting people, buildings and equipment before the invading liquid eventually settled down to fill the caverns, drowning the trapped inhabitants. Here the reactor survived intact for a time, humming away happily in the midst of quietly floating bodies.

The Brazilian facility remained intact in its entirety, continuing to function through the directives of automatic control systems, its human inhabitants being dead to the last man. They simply couldn’t handle the sustained one hundred fifty degree temperature that was maintained by a greatly overloaded environmental system.

GLOW, of course, had rapidly moved into the nearest underground shelter that was available to him, which actually was very close to the position where Jacob and Moira, along with Sidney and Mary, lay at their observation post. This shelter was virtually unique, in that it remained intact throughout the major part of the bombardment from above. The facility’s communication with its above-ground sensors was destroyed, however, causing him to be irritated with his lack of information on the world above the shelter. Quickly tiring of this forced isolation from the world that he had come to understand as his personal possession, he took the elevator back up to the surface. He just had time for a swift glance around when a final piece shed from the comet stamped on his head and smashed him into the ground. Despite the finality of this event, there was yet another leg to GLOW’s involuntary journey. Eventually Wisdom would oversee his transportation to the fresh new daughter of Jupiter that still loomed over the Earth. There, in the somewhat warmer climate that prevailed in the center of that planetoid, GLOW would literally and quite spectacularly represent the name he had chosen for himself.

With a precision unique to God, there existed by His divine Hand a tiny enclave of life in addition to the hills below Dafna in Israel that escaped the general turmoil. This island of life was located in midwestern North America in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. Here in the vicinity of Mount Rushmore the territory not only was spared the hurricane winds but became blanketed above by cloud, being located near a node of minimum atmospheric disturbance. The people who resided there in temporary but quite adequate shelters had very little knowledge of the worldwide disturbance, as their communication devices were inoperable due to intense ionization.

Shielded from the awful apparition above them, these people shared a thread of commonality: most were Christians who had come to this singular location at the nudging of the Holy Spirit; the others came, albeit reluctantly, as family members. They had in common one other thing, which was an extremely rare and precious circumstance: some of them continued to survive through the next day.

The Black Hills began to rise even as the giant tsunami rushed toward them from the east. As the land rose, cracks appeared in the soil and snaked upward to the precariously balanced rocks above. Responding to the shaking and the undermining, enormous pillars of granite toppled and rolled down the moving slopes, like giant sequoias, felling the trees in their paths and leaving scratches like giant claw marks. Jackrabbits and deer scattered out of their paths along with terrified humans. Most were successful. Some were not. Those who managed to dodge the monsters were troubled yet further by a noise from the east that rose above the nearby din of tumbling boulders.   Far below them the Cheyenne River became a metallic ribbon of reflected light from the leaden sky above as the outflow from the broken dam of the Angostura Reservoir cut into the changing topography to pencil out a new channel. But this insignificant line was dwarfed by an astonishing plane of pewter rimmed with silver farther to the east that stretched to the horizon. As the frozen people stared in open-mouthed awe, the plane continued to flow toward them like liquid mercury as the horizon itself rose perceptibly and light and shadow firmed to define a crest fifty miles to the east of the rapidly approaching trough. The scale was too large for the human mind to grasp, living beings never having encountered before such enormity of motion. Only when the new water tumbled over the changing Cheyenne River, completely dwarfing it, did the awful scene come into perspective for a few. As the magnitude of the liquid cliff became apparent the revelation evoked the dizziness of hanging over a sheer precipice; many were so overwhelmed that they simply stood there, puke pouring from their open mouths. As it bore down upon them, the white frothing vanguard of water was a roaring cliff of such incredible height that it appeared to be above them. The roar deafened them; before they fell onto their faces in panic the compressed air threatened to lift them into its turbulent maw and fling them headlong to the west. Then the wind front swept past, followed by the sea of darker water, furnishing a more constant reality to the nightmare. The level of onrushing darkness continued to rise about them with the approach of the first crest. But then it finally passed them and the water started slowly to descend. They began for the first time to breathe hope.

Through all this commotion the Christians had prayed fervently for deliverance, but they also were quick to appreciate that they were located at that spot for just that reason. With the passage of The Crest, as the peak of water would be called for generations to come, their prayers turned to thanksgiving. As the turbulent ocean continued to rush past beneath their amazed eyes and which had instantaneously turned their mountain into a western Atlantic island, they came to the conclusion that such force must necessarily have been related to a planetary event and pondered the significance of it to the rest of the world. Being attuned to the Biblical account of Noah’s flood, some had now come to appreciate that the Bible was far more accurate that the contradictory science to which they had been so thoroughly indoctrinated. Implicit in that new understanding was the realization that what they were now experiencing was a repetition of events that had occurred long ago.

San Francisco was still in nominal night as dawn arrived in New York; however, the large globe sitting on the western horizon lit the sky with a white glow that totally dispelled the darkness. Those who could bear the sight watched in horrified fascination as the comet noticeably increased in size before their eyes and then, as it approached the Van Allen zone, appeared to spread vast wings as an eagle swooping down on its prey. Most who watched this appalling scene from their apartment windows were unaware of the drama taking place on the waterfront below them. For the first time in over three thousand years the sea was transgressing its boundaries to complement its retreat from the eastern continental edge. Slowly at first, the tide kept rising. At an ever-accelerating rate, the black water engulfed first the docks, then the low-lying buildings, and began to mount the hills. The apartment dwellers first became aware of this new disaster indirectly, noticing first how slowly the comet moved below the horizon, and then how the reflected light of the comet on the ocean appeared where land was shortly before. Then the winds came and the ocean continued to rise, white caps gleaming, then great waves, monsters smashing into buildings accompanied by tornadic screechings and the jolt of buildings being ripped off foundations, glass breaking and frigid wetness.

Within a short time the western coastline of the American continent was inundated to a depth of over six hundred feet. San Francisco was now eighty five miles seaward of the new, violently battered shoreline. Then, as quickly as it had come, the sea receded back, forming an enormous mass of moving water that would cross the Pacific to smash headlong against Asian coastlines. The lifeless remnant of San Francisco would stand, dry, to receive the rays of a tropical sun. To the north, Portland lay buried beneath two hundred and fifty feet of mud, silt, and the remnant soils of what used to be the banks of the Columbia Gorge. Here, during the inundation of San Francisco, the mighty Columbia had been an immense river of saltwater that roiled up the gorge to smack into dam after dam, mountainous white spray bursting upward to the sky, cracking each in turn like a fragile eggshell. But each assault and breach claimed its toll of energy. As the sea reached its easternmost boundary, it spread out and gently licked at the dry plains. For a tiny instant, with mountains flaming and smoking, bleeding lava from thousands of rotten sores, the water itself was expended and quiet from the exhausting climb landward. Then, slowly like a brakeless freight train gathering downhill momentum, it began to recede. Shortly it was speeding out of control, sucking at the river banks, digging up new channels, creating a new Grand Canyon that, like its predecessor, now lay at a latitude that used to mark the boundary between Arizona and Utah. From time to time rumors of Portland’s existence would surface, but Portland itself would never be found again.

“Let’s call it a wrap,” the Divine Will said to His beloved Consort, who responded with an outstretched finger leveled at the threatening monster. Seen by fewer than a thousand people, a great sword of blue-white light connected for the merest instant the Carlson Comet with the Earth. Had the atmosphere been quiet instead of the raging maelstrom that it was, the thunderclap could have been heard around the world. But in that same brief instant the world was saved: no longer did the Carlson Comet loom larger with each second that passed.

The Carlson Comet came to within less than five earth diameters of the ravaged planet before hurtling away along its own path. Close as they came to actually colliding, and devastating as its proximity was to the earth and to the life upon its surface, pockets of life nevertheless remained, humbled and ready to fully accept the leadership of God and His Christ. To prepare the way for this welcome transformation, the physical devastation of the planet served to bury the ravages of man so far beneath the surface that for all practical purpose the numerous blights no longer existed. Particularly satisfying to Wisdom was the complete removal of all the disgustingly ugly wind farms, every windmill of which had deliberately been thrust past the Earth’s mantle to melt back into basic molecular constituents.

The strange violence on the surface of the Earth died out over time, but slowly. Its passing was reluctant, attended with endless battles between sea and land, taking its time to subside as the floor beneath the seas continued ever more slowly to restore itself to equilibrium.

Existence would be primitive from that time forward for over a century as the remnant of mankind learned to adjust to new latitudes and piece out the rhythms of new seasons. But God was now with them and, despite the hardships of their daily toils, they would sit by campfires at night and recount tales to their children of a great winged monster who shook the earth, and of enormous waves, and blood-red lava, and of God with them.

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #36

Chapter Thirty Six

 

 

 

 

 

In its lust for oil the Chinese government turned its face from the portent of doom in the sky above. Its leaders, having survived many internal battles through cleverness of mind, had been quick to perceive that this Earthwide crisis was not the first to have been experienced in the memory of mankind. Recognizing the basis of the ever-present appearance of dragons at important events, they had early on made the association between portents in the sky and massive disturbances in the earth below. They reasoned that although this latest catastrophe might be the end of all mankind, whatever course China took wouldn’t matter. On the other hand, if by chance mankind managed to avoid its ultimate doom and survive, and China ended up taking possession of the earth’s greatest cache of oil, China would dominate the world from that time onward. It was worth the gamble; besides, what did China have to lose?

GLOW’s anger, meanwhile, had developed into an insanity that drove him to battle in the face of the bigger issue in the sky above.

 

Well before I-day the vanguard of the enormous Chinese expeditionary force crossed the now dry Euphrates River under a gray and threatening sky. It was initially unopposed, but GLOW reacted with a hastily-assembled army of his own, which raced into the Mediterranean Sea and along the land routes traveled before by the invading hordes of the Russians and their confederates. GLOW’s objective was the same: kill the enemy in Jerusalem and take over the state apparatus, particularly the control over the Israeli oil field.

GLOW’s response had restored unity to the ten regional governments, as did his demand for the immediate drafting of troops from each region. It didn’t matter that the draft quota that he imposed involved most of the workforce: if he didn’t get the oil, there would be no need for the workforce anyway.

In some respects the resulting battle for Jerusalem was a reprise of the earlier battle waged by the Russians and their Mideast cohorts. The objective was similar: remove Israel from the world map. The routes the GLOW power took to get to Jerusalem were virtually the same, and their entry into Israel began at the port that used to belong to Haifa. But other aspects of the battle were quite different: The motivation of hatred was replaced by an even more evil indifference to the fate of Israel in the greedy quest for oil. The routes of advance, while similar to the earlier ones with respect to GLOW’s Western powers, involved the additional route from the east taken by the Chinese army. Haifa, being the location of the first assault, now no longer existed, although the ground upon which it stood was trampled by the marching feet of soldiers too numerous to count. The advancing troops weren’t told that the ground beneath them was so radioactively hot that in merely being there they had probably signed their own death warrants. No matter: they’d last long enough to do the job.

The new combatants, in representing all the peoples of the world in a vast conglomeration, was more racially and ethnically diverse than the earlier invaders; there were more of them, too – far more.

Now, with the immanent approach of I-day, Jacob and Moira viewed the assault from the same position they had taken during the Ezekiel 38 war. This time they had Sid and Mary with them. “I don’t know how many angels that God is planning on deploying in this battle,” Moira said, “but from the looks of things down below, the entire world is showing up to kick the Jews into the Med.”

“Yeah, looks that way. Whatever’s going to happen next, it’s not going to be pretty. I feel badly for our brothers and sisters in the middle, engulfed by all that vicious sub-humanity. But at least you’re here and not there, and, I’d hope, safe from what’s going to go down in Jerusalem.”

Before he could speak further, Jacob and Moira were tossed into the air. They returned to the ground to be shaken like they were in the teeth of a violent, angry dog, complete with a rumbling growl.

They heard Wisdom speaking to them through the noise of this enormous quake. “Hide your eyes,” She warned them. “You don’t want to watch what happens next.”

Still shaking, they buried their heads in the ground. Even with their faces in the dirt, their eyes registered such an overwhelming brightness that they could see the bones in their hands. Multiple seconds later the shaking of the ground jumped to renewed life and the couple began to think that the end of the world had just arrived.

The shaking slowly subsided, only to be replaced by a windstorm of epic magnitude. Cautiously raising their heads as this new force diminished, they saw that most of the troops were no longer standing, but were flat on the ground. Looking back, Moira noticed that the blast and its aftermath had leveled the buildings of Dafna. The destruction saddened her. “Look behind us, Jacob,” she said. “No Dafna.”

“Too bad about that,” he replied. “But look on the bright side. There’s still us. Besides, Wisdom is around to comfort us. God matters more than anything else.” His eyes returned to the battle below, and Moira’s soon followed.

But then, as they continued to look, they saw the majority of the closer troops raise themselves back up to standing positions. “What was that, Jacob? God or man? Nuclear or something else?”

“No, it was nuclear, all right. Look at the mushroom clouds. They look like textbook photos. GLOW may have set them off, judging from where they hit southeast of Jerusalem. Look over there,” he said, pointing to the largest cloud. It was still glowing red from some massively hot internal violence as the central column reached for the stratosphere. “That entire area was filled with human beings before the bombs, and now look at it. It’s completely barren for acres upon acres around the central column, empty of soldiers. And I wouldn’t count on anything living inside the column itself, not even the meanest snake.”

The battle for Jerusalem continued to rage for three days. The attackers had breached the defensive lines of the city and had entered it, bent on the utter destruction of its terrified inhabitants. The horrified people of Dafna looked out on the distant slaughter taking place in their beloved city. Their own front had remained quiet, but the spectacle of what was happening in Jerusalem tore away at whatever relief they may have enjoyed.

“Bury your heads again,” the two couples heard from above, and responded instantly. What happened next dwarfed the turmoil of the nuclear blasts. As I-day arrived, the ground thrust them upward again, but this was an impact shock, not a quake. Several more shocks occurred in rapid succession, each closer to them than its predecessor. Once again, the air above them moaned in hurricane strength. After a chaotic eternity, this next phase of violence settled down. Once again Jacob and Moira lifted their heads, to be confronted with the shocking sight of massive dirty-gray columns that reached upward beyond their vision. They had the appearance of exceedingly broad tornadoes, but they were stationary. At their bases the ground bulged upwards in circular rims. Flecks of red revealed the molten state of the soil beneath the surface. The columns extended beyond the land to the Mediterranean Sea, where their color was whitened with water. Even as they watched, the water began to fall with majestic slowness into a sea troubled with enormous impact waves which raced toward the shore. Awe-struck with the overwhelming visual magnitude of the events playing out before their eyes, they recoiled in horror as the first tsunami breached the land and overwhelmed the waterfront buildings and continued inland, virtually unimpeded by the apartment blocks and even high-rise constructions and the hills upon which they stood. Before the first wave receded, another came crashing ashore, to be followed by many others. The troops, so impressive in their size before these catastrophic events, were washed out to sea like so many tiny ants.

“Now that looked like an asteroid strike!” Jacob said laughingly. “Did you see how it dwarfed the nuclear attack?”

“Give it to God. But I wonder about Jerusalem, being in the middle of all that.”

“I don’t know,” Jacob replied. “I can’t see it any more.”

The sky was so cluttered with the columns of smoke and pulverised earth that Jerusalem was no longer visible to the pair. “I wouldn’t worry, though,” Moira said. “Jerusalem’s special to God. Somehow it must still exist.”

Jerusalem did continue to exist, but virtually every city, town and community throughout the world fared less well. The American Midwest was hit particularly hard. The impact of that day on the newlywed couple George and Linda Kasik was typical of that area. Awakened by tremblings and rough shakings, they had arisen from their happy bed and left their country cabin hand in hand to survey the commotion outside, still secure in the knowledge that their love was sufficient to overcome any kind of trouble that life could throw at them.

They had walked about a quarter of a mile when the tremors sharply increased in amplitude. George and Linda continued to hold hands as they rode out the undulations of the ground beneath them. There was a sharp jolt and they squeezed each other fiercely in a mutual gesture of support and reassurance. Not more than half a mile to their front the ground reared up as if it had suddenly come to life. It refused to stop, but continued to rise more sharply. They realized to their horror that where they were on flat ground scant moments before they were now on a slope that was rapidly becoming steeper, and were looking up at a crest of ground that was reaching heavenward.

Looking back, George was astonished to see the ground recede below them. He was overcome by vertigo and put out his free hand to cushion his dizzy drop to the ground. As his hand touched the earth it recoiled from the intense heat, and George suddenly apprehended that the ground was smoking. Attempting to return to an upright position, he wobbled drunkenly as the surface gave way and a gaping red crevasse opened up beneath his feet. Fixated on the landscape rising above her, Linda felt his pull on her hand and screamed in horror as she saw him sink to his knees. Close to fainting from fright, she struggled to pull him free even as she saw the flesh of his legs bubble and redden. His eyes pleaded with hers and then she saw him accept his fate. He jerked his hand free and with remarkable grace allowed himself to sink into the widening crack. Wailing, Linda averted her eyes toward the rising peak.  They focused on another crack that was racing downward directly toward her. Screaming again, she ran downslope. The path she took ended abruptly a hundred yards ahead in a hump, the far side of which was rapidly developing into a cliff. Then the wind came up.

Screaming all the way, Linda ran down to the hump and just kept going out into empty air.

For over an hour after the Kasiks came to their abrupt end, their neighbor Billy West had been laying in a virtually prone position in the lee of a huge boulder, unable to move more than a fraction of an inch for fear that the screeching wind would pluck him from his shelter and fling him into the midst of the airborne debris that had hurtled past. Some of the debris had been human, damaged beyond anything recognizable. The ground here had remained cold, and it was robbing him of heat where he had soiled himself earlier. He was shivering, but he did not recognize his discomfort, for he was held in the thrall of a terror so complete that it occupied every nerve in his body.

Suddenly the vicious motion of the air stopped, as if something larger and infinitely more menacing was sucking it into its maw. The screaming ceased, to be replaced by a lower, more distant rumbling, so powerful that the ground trembled and quaked. This ominous sound was frequently interspersed with the hollow thumping of objects falling from the sky. Billy felt one land nearby. It had once been a dog, but was now a mixed bundle of fur and red flesh like he used to see infrequently on the side of the highway. There was another thump, and he saw another bundle of raw flesh, to which tattered strips of clothing still clung, smack into the dog. More human remains landed about his inadequate shelter and he began to smell the cloying stench of raw meat mingled with contents of stomach and intestines. He saw these things but he didn’t react, for fear continued to prevail.

His present location was several hundred miles inland, so Billy had no thought of danger from the ocean. This state abruptly ended as he peered around the boulder, looking to the east. In that direction a new mountain range stood as a sentinel to protect the land about him. But now he stared in disbelief above the mountains, so far above them that the distant intruder was obscured in haze, an enormous but rapidly moving wall. Even as he looked it passed overhead, blocking the sun and casting his world into deep shadow. He trembled involuntarily. Unnoticed, his bowels moved again.   As the top of the cliff receded into the distance tens of miles to the westward of his position he felt the shock wave as its base collided with the mountain range to the east. His eyes watched but failed completely to grasp the scale of the event they were registering as mountains were dwarfed by white spray. Moments later the ground began to vibrate and the spray spanned the thirty miles or so between his position and the mountains, and continued on past him like the top of the wall, a low, dirty grey roof that rapidly darkened as the wall continued to advance westward.

He had just a short but indelible glimpse of dark water following the white spray to breach the mountaintops when the mist began to settle about him and cut off his view. Now he was in the midst of a dark fog and could only hear the roar of the turbulent sea reaching toward him.

The first blast of water kicked him like a football. He was still conscious but trying to will his crushed chest to breathe as he tumbled through the air. He hit the ground and lost his consciousness a quarter of a mile from the point of first impact and remained unconscious as the water kicked him a second time and rolled him like a pebble. The third impact buried him beneath the moving wall of water and crushed him into jelly that quickly diluted into nothing.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #35

Chapter Thirty Four

As the residents of the tent city in Custer Park near Mount Rushmore awoke and began to greet the day among their beautiful surroundings, that same Saturday morning began quite benignly elsewhere as well in North America. Springtime was becoming apparent in the pleasant temperature and new growth of grass and leaves. Despite the excesses of the government and the repression and slaughter for which it was responsible, the land itself appeared to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts. The hue of the sky above was a deep blue almost to the horizon where it paled almost imperceptibly, just enough to confirm the new warmth of the surrounding air. In those areas that had been the least troubled by the brutal events of the recent past, the world outdoors was a fresh tapestry of soft, brightly blooming trees and flowers and lush green fields. Birds called joyfully and their songs blended harmoniously with the lively warm air.

At precisely 8:15 that morning, Alan Carlson shut off his phone and returned to his breakfast nook, where he sat disconsolately sipping coffee. He was a lucky man to have coffee to enjoy. But then he had reason to be so favored. As an astronomer he was, like all prominent scientists, a quasi-governmental official who, although not permitted the amenities of the FEMA underground facilities, was blessed with housing and food in relative abundance. He was given guard protection as well. These niceties came at a substantial price: Alan had finally succumbed to the prodding of government officials and accepted the mark of the beast.

Dr. Carlson was not a happy man, the phone call having changed his day from joy to a bleak horror. Thirteen nights ago he had discovered through his telescope a previously-undiscovered comet, a finding that had given him an ecstatic boost and his name a household term, at least among those fortunate enough to remain in the possession of households. The comet was even labeled the Carlson Comet in honor of his discovery of it. Since that discovery, up until the phone call, he had felt a possessive bond with the object, as if it belonged to him personally. Very quickly, however, other experts had inserted themselves in on his find to evaluate its characteristics, including its size and particularly its path. The first surprise that confronted these experts on minutiae was its size: it was massive, almost the size of the moon. Comets of such size were of such rarity that some experts would have denied the possibility of this newcomer’s existence without visual proof, just as past peers of equal authority had denied the existence of meteors until they were forced to view the meteorites that had landed virtually at their feet. But it was the trajectory that stumped them, causing them to wait for several days’ confirmation before they officially announced the comet’s apparent destination.

After they had reviewed the numbers several times over, quiet panic set in among the astronomers who had so callously muscled in on Carlson’s new pet. Their preoccupation with this new object grew rapidly as communications networks carried urgent requests for support to colleagues around the globe. Ultimately, the government got directly involved by commissioning the world’s finest computer-knowledgeable mathematicians to perform more sophisticated trajectory computations as if man, by mathematical precision, could alter the path of a several thousand-mile wide rock. With the unwelcome confirmation they provided, GLOW tried briefly to suppress its disclosure to the rest of his government for regional security reasons. Finally the hitherto-omnipotent GLOW himself came to the disturbing realization that the issue was bigger than regional security. His unhappy mind churned out random thoughts that equated, in the aggregate, to his displeasure at being usurped by a mere object. Darkly appreciating that a problem of this magnitude took all the fun out of elitism, he removed all obstacles he had inserted in the information path between the scientists and his government functionaries. If there was anything good to come out of this flap at all, he thought with resignation, it was that if crises were useful tools for the manipulation of peoples, this was the mother of all crises.

Dr. Alan Carlson, who himself had been kept in the dark regarding the object’s path, had just been informed of it by the latest phone call. The problem was specifically that the trajectory of the Carlson Comet, as confirmed by at least a thousand independent calculations, was found to terminate a very short time in the future at a point in space that would be concurrently occupied by the planet Earth. From this time forward, the unfortunate Dr. Carlson would be identified not for his expertise as an astronomer, but as the first harbinger of Earth’s inevitable doom. The corresponding intra-governmental communiques were brutally truthful: man, with all his ingenuity and scientific prowess, would be helpless before this monster, unable to deflect it from its path by any meaningful amount. The beast was simply too massive, and time was too short. The advent of the Carlson Comet was a complete surprise.

Over the next couple of weeks the earth and the planetoid went on about their respective businesses with benign indifference to each other. People continued to suffer under the repression of the regime, which had become even harsher in the wake of the discovery. Those individuals who had accepted the mark and had been relatively well-off now were making general asses of themselves as they went through the grieving sequence of denial, anger and grudging acceptance.

The period of denial varied with the level of understanding. The average person took it on faith that the “science guys” would send up a nuclear-tipped rocket that would blast the cosmic intruder to smithereens. Having thus solved the problem to their collective satisfaction, this group quickly reverted to their usual activities. The “science guys” knew better: their period of denial was virtually nonexistent. They knew that the Carlson Comet was far too massive to be blown to smithereens by anything that they could cook up. Besides, even if they could have found a method to counter the beast, recent cutbacks of applied technology had made launch vehicles way too scarce to deploy all but the most puny firepower.

It would be theoretically possible, over a span of fifty years, to alter the comet’s trajectory with existing knowledge and materials found on earth. Fifty years, however, was significantly longer than the allotted time to collision. These intellectuals, who were a dollar short and a day late and knew it, knew also that the world was expectantly waiting for them to solve the problem. They made the first transition from denial to anger. Discarding their assumed images of disinterested professionalism, they shamelessly and with quite shocking vehemence blamed each other (and especially the hapless Dr. Carlson) for discovering the offensive object in the first place. Then they blasted their own shortsightedness and fixated next on the shortsightedness of government and the apathy of the common person with respect to scientific matters for their current inability to solve the problem. These carryings-on eventually filtered down to the common person, who finally perceived that indeed the “science guys” were not coming to the rescue. Once this perception was attained, they, too, immediately entered the anger phase. Of course the primary focus of their anger was the “science wimps”, chief among them the poor Dr. Carlson who, although just an innocent astronomer, was bombed out of his car one morning. Demonstrations were held; these pathetically inept demonstrations of the public temper quickly progressed into ugly riots with demands for governmental intervention by those who wore the mark and relied on the government to solve all their problems.

The transition to the acceptance phase was universally shared. Riots began anew and quickly descended into self-serving orgies of looting and destruction. Society throughout the world once again became disordered and chaotic, and with this breakdown of order the means of production and distribution halted. Just as the pinnacle of power finally had come into his grasp, GLOW realized that he might well become virtually ineffective, an understanding that made him very, very angry.

Chapter Thirty Five

 

 

 

 

The belligerent nature of the angry hot body extracted from Jupiter and set in motion by the Holy Spirit mirrored the troubled arrogance of the insignificant little specks on the surface of a distant companion in space, Earth. Angry with the descending quality of their lives under the brutal new North American regime and its sibling governments throughout the world but curiously stubborn in their insistence in ignoring their God, men of ill-will continued to clash one against another in their headlong pursuit of Self as they attempted to eke out acceptable standards of life in a land where such standards no longer existed. The government, even more devoted to Self than its subjects, continued its quest for absolute control over its miserable and impoverished subjects, committing a wholesale slaughter of both the land and the people within it.

But the new planetoid had a destructive potential that exceeded by a huge margin the capacity for evil of Earth’s occupants. This body now held all the cards, subject only to the will of the Father and the response of His Divine Companion.

In this cosmic game the unwelcome intruder slapped its first card on the table by interfering with Earth’s gravitational field and causing a movement of the mantle.

This new development reached North America with a deep rumbling sound like that of an enormous trumpet that pierced the air and white-hot rock belonging to the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted from the tortured ground in a massive outpouring. A vast wind came up and blew the enormous black cloud of ash eastward, enclosing the entire southeastern portion of the old United States in a suffocating, poisonous cloud that slaughtered millions of people, relieving them rapidly of their miserable lives.

In faraway Israel the land below Dafna began to be pelted with fast-moving rocks that rained upon the masses of intruding soldiers. Astonished people looked upward toward the source of this vast commotion to see a more amazing spectacle yet, that of a sky lit up like a Christmas tree and beyond that another moon that wasn’t their own familiar Luna. Awed people around the globe first assumed that this enormous object was an asteroid, but after a while they began to notice things about this new cosmic intruder that didn’t square with what they knew about the behavior of asteroids.

In the first place, it wasn’t barreling toward them with the speed of a bullet. It was just standing still, or if it indeed was moving, it wasn’t moving fast. Not only that, but it was much too large to be an asteroid. It looked more like a planet, or at least like the moon, which it appeared to match in size and brightness. It was barren and void of any atmosphere of its own, but it appeared to be shedding pieces of itself, some of which were igniting into flames and making the sky sparkle as they entered the earth’s atmosphere. The boulders that survived this fiery entry turned ugly as they hurtled into the militant crowds and left roadkill behind. In North America, the onlookers watched amazed as a particularly large chunk of extraterrestrial matter splashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound, creating an enormous circular wave that inundated the surrounding area. The sight led the observers to switch their focus to the larger ocean beyond, which had become so turbulent that it was sinking many ships, both small and great.

As a catastrophe of planetary scope, the destruction and terror was almost universal. With a few exceptions in isolated localities, life for humanity became very basic and very, very ugly. At about that time also, the first real effects of the cometary encounter appeared with the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. With less than a few days to go before I-day (I for impact), the intruder’s gravitational influence became sufficiently large that the magnitude and frequency of earthquakes accelerated beyond the already-disturbing upward trend. Japan was almost obliterated by the explosion of Mount Fuji and the tidal-wave aftermath. In the Western Hemisphere Mount Rainier and Mount Baker both resumed activity. After burying several large communities under carpets of mud, Mount Rainier continued to grow, reaching a lofty altitude of over twenty three thousand feet before exploding in a gigantic eruption that sent two thirds of the mountain skyward in a cloud of dust. Mexico City buckled and heaved once more, this time taking seven million lives.

Each hour, as seismic activity increased, the source of this horror became larger and more apparent to the naked eye. There was no remaining doubt about the seriousness and inevitability of this event. One day before I-day the animal kingdom became generally aware of impending disaster. Animals of all kinds began to congregate together oblivious to the usual natural relationships. Most pathetic was the inbred reliance of the domesticated animals on their human masters. They looked to them for safety, but the masters turned away, focusing on their own plights and indifferent to the problems with the animals.

As I-day approached, the comet began to dominate the sky, mocking the helplessness of mankind to control it. By this time all the sequestered liquor, pills and drugs had essentially run out, forcing the elite to face their doom sober. Suicides increased to epidemic proportions; roadways of all sizes were impassable, littered to uselessness with shapeless hulks of vehicles whose drivers had raced headlong into welcome oblivion. Within the military, the sound of self-directed gunfire was commonplace until the bullets were all gone. Then the knives and razors took over, finding their ways to veins and arteries. The major cities began to smell of death.

The earth had by now reached an equilibrium of gravity-induced stress. Earthquake activities diminished dramatically. An ominous silence blanketed the earth, presided over by the giant and yet more rapidly growing apparition that dominated the sky.

The dawn of I-day arrived in New York on time. But at that point time had lost its usual meaning, for the sun took until noon to reach only halfway overhead, and there it remained. During that time the tide continued to ebb, outward, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. Land was newly exposed in inches, feet, yards and then miles. Ugly, barren, terrifying plains finally extended over the horizon. The wind came up, from gale to hurricane and quite unbelievably beyond, a smashing fist that broke every window in the city and then, one by one toppled every skyscraper. By early afternoon a shadow appeared on the distant horizon, shimmering and indistinct. With unexpected speed the shadow materialized into a wall of moving water that, had they remained upright, would have dwarfed the largest skyscrapers. This wall overshadowed the city like a tornado of infinite extent and, rushing through, killed every living being in its path. The wall would continue on across the great plains and beyond, finally dissipating itself on the western slopes of the continent. Although nobody remained to appreciate it, the sun itself was larger and hotter in the new, more southern latitude of the late New York City.

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #34

Chapter Thirty Three

 

The soft but insistent whisper in his head gently woke him. “Time to saddle up and move out,” Wisdom told Earl. “I know it’s early,” She added as he glanced over to the clock on the dresser, “but you need to be on the road before dawn.” Earl woke Joyce and they quickly dressed. Joyce went to the neighboring door and softly knocked. She was greeted by Marge, who also was fully dressed, as was Ellery in the background. “Yeah,” she said, “She told us too.” Moshe and Miryam were already in the kitchen when they came in. Henry and Terry were there too. Terry softly wept as she cooked breakfast.

“How did this happen?” Terry wailed. “Why does my family have to go? How on earth did we get ourselves into this ungodly mess?”

“You said it yourself,” Wisdom interjected.

“Huh?”

“You said it now in one short word. ’Ungodly’ was the operative word, Terry. The United States, in particular, had chosen at the outset to align itself with God. The hand of God is on your constitution and many other guiding documents. That closeness to Us brought Us closer to you, and in turn gave you a special status, almost approaching that of Our beloved Israel. For centuries you remained somewhat faithful, falling away into complacency for brief periods. It was about the best We could expect from you. Up until recently most of you would repent and return to Us. But some of you never returned, and those of you who didn’t were a vital part of Our relationship with you and your country. Colleges like Princeton and Yale, which were established with the express purpose of teaching the Bible and Biblical principles to future leaders of your society degenerated into bastions of secularity, wherein the future leaders were taught the principles of material success over a relationship with God. This mindset bubbled over to infect the Christian seminaries, supposedly fulfilling their mission of preparing devout men of God to become pastors and spokespersons for God. Out of these terribly wounded seminaries came yet more secular attitudes and worse, doubts over the nature of God and whether He even existed. These seminaries turned a blind eye to the encroachment of false science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, being indifferent to its obvious rejection of the Creation narrative of Genesis.

“Jesus said something very relevant to your collective turning away,” She added. In Luke 12:48 He said this:

“’But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. But unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required; and to whom men have committed much, of him will they ask the more.’

“You began as a holy nation,” She continued, “willingly setting yourselves apart from other nations to serve Us in love. We gave you much in return.

“So now You’re going to ask much,” Terry said dully.

“We already have, and in the past you have responded admirably, helping yourselves to achieve greatness among the nations.  We’ve always given more than what We’ve received, and for a long period of time, you were among the happiest of people.  But then you began to turn away, exactly like Israel did after her glory years under the kingships of David and his son Solomon. I realize that you never read the blessing and the curse that We had pronounced over Israel who, even more than America, are Our special people. The major portion of it is in Deuteronomy 28. Since you don’t have a Bible either, I’ll give you a few excerpts, paraphrasing it a bit for your modern sensibilities:

“’But it shall come to pass, if you won’t listen to the voice of the Lord your God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day, that all these curses shall come upon you, and overtake you. You’ll be cursed in the city, and in the field. Your harvests will be cursed, and so will your offspring. . .The Lord shall send upon you cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that you set your hand to do, until you’re destroyed, and you die quickly, because of the wickedness of your doings, whereby you have forsaken me. The Lord shall make disease cling to you, until He has consumed you from off the land. . .The Lord shall smite you with cancer, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with extreme burning, and with violence, and with failed crops, and they shall pursue you until you die. . .The Lord shall change rain into dust. . .The Lord shall smite you with the boil of Egypt, and with the tumors and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof you can’t be healed. The Lord shall smite you with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. . .You shall marry a wife, and another man will have her; you shall build a house, and you shall not live in it; you shall plant, and another will harvest it.’

 

“I could continue with this litany of painful consequence,” Wisdom continued, “because there’s much more in that dark chapter, all of which Israel had to endure over the centuries after she divorced herself from Us. But I think you get the point.”

“So those things that have been happening to us over the past decades – they’re actually consequences of removing you from public conversation? The superstorms, the earthquakes, the droughts, and the diseases?”

“Yes, Terry. Some of you Christians have attempted to warn the public about that connection from time to time, but each time they did so, they were immediately shouted down. They should have stuck to their guns. After all, the Bible is very clear about it, and not only in the words of Moses. Listen, for example, what the prophet Haggai had to say in verse seventeen of his Chapter 2:

“’I smote you with blight and with mildew and with hail in all the labors of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the Lord.’

 

“Over the years, that portion of you who stubbornly chose to separate yourselves from Us grew ever larger in proportion to the rest of society. Eventually that group became the dominant one and included the nation’s opinion-shapers. Then, with the extension to secondary and state levels of the takeover of the institutions of government and education the secularization of America metastasized and spread more thoroughly into the organs of everyday life. Teaching colleges pushed a secular agenda onto their candidates, who themselves were selected as future teachers not on the basis of academic excellence, moral clarity, character and a love of God, but rather for their shallowness of thought and secular outlook on life. Once those teachers entered the schools, the cancer of secularism spread very rapidly. Look around you, Terry, and you others also. Didn’t you ever wonder why you as Christians are such a marginalized minority? America wasn’t that way for a very long time. It was its Christianity that made it great, because We favored you with a loving Hand that matched and surpassed your loyalty to Us. Now you’re going to have a measure of pain and suffering, not so much by your actions as by the actions of your secular brothers and sisters. But there’s a silver lining in that. We’ll understand your trials and be with you all the way. You’ll end up having lived noble lives, possessing qualities that We’ll cherish forever.”

They ate breakfast in uncomfortable silence, assuming that Wisdom had left. Moshe scratched his head. “I don’t even know where we’re heading,” he told Earl. “Sturgis,” Wisdom broke in.

“Sturgis? Wow. I had no idea You’d go for that kind of thing,” Ellery responded as a kaleidoscope of lurid images entered his mind.

“Enough,” She told him, but with a smile. “This conclave at Sturgis isn’t going to be the drug-infested biker Woodstock of past years, with naked women riding men on bikes and the fully connected but unstable assembly wobbling down the street. It’s going to be a Christian gathering. As a matter of fact, it’s only a jumping-off spot for Mount Rushmore, which is your ultimate destination.”

“What is that about, a modern-day Masada?” Earl responded.

“More than you possibly can imagine,” She told them. “But let’s save the details for later. You’ll be taking your bikes, of course, for the protection they’ll give you from the authorities. I’ll leave it to you as to the route you’re going to take to get there, but with the warning that it won’t be an easy trip.” She left.

Henry brought out an old Triple-A map of the United States. The regime may have changed, but the highways hadn’t, except for some earthquake damage and much neglect. They decided to head north almost to the border and pick up Kansas Highway 36, which they’d follow to Oberlin, where they’d go into Nebraska to the town of McCook, then take 2 to 61 and north along 61 into South Dakota, where they’d travel a very short distance along Interstate 90 to reach Highway 34, which would take them directly to Sturgis, bypassing Rapid City altogether. Although motorcycles were usually effective in preventing checkpoint halts, there was no sense in asking for trouble by taking the more well-traveled highways.

The men left the house after breakfast to take care of last-minute packing chores while the women and Henry said their good-byes, knowing that Henry and Terry would be left behind for good, never to be seen again. Behind her sorrow, Miryam harbored a gleam of excitement in her eyes. Terry noted it and was comforted by it, knowing that at least Miryam possessed the possibility of happiness, however brief it might be. Understanding that her own end was likely to be both soon and bleak, Terry nevertheless resolved to be brave about it, as a host of predecessor Christians had been with the comforting help of the Holy Spirit that was companion to their faith in Jesus. She looked at her husband with fondness and linked her arm in his. I have God and a good husband to live and die with. What more can a person ask?

 

A gloomy dawn came with a steady breeze as they traveled westward across Kansas. The fractionally increasing light revealed thick dark clouds that threatened rain, and maybe worse. Despite the ominous weather, for the first couple of hours the riders thrilled to the new adventure, the men enjoying the fresh experience of two-wheeled travel and their mates enjoying the openness of the view. Around noontime the south wind, which had been increasing in gradual stages and causing them to lean to the left, suddenly strengthened to the point that the riders were getting buffeted so hard that their leaning became precarious. Earl in particular began to feel that he was right on the edge of control. The spindly extension to his right arm that Moshe had cobbled up began to ache and his control over the handlebar was beginning to slip, but he knew that he must persevere through the obstacle or risk falling behind and losing the others. Wisdom, please give me strength to handle this, he pleaded. He continued to fight the wind, gritting his teeth.

A brief respite came when they reached Oberlin and headed north into Nebraska toward McCook. The storm became a tailwind, which was much easier to handle. Before they reached McCook they stopped by the side of the road and ate the lunch that Terry had lovingly packed. The wind buffeted them again when they left McCook to head northwest, but that leg was short and Earl was able to handle it. He still was very relieved when they turned back northward for the longer journey up through Nebraska into South Dakota. His relief was so palpable that he operated the cruise control, stretched out his legs, and leaned back to relax. He hummed a tune. The relaxation ended abruptly with a blow to his kidney. “Don’t get cocky!” Joyce shouted into his neck. He stiffened his back. His feet went back onto the pegs and remained that way for the rest of the trip. They left the stiff wind behind when they turned westward again along the final leg into Sturgis, and by the time they arrived in the evening the sun had made a brief appearance.

Regardless of whether the rest of the country was in the grip of a repressive regime, Sturgis was biker country and off-limits to authority of any kind except the local sheriff, who, the town had made sure, was also a biker with a biker’s attitude. At increasingly widely-spaced intervals one authority or another had attempted to impose a stricter control over the town. Such visits were invariably brief with quick descents into violence that left the feckless visitors worse for the wear.

The three weary couples parked in front of a likely bar, stretched their legs, and went in. Emboldened by the feel of the place, Ellery walked up to the bartender, noting that he didn’t seem to be wearing the mark. “We’re pretty hungry,” he said, “but we only have cash.”

“We only take cash,” the man said. “Take a seat at a table and Janie’ll come around and take care of you.”

They plopped themselves gratefully into chairs and looked over the menus, which boasted of a large variety of beers and stronger drinks but was limited in food to burgers and fries. The thought of hamburgers appealed to them all. Halfway through the meal they began to wonder among themselves as to what to do after they ate. The question was answered for them as a few people began to enter the bar and drift over to their table and sit. The newcomers eventually grew into a substantial crowd. Ellery adjusted to this development by extending his hand in greeting to the first of his new neighbors, who responded in kind. “Where’re you headed?” the man asked.

“Rushmore,” Ellery told him.

“Same here,” the man replied. “There’s a park outside the main attraction, the Presidents and such. It’s a tent camp now. Got a lot of people, Native Americans too. Don’t know why, but they all seem to have gotten the word to be there and be quick about it. Same with us. Somebody in my Church seems to have an inside track to God, or so she says. Told her to get herself over here and bring the rest along. I’m part of the rest, kind of tagging along. Nothing for me back home, so I might as well be here as there. Hope you have a tent. We’re kind of filled up.”

“We do,” Marge said, thanking God for the insistence on being prepared.

 

Outside the bar the street was almost filled with bikes. The three couples decided to go with the flow and followed the group out of town and up the mountain toward the park. It was now dark but the clouds were gone and as they traveled the inky blackness above them was the sky was dotted with bright pinponts of light.

The drive up the Rushmore Parkway was smooth, the numerous curves being wide and easy and, from what they could see from all the headlights, beautiful. There were trees in abundance, tall conifers silhouetted by the full moon that had just arisen over the mountaintop. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in the daytime, Joyce thought to herself. Eventually the bikes peeled off into the park, where gas stoves and lanterns lit up the tents. It looked like a city. They found an empty spot and unpacked their bikes, lighting a lantern for the illumination they’d need to set up their tents.

When they finished the housework, by common consent they turned off the lantern and lay on their bedding looking up at the sky. In their own way, each of them thanked God for the adventure and their rest among the grass and trees of His natural creation. I wonder what God has in mind for us now, Earl thought.

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #33

Chapter Thirty One

Since the completion of Jerusalem’s Third Temple, the nearby HaRamban Synagogue had been nearly deserted, its staff reduced to a skeleton crew consisting of the most junior rabbis and their assistants. Now it was densely packed with hundreds of scared and hungry humans. Some, the most fervently religious, awaited their fate stoically while many others openly wept at the misfortune that had befallen them. Virtually all of them were Messianic Jews whose crime was that they had failed to leave the city as quickly as the rest of their fellows. The crime carried the penalty of death.

The doors were locked, but it was only a matter of time before they were breached and the angry troops outside rushed in to slaughter them. One of these soldiers, a man named Mark, looked over at his buddy Jake, who was eagerly awaiting the order to advance. “Stand down, soldier,” Mark told him, grinning. “Rumor has it that we’re gonna spread napalm around the periphery and light the building up. We’re probably just waiting for the flame tanks to arrive.”

“I sure hope you’re wrong,” Jake responded. “My knife is sharp as a razor. I wanna try it out.” Blood lust was evident in his eyes. Mark looked around. The eagerness was universal among the men, as it was with him.

Mark laughed again, a short, brutal bark. “Hey, this time we got a double reason to kill. They’s Jews, but they’s also Christians. Means maybe we should kill ‘em twice!”

“Be okay then if we rape ‘em and kill ‘em after,” Jake said, his eyes bulging in anticipation.

“Hey, genius!” another soldier called. “You just come up with that idea?”

The soldiers became impatient and, their military discipline weakened by the drugs they had been issued by their leaders to dull any residual sense of morality, they began to act on their own. A group managed to lasso a lamppost and, tugging together, brought it down. Hefting it, they ran together with it, ramming it into a door. It took five attempts to batter down the door, but when it gave way there was a mad rush to enter and kill the men. The building erupted into a cacophony of screams and wails, and the smell of blood mingled with the stench of urine and feces. Eventually just the women and children remained, and then just the women. Several hours later the last woman was gone and an eerie silence prevailed as the soldiers lay around, tired and sated, oblivious to the carnage that surrounded them. The calm of the soldiers clashed wildly with the scene, which looked like the inside of a meat packing plant that had suffered the violence of machinery gone berserk.

“Okay, men. Up! Out! Out!” came the shouted command by a major, who was supported in his task of rousting them by a troop of MPs. A flame tank had arrived after all, its turret traversing one side of the building laying a patch of unlit napalm as the soldiers filed out, tired and disheveled. It’s engine shouted momentarily as it moved to another side, treads clanking heavily. When it had completed its traversal of the perimeter the tank returned, aimed through the open doorway and discharged a gout of napalm, this time aflame.

The grisly scene at the synagogue was played out in the same manner throughout the city, in other places of worship, in public meeting places, in shops and in private homes. The shops and homes didn’t rate the tank, but were set ablaze manually with gasoline. Except for a very few enclaves that had remained untouched, the Jerusalem that remained was no longer Christian or Jewish.

Jerusalem now was firmly in the hands of GLOW, who quickly restored peace to the city through implacable force.

That small but important portion of the vast Muslim community that insisted upon adhering to what they considered to be the important precepts of Islam utterly rejected the Catholic Church’s appeal to the majority of Muslims. They made their displeasure known through a continuation of the terrorist war that their predecessors had waged. The GLOW-dominated media refused to disseminate news of their numerous attacks, which gave the majority of mankind the impression that such extremism no longer existed. Life for most of mankind remained as it had throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, with the poor getting poorer and more miserable and the very wealthy reaping the comforts and privileges of their vast wealth. There was now no place on earth where the middle-class entrepreneur could gain a foothold and raise himself above the ranks of the unionized factory or farm worker. With few exceptions personal property was a privilege of the wealthy, the mass of humanity being consigned to a minimalist apartment existence.

Many of the Israelis who had fled Jerusalem at the desecration of the Third Temple found shelter from the government and people of Jordan, for which they were very grateful. Those who had managed to escape Jerusalem but were slower in the general rush to leave fared rather more badly. They were taken back to the temple, where they were tortured to the point of insanity, and then they were put to death in a mockery of the Jewish ritual of sacrifice. It was they who were butchered upon the temple altar, their blood running in a river down the exit channel.

Yet the system ran quite smoothly, just as those who had first created the structure of government had anticipated. That situation came to an abrupt end with the elevation to enormous of the importance of the disaffected Muslims’ decision to poison the wells, those wells being the vast and far-from-depleted oil wells of the Mideast and South America. In this case the poison was nuclear, inserted into the oil-bearing soils by missiles. Given half-lives exceeding ten thousand years of some of the nuclear materials, the oil fields that had fueled the economies of the world for a hundred years were lost forever.   The alternative oil beneath the ground of Russia and North America may have been sufficient to meet the primary needs of the system had their exploitation not been halted by the humbling of Russia in its war against Israel and the halting of drilling in North America due to the worldwide economic depression that had led to financial chaos and destroyed the oil extraction infrastructure.

The only truly viable source of oil left was the vast Mediterranean field controlled by the Israelis, which destroyed much of the unity among the world’s Regions as their individual leaders scrambled to outbid each other for access to this oil.

The Chinese leader found the hasty response of the Regional leaders to be humorous. “Look at those blind mice!” he chuckled at a video of their push to gain the benevolent attention of Israel’s prime minister, who now was enjoying an unprecedented surge in popularity among the world’s elite. “They’re falling all over themselves to lick the prime minister’s boots!”

“Don’t forget our own situation,” one of his peers in the politburo commented drily. “We ourselves are on the verge of oil starvation. At least they’re attempting to do something about it.”

“And we’re not?” the leader shot back, affronted. He stared at the offender as if he wished to strangle him for his stupidity. “Come here,” he said shortly, walking over to a large framed picture hanging at the most prominent position on the wall. The picture depicted a relatively small but numerically impressive portion of the vast Chinese army in full battle dress. “The other leaders are attempting to negotiate to their advantage. While they’re preoccupied with that futile task, we are going to march over there and simply take it. Does that address your ill-conceived concern? Have you no memory for how easy it was to reassert our dominion over Taiwan?”

The man shied away from the leader in humiliation while his other peers laughed openly at him. Why was I left out of this information? he asked himself, now in dread for his own future.

A day later the Chinese government began to prepare in earnest for a full-scale, take-no-prisoners assault on the already hotly-contested nation of Israel with the intent of grasping their oil field, now prized by virtually every nation on earth.

It was at this precise point that God decided that He’d had quite enough of mankind’s childish, arrogant foolishness. It was the perfect time, as He’d anticipated millennia before, to step into the affairs of man in a larger and more direct way. Merging with His Divine Consort, He communicated intimately with Her His will in that regard. Wisdom responded immediately.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty Two

 

 

 

 

There are a number of theories as to how the ring of space rubble that comprises the asteroids came to be formed. According to the planetesimal theory, it formed by accretion as the planets themselves supposedly did, but consisted of remnants that did not coagulate with the others because they lacked the collective mass to configure into a single, distinct body. There are problems with the planetesimal theory, chief among which is an inconsistency with the Newtonian law of conservation of momentum.

Another theory has it that the asteroids are the partial remnants of an enormous collision between a planet and some other very large body. This is the more likely supposition. A different kind of space object, the comet, is distinct from the asteroids in the location of its orbit and sometimes but not always its composition. Until the latter years of the twentieth century, comets were thought to be invariably cold and icy. This supposition was challenged by data gathered with the aid of modern equipment and techniques. While some comets are still known to possess characteristic ice, that is not always the case.

There are three types of comets: those that belong to the Kuiper belt, another belt like that of the asteroids but farther out, beyond the orbit of Neptune, and those associated with a hypothetical Oort Cloud that envelops the Solar System. The Oort Cloud has been placed as far out as 50,000 times the distance from Earth to Sun, almost a fifth of the distance to the nearest star. Those comets that belong to the Kuiper Belt populate the plane of planetary orbits and have shorter periods of orbit about the Sun, on the order of ten years, whereas the Oort comets have significantly longer periods.

The third type of comet is created directly by God when and where He wishes, but typically from material found within a large planet. Having been created by God Himself, its composition, size and trajectory are entirely up to God’s discretion. From the time of the Flood until now, Wisdom, in Her periodic entrances into the affairs of mankind to help some and wake others up, had contented Herself with picking up one of the numerous stones to be found in the asteroid belt and tossing them earthward. Now She decided to go big.

Bathed in the soft, weak light of its remote sun, Jupiter as viewed by the earthbound stargazer appears benign and cheerful in its cloaking hues of orange, red, and brown. Closer to its surface, the dominant planet of the solar system reveals more of its harsh and troubled nature. Gases thrust and swirl viciously against a starkly glaring backdrop of arcing electricity. The restless atmosphere provides but the merest hint of the seething hell far below, where element clashes with element in a heaving, boiling maelstrom as the massive giant on the very edge of starhood struggles to stay a planet, to avoid the fateful ignition.

Wisdom looked lovingly at this enormous planet, recalling with affection how many times She had used one of its offspring in the past to influence Her beloved mankind’s sojourn on Earth. The Flood; The Exodus; Joshua’s long day and America’s corresponding long night; Isaiah’s Errant Sundial

 

She recounted in Her mind the long and hazardous journey that Venus took as a wayward planetoid before it settled down into a stable orbit. Birthed from Jupiter by Wisdom as She was about to repeat with another planetoid, Venus at the Hand of Wisdom was directed toward Earth, which at the time had been enclosed by a beautiful, paper-thin canopy of ice. At that time, due to the canopy’s effect of creating a nearly uniform temperature from poles to equator, there was no rainfall on Earth, but a mist came up from the ground to water the life that God had placed there. Venus came close to Earth at the time of Noah, its gravitational influence shattering the canopy and shaking the Earth to release the highly-pressurized water in the aquifers buried underground. With the canopy gone, clouds formed, rain fell and the sun shining on the rain created rainbows for the first time.

Venus retreated from Earth with the Flood in its destructive wake, and continued on its awkwardly unstable orbit around the sun, which brought it back to the vicinity of Earth nearly once every Earth year. At its first return the planetoid remained far enough away from Earth that it didn’t do any further damage. On its next return Earth again remained undamaged, but the planetoid’s closest approach was just a little nearer to Earth. On its fifty-second return it finally got too close, and created more mayhem.

These fifty-two year cycles had repeated several times, each time visiting panic and terror upon mankind. One cycle was intimately connected with the Exodus of Israel from bondage in Egypt; the next caused Joshua’s long day and America’s corresponding long night. Things quieted down with respect to Earth after that, but then Venus, still in an unstable and dangerous orbit, nearly collided with Mars, stripping it of its water and half its surface, creating giant rifts, the Tharsis Bulge and Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, in the process pushing it like a giant billiard ball toward Earth. It was then Mars that threatened the Earth, coming so dangerously close every fifteen years that it influenced the Earth’s rotation and generated devastating earthquakes. The spectacle of errant planets was visible to men on Earth. Eyewitness accounts extend beyond the Bible to Homer’s Iliad and terrifying images of witches on broomsticks and dragons and sacred horned cows. The Israelites, in their journey to the Promised Land, were so terrified at the sight that they had decided to worship this apparition in the sky instead of their living and most loving God:

“And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Arron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, or your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with an engraving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord.”

When the game of cosmic billiards was finally over with Venus tucked away into a stable orbit, mankind did its utmost to forget the entire thing. Learned men who should have known better invented natural laws that violated common sense, like uniformitarianism that demanded that the processes that shaped the earth and influenced geological formations were tiny and slow. Whenever a braver person would come along and attempt to point out the truth, the establishment scientists would generate tantrums and attempts on the poor creature’s life and career.

These things Wisdom pondered as She prepared to act again. Man refuses to learn from the past, She thought, shaking her lovely head in sadness. But yet there still is some nobility among them.

 

It troubled Her briefly that in the process of correcting the frequently-errant mankind Mars was nearly destroyed, but then rejoiced that the situation with that planet ultimately would be a good thing too, as it would give Her Son and future daughter-in-law an excellent task to restore that planet to its former beauty and utility as a haven for life.

Okay, honey, Wisdom spoke softly to the giant planet. Time to be a mommy again.

For the most part, Jupiter’s mad tantrums remain confined to the planet itself, the thrashing hidden below the colorful atmospheric cover that belies the unending struggle within the tortured interior. At rare intervals, however, in explosive fury the angry giant hurls a piece of itself outward with such speed that it strains the bonds of the mother planet’s enormous gravity.

Let’s see, Wisdom thought, cocking Her lovely head in a pose of studious observation.   She poked and prodded here and there, and the huge mother planet responded by ejecting a massive, white-hot ball of magma out of its molten interior. At first this proto-moon joined its siblings that circled the parent giant. Wisdom gave it another nudge and it left Jupiter’s gravitational bond to wander as a planetoid through the solar system. Its movement was far from random. Wisdom’s precise poke directed it straight toward Her target planet.

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #32

Chapter Thirty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pope, having been informed of Israel’s selection of Simon ben Gideon as the world’s messiah, was apoplectic. After all the effort he’d put into placing the Catholic Church at the forefront of the world’s religions through ecumenization, this action on the part of the hated Israel had just cut him off at the knees. What rankled the most was that they’d done it behind his back. It was not that a new Jewish messiah would compete with the Catholic Jesus for the title and the religion. The Pope didn’t know whether this usurper was or wasn’t the actual messiah spoken of by the prophets. Nor did he care. Regarding the bottom line, however, he cared with a rabid intensity that took him over the edge into insanity. That bottom line, as he perceived it, was that the religious leadership of the world was slipping out of his grasp. And by a filthy, rotten Jew, no less! He had a terrifying image that the loyalty he’d won of many of the world’s movers and shakers through back-door bribes of money and prostitutes was wasted effort and that he was about to be consigned to history’s trash bin. Jerusalem would have been mine! he thought, horrified by the probability that he and his theology were on the verge of simply being shoved aside to make room for the Israeli messiah.

 

Insane or not, the Pope was correct in his dark assessment of his future. After GLOW’s meeting with him, the world leader had started asking questions. In very short order GLOW was fully apprised by the most trusted member of his personal staff of the Vatican’s rapidly-diminishing stature within the community of Regions. His ecumenism went too far, GLOW realized. The compromises left nothing of substance for committment to any one of the world’s religions, let alone them all. At any rate, one set of religious bandidos is quite enough, GLOW thought to himself, and I already have this new “messiah” in my pocket. GLOW correspondingly had directed staffer Abe Wilson to set in motion the elimination of the Pope and a media blitz intended to fully and irrevocably discredit the Vatican and its resident personnel.

It was not necessary to personally assassinate the Pope. The entire Vatican was torched to the ground in the dark hours of a cold, windy morning. Diabolically clever methods were employed to ensure that nobody escaped, so that the Pope went down in flames along with the entire Vatican organization. Given the increasingly open corruption of the Catholic leadership, the lamentation over their passing was minimal. With this removal of the central authority of the Catholic Church, each diocese was put adrift to survive individually the best it was capable of. Very soon thereafter, having bought into the necessity of a central leader and having accepted a theology so watered-down as to be meaningless, most of these Catholic representations closed their doors due to the profound loss of worshipers. A large number of elegantly purple-robed bishops and scarlet-robed cardinals found themselves without constituencies.

Good riddance! thought Wisdom as She observed the debacle, being perfectly aware that the real Church, consisting of widely-scattered individual Christians in diverse races, ethnicities and walks of life, had always existed apart from the man-centered and bureaucratic monstrosities controlled by self-serving leaders. They all were forewarned. Had they bothered to read and digest Scripture, they never would have put up with that mess. Well, Jesus through John told them, and He told them well.

The Scripture to which Wisdom referred in particular was Revelation 17:

“And there came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls, and talked with me, saying unto me [John], Come here; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters; with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sit on a scarlet-colored beast, full of the names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and bedecked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornications. And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great wonder.

 

          “And the angel said unto me, Why didst thou wonder? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not, and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is, not, and yet is. And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come, and when he cometh, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, who have received no kingdom as yet, but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast. These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire. For god hath put in their hearts to fulfill his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the woman whom thou sawest that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”  

 

As in the earlier declaration of Simon ben Gideon as Israel’s messiah, Jerusalem was again crowded with excited Israelis for the dedication of the newly-completed Third Temple. Another stage had been erected for the event, which held the most prominent of the orthodox priesthood. Messiah ben Gideon, who had willingly allowed himself to be placed above the Chief Rabbi, stood at the podium, ready to introduce the majestic GLOW, now seated behind the messiah and waiting to be formally introduced to the adoring crowd. Before the introduction, the rabbi gave a short dedication speech, quoting the first several verses of Haggai Chapter 2:

“’In the seventh month, in the one and twentieth day of the month, came the word of the Lord by the prophet Haggai, saying, Speak now to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the residue of the people, saying, Who is left among you that saw this house in its first glory? And how do ye see it now? Is it not in your eyes in comparison with it as nothing?’

 

“Well, that was what our new temple looked like a few short years ago,” the rabbi continued. “Nothing. But now . . . well, I’ll continue with Haggai:

“Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work; for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts. According to the word that I had covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my Spirit remaineth among you; fear not. For thus saith the Lord of hosts. Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come; and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts. The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former, saith the Lord of hosts; and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts.’

 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” intoned the rabbi, “this day this house shall indeed be filled with glory, for I present to you now our savior, Simon ben Gideon!”

Messiah ben Gideon pointed to the temple. “A marvel of construction,” he said to the crowd. “Utterly magnificent, a miracle, really. And so from this day forward, Israel has its temple, its messiah, and,” turning to the man seated behind him, “its God. God of Gods, very God of very God, majestic in stature, all-knowing, all-seeing, all Being. Ladies and gentlement, I present to you his majesty, GLOW.”

When the handclapping and cheering died down, GLOW began to talk, so quietly that the crowd had to strain to hear. Silence prevailed, intruded upon only by GLOW’s words. “People of Israel – hear me when I tell you that no longer are you to be forgotten and stepped on. You are my chosen people, chosen from before the Great Exodus from Egypt. I now announce a new covenant, the passing away of the nation of Israel. From henceforth, this shall be the home of your god, my home, and I shall name it after me. It shall be called Glowland, for I, GLOW, inhabit it as god with you. I call upon your messiah, Simon ben Gideon, to perform the prayer of dedication as I ascend the steps and enter my new home.

Ben Gideon stood before the steps as GLOW ascended them, spreading his hands to heaven as did King Solomon centuries before at the dedication of the First Temple. His prayer, in fact, attempted to parrot the words of this early king, a much wiser and God-fearing man.

“Lord god of Glowland,” Gideon began, “there is no god like thee, in heaven above, or in earth beneath, who keepest covenant and mercy with thy servants who walk before thee with all their heart; who hast kept his covenant and fulfilled it at this day. Therefore, now, lord god of Glowland, keep that which thou hast promised thy people, and dwell everlastingly with them. But will god indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that has been built in your honor!

“Yet have thou respect unto the prayer of thy servant, and to his supplication, O Lord my god, and to hearken unto the cry and to the prayer, which thy servant prayeth before thee today; that thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there; that thou mayest hearken unto the prayer which thy servant shall make toward this place. And hearken thou to the supplication of thy servant, and of thy people of Glowland and beyond to the whole Earth, when they shall pray toward this place, and hear thou in this dwelling place.

“We come before you in most humble thanksgiving for your condescension to dwell among us.”

At the completion of this dedication Gideon looked upward toward the sky above, which was empty of clouds except for one round, puffy cloudlet directly above them. Extending his arms yet further, he pointed both index fingers to that cloud. In response, a laser-bright beam of red light emanated from the cloud and rested on the new Holy of Holies, within which GLOW now entered, hidden from the crowd by the building itself.

Awestruck, the masses knelt before the temple, their hands in positions of supplication. Occupied as they were in worship to GLOW, the crowd failed to notice the Messianic Jews among them depart in haste. They had come out of curiosity; now, they were obeying the command of Jesus in Matthew 24 to run for their lives, their destination the other side of the Jordan River into the hills of Jordan:

“When ye, therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whosoever readeth, let him understand), then let them who are in Judea flee into the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house; neither let him who is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto those who are with child, and to those who give suck in those days! But pray that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day; for then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved; but for the elects’ sake those days shall be shortened.”

The Great Tribulation had arrived on earth.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #31

Chapter Twenty Nine

Jacob and Moira had thoroughly enjoyed the respite from fighting given them by the cessation of the Russian-led conflict and the subsequent emergence of Israel intact and now recognized by her people as truly blessed by God. They had used this time wisely to more fully integrate themselves into each other as a complementary team, putting the extraordinary bond they shared into use in their presentation of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah to a multitude of their countrymen. They often went on such missionary journeys to the Galilee area and into Jerusalem and the West Bank cities of Hebron and Ramallah. On many such occasions they were joined by others from Dafna, but at other times they preferred to go by themselves, considering those times to be mini-vacations in which they enjoyed the differences in people, scenery, the restaurants, and their overnight accommodations along with the pursuit of their mission.

Half of their free time was spent on the Temple Mount, watching the pace of construction of the Third Temple, which awed them with its beauty. So many Israelis had converted to Christianity, however, that Jacob and Moira began to wonder whether the ancient temple practice of slaughtering animals would actually resume once the temple had been completed. Perhaps, even though the Messianic Christians realized that the animal sacrifice had always pointed to Jesus and were no longer necessary since He had made the ultimate sacrifice on the cross, they would allow the practice to continue out of respect for tradition.

The other half of their free time was spent on the odious task of helping to bury the bodies of the dead invaders, a seemingly endless job that not only stank to the point of intolerability but carried with it the danger of radiation poisoning. Yet the couple, like many other Israeli citizens, considered it not only a duty but an honor to the mercy of God to be alive to carry it out.

On rare occasions Jacob and Moira would make the trek down to Gaza to visit their old companions Sid and Mary, another happily-married couple who were engaged in the task of rebuilding the area that was so devastated by the Palestinians when they were granted the formerly-lovely place by an ill-advised Israeli government. The restoration was quite far along, and when they visited, the two couples spent much of their time on the beach swimming and collecting sun tans. At least once on every such outing Sid would laughingly tell Jacob to keep himself away from the odd bullet, referring to the time Jacob was shot in the chest by a bullet from a would-be terrorist. That little drama would invariably be followed by a clinging hug from Moira.

One day while they were enjoying an idle day of sun at the beach, Jacob looked over to his lovely companion with a question on his mind. “Do you think that Jesus ever went swimming?”

“What kind of question is that?” she replied. “He made the ocean. He made the water that’s in the ocean. In fact, He made the molecules that make up the water, and the atoms that . . .“

“Okay, enough. And then you’re going to ask why He’d need to swim in the first place, since He can just walk on the top. That’s not what I’m asking   I’m thinking of what He did in an experiential sense while He was on the Earth. What He tasted, or felt. Did He enjoy the sun like we’re doing now? Did He get to feel His body surrounded by warm water? What did He know of His own Godhood. How far did He go in His kenosis?”

“I can’t answer that intelligently, dear. How can anyone possibly know what went on in Jesus’ mind during His incarnation.”

“Agree. But I’ve read a large number of accounts, many of which diverge rather extensively from what Scripture itself teaches. One that did agree with Scripture was particularly appealing. It was written some time in the 1920s, as I recall, by a professor by the name of Alva McClain. In his article he said something that really stuck with me, something to the effect that it would be infinitely better to give up the notion of his absolute attributes than his moral heroism. That statement alone fits perfectly with Earl’s notion of God’s omni-attributes being subordinate to His primary attribute of His willingness to give them up for the sake of selfless love.”

“What a beautiful thought!” Moira remarked.

“Yeah. McClain’s concept of Jesus’ kenosis makes sense in terms of the Scripture he cited as driving the entire controversy over how much Godhood Jesus maintained in His human form.

“Which is?”

“Philippians 2, verses 5 through 8. Here, I have a Bible in the backpack. I’ll read it to you.” He extracted the Bible and started reading:

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. But made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

“McClain differentiated the form of God from the intrinsic nature of God,” Jacob continued, “the nature of God being His transcendent attributes as well as His personality. The implication is that in His kenosis, his emptying of Himself, Jesus did not give up His Godhood, but just His form, which is the exercise of Godhood. What He really gave up was the independent exercise of Godhood, voluntarily and in perfect obedience to the Father’s will restricting any manifestation of Godhood to that specifically willed by the Father through the Holy Spirit. That restriction included His knowledge as well as His actions, which means that He was fully aware of His Godhood, but voluntarily maintained, in humble obedience to the Father, any actions or knowledge that wasn’t in perfect conformance to the Father’s will. To me that makes perfect sense, and it emphasizes Jesus’ selfless nobility.”

“You’ll have to revisit the issue in more austere surroundings. I’ve absorbed as much as I’m able to, and right now I can’t help but think of that beautiful water in front of us. How about a dip?”

That evening the two couples went up to Jerusalem to attend the ceremony in honor of Simon ben Gideon, the courageous soldier who had risked his life to save the children trapped in a burning building during the Russo-Israeli War. Jerusalem was packed with people wishing to add their own presence in support of the countrywide expression of gratitude for his selflessly heroic act.  The four crowded in best they could as the Prime Minister recited the soldier’s brave deeds, adding that ben Gideon had come to his country’s aid at precisely the right moment like David and his namesake Gideon before him, when all appeared to be lost and Israel desperately needed a champion. Proclaiming ben Gideon to be the very champion Israel needed, the Prime Minister draped a wreath of flowers on his shoulders and then placed a crown of olive twigs on his head in keeping with the millennia-old symbol of military valor. He kissed the man’s cheeks and turned him around to face the crowd. “Men and women of Israel,” he proclaimed, “I present to you the savior of our land!”

“That’s going a bit too far,” Moira murmured in Jacob’s ear. “We saw with our own eyes what happened. It was all God’s doing. I’m not saying that the man isn’t brave or shouldn’t be honored for what he did, but to claim that he saved Israel . . .“

“Yeah, what next?” Jacob broke in. “Are they going to make him the Messiah?” He was bumped in the shoulder by the woman next to him, who had overheard his comment. When he turned toward her, he was greeted by a vicious glare. “You’ll shut your mouth if you know what’s good for you,” she snarled, pointing to the large man standing beside her.

They were interrupted by a commotion on the makeshift stage. The cluster of dignitaries behind the Prime Minister parted to permit the entrance on-stage of the Chief Rabbi, a Levite from among the community of orthodox priests who had been waiting for their entire lifetimes for the privilege of constructing the third and final Temple of God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Now was an unprecedented opportunity: Israel’s primary enemies had been vanquished and the great Temple could now be built without meaningful opposition. The Chief Rabbi strode up to the Prime Minister, who deferentially withdrew himself, and moved over to stand behind ben Gideon. He gently turned the man around, gazed into his eyes, and kneeled before him. The sight of the religious potentate kneeling astonished Jacob and Moira, and much of the crowd with them. When he found his voice, he whispered in Moira’s ear, “I was only joking before, but I think that this is actually going to happen!” He turned to Sid, who was standing next to Moira, and they rolled their eyes in unison.

The Chief Rabbi stood and addressed the crowd. “This is a momentous day in the history of Israel,” he began. “I proclaim Simon ben Gideon to be our long-awaited Messiah, the Savior promised by our prophets, by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah. Represented by King David and represented by our Gideon of the past. By . . .“

He was drowned out by the noise of the screaming crowd. He patiently waited until the clapping and shouting began to die down, and then continued. “Our Messiah’s presence leads to another great and holy event. Wc can now start to erect our Temple.”

The crowd erupted in jubilation once more. When the noise dimmed again, ben Gideon took over. “Fellow Israelis!” he said loudly, and the crowed quieted in response. “I thank you for your recognition. I am indeed the one for whom you have been searching, and I myself proclaim a new era for our nation. But I must humble myself. As our orthodox religion implies, I cannot claim to be God. That singular attribute belongs to one person, and one person alone, the man you already know as the former president of the North American Region and who has now ascended to the position of GLOW. But through me, we of Israel have the unprecedented honor of serving GLOW as priests in fulfillment of his kingdom. Sons and daughters of Abraham! Very soon, with your help, we will begin anew to honor the tradition of sacrifice to your God and to mine. We shall restore the covenant, so dear to us all, the sacred transaction between God and our father Abraham and thus enter an era of endless blessing. Let the building begin!”

Once more pandemonium prevailed as the enthusiastic cheering began afresh. Jacob tugged at Moira’s sleeve. “Let’s go,” he said to her.

“You bet,” she replied, motioning for Sid and Mary to come with them. “Something’s terribly wrong about what he said.”

“What he said?” Jacob answered as they distanced themselves from the crowd. “Not a whole lot of kenosis there, although he did deny his godhood. But that’s not right either. Interesting that we were just talking about that. That’s not the only thing wrong with this scene. The very fact of his claim to messiahship is extremely wrong. He couldn’t be the Messiah, because the time window of the prophecies has come and gone. Furthermore, Jesus fulfilled that title so completely that there’s no room for another. But the biggest problem with the whole business is that since Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself on the cross, once and for all in our behalf, there’s really no reason for the continuation of animal sacrifice. And GLOW? From what I’ve heard about him and his unmitigated arrogance, there’s certainly no kenosis there either.” He turned around and received another shock. “Look at that, will you?” he said, stopping short. Following the lead of the Chief Rabbi, the people were now on their knees in worship.

“So now we have a messiah who’s not God, and a God who’s not the messiah,” Sid quipped, as they turned back and continued walking away from the spectacle. “I wonder how that strange theology will affect the Messianic Jews.”

“Probably not at all, except for a disgust with their fellow Jews for falling for such a blatant falsehood,” Jacob replied. “Their acceptance of Jesus as their Messiah in the face of Jewish tradition required them to give some serious theological thought to the matter. It would take me too long to list the contradictions in Scripture that this evil arrangement entails. The only part of Scripture that it agrees with is the end-time scenario.”

“Time to hit the road,” Wisdom said, walking with them. “Meaning to get yourselves in gear and head back to Dafna. But this time, Sid, you and Mary will want to go with them. Now scat.”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #30

Chapter Twenty Seven

“Dinner’s on the table,” Terry called. When they were seated the empty chairs spoke eloquently of two missing people. “Where’s Miryam? Terry asked, and received blank stares in return. “And Moshe?”

“They went out for a ride,” Earl said. “Said it would be short, but that was over an hour ago.” He looked at Ellery. As the others followed his stare, Ellery’s countenance fell and stomachs dropped around the table. Suddenly the dinner had lost its appeal.

Ellery rose from the table. “I’ll go look,” he said, and rushed out the door with his coat in his arm. The others heard the crack of his bike’s exhaust. Several eyes followed his back as it diminished down the road into the distance.

Ellery had guessed right about the route they had taken.. Half an hour later he found their motorcycle as he rounded a bend. In fact, he had to swerve to avoid it, as it lay on its side in the middle of the highway. Ellery hit the brakes hard and slowed, easing up to the head of a gravel road to the right. A hundred feet farther up the road a deer also lay on its side. It was dead. He looked around for signs of Moshe and Miryam, finally seeing the couple beneath a large tree. Miryam was lying down as Moshe leaned over her, attempting to administer some kind of help. He saw Ellery and beckoned him over.

As he approached the couple, Ellery saw that Moshe was crying. “I hit a deer,” he said. “It happened so quickly I couldn’t do anything. Miryam’s in trouble, Ellery. I can’t lose her.” His weeping became desperate.

“It’s okay,” Ellery said. I’m sure you couldn’t help it, so don’t blame yourself. Where’s her injury?”

“Her right leg is all torn up. She may have broken a bone in her leg or hip. But she’s so quiet! She was talking a while ago, sounded normal, and then she kind of fell asleep. She may have a head injury too. Aw gee! Why’d I have to . . .”

Miryam chose that moment to stir. She opened her eyes to look at Moshe. “Are you okay, Moshe?” she asked.

“Me okay? Me? I’m just fine, not that I deserve to be. How about you? You got me real worried. Are you still sleepy?”

“No. Not so much.” She struggled to get up, but Moshe firmly held her down. “What about the bike?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The bike’s not that important, not next to you.” Ellery assessed the couple. In actuality, Moshe didn’t look all that great. Both legs of his Levi’s were shredded and red, bloody flesh peeked out from the tears in the cloth. “Got a good dose of road rash yourself, I see,” he told Moshe. Miryam looked at him and put her hand to her mouth in horror.

“Yeah,” Ellery said. “You two are a fine-looking pair. Seems to me you’re just perfectly ready to get hitched. Would be a wedding to tell your grandkids about. Problem is, we can’t take you to the hospital, Miryam. Not after what Earl’s told me about what they do with sick folks. I don’t want to see you carted off to a death camp, and I’m sure that Moshe would back me on that.”

“Maybe you can go back and get us a vehicle that Miryam can ride in.”

“Sure thing. Here, take this and wrap her up in it. She’s probably still in shock.” He removed his coat and handed it to Moshe.

Returning back to the road, Ellery was prepared to steer the bike into a ditch and write it off, but in lifting it back upright he saw the deer must have hit the bike a glancing blow, enough to kill it and for Moshe to lose control, but damaging very little. He walked the bike to where his own stood and, leaving it parked there, got on his motorcycle and headed back for the house in a big hurry. The speedometer needle hit the hundred mph mark several times on the trip home.

They were waiting on the porch as he entered the driveway, but Henry took one look at his lone figure and ran down the stairs before he arrived and headed off to his old SUV. It was already moving as Earl and Ellery ran after it and piled into the front seat. Ellery returned first with the motorcycle, having managed to re-start it and drive it back. Henry’s car followed soon after with Moshe and Miryam inside. Dinner remained on the table, cold and forgotten.

Several anxious days passed before the extended family began to assume that Miryam’s head injury wasn’t life-threatening or permanent. Happiness prevailed when that was settled. Whatever else that was going on in the world was insignificant next to Miryam’s recovery.

One evening during her recovery Wisdom showed up at Miryam’s bedside. “Still a little sore, I see,” She said.

“I’m still alive,” Miryam replied. “I thought You wanted us to do this thing,” she added. “Why this?”

“I do want you to do ‘this thing’, Miryam. You and Moshe got banged-up some, but look how I preserved the motorcycle!”

Miryam couldn’t help but laugh at that. She stored it in her memory to share with the others later. “No, but really, did we do something wrong?”

“No, at least nothing serious. Moshe was getting cocky on the bike. He needed to shed some of that before the important trip. He’ll be a little more appreciative of you after that last little excursion. But those weren’t the main issues. You both need to develop more faith in Us. I don’t want to scare you, but there are some pretty heavy moments in store for you in the near future, and you’re going to need some mental preparation to match.”

“Oh-oh. Now you have me on edge. What do You have in mind – the end of the world?”

“I’ll make sure you both can handle it. No, it won’t be the end of the world. Not exactly. But it might seem like it . . . well, whatever. Just get well. We love you. ‘Bye now.”

For the next several minutes Miryam pondered the emotional grenade that Wisdom had tossed her way before leaving. Then she recognized it for what it was: another call to exercise faith. She began to relax and soon fell asleep.

Chapter Twenty Eight

Moshe and Miryam were married on a spring Sunday at Henry and Terry’s home by Pastor Arnold Bliss, an ordained minister who had lost his Church to the city fathers, who then had sold it to a group of entrepreneurs who turned it into a wholesale marijuana outlet. The loss was minimal, as the Church had been extensively vandalized two years ago, and the congregants driven to home worship, meeting at a different location each week. As the home for this Sunday’s worship service was at Henry’s, the entire congregation was there to witness the joyful event.

“That was rather rude, don’t you think?” One of the guests said to another after Moshe and Miryam abruptly departed for their honeymoon directly after the wedding ceremony, their destination happening to be Miryam’s room down the hall. The woman with whom she was conversing had a considerably sunnier personality and responded accordingly. “Not at all. I remember – vividly – my own marriage to Charlie, and how I was thinking that the reception was endless and all I wanted to do was grab my new mate and make it happen.”

“Really, Alice, was that kind of talk necessary?” They drifted apart after a brief but uncomfortable silence. Poor Adam, Alice thought, looking at the woman’s husband. Poor, poor Adam.

As Moshe and Miryam were enjoying their honeymoon, a continent away the Pope was having a heated discussion with a number of his bishops and cardinals, many of whom had arrived at his bidding from their homelands scattered about the world. “But how can you possibly reconcile Christianity with the Muslim faith?” one cardinal brought up for the fifth time that day to what appeared to be deaf ears. “It’s a monotheistic religion all right,” he continued, “but it’s monotheistic to a fault. When they speak of one God, they mean it so literally that they exclude the possibility of a divine Son and a divine Holy Spirit. In other words, your holiness, there cannot be a Trinitarian Godhead. And they aren’t about to back down on that issue, believe me.

“I hear you,” the Pope said over the murmurs of others. “I heard you before. And quiet down, people. I can hardly hear myself think. If they remain firm on that, it’s just a concession we’ll have to make to them as the price we’ll have to pay for world peace.”

“I wonder what God will have to say about that,” one bishop murmured under his breath. The Pope, who was endowed with exceptionally sharp hearing , picked up on it.

“God?” the Pope responded. “If God really existed, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in now. You know as well as I do that it’s our responsibility to maintain the myth of God to the masses of the world for the sake of world stability. It won’t do us any good to be caught up in the belief ourselves.”

The bishop who had commented was certainly caught up in the belief that God did indeed exist, having personally experienced the hand of God in his life. The Pope’s statement shocked him, as it was the first time that his superior had openly expressed his denial of God. Now he wondered what had happened to his beloved religion that had allowed an atheist to assume the lofty position as representative of Christ on Earth. But he kept his thoughts to himself, suddenly realizing that he must be in the minority. Although he privately chastised himself for his cowardice, the enormity of what he had just heard paralyzed him from speaking out about it.

“As a matter of fact,” the Pope continued, “in this modern era Christians have been quite thoroughly weaned from the Bible. They’ll readily accept a doctrinal statement from the Church that’s more all-encompassing than the narrow Biblical concept of there being only one path to heaven. The Church urgently needs to extend her reach beyond the Christian and Muslim communities to all the world’s religions for the sake of world peace. Look at how little our own Christian flock understands what Scripture says of God. Or even cares.”

“Well, maybe the Christians may not know what’s in their Holy Book, but the Muslims certainly do,” another bishop said. “I don’t think a statement of faith contradictory to the Quran will wash with them.”

“I do,” the Pope said. “Think of how contradictory the Quran is with itself, advocating both peace and violence at the same time. With the proper wording, we can easily get past that tiny little hurdle.”

Then he got to the heart of the matter. “We need to place more emphasis on the material world, minimizing thoughts of heaven or spiritual intangibles. What we really need to do is get in line with GLOW’s agenda. Look at what this magnificent man has already accomplished! And see how he’s been received by people of all faiths! Think how we can help by reconciling all the world’s religions – we’ll accomplish nothing less than the restoration of the original Babel, and indeed there will at last be nothing preventing mankind from pursuing every dream, every thought, and every delight that his rich, fruitful imagination can produce!”

“What about Israel?” another bishop pressed. “They’ve been clamoring for the right to build a new temple in Jerusalem.”

“What about it?” the Pope responded, irritated with what to him was an extraneous comment. “Let them build it. Since the Palestinians got so thoroughly trampled, they’re not likely to put up a fuss. And don’t talk to me about including Jews in our policy of thorough ecumenism. They’ll put up with anything we decide to do if they know what’s good for them.”

Within weeks the Catholic Church announced its position of tolerance and welcoming acceptance of all creeds and faiths within the vast community of mankind. To prove that new and kinder attitude, they published in all the world’s media their statement of faith, one in which the person of GLOW was prominently honored. GLOW responded by honoring the Church in a widely-publicized celebration held in the Vatican.

A major development that emerged from this celebratory gathering was another document, signed jointly by GLOW and the Pope, stating the Church’s support of GLOW’s confirmation of Israel’s covenented right to exist, a right that included Israel’s access to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the purpose of establishing a new temple. One item in the document that received much enthusiastic media attention was the formalization of the world-embracing Common Economic System, abbreviated to CES, its main feature the ubiquitous mark that symbolized patriotic obeisance to GLOW. CES promised to rid the world of the numerous curses by which the underworld had plagued modern society: theft of property and identity, money laundering and illegal transactions of every dark sort, and hoarding. CES made perfect sense to everyone except a tiny segment of society, those malcontents labeled Christian Fundamentalist Terrorists.

The peace in Israel imposed by GLOW led to the desire on the part of the rabbinical staff to forge ahead with the construction of a new temple, which had been a national desire for over a millennium. In synagogues the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a temple was quoted often, particularly selected passages of his Chapter 40 which was written while Ezekiel was still captive in Babylon:

“In the five and twentieth year of our captivity, in the beginning of the year, in the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was smitten, on the selfsame day, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me there. In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and set me upon a very high mountain, on which was a structure like a city on the south. And he brought me there, and, behold, there was a man, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed; and he stood in the gate. And the man said unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall show thee; for to the intent that I might show them unto thee art thou brought here. Declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel. And, behold, a wall on the outside of the house round about, and in the man’s hand a measuring reed of six cubits long by the cubit and an handbreadth; so he measured the breadth of the building, one reed, and the height, one reed. Then came he unto the gate which looketh toward the east, and went up its steps, and measured the threshold of the gate, which was one reed broad; and the other threshold of the gate, which was one reed broad. And every little chamber was one reed long, and one reed broad; and between the little chambers were five cubits, and the threshold of the gate by the porch of the gate within was one reed.”

 

While some rabbis would continue with the details presented in the remainder of the chapter, most would stop short after a few samples and exhort their congregants, saying in effect that since God had provided them with such minute details, many of which could apply only to the temple that hadn’t yet been built, did it not behoove His people to respond by implementing this great vision? This message, repeated often in diverse locales, brought the nation together in a unique way to fulfill Ezekiel’s vision.  

The nation of Israel commenced immediately with the construction of their Third Temple, working at a feverish pace as if its completion was a national emergency.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #29

Chapter Twenty Six (continued)

“I wonder if you could teach me,” Earl said, entering the conversation for the first time.

“Gee, I don’t know.” Moshe scratched his chin as he reflected on the possibility.

“Forget it, Earl,” Joyce told him. “You’re not exactly young any more. And what about a missing piece of your body? An important one for a would-be biker, I’d guess.”

Moshe was quiet for a time, thinking, as all eyes were leveled on him for the final answer. “It turns out that with a motorcycle the left hand is more important than the right,” he said after a lengthy pause. “The clutch is mounted on the left handlebar and takes a good squeeze to operate. The brake’s on the right, which if it was the only one would be at least as important as the clutch, but there’s also a foot-operated brake pedal on the right side, which makes for some redundancy. You’d just have to work around your handicap there, be more aware and leave extra space between you and the vehicle in front.”

“But what about the throttle?” Earl was excited about the prospect of riding a bike, but he was beginning to see the negatives. “How can I twist it with nothing to twist with?”

“Exactly right,” Joyce commented. “Which is why you’re not going to be playing with a motorcycle.” Joyce wasn’t conflicted in the least about preventing Earl from embarking on another risky adventure. Uppermost in her mind was her love for Earl, and her rich imagination presented a number of images of Earl bleeding from various abused body parts after falling off a bike. But also was her hospital memory of Maggie’s lengthy expositions of the hazards and discomforts of motorcycle riding behind her husband. Joyce knew that if, by some miracle, Earl would become proficient in riding a bike, he’d be bugging her to ride with him. No way that’s going to happen, she told herself, dismissing the possibility as ridiculous.

“Forget Earl,” Joyce said to Moshe. “Try it with Ellery. Let Marge have fun on the back.” Marge rolled her eyes to Joyce, giving her a sarcastic “Thanks, but no thanks.” But Ellery became excited about the prospect of a new adventure and coaxed Moshe outside for a first lesson.

Ellery had the entire household as an audience for his first try on the bike, which was a Yamaha Virago. The Virago was a sporty machine with an 1100 c.c. V-twin engine that Harley riders tended to call a Harley wannabe, but the truth was that it was a great engine in its own right. They were amply rewarded by the hilarity of Ellery’s ineptitude, which included a spectacular brush with a tree limb. Not to be put off by a little pain, Ellery persevered until he was able to keep the bike in an upright position for minutes at a time. The wobbling continued, though, which kept the mirth alive to the onlookers. Several days later, Ellery became proficient enough as a rider that his audience lost interest, and he continued to develop his skills in relative privacy.

A week after the previous session, Earl opened the Wednesday night Bible study with a direct rebuttal of Darwinian evolution. “In the first place,” he began, “natural selection doesn’t address the issue of how the first living thing began. All life has something in common: DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, which consists of a sugar-phosphate matrix that operates like the tape that used to be the storage medium for software instructions. Inside that matrix is a very long string of chemicals called nucleotides, whose pattern, like that of digital ones and zeros, describe a code for life. This code not only defines the nature and operation of a living being, but includes the instructions for making it.

“Natural selection describes a process by which a living being that is subjected to random variations in its DNA code may improve its characteristics or even, hypothetically, to develop into an improved being. Even if one accepts that premise, which is demonstrably false, natural selection has nothing to do with the creation of the first living being, because that process involves competition only remotely, if at all. One of the biggest problems with getting to that first living thing is the stumbling block of chirality. All of the enormously long sugar-phosphate molecules comprising the DNA string must be of a single orientation, called right-handed, whereas such molecules exist in nature with both left- and right-handed orientations in equal measure. The ability of randomly assembling even a small portion of a DNA string of the proper chirality has been mathematically demonstrated to be impossible, given all the time in the world. The same chirality issue exists with the assembly of amino acids into proteins.

“Speaking of assembling proteins, genes are the subroutines within the DNA code that specify the sequence by which specific amino acids are assembled to form the desired protein. But the assembly itself requires another protein to read the code and perform the actual assembly. This begs the question like the chicken and the egg of which came first: the protein being assembled to support a living being, or the protein required to perform the assembly? Entertaining the notion that they both formed at the same time is beyond naive.

“Then there’s the equally big issue of sexual reproduction: both male and female had to have been formed at the same time to make it workable. Moreover, sexuality is just one example of many living systems that require symbiotic relationships to maintain life.

“But even supposing that these issues could somehow be resolved, what about the fact that, by its own definition, a purely natural system lacks intelligence. The implication of that limitation is rather obvious: unintelligent systems cannot anticipate, meaning that they can’t visualize beforehand a function that doesn’t yet exist. Because of that inability, they can’t create that function, which is the basis of Dr. Michael Behe’s famous ‘irreducible complexity’ issue. By the way, there were some early attempts, since thoroughly discredited, to refute Behe on that score by proposing that new systems can be generated by ‘borrowing’ features of earlier systems.

“Then yet further, there’s the huge issue of systems integration. Even if a ground-bound animal with legs were to somehow develop wings and got past the transitional stage intact, he’d have to have the bone structure, musculature, tendons, nervous system, lung design and a host of other companion features to be able to fly with those wings.

“There are many more issues described by highly-qualified scientists that inhibit evolution from being a viable process. But our time’s up for tonight and you’ve been given plenty to think about. I hope that what I’ve said to you so far will help you see that the Genesis story of creation is the more scientific one after all. Good night and God bless you.”

The next evening Moshe opened the dinner table conversation with talk of the bike, but this time he switched the subject back to Earl.

“We can make you a prosthetic,” he told Earl. “Nothing that can rotate and twist, but I think we can modify the throttle grip, add a lever to it so that instead of twisting you can nudge it. The most difficult part there will be doing it in small increments. If you can master that, you’ll be home free. There’s something else in your favor – we can put you on the Goldwing after you get proficient on the Yamaha. The Goldwing is a bigger bike, but it also has an electronic cruise control, just like a car and it’s a good one. Once you get to highway speed, you can set that with the push of a button and relax.” Moshe looked at Joyce, expecting an onslaught of negative comments. He was astonished with her response.

“Good idea, Moshe,” Joyce replied. All eyes were on her, stunned with the acquiescence.

“She had a conversation last night,” Earl supplied economically.

“Oh,” was murmured about the table. But Henry didn’t get it. “What’s that all about?” he asked.

“Apparently, Wisdom thinks it may be a good idea for me to learn to ride a bike,” Earl told him. I don’t know why, but I’m sure She does, and I’m not going to argue.”

“Me neither,” Joyce said. It’s a matter of trust.”

Moshe spent the evening working on a throttle attachment. “It’s ready for you,” he told Earl the next morning over breakfast. The news excited Earl, who wolfed down the remainder of the meal and jumped up from the table, signaling Moshe to follow him out. Ellery was disappointed with the proceedings. “I guess I’m not gonna have a bike any more,” he said dispiritedly. “I was planning on taking Marge on a ride.”

“Hey, you still have your choice of the other bikes,” Moshe replied. “How about the Goldwing? But I’d get a little experience on it before taking Marge along.” The suggestion brightened Ellery’s outlook and he went out into the yard with Moshe, a happy grin dominating his features.

Marge was grinning too. “Another reprieve for me,” she said happily, to the laughter of Joyce and Terry. But Miryam was as excited as the men at the prospect of riding. “You’re lucky, Joyce,” she said. “You’ll be getting the Goldwing when it’s time to ride. Moshe took me out on it yesterday. I couldn’t believe the comfort. I felt like a queen. It’s the ultimate convertible. I love riding, cold out as it is now, and I’ll bet you will too once you get used to it.”

“As long as it stays upright,” Joyce countered. They all laughed at that.

Moshe fitted Earl with a stick-like extension to his stump of a right arm. The fastening device was an awkward arrangement of a belt and several bungee cords, but that wasn’t the problem. Try as he might, Earl couldn’t muster up the small muscle control required to operate the throttle, to which Moshe had attached a lever. The motorcycle remained in neutral while Earl’s struggles consistently brought the engine abruptly from idle to redline. Discouraged, Earl shut off the engine. “Good try, Moshe, he said, “but it looks like Joyce’s first assessment was right after all.”

“What, and deny the Holy Spirit?”

“There is that.”

“There has to be a way,” Moshe said, rubbing his forehead as if his brain needed stimulation. For several minutes they both were silent, each reflecting on how better control could be achieved. It was Earl who came up with a possibility. “How about if you added another lever? A stationary one, something that I could use as a brace to operate the other lever.”

“Yeah,” Moshe said. “Hop off, I’ll take the bike back into the garage. I’ll let you know when I’m ready again.”

A half hour after Earl had returned to the house, Moshe stood at the front door and called him back outside. The stationary lever was mounted on the bike and Moshe reattached Earl’s arm arrangement. “Try it now,” he told Earl.

Earl climbed back on and started the engine. He displayed a huge smile as the engine volume rose fractionally. That did the trick,” he told Moshe gratefully. “As a bonus, I can rest my arm on the new lever, which lets me feel that I have both handlebars under my control. Thanks a lot, man.”

Moshe went into the other controls, focusing first on the clutch handgrip, and then the foot-operated shift lever. “It’s not like a car,” he began. “In a car, you go to the position of the gear you want to select. Low’s one place, second’s another, and high another yet. But on a bike, it’s all sequential. You kick down from neutral into low, and then back up into second and up again into third, and another up takes you into fourth. Kick down and you go back into third. Up from there back into fourth, and down from there into second. You get back into neutral between low and second, it takes some practice to get the feel for where it is. Right now you want to keep it in low until you get comfortable with handling it. Now, about the brakes. Forget the hand brake, at least for now. The foot brake’s on the right. Go ahead, step on it, get the feel.

After several minutes of mentally reviewing the instructions, Earl felt ready to take the first try at moving. Moshe reviewed the controls once more with him, and then stood back. “Grab the clutch and kick it in gear.”

That part was successful, but what came next wasn’t. Earl was too quick on releasing the clutch and the bike jumped and bucked him off. Joyce was watching, and her concern added to the confusion. After settling them both down, Moshe switched tactics. “Keep your right foot on the brake as you release the clutch,” he told Earl. “Just keep your foot on the brake and do that several times until you get a feel for how to do it smoothly.”

Earl did as he was instructed, and then on the final iteration of that exercise he lifted his foot from the brake. That journey lasted for a hundred yards before he wobbled into a fall. Joyce was about to run after him but was surprised to see him laugh as he picked up the bike. “This is just like learning to hang glide!” he shouted to Moshe. “Lots of dust and muss and smashing into the ground, but that’s half the fun of learning!”

“If you say so,” Moshe said dubiously as he and Joyce came up to him. Earl got back on and lasted marginally longer in an upright position. Joyce refused to continue watching the debacle and returned into the house. At dinnertime Earl and Moshe came into the dining room with smiles on their faces. “He’s made real progress, Joyce,” Moshe told her.   At least now we know it’s doable.”

It took Earl two weeks of exhausting practice, but at the end of that time he was an accomplished rider, and graduated to the Goldwing. It took him another two weeks to become proficient with that bike, but finally the day arrived when he proudly invited Joyce to ride with him.

Joyce wasn’t at all happy with the prospect of riding behind a one-armed driver on a bike that looked about as big as a small car. She climbed on reluctantly, but was surprised at the smoothness of their departure. After a half hour of riding, she began to relax, appreciating that Wisdom knew what She was doing with Earl. The more she let go, the more she realized that her seat was beyond comfortable. Now I know why Maggie was so contented on the back of a Goldwing, she thought to herself. And why Marge was all smiles when she got on it. I think I can live with this, Wisdom, and thank you so much for the experience.

As Ellery and Earl became self-sufficient with their motorcycles, Moshe spent more time alone with Miryam. They rode together often, and with the weather warming up somewhat they took to packing their lunches and stopping at some inviting meadow for picnics. Their excursions grew bolder with time, as they began to appreciate that the authorities, of whom they saw plenty along their routes, avoided direct confrontation with motorcycle riders. The picnic sessions also grew bolder, becoming more intimate with time, and so did the petting, which finally led to Miryam’s jumping up with a shout to stop. “I can’t take this any more, Moshe,” she said, looking down on her man. “I’m getting so frustrated we either have to do something to make me an honest woman, or stop this altogether.”

“What do you suggest?” he asked, looking up at her with a wide grin.

“Don’t you think it’s your job to do the suggesting?” she shot back.

“You know exactly how I feel about you,” he said, laughing. “What’s more, the way the world’s going, I don’t think the usual lengthy engagement is in order. So then,” he said as he got on his knees before her, “Miryam my darling, will you marry me?”

It was her turn to grin. “Of course. What was the hold-up?”

Henry and Terry were thrilled with the news which, in opposition to the end-time lifestyle they were daily confronted with, spoke instead of the happy continuation of life. Terry went up into the attic and retrieved her own wedding dress, which she happily altered for Miryam’s use.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #28

Chapter Twenty Six

POTNAR failed to deny himself sleep over the loss of Taiwan to China. As long as this insignificant little island remained in its traditional place in the world economic system, he could live with the regime change. What did occupy his happy mind was the peace treaty. Its mere existence elevated him to a position of the most commanding respect in the world community for its accomplishment, something that American presidents had sought without fulfillment since just about the beginning of time. It’s time I put that respect to use, he thought, reminding himself of the deference that Poteur had shown him over the recent past. Collecting his enormous staff, he put it to them with his characteristic directness: convene a conference of the Regional Presidents. When asked deferentially by his Chief of Staff what this conference might entail, he merely said that he had a speech to deliver. With that, he retired to his favorite lounge, uncapped the exquisitely costly decanter of Scotch Whisky and poured a generous amount into a waiting goblet of silver inlaid with enormous diamonds and a painstakingly-crafted gold image of his crowned head. He called for his private secretary, who sat on the spartan chair provided for the purpose of dictation and began musing on the broad outlines of the speech he would deliver to this convention of world leaders. These days he usually delegated the task of speechwriting, like all his other duties, to his staff. But this time his mood told him that he could do this better by himself. Almost magically the most appropriate and eloquent words came into his head and out his mouth, to be collected with reverence by his secretary like precious jewels. He didn’t need an outline. The words just seemed to come out in the right order and fit without further adjustment into a grand organizing pattern that was simply there. He finished within the hour, filled his goblet with scotch, and shooed his secretary away to have the speech immortalized on paper without the usual invitation to sit on his lap. What he had just accomplished was far more enticing than the prospect of sex, and he used the interim to reflect on the recognition of greatness that this message would engender among those to whom he would deliver it.

Indeed, as he presented his speech to the body of leaders, they displayed the deference that he had anticipated. Actually, he reflected as he looked at them, their attitude went beyond deference to a state of awe, which led directly to the bottom line. “Gentlemen, I am now prepared to assume the duties and responsibilities, as is my rightful due, as your ultimate leader. I wish to formalize that position with your vote of confidence.” He paused, allowing the vote to be taken. It was unanimously in his favor, as he had expected, knowing that a win in the face of dissension by a minority would be met with virtually instant excommunication of the opposition, with a most unpleasant death very close behind.

His position having been formalized, Potnar informed them that henceforth he would be addressed by a title suitable to his position, which was GLOW, Grand Leader of the World. Under his leadership, all the world governments with the exception of China and the Vatican were now under his sole control, these governments consisting of the five Western regions of North America, South America, Western Europe, Indo-Australia and the Pacific Far West and the five Eastern regions of what remained of Russia and its old Eastern European satellites, Persia, Syrio-Turkey, Arabo-Africa and Southern Asia.

GLOW had managed to discount China in his mind as neither a loss nor a threat, preferring to adhere to the old Western view of that country as a sleeping giant, which was no longer true. The Vatican was a different matter. He had met with some resistance from the Pope to his assumption of world leadership, as evidenced by the hint in his pronouncements that the Catholic Church was still rather far away from the ideal of full secularization. It was time to have a personal confrontation with the Pope. He directed his staff to set up a face-to-face with the Pope at his residence and at a time convenient to his schedule.

The Pope knew that he couldn’t turn down a demand from GLOW to meet with him. The man was simply too powerful. What rankled him more than anything else was GLOW’s insistence that the meeting be held in the world leader’s own palatial estate, which now was considered to be the seat of world government. This venue meant that the leader held all the cards, as was obvious the moment they came together for a direct confrontation. The fearful Pope wondered if, perhaps, GLOW had a well-stocked interrogation chamber tucked away somewhere in the basement of this vast complex, which was more opulent by far than the once-grand Vatican.

The intimidation wasn’t as bad as the Pope had expected. Actually, the Church had come quite far into full ecumenism, almost to the point of accepting Islam into her fold despite the obvious differences between Christian Scripture and the Quran. What it would take to complete that massive accomplishment would be to continue the quiet, gradual setting aside of virtually all the meaningful portions of both texts, retaining only that material that would be acceptable to both peoples. This material was rather tiny and insignificant, but then most of the masses never had wanted to read their sacred texts in the first place, so the people themselves would be more than happy to see this information go by the wayside and worship a more benign and tolerant god of their own making. Given the prevailing state of the Church, the Pope was satisfied, albeit with a fearful look at GLOW, that he could support GLOW’s wishes.

During GLOW’s presence at the leadership conference and his follow-on meeting with the Pope, his staff was preoccupied with maintaining these events on track with his wishes and demands. America enjoyed a brief respite from his micromanagerial interest in the everyday affairs of the citizenry.

During that time a kinder Ralph took over some of the duties in the store, freeing Henry to wander down the aisles chatting up his customers. Putting his people skills to use, Henry was able to accurately differentiate between those who might be open to barter business and those who would call the authorities. Although there was an ever-present danger of his encountering a well-rehearsed government spy, he had devised a series of clever questions to help in outing such a person. Of course, he had the ever-present assistance of the Holy Spirit, although for the life of him Henry couldn’t grasp how such a presence could be so ubiquitous as to include him among the billions of people on the planet, each with his own problems.

Over a relatively short period of time the shop acquired a substantial base of repeat customers, most of whom came in to utilize the shop’s black market service. Collecting a nominal fee for each barter transaction, Henry was able to maintain the survival of his extended family, which included Ralph and the three couples who continued to live in his home along with his wife and himself.

There was a side operation to the business, one that fulfilled Wisdom’s motivation to create it. As the store became ever more popular among those who had avoided accepting the body mark, Henry was able to offer them the Scriptural materials that the three couples had generated. As a result, there was a substantial harvest of souls. As Ralph continued to develop spiritually, he also began to be influential in winning people to Christ. With every soul he participated in bringing to Christ, his countenence became sunnier. Henry slowly lost his missionary sense toward Ralph, which was replaced with a real brotherly friendship.

As Henry’s business expanded, so did Arnold Bliss’ Church, thanks to the excitement over Earl’s ongoing presentation of Jesus’ feeding events and the word-of-mouth draw of people into the Church and her Bible study.   This Wednesday evening in response to a question he moved on from the topic of Jesus Feedings to the trustworthiness of the Bible.

The question had been posed by Dick Billings. “Given the precision of the information on the feeding events, it kind of suggests that the Bible should be interpreted more literally than most of us are used to doing. At one Church I attended several years back the pastor scoffed at the notion that the creation story in Genesis One was literally true. He’d told us in the congregation that science, and particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution, had pretty much trashed the possibility of a literal interpretation.”

“Well, at least he told it like it is,” Earl responded. Too bad about that. Let’s see by a show of hands how many of you have bought into Darwin’s evolution.” Earl didn’t need to count, as everybody’s hand except Joyce’s shot up, including pastor Bliss’.

“Are you trying to suggest otherwise?” Dick asked as Earl shook his head in disbelief.

“Suggest? No, that’s way too weak a word. I’m telling you that Darwin is wrong, and that you and the rest of America should have placed more faith in your Bibles and less on the culture. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Christians who blew the whistle on him. It was science itself.

“For well over a century now,” Earl continued, “we have been told with the most positive assurance by our scientific authorities how the earth was formed. They have told us with a fool’s certainty how long ago this was, and how the life upon it came to be and how it changed, always upward, from the simple to the complex all the way up to that masterpiece of chance, mankind itself. Not only are we told by them, but their words are parroted to us by their followers in all walks of life. Our teachers from the very first grade had measured and controlled our development by the efficiency with which we swallowed the information that they had implanted within us. Added with equal authority to their voices are those who wrote, enacted and produced our television programs, especially by those who had professed to teach our children. Absurdly, even our national park rangers had arrogated to themselves this same function, who took it upon themselves to furnish us with the prevailing view of our geologic and archaeological history. We were told by this legion of instructors that man’s current understanding of his roots and the surrounding soil is so complete, exact and infallible that it must obviously and necessarily be true.   No matter if, from time to time, the mechanism of formation changes a bit here or there, or the time frame is halved, or quadrupled, or slashed to a tenth of the previous date so long as the antiquity is sufficiently great, measurable in millions of years.

“But common sense alone should have told you that the entire uniformitarian scheme of huge tracts of time has a serious flaw. Who among you doesn’t retain some unease at the concept that out of all these millions of years man in his full glory as recorder of history has been around for only the past few thousand years? That just seems a bit too coincidental, too pat in reasoning, does it not, the apparently sudden explosion of the ability to reason abstractly and to write? Perhaps we should question our experts a bit more, make them more accountable for what they insist is the truth. Despite the rigorous training that supposedly places them above errors of logic they remain, alas, human beings with all the faults of the mind that we share, perhaps even having a larger portion than others of that most disagreeable shortcoming, intellectual arrogance.

“This unjustified attitude, as a matter of fact, extends to all of us who were taught to believe that our present age of technoscientific enlightenment prevents us from falling into the errors of our ancestors.   We shake our heads condescendingly at the rigid thinkers who came before. We marvel that they were so blatantly medieval as to accuse as blasphemous such forward thinking geniuses as Galileo and Kepler and Columbus, men who risked their lives in their insistence that the earth was not the center of the universe, nor that the heavenly motions were composites of perfect circles, nor that the earth itself was flat. Virtually all of us would agree that such narrow thinking as fueled the engine of the Inquisition could not happen today. And in our agreement we are all terribly wrong. It may so happen that we are every bit as narrowminded as those who persecuted Galileo, being every bit as wrong. And the motivation behind their savagery and our just as terrible sin of passive acquiescence to our own self-proclaimed experts of the natural sciences would not be religious. It never was. It is now, as then, the attempt on the side of the information disseminators to maintain the concepts most dear to the prevailing intellectual regime, and on the side of their audience of a vile and ubiquitous intellectual indifference. Galileo, by the way, was a devout Christian. He was chastised for attempting to tell the Duchess of Tuscany that the geocentric view of the solar system was extrabiblical. But in the end he was right – the Church had embraced a notion that wasn’t even Scriptural.

 

“Over and above our own indifference, the uniformitarian basis of our earth and life sciences threw an almost insurmountable conceptual stumbling block into the path of any person who came to the Bible and other historically respected sources in search of understanding the nature of the world about him. The person who wished to speculate on the accuracy of our current understanding had a lifetime of injected information to sort through and logically test for truth and consistency. Beyond that, he had to have sufficient courage to withstand the attitudes and opinions of his associates, neighbors, and often even his loved ones. This was especially true for the individual who sincerely desired to comprehend the truth of the Bible, for our present science had declared it mythical, allegorical, and certainly not compatible in a literal sense with our advanced understanding of ourselves and the universe around us.

“I see that I’m running out of time and I haven’t even started to show you how modern molecular biology has tossed the theory of evolution into the intellectual dumpster despite the efforts of several molecular biologists to assert that Scripture and evolution were compatible. I’ll end this session by putting it to you straight. What if, despite the ponderous mass of prevailing opinion and the enormous weight of malevolent disdain that presses against those whose intellectual vision disagrees with it, our entire system of naturalist thought was indeed wrong? What if the Bible contained far more literal truth than virtually all but a tiny minority of the persons in this or the last several generations could have imagined?

“What if the gradualists had been recognized as wrong at the outset, allowing the early catastrophists to pursue their initial advances in the field of natural history? An acceptance of a different truth in Charles Darwin’s day might have led his naturalist contemporaries along a quite different path in their acquisition of knowledge than the one they so foolishly chose to follow. They may then have arrived at a scenario similar to the one that real, working scientists just a short time ago finally came to recognize as representing our very recent geological past. This picture places Jupiter, in response to the awesome Hand of God, as a source of very great violence against the Earth.” He and Joyce left, allowing them the opportunity to digest that thought.

One day Henry received a visit from several bikers, whose presence initially alarmed him. They turned out to be so cheerful and friendly that he went out on a limb and bought several of the bikes, giving them some badly-needed cash to survive as human beings for whatever short time remained. Although cash had been prohibited, the black market continued to use it as its principal means of exchange. Its portability and generality continued to make it more useful than straight barter, and the bikers insisted that the transaction involve cash.

Henry knew that he’d have to face Terry’s wrath when he told her about his purchase, and was sorry that the apprehension that he’d harbored about it was confirmed as all too real when he discussed it at the dinner table. Her tirade had hardly gotten off the ground when Moshe intervened. “Please,” he said. “Those bikes just may be the most valuable possessions you have.”

“How so?” Henry asked. Even he was taken aback by Moshe’s enthusiasm. “Nobody here even knows how to operate one.”

“Wanna bet?” he retorted. “I had a bike in Israel while I was going to college.”

“Did Somebody talk with you last night, Moshe?” Joyce interjected.

“Yes. She did. I have a very strong feeling that what you did was in the will of God, Henry.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Henry responded enthusiastically. “I had this strange feeling of comfort while were were making the transaction – like this was something that was supposed to happen.”

“I give up,” Terry said in exasperation. But she, too, seemed to accept this new development.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #27

Chapter Twenty Five

The abrupt end of hostilities between the Israelis and the Russian-led enemy forces created what the president of the new North American Region saw as an opportunity. He jumped on it, sending his Secretary of State to Tel Aviv with the mandate to forge a more permanent peace between Israel and their Palestinian neighbors, even though the subdued Palestinians were no longer seen by most Israeli citizens as a threat to the security of the state. Nor did the Palestinians themselves have an appetite for further conflict. Perhaps it was this new meekness that elicited compassion from the Jewish people toward those who wished to share their land.

At any rate, to the immense surprise of the world’s politicians, perhaps most of all to the feckless Secretary, Israel signed on to a binding agreement, effective for seven years, after the North American dignitary gave a speech in which, with all the considerable pomposity that he could muster, he delivered a pronouncement that he claimed came straight from the mouth of his boss: henceforth, provided that Israel agree to comply with the terms of this “interim” contract, the president would personally guarantee the maintenance of the original covenant between God and Abraham, basically that Israel had a right to exist.

 

The time was ripe for Israel’s compliance and the consequent solution to what had been considered an intractable issue. In utter disregard of the obvious intervention of God in the recent battle, the Israeli citizens remained fearful of yet more violence. The loss of Haifa was a big blow to the collective Jewish psyche.   They had had their fill of bloodshed. The countryside was littered with the ugly, rotting leftovers of the recent conflict. A massive cleanup campaign would be necessary to render much of the country livable.

The contract was, in fact, quite reasonable to those Israelis who had no knowledge of their prophets: simply for agreeing to live side-by-side with a new Palestinian nation that would formally govern the historically Jewish lands of Gaza and Judea, Israel would be able to call it a day on the fighting. It was a great solution, the new Israeli government claimed, because any threat of mass destruction would also threaten the new Palestinian nation with unthinkable collateral damage. With great relief, the Israeli population gave up its weapons, tossed their gas masks back into their closets, and tore down the walls that separated them from the Palestinians.

Centuries ago in the distant past, the prophets had said otherwise about this very event. Joel, for instance, had said the following in his Chapter 3:

“I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage, Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.”

Ezekiel and Jeremiah both spoke out about the false hope of peace, wherein in Chapter 13, Ezekiel said:

“Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there is no peace;”

Centuries later, Paul echoed that concern in Chapter Five of his first letter to the Thessalonians when he paraphrased an aspect of Jesus’ Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24:

“For when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape.”

But of all the prophets, Daniel in his Chapter Nine was the most clearly foreboding with respect to this issue.

“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”

 

In utter disregard of foreboding pronouncements of their ancient prophets, the Israelis set about in the wake of this agreement to commence building a new temple, to be erected on the Temple Mount under the sharing arrangement that was established in the contract.

Responding to a runner from Dafna, Jacob and Moira left their overlook at the crest of the ridge between Israel and Syria and returned to the kibbutz, somewhat happy with the situation and looking forward to a restoration of normal life in the community but yet, in their knowledge of Scripture, wary of the future. Knowing that they had but a few years at most of peace, they continued to feel that the time was not appropriate to have children. Nevertheless, and despite Moira’s sense of loss that they wouldn’t be sharing their love for each other with a child, they adjusted quickly to their new lives in Dafna in which their bond of love toward each other continued to grow and strengthen.

 

The Peoples’ Republic of China had observed the unfolding Mideast conflict with intense interest. Of particular relevance to the Chinese politburo was the neglect with which the Western Regions treated the little nation of Israel. The other governments could be forgiven for having mixed feelings about the clash between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the North American Region was another story. Throughout most of its previous incarnation as the United States of America, this entity was the professed friend and ally of Israel, and in the past it had come through with support for the nation at critical times. Perhaps that support was reluctant at times, but it had never really let Israel down when the going was tough.

Until now. America had offered no support whatsoever in this most recent unrest. Whatever caused the cease-fire, it wasn’t America that did it or even contributed. But then, Armerica has a rather poor record when it comes down to helping friends out of jams. Hungary in ’56, the leader noted. What a fiasco that was! How naive of the Hungarians to think America would come to the rescue. And Cuba. And Africa. As he ticked off he various countries that America had betrayed, the thought in the back of his head leapt to the fore: is Taiwan ripe for the plucking? Have we been too worried about a threat from America that in all likelihood would never materialize? The president reflected on the state of Chinese-American relations over the recent past, beginning with his country’s enjoyment of Clinton’s policy of “engagement” with them, which amounted to a winking at China’s brazen theft of military technology. They were cowardly then and are just as cowardly now. Undoubtedly more – worse than Neville Chamberlain of Britain as he fell over himself attempting to appease Hitler. Idiots. Now that the American government has decimated its own population and torn its own economy to shreds, they’re no longer even useful for trade.

Concerned now that the Chinese leadership historically had been far too cautious about retaking what really belonged to them, the president called for a formal meeting of the members of the politburo. When his peers were assembled, he shared his thoughts with them. His proposal was met with more timidity than he expected, his comrades voicing their concern over the American involvement in the peace treaty. But the Chinese president promoted his view of the new confirmation of God’s covenant with Israel as nothing but a lukewarm show of support to a nation that continued to survive without America’s help when they most needed it. Even as he overcame the objection of his peers, however, he was annoyed at a dark, troubling thought that persisted in the back of his mind. It was an undeniable fact that Israel had continued to survive under the bleakest of odds. How could that have happened? he asked himself. Unable to answer it, he forcefully shoved the apprehension from his consideration.

Quickly thereafter, the command was given to assault selected Taiwanese political targets with missiles from the mainland, to be followed by a massed assault by amphibious landing of the island by the most highly-trained troops, with sternly-expressed orders to leave the manufacturing sector and other elements of the economic powerhouse untouched. All that was needed was a change of owners.

The assault was carried out with overwhelming force and merciless precision. By the end of the next week, the economic powerhouse was running quite smoothly as if nothing had just happened. But now it was working on behalf of its new Chinese masters.

There was not so much as a peep out of the North American Region, leaving the Japanese people fretting about whether they would be the next in line for a Chinese takeover. The Australians also were rather concerned with the development in Taiwan, as were the Philippine people. But, given the absence of North American leadership, none of these fearful neighbors made the slightest move to confront the giant that was now fully awake, staring with wide-eyed lust at its potential enemies and breathing fire like the dragon that represented it.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #26

Chapter Twenty Four

 

 

“That’s all there is to it?” one congregant asked Earl at the next Wednesday night’s Bible Study run by pastor Arnold Bliss. Earl had followed his presentation from Second Kings 4 of Elisha’s feeding of the hundred with a presentation of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand. In the process he had described the nature of the miracle, which was simply that every time a loaf was broken, both halves became whole again.

“That’s it. The rest is in the process and the patterns.” Earl then described the process of distribution, followed by a figure that he had Joyce display in front of the crowd. “That’s the pattern,” he said, pointing to the figure. “Seventeen rows by five columns of companies, four of which are companies of fifty, and the middle one being a company of a hundred. Each of those five columns is given one starting loaf of bread, which is then distributed within the column by the process I’ve described. With the company of a hundred being twenty people wide and each of the four companies of fifty being ten people wide, the number of columns of people within those five columns of companies amounts to sixty. If each basket contains five leftover loaves, then it takes twelve baskets to collect all the remainders, one from each column of people. There you have it – starting with five loaves, Jesus fed, at least symbolically, five thousand people, with a remainder of twelve baskets. All the numbers in the Gospels for that event fit the pattern.”

“Remarkable!” one person exclaimed.

“But I just did the math,” said another. “Seventeen rows by four companies of fifty and one company of a hundred amounts to five thousand, one hundred people. There’s an extra hundred in there.”

“Very good. Okay, so then remove a company of a hundred.”

“But then you’re left with an awkward partial rectangle. I’d think God could do better than that.”

“So do I. Okay. So then insert Elisha’s company of a hundred.”

“Oh. Oh, my gosh.”

“Which is a very important, because it suggests that the several feeding events should be integrated together.”

The following week Earl continued with his discussion of the feedings, this time addressing Jesus’ feeding of the four thousand. “The interesting thing about this event,” he told the people, “is that if you perform the same process as with the feeding of the five thousand, you don’t come up with a pattern that satisfies the numbers given in the Gospels. The only way you can get a meaningful pattern is if you rotate the process so that the rows become columns and vice-versa. If you do that, two distinct patterns emerge: one rectangle of three companies of fifty, and another rectangle of eleven horizontal columns by seven vertical rows of companies of fifty. The smaller rectangle contains one hundred fifty people, and the large one has three thousand eight hundred fifty people. Together, they make four thousand people. The smaller company can be added to the larger during the distribution so that there are seven companies that each receive one loaf. There’s a total of thirty-five rows of people in all, so that with each row producing a leftover loaf, at the same five loaves per basket there are seven baskets of remainders. That’s all there is to it – seven beginning loaves, seven baskets of remainders, and four thousand fed.”

“Awesome,” someone spoke up. “But were the baskets of the same size in the two feedings?”

“Very good question. Actually, they weren’t. The baskets used in the collection of leftovers from the five thousand were small handbaskets, while the ones used in the feeding of the four thousand were larger. But here’s the point – in each case the feeding of the menfolk contributed five loaves to each basket, regardless of its size. The two groups were very different. The five thousand were fed on the north side of the Sea of Galilee. These people were primarily Jewish, as confirmed by the number twelve of baskets, which corresponds to the twelve tribes of Israel. The four thousand were fed on the south side, where Gentiles predominated, also as confirmed by the number seven of baskets, which corresponds to the seven Churches described by Jesus in Revelation 2 and 3. The Jewish religion was very patriarchal, which supports the notion that the smaller baskets of remainders from the feeding of five thousand held only the loaves from the feeding of the menfolk. The Christian faith is far more inclusive toward women and children, so it makes sense that this characteristic is emphasized by the larger baskets from the feeding of the four thousand included the remainders from the unspecified feeding of the children and women as well as the men.”

“That’s even more amazing,” the man said.

At the Wednesday Bible study the week after that Earl presented the pattern from Peter’s feeding of the three thousand with the Word of God, a strictly symbolic pattern that integrated quite astonishingly with the pattern of the feeding of the five thousand and Elisha’s one hundred and the pattern of the feeding of the four thousand into the figure of a cross.

Most of the congregation were speechless with that revelation. Finally one person spoke up. “You forgot something,” she told him. “What about the three companies of fifty that weren’t part of the bigger rectangle?”

“Oh, yeah,” Earl replied in mock surprise. “Three companies that can be hung on the cross as the Titulus, which in Jesus’ case, said the words “This is Jesus, King of the Jews” in three languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. I’ll let you digest that over the next week before giving you some new material. I’ll just say this about the feedings: it’s the details that make Scripture so rich and believable, like the account in the Gospels of the crown of thorns that was placed on Jesus’ head at the time of His crucifixion. In Matthew, for example, I think it’s in Matthew 29, the Roman soldiers fashioned a crown of thorns and shoved it onto His head, and then they mocked Him. Emperors often wore crowns that highlighted their majesty, but there was a different crown, one that was made of some kind of vegetation, that was conferred upon a person who was considered to be a savior of the nation, and placed on the head of the person to be so honored not by the emperor or one of his officials, but by a fellow soldier. It was treated like we in America used to respect the Congressional Medal of Honor. In view of that, Jesus our Lord was acknowledged right there as our Savior, perhaps inadvertantly, but confirmed as such nonetheless.”

A chorus of “Ohs” ripped throughout the room.

“Another thing about the feeding details,” Earl told those in the Bible study the next week, “is that they furnish another rich illustration of the Bible’s truth. Throughout the centuries since the beginning of the Christian era, numerous people, when they encountered the Gospel accounts of the feedings, found it inconceivable that while five thousand could be fed with five loaves and produce twelve baskets of remainders, it took seven loaves to feed four thousand and produce seven baskets of remainders. The numbers were counter-intuitive. They just didn’t seem to make sense. For that reason, many people thought that the feedings were simply allegorical of a moral truth despite the sloppy math, although they couldn’t figure out what that truth might be. You now know that the feedings indeed made mathematical sense, the presentation wasn’t sloppy in the least, and the feedings produced a very significant sign.”

After the clapping died down, Earl continued. “I hope you’re not clapping for me, but praising the Lord for the transcendent beauty of His Word. Speaking of which, today’s lesson will give you another jolt about the astonishing accuracy of Scriptural prophecy. I’ll be talking about Israel’s becoming a modern nation and in the process fulfilling a very specific prophecy in the Bible. Pastor Arnold, would you happen to have a whiteboard and some felt-tipped pens?”

“Sure thing,” he replied, and left the room, returning shortly with a whiteboard in one hand and an easel in the other. He set them up in front of Earl and then left again, returning with a number of colored pens. Earl continued after he sat back down.

“Can anyone tell me when Israel became a nation?”

“It was 1948,” one woman said.

“Great. When in 1948?”

“I think it was in May of that year,” she said.

“Yes. Around midnight of May 14 to be precise. Remember that day. Now I’ll tell you about an astonishing discovery that the late Grant Jeffrey, a superb Bible scholar, had made some time toward the end of the last century. He’d had clues from the Book of Hosea that the restoration of Israel to a nation would occur about that time. I wish that I could remember those passages, but . . . “

“I can,” Joyce spoke up. “They’re in Hosea four and six. I’ve memorized them. Shall I . . .”

“Please do, Joyce, and thanks.”

“I may have to paraphrase in places, but here’s the gist: ‘For the children of Israel will abide many days without a king, and without a sacrifice, and without an image. In the latter days the children of Israel will return and seek the Lord.’ That was in Hosea Four. In Hosea Six he says ‘After two days shall He revive us. In the third day He will raise us up and we will live in His sight.’ I’ve alway interpreted the days in this prophecy to represent a thousand years, in accordance with 2 Peter 3:8, where Peter equates a day with the Lord to a thousand years. In saying that, Peter is echoing Psalm 90.”

“Thanks, Joyce. I agree with you about the day being a thousand years, which would place Israel’s return close to the beginning of the Third Millennium A.D., or, in other words, some time between the last century and this. There’s some good agreement with those prophecies and the actual date of 1948, but Jeffrey’s review of Ezekiel and Leviticus brings Ezekiel’s prophecy much closer – to the very day, in fact.”

There was a murmur of astonishment in the room. “It’s right there in the Bible,” Earl told them. “Pray for me that my memory won’t fail me here. In Ezekiel Four, God tells the prophet to lay on his left side for three hundred ninety days. Each day that he does so represents a year of Israel’s iniquity. After that Ezekiel is to lay on his right side for an additional forty days, where again each day represents a year.” Earl put the numbers on the white board and added them up. “This represents a period of four hundred thirty years, which, by the way, is the exact time that Israel was in Egypt, to the selfsame day according to Scripture. “Anyway, Dr. Jeffrey figured that this time of judgment was to begin with Israel’s first captivity, which began around 606 or 605 B.C. , when Nebudchadnezzar carted the citizens of Judah off to Babylon as prisoners. According to Jeremiah, that captivity lasted exactly seventy years.” Earl subtracted seventy from 606 on the whiteboard and displayed the answer of 536. He also subtraced seventy from four hundred thirty to arrive at a figure of three hundred sixty.

“Okay, then,” he resumed. “We are left with three hundred sixty years of Israel’s punishment for iniquity, starting from around 536 or 535 B.C. The numbers didn’t make sense to Grant Jeffrey, because nothing like a resumption to statehood happened to Israel in that time period. Something – I believe it was the Holy Spirit – led him to read Leviticus Chapter 26, where he was astonished to find a possible answer. The gist of that passage states that if Israel persisted in her iniquity, God would increase the time of her punishment sevenfold. As Israel did indeed persist in iniquity past the time of her first captivity, Jeffrey multiplied the three hundred sixty years by seven and tacked it onto the date of 536 B.C.” Earl performed the calculation on the whiteboard, displaying the answer of 2520 remaining years. “Bear with me now, because it becomes rather complicated. We need to convert years to days, assuming that a prophetic year amounts to three hundred sixty days as it does elsetwhere in the Bible. We also need to remember that there is no zero year between one B.C. and one A.D.” On the whiteboard Earl multiplied 2520 by 360 to arrive at a total number of days of 907,200. He then converted days back to actual years according to the equivalence of one solar year with 365.25 days. His whiteboard computation gave a result of 195,774 days between the end of the Babylonian captivity to the beginning of A.D., and 711,426 days thereafter. In terms of solar years, this latter number of days amounted to 1948.

“Grant Jeffrey claimed that the actual day according to that prophecy is May 15, 1948, the exact day that Israel became a nation, if one assumes that the event actually occurred past that midnight. It would be beyond me to attempt to verify that claim here, but even so, I think you’ll agree that from my crude calculation the year alone, 1948, makes for an astonishingly accurate prediction.”

The handclapping that followed indicated their agreement with his assessment of the Scriptural accuracy of this prophecy.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #25

Chapter Twenty Three (continued)

Toward evening a runner came puffing up to their defensive position, rifle in hand and field glasses banging against his chest. “Jerusalem’s surrounded!” he shouted. He stood silent in front of them, chest heaving. When he caught his breath he spoke again. “There’s a huge horde of soldiers massing at the entrance to the city,” he added. I think they’re getting ready to overrun it.”

At the same time a rocket-propelled grenade exploded a hundred yards in front of their station, and the sound of gunfire signaled an approach of invaders. They were coming again and they were very close. When they came into sight, Jacob saw the overwhelming numbers of them, and breathed an urgent prayer for strength and courage. He carefully marked Moira’s position and saw that her rifle was raised and prepared to fire.

God’s going to have to act now, if there’s going to be any chance of our surviving, he thought. But then he questioned why God would single their little group out for survival when so many others were being killed. He was on the verge of accepting the inevitable as with a fatalistic attitude he set his sights on a screaming attacker and pulled the trigger. He quickly locked on another target, but before he could pull the trigger a second time the ground fell beneath him and then jumped back in a vicious upward thrust to hurl him headlong against Moira’s sprawling body. The ground continued to shake, uprooting trees, throwing clods into the air and thrusting both attackers and defenders flat on the ground. The savage shaking affected both sides of the battle, but clearly the attackers were getting the worst of it. Confirmation of this disparity came moments later, when the ground split apart and swallowed a major element of the attacking force. The shaking began to subside. Wide-eyed in fear, the remnants of the mob lifted themselves up and retreated back down the hillside. They left their weapons behind.

A battlefield in the aftermath of action is a disgusting place. The revolting sight of dead bodies in various states of disassembly is surpassed only by the awful stench of their decomposition. Compounding the hellish scene is the torn and shredded flesh and agonized shrieks of the maimed but still living.

This particular battleground was as bad as it gets. The opening of the ground exposed the rotting, partially decomposed remains of many of the victims of the earlier quake in which the Palestinians had participated and died when the earth had cleaved in their midst.   Their ripe condition released a disgusting stench into the air that followed the fleeing attackers and drove them far from where they may have stopped and regrouped.

Given the intensity of this latest quake, the weary defenders were amazed to see their home still standing. Posting a skeleton guard of the most hardy of their group, the rest headed straight to their bunks, where they were quickly overtaken by sleep and oblivious to the continuous rumbling of artillery that accompanied the raging battles that continued to take place below them to the south, beyond the Sea of Galilee.

The few guards on duty were treated to a spectacular display of colors in the night sky induced by the excess ionization of the atmosphere caused by the multiple tactical nuclear detonations. But they had to endure the sounds of distant battle and the sight, spared to the others, of the implacable massing of troops along a wide corridor that extended from Haifa to their holy city Jerusalem. Despite the obvious intervention of God in their own recent battle, the sight of such an overwhelming number of enemy soldiers terrified them.

Jacob received intermittent news of the battle through a radio account furnished by the IDF. Through it they learned of what appeared to be a miraculous event: a building housing a large number of children had been single-handedly defended by an IDF hero, one Simon ben Gideon. When he had used up all his ammunition in fending off the attackers, he ran out the door shouting with nothing but a knife in his hand. The enemy fled from before him as if he was leading a fully-armed battalion.

The nuclear devastation of Haifa failed to hinder the armies of the enemy, who disregarded the danger to the troops of exposure to radiation. The adjacent port was filled with activity as what appeared to be the armies of the entire world were being offloaded onto the shore. Jacob and Moira continued to watch, horrified, as an endless procession of soldiers with evil intent continued to march toward Jerusalem. Their concern over their beloved Jerusalem, city of their God’s dwelling place on Earth, was abruptly interrupted by a series of jolts, sharper by far than anything they’d experienced up to now. Staring in fascinated awe, they saw the column breaking apart in chaotic disarray as the ground split open beneath them along the entire route to Jerusalem. On the Haifa end of this path, the splitting of the earth continued out to sea, where waves of enormous magnitude competed with swirling whirlpools to gobble up ships both great and small.

“Look!” Moira exclaimed. “Another column, coming up from the southeast! Oh, Jacob, this is impossible! That new army is as large as the one that came in from Haifa!” They continued to watch, immobilized with horror, as the new army drew nearer.

The radio chatter increased dramatically as the vanguard of the new army came close. “The latest rumor is that we’re being attacked by an enormous number of Sunni Muslims. These aren’t of the Hezbollah from Lebanon. They’re a new army, the dreaded Taliban that have come all the way from Afghanistan to do us in. We need prayer, everybody. This is just so overwhelming . . . wait! Wait! They’re fighting! They’re clashing, but not with us! This is unbelievable! They’re fighting the column from Haifa!”

The battle raged on, the heavy fighting interspersed with violent quakes that rent the ground, opening numerous sharp, deep cracks in the earth. For hours, as the two columns continued to merge, the epicenter remained static with no clear winner. Eventually, the column from Haifa began to fall back, subdued by the viciousness of the southern troops and their uncompromising battlefield valor – and another element supplied by God.

“The column,” Moira exclaimed. “The troops are actually running into the crevasses!”

“Yes,” Jacob replied, studying the movement. “They appear to be running away from something even more terrifying than the certain death below the cliffs. They’re acting like lemmings.”

“What could it be? They seemed to be so evenly-matched.”

“Remember the story of Gideon, and how three hundred Israelites routed the army of the Midianites and their cohorts? They had a lot of help from an army of angels, who were visible only to the enemy. The same thing happened according to second Kings Chapter 6 when Elisha was confronted with a vast army to the terror of his servant. Elisha responded by praying to the Lord that He would open the servant’s eyes. When his eyes were opened, he saw an even bigger army of angels surrounding Elisha. Could be that we’re seeing a repeat of this miracle before our very eyes.”

“Awesome. Just like Zechariah and Ezekiel foretold, that He would make His holy name known again to Israel.”

No longer was Jerusalem or Israel threatened. The survivors of this immense counter-offensive of God’s straggled back to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, where surviving boats picked them up to return them home.

Bleeding from bullet wounds to his right calf and shoulder, Abdul Barakzai pounded on the Jerusalem gate with his left hand as he held a white cloth somewhat gingerly, favoring his wound. “Let me in!” he demanded. “I’m one of you!”

After repeating this action for over an hour, the small door in the gate opened cautiously. A heavily-armed Jew stood there, motioning the wounded man in. As Abdul entered, the door was quickly closed. “Here, I’ll take you to the hospital,” the man said, motioning Abdul to follow.

“There’s no time for that,” Abdul said, grabbing the man’s arm. “That whole crowd of fighters outside. They’re your brothers, as am I. I’m from the tribe of Joseph, of Ephraim. I must talk to your political leadership.”

The Jew was astonished. “You?” he said wide-eyed. “An Afghan? A Taliban fighter? You’re an Israelite?”

“Yes!” We’ve come home!”

The valor of the Taliban fighters and the vital part they played in preserving Jerusalem was of immense help in convincing the Israeli leaders of the truth of what Abdul told them. Reluctantly at first, they re-opened the small door in the gate to admit a thin stream of Afghan soldiers. As the incoming progressed without incident, the large gates were opened in welcome to them all, the bulk of whom were too numerous at that point to gain admission. Camps were quickly set up to accommodate them on the land surrounding Jerusalem.

It took a further several months to sort out the situation and to provide long-term accommodation for the new arrivals, and to integrate them into the Israeli society. At the end of that period Israel had finally fulfilled the Word of God in Ezekiel Chapter 37.

The vast camps of the Russians and their confederates remained in place for a short time as their defeated leaders attempted to sort out their next moves, but their almost-deserted tents took on a ghost-town atmosphere. Many of the surviving soldiers brought their wives and families into cities close to their stations, and an apparent peace prevailed in the Mideast.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #24

Chapter Twenty Three

“Another asteroid?” Moira asked in a tremulous voice, her body shivering in fear. The sound of an immense explosion had thrust her awake from a deep sleep in which she had been content and fully relaxed in the knowledge that Israel was in a state of peace with its neighbors, however tenuous and brief that interlude might be. Now she was instantly aware that the situation had suddenly changed to that of a wartime environment, probably to persist for the rest of their lives.

“No, I don’t think so,” Jacob replied. “God plays responsibly. Man doesn’t. Look at the sky. This time I think it’s nuclear.”

“Has it really happened? The start of the Ezekiel 38 war?”

“Looks like that just may be the case,” Jacob said, speaking with a calmness that belied the emotional turmoil he was experiencing.

The shock wave from the massive explosion burst upon them, breaking windows and shaking the ground beneath them. This was followed by a windstorm of epic proportions, which damaged their barracks yet more.

Curious, Jacob went outside to assess what was happening. From the vantage of the village, he could learn very little, so he popped back inside and told Moira that he was heading up to the crest.

“Wait one,” she replied. “I want to go with you.” Together they climbed up the hill to the crest and looked over. They couldn’t make out much in the dark, but they could see lights and what appeared to be activity coming from the military encampments off to the east. Concerned, they hiked around the mountain until they reached a place where Haifa and the coastline were spread out before them.

Except Haifa no longer existed. In its place was the unmistakable mushroom cloud, still glowing with internal fire and reaching up through the stratosphere. At its base, through a fog of airborne debris, Jacob saw a tangled mass of violently-disassembled construction materials. The destruction of the city hadn’t removed the artifacts of the hand of man, but had left the land littered with trash and as ugly to the sight as the human devastation that it represented. “It was so beautiful,” Moira lamented. “If it was nuclear, how come all those boats are landing?” The shoreline was thick with small boats debarking toylike figures. Jacob supposed that they were soldiers. As he continued to look, his supposition was confirmed by the sight of earlier arrivals, who now were marching in column to the southeast. Behind the troops, the sea was filled with ships of war, grey and bristling with big-bore guns.

“I don’t know,” he eventually replied. “The intruders seem to be staying well away from the epicenter. Looks like they might be skirting the remains of the city to get to the heartland. Then again, maybe they’re being treated as expendable. I wouldn’t put that kind of thing past their commanders.”

“It’s war, isn’t it?” Moira said in a small voice.

“Looks like it. Just when we were getting comfortable. But it was inevitable. I know we’ve been expecting it, but it’s still chilling to realize that now were really in it. There’s so much hatred, it’s so thick you can cut it with a knife. As if little Israel single-handedly was out to destroy the world. There’s no logic behind the feeling, it’s so irrational that it has to have demonic roots.”

“Refresh my memory, Jacob. What did Ezekiel have to say about it?”

“I pretty much have it committed to memory. Let me recall it the best I can, at least give you its substance. Ezekiel starts out in Chapter 38 by identifying the main antagonist, who obviously, from the name and the geographical location, is the leader of Russia. The implication is that God is forcing him into this confontation with Israel, which rings true because Russia seems to be driven by economic and political events. The alignment with Iran and Syria is actually forcing the leader’s hand, with Russia seeming to be desperate to recapture its status as a world power. I think also Israel’s exploitation of oil at Russia’s expense is a big factor. At any rate, God says that He will turn Russia back with hooks in her jaws, and Russia will lead a collection of anti-Semitic nations that include Iran, Turkey, and possibly even Germany or the European nations that were formerly in the old Warsaw pact associated with the Soviet Union.

“The war takes place in the latter years, or close to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is where we seem to be situated right now. This huge cloud of well-armed soldiers comes like a storm to cover the land. The motivation is evil, to take a spoil – to rob and destroy the people and their nation. Ezekiel even adds that the mealy-mouthed representatives of the Western regional governments, like North America and Europe, bluster about this invasion but do nothing to stop it. I detected a bit of sarcasm about what Ezekiel wrote, like he was describing the wishy-washy American State Department to a tee. Imagine that – two and a half millennia before the event, and Ezekiel knows more about the situation than our own media! He even says that the primary invaders come from the uttermost north. I’m pretty sure you know that if you were to draw a line between Jerusalem and the north pole, that the line would come very close to Moscow.”

“I did know that. Russia is for sure the country to the uttermost north of us. Turkey is to the north too.”

“Then Ezekiel continues by saying that the land will be greatly shaken, and even the sea.  There will be stones falling from heaven, a devastation so incomprehensibly huge that people everywhere will understand the event to be the hand of God. The end of it, according to Chapter 39, will be that only a sixth of the invading troops will survive.”

“Is this the end, then? The war of Armageddon?”

“I don’t really know, but I don’t think so. The slaughter will be awful – so bad that it will take Israel seven months to bury the dead and the stink of the corpses will be extensive, possibly covering the entire land. An interesting suggestion that at least part of the destruction is nuclear is that travelers are cautioned, when they see a bone, to mark it for a special burial party.”

“We already know that it’s nuclear. What happened to Haifa is pretty graphic.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure that God doesn’t also trump mankind’s destructive capacity with some events of His own. We’ll have to wait and see. Or maybe Wisdom will fill us in. Whatever, Revelation speaks of another invasion by oriental soldiers, and I’m not aware of such in this mix before us. That and Ezekiel’s mention of the post-war burial process leads me to think that the battle of Armageddon is a separate event. We’ll know for sure soon enough.”

“I’ve seen enough for now, Jacob. I’m so creeped out I just want to go back to Dafna and hide under the covers or something.”

“Buck up, my lovely,” he countered lightly. “We know it’s going to end well.”

“Yeah, well, our lives are going to end well in heaven, too. It’s the getting there that’s the grim part.”

“Not always, darling. At least not for me. Sometimes when I’m holding you, I think I’m already there.”

“Of course. I’m talking about the scary things, like what’s happening right now in front of our very eyes.”

“Keep the faith. Remember the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews twelve. And I’m here with you all the way.”

She hugged him fiercely. “Oh, Jacob!” she cried. “I’m so grateful for that.”

“And don’t forget Wisdom, who’s been around every time things got hairy.’

“Well, let’s go back home anyway,” she said, her attitude turning happy. “I can think of better ways to spend the day.”

“I’m with you on that,” he said with a smile. Hand in hand, they walked back to Dafna, where they were prevented from going to their room by several of their friends, curious for news. “What’s going on?” James asked, acting as spokesman for them all. “Did you see anything?”

“Plenty,” Jacob responded. “More than I wanted to know. Haifa’s gone, and our land is being overrun with soldiers.”

“Gone? You mean that Haifa’s no longer there? Any of it?”

“That’s exactly what he means, Esther,” Moira told the horrified woman. “We’re under attack. But since it looks like the war of Ezekiel 38, it does end well.”

Jacob looked at the growing crowd, assessing their mutual terror. “Let’s get our faith back. How about joining me in prayer.” It was more of a command than a request. They needed to remind themselves as to who was in ultimate control over their future. Joining hands, he led them in a fervent prayer, not for safety, nor for peace, but for the strength to see past the immediate events to God’s loving hand on their nation and on their individual souls. “Give us faith in You, Lord,” he pleaded. When he was finished and opened his eyes, he was pleased to see that calmness prevailed over the group.

“What are we supposed to do now, Jacob?” James asked. “Just sit around and do nothing about it?”

“As far as I know, that’s about it,” he replied. “This appears to be God’s battle, not ours. But if the enemy does come up to Dafna, we might as well die with our boots on fending them off.”

Later that day the sound of artillery encroached upon their peace. Later yet they began to hear small-arms fire, which they correctly interpreted as the sound of troops heading their way. They quietly went to their own weapons, inspecting them and loading them with rounds.   They stockpiled defensive positions with ammunition, food and water and sat down to wait for the approach of the enemy.

The small band of defenders continued to wait through the endless night, but so far the advance had bypassed the mountain village. Nevertheless, the threat of violence was so immediate that nobody slept. They continued to stand a tense watch as dawn broke and they were embraced by the welcome warmth of the sun. But no birds sang, and their ears were continually assaulted by the crash of artillery and the explosion of rocket-propelled bombs. The morning wore on, and eventually Moira propped her rifle against a wall and headed down to the communal kitchen. Several women followed her. Later Moira whistled from the porch and half the men walked down for a bite to eat. When they returned to their posts, the other half went down for breakfast.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #23

Chapter Twenty Two

 

 

 

 

 

The big old cinder-block building was crowded with the men of Abdul Barakzai’s community. Such meetings were not uncommon, as the persistence of intrusions by foreign governments had necessitated frequent strategy conferences at the local level throughout Afghanistan.

Two things set this meeting apart from the others. There was scattered conversation before the meeting proper, but it was of a desultory nature and much quieter than usual. The other item was the presence of Abdul’s wife. And not only was she present at a meeting of the men, but she was standing alongside him, bold as you please and naked of face.

This shocking betrayal of tradition gave most of the men there an urge to stomp out of the building after, of course, first relieving Abdul and his wife of their heads. What held them back from doing just that was their respect for the man. He had earned a reputation among them for masculinity and courage. For that he deserved a chance to have his say, not that there was anything he could say that possibly could justify this obscenity.

But the men had not counted on what Abdul had to say. His first few words were met with astonishment, which was immediately followed by skepticism, which descended rather quickly into disbelief.

Abdul bravely refused to stop speaking in spite of the growing unrest among his neighbors. Shaking with fear, his wife maintained her position at his side. As he continued his monologue he confronted them with their own traditions and then the implications, which were impossible to deny as they represented an intimate and beloved part of their communal life. “I’ve been reading this Book.” He held up the Bible that had been given to his wife. “It has become so important to me and is so wonderfully written that I’ve come to accept that my God is the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob.

“Do you know what you’re saying, Abdul?” his closest neighbor spoke up. “This cannot be taken lightly.” He had been a good friend. “You cannot just barge in with your blasphemy of our Allah, praise his name, and the news that we’re all – Jews, may our gracious and benevolent Allah be praised.” He spat out the word “Jew” as a repulsive epithet. “We need proof.”

“Don’t you think I needed proof too?” he asked rhetorically. “We wouldn’t be here now in this building if I wasn’t certain of what I’m trying to tell you. Well, here’s the proof.” He reached into a pocket and extracted a folded document. I received it yesterday, from Israel. I had sent the Aliyah Commission in Israel a sample of my skin and samples from my wife and daughter as well. A profile of our DNA was made, which claims that we belong to what is called the Cohen Modal-Haplotyp.”

“Say what?” his neighbor interrupted. “If you’re trying to snow us with big words . . .”

“No, no. Calm down, Rasheef.   What it means is that, according to our DNA we’re genetically close to the Israelites of the kingdom of David. We’re probably of them, but even if not, we’re very close.”

“Close isn’t good enough!” another man shouted out.

“Okay, then. I have another proof, even stronger. I had a Visitor some time ago. But you’ll have to believe me on that. The Visitor explained the exact nature of our ancestral roots.”

“We might believe you,” Abdul’s neighbor said,” but who would this “visitor” be who’d have the authority and knowledge to give you that kind of information?”

“God.” The word hung in the air like a cloud. After a lengthy pause, Abdul embellished on it. “The God of our patriarchs, Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob. The God of the Jews. Our God.”

Another meeting was held in the same cinder-block building two months later. The community in the interim had dealt with this shocking and initially-unwelcome information in a variety of ways, most involving a measure of anger, which, unfortunately, was applied to a disproportionate number of the womenfolk. This anger was mixed with a very real grief as the communal identity was turned upside-down. Given their recognition of the truth of the matter as represented by their own customs, with great reluctance they eventually began to accept their ancient identity. In doing that, they then were forced to confront the personal, communal, and religious implications of that understanding.

Each family was given a Bible, some of which were burned and others treated as refuse. Those that remained in homes were opened, first with hesitation and then with a steady quickening of interest as God stepped in to open eyes that had been closed for centuries. Abdul and his wife were the first to be so affected, as they were given some initial insights into the nature of their Judeo-Christian God. Along with that new understanding came a motivation to accept Jesus as their Savior and Lord, which led to the coming of Wisdom into their hearts.

The second meeting of the townspeople was chaired by a representative of the Israeli Mossad, who was gratified to note that the building was completely filled. Not only were the women present, he saw happily, but their faces were uncovered. “You have the right of return,” he told them, “the right to make aliya, as we call the repatriation of Jews to their homeland in Israel.” This statement brought on a noisy murmur, causing him to hold up his hand in a stopping gesture.

“Let me continue, please. You have that right. But I’d like to ask you to do something better, probably for you and certainly for us. Stay where you are, and you women, beautiful as you all may be, please go back to covering your faces. The world knows nothing about your true roots. We’d like to keep it that way for the time being. We have information that leads us to believe that in the near future you’ll be asked to participate in a battle against Israel. It would be very much to our advantage if you display your nature as you come into that battle to fight an enemy that thought you were one of them. If any of you might harbor any thought that such a deception would be cowardly, permit me to relieve you of that. First, you must know that your real enemy in that battle will be very quick to realize its mistake and will come at you with a force driven by a rage of such intensity that it will take all your courage to stand up to it. Second, your enemy is brutal, stripped of any humanity it may have possessed. It’s vicious, ugly and needs to be stopped by all means available to us, including the initial edge your deception will give us.

“You won’t be alone,” the man from Mossad continued. “You have a very brave man among you.” Abdul’s wife looked at her husband in adoration at this statement. “With our encouragement, he has taken it upon himself to visit a number of communities in your country, offering them the same revelation he gave you, and hand-picking representatives from each of those communities to spread the word to other communities as well. How he was able to do the picking is beyond me.”

I know how, Abdul’s wife thought to herself, echoing the same thought that ran through her husband’s mind. I hope She’ll come back to us.

“Let me tell you now,” the Mossad agent went on, “that your Abdul has given me a big job, which is to go back to every one of those communities scattered throughout Afghanistan and follow up with the same message I’m giving you here. But we back in Israel are very grateful for the opportunity to do so. We thank Abdul from the bottom of our hearts for giving us that chance, and we welcome you all in those same loving hearts as our dear brothers and sisters.”

 

The selfless concern for them exhibited by the tough little agent and the sense of purpose that he imparted to them gave the Afghanis a feeling of relationship with Israel. That tiny, beleaguered little nation now belonged to them in a way that they couldn’t have imagined a few short months ago. This new patriotism toward a land they had never seen was greatly supported by an ever-growing Biblical awareness. The community’s common conversion snowballed from there.

Abdul was aware of the trials facing the nation – their nation – of Israel. He knew that in the wisom of man, Israel was toast. Surrounded a hundredfold by hatred-laden people, it was a wonder that Israel had continued to exist up to now. Sharing their study of the Bible in a new and loving togetherness, Abdul and his wife had been led by Wisdom to read the account of the ancient hero Gideon beginning in Judges Chapter Six.

“I can’t believe it,” Abdul remarked. “There’s a lot of Midianites there out in the fields just aching for a fight. The Israelites are greatly outnumbered even at the beginning when Gideon pulls together twenty three thousand soldiers. Then God keeps reducing the size of the army. Twenty three thousand all the way down to a mere three hundred!”

“So they wouldn’t get puffed up with their own accomplishments,” she responded. “God wanted them to know that it was really Him who was doing the fighting on their behalf.”

“And then they actually win! Three hundred against an army, and they win! I wonder what caused the Midianites to flee in terror from such a small band of fighters?”

“It wasn’t small. An enormous army came against the Midianites on the behalf of Israel.”

“How so?”

“I was directed to an account in Second Kings that allowed me to understand what actually happened.”

Abdul turned the pages to Second Kings 6:15 and read the following:

“And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, behold, an host compassed the city, both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! What shall we do? And he answered, Fear not; for they who are with us are more than they who are with them. And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw; and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”

 

“Oh,” he said to her, “then, if this relates to the story of Gideon, there was an army of angels surrounding the Midianites and Gideon’s band of three hundred men. It was just that they were visible only to the Midianites, who fled at the sight.”

“Yes. The battle was really God’s, and I expect that, with little Israel now surrounded by enemies, the same thing will happen not so long from now.”

“I just hope that God will permit us to take part in that battle.”

“What do you think, Abdul? That the man from Mossad came here for nothing?”

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #22

Chapter Twenty One (continued)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A terrible thing about all these events like the Flood and the Red Sea and Noah and David and Goliath is that they make such interesting adventure stories that a number of authors have exploited by oversimplifying them, removing most of the wisdom and moral value, and treating them like comic book adventures to tell as childrens’ stories.  As a matter of fact, most of them have been put into comic book form like the adventures of Superman.  The problem with that is that nobody, including the kids who read that stuff, thinks that Superman really exists.  If they read about David and Goliath in a comic book, then they know that someday they’ll outgrow that myth.”

“Well said, Earl!” Wisdom said, laughing.  You just identified a big part of the problem of modern belief.  Please continue.”

“Well, it’s anything but a myth.  You’d know that if you read an adult, Biblical version of the account, and of the saga of David’s life.  A beautiful aspect of the Scriptural version is the faith and committment David demonstrated toward God.  The giants of Gath had surrounded the Israelites and were so certain that their size would inevitably lead to their unqualified victory that they took to taunting the Israelites, using their champion Goliath as their primary spokesman.  His jeers crossed over the line to a vicious mocking of God Himself, and yet all of the Israeli soldiers, from King Saul on down were too cowed by him to raise up against him.  David wasn’t even a soldier.  He was too young and was still thought of as a mere boy.  Yet he became so offended by the mockery of his God that he volunteered to fight Goliath.  Saul gave David his own armor, but he was too small to wear it properly, and tossed it aside as an encumbrance.  Yet he went out to face Goliath with nothing but a sling and stones.  Correct me if I’m wrong, Wisdom, but to my mind God took it from there.”

“You’re right, but We didn’t make ourselves known to David at the time, so it was still his valor that got the job done.  Sure, We did perfect his aim for him, but it was all David who did the tossing.  And who alone stood up for God.  There were many others who showed much of that same sefless, noble faith down through the centuries, but David is still very special to Us for that and his love for Us, which went way beyond mere worship.  The bottom line, Ralph, is that every word of that account in Scripture is true.  Literally true.  I’ll cut this short and let My Earl talk with you about the truth of the Flood and the Exodus events.  I do have a job for you and Ralph, though, that I want to brief you on before I leave,” She said, turning to Henry.  “I want you to set up a black marketplace inside your store, one that caters to the underground who refuse to accept the precursor to the mark of the beast, which, as they already know, will automatically become that mark when its imposition becomes world-wide.  And Ralph, now that you have a place to eat and sleep, forget about your store.  It’s already been taken over by the homeless.  Let them have it.  You can help Henry with his store, where you’ll be specializing in the black market operation.”

“I have a question before you go,” Moshe said.

“I know, She replied.  “You’re still wondering why I’m so directly involved with you while others, supposedly Christians, never even get a chance to see Me.   You’re thinking of the multitude of people and even entire churches that already have accepted the precursor to the mark of the beast and of the vast number who are getting ready to.  The answer, Moshe, is not whether they get a chance to see Me, but whether they now or ever will want to.  Believe Me, Moshe, We already have you – every one on Earth – pegged already.  Jesus told you many times that We’re as near as you want us to be, and, out of basic good manners, as far away as you wish.  It’s all your call.  You’d be surprised, though, at the number of self-styled Christians who have no interest whatsoever in getting close to Us.  But I’ll admit that there’s also the matter of the special position that you’re in with – well, let’s just say that things are coming to a boil on this Earth rather quickly and you’re right in the thick of it.”

 

“I have another question,” Joyce said.

“Good one,” Wisdom responded.  “As Christians, you do need the companionship and support of others.  There’s no formal Church left, of course, in the usual sense of a building where Christians congregate to worship.  But there are a number of home assemblies.  I’ve already picked out one for you.  It’s led by Arnold Bliss, a good, solid preacher who gets into the Word like a pastor should.  Give him a call.  As a matter of fact, he’s already expecting you.”

Joyce made the call to the pastor, who enthusiastically invited her and the others to Church services next Sunday.  “The service starts at ten and I try to finish up by eleven, although sometimes I go over a bit.”

“We wouldn’t mind that at all,” she replied.  “It’s not like there’s a ball game on that afternoon.  Most of us are very committed anyway, and the others are getting that way pretty quickly, things being what they are, so there’s really no Sunday distraction.”

“Great.  Is there any interest in a Bible study among you or your people?  I should add that we only have one Bible, and it’s really torn up to the point of being unusable.  So many pages are missing that it’s hard to find any continuity in it.”

“Yes, we’d love to attend.  In fact, my husband will be thrilled to assist, if you’re of a mind.  He’s not ordained, but he did conduct a Church in the Seattle area after the first wave of destruction there.  Beyond that, we’ve all been busy recalling Scripture verses and setting them down on paper.”

“Oh? Now you really have my attention.  Lately in our Bible study we’ve been discussing Jesus’ appearance after His resurrection to His disciples who were fishing.”

“John 21? His threefold request to Peter to feed his sheep?”

“Why, yes.  We only have a partial page to go on, but we’re making do with that and some very spotty snippets of memory.  Is there anything regarding that passage that you or your husband might be able to add?”

Joyce laughed, a long peal of delight.  “Just maybe, pastor.  As a matter of fact, Earl – my husband, has gone into great detail with respect to that passage, to the point of virtually memorizing the entire chapter.  He’s of the opinion, with plenty of Scriptural backup to substantiate it, that Peter’s fulfillment in Acts of that request of Jesus ties in very closely with the sign that Jesus developed in His feeding of the multitudes.”

“Fulfillment?  Sign?  What sign?”

“I’ll let Earl fill you in on that.  He’s the expert.”

“Let me do this, then, Joyce.  The Bible study’s at six in the evening every Wednesday.  I’ll lead into the subject and invite Earl do some talking about selected details.  If he’s as informed about John 21 as you seem to be saying, I’ll turn it over to him entirely, at least for that particular Bible study.  We’ll very much look forward to seeing you on Wednesday.  If you have a pencil and a piece of paper, I’ll give you the address.”

It took pastor Bliss less than ten minutes that Wednesday evening to finish his assessment of Earl’s knowledge of John 21 and a great deal beyond that and turn the Bible study over to him.  With the addition of Henry’s new clan, the large living room was crowded out into the hallway.  Pastor Bliss took a seat in one of the few remaining chairs with a happy anticipation of obtaining knowledge about Scripture that went way beyond his seminary training.

Earl had begun by repeating Jesus’ thrice-spoken request to Peter to feed His sheep, inferring that the request was a deliberate cancellation of Peter’s threefold denial of association with Jesus following His arrest.  He went on to describe Peter’s threefold fulfillment of Jesus’ request to him as recorded in Luke’s book, the Acts of the Apostles: the feeding of the three thousand with the Word of God, followed by the saving of five thousand souls, and after that the initial act in the salvation of the Gentiles, which was the feeding of Cornelius the Italian with the Word, a process that was closely coordinated by the Holy Spirit.

“What do you mean by ‘feeding’?” one participant asked.  “You seem to be linking salvation with feeding.”

Joyce spoke up before Earl could respond.  “Now you did it,” she said, laughing.  “We’ll be here until next week before Earl gets through answering that question.

“It’s getting to be closing time,” pastor Bliss said, rising from his seat.  “Maybe we’ll save that subject for next week.”

“Aw, no,” a congregant said.  “I don’t mind staying over for a while, at least until he gives us a clue as to what the connection is.”

“Everybody?” the pastor asked, addressing the entire crowd.  “Are you all good with that?”

The assent was unanimous.  “Okay,” Earl said.  “I don’t want to overdo it at the start, though.  I have to warn you, it’ll stretch your mind muscles.  I’ll just dip a toe into the water tonight, then.  Let me start out by reminding you that Peter was doubtful about spreading the Word to a Gentile, but God responded by letting down a sheet with unclean food, telling Peter to go ahead and eat.  Right there God Himself linked the Word that delivers salvation to food, or feeding.  In the Gospels,  Jesus is quoted more than once describing the Word as spiritual food.  As for the events in which Jesus fed the multitudes, first the five thousand and then the four thousand, he also at the same time was feeding them with the Word, the spiritual food.  The feeding with bread was only symbolic of that greater feeding, one in which Jesus integrated in Peter’s feeding encounter with the three thousand to form a highly significant and recognizable sign.”

“Are you saying that there’s a way to tie in Peter’s bringing salvation to three thousand with Jesus’ feeding events?” an avid listener broke in.  “Is that demonstrable?”

Earl paused before continuing, attempting to find the words to approach the subject in the simplest possible way.  “Yes, it’s demonstrable, and mathematically so.  But it’s a complex issue, so you’ll have to be patient.  He paused again.   “Did you know that Jesus’ feeding of the multitudes was foretold in the Old Testament?” he continued.

“No.  I, for one, didn’t,” Arnold Bliss responded.

“Yes, it’s in Second Kings Chapter Four.  Elisha feeds one hundred people with twenty loaves of barley, and they have bread left over.  That precursor feeding event is quite important on several levels.  First, it supports the notion that most of what Jesus said and did during His incarnation was preceded by the words and actions of people of the Old Testament as directed by the Holy Spirit.  Second, as we shall see very graphically later, it supports the integration of each feeding event into the others to develop a sign.  Third, Jesus’ feedings referenced the arrangement of those being fed by Elisha into companies of fifty and one hundred.  The basic pattern for the company of one hundred is furnished directly by Elisha’s feeding, which points to an arrangement of twenty long by five wide.”

”Speaking for myself, I think that’s about all we’ll be able to handle for now,” Bliss said, rising again from his chair.  Earl, perhaps you can stay for a few minutes longer while some of your new friends try to get that all down on paper.”  While that’s going on, let’s give all our newcomers a welcoming hand and our heartfelt invitation to come back for next week’s Bible study.”

When the clapping died down, a voice rose in protest.  “Don’t give them an invite.  Make it a demand!”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #21

Chapter Twenty (continued)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“As a reminder of how seriously the person who accepts that mark transgresses against God, permit me to quote a passage out of Revelation Chapter 14:

“’And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever; and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name. Here is the patience of the saints; here are they who keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.’”

 

“I hear you, Wisdom. But yet. . .”

“I’m not through. There’s another issue that your question raised and you were about to expand on, and it’s even more important than the other. You have to learn to trust Us in every circumstance. You cannot harbor any doubts as to Our character, even when an apparent contradiction arises, and remain firm in your faith. I’ve said it before in Job Chapter 40 and I’ll say it again to you now: ‘Shall he that contends with El Shaddai instruct? Let the one who accuses Eloah answer Her. Have you an arm like God?’ As the prophet Isaiah said in Chapter 51, ‘Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not She who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not She who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?’ And, by the way: if you want to read Job and Isaiah to confirm it was Me whom they were talking about, you’d have to go back to the original Hebrew. A gender switch was made in the translation.”

“Sorry. I do get it,” Ellery said. “I see now that the contradiction was only apparent, from failing to understand Scripture in the depth I should have, and not actually thinking about what Jesus said. I guess this was a good lesson in understanding that Your ways are higher than ours. I won’t question You any more.”

“Are we that special that you – God – would visit us so personally?” Terry asked.

“Of course you’re special. All true Christians are enormously special. But no, I’ve been introducing Myself to a very large number of new Christians lately, just like you and Henry, as time is getting short and your perils are on the increase. We want you to know how very much We love you and We don’t want to lose a single one of you to a lack of faith.”

“And I have a question too, a rather big one,” Henry said.

“I know you do. Out with it.”

“Maybe I haven’t been a Christian until now, but I’ve picked up a thing or two about Christianity over the years. I’ve always understood that God was all male. I mean that the Trinity is an all-male Entity. Maybe you’re speaking on behalf of God. An angel.”

“That’s the prevailing understanding, all right. Did you catch My names of El Shaddai and Eloah? El Shaddai meant ‘full-breasted’ before it was taken to represent ‘almighty’. Very few people nowadays have even heard of the name ‘Eloah’, which is the feminine form of God. That name was simply removed from all translations of the original Hebrew. I could go on for days on that subject and the reason why Scripture was tampered with. Again, Earl and Joyce can fill you in on the details as the opportunity comes up. Remember, Henry, and you, too, Ralph, and the rest of you as well. Stay here for a while, let things cool down a little. Thanks again for the meal, Terry. I’ll be going now.” With that, She vanished.

“Hey!” Moshe called. “I wanted to thank Her for bringing us together,” he said, looking at Miryam.

“She knows, Moshe,” Joyce said. “And She just told me to wish you both well.”

“Unbelievable!” Ralph cried. “I’d always doubted that God exists, and here I am, right in His – Her – presence. I just don’t know what to believe. But did you see the way She appeared and disappeared? People can’t do things like that. Or maybe I’m going crazy.

“I’ll accept that,” Henry replied.

“Let’s go into the den, both of you, and you, too, Terry,” Earl said. “I have a lot to say to you about God, things to put smiles on your faces.”

“Yes, go,” Joyce said. “You go too, Miryam. We’ll do the dishes,” she said, looking at Marge. They almost eagerly got up from the dining room table to go into the den, Moshe and Ellery in tow. “Maybe you want to wait on the dishes,” Marge said to Joyce. I really wouldn’t mind hearing more about God.”

“I have a voice, too, and I can assure you that Earl and I are on the same page with respect to God.” Joyce tossed a dishcloth to Marge. “I’ll wash and you wipe, okay? And as I’m working the dishes, I’ll bend your ear.”

“Got it,” Marge replied. As the two women did the dishes and the others sat in the den, Earl and Joyce spoke out on the nature of God while the others listened. Much later Ralph got on his knees and asked Jesus into his heart. His perpetual frown was gone, having been replaced by a smile that was genuine.

Chapter Twenty One

 

 

Wisdom came back briefly as Ralph asked the Lord into his heart. She interrupted him before he had finished a rather lengthy confession of his past shortcomings. “We get it, Ralph,” She told him. You know what? You were so over-the-top with your repentance that I might even give you a B-B gun,” referring to the classic Christmas movie that featured another and much younger Ralph. When the laughter had died down, She continued. “Yet you doubt, and don’t try to wave if off as insignificant. It’s extremely important, Ralph, and it’s something we should clear up right now. You have been conditioned by society to view the Bible and science as at odds with each other, with the Bible coming out as the loser every time they clash. As it stands, you’re flat unable to take Scripture seriously. Let’s take science first. How about evolution? You may be surprised to know that those in the know, the molecular biologists and philosophical mathematicians, consider evolution to be a fraud. It’s only the people who don’t know the details of the science they so reverently regard who have been suckered into thinking it’s good science and actually true. These people are intelligent enough to form opinions about evolution, but too intellectually lazy to verify the truth for themselves. They simply think that “scientists” know what they are talking about. They don’t, believe Me. Then there’s the age of the earth and all that’s within it, so meticulously worked out by “scientists” who valued their own suppositions over reality and applied circular reasoning to dating, using fossils to date the various layers of soil, and then turning around and using the layers of soil to date fossils. I could go on and on about those two issues and a bunch of other ones, but I’m going to hand them over to Earl. If you’re interested enough to pursue the subject, talk to him.”

“But still . . .“

“Yes, what you want to tell me is that it’s common knowledge that some things in the Bible are fables and their truth ends with the moral messages they are intended to convey. You’re thinking of Noah’s Flood, the parting of the Red Sea at the Exodus, David and Goliath and, oh, yes, the story of Jonah just popped into your head. You’re not aware of this, Ralph, but Jesus represents the entire Word of God, Scripture if you will, and Jesus very clearly said that He is the truth. Indeed He is. If that’s the case, then Noah’s Flood was a planetary disaster, the Red Sea did indeed part for the Israelites to pass through, David did kill a giant with a sling and a pebble, and Jonah did get swallowed by a whale and lived afterward to preach to the people of Nineveh. You’re focusing on Jonah. Okay, let’s start with that. There are a number of documented and verified accounts of people being swallowed by whales and living when they emerged, usually through the subsequent capture and gutting of the creature. That used to happen more frequently in the past, when whales were hunted down for their blubber and oil. But there’s more to the story of Jonah than his getting swallowed by a whale and then preaching to the Ninevites. In that adventure, Jonah enacted a very important prophecy regarding the nature of Jesus, one that was reeanacted later by Jesus Himself. Earl, tell Ralph what Jonah did that landed him in the sea.”

“First of all, he was running away from God. God wanted him to preach judgment to the Ninevites, and he scurried away in a ship instead, trying to get as far away from Nineveh as he possibly could. Then he fell asleep in the hold, and a vicious storm came up, one so violent that everyone on board considered it to be an act of God against someone who had offended Him and feared for his life. They decided to draw straws, the holder of the short straw supposedly being identified by God as the culprit. It turned out that Jonah, who was indeed the culprit, drew the short straw. At that point, Jonah admitted hes offense and, full of repentance like you, Ralph, offered to have the others toss him overboard to quiet the storm. Two things happened after that: the storm quieted immediately, and Jonah was swallowed by the whale. He was in the whale’s belly three days and nights, after which the whale coughed him up on dry land, where he then traveled to Nineveh and preached its destruction. The Ninevites, from the King on down to the common folk, repented of their debauchery, and God allowed the country to live on for another hundred and fifty years before finally being overthrown.”

“But you said Jesus reenacted that event. I never heard that before.”

“Many people haven’t,” Earl said, “because their reading of the Bible often is too superficial to go beyond the more traditional passages. I wish we had a Bible, but if we did I’d take you over to Matthew 8, where Jesus is lying in the bottom of a boat and a terrible storm comes up, threatening to sink the boat. Wisdom, maybe You should be quoting the Bible here.”

“Absolutely not. You’re doing just fine paraphrasing the passage.”

“Um. Okay. Jesus is asleep in the bottom of the boat while a storm rages overhead. The others wake Jesus in terror and He calms the waters, just like Jonah did in permitting himself to be tossed overboard. The point, as I see it, is that Jesus was telling His disciples that He’d have to die and be buried three days for the sake of the salvation of the world. Is that about right, Wisdom?”

“Close. There are other prophetic items, but you’ve covered the main one pretty well. Go on, Earl. Tell him about David and Goliath.”

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #20

Chapter Twenty

Jimmy Smith remembered how he’d smiled knowingly at his fellow tribal elders seated with him around the large circular table as the government representative had finished his pitch and sat back down.  He could see it now as if it had happened yesterday, the rep reaching for a glass of water with a frown that betrayed his fear of rejection, almost begging for the council’s permission to build and oblivious to the open glee on the faces of the other men.  They had returned Jimmy’s smile.  To the man, as if they’d been gifted with manna from the sky, as indeed they had.  They had been surrounded by wealthier Native Americans, living high off the greed and stupidity of ordinary Americans who fell all over themselves to pour their money into the miserly slots of the multitude of casinos that were springing up in Indian Nation after Nation and encroaching ever further into the white man’s civilization. Phoenix; Yuma; Flagstaff – you name it, one of their brother Nations already was there.  True, their own piece of the Navajo Nation had Monument Valley, but what were the reservation fees and the sorry vendors sitting out front peddling their wampum next to the cash cornucopia that the casinos were raking in?

But that was all about to change, as they’d thought at the time.  No more half-baked and impractical thoughts on how to transform the sleepy little town of Kayenta from a tourist stopover for the Griswolds into a metropolis big enough to support a decent-sized casino.  The Great White Father in Washington was about to hand over more than they’d get from a half-dozen casinos.  They’d be set for life.  They, too, would be part of the great Red Man’s push to win the Indian Wars once and for all.  Jimmy could remember other things, so sweet at the time, like extracting a cigar from his deerskin vest, snipping  off the end with deliberation, and puffing it with great satisfaction.  The other elders were similarly dressed, as if they’d just come out of a John Wayne western, so deliberately clueless in appearance that they exuded the impression of being ready and eager to sell the Island of Manhattan for some trinkets and beads.  The naive appearance was, of course, a deliberate fiction calculated to work to their advantage in the negotiations taking place.  Their grinning mouths, which matched the unreadable eyes, stopped just short of drooling

Their “Manhattan” was a desolate stretch of worthless desert out on the back forty hidden behind some massive mesas, where the government’s antenna farm would be out of view of the public.  What the U.S. wanted to do, the spokesman had said, was to “utilize” this empty space and, except for the antennas, maintain the appearance of disused emptiness.  When pressed as to why such disused emptiness would be worth the enormous amount of money the government was willing to pay for the lease, the spokesman had tipped his hand, probably way too much.  He’d told them that the area, being on Navajo property and thus intimidating to would-be curiosity-seekers, would be an ideal spot for a FEMA base.  Don’t worry, the man had said, just about all of it would be so far underground that nobody would know it was there.  Guaranteed.  The astronomical amount of money involved had raised some suspicion among the elders.  “What about mineral rights?” Jimmy had asked him, to which the man had replied that any minerals, including oil and gas, would remain in the hands of the Navajo Nation.  They had scratched their heads at that, somewhat nonplussed.  Finally, Jimmy had asked the man to step outside, maybe grab a cup of coffee, while the elders conferred.  After he’d left, the grins on the elders’ faces widened and a few broke out into open laughter.  “White man heap stupid,” one said in as gutteral a voice he could manage, which brought out some more chuckles.  “I think we need more beads out of the deal,” said the elder to Jimmy’s right, to another round of laughter.  Eventually, they let the man return, where he’d faced Jimmy, who was wearing a frown of displeasure.

“We’d like to help you, but I’m afraid it’s impossible.  There’s a lot of Indian bones out there, we don’t know exactly where.  Sacred.  The whole area’s a burial ground.  Sorry.”

The spokesman’s eyes had bulged out in disappointment.  “Isn’t there anything I can do to change your minds?” he’d begged.  That started a round of back-and-forth negotiating, which ended, to the spokesman’s vast relief, with a firm agreement for the leasehold.  All it had taken, in the end, was a doubling of the cash offer.

That was many years ago.  Many moons, Jimmy mused.  He was an old man now, ancient by any standards.  The government had come with a large array of equipment, almost always by night, and most of it by helicopter.  With the appearance of an enormous tunnel-boring device, everything went underground in a big hurry.  Five years later they seemed to be finished with the building task.  True to the spokesman’s promise there had been no trace of humanity around the site, including a total lack of vehicular traffic.  There was traffic, to be sure, just not there.  Vehicles entered and emerged at the opening of a two-lane tunnel way over southwest of Kayenta, miles away from the far side of the big mesa.  Man, that must be a long tunnel, Jimmy continued to muse.  But he wasn’t particularly curious to see the tunnel or the underground settlement that it serviced, visualizing in his head the bleak warning signs posted at the entrance that promised immediate death to trespassers.  People might be walking around right underneath the very spot I’m sitting, Jimmy thought darkly.

Jimmy continued to reminisce about that tunnel entrance.  The same wimpy-looking government spokesman had come back around as it was being built, trying to enlist their aid in camouflaging the tunnel’s purpose.  “Couldn’t you place some buildings around it, make it less obvious?”

“We could,” Jimmy had responded with a look of boredom.  “But it would take heap much money.”  If this little twit is typical of the white man, how on earth could we have lost?  We should have collared Custer in the first five minutes

 

“Money?  Money?  What do you think we’ve been giving you?  The G-man brushed his fingers through his thinning hair in frustration and a budding anger.

“Calm down, boy,” Jimmy had said indifferently.  “Take heap money to raise Indian out of poverty.”  He glared at the kid, who said, deferentially, “Okay.  I am authorized to, ah, extend the terms of our original agreement.”

After that the cornucopia turned into a mighty river of cash, awesome in its breadth and scope.  “Look at all the pretty beads!” Jimmy’s companions had said in appreciation as they held another powow to discuss what they’d do with the money.  It was a no-brainer.  After a few minutes of puffing on cigars and smacking their lips on twelve-year-old Scotch, they came to the conclusion that what the tribe needed now was a casino.  For a few months thereafter, the work on the FEMA facility was rivaled by the rapid construction of a magnificent palace of iniquity, glittering with a thousand lights.

“If we build it, they’ll come,” Jimmy had said prophetically, borrowing from the words of actor Kevin Kostner in his movie Field of Dreams.  They came indeed, in such droves that the tribe’s next project was an airstrip, which was followed by several new hotels.

Now that the government had turned on its people, Jimmy had bouts of a troubled conscience, questioning whether the agreement they’d signed was worth the terror that FEMA and other government agencies had instilled in the hearts of the population.  Ah, well, he consoled himself, they would have built it somewhere else anyway.

FEMA indeed had built elsewhere, at several locations scattered about the country.  This particular location, however, had been an object of God’s most recent attention.  The previous year had witnessed a dramatic uptick in activity from the Monument Valley site, particularly in the government’s use of drones and helicopters to track and harass the disorganized and destitute remnants of the general population.  Now the FEMA Monument Valley Center was planning to embark on an extensive program to round up the scattered people, and to herd them into a central location to force the barcode imprint upon them while they examined these individuals in order to classify them either as fit for duty or unnecessary burdens on society at large.

Wisdom didn’t buy into their plans.  Voluntary acceptance of the Mark was bad enough, but it was useful at least to separate the sheep from the goats – those who refused to accept the Mark at the threat of starvation or exposure to the elements.  The act of force-feeding the Mark was intolerable to Her.

Consequently, the land southward from Wyoming to the FEMA Monument Valley Center underwent a series of moderate but progressively stronger earthquakes.  Little attention was paid to them, as the number of earthquakes was becoming so great throughout the country that earthquakes were beginning to be accepted as part of the background noise.  But, unknown to the FEMA personnel, each earthquake in that area expanded an impressive crack under the earth that headed from its origin around the middle of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming directly toward the FEMA Monument Valley site.  The FEMA-built tunnel between its facility and its terminus southwest of Kayenta was puny compared to the length of this crack, which, when it finally ended, would have a length of five hundred sixty-three miles and a width along its entire length that of a six-lane interstate highway.  It would carry no vehicles, being more in the nature of a liquid pipeline.  Only the liquid that flowed through it it was molten rock, fresh from the great Yellowstone magma chamber.  It was, in essence, a volcanic river.

FEMA personnel were first alerted that something was amiss when the heat input to the underground city began to exceed the capacity of the air conditioning system.  Over a period of several days, the facility underwent a continuous rise in temperature, not so rapid as to initiate a sudden panic, but inexorable.  By the end of the first week after the temperature rise was noticed, the situation was becoming untenable.  Yet it was gradual enough that it failed to raise a general alarm.  On the next day, the eighth, however, a final earthquake split the concrete bed of the nuclear power plant to release the pent-out magma beneath it and out surged an unstoppable flow of white-hot rock.  Very quickly the nuclear facility was inundated with magma, but the intensely-radioactive core exploded before allowing itself to be encapsulated by rock, spewing superheated steam and hot gases throughout the power plant, breaching the nuclear enclosure and exposing the entire FEMA population to deadly radioactivity.  This upside-down China Syndrome took less than five minutes to kill off the last victim, and after that the facility was as silently dead as if it were a beehive that had been saturated with poison.

Within a couple more weeks, Jimmy Smith had become aware of the drastic curtailment of traffic in and out of the tunnel, and of the absence of any sign of life around the complex.  He wondered if something had happened.  After a while he shrugged his shoulders.  We got ours out of it, so what difference does it make? Maybe the white man is more stupid than we thought.

There were some lingering consequences to the public of the FEMA disaster in Utah.  One evening as the fugitive group sat down to dinner at the large dining table of Miryam’s uncle and aunt and thanks was given to God for the day and the meal, a voice at the end of the table spoke up.  “Pass the salt, please,” She said.

“Who on earth are you?” screeched Terry as Henry jumped up from his chair in surprise.

“Wisdom!” Earl cried, incidentally answering Terry’s question.

“Who?” asked Henry.

“This grand, lovely Lady is Wisdom,” Earl said to the others.  “God.”

“Hello, all,” Wisdom replied, cutting off the obvious questions in the minds of the shocked hosts.  “Earl will give you more of an explanation after I’ve left.  By the way, bravo, Earl!  Good talk.  Did Me proud.  I’m here to introduce Myself and warn Henry and Ralph not to go to their shops for at least the next week, especially since Ralph is coming along so well in Our relationship with him.”  She gave him a winsome smile, which filled him with joy.  “My compliments to you, too, Terry.  This roast beef is delicious.”  Wisdom explained to them what had happened at the FEMA site at Monument Valley and the grim aftermath involving a drastically-increased effort of the government to enroll the population in the dreaded Mark.

“Radiation, scalding steam and liquid rock,” Ellery mused.  “What a terrible way to die, like rats trapped in a barrel.  Pardon me for saying, but that seems like overkill to me.  I mean, good riddance and all that and of course we’re very grateful for the protection, but aren’t You – God – supposed to treat enemies with kindness?  Wasn’t that what Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was all about?  What I mean, Wisdom, is that we know you’re not a hypocrite, but. . .”

“Nobly spoken, Ellery,” Wisdom interrupted.  “It was overkill all right, so much so that the people inside hardly had time to register the fact that a disaster had just occurred, much less feel the pain.  They didn’t suffer, Ellery.  But they were spiritually dead anyway, to the last person, having accepted the deadly Mark of Revelation thirteen.  But now that you raised the issue, the kindness to enemies that Jesus spoke of in Matthew five and six  wasn’t meant to prevent a devoted parent – including Me – from acting to preserve the welfare of loved ones, particularly when the preservation of life – yours – involves the fulfillment of the Father’s will.  You have no way of comprehending just what that FEMA community had in store for you.  But I do and I did.  It wasn’t – isn’t – pretty.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #19

Chapter Nineteen

As Moshe continued to explain the seemingly-contradictory love of God to Miryam’s family, the sound of unsteady feet climbing up the stairs signaled the arrival of Ellery and Marge. Henry came to the door and opened it. He was about to give them a welcome, but the shock of seeing his rival antique dealer Ralph, obviously injured, stopped his voice. Wordlessly, he ushered them in. Ralph looked at Henry, his own shock equally evident. “Henry!” he exclaimed. “How do you know this lot? They’re Christians, didn’t you know?”

“I really don’t think it’s an appropriate time to grouse about their religion,” Henry countered. “Seeing as how they apparently rescued you and all that.”

“But-but they’re Christians, Henry,” Ralph sputtered. “I’d think you’d have been more put-off than me, given your . . .”

“Ethnicity as an A-rab?” Henry countered, cutting him off. “A raghead? Don’t try to deny it, you’ve looked at me as an unwanted alien from the time we first met. But then you judge everybody else, too, Ralph. I’ve heard plenty from people who’ve come out of your shop into mine. Tell you what. You show a little more kindness to people, a little less judgment, maybe you’d have a pretty impressive boost in sales.”

“Are you gonna let me stay, Henry? Just for a while. I don’t have a home any more.”

“Not unless you turn that frown into a smile, and right now.”

“Why should I? What’s there to smile about?” Ralph barked out a harsh caricature of a laugh as a deep anger entered into his self-pity. “God?” Your God and the Christian God are all alike. If they really existed, which they don’t, they couldn’t , they’d have to be some pretty mean hombres.” Ralph yanked his good arm from Ellery’s grasp, wincing at the effect of this sudden move on his injury, and turned to go.

“Wait!” Henry called. “Let’s see that arm of yours.” He inspected the damaged arm, told Ralph to sit, and gently removed his coat and shirt. “Looks like a problem, he said, inspecting the wound. “A break, but a clean one. Help me out here, Terry. I need a bandage and some boards for a splint.”

Terry returned with the first-aid supplies, glaring into Ralph’s eyes as she handed the splints to Henry. Together they set the break, sandwiched it between the splints, bandaged it, and made a sling into which they placed it. “Thanks,” Ralph responded with some vestigial truculence and stood up. “I’ll be leaving now.”

“Wait!” Henry said, grasping Ralph’s intact arm. “Don’t go before you have something to eat. I’m not gonna make you smile.”

“We don’t want to put Ralph into a hospital,” Joyce told the others, relieved that the standoff was starting to end well. “At his age, a hospital visit would simply be the first stage of a journey to a death camp.” The faces of Miryam’s aunt and uncle registered surprise. “Believe me, we know,” she told them.

“Been there and done that,” Earl added.

The thought of food was irresistible to Ralph. He turned around and stumbled inside. Terry pointed to a chair dubiously, wearing conflicting feelings on her face. She and Henry had a history of putting up with Ralph’s attempts to drive away potential customers. Yet some of what Moshe had been telling them about God’s love had sunk in, although she was far from understanding why.

Ralph brought the issue out in the open. He sighed loudly as he sat down at the big dining table, informing the others that the weight of the world rested on his aching shoulders. “My store’s gone. Trash. My wife’s gone and I have nobody left. I’m homeless and alone in a world that’s turning to crap. If I had a gun, I’d point it at my head right now and be done with it once and for all.”

“How about it, Moshe?” Henry asked. “Terry and I are real interested in how you’re going to handle that. What about all this evil in the world, and all the suffering. Is your God indifferent to it?”

“I do have something to say, but I think Earl could do a better job of it. How about it, Earl?”

“Wow,” Earl replied with a laugh. “Hot potato incoming. Sure, I’ll be happy to talk about my – our – God, because the issue Ralph raised isn’t new. It’s been an excuse for turning away from God for centuries. No, for millennia. Ralph, why are you here?”

“In this world? I didn’t ask to be born, that’s for sure. “Yeah, why am I here,” he asked confrontationally. “You got an answer for that?”

“You’re here because there really is a God. The miracle of life is amazing beyond any possibility that it came from chance. I could continue on that one subject, but let’s return to the main issue for now. You’re not here to please yourself. You’re here to please God.”

“Oh, so we’re here to entertain. Your God enjoys torquing up the pain and watching people groan.”

“No, because our Christian God, the God of the Bible, is the embodiment of love. The whole nature of the Bible tells us that. Besides, the Apostle John said it directly. What pleases God is your ultimate happiness, and that can be found in your enjoying full intimacy with God, in receiving all the love He has to offer, which is without limit.” But the spiritual world is where it all comes together. Heaven, if you will. The Bible never promises us that we won’t have painful experiences here on earth. In fact, it pretty much says the opposite. A very beautiful Lady once had me memorize a certain passage out of the Book of Hebrews and to recall it very recently. It’s in Chapters eleven and twelve. I’ll try to recall it from memory, asking that beautiful Lady to help me out:

“’And what shall I more say? For the time would fail me to tell you of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets, who through faith, subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again, and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tested, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented. (Of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

 

          “’Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which does so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him that endured such hostility of sinners against himself, lest you be wearied and faint in your minds. You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaks unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou are rebuked of him; for whom the Lord loves, He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chastens not? But if you are without chastisement, of which you are all partakers, then you are bastards, and not sons.’

“Pretty strong words, I’ll admit,” Earl continued. “Excessively harsh to many ears. But the odd thing is that whatever pain you are asked to endure is actually for your own benefit. As God also said in Romans 8, ‘All things work together for good to them that love God, who are the called according to His purpose.’

“I don’t get it,” Ralph said. “My wife died because God is working things out for my good? Hey, it’s been years and I’m still grieving. Now everything is collapsing about me and you expect me to see it as good?”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Earl admitted. “To understand it, you have to see the big picture. A big part of that is to accept on faith that God is the ultimate expression of love and that He is trying to get you to love Him back.”

“Pretty round-about way of doing things,” Ralph snorted. “Maybe I’d rather not have all that love, thank you.”

“You’d really want to give up a loving relationship with God in a heaven that’s more beautiful and exciting than you can possibly imagine in your wildest dreams? You don’t know what you’re saying. What God is really looking for in you – yes, you, Ralph, is a touch of nobility. Courage, selflessness, love on your part. God’s looking for that in all of us. Collectively, as His Church, we will be Jesus’ bride, His partner in marriage. Much as Joyce and I love each other, we both realize that the spiritual relationship with God that we’re looking forward to will far surpass anything we’re experiencing together here on earth. You lost your wife, but that’s really nothing compared to what you stand to gain in the spiritual domain. This life is really nothing more than a training ground, to prepare those who accept God’s terms rather than their own to be a vital part of that spiritual marriage. And there’s more besides. Those who do accept Jesus as their Lord and their Life are reborn spiritually, even here on earth. All Christians have the promise of the indwelling Holy Spirit, who comes into their lives and comforts them as they go through outwardly unpleasant experiences. Believe me, Ralph, we Christians actually have joy in our Lord, even during the most difficult of times. Yet more, the trials we endure give us the full appreciation of Jesus’ suffering on our behalf, and of the unfathomable love of God for allowing that to happen for our sakes. Beyond that, as we progress through those trials into more selfless natures, we continually acquire clearer consciences, a matter that’s a source of great happiness and an opening for us to receive God’s love in ever greater doses.”

Ralph remained silent, but Henry spoke up. “Thanks for that, Earl. I think I’m beginning to understand your God. The nobility issue appeals to me rather strongly. What you’re saying, if I can read between the lines, is that we have to get past our own selfishness to begin to see God and be a part of His plan for us. It’s like we ourselves are children in a much bigger universe that we thought we lived in, and giving up our own childish wants is part of growing up into that larger world.”

“You couldn’t have said it better,” Joyce said. “And loving each other is a big part of loving God. God Himself is selfless and noble. And very humble besides. It took a lot of humility as well as love to willingly go to the cross and accept the shame.”

“I think I like your God!” Terry exclaimed enthusiastically.

Ralph sat there, still as a statue. Gradually his features softened. Eventually, as they watched, he managed to turn the frown upside-down, achieving a caricature of a smile. Everyone knew that it wasn’t real, but the face-change made for a real improvement.

“But now tell us about – what?” Terry said to Earl. “A death camp, you say? I know things are going downhill fast around here, but even now, a death camp here in America?”

“I don’t know what else you’d call it, if you have people being carted daily into huge furnaces. And being starved, mistreated and abused to the point where the ovens are actually welcome. We lost our precious daughter there.” The pronouncement hung heavy in the room. Joyce gave a sobbing gasp at the sudden intrusion of that memory and turned her face to the wall.

“I’m so sorry I brought it up, Joyce,” Terry said. But Earl continued to speak of it.

“It turned out to be a blessing, Terry,” he told her. “She was severely handicapped by cerebral palsy. That was her crime – that she was eating the food of more useful people. And they punished her for it – severely. That first night they separated us we heard screams and wails from the barracks that held the handicapped people. The crying continued throughout that night and well into the second, but then that terrible noise began to diminish. On the morning after the fourth night there was no noise at all. Just this awful silence. The guards came in with carts and they left again loaded with bodies.

“Stop it, Earl!” Joyce cried. “You’ve said enough!” She turned and ran out of the room. Earl followed on her heels.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” Terry said.

“Don’t be,” Marge said. “You need to know about it. Ellery could tell you a thing or two about terribly wrong our government has been over the last few years. He was framed, you know. For a crime he didn’t commit, a crime that was done by corrupt generals who had become nothing more than common thugs. We were forced to witness the government descend into a den of snakes. They were happy – no, eager – to destroy our lives for their personal gain.”

“Maybe I should go in and apologize to them.”

“No. They’re tough. She’ll be over it by tomorrow, having grown a bit more into the nobility that God is looking for in all of us.”

When Joyce arrived at the kitchen to help with breakfast, she was as cheerful as ever. Terry gave her a big hug.

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #18

Chapter Seventeen

Ellery had just sighted a promising sign above an old shop which indicated that antiques were to be found within when he was accosted by a seedy man whose run-down appearance suggested that his home didn’t have walls or a ceiling.

“Got a five to spare, Jack?” he asked brusquely. Ellery started to dress him down for the inappropriate familiarity as he fished around in his pocket for change. While his hand was occupied, the stranger stepped behind Marge, grabbed her by the chin, and poised a long, vicious-looking knife at her exposed throat. “Don’t do nothin’ rash,” the intruder told Ellery. “Just hand the lady your wallet and I might let you live.”

Ellery did as Jack demanded, handing his wallet over to Marge. The man grabbed it from her and stuck it inside his coat. “Now,” he said, turn around and go back where you came from.”

“I’m not leaving until you let my wife go,” Ellery told him. The man responded by pricking her throat with the point of his knife. “You’d better, or this knife goes deeper. Jack.”

“Just let her go. Please,” Ellery begged.

“Maybe I will, but we have a date first. Then maybe. Maybe not. Scram.”

The futility of his pleading took Ellery over the edge. After the turmoil they’d both just endured and the probability that the man would kill his wife after brutally using her enraged him to the point that his primitive limbic system took over from his Christian understanding of loving his enemies. Unfortunately for the thug, God refused to intervene. Falling back on his military training, Ellery chopped the intruder’s wrist with a hard, sweeping motion that inserted his arm between the knife and Marge’s throat. The crackle of breaking bones accompanied the clatter of the knife hitting the sidewalk, but before it fell the blade had grazed Ellery’s arm, releasing a spurt of blood. Before the man could react further Ellery picked up the knife and, ignoring the damage to his arm, thrust it into the man’s groin.

“Eeee!” the thug cried in an intense wail that represented his shock, pain and fear of irreparable damage.   “I’m not through,” Ellery responded. “By the time I’m finished with you, you won’t think again about doing the same to another woman.” He backed up this cold, anger-driven statement by jabbing forked fingers into the man’s eyeballs, not enough to ruin them, but inflicting a very temporary blindness that added to the man’s sudden terror. He retrieved his wallet and walked away with Marge in tow, indifferent to the man’s squeals of agony, nor of his limited prospects for future survival.

By the time they had reached the antique store that he had sighted before the attack, Ellery’s adrenaline had diminished to a manageable level. He voiced his regret to God and then Marge of letting his anger overcome his Christian understanding of dealing with enemies, but Marge didn’t agree. “What, and have that cretin have his way with me? I’m glad you did what you did!”

Nor was he berated by Wisdom for his actions. She remained silent about the situation and his response to it.

They entered the antique shop, as dimly-lit as the previous one, but the proprietor, a man, was as cheerful as Miryam, and escorted them to a nook that bore immediate fruit in the form of a commentary on John’s Gospel. “Look at this, Marge!” he breathed. “This treasure is exactly what we’re on the lookout for!” They enthusiastically continued their search throughout the store, but failed to find another Christian-related book. In a continuation of their good fortune, the proprietor accepted their cash and they left the shop in high spirits, having been pointed by the man to the next antique store.

This one was well-lighted and considerably better-organized than the previous two, which made little difference to the ambiance of the store, as the man behind the counter viewed them with narrowed eyes, their angry glare emphasized by his scowling, downturned mouth. The deep furrows in his face accentuated his disgust with the world and them. “What are you looking for?” he asked as he walked toward them. Approaching the couple, he stood before them in a stance that demanded their quick reply. “What do you have there?” he asked, looking down at the book in Ellery’s arm and searching through his memory to verify that the book didn’t belong to him despite the obvious fact that the couple had just entered the store.

“We’re looking for books, sir”, Ellery said, attempting with a deferential attitude to tone down the confrontational element. “Christian books, if you have such.”

“Christian, eh?” the man said with a grimace, ramping up the confrontation. “We don’t carry Christian items here, so I’ll thank you to leave.” He pointed to the door.   “As a matter of fact, isn’t Christianity illegal?” Ellery turned back as they approached the exit to see the man extract a phone from his pocket. “Maybe we’d better run for it,” he told his wife. “I think he’s calling the police.”

“Whoa!” Marge cried as the sidewalk heaved upward under her feet. A pronounced ripple caught her eye as the buckling of the pavement approached their position. The shaking became so violent that they both fell, Ellery instinctively cradling Marge protectively in his arms. The hammering of the ground upon their bodies became so sharply aggressive that Ellery overcame his disorientation to rise to his feet and pick up his wife. A noise of shattering crockery and glassware came from the building they had just left, and blended into the rumble of tortured earth. This was surpassed by the loud screeching of rending framework accompanied by the thudding of beams as the store collapsed. White powder jetted out of the doorway as plaster walls disintegrated. Presently the ground motion subsided and left them with a momentary quiet, broken by a feeble cry of help from inside the chaotic wreckage of the store.

“Are you okay?” Ellery asked his wife. “Just a little shaken up,” she replied, “but I don’t think I’m injured in any way. What about you?”

“Me too,” he said, “but I think the guy in the store may be hurt real bad. We’d better go in and see how he’s doing. Yeah, I know,” he said to her look of surprise, “but we’re Christians and he’s probably suffering. We’re supposed to get beyond the hurt feelings and all that. Let’s go.”

He left the book on the sidewalk and they poked their way back into the store, threading their way back to the counter through the remains of the structure and the disarray of furniture and other antiques that once may have been of value. “Help me, please,” the feeble voice pled. They stood over the man briefly, attempting to assess his injuries. His right arm was cocked in an unnatural manner, suggesting a break. A wooden beam lay across his lap, and there was a cut on he side of his bald head. It was bleeding, but the man wasn’t in danger of a life-threatening loss of blood from it. Looking around, Marge found a blanket and a cloth flag, which she applied to the wound. Working together, the couple was able to move the log from his body. Careful not to touch the damaged arm, Ellery reached down and lifted him up. “Can you stand by yourself?” he asked the man as Marge wrapped the blanket around his shoulders.

“Yes, I think so, the man replied, holding his bad arm tenderly with the good one. “Thank you, then,” he said somewhat reluctantly. “I’m not sure that I could have gotten up by myself. Oh! Look at this store! It’s ruined!” The man began to weep.

“You can’t stay here,” Marge told him. “I’m Marge, by the way, and this is my husband Ellery. You’re going to need medical attention, whoever you are. Best come with us.”

“I’m not ‘whoever’!” the man complained, his previous demeanor beginning to return. “I’m Ralph. Ralph Dassenchuck.”

“Okay, Ralph,” Ellery said. “There’s not much you can do about this store, or, apparently, what was inside it. Come on. We have a place you can stay.” Wordlessly, Ralph allowed them to extract him from his store. Ellery picked up his book that was laying on the sidewalk and, holding Ralph’s good left arm, guided him back toward the house that Miryam had so generously offered for their use. Knowing Miryam and the generosity of her extended family that her offer had implied, Ellery had no doubt that they would offer the same to Ralph despite his ugly attitude.

Chapter Eighteen

In addition to the suffering the populations of the Western Regions had endured at the hands of their own governments, they were abused yet further by jihadists who had continued to inflict random acts of terror on them. This was not a separate issue, bur rather was another, more Machiavellian application of the government against its populace as a means of intimidating and subduing them. It was quite effective in its creation of a problem that could be solved, in the perception of the ignorant masses, only by more governmental control.

In their naive misunderstanding of this, the people had periodically clamored to the government to do more to control this menace, which only made Potnar laugh to himself. The actual threat of jihadism remained, as did the antagonistic division it engendered between the Western and Islamic arms of world government, as he thought of them, but the majority of destructive acts were inspired by the CIA in its execution of state-condoned terrorism.

All five leaders of the Western Regions, particularly POTEUR, had fully participated in this mass deception, the fiction being maintained by vehement periodic official utterances of condemnation against the more brutal actions.

But the power in the Muslim world was certainly no fiction, POTNAR mused. If he was to reach his ultimate objective of leadership and control over the entire world, he’d have to prune back that branch. The Russian part of that alliance was the most disconcerting, as the rest of that so-called Empire seemed to be following the leading of the Russian president. So Russia would be the first of his targets.

But what is Russia going to do with Israel? Potnar questioned to himself. Well, let them do what they’ll do. Israel’s become an annoying parasite on my good will. Perhaps in the process of ridding the world of Jews, Russia will find the adventure costly and debilitating, which will take care of my own problem with the Region.

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #17

Chapter Sixteen

 

 

 

 

 

“Oh!” Joyce exclaimed as they went up the wooden steps to the door of the large, well-maintained structure, embedded within a small forest of evergreen trees, the lawn still green despite the approach of winter. The green paint of the trim and shutters contrasting with the white house lent a pristine air to the scene. Three dormers stood out from the immaculate shake roof. Smoke from a wood fire curled up from the stone chimney. “It’s so pretty, Miryam. Are you certain that your aunt and uncle won’t mind? Won’t they be a bit put-out, our coming without notice?”

“Of course they won’t mind,” Miryam said. “You’ll understand when you meet them. And we’re not exactly coming on them unexpected. I called them while you were browsing for books.”

As if Miryam’s aunt had heard every word that she had spoken, the front door opened to frame her tall, chubby figure. “Welcome!” she cried, opening her arms to emphasize her cheerful greeting.

“That’s auntie Terry,” Miryam said, rushing up the stairs with a smile to embrace her aunt. “Thanks so much again!” she told her, looking up to her round face. “Those two,” she told her, “are Earl and Joyce Cook. They’re Christians, and they’ve been through a lot. The others are Christians too. Ellery and Marge are out looking for books, but they should be here soon.”

“And who is that young man by your side, Miryam?” her uncle asked. He had come over to the doorway and now stood next to his wife, his arm around her ample waist. Together they looked like a portrait of Santa and Mrs. Claus.

Miryam blushed. “This is uncle Henry,” she told her companions, who responded with hellos. “Guess what?” she said to Henry, looking at Terry with an expression that spoke of her hopes for their acceptance of her new companion. “This is Moshe,” she began, forgetting her incessant tales about him over the last two weeks and expecting their surprise at his obviously Jewish name. “The one I told you about. I’ve known him for ages. We’ve shared a lot.” Her blush brightened. “That didn’t come out right. What I meant to say is that we’ve gone through some pretty scary times together.”

“What you really meant to say,” Terry broke in with a broad smile, “is that you’re very glad he’s here. We’ve heard a lot about you, Moshe.” She extended her hand to him in welcome. “Come on in. Hot chocolate, everybody?” She returned to her kitchen without waiting for replies while Henry pointed to the sofa and bid them to sit.

“How lovely!” Joyce exclaimed as she looked about her at the cozy warmth of the fireplace and the equally warm furnishings of the living room. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such cheerful surroundings.” Perhaps this is indeed more modest than the hotel room, Joyce thougth to herself, but it certainly is more warm and charming. Thank you so much, Wisdom.

Henry looked at Earl, the unspoken question obvious about his ability to provide for his wife. Joyce picked up on it and laughed. “Oh, yes, Henry,” she said. “We did have a home every bit as cheerful as this, and we did it proud with much love and joy. We had a daughter, too. A lovely young lady, Cathy.” Her smile morphed into a frown and her eyes misted at the recollection.

“I don’t want to pry into your personal life,” Henry said. “But if you don’t mind my asking, and speak up if you do, what happened to your daughter?”

“The government happened to her,” Earl spoke up with bitterness in his voice. “Cathy wasn’t perfect, you see. Not up to the government standard for continued existence.”

“How awful!” Terry exclaimed from the kitchen. “You mean that they just let her die?”

“No, it’s worse than that. They took an active part in her death.” Earl told them about the death camp in Arizona from which they had escaped, and the adventures they’d experienced up to the point of their arrival here.

A general silence prevailed as Terry came in with steaming cups of chocolate. “Well, you’re here now, so maybe things will be looking up for you,” she said. “I’m trying not to be judgmental, folks, but from where I stand I wonder about your God. I’m not all that happy with Allah, especially being a woman, but I thought your God was supposed to be loving and kind. At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

As if to emphasize the point that Terry was trying to make, the ground shook as if it were being booted around by an angry God. As the movement increased in intensity, Terry grabbed the counter for support and froze in place while the others sat motionless in the living room. A lamp crashed to the floor and the house groaned in protest, but remained intact as the shaking diminished and stopped. Earl rose from the couch and picked up the lamp. He looked at Terry asking without words for a broom and dustpan, which she retrieved from a closet and handed to him. “Thanks,” she said as he brought the broken glass remains into the kitchen. She opened a door to the under-sink garbage container and he dropped the remains in. “Sorry for that,” he told her. “It looks like it was an expensive lamp.”

“Maybe so,” she replied, “but I’d rather see a broken lamp than a broken bone. Or cracks in the walls.” Her eyes darted about to confirm that indeed there were no cracks. “We’ve been having these quakes more often lately,” she continued. “I wonder what’s going on?”

“That another love letter from your God?” Henry smirked as Earl sat back down on the couch next to Joyce. “I’m with Terry. Your God seems to be as harsh as Allah. I don’t buy the whole religion thing, God or Allah.” He glanced at Miryam, searching for support.

Moshe spoke up first. He was troubled by the thought of clashing with Miryam’s family, but the subject was too important and too misunderstood to remain silent about it. “I agree with you about the appearance of anger rather than love. In fact, even as a Jew I might have taken your side on this.”

“You’re not a Jew?” Henry interrupted.

“Yes I am,” he replied. “But thanks to a man named Jacob and his wife, and now Earl and Joyce, I’m also a Christian, which makes a big difference in the way I see the world around me. I’m beginning to see the mercy behind the apparent anger, and, yes, even love. Especially love. Think about this – the opposite of love isn’t anger, but indifference. Wisely directed, anger can be a strong influence for improvement. Then   think about what life would be like without God. The way mankind is heading, without His intervention we’d blow ourselves up, along with our planet. Just as bad, we’d destroy ourselves in the meanest, cruelest manner our evil minds could devise before we got to that point. We’d be like a world populated by Rambos, all thinking that the rest of the world did them wrong and getting their own back in the most brilliantly-conceived, diabolical ways. And don’t think I’ve left the women out of that picture. Left to their own devices and a godless attitude, they can be just as cruelly inventive as the men. The bottom line is that God’s grace toward us is more than abundant, even if as individuals we reject Him. God fulfills the Genesis story of Joseph in that way. Just as Joseph rescued those who hated him, so did Jesus suffer and die on the cross in behalf of those who watched with satisfaction as His life drained away. But if, collectively, a people who were once called by His name turn against Him and force their children to reject Him, they inevitably will descend along a path that will take them to a hell on earth. In His mercy, God will put a halt to it before mankind completes its self-extinction. The best news is that to those who know and love their God, they find peace and joy in the most absurdly difficult, painful and dangerous situations. We who have accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior actually have God within us, guiding and comforting us in the midst of chaos and destruction.”

“What do you mean by ‘God within us’?” Terry asked.

“That’s the promise of the Bible, Moshe responded. According to John and Luke, the Holy Spirit – God – comes to live within Christians. Maybe I’d better turn the podium over to Earl or Joyce,” Moshe said. “It takes the Bible to really understand what I’m talking about and the very real love of God in spite of outward appearances, and those two understand the Bible from cover to cover.”

“You’re doing just fine,” Earl told him. “Go ahead with what you’re saying. I can see the input of the Holy Spirit with every word you speak. About the Bible, though. The story of Joseph in Genesis, the very first book of the Bible, is a good example of how the Old Testament described Jesus so thoroughly before He came in the flesh.   Joseph represented in great detail an important aspect of Jesus’ character and mission, saving those who hated him. But that account is just one of . . .”

“Are you going to let Moshe get on with it or not?” Joyce said, interrupting her husband.

“Sorry,” Earl replied grinning, sweeping his arm down in an invitation to Moshe to take up the conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #16

Chapter Fifteen (continued)

The five of them remained in Earl and Joyce’s room throughout the day and into the evening, struggling with the recall of Bible passages that popped unbidden into their minds. They broke for dinner in the room and, encouraged by what they’d accomplished to that point, continued working after the meal. They repeated the process into the night and through the next day, at the end of which time their attempt at a reconstructed Gospel of Jesus Christ had begun to take on form. On the third day, having exhausted themselves mentally and troubled with the knowledge that they had to leave by morning, they took a short break to watch the news on television. Moshe observed that the news appeared to be heavily censored and biased toward the current government. Despite the tense situation in his own homeland of Israel, there was very little information about it in the newscast, and Moshe was disappointed to note that what little was said about the situation was heavily one-sided toward the Palestinians.

Less interested in the news than Moshe, Earl continued to think about the task that Wisdom had laid before them. “Hey guys,” he said, jumping up from the couch, “I have an idea. Maybe all the Bibles are gone, but what about all the works about the Bible, like the commentaries?”

“Good idea,” Marge responded. “But where might we find books like that? Certainly not the library or the bookstores.”

“Maybe in some antique stores?” Joyce said. “All the ones I’ve been into in the past have had plenty of old books. Maybe we’d even get lucky and find a Bible there. At any rate, it would be a fun treasure hunt. Let’s do it! What do you say, Moshe?”

“I’m in. We can start first thing tomorrow morning.”

“But what about our sleeping quarters?” Marge asked the group. “ We know that we can’t stay here any longer. Maybe we should focus on that first.”

“I have a feeling that the answer to that is involved in looking for those books,” Earl replied. “I have two thoughts that seem to be messages: the first is to focus on what we were told to – the books. The second is to keep the faith.”

During the night Earl reviewed what they had accomplished so far: snippets of John 1, although none of them could recall the names of all twelve apostles; the same for John 2 and 3; there also were portions of John 8 and 10, where Jesus claimed His Godhood and pre-existence; the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac; the story of Esther’s rescue of the Jews from the clutches of Haman, the precursor of Hitler; the feeding of the multitudes from Mark 6 and 8; Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection from Matthew 26 through 28 with a reference back to Psalm 22; Isaiah 53, Psalms 2, 14 and 83; Ephesians 5, the portion of Hebrews 11 that described the Hall of faith; the stories of creation and Joseph in Genesis; the Passover in Exodus 12, again with reference to Psalm 22; and the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20, which took all five of them to finally come up with all ten; and Jesus’ pronouncements to the seven Churches in Revelation 1 through 3, in which, as they amazed themselves, they were able to describe all seven Churches. All in all, Earl thought, not a bad job. There’s enough information here to at least put some interest in God in the hearts of those who might read what we have here. Is there enough to lead to salvation? Earl turned into bed next to Joyce with that question in his mind. Not long after that his mind turned to wonder at the luxury they were experiencing, and with that final thought he went to sleep.

The next day they ordered big, knowing that this would be their last meal in grand hotel style. After happily polishing off the sumptuous breakfast, they set out on foot into the downtown area. Joyce brushed off Earl’s concern over the condition of her phantom feet. “I’ve had enough rest,” she told him. “It feels good to be walking.”

Joyce wasn’t so enthusiastic by the time they found an antique store. But the events that followed caused her to forget all about her prosthetics and the pain in her legs. Moshe was the first to the door, which he held open for the others. As they walked into the rather dark and cluttered shop, Moshe responded back somewhat indifferently to the greeting of the girl behind the counter and did a double-take in amazement when his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he recognized her. “Miryam?” he asked. “Miryam! It’s you! What on earth are you doing here?”

“Moshe!” she screamed. “Oh good God! What on earth are you doing here?”

Forgetting his companions, he rushed over to the counter as she stepped into the aisle and they collided in a fierce hug. “I never thought I’d see you again,” she wailed with joy. “This is unbelievable!”

“I’ve just been here a few days,” she replied to his question of what had brought her here. “I have a great-uncle who brought his family over here to the States in 1950, not long after they’d realized that Israel was there to stay. They were the smart ones, but they haven’t been doing so well since the big regime change here, and last week the stress got to him. He died of a heart attack, I think also caused by the the loss of his wife to cancer six months earlier. I have a college degree, Moshe, in accounting, and their children, my aunt and uncle, paid my way over here to meet them and maybe help out with the diminishing finances. I’m not sure that I can keep them afloat, but I’m trying.”

“Did a certain gorgeous Lady happen to be involved in these events?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, there was a lady. Gorgeous isn’t the word. She had me mesmerized. After I received the news and the funds, which involved a complicated transaction between family patriarchs here and there, there was a time of indecision as to whether I should come here or not. She made that time very brief, I’ll tell you that. She also got involved in the funding transaction, which is way over my head even with my degree. Who is she, Moshe? I don’t think I understand.”

“That’s where my Jewish background comes in,” Moshe told her. “When you refer to Her, you need to capitalize the first letter, because she’s actually God, a member of the Trinitarian Godhead.”

“Really? I thought that’s what She implied, but with my background as a female in a Muslim society, I found that to be very difficult to accept. I thought maybe She could be an angel, but . . .“

“No, She’s truly God. We Jews have a concept of God as one and yet as a multiple, and for the most part in our history we’ve perceived that one Member of this divine Triad, the Holy Spirit, was feminine. We didn’t really understand the full implication of that multiplicity or even the oneness in the face of that multiplicity until a Messianic Christian named Jacob and his wife Moira explained it as a divine Family. This Woman, Miryam, is the Spouse of God the Father.”

“What a beautiful thought!” I think I like your Jewish God, Moshe.”

“There’s more to it, and it’s all beautiful. I hope I get a chance to share the whole story with you, Miryam.”

“So do I. Oh, Moshe, I’m so happy that we’re together again!”

“You can thank our beautiful Woman for that, too, Miryam,” he responded as she gave him a fierce hug. Joyce looked on as they gazed into each other’s eyes in mutual ownership, marveling at Wisdom’s brilliant economy of strategy in bringing the two together while using that budding relationship between Moshe and Miryam to help the other two couples carry out the mission to which She had assigned them.

“So why are you here?” Miryam asked Moshe. “Is there something that brought you into the store?”

“Yes. We’re looking for a certain kind of book, a commentary on the Bible. An antique store is the only place we can think of to find such a book.”

“Well, I’m sure that you can figure out that I don’t know much about what’s in here. The best I can do is point you to where we have books on display and let you look for yourselves.”

“Good enough.”

“Follow me. And forget about getting out of my sight.”

“Believe me, that’s the last thing I want to do.”

“When you leave here, the family home’s quite large. There’s room in it for all of you. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather have you close by, so maybe you can move out of where you’re staying now. Not to be pushy, but . . .“

Miryam was interrupted by the raucous laughter in which the others participated. “What’s wrong?” she asked timidly.

“Nothing at all, Miryam,” Earl told her. “I’m Earl, by the way, and my wife’s name is Joyce. Our friends here are Ellery and Marge. We’re laughing because what you just said is the perfect answer to our biggest worry. To tell you the truth, we didn’t have any place to stay tonight until your offer. The problem is that Ellery and I have prices on our heads. Authorities of multiple flavors are looking for us and if they find us it’s the end of the road. Is your offer still open, or would you like to think about it a bit more?”

“Of course not!” she responded. “If you’re in trouble, that’s all the more reason to have you!”

“God bless you, then. And a heartfelt thanks to the Woman that Moshe and you were talking about, because it’s obvious that all this is part of Her plan. Her name’s Wisdom, by the way.”

Miryam stopped at a nook where some old hard-bound books were stacked on a rickety antique table. They found nothing that was even close to what they wanted, so they moved on to the next area of books. It was only after they’d exhausted all the books in the store but the last that they finally happened upon a book with a Christian theme: Vine’s Expository Dictionary. The fact that the title didn’t include a reference to the word “Bible” probably saved it from destruction. It wasn’t exactly what they were looking for, but it was certainly better than nothing. By referencing words in the book, it gave them a path, albeit indirect, to recalling some Scripture verses. It would be useful, but would require much effort to make it so.

“Could be that that’s just what Wisdom had in mind,” Earl said, voicing the thought they shared regarding the difficulty of its application.

“Are there any more antique stores besides this one close by, Miryam?” Moshe asked. “Maybe,” he continued after her somewhat tentative answer in the affirmative, “Earl, you and Joyce can pore over this book and see where it takes you, while Ellery and Marge and I continue to search out the other antique stores for books that might be more up our alley.”

“Nothing doing,” Miryam told him. “You’re staying here if I have anything to say about it.”

“Sure thing,” Moshe happily agreed. “It makes sense, though, for you and Marge to continue on with the search,” he told Ellery. “At least you have a full set of arms and legs. And each other.”

“Be glad to.”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #15

Chapter Fifteen

Joyce and Earl followed Moshe to the hotel room that Moshe had reserved for them, somewhat disconcerted by the man’s rapid but stiff-legged gait.  They almost had to run to keep up with him.  She was taken aback yet further when Moshe hurried off to his own studio room down the hall without a by-your-leave, but she hugged Earl in pleasure as they opened the door to their room at the Fairfield Suites.  They heard Marge laugh joyfully as she and Ellery entered their own room next door.

“Look at that enormous bed!” Joyce exclaimed as she lifted herself onto it and lay back, glorying in the soft comfort.  “And a bath!” she said as her eye caught a glimpse of the welcoming bathroom.  “Oh, Earl!  We may not be in heaven yet, but this is as close as we can get to it down here.  I can’t wait,” she added as she got off the bed and went toward the bathroom.  “I’m going to take a long, hot bath, and then it’s your turn.”

She heard a knock on the door while she was still soaking in the tub, and not long afterward the smell of cooked steak seeped into the bathroom.  It was delightful enough to extract her from the bath, and she hurriedly dressed and sat down next to Earl at their little table in front of a banquet the likes of which they hadn’t seen in years.  Obviously, the ills that had befallen most of the country hadn’t completely overtaken that part of Kansas that they were privileged to find themselves in.  She almost forgot to pray before digging in, but Earl softly spoke for the both of them as he fervently thanked God for their present situation.

Earl was in the bathtub, filled to the brim on the outside with warm water and on the inside with good food and having a good soak of his own, when the MacAfees dropped in, all smiles.  “To think of the difference a day makes!” Marge exclaimed.  “Yesterday I thought our lives were over.  Look at us now!”  The three sat down to get acquainted further and Earl came in with a beaming smile.  “I don’t know how long this is going to last,” he remarked, “but I’m good with it.”

An hour later their excitement had begun to wear off and they all began to feel tired.  They parted company and fell gratefully into their beds.  Sleep quickly overtook them.

In the morning they were greeted with room-service lumberjack breakfasts along with Moshe.  “Sorry about last night,” he said.  “I had no choice, believe me.  If you’ll get Ellery and Marge, we’ll have breakfast together and talk about the day ahead.”

After the little group of five had eaten, they went into the living room and sat.  “I guess we’ve all passed the courage test or whatever God had in mind to bring us to this point,” Moshe offered.  “We seem to have been assembled as a team, maybe something akin to your Seal Team Six.”

“Nah,” MacAffee countered.  “The Corps.  The Old Corps, hey Earl?”

“You bet,” Earl said with a laugh.  “Give us some creds, Moshe, and maybe we’ll let you in.”

Moshe responded with a generous laugh, and then went into a detailed review of his recent past as an IDF spy among the Palestinians.  “Looks like you don’t need us to let you in, Moshe,” Ellery told him when he’d finished with his tale of ever-present danger.  “Seems like God did the job for us.  He did a good job of it, too.  Welcome to the Old Corps, Moshe.”

Their attention turned to unexpected motion on the far side of the room, where Wisdom stood pouring Herself a cup of coffee.  “Okay,” She began, taking a seat.  “Now that you’re all together, we’ll have our first meeting of the Old Corps.  “Moshe,” she began, looking at him with concern, “we’re going to have to find you a date.  This isn’t good, you being odd-man out.”  Her frown turned into a wide smile that suggested that She knew something that Moshe didn’t.

“Fine with me,” he said with a grin.

“She’s up to the task,” Earl added.  “Look at Joyce.  It’s all Her doing, getting me linked up with Joyce.”

“Okay, enough with the flag-waving,” She broke in but with a wink to Earl.  Glad you’re enjoying your stay here.  A word about it, though.  You won’t be here very long, and your more permanent surroundings won’t be quite so grand, although I don’t think you’ll mind in the least.  Your adversaries, which means the MPs for you, Ellery, and the cops for you, Earl, are busy right now looking at surveillance cameras and getting close to figuring out where you are.  They’ll know by three days from now, and you need to be gone by then.”

“Where do we go from here?” Ellery broke in.  “None of us knows this area.  How can we find another place, especially while we’re being hunted down?”

You’ll figure it out.  I’ll give you a clue: finding your place of shelter will be related to your mission.  I’d spell it out for you, but you need to get some exercise focusing on a task while your situation’s dicey.  It’s part of learning to function outside of self-interest.  Besides,” She continued with a smile directed to Moshe, “events will play out with a romantic surprise.  I just love romantic surprises, don’t you?”

“Getting down to business,” She went on, “We – “We” being the Godhead – have a mission for you, an important one, but not without its hazards.  We think you’ll find it interesting, the more so as you shed more of your self-interest baggage.  The problem is this – Bibles have been banned for some time now, removed by poor souls who know no better, who are burdened with numerous hatreds and ill-will toward their fellow men.  So many Bibles have been confiscated and destroyed that they now are extremely rare.  There are multitudes of people out there who have had no access to any Scripture whatsoever.  As a consequence, their comprehension is so empty of who their God is that they don’t have the slightest understanding of how to approach Us, much less love Us.  Hosea, in Chapter 4 of his book, spoke of situations just like the one you find yourselves in now.  Permit me to quote excerpts:

          “’Hear ye the word of the Lord, ye children . . .for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no faith, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.  By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery they break out, and blood toucheth blood. . . My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee . . .”’

“Sure, We could directly write that Word in their hearts, and We’ve done it in the past, many times.  But that’s not the way We prefer to do it.  It represents too much intrusion into their lives and puts a taint of coercion into their relationship with Us.  It will be so much more dramatic and meaningful for them to arrive at that knowledge apparently on their own through their reading of the Word.  That’s precisely where you come in: to give them an opportunity to do just that.

“As you’re well aware,” She continued, “those words of Hosea’s about the sorry state of degeneracy in the minds of the common people apply to pretty much the entire population of North America, and beyond that, to the world in general.  But there are exceptions.  There is a surprisingly large remnant who, because of political events that happened before they were born, are receptive to knowing the truth – that there is a God, a loving One, Who wishes them to come to a knowledge of Him.

“Your mission is this – generate a semblance of Scriptural information, enough to furnish your fellows with an understanding of Us in enough depth that they will seek Us on their own.  Your follow-on mission is to reproduce that information and distribute it best as you can.  We’ll take it from there.”

“I’ve been regretting not picking up a Bible in Jimmy’s motor home, Wisdom,” Joyce told Her.  I thought about it not long after we took off in the airplane.  Now we don’t have one, and I doubt very much that we’d find a Gideon Bible in the nightstand over there.”

“Don’t get after yourself too much about forgetting the Bible, Joyce.  You wouldn’t have found it anyway, and if you did, it wouldn’t be in any condition to read.  The mob that attacked you took it with them.”

“Oh?  You mean that . . .“

“No,” Wisdom interrupted.  They weren’t interested in reading it.  They thought it might be useful as toilet paper.”

Wisdom pursued the topic of their mission before Joyce could dwell on that little piece of unwanted information.  “What you need to do – with My help at times – is to reconstruct from memory and other means specific passages that will lead these people to a knowledge of God that will bring them to repentance and have them seek the salvation that Jesus so freely offered all men.  Your reconstruction need not be exact, but should furnish an accurate representation of Scripture.  After all, before all the Bibles went by-by, there were many supposedly “official” versions that were more off-base and generally distorted than you could accomplish even if you wanted to.”

“Earl,” She continued after letting Her words sink in, “do you recall, for example, the writing on the underside of the toilet seat when you were incarcerated?

“Sure, Wisdom,” he responded enthusiastically.  “It was John’s Prologue, the first eighteen verses of John Chapter One.  I know it by heart.  I can recite it right now.”

“Put it down on paper and have it copied.  That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.  You also know, as I see, the account of the wedding at Cana in John 2 and Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus about spiritual rebirth.  The rest of you, and Earl, you too, do your best to recall enough of Jesus’ work on the cross and of His resurrection to give a good working account of the Gospel.  You’ll also want to describe enough of the significant events in the Old Testament to give your readers a feel for how, through the lives of certain people and the prophecies of others, Jesus was foretold in the Word of God long before His journey on earth.  You’ll want to start on these four passages along with John’s Prologue: first, present the story of Joseph.  Joyce, the account moved you to tears, so you take that; next is the Passover ceremony and how it relates to Jesus’ birth and Psalm 22 regarding His crucifixion.  Earl, your analytic mind is perfect for that task; third, the Genesis story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac in response to God’s call.  That’s for you, Ellery; and finally, Esther’s brave salvation of Israel in the face of Naman’s attempted genocide.  That would be a good one for you, Marge.  Questions?”

“Yes,” Ellery spoke up.  “As You said, that’s only part of the mission.  How are we supposed to distribute this information while we’re being hunted down like dogs?  What do you have in mind there?”

“You’ll see when the time comes.  Start exercising your faith.  All of you.  By the time that distribution becomes an issue, you’ll be long gone from this place, to more modest quarters I fear.  But then, you don’t want to get ahead of yourselves.  Enjoy the time you do have here while you’re working on your version of the Word.  I’ll be back when the time’s right.  Any more questions?”

“Yes,” Moshe said.  “What about me?”

“You’ll be occupied for the most part with other matters,” She said, laughing.  “I don’t think you want to rock the boat about that, as you have a bit of a surprise waiting for you, Moshe.  One thing, though.  You do want to thoroughly go over what the others come up with, and share the insights you get with whoever you might be associating with.  With that, She left with a grin on Her lovely face.

[to be continued]

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #14

Chapter Fourteen

Abdul Barakzai sat unhappily on his spartan chair, his elbows resting on the table before him, his face in his hands. The closed door of his daughter’s bedroom failed to block the sound of her weeping. He looked up briefly to the sight of his wife’s angry glare. Vicious, he thought. Glad I’m not a foreign invader, reminiscing of his clan’s women, who had been greatly feared by Soviets and Americans alike, as well as a long chain of their predecessors, the Grecians under Alexander the Great, the Turks and the British, each of whom had learned to respect Afghan sovereignty the hard way. They all had lost battles and lives at the hands of the fierce, hardy and courageous men and their cruel, merciless women who reveled in relieving wounded soldiers of their bowels and their privates.

For his modest station in life, Abdul was an educated man; among his Pashtun clanspeople he had great respect for the exploits of his namesake Abdul Ahad Mohmand, the first Afghan cosmonaut who in 1988 had spent nine days aboard the Russian space station Mir. He respected his wife too, despite the upbringing that taught him to think of her as less than fully human. He looked her way again. Her evil eye brought to his mind Rudyard Kipling’s famous 1895 poem The Young English Soldier, which immortalized the second of three nineteenth-century wars the British had engaged in against the Afghan people in 1878-9. He silently spoke to himself the final two stanzas:

“If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,

Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:

So take open order, lie down and sit tight,

And wait for support like a soldier

Wait, wait, wait like a soldier

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out and cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier

Go, go, go like a soldier,

Go, go, go like a soldier,

Go, go, go like a soldier,

So-oldier – of – the Queen!

Abdul’s wife was angry with him for his heavy-handed treatment of their daughter, who had been exposed to wrongful Western influence through the efforts of a gang of American Christians who had come into their lives through what they had called “The Joshua Project”, an ill-conceived effort to Christianize his fellow townspeople, including his own family.

At the heart of his current problem with his wife and his daughter was the inroad this group had made into his wife’s heart and her subsequent contamination of his daughter with these thoughts. Like all his friends and associates and their forebears for as long as anyone could remember, Allah be praised, he was a loyal and devout Sunni Muslim, and that was the way they would remain, regardless of this present unpleasantness.

A side issue of this problem was his wife’s absorption of the Christian intruders’ heretic notion that women were as blessed as men and deserved the opportunity of education, just as did all men. Blasphemous! he shouted within himself, gnashing his teeth in rage at her usurpation of position that had become so great that she had begun to infect their daughter with the thought of a manly education. Filthy trash! Before the group had attempted to impose itself upon them, his hatred had been limited to foreign invaders, Jews and the Shi’a sect of Islam, the pretenders to the Islam of tradition, those insufferable, arrogant creatures who thought the leaders of the faith should remain in the family of Muhammad, Allah be praised. This animosity had been familiar, as comfortable as the warm body of his wife. Now he didn’t know which to hate more. He thought of his wife, who so recently had upset the serenity of his family life.

She had been caught attempting to read a Bible. A Bible! He knew enough about this Western God to know that the God of the Christians was also the God of the evil, depraved Jews, worthy of slaughter to the last man, woman and child. Now this ugly document sat there on the table in front of him, figuratively as well as physically between his wife and him. He reached out to grab it and throw it into the trash, but something held him back so strongly that his muscles seemed to melt.

“Who are you?” The man reeled back in shock at the sudden appearance before him of a woman of such breathtakingly radiant beauty that he almost fell to his knees. Her commanding presence stripped away his ingrained view of womanhood and left his soul exposed and vulnerable. “Who are you?” His response to Her question with his own was completely automatic. In her presence his mind had gone completely blank.

“Who are you?” Wisdom repeated.

“I am Abdul Barakzai, a Taliban fighter in the name of Allah.”

“Who are you?” She demanded.

“I am a Pashtun warrior of the clan of Yusuf-zai.”

“Who is Yusuf?”

“Yusuf ibn Yaacob, a very great and noble ancestor, Allah be praised.”

“Who is Yaacob?”

He hesitated. He had known the answer from childhood, but now the implication struck him like a thunderbolt.

“Yes. You are Abdul Barakzai, son of Joseph, son of Jacob, of the Israelite tribe of Joseph, which was led captive out of Samaria in 721 B.C. by King Shalmaneser of Assyria. You were relocated to where you still live now, all these centuries later. Moreover, your blood is that of Joseph’s son Ephraim, and you are indeed the offspring of another very great and noble ancestor, Joshua, who assumed the reigns of leadership from Moses and led the Israelites across the River Jordan into the Promised Land. Joshua’s God – your God – was very different than Mohammad’s Allah to whom you were introduced in the eighth century. Although Allah had freed you from the chains of other gods into whose worship you had descended, the Jehovah whom your ancestors worshiped before them was greater in love. Moreover, this Jehovah represented a Trinitarian God, three Persons bound together in a family relationship so close that this God is really one God, as the amulets many of your women even now declare: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.’ Pick up the Bible and this time treat it with the respect it deserves.”

As Abdul reached for the Bible, it opened of itself to Deuteronomy Chapter 6. He picked it up, preserving the location of the open pages. “Read verses four and five,” She commanded. He read the passage, repeating to himself the verses She had just quoted. “The Shema of Israel,” She told him. “Read to this day by every committed Jew, and, since its inclusion into the New Testament, by every Christian as well. You yourself are an Israelite, Abdul, just like all your friends, relatives and associates. You are intimately connected with the Jews. Your Joshua stood tall with another great and noble man, Caleb of the tribe of Judah, to whom Joshua gave the city of Hebron as promised by God for his own valor. You act like Jews, circumcising your male infants on the eighth day, and your women wear amulets that preserve the Jewish Shema. You even have a mezusah affixed to your own doorpost which contains the Shema, as commanded by Moses in Deuteronomy 6:9. You and your friends wear prayer shawls and light candles on Friday nights like all good Jews around the world. Now we’ll turn to the Book of Second Kings.” The pages riffled of their own accord, resting on Chapter 17.

“Read the first six verses,” she commanded. He read the following:

“In the twelfth year of Ahaz, king of Judah, began Hoshea, the son of Elah, to reign in Samaria over Israel nine years. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, but not as the kings of Israel who were before him. Against him came up Shalmaneser, king of Assyria; and Hoshea became his servant, and gave him presents. And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea; for he had sent messengers to So, king of Egypt, and brought no present to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year. Therefore, the king of Assyria shut him up, and bound him in prison. Then the king of Assyria came up thoughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.”

“You recognize the names, I can see,” She said. “Halah, Habor, Gozan River. They sound familiar, don’t they?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

The notion of being the equivalent of a Jew was overwhelming, as Wisdom saw. Yet She remained firm about his acknowledging that fact. “Do you remember those Christians you were thinking about a few minutes back?”

“Yes.” His scowl deepened.

“Contact their leader tomorrow, and ask for as many Bibles as they can give you. Then you – personally – will be handing them out to your neighbors.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Not your wife. Not your daughter. You. Keep one for yourself and another for your daughter. And then start reading it. I’ll be around from time to time to answer your questions, and you’d better have some good questions to ask.”

Abdul responded nonverbally with a pout.

“Deal with it, Abdul. And start to treat your family like people instead of animals. I’ll be back.” Wisdom left.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #13

Chapter Thirteen

 

The Palestine Fiasco, as it was now called by the Israeli public, was accepted by them with mixed feelings, mostly negative. The temporary cessation of fighting was somewhat encouraging on the one hand, but on the other, the threat of a much larger army looming behind the front lines waiting to pounce on the little nation had injected a major dose of fear into the populace, bringing with it the vote of no confidence in the current Israeli administration that toppled its leadership and creating in its stead a government ready to bend like a willow in conformance with anything that looked like a path to a more permanent peace.

To make matters more critical for the would-be invaders, the Israelis were now exploiting the enormous cache of oil they had found in the Med and had claimed for their own. They now were the dominant oil exporter of the world, reaping the huge profits from that enterprise at the expense of their neighbors and the bankrupting of their enemies.

The Russian president sat on his opulent throne, his right hand propping up his cheek. Despite the majestic splendor of his station, he was despondent. He was fully aware of the propensity of the new Israeli government to cave at the slightest promise of a more lasting peace, which meant that the Israelis were willing to subject themselves to Western domination in exchange for the illusion of security.

He didn’t want that. He wanted the Israeli oil, and he wanted it now. His control over that oil would, at the minimum, cause the price to rise in the West.   The increase in wealth and control that he had anticipated out of his own oil revenues had not happened. The economic situation worldwide was so bleak that the demand for oil had dropped to the point where the cupboards in the Russian Motherland were rapidly becoming bare. The only way to turn that situation around would be to make oil more precious, and the only way to make that happen would be to intervene in the control of the oil available to the west. I have to have that Israeli oil, he thought.

The Russian combat troops ringing the Mideast weren’t helping. They’d remained in place, along with the Iranian and Turkish soldiers and now their wives and families. If their idleness was to be prolonged, it would drain Mother Russia dry as a bone. They needed to be clothed and warmed and fed, but as soldiers maintained in a high state of readiness they contributed nothing toward those needs. If I’m going to be hurting, he reasoned, my confederates will be hurting too, and sooner than me. Their combat readiness will suffer along with the cash flow.

He’d read the Hebrew prophets, more as a means of scoffing at their God than anything else. But he knew that in some quarters the words of their prophet Ezekiel had foretold of his invasion of Israel. Is God really putting a hook in my jaw? he asked in a brief moment of horror. He forcefully slapped it away from his mind, reminding himself of God’s irrelevance to the world. He doesn’t even exist, the leader said to himself. But I do. Me. He looked around the room, every item in it speaking of his own greatness. Comforted somewhat, he continued to think of the future, and of how he might still achieve the full greatness of his destiny.

The world of the Russian president’s contemplation was deeply polarized into three great political divisions: the West, with its five Regions, the North American, South American, Western European, Indo-Australian, and Pacific Far West, China and Israel standing alone with China as a giant monolith dwarfing the almost invisible little speck on maps that bothered to represent Israel as an independent nation. In opposition to the West was the Eastern Empire, consisting of the president’s own Russia and then Persia, Syrio-Turk, Arabo-African, and Southern Asia, five in all.   Of all of the motivating factors behind his eagerness to attack Israel, the manipulation of this political polarization to his own advantage was most prominent. The prospect of becoming indisputable master of the Eastern Empire through this war was so enticing that he had to suppress it to the subliminal level. But it was always there in the background, like the even greater prize of eventual domination of the entire world.

With Israel finally out of the picture, it would almost inevitably follow that the predominantly-Muslim Eastern Empire would become the stronger of the two five-toed branches of world government. China? Perhaps later, after the conquest of the West.

Take over the Israeli oil fields. Nobody’s going to complain, least of all the Arabs. America? What a laugh! Their State Department, presided over by a weak and self-indulgent White House, will scream like stuck pigs, but in the end they’ll do nothing to stop me. With a little show of strength in their direction, they’ll fall all over themselves to appease me. Put the troops to work earning their wages. Collect the oil money ourselves. Hand Israel over to the Arabs, that’ll make them happy. As if they had a choice anyway. It all makes sense. . .

He called in his top generals. “I want you to establish a definite timetable to get our troops moving and occupy Israel,” he told them. His stern demeanor presented the message more eloquently than his words: get off your rears and get moving.

“What kind of time frame are you thinking of?” asked one of the generals, a man whose portly physique suggested that his concept of rank included the indulgence in the comforts to which his position entitled him. “Perhaps a couple of months or so? The logistics of that time . . .“

The president decided to make the man an example of the urgency he felt. Signaling two of his ever-present personal security contingent to collar the man, he told them to handcuff him and hand him over to another detail who would then escort him to the prison in the palace basement, where he would enjoy the privileges of a treasonous private. “Have I made myself clear?” he spoke to the remaining generals. “In answer to his question of time, I’m looking at the end of the week. Get moving.”

By the end of the week, a multitude of convoys had departed the encampments, heading back north with the wives and families of the huge military machine, which now was feverishly in the process of fueling up and making last-minute provisions for moving out. At the same time, like insects spewing out eggs, the huge fleet of war ships parked in the northern Mediterranean were littering the waters with their spawn of little troop transport craft in preparation for a seaward assault to supplement the overland march of the main body of soldiers.

State departments of the Western nations “viewed this development with utmost concern”, as they approached the Russian consulates with timidity, frantically attempting to “calm the waters” by the dubious use of their negotiating tools with the vague promise of appeasing rewards. The Russian president demanded to be kept apprised of the several attempts along those lines, using them as a constant source of mirth. Every time he would receive a new snippet of such information, he gleefully would down a celebratory dollop of vodka.

Encouraged by the way his plans were coming together so satisfactorily, the Russian leader decided to give himself an extra cushion of support in his upcoming advance. Considering the fighting abilities of the fiercely anti-Israeli Taliban fighters that had brought Russia to her knees so recently in the Afghan war, he decided to open an additional front from the east with these Pashtuns in the vanguard. They were Sunnis, not his favorite sect, but then the Egyptians and Saudis were also of that persuasion. That might even be helpful in the future, the Russian mused. Perhaps once the Sunnis and Shi’ites take care of Israel, they’ll turn on each other and leave me with all the riches.

 

 

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #12

Chapter Twelve

Three of the four fugitives slept fitfully during the long night at Marge MacAfee’s home. They knew that they had but hours until the place was surrounded by angry police. Ellery had tried to get them to leave immediately, but they held back. They’d caught the news about the huge earthquake in Seattle, and Earl had assumed that the event was an act of God. Given that assumption, he’d also taken for granted that Ellery’s old FEMA community no longer existed. Besides, they had no place to go.

With that thought in mind, Earl prayed a confident thanks to God. “Thank you, Lord, for your mighty outstretched Hand in saving Ellery from that pit of iniquity.” All four responded with a fervent “Amen”.

Wisdom responded to the thanks that night, showing up at the foot of the makeshift bed of blankets in which Earl and Joyce were wrapped. “Bravo!” She said to Earl, Her beautiful features arranged in a wide smile.

“Wisdom!” Earl cried. “Then we’re doing okay?”

“Better than that. Keep it up, and you’ll even start to enjoy the ride. Here’s a heads-up: tomorrow you’ll have a visitor. He’ll be someone you don’t know, but he’s going to be very important to you. When he arrives by taxi, he’ll ring the doorbell three times, wait two seconds, and ring it twice more. When you hear that, let him inside, but be packed and ready. A cab will be waiting to take you to his hotel, where you’ll enjoy a decent stay with a brief respite from danger.”

“So nothing will happen to us tonight?”

“No. Have a good sleep. ‘Bye.”

Earl had a wonderful, relaxing, dreamless sleep for the rest of the night. In the morning he awoke refreshed, only to hear the grumbling of the others. “Hey,” he said to them, “chill out. We’re going to be okay. As a matter of fact, we’re going to be heading to a dandy hotel today, where we’ll really be able to relax without the fear of being caught.”

“Say what?” Ellery responded. “How do you know all this?”

“Trust him,” Joyce said with a smile of relief. “He knows, just believe it.”

“Well, if we’re going somewhere, we’d better pack,” Marge said to them. They busied themselves with that task. When they’d finished, Marge and Joyce worked together on getting them breakfast.

Half a world away from Earl and Joyce and their new companions, Jacob rose from his overlook in the twilight just before dawn, relieved himself, walked around below the military crest to get his blood going again, and returned to his position.

He brought the glasses back up to his eyes and continued to study the force arrayed below his position. There was movement now. A man in front was using a bullhorn to stir them up for the forthcoming battle while they appeared to be ingesting something. Whatever it was, it was too small to be a meal. Are they being drugged? he wondered. If they are, we’ve got a problem. Ah, well, it’s all in Your Hands, Lord.

A chorus of shouts arose from the assembled enemy, and they began to move forward. Jacob had company now, as, during the night the residents of Dafna came up bearing small arms to occupy the ridge. “Hold your fire!” the IDF commander called. Guns from several tanks cracked in unison, their shells whistling harmlessly above the Israelis.

The enemy advanced up the hill. The tanks labored as Jacob had anticipated, but their very slowness, coupled with the unbearable din of the unmuffled exhausts of the laboring engines, added a terrifying aura of implacability to their advance.   The noise overshadowed any possibility of the IDF commander maintaining control over his troops. The situation was indeed now in the Hands of God. The tanks spoke again, blasting gouts of turf out of the crest, taking Israelis with them.

Suddenly the earth moved and Jacob reached for Moira, grasping her in a tight clench. The movement continued, increasing in violence. Jacob saw an enormous crack appear in the earth below, right at the line of soldiers. The split widened and devoured the enemy troops, tanks and all, and then snapped back shut. It was over in less than a minute, the only remnant of the violent event being a massive cloud of dust that overlaid the line of the split.

The quake and its decimation of the Palestinian soldiers was observed by the larger forces of the Russians and their clients who had held back from the battle. From their distant viewpoints they misinterpreted the dust clouds, thinking them to be the result of coordinated explosions set off by the Israelis. Not knowing what other surprises the Israelis had for the next assault wave, the Russians decided to back off for the time being and sue for a graceful and peaceful temporary settlement.

Which was just as well, because the next assault wave didn’t exist anyway. Having seen the devastation and having correctly interpreted its source, the Palestinians threw down their weapons and returned to their homes. Many of them decided that this might be a good time to start praying to the God of the Jews.

The wholesale defection of the Palestinians from the battle unnerved the Russians. Their forces remained in place, but for the time being they failed to advance. As a result, a de facto peace prevailed. Moshe had a special visitor during this hiatus. Wisdom’s beautiful face appeared in front of his cot one night at the barracks in Tel Aviv and awakened him from his sleep to congratulate him on his courage as a spy, and to deliver both good news and bad.

“You did wonderfully behind the enemy lines,” She told him. Don’t get a big head out of it, but your nobility meant a lot to Us. I know you were hoping to get some mileage out of it with Ruth, but, sorry to say, I wouldn’t bother with her. She’s not for you. Just saying. Go ahead if you want, of course, but I can guarantee you that if you do, she’ll whittle your head down to size faster than you can blink. I’ll just give it to you straight, Moshe. She didn’t exactly wait for you during your extended absence. Besides, I know you were beginning to develop feelings for Miryam and held back because of Ruth. That was noble too, and We won’t forget it.”

“But Miryam is a Palestinian,” he countered. I wouldn’t want to be disloyal to my own kind. Not only that, but how would I continue to be accepted within Jewish society with a Palestinian companion?”

“Don’t get all stiff-necked on Me, Moshe. Miryam is a human being, just like you, who happened to have been born and raised as a Palestinian, and who lacked many of the comforts you have enjoyed in your life so far. Besides, you were pretty friendly with her, as I recall. She was certainly friendly toward you, as a matter of fact. It wouldn’t take much with you beside her to make her a Jew in her heart. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t take anything. She already is, or at least she is when she thinks of you, which is pretty much all the time.”

“Yes, but she’s there and I’m here, and I don’t exactly feel like returning. So that’s kind of the end of things with her.”

“You’re sure about that, Moshe? That’s kind of arrogant, don’t you think, especially when you’re conversing with God? Well, maybe you’re right – perhaps We should close the door on the entire thing.”

“Oh, no, wait!” Moshe exclaimed. “I’m so sorry, Wisdom. Should I keep hoping our paths will reconnect?”

“You just never know,” Wisdom replied enigmatically. “But first things first. Tomorrow you’re going to ask for leave, for the reason of visiting American relatives, which you do have if you consider fellow Christians to be family. Your superiors will fall all over themselves to grant your request, as they’ll have a task for you to take on while you’re there. Given your background as a recon spy, they’ll want you to assess the state of life among the common folks in the American heartland, and their attitudes regarding their government and the Israelis. You’ll be given an indefinite leave, subject to your regular reporting back.

A very tenuous and likely-to-be transient peace prevailed while the Russian leader struggled to revise his order of battle in the wake of the unexpected Palestinian defection. With the continuance for over a week of the temporary cessation of fighting, there began a resumption of Israeli communications with the outside world, and even some limited travel and exchange of goods.

Among the travelers was the Israeli Moshe, the man who had so bravely infiltrated the ranks of the Palestinians. Moshe also was a Messianic Christian, and he was on his way to Kansas City, Missouri, for a reason that was as obscure to him as to anyone else. All he knew was that God wanted him to go there. If that was the will of God, who was he to question it?

Moshe was treated roughly at the Kansas City airport by the security contingent, verifying what he had already suspected about America, that it had descended into an antisemitic stance very much like what he’d heard about the Nazis during WWII. After a prolonged period of interrogation, he was permitted to make a head call, clean up in the bathroom as well as he could, and grab a meal at one of the airport food concessions. As Israel had yet to sign on to the virtually worldwide convention of handling monetary transactions by means of a radio-frequency implant to the body, as a sovereign nation its citizens were exempted from the system and permitted temporarily to pay by special credit cards issued only to exempted nations, the thought being that, the situation being what it was, in the very near future Israel would cease to exist as a nation. The security personnel made sure that Moshe understood their disgust with this special treatment.

Seeing a familiar and very welcome face in the filthy eatery, Moshe moved directly to the table where She sat. “Hello, Wisdom!” he said with joy. “Never thought I’d see You in a dump like this.”

“Oh? Think these hands never see the handle of a shovel?” She displayed her callus-defaced palms to Moshe. “Or the dark side of reality?” Think again about the people with whom Jesus associated, and the many sleazy and dangerous back alleys He traveled.”

“Point taken. May I sit?”

“Of course. Actually, the burgers aren’t too bad if you close your nose to the old grease they were fried in. Lots of mustard helps, too.”

“I had a couple of dogs already. I’m okay for now with the food.”

“Dogs? Good grief, they were green! Even I drew the line on those. Oh, my, my! Whatever you do, make sure there’s a toilet nearby for the next several hours.”

“Oh, great. Well, at least I get a chance to see You. You’re here for me, aren’t You?”

“Yes, I am. And it’s good to see you again, face-to-face.”

“I’m honored that you’re here. But, with everything going on in the world, why me? Especially, why’d You bring me all the way here to America when my own country is in such danger?”

Her smile had that special enigmatic tilt that told him he wouldn’t get the full answer yet. “Let’s just say that you have a special skill that We’ll be putting to use later on. That and your courage. As I told you before, you did a magnificent job as a spy. I’m very proud of the way you handled yourself in the midst of all that danger. And don’t feel bad about the friends you think you betrayed. You’ll see them again in heaven, and they won’t be gunning for you there – I guarantee it. They’ll know Who you were really working for then. So here’s what’s going on,” She continued, changing the subject back to the reason for Her visit. “You’re going to take a taxi over to nearby Leavenworth and check into a very nice hotel there for an indefinite stay. Then you’re going to take another taxi to an address in Leavenworth that I’ll give you. Tell the cabbie to wait. You’re going to ring the doorbell three times, wait two seconds and ring it twice more. You’ll get inside the house with that, and then bring out with you the four people who are inside. Then you’ll take them back to your room at the hotel and order a lavish room-service meal for four.”

“Four? What about me?”

“Sorry, Moshe. You’re going to be occupied on the toilet, getting rid of those dogs in a real hurry. You’ll be okay by morning. Then you can look forward to a lavish room-service breakfast for five.

Already beginning to experience some discomfort, Moshe arrived at Marge’s house in the late evening after the sun had dipped below the horizon. He’d have to get his charges out of the house and into his car as quickly as he could before the situation became a matter of urgency.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #11

Chapter Eleven

Moira woke up to words being spoken. She looked out of the cave to see Jacob conversing with a stranger who was holding a white cloth in his hand. She cleared her throat and Jacob turned to her. “Moira, meet Ibrahim,” he said. “He came up the hill from the enemy below, but he was waving a white cloth. I couldn’t shoot him.”

“I’d think not,” she replied. “Hello, Ibrahim. What can we do for you?”

“I come from the soldiers down below who are getting ready to overrun you,” he said in perfect Hebrew. “But I’m not one of them. Actually, I’m a Jew. I must remember to revert back to my real name of Moshe. I infiltrated the ranks of the Hezbollah in Lebanon as an Israeli spy three years ago. I’m coming out at this time to warn the IDF that the Russians and their cohorts, including the Iranians, are standing off their invasion to permit the Palestinians to have first blood. My unit is preparing to go in tomorrow as part of a full-scale attack on the nearest Israeli settlement. That will be only one battle of hundreds coming immediately upon Israel.”

“Thanks for your courage, Moira said. “It must have been very difficult to be so close to such animals.”

“Actually, the most difficult thing of all is the friendship with them that I’m forced to betray. They’re people just like you and me, Moira, victims of the calculated use of them by corrupt government leaders. They were forced into situations of desperate poverty and permanent homelessness by governments that wished to reap the rewards of their hatred toward Jews. The despicable thing about the entire situation is that they easily could have been assimilated into the surrounding countries.”

“Something’s odd about what you just said,” Jacob reflected. “We know that Israel’s heading into the Ezekiel 38 war. We’ve been told as much by – well, let’s just say that we know. Ezekiel didn’t mention anything about the countries surrounding Israel.”

“Maybe not,” Moshe countered. “But Psalm 83 certainly does.” His interest piqued, Jacob reached into his backpack and extracted his Bible. He began to read:

“Keep not thou silence, O God; hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult, and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance. For they have consulted together with one consent; they are confederate against thee: the tabernacles of Edom, and the Ismaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes; Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assyria also is joined with them; they have holpen the children of Lot. Selah.

 

          “Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kishon, who perished at Endor; they became as dung for the earth. Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna, who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession. O my God, make them like a wheel, like the stubble before the wind. As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire, so persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm. Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek thy name, O Lord. Let them be confounded and troubled forever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish, that men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the Most High over all the earth.”

“Amazing,” Moira offered. “It certainly describes the people and the situation.”

“So this battle of Psalm 83 is the opening move of the Ezekiel 38 war,” Jacob said.

“It would seem that this is so,” Moshe replied.

Jacob offered his radio to Moshe. “Here,” he said. “You probably want to call in a situation report.”

“No,” Moshe said, waving off the device. “I need to talk encrypted.”

“Dafna has what you need,” Moira said. “I’ll take you down.”

She’s like a gazelle. Jacob marveled at Moira’s sure-footed steps as she led Moshe down the hill toward Dafna, where he would be able to communicate with the IDF. They ignored the occasional mortar blasts that dogged their journey. And the faith of a warrior of God.

Jacob had stayed behind, continuing to monitor the situation in the foreground through field glasses. He could see a vast line of enemy soldiers forming up in preparation for an all-out assault on the ridge where he lay prone observing their movements.

Tanks, easily recognizable with their rounded bows and single driver positions as old M48s but still deadly with their 90 millimeter cannon, were interspersed between the combatants. The IDF knew all about them. According to the manual he’d read back at Dafna courtesy of Jesse, their drill instructor who had subjected them to a harsh but necessary course in rifle proficiency according to the standards of the U.S. Marine Corps, he knew they’d be most vulnerable climbing the hill to the ridge. With eight hundred horses pulling a fifty-ton weight, they’ll be slow on their approach, he thought, balancing a little positive against the large negative of their numbers. He counted over a hundred in the first assault wave, but he knew that there were many more behind them.

“Is Moira there yet?” he asked as he called in an update. The answer came in the form of Moira’s voice. “Hi, honey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I’m sure you heard my report. Maybe you’d better stay there for the night.”

“And leave you up there alone?” she shot back. “No way.” The radio went dead. A few minutes later, he could see her making headway toward him through the glasses, and thanked God again for her. He looked again a few minutes later and did a double-take: Moira wasn’t alone. Wisdom was with her. The sight was wildly incongruous – here was the most beautiful Woman in the universe, dressed for action. But then that was what She did, who She was.

“Hallo, Jacob,” Wisdom called lightly as they arrived at his position. “I see that you have a front-row seat.”

“Hi to both of you,” Jacob said happily. Moira leaned over and planted a kiss on his mouth. “Yeah,” he responded to Wisdom’s observation. “Now that we’re getting so close to the end of the age, maybe I’ll just make this my home.”

“I hate to disillusion you, Jacob,” Wisdom replied, “but there remain several things that still have to happen before Jesus returns. There’s the upcoming battles – plural – and, most importantly, the ingathering to Israel is yet quite incomplete at this point.”

“Incomplete? Jews have come back from every nook and cranny in the world.”

“Yes, Jews. But remember the words We put into Ezekiel’s mouth in Chapter thirty-seven:

“Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it For Judah, and for the children of Israel, his companions; then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel, his companions; and join them one to another into one stick, and they shall become one in thine hand. And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying Wilt thou not show us what thou meanest by these? Say unto them, thus sayest the Lord God: Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel, his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand. And the sticks on which thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes. And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, to which they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king to them all; and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.”

“I was of the opinion, since the modern nation of Israel includes land that used to belong to the ten northern tribes as well as the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin, that when You brought back the Jews from around the world, You’d have included among them Israelites from the northern tribes as well. After all, there’s a reason why they’ve been called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. You alone know who those people are.”

“I’ll second that opinion,” said Moira.

“So will most of the rest of the world,” said Wisdom, laughing. “Yes, We do know where these Israelites are. So do you, as well as all those around the world who still have access to the news. You just don’t know the “who” yet, although you’re already well aware of them. You’ll find out soon enough. They’re not insignificant either, being a rather large crowd.”

“How large is that?” Moira asked Her.

“In the millions.”

Jacob and Moira waited for more definitive information from Wisdom about these enigmatic Israelites. But She vanished without embellishing on what She had told them.

Chapter Eleven

Moira woke up to words being spoken. She looked out of the cave to see Jacob conversing with a stranger who was holding a white cloth in his hand. She cleared her throat and Jacob turned to her. “Moira, meet Ibrahim,” he said. “He came up the hill from the enemy below, but he was waving a white cloth. I couldn’t shoot him.”

“I’d think not,” she replied. “Hello, Ibrahim. What can we do for you?”

“I come from the soldiers down below who are getting ready to overrun you,” he said in perfect Hebrew. “But I’m not one of them. Actually, I’m a Jew. I must remember to revert back to my real name of Moshe. I infiltrated the ranks of the Hezbollah in Lebanon as an Israeli spy three years ago. I’m coming out at this time to warn the IDF that the Russians and their cohorts, including the Iranians, are standing off their invasion to permit the Palestinians to have first blood. My unit is preparing to go in tomorrow as part of a full-scale attack on the nearest Israeli settlement. That will be only one battle of hundreds coming immediately upon Israel.”

“Thanks for your courage, Moira said. “It must have been very difficult to be so close to such animals.”

“Actually, the most difficult thing of all is the friendship with them that I’m forced to betray. They’re people just like you and me, Moira, victims of the calculated use of them by corrupt government leaders. They were forced into situations of desperate poverty and permanent homelessness by governments that wished to reap the rewards of their hatred toward Jews. The despicable thing about the entire situation is that they easily could have been assimilated into the surrounding countries.”

“Something’s odd about what you just said,” Jacob reflected. “We know that Israel’s heading into the Ezekiel 38 war. We’ve been told as much by – well, let’s just say that we know. Ezekiel didn’t mention anything about the countries surrounding Israel.”

“Maybe not,” Moshe countered. “But Psalm 83 certainly does.” His interest piqued, Jacob reached into his backpack and extracted his Bible. He began to read:

“Keep not thou silence, O God; hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult, and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance. For they have consulted together with one consent; they are confederate against thee: the tabernacles of Edom, and the Ismaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes; Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assyria also is joined with them; they have holpen the children of Lot. Selah.

 

          “Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kishon, who perished at Endor; they became as dung for the earth. Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna, who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession. O my God, make them like a wheel, like the stubble before the wind. As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire, so persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm. Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek thy name, O Lord. Let them be confounded and troubled forever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish, that men may know that thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the Most High over all the earth.”

“Amazing,” Moira offered. “It certainly describes the people and the situation.”

“So this battle of Psalm 83 is the opening move of the Ezekiel 38 war,” Jacob said.

“It would seem that this is so,” Moshe replied.

Jacob offered his radio to Moshe. “Here,” he said. “You probably want to call in a situation report.”

“No,” Moshe said, waving off the device. “I need to talk encrypted.”

“Dafna has what you need,” Moira said. “I’ll take you down.”

She’s like a gazelle. Jacob marveled at Moira’s sure-footed steps as she led Moshe down the hill toward Dafna, where he would be able to communicate with the IDF. They ignored the occasional mortar blasts that dogged their journey. And the faith of a warrior of God.

Jacob had stayed behind, continuing to monitor the situation in the foreground through field glasses. He could see a vast line of enemy soldiers forming up in preparation for an all-out assault on the ridge where he lay prone observing their movements.

Tanks, easily recognizable with their rounded bows and single driver positions as old M48s but still deadly with their 90 millimeter cannon, were interspersed between the combatants. The IDF knew all about them. According to the manual he’d read back at Dafna courtesy of Jesse, their drill instructor who had subjected them to a harsh but necessary course in rifle proficiency according to the standards of the U.S. Marine Corps, he knew they’d be most vulnerable climbing the hill to the ridge. With eight hundred horses pulling a fifty-ton weight, they’ll be slow on their approach, he thought, balancing a little positive against the large negative of their numbers. He counted over a hundred in the first assault wave, but he knew that there were many more behind them.

“Is Moira there yet?” he asked as he called in an update. The answer came in the form of Moira’s voice. “Hi, honey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I’m sure you heard my report. Maybe you’d better stay there for the night.”

“And leave you up there alone?” she shot back. “No way.” The radio went dead. A few minutes later, he could see her making headway toward him through the glasses, and thanked God again for her. He looked again a few minutes later and did a double-take: Moira wasn’t alone. Wisdom was with her. The sight was wildly incongruous – here was the most beautiful Woman in the universe, dressed for action. But then that was what She did, who She was.

“Hallo, Jacob,” Wisdom called lightly as they arrived at his position. “I see that you have a front-row seat.”

“Hi to both of you,” Jacob said happily. Moira leaned over and planted a kiss on his mouth. “Yeah,” he responded to Wisdom’s observation. “Now that we’re getting so close to the end of the age, maybe I’ll just make this my home.”

“I hate to disillusion you, Jacob,” Wisdom replied, “but there remain several things that still have to happen before Jesus returns. There’s the upcoming battles – plural – and, most importantly, the ingathering to Israel is yet quite incomplete at this point.”

“Incomplete? Jews have come back from every nook and cranny in the world.”

“Yes, Jews. But remember the words We put into Ezekiel’s mouth in Chapter thirty-seven:

“Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it For Judah, and for the children of Israel, his companions; then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel, his companions; and join them one to another into one stick, and they shall become one in thine hand. And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying Wilt thou not show us what thou meanest by these? Say unto them, thus sayest the Lord God: Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel, his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand. And the sticks on which thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes. And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, to which they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king to them all; and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.”

“I was of the opinion, since the modern nation of Israel includes land that used to belong to the ten northern tribes as well as the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin, that when You brought back the Jews from around the world, You’d have included among them Israelites from the northern tribes as well. After all, there’s a reason why they’ve been called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. You alone know who those people are.”

“I’ll second that opinion,” said Moira.

“So will most of the rest of the world,” said Wisdom, laughing. “Yes, We do know where these Israelites are. So do you, as well as all those around the world who still have access to the news. You just don’t know the “who” yet, although you’re already well aware of them. You’ll find out soon enough. They’re not insignificant either, being a rather large crowd.”

“How large is that?” Moira asked Her.

“In the millions.”

Jacob and Moira waited for more definitive information from Wisdom about these enigmatic Israelites. But She vanished without embellishing on what She had told them.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #10

 

Note to the reader: Home, Sweet Heaven is now available in ebook and paperback form from Amazon and Signalman Publishing, as are the other novels in the Buddy series, Buddy, Cathy, Jacob, as well as the Christian nonfiction book Marching to a Worthy Drummer

 

 

 

 

Chapter Ten

Earl looked with compassion into Joyce’s red-rimmed eyes. “I know this is tough on you, honey,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Now that we’ve arrived in Leavenworth, maybe we can relax a bit.”

“All I want is sleep,” she responded, entwining her fingers with his. “I could sleep for a year.”

“More food would be good too,” he said, looking down at his empty plate and wondering how they would leave the restaurant without paying and dodging the alternative of being escorted to jail by the cops, and then of finding their next meal. And the one after. And the one after that. He prayed briefly, thanking God for the meal they had just finished and placing his concerns onto Him.   A Scripture immediately came to mind: “If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”   Well, that has truly happened to us, he reflected. Why, then, should I worry about lesser matters?

He was interrupted in his thoughts by a very bright flash, followed by the disintegration of the large window that fronted the street amid a cacophony of loud noises. The tinkling of the glass in the window was overshadowed by an enormous sonic crack, a continuous roar, the screeching of tearing metal and the rumble of something solid being pulverized.

“What was that?” Joyce asked, swiveling her head in the direction of the amazing event that had just occurred. She expected to see frenzied activity out on the street, but the situation was exactly the opposite: the scene was a still life, the people frozen in awe, all staring in one direction. The restaurant patrons rushed outside, followed by the proprietor. Earl took the opportunity to fish in his pockets for some cash, which the proprietor might find useful in the event that the city had a black market, grab Joyce’s hand and make a graceful but hasty exit from the eatery. Moving away from the crowd in front of the restaurant, their eyes followed a furrow that had been carved out of one side of the roadway, overlain by a straight-line plume of dust that receded off into the distance. Earl looked in the opposite direction to find, to his astonishment, a military humvee stopped in the middle of the intersection to his left. Except for an open space where the doors used to be, flames licking at the exposed doorframes, the vehicle appeared to be intact.   It also appeared to be unoccupied, at least in front.

They would soon come to the astonishing realization that an earth-grazing asteroid had just assaulted the city of Leavenworth. The object, initially relatively large, had been whittled down by the earth’s atmosphere to a nearly rectangular rock of a size that matched, quite oddly, the doorframe of the humvee, and that had whisked the disassembled molecules of its driver and front passenger, both military policemen, somewhere off into space. The process of digging a trench in the street after this spectacular action had slowed the rock dramatically until it eventually parked itself deep underground, leaving no sign of its presence other than a little pimple of dirt in the grassy field above it ten miles in the distance.

Earl was taken aback further by the sight of Wisdom, sitting down at an outdoor table underneath a large umbrella. She was sipping a latte and She had a wide grin on Her gorgeous face. “Wasn’t that a bit over-the-top?” he said as they approached the table.

“Yes it was – I did it and I’m glad,” She responded. “I rather enjoyed that.”

“But what about the poor fellows in the vehicle?” Joyce asked Her.

“Joyce, Joyce,” She said, shaking Her beautiful head. “After all this time and you still don’t trust Me? I should simply refuse to answer that question. But I will, because despite your failings, you’re both quite lovable. Actually, the driver was a highly-decorated Marine whose time on earth was finished. He’s now enjoying his reward in heaven. As for the passenger in front, well, the poor fellow was so lacking of a serviceable soul that he was beyond hope. In fact, my space rock just did what had to be done anyway. The alternative was pretty grim. He had in mind some clever ways to torture the passenger in back. No, you can’t see him from where you’re standing, but he’s there, and he’s the whole reason why I had you come up from Texas. Right now, before everyone here recovers their senses, you two need to jump in that humvee and drive away. Before you do that, though, you need to go into that deserted hardware store across the street and grab a bolt cutter before the owner recovers his senses. Third aisle on the left, halfway down. Here’s the direction you’ll be taking: go north three blocks, make a left and head west for twenty-three blocks. Turn right and park in the driveway of the third house on the right. Got that?   Now go.”

The couple rushed over to the hardware store. While Joyce remained outside, Earl raced down the aisle, quickly searched for the device, grabbed it and ran back out. They ran to the humvee and jumped in. Earl started it and accelerated up the street as the astonished crowd began to gather its collective wits and started moving. A moment later Earl and Joyce heard the sirens of a multitude of first responders racing to the scene of the disaster. As Earl drove, Joyce turned and peered into the rear of the vehicle. Her eyes focused on a man in prison garb, wrapped in chains and trussed to substantial supports. “Hello,” he said meekly. Joyce’s kind face gave him the hope that his fortunes had turned for the better. “I know that I look pretty bad, but I’m not.” He took a chance on them. “My crime is that I’m a Christian. I was handling FEMA security over in Seattle when they decided to do something about that. They framed me real good and here I am – was – on my way to the Federal military prison here in Leavenworth. The way they framed me gave them a perfect opportunity to slake their greed and pin the rap on me.

“Christian, eh?” Joyce said. She reached over and patted his shoulder. “We already knew that. You obviously still have some pull with our Holy Spirit, because the reason why we’re here in Leavenworth is you. By the way, we’re Christians too. A diminishing breed.”

“For sure,” he said.   “That sure makes my day. Could you maybe help me find my wife? She’s here in Leavenworth somewhere, but I don’t know where. Even if I did know, I don’t see a map around.”

“That’s okay,” Joyce replied. We know that too. I suspect that’s where we’re heading right now.”

“You know where she lives?” he asked in wonder. “Who are you people?”

“I should ask the same about you. You must be important. By the way, my name’s Joyce. This is Earl sitting next to me.”

“Glad to make your acquaintance,” he responded. “You don’t know how glad. My name’s Ellery MacAfee. Late Master Sergeant, USMC.”

“Well, Semper Fi, man. I’m a Marine too, long since released from active duty. Maybe that’s one reason I’m here to get you out of the hot spot you’re in.”

“Remember when we were just privates, wet behind the ears, and our elder Marines would harp about “the Old Corps”? Well, Semper Fi to you too, but I’ve got some bad news for you. The Old Corps no longer exists. Our beloved Crotch is truly different now, not a trace of the old pride. They’re just a gang of ill-disciplined, self-serving thieves.”

“Sorry to hear that, Sergeant. Well, you’re a Christian, holding up under a load of persecution. That’s where the nobility lies now.”

As he spoke, Earl slowed and pulled off the street into a parking lot and stopped. “You don’t want your wife seeing you like that. Let’s get those shackles off.” He picked up the large tool from the floorboard and attempted to apply it to a chain link one-handed. After several awkward attempts, the three of them coordinated their actions and managed to sever the link. After that initial success, the work was downhill and fifteen minutes later Ellery was a free man. “Too bad the former occupants didn’t leave their clothes behind,” Joyce commented as Earl resumed driving.

“That may not be a problem,” Ellery said, looking down at the floor next to him. “There’s a seabag here. It’s not mine, so it must have belonged to one of the MPs.” He rummaged through the bag, extracting several items of clothing, with which he quickly replaced the prison garb. “What do you think?” he asked Joyce as Earl pulled into the driveway.

“The new you – looks pretty good, but you could use a shave. We’ll stay here while you reaquaint yourself with your wife.”

With a wide grin on his face, Ellery extracted himself from the humvee and went to the door, which was opened quickly by an attractive woman who held her husband in a passionate hug. After they re-introduced each other, Ellery’s wife peered out at Earl and Joyce from his encircling arms. She waved them to come inside. Joyce accepted but Earl declined. “We need to get rid of this humvee,” he called. Presently he left the driveway and headed down the street, Ellery’s wife tagging behind in her own car. Earl pulled into a small shopping mall several miles from the MacAfees’ temporary residence and parked it off in a corner under a large tree.

“Hi again,” Marge said to Earl as he opened the passenger door and got into the car. “First off I want to thank you for saving my husband. Despite the huge problems we’re going to face, our lives will be a whole lot happier with us together again. I can’t wait to fix you and Joyce – and Ellery, of course – a good home-cooked meal.”

At least the general had been good to his word about taking care of Marge. Her immediate needs had been taken care of, courtesy of the government, but she suspected that now, with Ellery on the loose, that largesse would come to an abrupt halt.

“There’s only one thing that bothers me,” Earl said to the other three inside the house.

“Besides our need to get out of here soon?” Joyce asked.

“There is that. But that’s part of what I don’t get. Where do we go from here? No insult intended, Ellery, but Wisdom went to a lot of trouble preventing you from going into a maximum security prison. What’s so important about you, and what are we supposed to do with you now?

“I don’t know,” Ellery replied. “Could it be that I’m Jewish?”

“Jewish? MacAfee sounds more Irish than Jewish. And you’re as white as a Scandinavian.”

“I’m not quite that white. The name’s closer to Scottish than Irish. Besides, you should know better than that. Look at all the movie actors with Jewish blood that look as if they’d just come from Sweden. And as for that surname – well, yes, it was changed, but not much. Our original name was Maccabee. Of Masada fame.”

“Oh. Well, maybe we’ll be getting directions soon from God. In the meantime, let’s eat up and prepare to head out to who knows where.”

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #9

Chapter Nine

It started like the ones before it, little more than a gentle rocking. Conditioned by the numerous earthquakes that had preceded it over the past several months, General Urkmore ignored the movement, intent as he was in consuming the line of cocaine on his desk before him. He hadn’t yet gotten around to distributing the contents of his drawer to his companion officers, as he was still considering the quantities that he’d be giving up. It was like a retirement computation. He had to balance the numbers involved in the final distribution against the number of bags he’d need in order to permit his continuous consumption for the rest of his life.

But the shaking didn’t stop. It just went on and on. What began to alarm Urkmore was that along with the continuation, the movement became more pronounced, sharper.

His alarm turned to panic when a huge crack appeared in the solid concrete wall in his office, exposing rebar and emitting a cloud of pulverized particles of concrete. This was quickly followed by an enormous jolt that threw him out of his chair and sent him flying across his desk and against the wall in front. The sound of screaming barely reached him amid the screeching of crumpling furniture and the freight-train rumble of the surrounding earth. Another jolt sent his chair on top of him, winding him. His desk came after the chair. A drawer opened and out flew his precious bags of cocaine, some of which broke open and drenched his head in powder. His suffocation followed, but not before he perceived the irony of ingesting cocaine for the rest of his life.

The captain in the adjoining room looked at the moving walls in disbelief as his chair rattled and jounced as if it had been attached to a car with useless shocks riding over potholes at highway speed. A vicious jolt sent the chair flying into the doorway, rocketing the captain against a wall in the hallway and breaking his neck. His eyes remained open, permitting him to see the hallway walls coming together and sandwiching him in between.

Terror prevailed throughout the enormous underground city as its residents began to appreciate this quake as the dreaded big one that had been anticipated for years. The city people who lived above the shelter faced a different sort of terror: the swaying of the high-rise buildings amplified for the occupants within them the stunning visual impact of neighboring buildings being tossed about like toys in the jaws of a rabid dog. Despite the foresight of the engineers who designed the more modern buildings to withstand a major earthquake, this catastrophe surpassed by a wide margin the maximum intensity that was anticipated for an event of this kind. Buildings swayed well past any movement imagined for them, and they began to crumble and fall. In Seattle, the landmark Space Needle buckled at its northwest corner and then, with majestic slowness it fell on its side. The skyscrapers near the convention center began to knock into each other, large chunks of glass and concrete breaking off with each impact and hurtling into the agitated ground below. They, too, began to collapse as well, shedding entire sides and then falling amid fogs of disintegrating concrete and rains of girders and furniture. The convention center collapsed, filling the freeway tunnel below with bodies, concrete and artifacts, completely blocking Interstate 5. The bridges linking Seattle with the densely-built cities on the east side disappeared beneath the troubled waters of Lake Washington, taking vast strings of occupied vehicles down with them. The large lake itself, its motion becoming synchronous with the shaking, sloshed over its boundary to the south and inundated the crowded City of Renton.

On a scale of a different magnitude entirely, the Pacific Ocean was troubled by a huge wave, the likes of which hadn’t visited this region for over three hundred years. The tsunami entered the Straight of Juan de Fuca separating the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, inundating in its wake Port Angeles and the smaller towns along the old U.S. coast as well as Victoria in Canada, tossing a supertanker bound for the refinery at Anacortes onto the still-shaking soil of Whidbey Island. The fully-loaded tanker tore apart under the shaking of the ground where it lay and out gushed millions of gallons of oil that enveloped a significant section of the island. The oil caught on fire and an immense black cloud rose up into the dark sky. The giant wave continued on into the Admiralty Inlet to the northwest of Seattle and barreled down the sound, eventually smacking into the Seattle waterfront.

Recognition grew along with mounting terror that this was that which was called a subduction quake, wherein the monstrous Pacific Plate, having been blocked by friction from subducting beneath the North American Plate, suddenly broke through the resistance, creating an enormous upward surge that generated shaking that went beyond a Richter Magnitude 9 along with a tsunami of monstrous proportions. The last time it happened it had uprooted an entire spruce forest along the Washington coast, compacting the vegetation into a mere few feet, and created a monster wave that inundated the coast from Northern California to southern British Columbia and then traveled across the Pacific to decimate Japanese towns located near the seacoast. There it was recorded for future historians as an orphan tsunami. The dateline was January 29, 1700.

The modern northwest was significantly different from the land of that earlier era. Now it was dotted with seacoast towns with populations that remained significant despite the harsh conditions of the current regime, and many people who still attempted to possess some natural enjoyment by visiting the beaches. Those who were at the beaches that day were astonished to see the coast recede, exposing land that had not been dry in the memory of the white settlers who had attempted to muscle out the Native Americans. It was an awesome sight, and most of those on the beach that day instantly recognized the shaking and the retreat of the water as signs of a giant wave that would soon inundate the ground they were standing on. They rushed to their cars in panic, but their haste created such a traffic jam that very few cars made it to safe ground. All the rest could do was look on helplessly as the water came back as a huge black wall that moved inexorably like a giant railroad locomotive to toss the cars like pebbles and then cover them and smother and crush the occupants inside.

For those relatively few who managed to reach the safety of high ground, the sight of that huge black wall of water rushing implacably back toward land was burned into their memories. The terrifying image would continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The only redeeming feature of this wave of destruction that snuffed out the lives of those in the trapped cars and the coastline cities was that the quality of life in the post-U.S. society wasn’t all that great anyway.

The panic of the inhabitants of the FEMA underground facility was very briefly heightened by the utter blackness caused by the breaching, sudden destruction and ungraceful shutdown of the internal multi-megawatt nuclear power plant. Hot coolant and radioactive gases permeated the entire structure, but the spaces they entered – all that were left – were tiny, much smaller than the volume of an adult human. By that time nothing mattered to the population inside, as they had all perished. Only two humans of the thousands who had dwelt there the previous day remained alive, and they were now in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Urkmore’s death failed to stop the gigantic earthquake, which continued to play out as a city-destroyer. The major metropolitan areas of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, Marysville, Bellingham and the multitude of outlying communities in between in Washington State were trashed, causing an unthinkable number of casualties. In Canada, Vancouver survived as a city but suffered enormous destruction.

The inhabitants of the underground Los Angeles area FEMA headquarters didn’t respond well to the earthquake events that took place to the north of them. The Big One was supposed to drop the entire L.A. basin into the sea, or so the street wisdom had said. Now that the Northwest had experienced their own Big One, was L.A. next? With the Big Big One?

“Maybe this underground business isn’t such a hot idea,” one FEMA authority said to her male colleague. The surrounding earth took that opportunity to jiggle slightly, upon which the lady almost lost it, the hairs on her forehead standing out almost beyond her protruding eyeballs. Her companion laughed at the sight of her fright, which made her start to cry, her face reddening with angst.

Ten minutes later he regretted laughing at her.   He wanted to cry too, because the shaking wouldn’t stop. His male ego, such as it was, limited his own very pronounced angst to strangled whimpers. He had opened his eyes once during the temblor, but when he saw the concrete wall crack in front of his very nose, he squinched them shut again and kept them that way. He didn’t even notice the fact that his companion, with whom he had spent much time attempting to get her to be more than a friend, was hugging him with all her might. The quake finally stopped, but it was the worst they’d experienced in their lifetimes.

When his companion finally realized that the quake was over, she looked over to him and, seeing his disgraceful demeanor, quickly untangled herself from him and stood up. That’ll never happen again, she breathed in disgust. He eventually stood as well, but they both failed to make eye contact and went off to pursue their separate agendas, her primary one being to pursue a separate agenda.

The talk about wanting to relocate topside continued throughout the week as most of the FEMA personnel, from the lowest to the highest, discussed the tenability of remaining underground in the face of the worsening earthquake situation.

POTNAR belatedly attempted to come to the rescue with his entourage, which included a virtual army of security troops. Forced to land his winged palace at Fairchild Air Base near Spokane due to the devastated condition of the airports on the west side of the Cascade Mountains, he commandeered a Chinook helicopter for the far west leg of his journey. He commanded the pilot to give him a bird’s eye view of the Seattle area before setting down. It was obvious, he thought with gloom, that Seattle was a complete write-off. The entire area looked like a vast, naked landfill. Convincing himself that there was nothing he could accomplish therre, he returned to his airplane and redirected it to Los Angeles. There he bravely assembled and held an all-hands meeting, addressing directly those fortunate enough to be in the large hall and through loudspeakers throughout the complex for the others. Praising them for their nonexistent courage, he spoke of the absolute necessity for their return to duty underground and the imminence of the next political phase, during which the major players in the government would be relocated aboveground. Then he left for his next feel-good mission, leaving the L.A. facility somewhat nonplussed. The imminence of the next phase only gave the inhabitants the claustrophobic sense that if it was imminent, why wasn’t it right now?

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #8

Chapter Eight

“Aw, no,” Earl mumbled to himself. The sound of his voice woke Joyce out of a fitful, shallow, and thoroughly unsatisfactory sleep.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Look outside the windscreen,” he replied.

She looked, rubbed her eyes and looked again. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

“Precisely,” he confirmed. “Fog. We’re blanketed in the stuff. I have to fly on instruments.”

“Well, you did say that you had an instrument rating.”

“For people like me with ten thumbs, it takes constant practice to be any good at it. And my mind doesn’t work as fast as it should.”

“You seem to be doing okay. I don’t hear the rushing of wind telling us that gravity is hurling us to our doom. In fact, it’s almost peaceful.”

“I’m coping. Barely. But we’ve got less than a quarter of our fuel left. If this fog doesn’t ease up before we need to land, we’re in some deep do-do.”

“Earl. We both need to get with it. Remember our condition when Wisdom scraped us off the pavement? We could crash into a tree and I doubt if we’d look more like roadkill than we did then. By rights we should already be dead.”

“But we aren’t.”

“Bingo. So we won’t be. At least until we accomplish something on God’s agenda. I don’t think just riding around in an airplane does much for any agenda.”

“Point taken. Why don’t you read me something to stiffen up my spine?”

“Good idea.” She reached into Earl’s backback and rummaged through it, searching for the Bible. “Huh,” she said, frowning.

He barely heard her over the noise of the plane. “What’s wrong?”

“The Bible’s not in here. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember seeing one in the RV. I’ll just have to wing it. How about the story of the twelve spies?”

“Yeah. That’s a good one. Go for it.”

“They were two years into their wilderness journey, on the border of the Promised Land. Moses told them to assemble twelve spies, one representative for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. They were to do a recon of that land, to assess its produce and its people, and come back with a report. They came back forty days later, as I recall, laden with an abundance of fruit, saying that the land was rich in milk and honey.”

“Didn’t they return bearing on poles a burden of huge grapes?”

“I think so. Anyway, after telling the people how good the land was, they told them there were giants that lived there, making the spies seem like grasshoppers in comparison. Ten of the twelve spies whined about it and convinced the people that it would be too risky to go into the land. The people wept at the news. I remember them saying that familiar phrase: ‘Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt!’ But two of the spies refused to wimp out. They trusted God, that He’d see them through the battles ahead. One of these brave ones was Joshua, of the tribe of Ephraim, one of the two sons of Joseph. The other was Caleb, of the tribe of Judah. The people wanted to return to Egypt, and were punished for their lack of faith by remaining in the wilderness for another thirty-eight years, time enough for that entire generation to die off.”

“Except for the two courageous spies.”

“Except for them. Remember that Moses wasn’t allowed to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land when they finally did go in. The honor of leading the people into the land and conquering it was given to Joshua for his faith under fire. Then, when they got to Hebron, Caleb reminded Joshua that his own reward for his faith was the city of Hebron. He was eighty years old at the time and yet he fought for the city with his troops and prevailed. Hebron became his as God had promised him.”

“A very important place.”

“Very. It was the burial place of all three Patriarchs and their primary wives: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah. Jacob preferred Rachel over Leah, but it was Leah who gave birth to Judah and whose blood down through the centuries culminated in Jesus through Mary.”

“It also was the place where King David reigned over Judah and Benjamin for seven years, before he moved to Jerusalem to reign over the entire twelve tribes of Israel for the remaining thirty-three years of his kingship. Amazing how the world forgets that, or maybe just doesn’t care.”

“But God certainly does. Even more than than the rewards they were given, they were beloved of God. Can you imagine their joy in the spiritual realm?”

“Good story. A real spine-stiffener.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from. How about David and Goliath, since we’re on the topic of faith and courage?”

“I’m okay now, thanks. I appreciate your having knocked the fog – the gorilla out the windscreen – down to manageable size.”

“Question, Earl. About David’s encounter with the giant Goliath. I don’t get why David picked out five stones. There was just Goliath, and David had just one chance to get it right.”

“Goliath had four brothers. He had to be ready to take them on, too.”

“Amazing!” she said. “The accuracy of the Bible in even the smallest detail straightens my back.”

After several minutes of silence, Earl was comfortable enough in the situation to take a stab at finding out where they were. He grabbed the sectional chart and scanned it intermittently along with the instruments, settling on a particular VOR transmitter that he estimated to be the closest. He re-tuned the receiver to the frequency of that transmitter and was gratified to note that he had acquired the signal. The indicator showed him ten degrees off the transmitter’s centerline. He corrected the offset and set the directional gyro to agree with the receiver heading. Glancing at the sectional, he saw that the nearest city of consequence was Tyler, Texas. Scanning the fuel gauge next, he thought they had a good chance of making Tyler before the fuel ran out. He made a quick prayer of thanksgiving to God that the owner had topped off the fuel.

“Look at this chart,” he said to Joyce, handing her the sectional. Locate Tyler on it and fold the chart around that town.” When she complied, he took the chart back and focused on Tyler, searching for an airfield symbol. The fog lifted as they approached the city and he directed the plane for a straight-in approach to the field as he set up for the descent. It was a Unicom field, which meant that it wasn’t equipped with a control tower. Pilots going into Unicom fields called in their intent to land by radio. He glanced at his watch. At eleven-thirty in the evening, there wasn’t much likelihood of other traffic.

He executed a surprisingly smooth landing, impressing Joyce no end, and himself as well. “Well, at least we made it here,” he said to Joyce as he taxied to the fuel island. “Now all we have to do is get some fuel without paying for it, and after that take off again without being collared by the police. Otherwise, be prepared to run for your life.”

“All things are possible with God,” Joyce reminded him.

The field had a Fixed-Base Operator (FBO) in a nearby building. A man came out of it and headed toward the plane as Earl broke out into a sweat of anxiety and Joyce quivered nervously inside the plane.

“Hi, there,” the man said. “You Jack Garrett’s new pilot?” he asked, supplying Earl with all the information he needed to survive the ordeal.

“Sure am,” Earl told him with a confidence he didn’t feel. “Arnold’s my name,” he said, extending his hand. “Heading east into Louisiana on an errand for Jack. I’ll take a fill-up.”

“I’m Bart,” the man offered, shaking the hand. Sure thing,” he added, mounting a ladder with a hose and going about the task of fueling the plane through the receptacle in the wing.

“Put it on the tab?” Bart asked when the task was completed.

“Sure, of course,” Earl replied, offering another fervent thanksgiving to God.

“Well, take care,” Bart said. Say hello to Jack for me.”

“Will do, Bart. Thanks for the help.”

Earl climbed back into the cabin and started the engine. “All things are possible with God,” they said in unison, laughing. They took off again, heading east. When the airfield was off in the distance, Earl made a sharp bank to the left and corrected course to a northerly heading. More confident now, he dialed up another VOR transmitter and set their sights toward Paris, Texas and beyond into Oklahoma, close to the Oklahoma-Arkansas border.

The flight north was uneventful all the way up to the end. The sky remained crystal-clear and Joyce imagined herself and Earl alone in a cocoon halfway to heaven. As the journey progressed, she drifted off into a deep sleep, as comfortable as if she’d been in her own bed.

They ran out of luck just north of the Oklahoma-Kansas border, on the outskirts of the little town of Coffeyville, Kansas. When the fuel-starved engine died at four-ten in the morning Earl dropped the flaps to a full forty degrees and set down on a dirt road that bordered a field. The landing was bumpy, but not so bad that the plane was damaged. It took Joyce a few minutes to recover from her terror, but then she put her arms around his neck and congratulated him for the dead-stick landing. She called it heroic, but he was just happy to be on the ground with both of them intact. Then he started to worry about what they’d do next.

They stepped out of the plane into a wet, pre-dawn chill. “We need to get out of here right away before they find the plane and then track us down,” Earl said.

“Fine with me,” Joyce replied. “It’s too cold to sleep anyway.”

They crossed two fields before chancing upon a road. Earl looked up to the sky to acquire his bearings and, determining roughly the direction of north, started walking in the direction of the road that approximated their desired heading. “I need to rest,” Joyce said to him an hour later. “Just because I have no feet doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.”

“Just a bit more,” Earl coaxed. “Ten minutes and then we’ll stop and rest.”

“All right,” she grumbled, “but not a step further.”

Four minutes later they came to a railroad crossing. “Just what I’ve been hoping for!” he exclaimed. “Look!” he shouted as he saw the tracks gleaming in the dawn light. “We’re really in luck! This is a well-traveled line!”

“Lucky?” she countered. “All things are possible with God!” they exclaimed in unison, laughing.

They slept fitfully by the side of the tracks until around seven in the morning, when they were awakened by the deep rumbling of a slow-moving diesel. Earl caught a boxcar with an open door and, forcing the stump of his right arm against the side, pulled Joyce up with his left.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #7

Chapter Seven

Earl reached over with his left arm to clasp Joyce’s hand and pulled her up into the cabin of the tiny airplane. She shut the flimsy door and turned to Earl, who sat staring at the instrument panel. He looked perplexed. “Something wrong, flyboy?” she asked him.

He scratched his chin. “Gee, Joyce,” he replied, “I’m not sure that I even know how to start this thing.”

Sitting in the cockpit of a tiny, almost claustrophobic airplane with a pilot who wasn’t sure that he even was a pilot was disconcerting. “I thought you told me you were a flight instructor. With commercial, instrument and multi-engine ratings.”

He continued to stare intently at the instrument panel, and then took the sectional map out of the door pocket, peering at the logo of the nearby San Antonio airport and memorizing its elevation reading of 809 feet above sea level. “I think it’s starting to come back,” he said, but his voice lacked the timbre of certainty. Knowing that Helotes must be a bit higher than San Antonio, he twisted the knob on the altimeter, setting it to his estimate of a thousand feet for the elevation of the grass strip where they were situated.   Just as Joyce, with her hand on the door handle, was formulating a “thanks but no thanks” response on the order of “I think I’ll walk, if it’s all the same to you,” Earl pulled out the choke, set both magnetos to “on”, turned on the ignition and started the engine. He pushed in the choke and fiddled with the gas, which was a knob on the panel rather than a foot pedal. The affair looked like it belonged in a museum.

“Oh,” he said reflectively. “See that toggle switch on the panel and the dial nearby?”

“Um, yeah. Is it important?”

“Pretty much. It’s the control for the flaps. If the plane’s slow it keeps it in the air.”

“Oh.”

“Flip the toggle down until the indicator reads ’20 degrees’. Now,” he continued after she responded, “see that wheel between the seats? That’s the trim setting wheel. It’s important too. It keeps the plane going level when my arm gets tired pulling on the control wheel. Don’t do anything with it now. Just be ready to turn it forward or back as I ask.”

She gave him a dubious look. “Great. You have a perfectly green copilot.”

“You’ll do fine.”

Goosing the throttle until the plane started to move, he entered the small grass runway, steering with his feet on the rudder pedals and heading for the downwind end of the field. “Oh,” he said reflectively as they cruised down the taxiway, and Joyce saw the movement of his good hand on a toggle switch. “Twenty degrees flap,” he mumbled to himself. A small motor whined for a brief moment. When it stopped he returned to his focus out the window.

When they reached the end of the runway he maneuvered the plane around until it faced the opposite direction. He lined the plane up with the center and pushed the throttle forward. The engine responded and he did a quick mag check, took his feet off the brakes and the plane started forward.

“Stop!” Joyce commanded.

Earl stomped on the brakes, his heart racing. “What’s wrong?” he asked in alarm.

“You forgot something very important.”

“What?” He made a quick scan of the instruments, wondering what essential item had gone unremembered.

“Don’t you think it would be wise to pray before embarking on this journey into the unknown?”

“Oh.” He cast a quick glance back to the house, but corrected himself with the knowledge that God was in ultimate control over this adventure. “Sorry.” He reached over to clasp Joyce’s hand. “Father, we thank you in Jesus’ holy and precious name for the opportunity that you have given us to serve You. We place our welfare, particularly our souls, in Your mighty and capable Hands, knowing that it was You who had directed us to this place at this time. We ask particularly that You infuse us with the courage to serve You in this way with joyful hearts, and that we may fully accomplish the work that you have given us to perform. Amen”

“Amen,” Joyce echoed. When she turned back to Earl, she was smiling.

He pushed the throttle hard, to the firewall, and the plane moved down the runway. It swerved slightly as it gained speed, but Earl quickly mastered the corrections. At the last moment he remembered to set the gyrocompass to the magnetic compass reading for the direction of the tiny runway along which they were traveling, and when the airspeed indicator showed sixty-five, he gently pulled back on the wheel. The plane became airborne, and Joyce let out a breath in relief. She looked down at the house, noting that no new lights had come on. “Looks like the girl with the cat didn’t get alarmed at the noise of the plane,” she shouted over to Earl.

Earl asked Joyce to toggle the flaps back to zero as he checked the altitude. When the plane had reached an indicated altitude of two hundred feet over the field, he pulled back on the throttle as he leveled off. The plane wobbled a bit as it gained a minuscule amount of airspeed, but Earl managed to settle back and began to relax to the constant hum.

“Okay, Joyce, turn the trim wheel forward,” he said, feeling the resistance of the control wheel lessen as she did so. “Enough, thanks,” he said when the control wheel felt neutral in his hand.

Knowing that the plane had a range only of a few hundred miles, he juggled his desire to   cover ground fast with inevitability of having to refuel somewhere. He decided to compromise and gradually pulled back on the throttle until the airspeed indicator read ninety-five. As his tension diminished his muscle memory began to take over. It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle, but it was passable. Seeing him losing his uptight attitude, Joyce relaxed as well.

“Maybe the girl thought her folks had decided to take the plane after all,” he finally said in response to her comment as they had taken off. “She’s probably tuned in to her iPod, so maybe she’s only taking in a fraction of what’s been happening around her. If that’s the case, our God is really handling the details in a big way. Thank you, Lord,” he said in gratitude.

After a while Earl brought the sectional back out and studied it. He reached over to the radio and set the frequency to match that of the closest VHF omnirange (VOR) printed on the chart. He struggled with his left hand to twiddle a knob and set a bearing, turning the plane to the heading he wanted. He looked over to Joyce. “It really is coming back,” he said with a smile. His increasing confidence gave her a critically-needed boost in spirits, and she looked at him with pride. She looked down out of her window to see patchworks of trees and fields illuminated by the bright moonlight. “Why so low?” she asked. “Isn’t that kind of risky? What if the engine decides to stop running?”

He looked over to her in mock sorrow. “Joyce,” he said, shaking his head. “What did we do just before taking off?”

“Oh. Oh yeah. We prayed, didn’t we? Okay, I’ll buck up.”

“Be riskier to go any higher,” he told her. “We’ll have to trust in God to handle the engine.” Just then the VOR receiver showed a no-signal fault. Realizing that he was too low for reliable operation of the VOR, he switched his attention to the gyrocompass for heading information.

The tiny airplane droned on. He checked the fuel guage, noting with relief that it showed full. Suddenly out of the corner of his eye he saw a flashing light that occupied a space into which the airplane would also occupy in the very near future. He pulled back on the wheel instinctively, shoving the throttle forward. An electrical transmission tower passed just beneath them, the warning light atop it flashing intermittently.

“Whoa!” Joyce exclaimed. “That was scary. Can’t you compromise a bit with the altitude?

“Will do,” he said grimly, going back into a brief climb. He leveled off at an additional two hundred feet.

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #6

Chapter Five (continued)

They continued to trudge up the highway into larger and larger tracts of undeveloped land. As they did, the homes became more elegant to complement their isolation. Some obviously belonged to gentlemen ranchers.

Standing out of the growing darkness of evening, Earl saw in the distance to the east what looked like the tail of an airplane. “Let’s head over that way,” he said to Joyce, turning off the Bandera Highway onto a much smaller road which headed in that direction. A mile and a half down the road the aircraft came into full view as it rested outside a small hangar. “A 152,” he breathed. He lay on the ground and motioned for Joyce to join him there.

“What?”

“A Cessna model 152, single-engine, two-passenger light airplane. The smallest in the line, mostly used as a training plane for private pilots. I’ve had a lot of air time in one of these.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Some good news and some bad. If there’s any airplane I’m experienced with, that’s the one. The bad news is that it’s slow and it can’t be good for more than about three hundred miles between fuel stops.”

“How slow is it?”

“Slower than a good motorcycle. Maybe we’d be able to do about a hundred tops.

“Well, it beats hitchhiking. We seem to have been led to this place. Let’s stay here for a while and see what turns up.”

“Agree. But we need to get closer to the house.” The crept together toward the near-mansion, marveling at how some people managed to live.

“I could see living here,” Joyce told him. “Some people really have it good.”

“Like us, Joyce. We’ve had our share of adventures. And each other. And maybe a decent harvest of souls. What else could we ask for?”

“Thanks for reminding me. What these people have is temporary at best. Those things you mentioned – they’re ours forever.”

“Look there,” he said, gazing through the large French window into the living room. “She must be the lady of the house. She’s dressed for some occasion. So’s he. He’s holding some keys and talking to her. She’s nodding her head, and now he’s going into another part of the house.”

A light went on in a room off to the left, and he rushed over to see what was happening there. Peering in from behind a bush, he was just in time to see the man open a drawer, put the keys inside and extract a different set. The light went back out and Earl rushed back to Joyce. They both watched as the man draped a wrap over his wife’s shoulders and exited the room. The front door opened and they walked down a pathway to the enormous garage. The man flicked a remote and a door opened to reveal a perfectly-maintained cream-colored 1941 Lincoln Continental.

Joyce looked at Earl.  “You’re drooling,” she said.

“Yes. I am. What a beautiful work of art! I wouldn’t mind taking that instead of the Cessna.”

“Stay focused, Earl. Do what needs to be done.”

The couple bypassed the antique, getting into a much newer Bentley convertible. They left in it, the garage door closing behind them.

“Having the motive, Joyce, we now have the opportunity to commit the perfect heist. I’m sure that he put the keys to the plane in the drawer.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something? Like maybe an alarm?”

A light went on in a room on the second story. Presently the front door opened to frame a teenage girl. She was holding a large black-and-white cat. She stooped down, released the pet, returned inside and closed the door behind her.

“There’s our answer,” Earl said. I’ll bet she comes back for the cat later. In the meantime, the alarm’s probably off and we can do a smash-and-grab for the keys.”

“Earl!” she said in alarm. “Just because we’re criminals you don’t have to talk like one.”

“Okay. Sorry.” But his attention was focused on the window in the master bedroom. He went up to it and worked his knife into the junction of window and frame, finding the latch. It submitted to his fiddling and he quietly opened the window and climbed in. Her attention focused on Earl, Joyce didn’t notice the cat, who had come up to her in curiosity. She planted a foot on the creature’s tail, which evoked a screeching howl. Terrified, Joyce ducked behind a tree just as the upstairs bedroom opened and the girl leaned out. “Maybelle!” she called, squinting into the night. The girl left and returned with a flashlight, which, to Joyce’s terror, she shined on the ground below. She must have seen the cat’s eyes shining back up at her, or maybe that of a nearby raccoon, for she switched off the flashlight and closed her window, completely missing the open window of the master bedroom directly below her.

After a few more minutes, during which Joyce regained her equilibrium and relieved herself next to a bush, Earl emerged from the window, softly closed it, and came up to her side. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Okay. But didn’t you hear the commotion with the cat?”

“I did, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.”

“I think you’re braver than me. Now that we’re about to take off into the wild black yonder, I feel kind of scared about it. I have a queasy gut, Earl.”

 

Now wasn’t the time to tell her that he felt the same queasy apprehension.

Chapter Six

“Oh, Ellery,” she cried, sobbing into his shoulder. I’m so sorry. What are we going to do?”

“Well, honey, at least you’ll still have some semblance of freedom if General Urkmore has any honesty left in him,” he murmured, his voice muffled by her cheek. “He promised that you’d be taken care of.”

“But what about you?” she wailed. “How could things have gotten so bad that an innocent man – a good man – could be treated so badly? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“Yes, you have. You’ve read the Book of Acts, and Foxe’s book of martyrs. You know all about the targeting of Christians for hatred and persecution. You know of the recent and ongoing persecutions of Christians in Africa and the Mideast, and of the even more recent persecutions taking place right here in America. But it’s okay, honey. Gives us a chance to repay our God for the many blessings He’s given us in our lives. And, for sure, we have heaven to look forward to. According to Scripture, that’s our real home anyway. Look at it this way – if God wants us to stay alive and maybe even free, He’s more than capable of making it happen. In the meantime, let’s just go with the flow for now.”

At that precise instant, there was a knock on the front door. Ellery opened it to face two very large Marine MPs. “We’re here to help the missus pack,” the taller one said. She’s on a morning flight to Leavenworth.” He turned around to signal two noncoms standing beside an electric hand truck loaded with empty boxes. Grabbing hold of two of them, they came in through the door. “Can’t take too much,” he said casually to Marge. “But then,” he added, grinning, “you don’t have too much.”

It was true. The logistics of equipping and maintaining a city situated hundreds of feet underground severely restricted the amenities available to the personnel who lived there, particularly for the enlisted folk. Ellery doubted that even if the general kept his promise, there’d be anything more waiting for Marge in Leavenworth. But he also knew that Marge saw beyond material comforts. He wondered how or even if she could adjust to his permanent confinement. He did the only thing he could – put his sweet wife in the Hands of God. “Lord God,” he prayed, I’m most grateful, knowing that you’ll keep your dear daughter Marge in Your loving Hands. Thank you.”

Ellery’s concern for her welfare in the face of the cruelty that had befallen him only made Marge weep louder, causing him to comfort her with a hug.   “Think on the bright side, honey,” he murmured in her ear. At least we’ll be out of this ungodly hole in the ground and back among the living.”

“You have it exactly right,” she responded. “There’s not a single soul down here that’s not deader than a possum flattened by an eighteen-wheeler.”

“Except you.”

“And you. Oh, honey, I’ll miss you so. And thinking about what you’ll be going through in prison.”

“I’ve been through worse.” A combat veteran, he’d been wounded and spent several months returning to fitness. “And remember Who’s in charge of everything. God will be with us, no matter where we find ourselves. And He promised that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. Keep those words in your heart, because God, through Paul, includes us in that message of hope. Remember what kind of witness you have been down here for Jesus Christ.”

“As were you. Which is rather obvious, seeing as how that got you into this pickle. I’m very proud of you for that, and don’t you forget it.”

They left the bed behind for a quick morning of packing, but everything else except for a box of cereal, the remainder of a loaf of bread and a nearly-empty container of milk had been removed by nine that evening. The packers left, but the two MPs remained outside the door. Their watch was relieved and replaced by two other Marines at midnight.

Knowing that this would be their last night together for at least a very long time and probably forever, Ellery and Marge attempted to make love. It was an awkward and joyless effort that ended up being futile as well, as Marge couldn’t help but break out in tears that refused to stop. They ended up in a tight embrace with arms and legs entwined about each other, but sleep failed to overtake either of them. By five o’clock they climbed out of bed and silently dressed. Marge prepared a basic breakfast for them, but in the end they put it into the garbage uneaten.

Marge was summoned at six in the morning and hurried out of the concrete chamber that represented her home. They clung to each other so fiercely they barely had time for a quick kiss goodbye. Ellery left the room at eleven, and by late that evening he found himself on a plane to the maximum security facility for military personnel, wearing prison garb and shackled solidly to the floor. The flight was impersonal, cold and bleak. By the early hours of the next morning he had his first glimpse of his new and permanent home: the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Leavenworth, Kansas.

 

 

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #5

Chapter Five

“Hello, Earl,” Wisdom said gently, Her beautiful face radiant in the bedroom of the late Jimmy’s and Millie’s motor home. “I know it’s a bit dismal here, but believe Me, this will work out to Our good and to yours as well.”

“How did our country get into such a mess?” he groused.

“You know full well how it did. In the years after 2008 there were many legitimate protests over how the government was being transformed. Even before that there was widespread concern over how the security issue following the 9-11 disaster was making inroads into the liberty you’d come to take for granted. These issues were real, but they were very far from the most basic one – your having allowed the removal of Jesus Christ from your national consciousness, causing Us to politely step back from interfering in your political affairs. The other issues were peripheral to that and had no chance of being solved while the main one was ignored.”

“I guess we’re kind of unique in that regard, having so much given to us and turning away so thoroughly from You – the Source of all that goodness.”

“Your thought is well founded, but you’re far from unique.   We’re proud of your knowledge of Scripture, Earl, but it’s far from complete. One area you’re weak in is the history of the Israelites in Samuel, Chronicles and Kings. America is following the pattern of Israel rather closely, from the glory of the kingdoms of David and his son Solomon to the rapid descent into apathy toward God and political ruin that ended in their captivity and destruction. It wasn’t all downhill at first; there were several ups and down, but, like in your America, the trend was generally downward. I’ll quote a typical passage from 2 Kings 3, which is part of an all-too-familiar litany:

“Now Jehoram, the son of Ahab, began to reign over Israel in Samaria the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, and reigned twelve years. And he wrought evil in the sight of the Lord, but not like his father and like his mother; for he put away the image of Baal that his father had made. Nevertheless, he cleaved unto the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin; he departed not from them.”

 

“I hear you, Wisdom,” Earl responded. “Collectively, we’ve dug our own grave by casting You out of our lives. But on a personal level, isn’t Joyce and me being here kind of double jeopardy? Even our human laws prohibit hanging twice.”

She laughed, a rich, full-throated burst of colorful music. “Don’t make it any worse than it is. If you maintain your faith, I’ll help you get over the negatives. With the right attitude you can view it as an adventure, even a thrilling one.”

“Okay,” he said reluctantly, then brightened as he started to visualize their situation as under the control and supervision of their loving God.

“Good,” She replied, picking up on his change of attitude. “Now, down to business. As you can see, there’s not much for you here. In fact, you need to get somewhere in a hurry, and it’s too far away to make the journey by ground transportation. You need to go by air.”

“Oh, right,” he shot back. “Like we’ll breeze right through the officials at the airport, even assuming that we’d have the means to pay for the trip.”

“What did I tell you about faith? And who said anything about a commercial flight? I’m going to leave it up to you to do the detailed planning and execution – as a much-needed exercise in faith – but I’ll give you a hint. Not far from here are some very wealthy homes. Some of those homes have little airfields on their grounds, and many of those private airfields have little airplanes on them. You might want to “borrow” one and take it for a ride. That is, if you can remember your pilot training.”

“What about my missing arm?”

“What about it? I’ll say it one more time. Have faith. She softened the rebuke with a loving smile and gave him a warm kiss on the forehead and turned away to depart.

“Please don’t leave yet,” he pleaded. “I have a question, Wisdom. One that’s been nagging me for some time, even before this latest dustup. Why is it that we have gotten so intimately involved with You instead of with Jesus?”

“Oh, but you are involved with Jesus, more intimately than with Me. Look around you. Everything you see is the revealed will of God, is it not? That is Jesus – the Living Revealed Will of God. When you read the Bible, every word you take into your heart is the Word of God, also the Living Revealed Will. When you see Me, you interact with the Mother of that Revealed Will, the Holy Spirit who Jesus promised to you after His work on the cross and His subsequent resurrection. Everything that happens in our interaction is Me saying lovingly to you – ‘This is my Son’s world. Everything in it belongs to Him and everything you do with Me happens in His name and to His glory.’”

“I get that. But still, we’re supposed to be His Bride in the spiritual domain. How do we get to the point of loving Him to the extent that is implied by this marriage?”

“Everything that you do to His glory gives you much more than your personal nobility. It gives you insight into His noble nature as well, as you’re acting on His behalf in those matters. When you assume your future role within the spiritual Church, you’ll be amazed at the depth of intimate love those acts will endow you with.”

“Thanks, Wisdom. I’m not sure I fully grasp the implication of what You said, but I trust You that this is so.”

.

“It’s time to move,” Earl said to his wife as he arose from the bed. Joyce agreed with alacrity. Being in their friends’ home while they lay dead outside was extremely depressing. Besides, the corpses were beginning to ripen. While the stink was still bearable, it wouldn’t be before the day was over. Joyce took some cans of food out of the cupboard and was about to open one, but Earl stopped her. “Not here,” he said. “I couldn’t manage to eat, knowing what’s right out the door.” Joyce agreed and went into the bathroom to take care of a few morning necessities while he retrieved a small backpack from a closet and started loading it up with food and water. When she came back out he went in and shaved. They hit the road when he finished.

“What do you have in mind?” Joyce asked as they headed northwestward up Bandera Road, a highway that connected San Antonio with the towns of Helotes, Bandera and, eventually Kerrville in the midst of the Texas Hill Country. “Let’s stop for a bit and grab a bite to eat,” he said, eyeing a bench in front of a rural store. They had moved outside the killing zone and away from the high-density housing closer in to the city. The fresh air delighted Joyce and she enthusiastically reached into Earl’s backpack to extract a can. “Got a knife on you?” she asked him.

Earl fumbled in his pocket in increasing desperation until his fingers finally found a pocket knife. “Reminds me of an old Gary Larson cartoon in a Far Side book. The view was a cutaway one showing a couple inside an underground room filled with cans while the air above was littered with mushroom clouds. The enraged wife is yelling at her husband “How many times did I tell you, Harold? How many times? Make sure the bomb shelter has a can opener!” Joyce snickered at the joke as she punched into the can. She turned serious. “Amazing that we find ourselves in this situation.”

“Buck up, my lovely,” he replied. “We know now that we have a better home awaiting us, so whatever happens is kind of a don’t-care. Think of it more as an adventure.”

“It seems like every minute that passes I forget another aspect of it. I wish that I could remember it more. It was a beautiful place, but I can picture just a couple of things. It’s frustrating.”

“It’s a blessing. If we remembered it more, we’d be spending all our time yearning to go back. We still have a job to do, and it must be pretty important.”

“You didn’t tell me what your plans are,” she said, chewing on the last of the canned stew.

“Well, we’re heading over to the town of Helotes. From what I remember when we came down this way, it’s an upscale place. People here are rural gentry – big homes, lots of acreage. They probably have important jobs in San Antonio. I’ll be willing to bet that they do a lot of commuting, and that some of them have private airstrips.”

“Can you fly? I mean something besides a hang glider? I’ve never flown with you in a real airplane.”

“A hang glider is a real airplane,” he sniffed. “The realest of them all, as I see it.”

“There, there,” she said, patting his head in a mockery of his offended tone of voice.

“Yes, I can fly a real airplane. At least I could. I was certified as a flight instructor, in fact. With commercial, instrument and multi-engine ratings.”

“Oh. Now I feel that I’ve missed out on something in our marriage. Why didn’t you ever take me on a flight?”

“Joyce, that was a long time ago. It’s been years since I last flew in something besides my glider. I would have had to go back and get a medical certificate, while my hearing is much worse than it was back then, and I’d have to redo ground school, and then I’d have to get some familiarization air time with an instructor, all on a limited budget. There were just other things that seemed more important at the time. And time itself, unfortunately, just slipped by. Anyway, if things work out, you’ll be flying with me very soon.”

“Great. I’m looking forward to it. I think. Maybe”

[to be continued]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #4

Chapter Four

 

 

“Yes sir?” Master Sergeant Ellery MacAfee, USMC, said into the phone.

“Get up here pronto, sergeant,” Captain Lethbridge told him. “I want you here giving me a crisp salute some time within the next two and a half minutes.” The captain was simply responding to orders from above, but he had an idea about what was going to go down, and the notion pleased him. Good riddance, he breathed.

“Yessir,” MacAfee replied, arising from his desk in the bowels of the underground FEMA facility. He picked up his cover from the rack behind him and headed out the door. As he walked rapidly down the hall, he was filled with an ominous sense that life as he had known it until now no longer existed. MacAfee, being a courageous man, kept his fear under control. What concerns he had mostly applied to his wife Marge, whose own world was about to be upended along with his.

Sergeant MacAfee and his wife were Christians. The couple had refused to be intimidated by the deliberate and progressively harsh culling of Christians from the ranks of the United States military over the past several years. The primary objective of the military in supporting this negative bias was to permit its revamping into a force that would obey without moral reservations the government’s switch from fighting foreign enemies to herding an increasingly large segment of the U.S. population into detention camps and controlling them thereafter under a spartan and ultimately deadly regime. The soldiers themselves, those who went along with the plan, were being treated most generously to the crass and disgusting level of entertainment that they preferred. Alcohol and recreational drugs were permitted, even while they actively engaged in their assigned tasks, provided only that they maintained the performance standards set out to them.

In their opposition of this descent into wholesale depravity, the MacAfees had been openly vocal about their Christian beliefs. Marge had been forced to endure, as a result, a progressively thorough isolation from base functions, social events, and even communication with her former friends, who, to a person, avoided her like she was radioactive.

Now Ellery had a problem and he knew that it was turning out to be a big one. As a temporary solution he had been transferred to the FEMA facility early on during the transition of the military into a morally pliant body, the thought being that if he was safely closeted in an institution that didn’t have direct contact with the public, he could still be useful without creating an unpleasant situation. After all, his loyalty had never been in question, and he was uncommonly efficient about his work. But his superiors had had it to the tops of their heads with his constant referral to his God, as if this diety truly existed outside his own fertile but twisted imagination. Eventually it was decided that something had to be done about him. Something permanent.

“Why not kill two birds with one stone?” General Lesczowitz had offered the previous evening to the five others who lounged with him in the Senior Officers’ club room, sipping single-malt whisky and puffing, to a man, on large cigars. “He’s gonna die anyway. No reason not to make a buck in the process. We’ll plant some coke in his quarters, cry ‘foul!’ about an inventory discrepancy on recreational drugs, and hang him for the theft.”

General Peebles was a bit slow on the uptake. “There’s nothing missing in the coke inventory as far as I know,” he said to his peers. “How are we going to pin something on him when there’s nothing to pin on him?”

To a man, his companions stopped puffing on their cigars and eyeballed him has if he’d just told them he’d gone potty in his underwear. Urkmore turned his back on the others, made a quick call on his cell, and almost before he put it back away his aide had entered the room with an urgent message for General Peebles, asking him to accompany him outside. After briefly rolling their eyeballs, the others continued their conversation as if Peebles no longer existed, which, for all practical purposes, was true.

“Good idea. I’ll get the captain to check the coke out of the locker for my personal inventory review. Wouldn’t Peebles be surprised to learn that there really is a discrepancy?” After the laughter died down, Urkmore continued. “But hanging’s too good for Christians like MacAfee,” he declared, his voice tinged with alcohol, smoke and pure hatred. “Let him rot over in the U.S. Discliplinary Barracks in Leavenworth.   That way there’ll be no closure for his goody-goody wife, who’ll have to suffer right along with him as she gets wind of the intolerable conditions he’s constantly undergoing. Remember the poor Marine who made a wrong turn into Mexico with a bunch of weapons in his car? There’s a lot of folks who suspect that the president deliberately refused to come to his aid out of pure enjoyment of the drama. We could do the same. Think of us puffing away on our stogies, taking sips of bourbon, and relaxing to the thought of this poor sap having to endure an endless round of torture. It almost makes me want to call Flo.”

“That skank?” Lesczowitz had responded, laughing. “Give your wife the clap. Even you can do better than that.”

After his aide had done his bidding and the “missing” coke was safely tucked away in Urkmore’s desk, except for the minuscule portion that was placed in MacAfee’s quarters, the sergeant received the call from Lethbridge commanding his presence.

“In there. Now,” Captain Lethbridge said, pointing to the closed door of General Urkmore. He didn’t bother returning MacAfee’s salute. Moments later, the sergeant stood facing the general, his arm up in another crisp salute.

The general, like the captain, ignored his upraised hand. He wondered how long the sergeant would be able to hold it up before gravity took over. “MacAfee, you’re a disgrace to your uniform.”

Although he had suspected the displeasure of his superiors for some time, the unjustified accusation startled him. “Sir, I have been a loyal Marine. Always. In what way could I have possibly dishonored the Corps?”

An unreasoning hatred boiled up inside the general that threatened for a brief moment to drive him to reach out and slap the sergeant across the face. Only with the strictest self-discipline did he manage to avoid a physical confrontation with this disgustingly pristine man. “Look what was found in your quarters.” He pointed to a plastic bag filled with a white substance. “Don’t we pay you enough that you don’t have to go around selling cocaine? Or maybe it’s for you and your wife. That it, MacAfee?”

Although the recreational use of cocaine was permitted under the new regime, the hoarding and sale of it outside the strictly-controlled system not only was forbidden, it was a capital offense. The military reserved to itself the distribution of it for the carrot-stick benefits that could be gained from its exclusive manipulation. The restriction also applied to generals, but Urkmore knew that he’d be able to dispose of the many bags of cocaine in his two right-hand drawers with ease, and at a handsome profit, while MacAfee got blamed for stealing the lot.

MacAfee knew instantly that he’d been framed. Yet there was nothing that he could do about it. “Will there be a tribunal?” he asked.

“There could be,” Urkmore replied. “Which would you prefer – taking your punishment like a man and having your wife able to visit you at Leavenworth, or going to Leavenworth anyway in the end, and having your wife incarcerated down here, never able to see the light of day again?

He had no choice. “Uh, Sir, what about her living arrangements?”

“We’ll take care of that. Private housing will be arranged at government expense.”

“Okay, Sir. May I still see my wife before I go?”

“Tonight. You leave first thing in the morning. Your wife will go too, by separate transportation.” The general finally responded with a salute of dismissal. When the sergeant had left his office, the general breathed out in relief and rewarded himself by opening his drawer and peering down into his booty of cocaine. Rather than replace the bag of evidence to the drawer, he sniffed the outside and then cautiously opened it. With mounting excitement he extracted a pinch and lifted it up to his nose, breathing deeply of the white substance.

General Urkmore’s cohorts knew how the sergeant would be framed for its theft, but what they didn’t know was how extensive the actual theft had turned out to be. They also knew how phony Christians were, acting all nicey-nicey and being so hypocritical. His buddies would easily believe that the sergeant was really involved after all, which meant that the distribution to the spoils to them need not reflect the actual quantity involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #3

Chapter Two

His first awareness was of pain.  His throat hurt and he had difficulty catching his breath, but that issue was overshadowed by the throbbing of his head.  He reached up to his scalp with his right hand.  Feeling nothing, he suddenly remembered that his right arm was missing.  He reached again with his left and withdrew a bloody hand.  “Ow!” he moaned.  The vivid memory of Joyce forced to stand on bloody stumps crowded into his awareness and he forgot his own agony, looking over to his companion.  She lay there inert, peaceful in death, and he wept bitterly.

“I’m here, Earl,” his wife said to him.  Astonished, he looked back to her and saw her eyes open, their whites contrasting sharply with the blood that coursed down her face.   The eyes blinked and squinted against the pain that wracked her abused body.

He crawled to her side and wrapped his good arm tenderly around her shoulders.  “Thank God you’re alive,” he spoke fervently.  He turned his face upward and addressed his thanksgiving directly to God.  “I don’t know why we’re back here, but thank you, Lord, for bringing Joyce back to me.  I do know that everything you do has a reason, and I have faith that the reason will end up being good for Joyce and me.  In the meantime, though, I – we – would sure appreciate it if you give us the strength and especially the courage to handle his new situation and allow us to honor You in the process.”  He half expected to see Wisdom with words of advice and encouragement, but She didn’t show.  “I guess we’re on our own, honey,” he said to Joyce.

“At least we’re alone for the time being,” she replied, her eyes following the backs of the mob moving away from them, undoubtedly looking for more prey.  “I think we’re going to be okay for now, Earl,” she said as she cautiously moved her arms and neck.  “Seems like we got a partial healing, enough to keep us alive for the duration of whatever job we’re supposed to do.  Do you have any idea what that is?” she added.

“Not a clue.  We’re not far from the RVs.  Maybe we should go back there and see if anyone there needs our help.”

“First I need my legs.  Can you see them?”

Earl found her right prosthetic against a wall.  It was covered with blood, most of which had belonged at one time to Joyce, particularly the clotted mess where the leg connected to her stump of flesh.  But the blood around the artificial foot spoke of the leg’s use as a club.  That, too, might have been Joyce’s, he thought with sadness.  He couldn’t see the other one.  He gathered up his strength and stood upright, searching the area.  He found the other leg discarded a hundred feet away amid a cluster of broken liquor bottles.  He saw another object lying there, one that spoke of an inappropriate, degenerate enjoyment of their dark work, as if the spree of torture and killing was conducted in a party atmosphere.  He turned his eyes away in revulsion and returned to Joyce, handing both legs over to her.  He grimaced in sympathy as he watched her struggle to connect the prosthetics to her damaged flesh.

“Aren’t you worried about sepsis?” he asked her, looking at the filthy appearance of the prosthetic with a dubious eye.

“What, that maybe I’ll get sick and die?” she responded with a grim laugh.

“Oh,” he said.  “I see your point.”

“Okay,” she said eventually, having strapped them back on.  She stood, wincing at the pain of her abused stumps, still bleeding from the cruel treatment she’d received from the vicious mob.  Earl reached out to help her, but she bravely waved him off.

“Something I’m just going to have to get used to, Earl,” she told him.  “Well, now that we’re saddled up, its time to roll.”  They moved out together toward the RV inhabited by Jimmy and Millie.

They hobbled past a number of bodies that lay scattered about the park, their crumpled and damaged remains mute testimony to the brutality that they had suffered.

The other couple were there inside the recreational vehicle, but they were no longer alive.  They had been so obscenely dismantled that they were far better off being dead.  Here again there were signs that the couch had been used in a way that suggested these animals took pleasure in their wanton destruction of life.  Beer cans littered the floor, and crudely-drawn graffiti declared their victory over their helpless, innocent victims.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ground gave a solitary heave, rather weak and little more than a tremble, but enough to awaken Jacob from a sound sleep.  He raised his head and looked around, his awareness returning slowly.  I’m in our cave, he thought.  Let’s see what’s new.  Damascus no longer exists, our kibbutz was bombed, I’m lying here with my lovely wife, Wisdom tells us not to worry, and nothing else really matters..  His arm pressed against Moira’s side, reassuring him with the comfort of her soft but firm flesh.  He let his head drop down and with his nose he parted her hair.  He kissed her neck and she stirred, turning around to face him.  “’Morning,” she said with a smile and kissed him on the lips.  “Are you trying to tell me that we’re still alive and that the world still exists?  I don’t believe it.”

“All’s quiet on the front right now.  The loss of Damascus scared them off, those who survived the hungry ground that ate a bunch of tanks and troops yesterday.  I need a shave, honey.  Maybe we’d better go back to Dafna and see if my razor’s still there.  As well as Dafna itself.  And, of course, our beloved friends.”

“I’m worried about them, too.”  She rose up, stretched and pulled him upright.  “Let’s go.”

They were still some distance above their kibbutz when they were relieved to see that the crater from the explosive detonation they’d seen the night before was a good two hundred yards from the nearest building.  “Looks like their aim was off,” Jacob remarked.

“Wouldn’t have done them any good to have aimed better.  I think Wisdom is rather fond of our community.  That miss is just more proof of it.”

“Right you are,” he responded brightly.  When they arrived the greeting was made with hugs and much thanksgiving to God.  “They’ll be back,” Jesse said, frowning darkly.  “They’ve got too much hate in them to quit now.  But we’re not going anywhere.  We’ll be ready for them as many times as it takes to wise them up.”

“We’ve got some pretty fine backup, Jesse,” Moira said to their ex-Marine weapons instructor.  “Makes our role in all this more of a witness than anything.  You can’t see the valley from here, but we’ve got news: Damascus no longer exists.”

“You don’t say!” Jesse exclaimed as the rest of them murmured in surprise.  “Well, we knew it would happen someday.  It’s right there in the Bible.  Somewhere.”

“Isaiah Seventeen,” Jacob replied.  “We’re going to clean up and then we’ll head back up.  There’s nothing going on now, but I’ll bet they come back before evening.”

A friend grabbed Moira’s arm.  “Come along,” she said.  “We’ll fix you both a good breakfast.  Then you can shower and fix yourselves up.  As for me, I want to hear more about what happened to Damascus.”

Moira, freshly cleaned up and with an enormous breakfast residing comfortably in her stomach, continued to talk to her friends while Earl took their rifle instructor Jesse aside to discuss the weaponry that their enemy had arrayed against them.  His most urgent need for information concerned the massive arsenal of tanks.

“Describe them as well as you can remember.  What about the front, the bow?  Was it rounded or straight?  How many driver positions were there?  One or two?  Did it have skirts over the roadwheels?  Did it seem extra large, or not?  Did . . .”

“Hold on, Jesse.  You’re asking so many questions I’m going to forget half of them.  About the bow – I think it might have been straight.  No, cancel that, I remember one that was curved.  As a matter of fact, they probably all were.  No skirts over the roadwheels, and, as far as I can recall, there was only one driver.  It was big, but I think I’ve seen bigger.”

“Sounds like the M48 medium tank.  They were still in use when I was in the Marine Corps.  As a matter of fact, I think I have an old manual on it back in my hooch.  Let’s go.”

Jesse pulled a brown book from his extensive shelf.  Turning a page to a figure, he showed it to Earl.  “Is this what it looked like?”

“Yes,” Earl replied.  “That’s it exactly. “

“It’s an M48 then.  Medium tank, fifty tons.”  Jesse quickly reviewed the manual, eventually speaking up again.  “Powered by a Continental air-cooled V12 putting out 812 horsepower.  Seems like a lot of muscle, and if you were to look at one of its cylinders you’d think you were staring at the inside of a garbage can, but for fifty tons it’s not.  Top speed’s about thirty-five, and it really lugs down climbing a hill.  Built like a fortress, there’s a good foot or more of homogenous steel between the driver and the outside, and the steel’s pretty thick on the sides and turret as well.  Where the armor’s weak is on the underside and in the rear, where the engine sits.  I don’t think the armor’s more than an inch thick at either locations.  The engine uses gasoline, by the way, not diesel fuel, so if you can get them to burn, they’ll light up the sky.  A good RPG shot into those locations might be able to defeat the armor, so when you go back up the hill, take one with you.  Let Moira carry some extra ammo, as well as her rifle.  And don’t forget to take yours too.”

“Thanks, Jesse.  I appreciate the info.”

“Hey, if you take some down, you’d be doing us all a favor.  We should appreciate you.  As a matter of fact, I think I’ll come up later and join you.  Another thing you should watch.  The M48 carries a powerful main weapon besides a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on top of its turret and a .30 caliber little brother to it on the side of the turret.  The tank has a four-man crew: tank commander, gunner, loader and driver.  The tank commander operates the big machine gun, and the gunner the other one and the main weapon’s a 90 millimeter cannon – a real boomer.  Take a good look at those big guns, and then see if there are any tanks with guns that look shorter and thicker.  If you see any of those, be very careful.  They’re flame tanks – T67s.  With a range approaching two hundred yards, they can do a lot of damage, but they’re vulnerable too.  There’s a big tank full of napalm inside the turret, and it’s under a lot of pressure.  If you can manage to place an RPG round inside on of those babies, you’ll get a real show.”

“Given the character of this lot, I can imagine them enjoying the prospect of herding frightened Israelis with burning napalm on their tails.  I’ve got news for them: they won’t be finding any Israelis running away.”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #2

 

Chapter One

Joyce looked down at her inert body lying battered and bloody on the asphalt, the tortured stumps of her legs shredded at the ends where she had been forced to stand on them. The rest of her looked small and deformed without complete legs. She was indifferent to the sight, but as her eyes moved over to Earl lying next to her, his unseeing eyes peaceful, she was moved beyond tears. Much as she struggled to return to Earl’s side, she found herself moving away from the scene, her arm held in the firm grip of Wisdom. She looked to Wisdom’s face, Her beauty marred by the tears streaking Her cheeks. But then Wisdom’s countenance changed from sorrow to joy as She saw something in the rapidly diminishing distance. Joyce’s eyes followed Wisdom’s to a brilliant light. As they approached it she herself was overcome with joy, her attention directed away from the chilling scene below.

They entered the light and emerged into a scene of awesome splendor. It was familiar, even homey, as if she’d been here before, long before her journey on earth. She was surrounded by greenery more vivid and lusher than what she’d been used to on earth. The trees appeared to be alive, their leaves flashing with emerald sparkles in the light breeze. They cast soft background glows that blended smoothly into a warm powder blue sky at the horizon that gradually deepened into a midnight blue at the zenith. This visual experience is a beautiful song, Joyce marveled.   Even the grass seemed to be participating harmoniously in the joyful singing that surrounded her both visually and aurally. She rapidly began to view the dimensional restriction of her past life on earth as an irritating encumbrance. As she looked around, Joyce thrilled to the softly harmonious blend of colors. It was like the transition between black-and-white and color TV. Beyond the grandness of the visual experience, love was in the very air, so immense that it seemed to have a palpable presence. Her sense of familiarity strengthened as, mingled with the love was the growing knowledge that this was her real home.

“Yes!” a laughing angel affirmed to her without speaking. The presence of this being, Joyce realized with shock, was not outside her own soul. The being was within her, part of her own self and anything but an invasion of her privacy. Privacy here was meaningless, her spiritual intuition told her, as unwelcome as such an intrusion would have represented in the material world from which she had so recently departed. The intimacy was akin to romance with perhaps even an implication of sensuality in its connectivity, but extended vastly beyond the earthly experience. Another spiritual being entered their domain, extending the joy of intimate communion.

“Oh!” Joyce exclaimed to her new companion. “Oh my, I recognize you! You’re Cathy!” The recognition of the soul who in earth had inhabited the severely crippled body of a girl afflicted with cerebral palsy overwhelmed her and she began to cry. Cathy joined in, weeping with joy and tightening their spiritual bond. “Look at me!” she cried, moving outside Joyce’s domain momentarily to prance. “I’m whole!” She skipped away, and then returned to Joyce, laughing. Joyce continued to cry as she looked with wonder at her adopted daughter who had been so cruelly mishandled at the hands of the prison guards. After a time of silent, heartfelt communion, Cathy began to instruct her about heaven. “The spiritual realm is our normal home, Joyce,” she told her earthly guardian. “I chose to spend some time on earth, and I chose the body and circumstances under which that time would be spent. We were given that choice as an opportunity to grow in our love of God and to help others grow as well. You were one of my primary assignments, although I wasn’t aware of it while I was on Earth.”

“Me? You were to help me?” Joyce responded in surprise.

“Yes. You thought it was the other way around, but I was placed into your life to help you grow in love and compassion. A big part of that growth involved your becoming more selfless in your interaction with others. But there were others with the same mission, like Earl. And Sam.”

“My Sammy! Oh, please tell me that he’s here!”

“Yes, and you should be seeing him shortly. Actually, seeing isn’t the right word. You’ll be mingling with him. But first, we have much to talk about to prepare you for your return to the real world – the beautiful world of heaven.”

With awe, Joyce began to assimilate from Cathy and her own returning spiritual memory that her time on earth was but a brief interlude in the vast sea of experience in this infinitely more real spiritual domain. In recognizing that fact, she also began to appreciate that her experience in the material domain was a choice that she had deliberately made. She had chosen to enter it for the purpose of helping herself and others, particularly Earl, to grow, like Cathy in their love of their God and in the development of the selfless nobility upon which that love depended. That they had all come back to their home domain with whopping and often epic “sea tales” was no small benefit.

Joyce turned back toward Wisdom, but She was no longer at her side. But before her mind registered alarm, Wisdom appeared in the distance, returning with a man at Her side.

“Earl!” She cried, running toward him as they met the grass. He looked entirely different, but yet she knew hims as the same man that she loved so intensely. She flung her arms around him and clung to his neck, weeping with joy.

Wisdom stood behind them, observing their tear-filled reunion, which was complete now in a way that would have been impossible in the material domain. She watched as the couple reunited with Cathy and the special angel with whom Joyce had been communing. Wisdom thrilled to the anticipation of that union growing to extend to many others, and of the intimacy among them becoming a vital organic component of the spiritual Church.

“Oh!” Joyce put her hand to her mouth in wonder. She’d just had the barest glimpse of the most beautiful Person she’d ever seen, One who had made such an immediate and lasting impression on her as to cause her to imprint to Him in the most intimate way. She looked again at Earl, now part of herself, and her love toward him flowed undiminished. But that Other – she longed with a transcendent, aching passion to become part of Him and to share that experience with Earl, and Sammy, and Cathy, and all those to whom she had become attached in her material existence.

“Hello, Son!” Wisdom greeted Jesus with enthusiasm as He gave Her a hug. When He finally broke off with reluctance, His eyes moved and then settled on something nearby. She followed His gaze toward Earl and Joyce. “Don’t look too closely, now,” She cautioned. “You’ll have all eternity after You’re married to see them face-to-face.”

“That couple over there,” Jesus responded. “I see in their souls two very special people. I yearn for them, Mother. Particularly so.”

“You’ll feel the same way toward countless others, Son. Especially as they merge together into a spectacular unity that will be Your lovely Bride. But I know what you mean, as I, too, have paid special attention to them, all in accordance with Your Father’s will.” A wedding was about to take place, Wisdom reflected, one that had been anticipated for ages past and which would give Her the Church as Her daughter-in-law. It would be in this grand event that the composite spiritual entity within which Earl, Joyce and Cathy would play a major role would, as a Woman of such radiant beauty as to rival Her own, come joyfully to unite with Her divine Spouse, Jesus Christ.

Wisdom’s own spouse, the beloved Father, extended Himself to enter more fully into Her domain. “Hello, my darling,” Wisdom whispered without words to Her cherished Partner, Her focus becoming fixed upon Him.

“And to You, My beloved Other,” He returned, His love permeating Her soul. “But I am saving the pleasure of Your company for later, with much anticipation.” He withdrew from the union. “Sadly, I have a request to make of You, one that won’t be a happy one, not at first. It involves the very two people you and Our beloved Son have been discussing. I intend to make them even more special to Our Jesus than they are now. It is most necessary that in the process they be refined yet further, but the end of it will be most wonderful, better than it would have been without the intrusion of yet further sorrow and pain.” He continued with the request, communicating the essence of it, along with His sorrow, to His divine Partner. Reluctantly, she agreed to perform a task of obvious distaste. “Yes, Boss,” She replied to Her Spouse, Her gorgeous face thrust outward and Her lips pursed in a confrontational pout.

“No need for the attitude,” Her Divine Spouse remarked, but His face bore a wide grin.

“Your will be done, My Lord,” She acquiesced to Her Divine Lover. “But when they return, they’d better have something pretty special waiting for them, or Our own reunion after the event won’t be anything to write home about.”

The Father broke out into a hearty laugh. “Of course!” he affirmed. “Just please allow me to entertain the illusion that I’m running things around here.”

The light-hearted exchange had softened their communication, but when Wisdom turned away to her new task She bore a heavy heart.

Wisdom had been preparing to witness Earl and Joyce commune with others of their spiritual Body. She had been anticipating with gladness their reunion with their former physical spouses, Alicia for Earl and Sam for Joyce. The four of them would have formed an initial nucleus, along with Buddy and Cathy, whose love would extend outward from there to embrace the entire feminine being of the spiritual Church. Now a frown darkened Her face as she prepared to respond to Her Spouse’s request.

The frown deepened as Wisdom approached Earl and Joyce, evoking more tears from Her eyes. “I’m so very sorry,” She whispered to them, “but your time has not yet come to stay. You must go back.”

“What?” Earl responded in alarm “Why? Haven’t we suffered enough?”

“You have indeed, and more,”Wisdom replied. “But you are needed back on earth. You will come back here, and when you do, it will be to a loving welcome of epic proportions. Come, let Me take your hands and guide you back.”

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN INSTALLMENT #1

Copyright © 2015 by Arthur Perkins                         Wordcount: approx. 78,000

12010 Clearlake North Road East                              280 pages (dbl-spaced version)

Eatonville, WA 98328

(360) 832-6099

HOME, SWEET HEAVEN

JOINING THE FAMILY OF GOD

Book Four of the Buddy Series of Christian Novels

Introduction

Earl Cook and his wife Joyce, having escaped from a death camp in Arizona run by the government of the new North American Region, are now in a recreational vehicle park situated on the northwestern outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. Their journey to this location involved a number of harrowing events in which the couple lost several dear relatives and close friends. In the process, God saw to it that their characters were challenged and strengthened.

They are now lying in the street outside the RV park, bleeding and near death after being accosted and brutally beaten by a mob with a murderous anti-Christian agenda. Their lives are now in the hands of Wisdom, who Herself is torn between taking them to the heaven they so richly deserve and keeping them alive for another mission of critical importance.

North America itself is in the throes of chaos. The government has temporarily retreated to underground shelters which were operated by the Federal Emergency Management Administration for the purpose of preserving society’s elite from danger. The danger was real, much of it having been deliberately initiated by the government itself to serve two evil, deceitful purposes: to winnow down the population to manageable size through starvation and anarchy more quickly than the overstressed death camps could accomplish, and to render the survivors more compliant to the imposition of harsh and rigid measures appropriate to complete, implacable control under the dreadfully totalitarian regime anticipated by the elite leadership.

In the years before the government had become overtly dictatorial a secret, extremely ambitious project had been set in motion to identify, continuously track and selectively incarcerate all citizens who would pose a potential threat to a regime such as the current political system. These individuals would include all persons suspected of ultra-patriotism, ultra-conservatism, or ambitions or other features of character and intellect that set them apart from the norms of the passive masses. Christians were definitely on the list, as were Jews. Even members of sects considered marginal by mainstream Christians and Jews have been included in the government watchlist. Toward the end of that phase of enhanced population control, a limited form of gun control had been established, wherein the more destructive weaponry, such as rocket-propelled grenade launchers, shoulder-fired missiles, large-bore weapons including all types of cannon, and machine guns were prohibited. In addition, the ammunition for the more lethal of the smaller weapons had been severely restricted in an effort to rend such weapons unusable.

Weapons of more limited killing potential were ignored by the government, the thought being that such weapons would be of value in fostering the contention among the citizenry and subsequent loss of life that was envisioned for the aftermath of the deliberate governmental disruption of the various subsystems involved in furnishing food and shelter for the population in general.

In the widespread chaos resulting from the destruction of the civil infrastructure, the government operated numerous drones from deep within their underground shelters, targeting those persons identified earlier as potential troublemakers and who had so far managed to escape the harsh, repressive governmental system.   This further venture enjoyed only limited success due to the intimate involvement of the omniscient Holy Spirit in the lives of these exceptional individuals.

The chaotic upending of society was amplified by an unexpected series of natural disasters initiated by God, partly to winnow out the ranks of the evil leadership, partly to thwart the desires of the satanic government and partly to hasten the process to the necessary conclusion foretold centuries ago in Scripture; but primarily to ennoble those destined for heaven to prepare them for the positions they will assume as components of the true Church, the lovely spiritual Wife of Christ.

At the point in time represented by the beginning of this story and its continuation from the previous novels of the Buddy Series, Buddy, Cathy and Jacob, the leaders of the North American Region, one of ten regions which together will rule the world under the direction of the antichrist, are preparing to emerge from their FEMA shelters to assume a more direct command of the decimated population. They expect to face widespread devastation of the land and major cities. They welcome this prospect, in fact, as an excuse for their planned imposition of a repressive political system. The use of cash, precious metals and jewels for commercial transactions carries the threat of a death sentence, its prohibition having been designated as a capital offense. Except for very limited exceptions, the use of credit cards is also banned under a lesser statute in favor of a personal code implanted under the skin and electromagnetically readable by standard point-of-sale equipment. Because of the direct link of this system to the dreaded Mark of the Beast described in Revelation 13 and warned against in Revelation 14, there will proliferate a strong black-market system based on gold and silver, which will prolong the lives of many Christians who take seriously the warning from God embodied in Revelation 14:9-12:

“And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever; and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name. Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.”

 

While Earl and Joyce lay near death in the street, Master Sergeant Ellery MacAfee, USMC, continues to serve in the security detail of the FEMA headquarters of the Seattle area. He faces a big problem along with his wife Marge: they’re both Christians and are fully aware that very soon they will be required to accept the mark of the beast. They plan to refuse, of course, and expect to pay for that refusal with their lives, as there’s no possible way for them to escape the elaborate underground city in which they are entrapped. But God has other plans for them.

Half a world away from where Earl and Joyce lay unconscious, Jacob Perlman and his lovely new wife Moira are asleep in a cave atop a ridge overlooking the valley of Megiddo, where they had been scoping out the vast enemy forces preparing to overrun the tiny nation of Israel and fulfill their constant, fervently hoped-for threats to toss every Jew into the Mediterranean Sea. Jacob had escaped from the Arizona death camp with Earl and Joyce following a massive earthquake. Their run for freedom kept them together initially, but they parted company in the middle of the vast and sparsely vegetated Texas dry country. Miles apart, they each continued to head southeasterly, where Jacob’s journey took him to the port of Houston and from there to Israel with his own near-disasters to contend with. After helping his fellow Jews to understand Jesus as their Messiah and linking up with Moira as he undertakes that mission, the couple find their desired destination in the beautiful kibbutz of Dafna, only to come face-to-face with the impending battles described in Psalm 83 and Ezekiel 38.

The political turmoil and its aftermath have sharply divided North American society into four distinct classes: the elite at the top with their control and their vast wealth, who are free to live and enjoy life as they please; the massive base of people who have accepted the precursor to the mark of the beast, most of whom consider themselves to be free but are not and must content themselves with low wages and few amenities; the people of the Book, the Jews and the Christians, who as outcasts of society must live under the ever-present danger of persecution and starvation, their acquisition of the necessities of life limited to the black market; and the rather large underground society of independent and nonreligious malcontents, their constant rage fueled by the drastic take-away that the dreadful new regime has wrought to their previous lifestyles. The Judeo-Christian and independent underclasses are mutually-supportive in unexpected ways: the independents, through their maintenance of illegal but lucrative cash transactions, are helping to keep the Jews and the Christians alive; at the same time, they furnish a pool of potential Christians to whom the Christians can address with the Gospel message.

NOTE TO THE READER

The book Marching to a Worthy Drummer was completed in the previous posting. I thank you for your interest in it.

This blog now continues with postings of installments of my latest novel, Home, Sweet Heaven. This book, which is the fourth in my Buddy series, continues with Earl, Joyce, Jacob and Moira facing and overcoming many trials as their adventures continue in an end-time setting, as described in the following back-cover writeup:

A COURAGEOUS CHRISTIAN COUPLE HAVE A WELL-DESERVED TASTE OF HEAVEN . . . BUT ONLY A BRIEF SAMPLING BEFORE THEY MUST RETURN TO EARTH TO EMBARK ON ANOTHER MISSION OF IMPORTANCE TO GOD AND THEIR OWN FUTURES AS MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH IN HER ROLE AS BRIDE OF CHRIST.

 

AS EARL AND JOYCE PURSUE THEIR MISSION IN AMERICA, ISRAEL AND HER IMPLACABLE ENEMIES CLASH IN THE FIRST SKIRMISHES OF THE GREAT WAR OF ISRAEL’S ANNIHILATION.

In this fourth novel of the Buddy series, Earl Cook and his wife Joyce pick up their battered bodies from the street in Texas where they had been brutally assaulted and left for dead, and head out on a new mission to free a fellow Christian from a life behind bars in Leavenworth, Kansas. There they will be joined by a courageous Israeli spy to form a team dedicated to bringing the Word of God to Americans who have resisted the acceptance of the dreaded mark of the beast described in Revelation 13 and 14.

As the Americans encounter numerous hazardous obstacles to their pursuit of their objective, Jacob and his new wife Moira witness the beginning of open warfare between Israel and her hatred-laden neighbors as foretold in Psalm 83. After a brief interlude initiated by God, the follow-on battle of Ezekiel 38 and 39 ensues, forcing Jacob and Moira into dangerous confrontations with the enemy. A motive of greed brings the Chinese into a final battle over Jerusalem as the conflagration expands to involve the entire world. When all seems to be lost, God introduces a wild card into the melee – a large tribe of fighters, known the world over as brave and fierce warriors but never before associated with Israel.

As the world descends into a frenzied chaos that threatens irrevocable ecological damage, God steps in with a bizarre, unthinkably massive catastrophe of His own design. The Americans, Israelis and the entire Earth are caught up in the disastrous events that follow.

The adventures and romantic involvements of the key characters merge into the events foretold long ago by Jesus and the ancient prophets Daniel, Ezekiel and Zechariah as the world, driven by power-drunk madmen under the control of their evil master Satan, culminates in the final Battle of Armageddon. As in the previous three novels of the Buddy Series, the adventures color insights into the nature of God that are suitable for an in-depth Bible Study of concepts and associations rarely, if ever, presented to the lay public.

Current plans are for the book to be available in ebook and paperback form around the summer or fall season of this year.

 

 

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #27

Chapter 9: Some Christian Churches that Appreciate the Feminine Nature of the Holy Spirit

 

I sometimes wonder what would have become of my understanding of God had my parents, grieving over my misbehavior as I noted in Chapter 4, marched me from the police station to a better Church than the sorry excuse that I was forced to attend. They certainly had other opportunities, for that particular incident was but one among many such sordid episodes in our coming of age.

For a few years during our preteens our neighborhood was embroiled in open warfare. It began inadvertently by our parents, who armed us with BB guns, which we promptly turned on each other. Usually my brother and I were pitted against Dave and Jeff. As such things inevitably do, the warfare engendered an arms race. Unknown to our parents we’d hold back on the Fourth of July fireworks, hoarding them for our more sinister pursuit. Away from their watchful eyes we’d tear apart the firecrackers and save the powder in a jar. We’d also dig in the backyard for clay and mold ourselves very realistic grenades. We’d poke a hole in the top, and after they dried hard we’d fill the hole with powder and stick in a fuse. Now, along with the flying BBs, we’d have exploding shrapnel filling the air. We also made a pipe cannon. Capping one end of a section of galvanized water pipe, we drilled a hole near the cap into which we’d insert powder and a fuse, and pop a marble into the muzzle. We tried it out against the stucco wall of our house one day the minute our parents left for the store. It worked great, so good that a neighbor lady called the police.

We continued to load it up and fire away, starting to go through military aiming procedures when a police officer, who had been sneaking down the side of the house, suddenly jumped into the open to confront us. Unfortunately, we already had lit the fuse. We stared at him helplessly as he began his harangue, not knowing that he was inside the target circle. I made a surreptitious effort to redirect the pipe, but he shouted to get my hands off it. I still remember his expression and his pointing finger as the glass round whistled past his arm to strike the wall beyond.

We paid for that debacle with an involuntary arms reduction move by our parents. Fortunately, it was temporary. Somewhat subdued, my brother and I used that hiatus to construct our next war machine: a tank. Built atop an old four-wheeled coaster, it was absolutely impregnable. There was even a turret and a hatch atop it for entry. Our house was located at the top of a steep hill and after issuing a challenge to our enemy who awaited us on a level stretch of pavement below, we climbed in, poked a BB gun out of the turret, and headed off to the fray.

We hadn’t thought our tactics through. The tank, being unpowered, stopped when it reached the level stretch. The enemy simply approached behind the turret and turned the tank upside down, trapping us inside as they peppered us with BBs and grenades. My brother and I, finally appreciating the stupidy of the whole skirmish, took it out on each other. It was awful.

If I had been marched into a better Church after an episode of miscreancy, would I have become a Christian right then and there? If I did, would I have been less skeptical of Church dogma and therefore more open to the acceptance of it as irrefutable truth? In brief, would I have been a more docile (and shallow) member of the Church as a whole?

There are other alternative scenarios of my becoming a Christian: perhaps I would have questioned less at the outset and rejected it at the first hint of a contradiction. Or maybe I would have rejected the Gospel for other reasons.

But that kind of speculation leads nowhere, because there are an infinite number of possibilities to speculate upon, and, in the end it doesn’t matter anyway. It is what it is. Here I stand, deeply committed to my Christian faith after having been distanced by God from my earlier rejection, with a number of slipups and chastisements along the way, and burdened now with a system of belief that doesn’t quite square with the thinking of the Church.

But if that makes me a heretic to the main body of the Church, at least I don’t stand as alone as I had originally thought.

I categorize the Church that opposes my viewpoint as Western, both Catholic and Protestant, because many Eastern Churches, particularly those among Churches of Egyptian Coptic and Syriac roots, do indeed acknowledge the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit, as did the Jewish religion. Of the Western Churches, a substantial component of the Messianic Jewish community also considers the Holy Spirit to be feminine.

It was with this welcome understanding that I pursued my research on other theologians and Churches within the community of Western Christianity, following which I posted the article below on my blog site friendofthefamily.wordpress.com:

I’m Not as Alone as I Thought

“As I learn more about the early Christians and the Church Fathers, I’m beginning to appreciate that there have been more sheep than I first thought who have been feeding in my little field.

“Not long ago my pastor loaned me a little paperback book entitled Creation out of Nothing, written by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig and published in 2004. The primary issue for Drs. Copan and Craig is the question as to whether God created the heavens and earth from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) or whether He did so from pre-existing matter (creatio ex materia). Admittedly, I hadn’t given the matter much thought because I had simply assumed that God, being God, wouldn’t have the need to start with something already at hand. I found the topic fascinating, however, and was intrigued with the necessity of addressing it, which, it seems, began with the Gnostic view of matter as evil and thus out of the realm of God’s creative effort. I was also intrigued with the arguments that the authors presented in favor of creatio ex nihilo, which covered a range of source material from the Old and New Testaments, as well as information from extrabiblical sources, including religious texts and scientific data. The source that most impresses me is John 1:3:

“’All things were made by him, and without him was nothing made that was made.’

“As far as I can see, that statement pretty much covers it all. That, and the fact that if God had to rely on pre-existing material to perform His creative work, He couldn’t exactly be called omnipotent.

“Interested as I became in the main theme of the book, what really grabbed my attention was a side issue, one almost but not quite confined to the footnote region. On page 23 of the book, the church father Irenaeus is said to have essentially equated Wisdom with the Holy Spirit. Nor was this association trivially presented, for on page 24 Wisdom is described by Copan and Craig as a Craftsman at God’s side, with a reference to Proverbs 8:27 and 30:

“’When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth. . .Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;’

 

“The association of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit immediately exposes a gender issue, for Wisdom in Proverbs is identified as a female personage. It is precisely the same issue that led so many “experts” to pasteurize their attempts to offer “explanations” of the Holy Trinity into cold and ultimately empty logical sophistries. One can only conclude that such “explanations” are products of self-interest and fear. Irenaeus, on the other hand, seems not to have been so burdened with socio-political concerns; apparently, he seriously entertained the thought of associating the Holy Spirit with a female function.

“The reference to Proverbs 8:27 and 30 again associates Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, and this time it sets the record straight as to whom this passage refers. The prevailing preference is to associate this passage with Jesus, despite its obviously being out of context for that identification, as I noted in Family of God. I was most happy to note that the authors of Creation out of Nothing understood this and properly associated the passage with Wisdom. I think that the authors understand the unstated implication of attributing the verses to Wisdom: again, that the Holy Spirit and Wisdom are one and the same, and in the context of the nature of Wisdom presented in Proverbs, the Holy Spirit thus possesses a female functionality.

“The authors go further, noting on page 25 the self-sufficiency of an intra-Trinitarian love relationship. Love relationship indeed, and one that we can readily identify with on an intuitive level.

“I’m more than happy to share my little turf with others. I just wish that they’d come on in, rather than just poking their heads through the fence.”

Over the course of the history of the Church, there indeed have been people who have spoken up regarding important aspects of the true nature of Christianity in contradiction to the mainstream viewpoint, and some have even managed to be heard over the tumult of the opposing voices of highly respected but blind and shallow theologians. As I noted in Chapter 7, one of those few who understood better than his peers was the writer of the introduction to the Song of Solomon in the 1967 edition of the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible, edited by C. I. Schofield, D.D.

The writer of this introduction was lacking in one important association, that the Song of Solomon may well have been an allegory of the intra-Godhead relationship as well as representing the relationship between Christ and His Church. Perhaps, like his peer from the Reformation Reference Bible who wrote the comparable introduction to the Song of Solomon, he was tempted to do so, but was forced to back off from such a direct contradiction to the teachings of the Church, despite its harmony with Scripture.

In the Catholic canon, as I noted in Chapter 7, Chapter 9 of the Book of Wisdom describes Wisdom in a context that virtually declares this female Persona to be the Holy Spirit. No other Biblical personage, human or God, harmonizes so fully with the descriptive material of that chapter.

I was tempted to include the Nag Hammadi documents, buried in Egypt and uncovered in 1945, as material supportive of a feminine Holy Spirit. What held me back from this was my reading of the Gospel of Thomas which was found among these ancient writings, from which I took away the strong sense that the writer of this document was clueless as to the true nature and character of Jesus, whom he presented as entirely at odds with the selfless, noble and spiritually-inclined Jesus of the canonical Gospels.

Well after I had pieced together the information I have presented above, I came across, through a search of books offered by Amazon, two authors whose views closely paralleled my own. One was written by a woman, Patricia Taylor, to be specific, entitled The Holy Spirit: The Feminine Nature of God, published by iUniverse, Inc., and the other entitled Sophia The Holy Spirit and published through the organization La Ermita – The Hermitage, Inc. The publication date of Mrs. Taylor’s book is 2009, while that for the other is 2010.

Like my books, they both employ logic similar to my own to justify the femininity of the Holy Spirit, and they both view the primary consequence of this feminine Presence within the Godhead as supportive of a loving Divine Family.

Their books both differ from mine in their adamant claims that the use of masculine pronouns to refer to the Holy Spirit was never inspired by God and, furthermore, was not in the original versions of the texts but rather was a deliberate alteration performed in later translations in an attempt to distance their Christianity from its Gnostic and pagan rivals. Regardless of the purity of this intent on the part of the early clergy, it represents a gross violation of the sacredness of Holy Scripture, something on the order of a layperson entering the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple.

These authors possess sound backup for their claim, perhaps the most significant of which is the Siniatic Palimpsest discussed in Chapters 4 and 7, in which in the original Jesus is recorded in John 14:26 as referring to the Holy Spirit with feminine pronouns.

As I had noted in several places in my books, I consider this “he” issue to represent the most substantial of the objections to a feminine Holy Spirit. If these authors are indeed correct, as I think they are, those who insist upon either the masculinity or the gender-neutrality of the Holy Spirit have some very spindly legs to stand on.

The timing and similarities in what the three of us have had to say about a feminine Holy Spirit leads me to believe that the Holy Spirit Herself is taking an active part in our understanding of God. An observation made by one of the authors, Mr. Meisner, is that over the past decade or so the Internet has seen a substantial increase in the number of people interested in the possibility of a feminine Holy Spirit. This, too, indicates an active involvement of God.

But then there’s that thing about my marching to a different drummer. It continues to haunt me. After all is said and done, maybe my momma was right.

But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about the Holy Spirit.

BACKGROUND TO BUDDY #28

Note to the reader: the series of articles entitled Background to Buddy were extracted from a Christian nonfiction work that formed the basis for the novel Buddy, which is available from either Amazon or Signalman Publishing. Directions are noted on the page entitled Buddy on this blog site. The purpose of this work was to explain the reasons why I consider the Holy Spirit to be functionally female. Adventure episodes and humor were added for the entertainment of both the reader and the author.

Chapter 13: An Incomplete Resistance to a Female Holy Spirit (continued)

The Catholic Church embraces other traditions regarding Mary that don’t appear to follow Scripture, at least directly. Yet some traditions may capture the essence of Scriptural teaching. Some of these are quite beautiful. As we have already noted, Father Gerald Vann (1906-1963), in his little book Mary’s Answer For Our Troubled Times, illustrates quite convincingly an account of Mary wherein with an agony of the heart she supports Jesus in His suffering during His crucifixion. While the specific interchange between Mary and Jesus is not found in Scripture, the reader nevertheless senses that it is appropriate to the situation and is inclined to agree that other Scripture indirectly supports the reality of this presumed relational event.

In his chapter “Mary and Modernity”, John Macquarrie mentions an Aztec Indian by the name of Juan Diego3 who lived in the town of Guadalupe near Mexico City, experiencing an apparent encounter with Mary in the year 1531. Macquarrie remarked upon the strange contrast between the ancient and modern worlds: while Christians still flocked into the Shrine of Guadalupe to kneel beneath Juan Diego’s cape, the same cape was visible but irrelevant to the busy people who went about their business along a modern moving walkway just outside the shrine. In observing this dichotomy, Macquarrie questioned the place of Christianity itself in our post-enlightenment society.

I remember reading of Juan Diego in an entirely different context. The account was presented by Jacques Vallee in his book Dimensions5, in which he speculated on the spiritual, even religious side of UFO encounters. The story of Juan Diego is quite moving; I included it in my book Myths, UFOs and the Judeo-Christian God6 and present it below as being of interest with respect to Mariology. In demonstrating an ongoing supernatural association with Mary, it indicates God’s approval of her veneration by the Church. Of particular interest in this type of visitation are the apparent absurdities in the encounter, which, upon a deeper grasp of the event, turn out to be of real importance. Vallee himself commented in the narration of the story, that:

“Indeed, we cannot help but recall here the word of Hartland in his Science of Fairy Tales: ‘This gift of an object apparently worthless, which turns out, on the conditions being observed, to be of the utmost value, is a commonplace of fairy transactions. It is one of the most obvious manifestations of superhuman power.’”

Elements of the tale which evoked that response are repeated below:

“Juan spent the day trying to relieve [his uncle’s] sufferings and left him only on Tuesday, to get a priest. As he was running to Tlaltelolco, the apparition again barred his way. Embarrassed, he told her why he had not followed her instructions, and she said:

“’My little son, do not be distressed and afraid. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Your uncle will not die at this time. This very moment his health is restored. There is no reason now for the errand you set out on, and you can peacefully attend to mine. Go up to the top of the hill: cut the flowers that are growing there and bring them to me.’

“There were no flowers on the top of the hill, as Juan Diego knew very well. In the middle of December, there could be no flower there, and yet, upon reaching the place, he found Castilian roses, ‘their petals wet with dew.’ He cut them and, using his long Indian cape – his tilma – to protect them from the bitter cold, carried them back to the apparition. She arranged the flowers he had dropped in the wrap, then tied the lower corners of the tilma behind his neck so that none of the roses would fall. She advised him not to let anybody but the bishop see the sign she had given him and then disappeared. Juan Diego never met her again.

“At the bishop’s palace several servants made fun of the Indian visionary. They ‘pushed him around’ and tried to snatch the flowers. But when they observed how the roses seemed to dissolve when they reached for them, they were astonished and let him go. Juan was taken once more to the bishop.

“’Juan Diego put up both hands and untied the corners of crude cloth behind his neck. The looped-up fold of the tilma fell: the flowers he thought were the precious sign tumbled out and lay in an untidy heap on the floor. Alas for the Virgin’s careful arrangement!

“’But Juan’s confusion over this mishap was nothing to what he felt immediately after it. Inside of seconds the Bishop had risen from his chair and was kneeling at Juan’s feet, and inside of a minute all the other persons in the room had surged forward and were also kneeling.’

“The bishop was kneeling before Juan’s tilma, and, as Ethel Cook Eliot remarks, ‘Millions of people have knelt before it since,’ for it has been placed over the high altar in the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The tilma consists of two pieces, woven of maguey fibers and sewn together, measuring sixty-six by forty-one inches. On this coarse material, whose color is that of unbleached linen, a lovely figure can be seen, fifty-six inches tall.

“’Surrounded by golden rays, it emerges as from a shell of light, clear-cut and lovely in every detail of line and color. The head is bent slightly and very gracefully to the right, just avoiding the long seam. They eyes look downward, but the pupils are visible. This gives an unearthly impression of lovingness and lovableness. The mantle that covers the head and falls to the feet is greenish blue with a border of purest gold, and scattered through with golden stars. The tunic is rose-colored, patterned with a lace-like design of golden flowers. Below is a crescent moon, and beneath it appear the head and arms of a cherub.’

“Juan’s uncle was cured. As he was awaiting the priest, too weak even to drink the medicine his nephew had prepared, he saw his room suddenly filled with soft light. A luminous figure, that of a young woman, appeared near him. She told him he would get well and informed him of Juan Diego’s mission. She also said, ‘Call me and call my image Santa Maria de Guadalupe’ – or so the message was understood.

“In the six years that followed the incident, over eight million Indians were baptized. In recent times, some fifteen hundred persons still go to kneel before Juan Diego’s tilma every day.”

The interested person can see the image on the tilma for himself or herself by going on the Internet to http://www.sancta.org/juandiego.html and clicking on “pictures” at the top of the page. The pictures include a photograph of the actual image on the tilma and a close-up of the face. The detail is amazing; the image itself is awe-inspiring.

Other experiences that are sometimes placed in the UFO category seem to have religious connotations involving Mary as well. The well-known Fatima miracle, as Jacques Vallee relates, was connected with UFOs:

“The famous apparitions at Fatima7 offer a historical example of the religious dimension of UFO encounters. The case is a celebrated one, yet I am prepared to wager that few Americans know the full story of what happened in 1917 near the small Portuguese town. I suspect that even fewer realize that the entire sequence of observations of an entity thought to be the Virgin Mary had begun two years previously with a fairly classical sequence of UFO sightings.

“If we accept the interpretation given of Fatima by the Catholic Church, we are dealing with a phenomenon that cannot be explained either as a physical effect or as an illusion. In its decision of 1930, arrived at after thirteen years of painstaking investigation by many scholars, the Church stated that:

“’The solar phenomenon of the 13th of October 1917, described in the press of the time, was most marvelous and caused the greatest impression on those who had the happiness of witnessing it. . .

“’This phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory registered and which therefore was not natural, was witnessed by persons of all categories and of all social classes, believers and unbelievers, journalists of the principal Portuguese newspapers and even by persons some miles away. Facts which annul any explanation of collective illusion.’

“This ‘miracle,’ the reader will note, had been predicted several months before by three illiterate children after their vision of a woman ‘in a bright glow.’ She had not said that she was the Virgin Mary. She had simply stated that she was ‘from Heaven’ and instructed them to return every month until October, when a public miracle would take place ‘so that everyone may believe.’

“The events at Fatima involve luminous spheres, lights with strange colors, a feeling of ‘heat waves’ – all physical characteristics commonly associated with UFOs. They even include the typical falling-leaf motion of the saucer zig-zagging through the air. They also encompass prophecy and a loss of ordinary consciousness on the part of witnesses-what we have called the psychic component of UFO sightings.”

Vallee goes on to describe various messages given to selected individuals, the prophetic statements, and the several follow-on apparitions that comprise the Fatima miracle. He notes features of the events, like buzzing sounds experienced by some witnesses, which are characteristic of modern UFO sightings. Some prophesies are quite specific, as noted by Vallee:

“’The war is going to end, but if people do not stop offending God another and worse one will begin during the reign of Pius XI [note: he died in 1939]. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light know that this is the great sign that God is giving you that he is going to punish the world for its crimes by means of war, famine, and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father.

“’To prevent this I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia. . .If they heed my requests, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the world.’”

Vallee then makes a curious statement regarding this prophecy:

“The mixture of seriousness and absurdity that we have already noted in several contactee stories is an unmistakable characteristic of this statement. We will find the same thing to be true in Lourdes, where the alleged Virgin Mary instructs the little Bernadette to perform meaningless actions.”

Did the statement have absurd elements? World War II began the same year Pius XI died. Major events which precipitated it occurred during his reign. According to Christian (and Western) thought, Russia has indeed spread her errors throughout the world.

NOTES

General Notes:

1. All bible references are taken from the King James Version
2. Only the first appearance in each chapter to an item to which a note is associated is subscripted.

Chapter 13

1. For an overview of the Catholic Church and her beliefs, including Mariology (veneration of Mary) or Marian Devotions, a good starting place is The Everything Catholicism Book by Helen Keeler and Susan Grimbly, published 2003 by Adams Media Corporation. Excellent follow-on books dealing more specifically with Mary are Mary For All Christians by John Macquarrie, published 1991 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Group, and Mary’s Answer For Our Troubled Times by Gerald Vann, published 1950 by Sophia Institute Press.

2. See Wikipedia re “Carl Gustav Jung”

3. Family of God, Arthur Perkins, published 2004 Falcon Books, portions or all available on request to perkinsart44@yahoo.com

4. See Wikipedia re “Juan Diego”. Juan Diego Cuahtlatoatzin (1474-1548) witnessed an apparition of Mary in 1531 near Mexico City that ultimately led to the salvation of thousands, if not more. He was canonized as a saint in 2002 for his extraordinary experience. Also visit website http://www.sancta.org/juuandiego.html and click on “pictures” for a view of his cape.

5. See Wikipedia re “Jacques Fabrice Vallee” Dr. Vallee (1939 -) received a B.S. in Mathematics from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University. His achievements included a computerized mapping of Mars for NASA, as well as contributions to the development of the Internet. He was also a major researcher in the UFO phenomenon. He, along with Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Project Bluebook notoriety, eventually began to think of UFOs as having interdimensional capabilities.

6. Myths, UFOs and the Judeo-Christian God, Atthur Perkins, 2011, unpublished, portions available on request to perkinsart44@yahoo.com

7. See Wikipedia re “Our Lady of Fatima”. The Fatima episode was an apparition of Mary in 1917 that appeared to three children in Fatima, Portugal. Two of the children died in the great influenza epidemic following World War 1, supposedly with the full knowledge of and joyful anticipation of their coming death. The third, Lucia, lived to the age of 97, passing away in 2005. The children were given three secrets by the apparition of Mary. The first involved a vision of hell. The second involved a request to save souls and a command to consecrate Russia to Mary, with the warning that if Russia didn’t return to God, another, worse war would occur during the tenure of Pope Pius XI. This prophecy was fulfilled in 1939, the year that Pope Pius XI died. There is a bit of the cloak-and-dagger regarding the third secret of Fatima. Lucia had cautioned that it was not to be revealed until 1960, but the Catholic Church continued to hold it secret until 2000, when the secret was declared to have been a vision of a Pope climbing up a hill toward a cross, accompanied by many Church leaders and other Christians. Upon reaching the cross at the summit, they were gunned down by soldiers. Angels were said to have collected their shed blood. But there is still controversy regarding this third secret, with many claiming that the third mystery revealed more than the Church has been willing to disclose. At any rate, Popes Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have all strongly acknowledged their acceptance of the Fatima apparition and the secrets as supernatural fact. In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI repeated this conviction. Other apparitions of Mary have been witnessed, including eighteen appearances to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France, and a number of events at Medjugorje, Bosnia beginning in June, 1981. A recommended Web site for the interested reader is “Apparitions of Mary”.

THE SHEKINAH GLORY

Several months earlier I had posted installments of my Christian adventure novel “Buddy”, which is available in ebook and paperback versions at Amazon and Signalman Publishing. Above the surface layer in that book of adventures, mishaps and romance is a theological treatise wherein I claim with abundant Scriptural support that the Holy Spirit, while being of the same substance as the fully male Father, is functionally fully female. The most important issue in viewing the Holy Spirit as functionally female is the family factor, the merging of two into one in love. Observe below how Scripture itself supports this idea:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Genesis 1:26, 27

From this passage we get the idea that the gender separation is intrinsic to the Godhead itself. Are we reading too much into this? If this passage stood alone as supportive of that idea, we might be. But there are other passages like the following that dovetail well with that same interpretation:

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2:23, 24

This passage is repeated in Ephesians 5:31,32 in the context of Christ and the Church, which identifies the Church as female. Here again we get the idea that in the family context two individuals merge in love into one, which is also the case between Jesus and His Church. As noted in the Scriptural passage below, this unity in love has an implication with respect to the borrowing from the male the name of the female partner.

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

Genesis 5:1, 2

The significance of this passage to the view of the Holy Spirit as a Complementary Other to the Father is that it justifies the use of a male pronoun in referring to a basically female Holy Spirit. It implies that the bond between Father and Holy Spirit, representing the image upon which the bond between Adam and Eve was based, is so perfectly close that they can truly considered to be one. In that context, the male pronoun applied to the Holy Spirit would represent the perfection of that bond, or, in other terms, the magnificence of that love.

Numerous additional Scriptural texts in support of that perception are cited in my novel “Buddy”. As I continue to research this subject, I continue to acquire more Scriptural reinforcement. I’d like to share with you here yet further Scriptural backup, this being profoundly supportive of the position that the Holy Spirit is functionally female. In 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22 Paul asserts that the Church is a temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit:

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together growth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

The facts embedded in these passages are no surprise to Christians, who generally accept without question that believers are indwelt with the Holy Spirit and comprise, as the Church, a holy temple. What some of us may not be aware of is that this temple and its indwelling by the Holy Spirit was represented numerous times as the Glory of God in the Old Testament. An example taken from 1 Kings 8:6-11 is given below:

And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto ists place, into the inner sanctuary of the house, into the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim. For the cherubim spread forth their two wings of the place of the ark, and the cherubim covered the ark and its staves above. And they drew out the staves, that the ends of the staves were seen out in the holy place before the inner sanctuary, but they were not seen outside; and there they are unto this day. There was nothing in the ark except the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the lord made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt. And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord.

A passage of the same flavor can be found in Exodus 40 regarding the Tabernacle in the wilderness.

Interesting as this passage and others like it may be in their apparent correlation with Paul’s understanding of the Church as constituting a temple and of its being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, they’re still not all that surprising. It’s not a difficult reach in this context, to view Solomon’s temple as a type representing the Church and the Glory of God descending upon it as representing the indwelling Holy Spirit. Nor does it conflict in any way with our conventional understanding of Scripture.

This situation changes rapidly when we investigate the meaning of the phrase “Glory of God”. In the original Hebrew this Glory that Paul understands to be the Holy Spirit is named “Shekinah”.

Still no problem so far, because in the English language nouns lack gender attributes. Not so, however, for the Hebrew language. The noun “Shekina” does possess a gender attribute, which is female. Turning to the Internet, the Wikipedia entry for “Shekinah” begins as follows:

“Hebrew [Shekinah] is the English spelling of a grammatically feminine Hebrew ancient blessing. The original word means the dwelling or settling, and denotes the dwelling or settling of the divine presence of God, especially in the temple in Jerusalem.” An accompanying figure shows the Shekinah, or the Glory of God, indwelling the temple as described in 1 Kings 8.

Noting the female gender of this indwelling Shekinah, we find here by comparing the indwelling presence of the Glory in Solomon’s temple with the description in Ephesians 2 of the Holy Spirit indwelling the human temple that Scripture itself, by furnishing this direct comparison, supports an interpretation of the Holy Spirit as a female Entity. This does appear to conflict with conventional Christian thought, as driven by the use in Scripture of the male pronoun in reference to the Holy Spirit. I fully explain in the novel “Buddy” why that viewpoint of conflict is actually a misperception.

This gender attribute in 1 Kings 8 was simply lost in the translation from Hebrew to English, which could have been a result of the lack of gender precision in the English language. But there is an associated gender misrepresentation in Isaiah 51:9, 10 that appears to be more deliberate. What the translators did in that passage was to substitute the grammatically incorrect ‘it’ for the gender-correct ‘she’ in reference to Shekinah. In their desire to maintain a fully masculine Godhead, they neutered the female. In the process, they inadvertently managed also to castrate their masculine God.