“That’s what my dream was about. The garden was withering away, and the little girl couldn’t stop it. Even though she planted it in good soil, it still withered away. No matter what she did, it kept withering.”
“Yes, and the same imagery was used two and a half thousand years ago, in the Book of Ezekiel, when the Lord gave a prophecy concerning the days of judgment that would come upon the king and his kingdom:
It was planted in good soil by many waters, to bring forth branches, bear fruit. . . . All of its spring leaves will wither. . . . Behold, it is planted, will it thrive? Will it not utterly wither . . . ? It will wither in the garden terrace where it grew.”4
“So it could have almost been written about the tree at Ground Zero.”
“The tree in the prophecy,” he said, “was a symbol. So too the tree at Ground Zero was a symbol. It was the seventh of the nine harbingers. And in the ancient vow, the erez tree was the symbol of the nation’s defiance of God and the embodiment of its intention to come back stronger and greater than before.”
“So it was the withering of a sign,” I said.
“And a sign,” said the prophet, “of withering.”
“The withering of what?”
“Of that which the sign represents. So what was it that the erez tree represented?”
“The nation’s coming back stronger and greater than before, but without God.”
“And so its withering is a sign that all these things will be undone, and more than that. The erez tree ultimately represented the nation itself. The nation would become as strong as an erez tree and stronger than its former state, as an erez tree is stronger than a sycamore. The tree stood for the nation.”
“In my dream . . . the garden was shaped into the form of an eagle . . . because it represented America.”
“What was the name they gave to that erez tree at Ground Zero?”
“The Tree of Hope.”
“They were transforming it into a symbol, a symbol of hope, an embodiment of a people, a nation, rising up from calamity and the ground of destruction.”
“So then the withering of that tree, that symbol . . . ”
“Signifies the withering of a nation,” he replied.
“The withering of America?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Morally,” he said, “and spiritually, America was withering away. A diseased tree, on the surface and for a time, may appear strong and alive as in past days, but below the surface is decay. So it was with America. It was a nation withering, its core decaying, its center deteriorating, a civilization in spiritual and moral decay.”
“No matter what the little girl did to save it, it kept withering.”
“As so it was with the Tree of Hope.”
“So then is there hope for the tree?” I asked. “Can it be saved?”
“Do you mean for the Tree of Hope, or America?”
“For America. Is there hope?”
“A disease that lies in the spirit cannot be cured by that which doesn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“A spiritual disease cannot be answered by cures rooted in other realms, political cures, economic cures, ideological cures. No such cure can stop the withering. A spiritual disease can only be answered by a spiritual cure. Apart from that there is no hope.”
“And so for America . . . ”
“America was planted as a tree of hope. But if such a tree should cut itself off from its roots, then what hope is left. Then it has no choice but to wither away.”
“It must have been disturbing,” said Ana, “for those who planted the tree at Ground Zero to watch it wither away like that.”
“It was,” he replied, “but there was nothing they could do about it.”
“So the prophet gave you another seal?”
“Yes, as we came out of the forest.”
“And what would it lead to?”
“Something very different,” said Nouriel. “It would take me to a place I had never been to before, and to an ancient day I had never heard of, and to ramifications that were, to say the least, ominous.”
Chapter 20
The Ninth of Tammuz
SO WHAT WAS on the seal?”
“An ancient-looking building with columns, capitols, a frieze, a triangular-shaped roof, and wide steps leading up to its entrance. I imagined it was some sort of Greek or Roman Temple. To the right and left of the steps were two figures, a man and a woman, each seated on some sort of throne. But the strange thing about the temple was its columns. There were eight of them. Two began at the same base, then spread out upward to end at two separate capitols. Two others crisscrossed each other, forming a giant X.”
“And what did you think it meant?” she asked.
“I came up with several different ideas, but none of them led me anywhere.”
“And then?”
“And then I had a dream. I was inside some sort of ancient temple.”
“As on the seal?”
“I couldn’t say. I didn’t know what it looked like from the outside. But inside the temple were priests.”
“What kind of priests?”
“I would imagine, pagan priests.”
“How would you know what pagan priests look like?”
“I wouldn’t. But they looked as I would have expected pagan priests to look like, had I known what they looked like. Their heads were shaved, and they were wearing long, dark robes. I counted five of them. They were holding a parchment.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. It was a large piece of parchment, the size of a small table.
Together they carried it up a stone staircase. They reached the top and were overlooking a stone altar by a blazing fire. They raised up the parchment, then dropped it into the flames.
“And then everything changed. I was now standing outside the colossal walls of what I presumed to be an ancient city. Surrounding me was an ancient army with shields and spears and siege works. But they were just standing there, waiting. I’m not any kind of expert on such things, but for some reason I knew it was the army of Babylon.
“Suddenly, there was a commotion. The soldiers began pointing upward to pillars of smoke that were ascending to the sky from inside the walls. I knew that the smoke was coming from the altar inside the temple. It was the parchment that had been cast into the flames.
“‘It is the sign,’ said one of them, the one who appeared to be their commander, ‘a sign that today is the day that their walls come down and their hedges will be broken.’ At that, the army began attacking the colossal wall, pounding it with their siege works over and over again until a breach opened up. And then it all collapsed.
“I had expected to see the inside of an ancient city. Instead, the breaking of the wall opened up to me a vast landscape of many cities, fields, towns, and houses. It was as if I were looking at an entire nation, a civilization. The soldiers began pouring through the opening. And the dream came to an end.”
“And what did you make of it?” she asked.
“As far as the priests and the parchment, I had no idea. But the scene at the wall seemed clear enough. It was the siege of a walled city, and yet it had to do with more than a walled city.”
“So where did you go from there?”
“And apart from the possibility that the temple on the seal could have been the same as in the dream, I didn’t see any connections. I looked for images of ancient priests, but I didn’t find anything that quite matched what I saw in my dream or anything that had to do with the burning of parchment.”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing, until one day as I was reexamining the seal, it hit me. What if the image wasn’t that of an ancient temple . . . but a modern one?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are modern buildings that look like ancient temples.”
“Where?”
“In the nation’s capital. I began searching the internet for im
ages of buildings from Washington, DC.”
“And?”
“It wasn’t long before I found it. It had eight columns, as did the building on the seal. Leading up to its entrance were wide steps framed with two statues, a seated man on one side, and a seated woman on the other. It could easily have passed for a classical temple.”
“Which building?”
“The Supreme Court.”
“But what would the Supreme Court have to do with ancient Babylonians?”
“That’s what I set out to find.”
“Set out?”
“For Washington, DC. I booked a hotel there for three nights. I figured it would be enough time to find whatever I was meant to find. But it turned out that I wouldn’t need it. My train arrived in Union Station in midafternoon. I took a taxi to my hotel and then, from my hotel, to the Supreme Court. I arrived there in the early evening. The building was lit up, giving the wall behind the columns a warm glow of incandescent yellow and orange.
“I had, of course, taken the seal with me. I removed it from my coat pocket and compared it with what was before me. Everything matched, the shape, the steps, the roof, the two statues, everything but the strange anomalies in the columns of the image.”
“The highest court in the land,” said the voice.
I turned around, and there he was. His gaze wasn’t directed at me but upward to the building’s facade.
“The Supreme Court,” he said. “Here the judges preside, and from here they hand down their judgments. But it is not the highest court. There is one of much higher authority . . . and a Judge far more supreme.”
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Tell me your dream,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why we’re here.”
So I told him.
“What you saw in your dream was the beginning of the end of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah. The army outside the city walls was, as you believed, that of Babylon. The end began in the fourth month of the Hebrew year.”
“How?”
“The Book of Jeremiah records how it happened:
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army came against Jerusalem, and besieged it. . . . In the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month, the city was penetrated.1
“It was on that day that the first of Jerusalem’s defensive walls was broken through. The city’s defenses were breached. The account continues:
So it was, when Zedekiah the king of Judah and all the men of war saw them, that they fled and went out of the city by night, by way of the king’s garden, by the gate between the two walls.2
“With the breaking down of the city’s wall of defense, the end was sealed. Those charged with the city’s protection abandoned it and fled. The way was now opened for destruction and judgment. Just four verses after the words that record the breach in the wall comes this:
And the Chaldeans burned the king’s house and the houses of the people with fire, and broke down the walls of Jerusalem. Then Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried away captive to Babylon the remnant of the people who remained in the city.3
“The breaching of the city’s wall of defense led directly to the destruction of the Temple, the city of Jerusalem, and the nation itself. Thus the day it happened was most significant and critical. The account reveals the day:
In the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month . . . 4
“It was the ninth day of the fourth month.”
“And the fourth month of the Hebrew year is called what?” I asked.
“Tammuz,” he replied, “the month of Tammuz.”
“So the ninth of Tammuz was the day that the end began.”
“Yes,” said the prophet, “and so it became a day of sorrow, fasting, and mourning.”
“OK, so the ninth of Tammuz was the day that sealed the destruction of Israel. But I’m not seeing what it has to do with the Supreme Court.” “Come,” he said.
At that, he led me up the steps and over to the right by the platform on which rested the statue of a seated man. He held a sword in his left hand and a tablet of stone against his shoulder.
“The Guardian of Law,” he said. “His charge is to guard the law. But what happens if the nation itself turns away from the law of God?”
“I don’t know.”
“When a nation turns away from God and the foundation on which it was established, the turning of spirit will inevitably lead to a turning of values, the changing of standards, laws, and precepts. It will rewrite the tablets. It will alter the underpinnings on which it stands. That which it had long upheld as right, it will now judge as evil, and what it had long opposed as wrong, it now champions.
“So it was for ancient Israel. What they once knew as immoral they now celebrated, and what they once revered they now despised. Those who opposed the ways of God, they now lifted up, and those who upheld His ways, the righteous and the prophets, they now persecuted. So the prophet Isaiah wrote of his nation’s metamorphosis:
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!5
“In the last days of ancient Israel, this metamorphosis entered the realm of sexuality. The nation’s culture had once upheld the sanctity of sexuality and of marriage as its sacred vessel. But now it turned away from both and embraced sexual immorality. Marriage was defiled and desecrated. The sacred was profaned; the profane was sanctified.
“And what of America?” asked the prophet. “If America has likewise turned away from God, then we will witness the same metamorphosis, the same transformation of values. And what the nation once knew to be right, it will now war against, and what it once knew to be wrong, it will now celebrate. It will turn away from the sanctity of marriage and sexuality and will embrace that which wars against the ways of God.”
“And it has,” I said.
“Who was it,” asked the prophet, “in ancient Israel that sanctioned this transformation, who authorized the metamorphosis of its values?”
“Its kings?”
“Yes, its kings and its priests, the keepers of its values.”
“And the priests of America would be its clergy?”
“America has no single clergy,” he said, “but it does have priests of another kind, a secular priesthood that has sanctioned the altering of its values.”
“The priests I saw in my dream officiated in the temple, and the temple represented the Supreme Court. So its priests would be the judges, the justices of the court . . . in their dark robes.”
“Come,” he said as he led me up the remainder of the steps. We were now standing in front of the great bronze doors that formed the building’s entrance.
“Beyond these doors,” said the prophet, “reside the high priests of American culture, those who sit as the keepers of the nation’s standards, the sanctifiers of its values. The priests play a central role in the apostasy of a civilization and the fall of a nation. They will either uphold its spiritual and moral foundations and resist the nation’s apostasy . . . or they will sanctify, sanction, and seal the nation’s apostasy. In the fall of ancient Israel, they sanctified it . . . and so too in the fall of America. So the sealing of the metamorphosis will be manifest in this house, in this temple.”
“There are nine Supreme Court justices,” I said. “But in my dream, I only saw five. Why?”
“Because your dream concerned a specific event. And there were five who took part in it.”
“The parchment,” I said, “what was it? What did it represent?”
“It represented a sacred foundation on which civilization has stood for ages.”
“Which was?”
“Marriage,” he said. “And upon that foundation has rested the family, and upon the family, society, and upon society . . . civilization. And yet, it was even more than that. Marriage is intrinsically bound to the foundation of human life and human nature, the distinction and bond of male and female.”
&
nbsp; “And the destruction of that parchment represented a specific act or sin against that foundation?”
“More than a specific sin and beyond any specific act, person, or people. All have sinned, and thus all are in the same place, and to all He extends His mercy and love, and so must His children. But what you saw represented the turning away of an entire civilization.”
“What I saw was the priests letting the parchment fall into the flames of the altar.”
“Yes, and so this Supreme Court took the covenant of marriage as it had been known and upheld for ages and brought it to an end.”
“To an end?”
“The end of what it had been for ages. Its essence, its core, the covenantal bond of male and female, was, with one act, struck down, the reason for its existence nullified, the sacred vessel annulled.”
“Annulled,” I repeated.
“Divorced from its purpose,” he replied.
“But I still don’t see the connection between what happened here and what happened in my dream . . . at the wall.”
“But in your dream,” he said, “it was connected. It was the smoke from the burning parchment that alerted the soldiers at the wall that the day had come.”
“Yes, but what would the Supreme Court ruling have to do with a wall?”
“The fall of ancient Israel began with a breach in the wall, the breaking of the hedge that protected the city. What took place in this house, this court, was the breaching of the wall, the breaking down of a hedge by which a civilization was preserved.”
“So that’s the connection?”
“More than that,” he said, “in the case of ancient Israel, it was the breach in the wall that protected a civilization that had fallen from God and was heading toward judgment. Once the wall was breached, there was nothing to stop its descent to judgment.
“America is now a civilization fallen from God and heading toward judgment—yet it was even more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“That ruling, the ending of marriage as it had always been known, came on June 26, 2015.”
“And?”
The Harbinger II Page 14