2013: Beyond Armageddon

by Robert Ryan

The sorrow of the Lord will be great, but a fifth age will dawn when again He tries to spread his message of righteousness through one called Muhammad. But Man will corrupt the words of this chosen prophet, and will not be saved.

  Thence will Man descend into two long ages of war and famine and plague, and he shall lose faith in salvation. An apostate generation will arise, and they shall turn to the Antichrist, and his dominion will spread upon the Earth.

  But at the end of the seventh age there will be an awakening, when the righteous will rise from sleep, and the divine spark in every soul will begin to grow into a single flame. Yet lo, the spark of Lucifer shall burn just as brightly in the multitude of sinners he hath gathered since Cain.

  And the Creator beholds Man standing at the edge of the abyss, when the day of reckoning is at hand, yearning to follow the light of heaven yet being drawn to the light from the lake of fire. And He weepeth at the sight, for He hath feared since the days of Adam that the temptations of Lucifer will be too powerful for Man to overcome. Only if He cometh as the Messiah can they be saved.

  But lo, the Creator said unto me He would not come, unless there be one righteous soul who wouldst sacrifice himself to pave the way for the final confrontation in the bottomless pit. For Man will have sunk so deep into wickedness that he must prove he is worth saving. And so one shall be chosen.

  The day of reckoning shall come at the dawn of the third millennium after the coming of Jesus. Thence will the seventh age end and the final age begin. Between these ages shall be a threshold in time, whither the Lord God, Father of all, shall create an opening in the heavens to lead Man from his world of sin to the world of righteousness for which he was created. And as the Heavenly Father did at the birth of his son Jesus, He shall align the stars to announce that the time of the Messiah is at hand.

  Ye shall know the day of reckoning is nigh when the days grow shorter and the eye of God stares down from the sun. And on the shortest day the heavenly finger of God shall point the way to the new world of salvation and righteousness. But before Man goeth through that heavenly gate, there must be a day of judgment. And if the chosen one is stronger than Job and will blaze the trail to the fallen Lucifer, the Messiah will come, and the pit shall give up its dead.

  And the Creator saith unto me, if Man chooseth wisely at the end of the seventh age, he shall be given a new age of righteousness to fulfill his promise, an age of glory without end. But if he chooseth the path of wickedness, he shall be lost forever.

  But ye must watch, for the heavens are ever changing, and no one can know the exact day nor the hour wherein the Messiah cometh. If ye do not watch, then Lucifer, that swallower of souls, will come upon thee as a thief.

  Then didst He say unto me, all that I have told you, all that you have seen of heavenly things, all that you have seen on earth, take thence the books which you yourself have written. And Man will read them, and will know me as the Creator of all things, and will understand that there is no other God but me. And let them distribute the books—children to children, generation to generation, nations to nations.

  Zeke rubbed his eyes and took a sip of his coffee. It had gotten cold.

  Dr. Connolly had said that these scrolls were beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings. If these were the actual words of Lot and Enoch, he was right. Jotting a quick note to get a second translation, Zeke considered the scrolls on the assumption that Dr. Connolly’s conclusions were correct.

  Written testimony from Lot and Enoch.

  The two mysterious angels from the Sodom and Gomorrah account in Genesis indentified as Metatron and Michael.

  The existence of Satan and Hell confirmed.

  A prediction about the “day of reckoning.”

  Dr. Connolly had said he interpreted it as occurring in 2012. Zeke leafed through the professor’s notes until he found his interpretation of Enoch’s timeline. He had copied the relevant section of the scroll onto a separate sheet, then attached two pages of handwritten analysis. Zeke carefully read the excerpt from Enoch’s scroll that filled the first page.

  “The day of reckoning shall come at the dawn of the third millennium after the coming of Jesus. Thence will the seventh age end and the final age begin. Between these ages shall be a threshold in time, whither the Lord God, Father of all, shall create an opening in the heavens to lead Man from his world of sin to the world of righteousness for which he was created. And as the Heavenly Father did at the birth of his son Jesus, He shall align the stars to announce that the time of the Messiah is at hand.

  Ye shall know the day of reckoning is nigh when the days grow shorter and the eye of God stares down from the sun. And on the shortest day the heavenly finger of God shall point the way to the new world of salvation and righteousness.”

  Zeke flipped the page and began reading Dr. Connolly’s comments. The handwriting was shaky and got progressively worse.

  This entire passage confirms what many Enoch scholars have argued, that Enoch was also the first astrologer, since he is clearly indicating that the positions of heavenly bodies can influence human behavior. This idea is further supported by Enoch’s mention of God aligning the stars at the birth of Jesus to announce the coming of the Messiah, which would explain the Star of Bethlehem and, one could argue, actually make God the first astrologer.

  Be that as it may, Enoch’s prediction about the day of reckoning is quite clear. “The dawn of the third millennium after the coming of Jesus” would mean sometime in the early 2000’s. “When the days grow shorter” would indicate sometime in the fall or winter. “And the eye of God stares down from the sun.” Many ancient cultures referred to a total solar eclipse as the eye of God. Starting with the year two thousand, there have been two in the fall/winter months. Since no cataclysmic events occurred, we know that the “day of reckoning” has not come.

  The next total solar eclipse—the only one in 2012— will be on November 13. If we take this as Enoch’s (God’s) harbinger that “the time is nigh,” then his next statement that “on the shortest day the heavenly finger of God shall point the way to the new world of salvation and righteousness” leads us to a very specific date: the winter solstice of 2012. It seems worth mentioning here that, also on that day, three planets will be aligned in a triangular arrangement we now call a yod, but which ancient astrologers referred to as the finger of God. And while yods in general are not uncommon, this one featuring Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto is quite rare. It is also intriguing to note that the ancients referred to the winter solstice as the Golden Gate, or Gate of God. While this may be a detour from the realm of science into pseudoscience or mythology, it is an indisputable fact that December 21, 2012 is the final day of the Mayan long count calendar—a day they considered the end of one world and the beginning of another. In other words, this is the point of alpha and omega.

  In any case, I have only scratched the surface of the mountain of speculation surrounding the 2012 phenomenon, and I am too weak to continue. There are many experts who could take up this thread.

  In the margin he had scrawled Unger? And beneath that, call Zeke.

  As a paleographer, in the final analysis I still consider the scrolls to be the primary, incontrovertible evidence that the day of reckoning is upon us.

  The handwriting had become extremely shaky.

  As to whether December 21 will be the actual day, even Enoch cannot be sure, because he says that “the heavens are ever changing, and no one can know the exact day nor the hour.” NASA agrees with him. Their website mentions that astronomical cycles are not absolutely constant and are not known exactly.

  Dr. Connolly’s notes ended there.

  December 21. Barely two months away. Two months to put together a dig, find the opening to Hell, figure out how to defeat Satan, then somehow make your way down…

  Impossible. Absurd. Unless December 21 wasn’t the day. Or, much more likely, the whole thing was nonsense, no matter how convinced Dr. Connolly was.

  Unless…

  Unl
ess Zeke was the Chosen One, and Some Greater Power was making things unfold according to some Master Plan. Dr. Connolly had tried to make that case, but Zeke hadn’t been convinced. He still wasn’t. It didn’t make sense.

  Lot had apparently been the original chosen one, but after all God’s pains to save him, he had never gotten the message out. Had the Archenemy gotten past Michael—the very archangel in charge of leading God’s army against Satan—and killed him? If so, what did that say about God’s power over evil? Lot said Satan and some of his “host” were watching them. Maybe Michael and Metatron were so outnumbered and preoccupied saving the daughters that they hadn’t been able to save Lot.

  Lot specifically told whoever found the scrolls to “sound the trumpet,” but Dr. Connolly never had. Convinced that Satan and his threats were real, he had essentially spent his life in hiding.

  For many are called but few are chosen…

  As the second one to read the scrolls, where did that leave Zeke?

  He turned on his computer to further his research. While it booted up he quickly scanned the professor’s notes, about fifty rumpled sheets that were mostly drafts of the scrolls. Countless comments were squeezed into spaces and margins—a paleographer thinking out loud, debating meanings with himself, notes about things to look up.

  The computer finished booting up and Zeke lost himself in other worlds. He scoured the Internet for everything he could find about Enoch and Sodom and Gomorrah. He copied blocks of text into a word processing document that quickly reached a hundred pages. He downloaded dozens of files and pictures that made him thankful he’d gotten the fastest possible fiberoptic connection. He became so absorbed that he was mildly startled when he noticed the first dim light of dawn coming through his window. Time to wrap this up so he and Leah could begin their day.

  He wiped his bleary eyes and did a final scan of the information he’d gathered, starting with the section on Enoch. From several apocryphal books attributed to him and his depiction in the Bible, an entire body of lore had evolved.

  He was the great-grandson of Adam, great-grandfather of Noah, and the father of Methuselah. Legend had it that he had been taken to heaven by God without dying, turned into the angel Metatron, placed nearest the Throne, made head of the angels and taught the nature of all things. Enoch/Metatron became the inventor of writing and mathematics and the first astronomer/astrologer. He developed a calendar from his study of the movements of the sun and planets. A Book of Enoch had once been part of the Bible but had been banned by the church. The writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls had included some of his writings. Some scholars believed The Book of Enoch had heavily influenced the writer of Revelation.

  He scrolled to the section on Sodom and Gomorrah.

  People had been searching for the “lost cities of sin” for thousands of years, but they had never been found. The countless hypotheses about their location varied widely, but most placed them somewhere around—or under—the Dead Sea. That bit of information had sent him down another road in his research.

  The Dead Sea sat on one of the world’s largest fault lines, the Great Rift Valley, a three-thousand mile scar on the face of the earth that ran from the Mideast down into Africa. The western half of the sea lay in Israel, the eastern half in Jordan. Ten times more saline than the ocean, its salt content was second—barely—to only to Lake Assal in Africa. The salt and a stew of other chemicals made the water about twenty-five percent solid, which made it the densest body of water in the world. This extreme density made it very difficult for anything to sink. The most common picture at the tourist sites was a vacationer floating atop the water while leisurely reading a newspaper.

  About two-thirds of the way down its length, an east-west peninsula divided the sea into two basins. The northern one was about thirteen hundred feet deep; the shallow southern one had actually dried up. Water was pumped into it from the northern basin to fill solar evaporation ponds, used by mining companies to extract the salt and chemicals. The water in the ponds ranged from about ten to fifteen feet deep.

  The Dead Sea was also the lowest point on earth, its surface about thirteen hundred feet below sea level. It struck Zeke that if there was a Hell, this seemed like the best place for the entrance to be. You were halfway there already.

  He needed to wrap this up, but he kept getting caught up in the many passages linking the Dead Sea, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Devil, and Hell.

  Myths and legends about the strange body of water had begun to spring up long before the Greeks and Romans, reaching their most fertile period during the Middle Ages. Pilgrims, influenced by Biblical accounts and the theological fervor of the time, saw signs of God’s wrath everywhere—especially in the pillars of salt they took to be Lot’s wife. Zeke noted with interest that these sightings most frequently took place at the southwestern corner of the sea.

  In more modern times, scientists discounted as nonsense the idea that any particular column of salt could be Lot’s wife, because even when crystallized, no salt formation would be able to withstand thousands of years of erosion. The natural forces of the region continually erased salt pillars and threw up new ones.

  Still, geologists and other researchers frequently found chunks of sulfur in and around the sea. Brimstone…

  In the thirteenth century, a monk called the sea the mouth of Hell, and the haze rising from it the smoke from Satan’s fire. Another account called the sea the chimney of Hell. In the fifteenth century, friar and respected scholar Felix Fabri said the sea drained into Hell.

  Lot’s name popped up often. Arabs to this day called it the Sea of Lot. Through the ages it had also been called the Sea of Sodom, Sea of Death, The Devil’s Sea, the Sea of Hell.

  “This is all very fascinating,” Zeke said out loud, almost giddy now from lack of sleep, “but I need to take it all with a grain of salt.” Laughing way too hard at his corny joke, he finally got serious again, concentrating on the ultimate question for mounting an archaeological expedition: where to dig?

  He flipped through Dr. Connolly’s notes, to a section headed Where are Sodom and Gomorrah?

  Despite the fact that Lot himself said he was in a cave to the west, the professor scrupulously avoided jumping to conclusions. “It is conceivable,” he wrote, “that in the confusion of escaping first Sodom, then Zoar, and the shock of watching his wife turn into a pillar of salt, Lot could have become disoriented and lost track of where he was. Even so, the Bedouin said he found the scroll in a cave along the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea.” Taken together, the professor concluded, this evidence outweighed all other conjecture about the location of Sodom and Gomorrah, and placed them somewhere toward the western side of the shallow southern basin.

  The theory seemed arguable to Zeke, based on everything he’d just read, but then again he’d only considered the problem for a few hours. Dr. Connolly had obsessed about it for decades.

  Zeke looked at his own notes on the most recent speculation about their location. Many experts favored a site near the southeast corner, but just as many thought it was under the water of the shallow southern basin. The latest expedition, however, had been triggered by a space shuttle photo showing shadowy anomalies in the deep, northern part of the sea. Two men in a small submarine designed for deep sea exploration had inspected the site. One of the men was the world’s foremost geological expert on the Dead Sea.

  The anomalies turned out to be mounds of the salt that constantly settled to form a crust covering the bottom of the sea. What, if anything, the mounds might cover could only be guessed at, because no mechanical arm attached to a submarine could dig through the rock-hard formations to find out. Explosives weren’t an option, since they might destroy whatever the archaeologists hoped to uncover. Just like terrestrial archaeology, marine archaeology ultimately required the slow, painstaking digging of trained human hands, and that wasn’t going to happen down there. Divers simply couldn’t survive at thirteen hundred feet.

  Eyes burning, Zeke took a las
t look at his notes. A verse he’d copied from Genesis caught his eye. It was nearly the same as a passage in Lot’s scroll, except that it was Abraham instead of Lot looking down on the destruction:

  And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

  Zeke turned off the computer and locked the materials back in the safe. He headed for the bedroom, mentally sifting through centuries of observations about Sodom and Gomorrah and the lowest point on earth. As he trudged up the stairs, all his thoughts had boiled down to one:

  Where there’s this much smoke, there has to be fire.

  CHAPTER 24

  When Zeke reached the bedroom Leah was just waking up. She noticed he was dressed. “What’s up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep so I went to the office to do some research on the scrolls and what it might take to put together a dig. Come on downstairs, I can tell you about it while I fix us some breakfast.”

  Leah showered while Zeke whipped together bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee. Over breakfast he gave her the highlights of his research.

  “I never knew the Dead Sea had such a fascinating history,” she said.

  “Me neither. But that’s just preliminary background information. I’ve still got to figure out what it all means. I feel like it’s time to make a decision about this, one way or another, so we can get on with our lives. Are you ready for that?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. It’s time.”

  “Okay. I’ll boil the ton of information I’ve gathered down to the essentials, so we can look it over and decide whether it’s time to seriously consider this or forget the whole thing. That does not mean, however, that we have to stop our film festival. I’m way into it. How about you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m going to have make a grocery store run. Among other things, we’re down to our last candy and microwave popcorn. You simply cannot have a film festival without these items.”