"And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke."
Joel 2:30

Then the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and testing Him asked that He would show them a sign from heaven. He answered and said to them, "When it is evening you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red'; and in the morning, 'It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and threatening.' Hypocrites! You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times.
Matthew 16:1-3

For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.
Matthew 24:24

"Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here [is] the Christ!' or, 'Look, [He is] there!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. But take heed; see, I have told you all things beforehand.
Mark 13:21-23

And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover." So then, after the Lord had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with [them] and confirming the word through the accompanying signs. Amen.
Mark 16:17-20

And there will be great earthquakes in various places, and famines and pestilences; and there will be fearful sights and great signs from heaven. But before all these things, they will lay their hands on you and persecute [you], delivering [you] up to the synagogues and prisons. You will be brought before kings and rulers for My name's sake. But it will turn out for you as an occasion for testimony. Therefore settle [it] in your hearts not to meditate beforehand on what you will answer; for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to contradict or resist.

You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relatives and friends; and they will put [some] of you to death. And you will be hated by all for My name's sake. But not a hair of your head shall be lost. By your patience possess your souls. "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those who are in the midst of her depart, and let not those who are in the country enter her.

For these are the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days! For there will be great distress in the land and wrath upon this people. And they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led away captive into all nations. And Jerusalem will be trampled by Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. "And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near." Then He spoke to them a parable: "Look at the fig tree, and all the trees. When they are already budding, you see and know for yourselves that summer is now near. So you also, when you see these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is near.

Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away. "But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly. For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man."
Luke 21:11-36

I will show wonders in heaven above And signs in the earth beneath: Blood and fire and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, And the moon into blood, Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the LORD. And it shall come to pass [That] whoever calls on the name of the LORD Shall be saved.'
Acts 2:19-21

And even as they did not like to retain God in [their] knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.
Romans 1:28-32

Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things?

And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains [will do so] until He [fn] is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the [lawless one] is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning chose you for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth, to which He called you by our gospel, for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given [us] everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work.
2 Thessalonians 2

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.

But you have carefully followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra--what persecutions I endured. And out of [them] all the Lord delivered me. Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned [them], and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture [is] given by inspiration of God, and [is] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3



Decoding Bible's 'cryptogram'

Ron Csillag, National Post | www.biblecodedigest.com | 31 March 2003

Read letter to Michael Drosnin


Will Saddam Hussein be overthrown? Where is Osama bin Laden hiding?
For answers, see the Good Book


Author Michael Drosnin believes the Bible, which includes the story of Moses, holds prophetic codes.

Among the hundreds of meetings and briefings that took place in the Pentagons bowels in the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, one earned the fleeting disdain of The New York Times, whose columnist, Bill Keller, sniffed that "several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time" had been "consumed [by a writer] who claims -- I am not making this up -- that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

"Maybe were all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged," Keller said.

The gathering, which reportedly took place Feb. 21, was said to have been convened by Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence, and attended by 10 top military intelligence officials, including Vice Admiral Lowell "Jake" Jacoby, director of the massive Defense Intelligence Agency, and Wolfowitz's deputy, Linton Wells, who is in charge of the Pentagon's nerve centre, known as 3CI (Command, Control, Communications).

On the eve of war, the military brass listened intently for a full hour as Michael Drosnin expounded on his two brisk-selling volumes on the Bible code.

Drosnin argues the Hebrew Torah -- the first five books of the Old Testament -- were intentionally encrypted, by a higher power, with prophetic warnings that have accurately predicted the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Kennedy assassinations, the moon landing, Watergate, and 9/11 -- and foretell the fall of Saddam Hussein and the precise location of bin Laden.

The Americans "took it very seriously," Drosnin says. "They're practical people and I wanted to give them something of practical use."

As a result of the meeting, Drosnin says U.S. and Israeli intelligence forces are hot on bin Laden's trail in that very place the Bible mentions, "right as we speak." Of course, he would not divulge where that place is.

As for Saddam Hussein, the Bible's embedded code ponders, "Who is destroyed?" and then, in the same matrix, answers, "Hussein," with the following number crossing his name: 5763, the Jewish year that corresponds to 2003. "That foretells the outcome of this conflict," Drosnin says confidently. "It might be obvious now, but it wasn't when I told them."

It could be that the U.S. defence establishment is grasping at straws, or that more and more people in Washington are motivated by a White House that frequently invokes God and religious imagery. Drosnin discounts the religious angle.

"This is not based on faith. This is based on experience. The code keeps coming true."

Drosnin is a secular Jew, a former police reporter for the Washington Post and former writer for The Wall Street Journal. To be sure, his books, The Bible Code (1997) and last year's sequel, Bible Code II: The Countdown have been used by various fundamentalists, prophets of doom and supermarket tabloids as sure signs the Good Book knows all and that the end is nigh. Detractors point out the code violates the Bible's own ban on soothsaying.

Drosnin himself says he did not fully believe the code's power until Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in November, 1995. Having learned Hebrew and the computer program that searches for hidden words, he found "Yitzhak Rabin" intersected with the letters that formed "assassin that will assassinate." Drosnin says he warned the doomed leader in a letter in September, 1994, that the Bible predicted he would be assassinated during that Jewish calendar year.

After the killing, the word "Amir" was found as part of the same grid (Rabin's killer was Yigal Amir.) Drosnin remembers his reaction: "Oh my God. It's real."

The idea of a secret text embedded in the Bible is hardly new. In the 12th century, European rabbis wrote about discovering meaningful words hidden in the Hebrew text of the Torah. Isaac Newton, the scientist who discovered gravity, obsessively searched the Bible for the "cryptogram set by the Almighty," in the words of John Maynard Keynes in a biographical sketch of Newton. But lacking a computer, Newton could only speculate. He did, however, set a date for Armageddon, based on his research: 2060.

Sixty years ago in Prague, Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl expanded the search. But the true breakthrough came in the early 1990s by a team of Israeli mathematicians led by Eliyahu Rips, an expert in group theory, a field that underlies quantum physics.

Using a computer, Rips converted the Bible into a string of 304,805 Hebrew letters, minus spaces, and looked for names of great Jewish sages in close proximity to their birth and death dates. He was astonished to find many matches, and calculated the probability of finding his results by random at one in 10 million. His paper, entitled Equidistant Letter Sequencing in the Book of Genesis, was published in the journal Statistical Science in 1994. The math in the thrice-refereed work was pronounced ironclad. The coup-de-grace, as it were, came when Harold Gans the United States top cryptologist at the U.S. Defence Department set out to disprove Rips work and ended up corroborating it.

Thus was born the primary tool of code research -- ELS, or equidistant letter sequencing.

What does a typical ELS look like?

The folks at biblecodedigest.com helpfully offer the following:

Suppose we start with the sentence, "All of our avenues are wide." To locate an ELS, we eliminate the spaces and look for words that could be formed from letters that are equally spaced within the string of letters that form the sentence.

So, if we start with the second letter (L) and then skip three letters to pick up the next letter of the code (O), and so forth, we find the word LOVE within the string: a L l o f O u r a V e n u E s a r e w i d e.

To Drosnin and the like-minded, the Hebrew Bible is a giant crossword puzzle that criss-crosses the entire text with a complex network of hidden phrases and words -- a computer program that could not have been written by humans.

He took the ELS concept a step further, using it to claim the Bible leads to secular prophecies. On Sept. 11, 2001, for example, his computer allegedly found "twin," "towers," "airplane" and "it knocked down" hidden in the Bible, and "sin, crime of bin Laden" intersected with "city and tower."

And apparently, the Big One is coming. Drosnin's most dire warning yet contains the words "world war," "atomic holocaust" and "end of days" all in the close vicinity of "2006." (Note the similarity to Newton's year of doom).

While Drosnin apparently has his fans in U.S. military circles, both Rips and Gans have distanced themselves from Drosnin's conclusions, saying using the Torah codes to predict the future is unfounded, futile and of no value.

Barry Levy, dean of McGill University's religious studies department and a Torah scholar, says, "I'm surprised to learn that the Pentagon is engaging in sorcery as part of its military strategy. There is nothing particularly spiritual or convincing or valid about this. It's entertainment."

The major problem with the codes, as Levy sees it, is that the original Hebrew text of the Torah is long gone, and that results can vary wildly depending which of many versions of the Bible one uses -- and whether one believes the Bible is inerrant in the first place.

"The codes just confirm ideas people already have. To imagine this does anything other than provide spectacular entertainment is just silly," Levy says. "You could probably do this with a newspaper."