Jesus said, "You, don't understand my abundance!"
With that the vision ended.
It was late January, 1998. For the previous two months I had been in a serious study of Time in the Bible. Jesus already had His hand heavily into the project.
Now I was being told I did not understand. What was I missing?
Over the 1997 Thanksgiving Holidays, I had set out to chart the historical chronology of the Bible. My purpose was simple. I wanted to see what I could learn by piecing together all the various time references spread throughout the Old Testament.
Over the 2 months that followed, I had experienced some of the strangest events in my Christian walk to that point.
The timeline project was scheduled into my late afternoons, the hour or so before dinner was when I had time each day to work on the project. In what I thought should be unrelated morning devotionals the pieces of the puzzle kept "arriving" for that afternoon's work. Nearly every day, through situations that could only be a "God thing" more and more clues kept adding to that original chronology.
Those clues are still visible in the stories and chronology found on the Bible Time website.
One example was my understanding of 1 based math as it applies to the lives of people. I came to understand that year 1 of life for all people recorded in the Bible is counted in the Bible as their age 1. Not year 0 as we count ages today. This was strange but important since so many life lengths chain together to compose the Bible's chronology.
One morning I opened my mail and found the monthly church newsletter. The first article, in normal fashion, was a letter from the church pastor. In the article he quoted the life length of Peter the Great. The Pastor's count was one year lower than I had read the previous day in my set of dusty encyclopedias. What was up? My 50 year old encyclopedia set had used the ancient style of counting, his modern encyclopedias had converted to modern style ages where year 1 of life is counted as year 0, dropping the age at death by 1 year.
In this case it was a miracle of timing. Peter the Great isn't even on the timeline, but the age calculation differences mattered signficantly to the way the timeline is graphed for people who are on the timeline.
By late January 1998, I thought I was done. The historical chronology from Adam to the present, with an estimation of the current biblical year from Adam was done.
What more was there? What more besides an interesting historical chronology?
On the afternoon of the vision I had been at work in my office. I worked at home, telecommuting 3000 miles from the Seattle area to my employer's offices in North Carolina. I had been sitting at my computer doing company business. Then, all of a sudden, I could not stay awake.
To keep from falling out of my chair and hurting myself on the tile of the concrete floor, I headed for the bedroom to lie down. Better to give into this need to nap than get hurt.
After my head hit the pillow, but before I ever fell asleep the vision began. I was sitting in a classroom. Jesus was at the front. Everything was very fuzzy, nothing was easy to make out. There were tables, and it appeared, others, in the classroom also taking lessons.
"Professor Jesus" was at the front. He looked at me, pointed his finger and said, "You don't understand my abundance." Then the vision ended.
I was no longer sleepy at all. I had an intense emotional feeling of shame. I did not understand something. What, I wondered, was there to not understand about the historical chronology of the Bible?
The only thing to do at this point was to pray and ask Jesus, "What does abundance mean? What is it that I don't understand?"
After praying this way for several days, I had the answer. An answer that if correct meant that the Bible contained a stunning amount of information about events in world history and especially events in our part of the age. More information than anyone had ever dared to suggest.
The original, historical, chronology of events in the Bible repeats again. 1 modern day for 1 historical year.
This rule brings every dated historical story in the Bible to bear on modern world headlines. This is far more abundant that any other existing theory of how the supposed end-times works. Not only did I not understand Jesus' abundance, nobody else did either.
The aligning math, the math that shows where the replay falls in modern world history, springs directly from stories in the Bible. For now the exact math does not matter. But, after running the math, there is a list of dates, a timeline, on which each dated story within the Bible will replay. The first such date was in July of 1974, the last in March of 2010.
Once I understood how the math worked, and when each story fell against modern dates, I still did not know if the math was right. I needed to validate Bible stories against past events in world headlines to see if the math worked.
I took the list of dates produced by this process and went on a trip to the local Public Library. I pulled out the microfilm rolls that contained copies of the local newspaper.
What, I wondered, did this time line predict?
This is a curious, and important, question. A statement that the Bible's stories are replaying again now in world events does not answer the question how?. Bible stories may be subtly replaying, or they may be grandly replaying. They may have a limited geography, say in modern Israel, or they may be widely fulfilling, say across the planet. Without a specific list of examples of how it has replayed so far, it is impossible to know how they unfold, or "fulfill" in their replay.
After about two hours in the library it was clear. The Bible's chronology provides a dated outline of when the world "changes." The way the change happens is patterned after the associated Bible story.
The first date on the timeline was the date of President Nixon's resignation. The United States had lost a leader and lost face. This was a replay of Adam's fall, when Adam had lost his position in heaven and had lost face. Adam (and Eve) had eaten of the forbidden fruit. The modern Adam, the United States, represented by its leader, Richard Nixon, had also eaten the forbidden fruit, the Forbidden City, the capital of China.
The curses pronounced over Adam, that the ground would no longer yeild its crops, would take about 10 years to unfold, as the unemployed masses of China began taking away jobs from American workers. Before Nixon "opened" China (ate from the forbidden fruit) Americans could comfortably support a family of 4 on the factory wages of a single worker. Within 25 years it would take 2 wage earners in low wage service jobs to similarly support a family of 4, and light manufacturing jobs would essentially disappear from the United States.
It is also curious to note that Nixon was pardoned. Spared from the impeachement process that was brewing against him at the time of his resignation. Adam was similarly pardoned, granted life on Earth, and time to reproduce. The son fashioning a plan of redemption. In Adam's case it was his son Jesus, in Nixon's case his political son, President Ford.
By 1985 the timeline dates turned to the Soviet Union and Russia. Every date indicated by the day-for-a-year replay story pointed at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev did something to permanently change the makeup of the Soviet Union. Eventually, on another prophetic date the Soviet Union would collapse.
It was now clear that the United States and the Soviet Union were both subjects of the Bible's replaying stories. This was far beyond modern Israel as a field for prophetic fulfillment and an important lesson from the entire story. Fuller understanding of this angle of the story awaited several more years of study.
By January of 1991 the timeline story turned to Noah's flood. The primary event in Noah's story is 40 days of rain that destroys the ancient world. Of course Noah's covenant prevents a perfect replay, and besides each story is replaying in a metaphorical sense anyway, but those 40 days of rain replayed as the 40 days of air war in the Persian Gulf War. Instead of water from the sky causing destruction, it was bombs from the sky causing destruction.
Not only political events, but military were now documented as following the timeline.
A seven year period of relative quiet followed the Persian Gulf War before the time line suggested other important dates. This is the quiet time in terms of Bible narrative between Noah and Abraham.
In spring of 1998, when I was first working on the timeline, this 7 years of quiet ended in the future in the fall of 1998. Abraham's prophetic stories were going to unfold in the last 3 months of the year. I could not tell how they would unfold, but instead of an historical study, it was clearly going to be in real time. I was going to be watching Bible stories unfold on dates as they happened.
This was clearly something that Kings had longed to see. Since when, for at least 2000 years, had the Bible been describing headlines as they unfolded? The significance of this was overwhelming.
By April 15, 1998, I had quit my job.
My thinking at the time was that I could have the story written up fast, perhaps by the middle of 1998. I figured I would then return to computer work full time. By July it was clear that the money would run out long before the project ended. What, I prayed to Jesus, was I to do?
"Simplify," was his response.
With that I set about to simplify my entire life, to make room for what He wanted me doing.
By August the house was sold and most of the contents either given away or thrown away. I was now working full time for Jesus, with an amazing timeline to follow as the headlines unfolded.
Seeing past dates work is no indication that they will continue to work into the future. It may "fit" history yet have nothing valid to say about the future. Using microfilm is also easier than real time because prophetic dates can be checked from both sides. Not so in real time.
My chance to see that the prophetic stories unfold as time passed began in the last 3 months of 1998. This is where Abraham's stories unfold across the timeline, and there is plenty of narrative in order to spot fulfillment headlines.
The Wye River Memorandum signing dates and the events of mid December, 1998, when Clinton reopened wide spread bombing in Iraq showed that the story continued. Clinton's bombing, especially was a prophetic fulfillment of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. At the time every wondered if Clinton's actions were a "Wag the Dog" scenario. The Bible's supporting stories clearly said this was. Clinton had burned Iraq in order to keep his own political career alive.
I strugged, though, with an apparent miss. On November 21, 1998, there should have been a replay of Sodom and Gomorrah. Fire from the sky is a pretty hard thing to miss and should have been easy to spot in headline news. There was no fire that date. Why?
The answer took years to figure out.
Some stories have a prophetic way to read them. In the prophetic application, all numbers in the text count towards the eventual fullfillment.
This rule requires an audited translation, of which there are none, thus the Open Source Bible Project was born. In specific cases, though, like Sodom and Gomorrah, it is possible to chart out the modern prophetic variation on the historical story. In this case Sodom was burned on September 11, 2001. This is also the fulfillment of several other stories, including Samson pushing over 2 columns, killing 3000 people on the roof.
This more complex reading of scripture has taken years to learn. No wonder it has remained a full time project, even to this day.
Those early months were very satisfying. The timeline worked historically as well as predictively. Problems still remained.
The historical record in the Bible, the source of most of the historical dates, is mostly about the political intrigues of its central players. From Abraham's deceptions to Moses leading the people out of Egypt. Even the records of the various kings' reigns are filled with stories of "palace intrigue." Those intrigues are hard to see in modern headlines, but they are there.
By the spring of 2000 my eye for seeing the details had changed dramatically. I was now able to seperate vaious stories into distinct fulfillment "bands" and the timelines began to take on a much more realistic, but complex, structure.
The mysteries of the Gospels began to unfold as well, and Jesus' own, complex, and prophetic timelines began to get charted.
Imagine trying to document a symphony. Each musician has a seperate score, each playing his own story. But, they all work together as a whole. Nobody plays a note that does not match someone else's note. This is much more like how the Bible's timeline actually works.
One of the score's is Noah, another Abraham, another Moses, another the Judean Kings, another Jesus, another Stephen, and there are several others beyond this list.
Each of these series represents both a replay of the original historical chronology as well as a series of modern dates implied by a modern replay.
Needless to say, the Bible provides an abundant, intricate, outline of important world events throughout this period of history. I've been watching the stories unfold for 9 years and continue to be amazed at the way details from the Bible's stories agree with the people, places, and events found in the headlines.
I doubt I ever could have had that vision, a vision that radically changed my life, if I wasn't already walking with Jesus regularly.
I don't have an exclusive on this, not the time line, nor on Jesus himself. Jesus wants a relationship with you too.
If you don't already know Jesus, start today, start now. Decide that you are going to follow Him, and get to know Him and be obedient to him. Jesus is alive and well. His spirit speaks to all that would listen. Get to know Him, do what He says. Only Jesus knows his plans for this period, only Jesus can show you how to walk through this very dangerous time in world history.
In Jesus' service,