Frank Molver; thanks for your comments and affirmation … I've attached another report of something else I consider miraculous, but in a different way


A stone not made with human hands

When I was young my mother used to say -‘look at the dogwoods, they’re blooming white crosses for Easter.’ I thought so too. But as I grew older I noticed the dogwoods sometimes bloom way before Easter, and way after too.

Sentimental symbols from nature. Not unlike the sand dollars we stared at with our own children; neat lacquered descriptions of the wounds of Christ, set alongside velvet paintings of lions, tigers, and Elvis shaking hands with Jesus. 

Statues are stones cut with human hands, traditionally made for kings and conquerors. The prophet Daniel had a vision of a massive statue, empire level potentates all rolled into one, someday giving way to a ‘stone not made with human hands’, a divine stone that would crumble the massive edifice of all the worldly kingdoms in history.

If you look at the Middle East from Space, and squint a little, it looks like a king kneeling in prayer. The folded hands are the fertile Nile valley protruding from the sleeve. Saudi Arabia forms the main part of the body; the head and crown are Turkey and Greece. The long robe flows through Iran.

 


The only manmade feature you can see from Space is the Suez Canal, which cuts through the wrist like a nail. At the bottom tip of the Nile valley stands the Great Pyramid of Giza. Legends saw it as a symbol for the world, with its inner passageways resembling a model of biblical history.

The descending passageway at the entrance became the descent of humanity after the fall. A cramped upward branch, forcing you to stoop the entire way, symbolized redemption by the legalism of Old Testament times; weighing people down with burdensome statutes.

Then on to the birth of the Messiah, with a vaulted hallway on that same upward path, but where the visitor can stand fully erect, a freedom felt deep in the bones, literally. The rising angle of this passageway intersects Bethlehem of the Christmas story, when taken from the Great Pyramid’s coordinates. 19th Century Indian Jones types, making the most of these curious passageways, measured their transitions with biblical dates, marked and calibrated by some clever alignment with the stars.

So we have a relief of a king kneeling in prayer over the earth and its history, bearing a crucifixion wound inflicted by the very people for whom he prays. What we would call a good king, it seems to me. And there is a place near the king’s breast the world calls the Holy Land. All of this by some freak alignment between history and nature.

But it’s called the Holy Land, not because of the image of the wounded king we can only see from Space, but because it is the center of the redemption story unfolding over thousands of years; where the Lord himself had been that perfect witness, not only as an example to follow, but as an expression of divine love for a broken humanity.

If we let these stones speak a little more, key events appear to be marked by their distances to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, in the heart of the Holy Land. What an odd thing; that significant dates in history should appear as physical distances from this Holy place.

This would not have surprised the ancient Hebrew sages; they believed God chose this Temple Mount as the ‘Center of the Earth’, the Center of Life. These are the hills Abraham climbed on his horrific mission of faith. The same hills where Jesus was nailed to a cross, as if his crucifixion would someday reach beyond its gentle slopes.

So yes, Jerusalem and its Temple site has been a place where history has been shaped like no other. And yes, it has emerged again today, as an intractable political issue for much of the world, just as the Bible prophesied it would become in the Last Days; ‘a burdensome stone’.

But it is quite another thing to claim that it’s very location and dimensions were a kind of prophetic cipher of future events. Yet according to John Maynard Keynes, even Isaac Newton had become fully absorbed in such arcane musings, a discovery that shocked Keynes and Newton’s friends as well. So they shuffled him off to London, away from such an eccentric lifestyle, to a habitat more suitable for a prominent scientist of the Enlightenment.

And that was the end of that, until David Flynn wrote the ‘Temple at the Center of Time’ and took up where Isaac Newton’s sacred mysticism left off.

Flynn made measurements from the Temple Mount using the original Federal Aviation International Sphere Model of the earth (FAI), or some such earth model, and found a direct correlation of key historical events with their distances to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

The Hebrews escaped slavery in Egypt around 1441 BC, and he measured 1,441 thousand feet from the Great Pyramid to the Temple Mount.

A millennium later, the Hebrew people were freed by Cyrus from Babylonian captivity, after Cyrus had conquered Babylon in 539 BC. And Flynn measured 539 statute miles from Babylon to the Temple Mount.

Then in the 1st Century AD, Jerusalem and the Temple were laid waste by Rome’s legions. And ever since, a Hebrew homeland was barely imagined, until Napoleon decreed in 1799 AD that a homeland within Palestine should be returned to the Hebrew people still scattered throughout the earth. And Flynn measured 1799 nautical miles from the Temple Mount to the center of Paris.

Through the cooperation of Great Britain, a homeland for a re-born nation of Israel came to fruition in 1948 AD, and Flynn measured 1948 nautical miles from the Temple Mount to the foundation stone of London.

Mecca’s Kaaba, constructed in the 7th century AD, came out to be 666 nautical miles from the Temple Mount. And for much of the church in those following centuries, the rise of Islam was a virtual fulfillment of the Book of Revelation, complete with the persecution and retreat of the Christian faith from most of the ancient world, and continuing on into today.

Stranger still is the way these distances from the Temple Mount change from ‘Statute’ to ‘Nautical’, as Biblical history shifts from the Old Testament, a book of laws or statutes, to the New Testament, a new community awash in nautical symbolism.

As if all of this is not peculiar enough, an Israeli scientist, Saul Kullook, recently developed an algorithm correlating the change in the Earth's axis tilt, with major events in Jewish history.

I have no idea what lead him down such a rabbit trail. Perhaps he was thinking the earth's tilt influences the climate of Israel. Perhaps the tilt is timed to align with Old Testament prophecies of Diaspora and its subsequent desertification, and the Aliya of the last century with its agricultural boom. I don’t know.

But while the Flynn and Kullook results agree on the return from Babylon, David Flynn measurements had the Exodus at 1441 BC, but Saul Kullook calculations came out at 1476 BC.   

To our modern ears there can’t be any more ridiculous hypotheses than Flynn’s and Kullook’s. And yet they end up in agreeing within a few percent, despite being based on entirely different premises.

~

We see through a glass darkly, to quote St. Paul. Quite the understatement, in my opinion.

Still, this image of a wounded king praying over the world and its history, appeals to me more than my mother’s dogwood blossoms.

It is as if the very topography of the earth is carved and staked with the redemption story, no longer just an imaginary stone in some prophet’s dream.


‘And if they become silent, the very stones will cry out’

                                               Gospel according to Luke 19:40