02 Thunder of Heaven: A Joshua Jordan Novel (36 page)

“Bible scholars have argued over whether this second event will happen after the rapture, or just before. It’s my judgment that it will probably happen
before
the rapture.”

“So, what’s this event?”

“I call it Ezekiel’s thunder.”

“You’ll have to explain that one …”

“Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament. One of God’s prophets. Chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine. Someone called Gog is described as the leader of a nation called ‘Magog,’ which is said in the Bible to be a great land in the north. In chapter thirty-eight God tells His prophet that this nation of Magog, which seems to be a clear reference to Russia and its neighboring republics, is going to be the leader of a deadly coalition of Islamic nations. That prophecy tells us they will come against the nation of Israel in a ferocious war.”

“Coalition of nations? Like …”

“They’re actually named in that part of Ezekiel. You can look it up yourself. Those nations can be identified by matching them historically to their present-day counterparts. Libya today was called ‘Put’ back then. Then there’s ‘Persia’ — that’s modern-day Iran. ‘Cush’ is described in Ezekiel too. That would be Sudan today. ‘Gomer and Togarmal,’ also called ‘Beth-togarmah,’ those are the areas now in modern-day Turkey, and so is ‘Meshech.’”

“What happens in the war?”

“Something amazing. The enemy armies are poised to cover Israel, we are told, literally like ‘a cloud,’ they are so numerous. There’s seemingly no hope for Israel. Then God intervenes in a stunning, incredible, miraculous way. God causes so much confusion that we are told
in verse twenty-one of chapter thirty-eight, that ‘every man’s sword shall be against his brother.’ In other words, in the melee created by God to protect Israel, the enemy actually helps to destroy itself, to fire on its own troops.”

“So, where’s the big miracle?”

“Verse twenty-two.”

Belltether smirked. “Sorry, Reverend, I must have misplaced my Bible.”

But as he said that, the reporter thought it odd that a memory bubbled up to the surface: that black-covered Bible that his mother gave him for this twelfth birthday. He wondered where it was. Probably in an attic somewhere or thrown away with his other middle school books.

But Campbell wasn’t fazed by Belltether’s wisecrack. He knew verse twenty-two by heart. “Ezekiel says that God will destroy the enemies of Israel in that day by ‘great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.’ And just before that, in verse nineteen, we’re told there will be ‘great shaking in the land of Israel.’ So, Mr. Belltether, you tell me … what does that sound like to you?”

“You’re the Bible scholar.”

“Fire and brimstone, volcanic eruptions; shaking of the land, earthquakes. That sounds logical doesn’t it?”

“No, actually it doesn’t. The whole thing sounds like science fiction on steroids.” That’s what the reporter said out loud, at least, but he didn’t say what he was really thinking. In a world where the Jersey coast had just been nuked and where New York barely escaped destruction itself, Belltether was ready for anything.

Campbell smiled. “When God says He will do a thing, it doesn’t matter that He has said it through His prophet twenty-five hundred years ago. If the Lord says it will happen, then it will happen.” Then he added, “And why will God do it? The Lord makes it clear through His prophet Ezekiel. He does it all to let people like you and folks around the world know that He is God. Right there in Ezekiel chapter thirty-eight, verse twenty-three. When all the dust has settled from this miraculous rescue of Israel, the Lord speaks and says, as He does
repeatedly in that part of Ezekiel: ‘Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself, and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the Lord.’ ”

In his hotel room, Belltether finished looking at his notes from that interview and dropped them on the table. He stared out into space. A shiver ran down his back, as if a gentle breeze had unexpectedly brushed against him.

Then he shot up from the couch and started rummaging wildly through the dresser drawers. He ran to the bedroom, and from the nightstand he retrieved a Gideon’s Bible. He thumbed around in the Old Testament until he finally stumbled on the book of Ezekiel. His hand was shaking. He found this all too incredible and was trying to calm himself.
What’s the matter with you, Belltether? You act like you’re about to meet a ghost. Just read the Bible verses for yourself. Just do it.

He sat back down with chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine of Ezekiel opened on his lap. He read the exact verses that Campbell had cited, the prophecies of Ezekiel given two thousand five hundred years before.

There it was, in black and white. The description of the exact nations that would come against Israel. The massive size of the invading army. The whole thing would look hopeless from Israel’s standpoint — and it would be. Belltether had received the media reports from the war front. Israel hadn’t had a chance. Their own generals were getting ready to die with their boots on because they saw absolutely no hope. But it wasn’t hopeless. The unimaginable miracle
would
happen. Just as the invading forces were entering across the borders, a freakish series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes had burst through the earth’s crust, encircling the tiny country — as if someone had drawn a circle of fire around Israel, as if someone were saying, “You shall not pass.” All the details were spelled out in the prophecies of Ezekiel: “brimstone, fire, a great shaking in the land” — which is exactly what had happened in the fiery conflagration of volcanic explosions and earth-shattering quakes.

Belltether’s hands were trembling.

Another memory came to his mind. His mother used to walk him as a boy to Sunday school every week. She would quiz him when it was over: “Okay, Curty boy, what did you learn about the Lord Jesus today?”

He was clever enough to spout back what she wanted to hear. But what had he really learned? Then the years of ruthless, hard-boiled cynicism followed, and a life that had taken some rough turns. But he had never forgotten them, those Bible lessons as a child. Maybe he needed to be a boy again to figure this all out.

He dropped down to the ground, onto his knees. Curtis Belltether had some unfinished business from thirty years before. He started praying.

“God, it’s me, Belltether. We haven’t talked since I was a schoolboy and my mom made me go to church camp and Sunday school. That was a long time ago. I remember looking at that picture in the Bible, of Jesus on the Sea of Galilee stopping the storm and stilling the waves. I somehow knew back then it was all true, but I walked away anyway — don’t know why — and I’ve been walking ever since. Going nowhere fast. But I’m back. You’re too big for me to ignore anymore. I want Your Son Jesus Christ to take over now. I should have done it long ago, but I’m doing it now. I believe in Him, and I need You to save me.

When Belltether was done, he stood up. He had to smile. He thought of something.
Too bad Mom’s dead. She’d be so happy.

Then he snatched the package off the coffee table, blew out of his hotel room, and took the elevator to the lobby. He asked the desk attendant to mail the big envelope for him. Then he added, “This has to go out immediately.”

Belltether took the elevator back up to his floor. As he did he couldn’t avoid the eerie, unmistakable feeling of completion. Finality.

He walked back to his hotel room. He was going to take his room key out to unlock the door, but it was already slightly ajar. Wow, he thought,
I guess I really was in a hurry to get that package mailed.

When he walked into the room something wasn’t right. His notes, his tape recorder, and the copy of his completed article — all of them had been on the coffee table. They were missing.

Belltether whirled around just in time to see the barrel end of the handgun fitted with a silencer pointed at his forehead. There was a surprised look on Belltether’s face, but there wasn’t the usual look of hopeless panic or fear that the gunman’s victims usually had. The man holding the gun, Tomasso, the bodyguard of Caesar Demas, thought that was strange.

Belltether didn’t have the chance to say a word, but he had already done his praying. Any attempt to talk Tomasso out of killing him would have been useless.

Tomasso didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger, and Belltether dropped backward. The gunman had to take one last look at his dead victim on the floor as he puzzled over Belltether’s final reaction.

The killer had already coldly collected all of Belltether’s notes, tapes, and finished article and stuffed them into his small briefcase. He tucked the gun away, and with briefcase in hand he quickly slipped out of the room, down the elevator, and out of the hotel.

The cameras were rolling, but the conversation had just stopped. The production director in the control booth was squirming and muttering to himself, “Come on, say something …”

The host of the television program, Bernie Bellows, was seated in the middle of his famous round table on the studio set. On his left, Dr. Nigel Huntington, the Oxford philosopher and usually bellicose atheist, was looking more passive than usual and taking a long, languid drink of water. Across the table from him, Christian theologian Dr. Maxwell Thompson was waiting for an answer to his question.

Bellows smiled and was about to interject something, just to fill the dead air. But Dr. Thompson hopped in first. “Dr. Huntington, what I’m asking is whether you are familiar with the mathematical odds worked out by a Nobel Prize – winning mathematician at your own university, at Oxford? The odds that those long-extinct volcanoes and attending earthquakes in the Middle East would explode precisely and exactly, as if on cue, just as the coalition armies and navy were about to invade Israel. Bernie, I think you have the graphic; can you put it on the screen?”

With that, Bellows clicked a button, and his set backdrop became an illuminated screen. There was an outline of the nation of Israel, with little red flame symbols designating each volcanic eruption and a lightning bolt representing major earthquake activity. An arrow represented each attempted enemy army or navy advance. On the graphic,
at each exact attempted invasion point, there were symbols for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Thompson couldn’t help but laugh. “Dr. Huntington, look at this. Down in the Sinai, the armies of Libya and Sudan advancing toward Israel from the south, see the arrow? Notice how the arrow is cut off by the lightning bolt of a major earthquake and two volcanic eruptions. Then over at the Jordanian border with Israel, the armies of the coalition are stopped right at the border of Israel by the same thing. Total destruction. The armies trying to cross over through the Golan Heights from Syria, stopped in their tracks by eruptions, earthquakes — incinerated. Same story …”

Huntington had both his hands in the air, waving them. “Don’t bother. We all know the story. We’ve seen the news so you don’t have to bore us.”

“Then,” Thompson continued, “up in the north of Israel, the big army push from the Russian coalition — earthquakes, volcanic ash and lava, hurtling boulders blown out of the volcanoes. Wiping them out, just at the perfect time, as if directed in perfect military precision. And what the earthquakes and volcanic fireballs didn’t accomplish along Israel’s borders, the giant hailstones falling from the sky did. Now, your Oxford mathematician, working jointly with a geologist, computed the odds of all of this happening the way it did to be eight hundred trillion to one. Conservatively speaking. But that’s just the start — ”

“Let me talk about odds — ”

“Please, Dr. Huntington, let me finish. Those odds don’t even take into account the fact that these events were predicted twenty-five hundred years ago in Ezekiel chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine of the Bible. That additional factor was loaded into the world’s fastest computer several days ago at Cray, Inc. up in Seattle. That computer can do ten quadrillion operations per second. It is still working the question, trying to come up with a number large enough to indicate how infinitesimally small the chances are that such a prediction could have come true purely as a matter of random chance.”

Huntington was trying to look unimpressed. “Statistics, odds —
they’re valid in themselves from a mathematical standpoint, certainly, but you’re missing the point … the earth was started with just those kinds of odds — ”

“Exactly! Which means that it takes more of a leap of faith to believe that life started on this planet randomly than it does to believe it was set in motion by a Creator God. More relevant to our discussion, it takes more wild speculation to swallow the idea that the rescue of Israel that we have witnessed was just by chance, than to believe the truth — that God Himself orchestrated this victory for Israel so that the world would see that He is God. It is God’s most spectacular evidence of Himself to date. You have to ask yourself, if this proof of God doesn’t do it, if it doesn’t satisfy you, then exactly what manner of proof would? That’s a question you refuse to answer, Dr. Huntington. So, my prayer for you is that you take this opportunity to get right with God, pull down your wall of philosophical obstructionism and admit the truth. God is there. That when it comes to dramatic miracles of biblical proportions, God has broken His silence, and He is calling you to believe that He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to earth, according to the Scriptures — and that He is coming again.”

Bernie Bellows broke in. “Our time is up. But we clearly have to admit that something extraordinary has happened as a result of these events in Israel. Churches in America have tripled in attendance. Reports of spontaneous Gospel revivals breaking out — right here in Los Angles, Seattle, Las Vegas of all places, Denver, Omaha — stories of divorced couples coming back together …”

The credits started rolling across the screen, but Bellows wasn’t done. He kept reading from his notes while he shook his head in disbelief. “Despite the devastation here at home in New Jersey from a nuclear attack — thousands of lives lost — and the fear from these massive geopolitical events and the major outbreak of war across the ocean, people seem to be responding to some kind of movement of the spirit. Revivals in St. Louis, drug rehab centers emptying, criminals turning themselves in after confessing, more revivals in New Orleans, Boston, New York City, Albuquerque, reports of gangs in the projects
of Chicago coming to Christian faith, more revivals in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Columbus, Akron, Indianapolis …”