Listening by Dave Mckay Mckay (best summer books .TXT) 📕

pulled out a little penlight and, looking over David's shoulder, he shone it on the open passage. One line stood out: "The churlish man will no longer be called liberal." A smile crossed his face as he thought of the recent decision by the Liberal Party, to change its name. For as long as he could remember, the party had been conservative to a fault (even 'churlish' he thought mischievously) in its foreign and domestic policies. It had always been a misnomer to call them 'Liberals'.

"In Bible prophecy," David continued, "the harvest is the end of the world. There are seven trumpets that signal a time of great trouble, just before the end."

Chaim flinched. The end of the world? Bible prophecy? he thought. These were not his favorite subjects, not as a Quaker, as a Jew, or as an academic. Yet it was no more preposterous than him sitting here in a dirty, smelly, darkened room in an Aboriginal housing estate. He may as well hear David out.

The others squatted on the floor, in front of Chaim and David, who were sitting on the worn-out couch. "It's not really the end of the world, like the destruction of the world," David explained. "It's more like a change... the end of one age… an age of spiritual darkness. And the dawn of a new age… an age of justice and righteousness."

Chaim noted that David's words were almost identical to the ones Hindus use to describe what they expect when their Kalki Avatar arrives.

David explained further: "Just before the end, there'll be another leader who will bring what seems like peace, prosperity, and religious unity. The problem is that he'll be a counterfeit. Only those who are tuned in to God will know the truth. This false peace will turn into the worst suffering in the history of the world."

"What happened in America?" Chaim asked. "Is that what you're talking about?" He knew what fundamentalist Christians believed about the coming world leader, but he was hoping that David might be pushing a toned down version.

"Way I see it, we're going to experience something even worse than that," David replied.

It was difficult to imagine anything worse than the destruction of America. The official death toll was now nearing thirty million and counting, with some 300 million people evacuated over the past year, and millions more unaccounted for, presumably dead, or living in Canada and Mexico by now. The entire country had been left uninhabited, and there was hardly a person on earth who had not been directly affected by it. Not even the Black Plague had taken so many lives.

On the other hand, what David was saying coincided with Chaim's own misgivings about something even worse coming in the future.

David continued. "This world leader, who starts out good, ends up as evil as the devil himself, a man called, 'The Antichrist'. He'll try to kill true believers, but the Bible says they'll be taken to someplace called 'the wilderness', where they'll be protected. Maybe this is where God will use the Aboriginal people. They've lived for centuries in some of the harshest country in the world... the wilderness of Australia. They could train people all over the world in how to survive. I think the 'gift' these people bring to God may be the people they help to escape from the Antichrist."

The concept of an antichrist wasn't new to Chaim, but he had not personally met anyone who related any of it to the Aborigines.

"How long have you believed these things? Have you shared them with others? And if so, what has been their reaction?" he asked as politely as he could when David had finished his presentation.

"I've been talking about this for a few months now, travelling 'round the Outback. Truth is, no one so far has been interested in it." David hung his head slightly. "Least not till tonight."

"Most of our people are as lost as anyone else," Ben said through two missing front teeth. "But I fink it's true. I been finkin' 'bout Jesus for a long time, and I reckon he's got more aboriginality than most us Black fellas."

Talk turned to things that Jesus was reported to have said about money and about living by faith. This part of what David was saying appealed more to Chaim. He recognised Jesus as a great teacher; and he had already noted a link between what was happening in India and things Jesus had said. He himself had pretty much stopped working for money now. So it was intriguing to think of Australia's Aborigines becoming part of a similar movement, if that was what David was talking about.

The Aboriginal people, most of whom had no word for 'money' in their native languages, had for millennia escaped the curse of materialism. While the world saw them as misfits, who refused to become compliant workers in its economic quests, the Aboriginal people themselves had held out. But many thousands had drunk themselves to death, and many more had suffered a kind of collective insanity in the process.

Despite his reservations about the eschatalogical stuff that David was spouting, Chaim was starting to feel that they were getting closer to discovering the true destiny of the native people of Australia.

Missionaries had tried to scrub and clothe those to whom they ministered, but they had never seen the potential for the Aborigines themselves to become missionaries of a different sort... ambassadors of truth and goodwill to the rest of the world. With this concept of learning to survive without paid jobs in an alien world, the Aborigines might be the natural experts.

There were points here that could be quite exciting... if only Chaim could get over the stuff about Bible prophecy. He decided to ask more questions.

"I've read a bit about prophecy," he explained, without revealing his academic expertise in the area of religion. "It always seems like the prophetic bits could be read in several different ways. The interpretations aren't usually clear until after they've been fulfilled. Would that be a fair way to put it?"

"I don't see it quite like that," said David. "But is it really important that people understand it all in advance? Might even cause problems if they did know too much. As long as it really does fit with what happens, seeing it can still be inspiring even if you don't see it till after it happens." David paused for a moment and then went on.

"Of course some prophecies are easier to prove than others. I'll give you two examples...

"There's the Isaiah 53 prophecy about Jesus being wounded for our transgressions, and being led as a lamb to the slaughter, without answering back. That kinda stuff.

"It's a pretty good match for what he actually did; but the prophecy itself doesn't say enough for people to have been sure it was talking about the Messiah before Jesus came along. This is the kind of thing you're talking about, isn't it? It wasn't clear until after it all happened."

Chaim grunted agreement.

"There's lots of prophecies like this," David confessed.

"But there's another one that says right from the start that it's about the Jewish Messiah. In fact, it's the only prophecy in the Old Testament that uses the exact word 'messiah'. And it tells the exact year when Jesus would be crucified." He looked to see if Chaim was interested, and he was. This was something different.

David continued: "It was written by the Hebrew prophet, Daniel, more than 500 years before it happened."

David directed Chaim to Daniel 9:24 to 27. It said that "Messiah will be cut off, but not for himself" 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. David was talking about a decree by Artaxerxes of Persia, in 446 B.C., to rebuild Jerusalem.

"Even if one is skeptical enough to believe that Daniel wrote the prophecy after the decree was issued by Artaxerxes," David explained, "no one believes it was written after Jesus was crucified, in 30 A.D. So Daniel definitely beat the odds by picking the exact year of Jesus' death so many centuries earlier."

Chaim wasn't so sure. Somehow, in his studies, he had never heard of this passage. Also, he had done some quick calculations while David was talking, and he came up with a discrepancy of seven years.

"From 446 B.C. to 30 A.D. is only 476 years... not 483," he argued. The prophecy is off by seven years."

"Only if you work on the modern calendar, which has 365 1/4 days to the year," David explained. The calendar used in Bible prophecies worked on a year of 360 days."*

"Over a period of 476 years, at a rate of 5 1/4 days per year, you would have accumulated a total of 2499 days, or roughly seven years!"

Chaim was impressed. Why hadn't he ever encountered this passage in his studies? As a Jew himself, any reference to the Messiah should have included reference to this passage, if it really was, as David said, the only passage in the Old Testament that specifically named the 'Messiah'.

(*See Revelation 11:2, 11:3, 12:6, 12:14, 13:5, and Daniel 7:25, and 12:7, where a period of three and a half years is also described as 42 months, or 1260 days [42 x 30 days, or 3.5 x 360 days] ).

The fact that it predicted the exact year of the crucifixion of Jesus (and, of course, the subsequent impact on history made by this one incredible man) was overwhelming evidence for Christian claims about Jesus being the Messiah.

But for Chaim himself, messiahs of any sort were not a major concern. Nor were prophecies. He was not that kind of a Jew. What he was interested in were the implications of all this with regard to his dealings, both with the Aborigines of Australia, and with the Vaishnuvites of India.

 

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Threshing

Chapter Ten--Threshing

There was no way of knowing at the time that the changes Chaim was undergoing would one day give him a reputation as a monstrous killer. He was too busy trying to follow his conscience, and trying to answer to that of God within his own heart. Nevertheless, there were hints that what he was going through was pointing toward a destiny that was vastly different to anything he had expected before the fall of America.

Ben Black and David Hartley moved in with him, in his plush apartment not far from the University of Newcastle. They continued to come and go from Newcastle, as they visited Aboriginal communities around Australia. Their efforts centered around a commitment to Christianity, while Chaim himself was primarily searching for answers that could be relevant to people of all religions.

The idea of a culture where people worked for the good of others, without regard for money, was appealing even in the world as Chaim had always known it before the fall of America. But if spiritually dark times really were ahead, he could see how it might eventually become a necessity for survival as well.

During the Reformation, the Anabaptists were hated and hunted by both Catholics and Protestants because they had refused to become a part of either of the politically warring factions. Their peace-loving stance nearly resulted in them being wiped out. The Pilgrims fled England because of religious persecution, and the Quakers of that same era found themselves hated even by the other Pilgrims after they arrived in America, because of their ideals. Each movement, however, had eventually mellowed with regard to some of their more offensive beliefs, possibly in an effort to escape persecution and to be re-absorbed back into the mainstream. Jehovah's Witnesses, who still refused to recognise the sovereignty of any political system over their loyalty to God, probably represented the nearest thing to the fanaticism that had resulted in persecution for each of the earlier movements.

So what if, Chaim thought, there was a time coming when a revival of faith would be met by an equal revival of persecution? Wouldn't it be helpful to have an army of people who were able to survive underground? This was the kind of reasoning that had earlier piqued his interest in Vaishnu's philosophy. The idea of people working for love instead of for money would be eminently practical... with or without dark times.

It came as a surprise when Chaim was approached after meeting one Sunday and asked if a threshing meeting could be arranged at