The Fifth Seal
2657 words long.
Published on 2024-07-15
The bulk of this article first appeared as "Postscript: Because I promised" in Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. It focuses on the plague of darkness, the ninth of the plagues against Egypt. God has woven together many patterns in history. They all connect near the end of time. Thus in God's larger application of the pattern of the plagues against all mankind, not just Egypt, we are about to face a worldwide plague of darkness. This plague is the flip side of the opening of the Fifth Seal of the scroll.
- The Fifth Seal, when opened, triggers a great persecution.
- The persecution separates Christians from non-Christians by forcing the Christians to flee or dissociate themselves from relationships with unbelievers.
- Non-christians, now separated from the light of the church, are plunged into darkness.
- The plague of darkness destroys all progress in science, separating the lost from the "god" that they once turned to to solve all their problems.
The irony is that even as the world is plunged into darkness, God will be opening the minds of the faithful to see marvelous truths hidden in the Bible. The Lord will open more of the scroll for our inspection, first the Book of Ecclesiastes, then when the sixth seal is opened, the Book of Matthew.
The fifth pillar of wisdom, the Book of Ecclesiastes will be illuminated for us by the fifth Spirit of God, the Spirit of Might. God's Word shall be our strength.
What is the modern plague of darkness?
The cover of this book implied a promise when it asked, “Which plague’s next?” Brief summaries were given in “Epilogue: The Fifth Commandment” and “Exodus: Clocks of Judgment for Israel and the Church”. This author is not a prophet. I feel comfortable matching already fulfilled prophecies to past events. That is the work of a historian and apologist. When I extrapolate the Bible’s clocks into the future, the most I can confidently assert is that a given Bible passage holds a prophecy and that it will be fulfilled in the time period that corresponds to its place in the clock’s structure. To say how the prophecy will be fulfilled is speculation. Now I shall speculate, comparing trends I see in the world around me to the images provided by these prophecies. Because it is speculation, I have buried it after the end notes where I suspect few will read it, but at least I will have kept my promise.
Four major prophetic themes shall all collide in the near future, disrupting this world:
- Solomon’s “time to hate”
- The opening of the fifth seal on Revelation’s scroll
- The Exodus plague of darkness
- The ninth commandment against lying
- The tenth commandment against covetousness
The analysis of clocks in this book and in Peace gave the evidence and established the time periods for all five as in our near future. Now to consider what that will mean for the world.
Relevant Scripture passages
The Word is light.
Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.
- Psalm 119:105
Jesus is light.
We must work the works of him who sent me
while it is day;
night is coming,
when no one can work.
As long as I am in the world,
I am the light of the world.
- John 9:4-5
The Church is light.
You are the light of the world.
A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
- Matthew 5:14
Israel is light.
Give attention to me, my people,
and give ear to me, my nation;
for a law will go out from me,
and I will set my justice
for a light to the peoples.
- Isaiah 51:4
To turn away from the sources of light and reject them is darkness.
Pharaoh speaks to Moses during the Plague of Darkness:
Then Pharaoh said to him,
“Get away from me; take care never to
see my face again, for on the day you
see my face you shall die.”
- Exodus 10:28
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.
- Revelation 6:9-11
These passages disclose four sources of light. The first source is God’s Law, the Ten Commandments, which promotes justice. The second light is Jesus Christ. The third light is the church, whose witness spreads the light of Christ. Then as the end draws near, the modern nation of Israel will be steadily transformed into a fourth remaining source of light, when all the others have gone out.
A Fifth Light, Fading
There is a fifth light: human reason, as expressed in the scientific endeavor. God will judge the world by removing the fifth light for its crime of attempting to extinguish the other four. We can see this spiritually as well as materially. The symbolic representation of the divine light is – well – light. The spiritual representation of divine light is a commitment to the truth. God is executing this plague against mankind by taking action against both symbol and spirit.
The passage from Exodus tells us what kind of man Pharaoh was. He craved power, not truth. He refused to look any more upon the face of Moses, the face of divine light, and so his kingdom was plunged into physical darkness. People today are much like pharaoh. They believe that they can have mastery over nature, through science, but dispense with the source of scientific truth, namely God and the accumulated wisdom of the church.
Pharaoh hated Moses. Hate leads to persecution and separation. As the world enters Solomon’s "time to hate", the modern pharaohs have already told the new Moses, Jesus, to get lost. They do not want to see him anymore, and if he (or his representative, the church) should approach, he promises he will kill them. Thus shall come the great persecution that will attend the opening of the fifth seal. That persecution will be against Jews and Christians. Many Jews will flee from America to Israel, at last completing the prophecy of the ingathering. Christians will have nowhere to run.
Before we continue, a disclaimer. I work for an oil company and my parents worked for General Electric, founded by Thomas Edison.
The first symbolic step toward darkness was the banning of Edison’s incandescent bulb, the invention most associated with light. The second step is the relentless march to “replace” the world energy system with one free of hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). In the last few centuries, humanity has moved to new sources of energy several times, but each time the switch was first proven out with new inventions (like the steam engine or internal combustion engine) and exploration for the necessary raw materials, like coal, oil or gas. Not until the needs for energy could be fully and economically met by the new source did we give any thought to displacing the old.
Not so the current panic surrounding climate change. Copper, lithium and rare earth minerals are needed for the solar panels, batteries, turbines and other components of the new energy system. Given proven deposits and current rates of mining, it would take a thousand years or more to dig enough of these materials to satisfy the needs of the next forty years of buildout. Only by immediately beginning strip mining all over the world on a massive scale could we hope to achieve this. We would destroy the planet we are trying to save.
(This claim is based on research by Simon Michaux, Associate Professor of geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) in KTR, the Circular Economy Solutions Unit. His YouTube video is titled “The Quantity of Metals Required to Manufacture Just One Generation of Renewable Technology to Phase Out Fossil Fuels.”)
Take copper as an example. The estimated need for new copper over the next thirty years equals all copper ever mined by everyone throughout all of human history. Why is copper a good example? Decades ago the world was running out of copper. It was needed for all the world’s telephone cables. Things looked bleak. Then someone invented the fiber optic cable. Those cables are made of glass. Glass is cheap and abundant. After the switchover to fiber optic cabling, the supply of copper rebounded.
Such things are possible concerning our current situation, but you cannot legislate them! Governments can fund research but they do not have godlike powers to change the laws of physics or speed up time. Solutions that allow us to use cheap, abundant materials to build out a new energy system that do not require massive ecological devastation may be possible. How long will it take? Ten years? A hundred? If you force the world to build on spec before those solutions have been proven in demonstration projects, you will get the results that we are seeing in Germany and Australia. Brownouts. Shuttered factories. Business leaving because the power is unreliable. The lights turned off.
The entire push to stop global warming is a parable in itself. Studies show that ten to twenty times more people die from exposure to cold than from heat. For example, consider a 2021 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health. According to the Washington Post:
Published in Lancet Planetary Health, the second paper reported that between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased. But deaths from cold exposure, which were far more common, fell by an even larger amount.
All told, during those two decades the world warmed by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and some 650,000 fewer people died from temperature exposure.
By opposing global warming, people are in effect saying that they want to reduce the amount of light coming from the sun and shiver to death in the dark. Like Pharaoh, they demand darkness, for in darkness no one can see the face of God.
In the spiritual realm, we are seeing a corruption of science itself. Surveys of several branches of science show that half or more of all papers put forth results that cannot be reproduced by other scientists. Some are fraudulent. Others were poorly conducted.
Fake peer review and citation rings have been detected, wherein a group of researchers agree to back each other up, getting their papers approved even if they have errors, and rejecting anyone outside their circle. One example of this kind of fraud was uncovered in July 2014 by Sage Publications. They had to retract 60 papers from the Journal of Vibration and Control. They discovered that researcher Peter Chen at the National Pintung University of Education (NPUE), rigged the peer reviews of all 60 papers by generating fake email accounts for real reviewers and impersonating them.
Scientists whose findings enrage special interests have their papers retracted because the journals are hounded by bullies with political power. They are turned down for grants, fail to make tenure, and are attacked in the press. One example of pressure being applied to force the retraction of a paper for political reasons is the paper “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming” (by Gianluca Alimonti, Luigi Mariani, Franco Prodi & Renato Angelo Ricci). It said in its abstract,
“In conclusion on the basis of observational data,
the climate crisis that, according to many sources,
we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
Yes, using accepted sources, they showed that we have not yet seen any increases in the frequency or intensity hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought or wildfires in the last few decades, contradicting claims by politicians, the media and many scientists. If those problems have not yet arisen, what is the urgency?
If saner heads do not prevail in this rush to dismantle our energy system, what will the outcome be? Agricultural output will plummet, triggering famine. Skeptical? This already happened in one country. The push to reduce use of petroleum derived fertilizer (which is advocated by the misguided elites pushing the climate change narrative) devastated Sri Lanka in under a year! Consider this quote from Foreign Policy in 2022:
Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
Other ill effects will include skyrocketing electricity rates, automobiles half the population cannot afford, wars over resources like that in Ukraine, and more.
The US government has taken to censoring stories critical of its policies by colluding with social media companies. This facilitated suppression of the theory (now considered highly credible) that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab. This was done to avoid embarrassing the US health officials who approved and funded the gain of function research done in China under unsafe conditions. Such research was forbidden by US law. Their arrogant disregard for law and truth contributed to the deaths of millions.
The government also assured nursing mothers that the vaccine was safe because it couldn’t get into breast milk, now also shown to be false, as reported in The Lancet in Biodistribution of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in human breast milk.
Recent cases of fraud in all areas of science are many. Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino billed herself as an expert on honesty and deception. She was the deceiver, her research fabricated. Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart made up his data in studies cited by hundreds of other researchers. His studies found racism where it didn’t exist, promoting racial hatred and contributing to the “time to hate”.
If fraud and political pressures to not tell the truth keep mounting, eventually scientific progress will halt. That is darkness. The ruination of human intellect is God’s wrath against all who violate His ninth commandment. Thou shalt not lie.
You may ask, since God has already judged nine civilizations (Babel through Islam), why we are not instead seeing judgment against violating the tenth commandment? Recall that there are two large cycles of judgment underway, against the church and against the beasts of the earth: the empires of man. These cycles began millennia apart but run out at about the same time. The cycle of judgment against the church is reaching the ninth commandment and the plague of darkness. The cycle against Western Civilization is reaching the tenth commandment and the plague against the firstborn.
The judgment against the church also affects our civilization. As segments of the church continue to depart from the gospel, God’s response cuts both ways. The world perishes for losing the church’s light and the church suffers at the hands of the people they could not save with their corrupted gospel. That will bring us all, church and civilization, to the tenth commandment and the plague on the firstborn. Faithless Christians will be turned away by the “Firstborn over all creation” when Jesus separates the sheep from the goats. So will all who rejected the light of the world.
Those are the plagues we are beginning to face.
Pray with me.
