We walked to the window facing eastward to the East River, Queens, and Long Island.
“So the tower,” he said, “was brought into existence by a word, and, by a word, was sealed.”
“Finished with the same word by which it began.”
“Because the tower was the manifestation of that word.”
“When the word was spoken on Capitol Hill, it was the actual vow, Isaiah 9:10, word for word. The Senate majority leader even said that it was from Isaiah. But when the president wrote those words on the beam, did he realize that?”
“No. And yet he still wrote what he wrote.”
“He summed up the vow.”
“And more than that,” said the prophet.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to speak the vow in its original language, as it was spoken and written down two and a half thousand years ago. When I do so, I want you to count the words.
“L’venim.”
“One.”
“Nafaloo.”
“Two.”
“V’Gazit.”
“Three.”
“Nivneh.”
“Four.”
“Shikmim.”
“Five.”
“Gooda’oo.”
“Six.”
“V’Arazim.”
“Seven.”
“NaKhalif.”
“Eight.”
“Eight words. The entire vow in the original language consisted of only eight words. By eight words, a nation’s fate was decided. By eight words, its judgment was sealed. And by eight words, its entire existence was brought to an end.”
“Eight words,” I said. “In my dream, the king wrote a word on each cloud. There had to be eight of them. But on the seal, there was only one word. Why?”
“A word of how many letters?” asked the prophet. “Could there have been eight?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t a word, Nouriel. It was eight letters, the eight letters that began the eight words of the vow.”
“What about in English? How many words does the vow come out to?”
“Translated into English, the vow comes out to over twenty words. Now I’m going to speak the words that the president inscribed on the tower. I want you to count again as I speak.”
“We.”
“One.”
“Remember.”
“Two.”
“We.”
“Three.”
“Rebuild.”
“Four.”
“We.”
“Five.”
“Come.”
“Six.”
“Back.”
“Seven.”
“Stronger.”
“Eight.”
“Eight words. Not only does the president’s inscription match the ancient vow in its meaning, but it matches the number of words in the ancient vow.”
“A vow of eight English words to match a vow of eight Hebrew words.”
“By eight Hebrew words, a Hebrew kingdom was destroyed. And now the same vow becomes eight English words.”
“And inscribed on the harbinger.”
“In the center of the president’s inscription, the fourth word, what was it?”
“We remember. We rebuild. The fourth word is rebuild.”
“The fourth word at the center of the ancient vow is the Hebrew word nivneh.”
“And what does it mean?”
“Rebuild.”
“The same word!”
“It means rebuild, specifically as in ‘we will rebuild.’”
“And the word appears on top of the object that represents the very rebuilding spoken of in the vow.”
“Eight words on ancient parchments, eight words on the beam of an American skyscraper.”
“And by eight words an ancient nation was sealed for judgment and destroyed. And now by eight words . . . ”
“Remember what I told you, Nouriel—the words of kings determine the fate of nations.”
“Then it’s even more ominous.”
“So the tower of defiance, the embodiment of a nation’s defiance of God, was crowned with the words of defiance. The harbinger was sealed with the same vow that brought it into existence—a tower of judgment brought to its completion with the words of judgment.”
He then led me to the window facing the north. We could now see the rest of the city, the Empire State Building and the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. The sun had set, and everything was lit up.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Where is what?”
“The words, the inscription. Can I see it?”
“No,” he replied. “But you’re as close to it now as you’ll ever be. The words are hidden inside the walls on the beam that crowns the tower.”
“Everything comes together without anyone planning it . . . all according to the mystery.”
“And so it did six months later.”
“What happened six months later?”
“Six months after the president inscribed the words on the beam, he was inaugurated for the second time. He chose a man to seal the inauguration with the reciting of a poem. The man called the nation to give thanks not to God but to ‘the work of our hands.’7 Then he gave praise to the work of the nation’s hand, to an object, the tower of Ground Zero.”
“He called America to give thanks for the harbinger!”
“As he sealed the president’s inauguration, he directed the nation to
. . . the last floor on the Freedom Tower jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.8
“What does that remind you of, Nouriel?”
“Babel. The last floor of a tower, the top of a tower ‘jutting into a sky’ . . . ‘a tower whose top is in the heavens.’”9
“He directed the nation to the top of the tower, to the last floor. What was it that was specifically there on that last floor of that tower?”
“The inscription,” I said, “the vow of defiance.”
“Defiance,” said the prophet, “a tower ‘jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.’ The president’s inauguration was sealed with words that spoke of the harbinger and called forth the imagery of Babel.”
“And the words of Babel,” I said, “were there from the beginning in the ruins of Ground Zero, from which the tower would rise.”
“And so the highest words in New York City, the highest words in America, the words that its king lifted up to the heavens . . . were the words of a nation in defiance of God, in defiance of heaven, and under the shadow of judgment.”
“It all goes back to the beginning,” said Ana, “to the tower and that vow . . . a nation in defiance of God. . . . amazing . . . and ominous.”
“We headed to the elevator and down the tower. I was silent the entire time, not because we were inside the harbinger but because of the ramifications of what he had revealed to me there. It was after we left the building that he asked me for the seal and handed me another.
“This revelation would involve a dream, from which I would awaken in a cold sweat. And it was the reality behind the dream that was even more ominous than the image I was about to see. It belonged to the realm of nightmares. But it was real.”
Chapter 22
The Image
THE IMAGE YOU were about to see,” she said, “do you mean the image on the seal?”
“No,” said Nouriel. “The image on the seal was just the beginning.”
“What was the image?”
“I saw a man in robes on his face, bowed down before a pedestal, on which sat a man . . . or, rather, on which was a seated figure. The figure wasn’t human. It was too large in relation to the one bowing before it.”
“Then what?”
“I took it to be a statue, an idol, a god.”
“And what did you make of it?”
“I had no idea. I decided to search the web for images of ancient gods and idols.”
“And what did you find?”
&nb
sp; “A lot of ancient gods and idols. It didn’t lead me anywhere. And then I had a dream. I saw a steep and colossal mountain towering over an ancient city. Ascending the mountain were men with hammers and chisels. They began pounding their hammers and chisels into the rock face. They were carving out an image. It wasn’t long before the image became apparent.
“It was a face, a colossal, stone face, the face of a man, bearded, with curly hair, and wearing a crown. But then it began changing into the face of a man, clean-shaven and bald, and then the face of a woman with long wavy hair adorned with jewels. Then it changed again. It kept changing and changing into one face and then another. And while all this was happening, the people at the bottom of the mountain began to worship and sing praises to the image on the mountain. The face again became that of a woman. That’s when it stopped changing. The face smiled.
“And then the mountain rock began cracking apart and breaking off until it revealed the stone body of a colossal creature. It was the rest of her, the body of the face. She had, at first, been seated on the ground, but now she rose to her feet. She was colossal. As she rose, the people began bowing down before her in homage.
“In her right hand was a sword. She lifted it to the sky. Then she raised another arm . . . and then another . . . and another.”
“How many arms did she have?”
“Eight arms. Then she began to walk as if oblivious to the people under her. They began screaming and running from her path. She made her way to the city and stood in its midst, in between its tall buildings and towers. It was only then that a strange headdress appeared on her head, a mix of square ridges and a spike protruding from its center. She opened her mouth to speak. ‘I am death,’ she said, ‘the destroyer of worlds.’ And then she began to laugh maniacally as she raised her sword over the city.
“And that’s when it ended. I woke up with her maniacal laughter ringing in my mind.”
“Wow!” said Ana. “I understand why you woke up in a cold sweat. So what did you make of it?”
“I decided to draw a picture of what I had seen while it was still fresh in my mind. I put it in my coat pocket where I kept the seal. It was that same day that the mystery began to unfold.
“I was in Lower Manhattan. It was midday, lunchtime. I had stopped near a street corner where there was a food vendor and bought a falafel. It was then, standing there eating that falafel, that I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The headdress,” said Nouriel, “the headdress that the woman or thing was wearing. I pulled out my drawing and held it up to what I was seeing. The creature’s headdress was much more compressed than what I saw in the distance, but it was the same, the same shape, the same structure.”
“What was it?”
“It was the Empire State Building.”
“The Empire State Building! A headdress?”
“The top of the building . . . I don’t know, maybe the top fifteen stories and the spire that crowned it . . . the square ridges, the spikes—that’s what she was wearing.”
“She was wearing the top of a building? What did it mean?”
“I had no idea,” Nouriel replied, “but I had to find out. So I jumped in a taxi and took it up to 34th Street, to the Empire State Building, went inside, and took the elevator up to the Observation Deck.”
“You were there before.”
“Yes. With the prophet. I was hoping he would be there again. Without that I wouldn’t have known what to look for. When I got up to the Observation Deck, I immediately began searching for him through the crowd. The first time I saw him there, he was looking through one of the telescopes they have there at the edge of the deck. So I paid special attention to those using the telescope as I scanned the crowd. But there was no sign of him.
“I didn’t know what to do. I decided to go around one more time. So I did. And there he was, looking through one of the telescopes into the cityscape.”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I assume the same way you did,” he replied. “I used the elevator.”
“I just checked a minute ago, and you weren’t here.”
“The last time I checked, I was.”
I realized it was useless to argue the point.
“I have no idea how you’re going to make sense of this one.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” he said. “I assume you had a dream?”
“Yes.”
So I told him what I saw and showed him the drawing and how it matched the top of the building.
“The image on the seal,” he said, “is exactly what you believe it to be, the temple of a god, the shrine of an idol. And your dream had to do with the same thing, an idol, a god.”
“What does it have to do with . . . ”
“When Israel turned away from God, they didn’t turn to nothing; they turned to something else. They turned to other gods, foreign gods, the gods of the nations, idols. It’s always that way. You see, we’re each made to worship God. So if we turn away from God or if we never know Him in the first place, we’ll end up worshipping something else, other gods, idols, the works of our hands.”
“Why idols? Why does man turn to idols?”
“Because to create your own god is to become the creator . . . and thus your own god. And if you can create your own god, you can create your own truth, and alter it.
“So when the people of Israel drove God out of their lives and culture, the gods came rushing in to fill the void. And since, unlike the God of Israel, the gods that came in from the nations to replace Him could be seen and touched, their appearance triggered a metamorphosis away from the worship of the unseen to the worship of the visible, the physical, the material, the carnal, the sensory, and the sensual. That too is what follows.”
“So if America is following the course of Israel’s fall, then would it also . . . ”
“Turn to idols?” asked the prophet.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what the warning was at America’s founding . . . the warning of John Winthrop?”
“Remind me.”
“But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other gods, our pleasure and profits . . . , and serve them . . . 1
“So it was for ancient Israel. As their hearts turned away from God, they were seduced to worship and serve other gods. And thus the warning of ancient Israel became the warning given to America at its inception. The warning is this: if America should turn away from the God of its foundation, it will end up worshipping and serving other gods.”
“So would you say it did?”
“It was in the mid-twentieth century that America’s removal of God from its public squares and culture became overt and overtly progressive. It’s no accident that in that same period of time, another transformation took place, the metamorphosis of American culture away from the unseen and toward the carnal, the material, the sensory, and the sensual. And as God was driven out, the gods came in to fill the void.”
“But the worship of gods and idols?”
“In modern America and much of the modern world, they don’t call them gods or idols, but nevertheless, it is the same thing. . . . American gods and American idols, the god of success and prosperity, of money, comfort, sexuality, pleasure, the self, and a host of other deities and masters. And when the gods take over, the culture becomes fractured, truth becomes subjective, appearance becomes reality, and man becomes God. When God is abolished, everything becomes God.”
“And does this have to do with judgment?”
“In the Book of Second Kings there’s a prophetic autopsy concerning the judgment and end of ancient Israel. It says this:
And they rejected His statutes and His covenant that He had made with their fathers . . . they followed idols, became idolaters, and went after the nations who were all around them. . . . So they left all the commandments of the LORD their God, made for themselves a molded image . . . and wors
hiped all the host of heaven.2
“The appearance of gods and idols in the land is, in itself, a sign of coming judgment. And in the last days of Israel, the signs of the gods proliferated.
“It happened not only in the northern kingdom of Israel but in the southern kingdom as well. Before judgment came on the kingdom of Judah, the images of the gods began manifesting everywhere—even in the most holy places. The prophet Ezekiel was taken, in a vision, to the Temple of Jerusalem and given a glimpse of what was taking place in the sacred chambers. He was brought to the gate of the inner court, where he saw an idol he simply described as the ‘image.’3 Then he was taken inside a chamber:
So I went in and saw, and there—every sort of creeping thing, abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed all around on the walls.4
“Note, again, it is the same sign, the sign of images, the signs of the gods. And right after that, he heard a voice:
Then I heard him call out in a loud voice, ‘Bring near those who are appointed to execute judgment on the city, each with a weapon in his hand.’5
“It was the pronouncement of the city’s judgment and the nation’s end. First the images of the gods and then the judgment—the one follows the other. So the pattern is this: In the nation’s last days, the people give themselves wholly over to the gods and idols; they proliferate in the land, and their images become manifest. Then comes judgment.”
“But how could the images of the gods manifest now? I understand about modern gods and modern idol worship, but if we don’t call them gods, or recognize them as gods, or display them as gods, then how could the sign of the gods or an image of a god appear in America?”
“Signs have a way of manifesting regardless.”
“What do you mean?”
“It appeared. It manifested. The image of the god appeared.”
“What god?”
“The images that appeared in Israel’s last days were of foreign gods. So the image that appeared in America was likewise that of a foreign god.”
“Where?”
“It appeared in New York City.”
“How?”
“When the prophet was brought to the Temple and saw ‘all the idols of the house of Israel,’ in what form did they appear?”
The Harbinger II Page 16
