Thursday, August 23, 2007

Bible scholars claim future tense

WITH DEVASTATING storms and quakes lurking to savage this planet and such a madman as Iran's Ahmadinejad threatening the very existence of Israel, the world's future looks grim.
In fact, when I started to thumb through dust-covered files from early 1999, this investigative reporter uncovered some startling evidence of calamities about to become reality, which I detailed in a series of articles for World Net Daily. That was some eight years ago.
It reminded me of what the late TV preacher-personality Jerry Falwell's claim that the Second Coming could occur by the Year 2009. And on his website some eight years ago, he wrote: "In addition to asserting that I personally believe that Christ could return soon, I stated that the Antichrist may possibly be alive on the earth today."
Even the skeptics and so-called psychics have agreed these are, perhaps, the Last Days of what has been dubbed as the Last Generation.
While I have been skeptical of such doomsday scenarios, the French seer Nostradamus, once gazed into a candle and stated: "In the year 1999 and seven months (July 1999), The Great King of Terror will come from the sky, He will bring back to life the great king of Angolmois. Before and after Mars reigns happily."
An English translation claims "Angolmois" is as an anagram of "Mongols" (The Great King of Mongols was Genghis Khan); Mars is the God of war (and of transformation). Colin Wilson says in his "Occult" (1970) that "un grand Roy d'effrayer" sounds uncannily like a hydrogen bomb.
However, while Nostradamus may have been off a number of years, the Congregation Yeshuat Yisrael of Nashville, Tenn. used Biblical verses to make their claim that the Last Days began in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War and then followed it up with these assertions:
* The Beginning of Sorrows:
1. Nation against Nation, Kingdom against Kingdom -- Major worldwide conflict that begins the End Times or Last Days: World War I & II (1914, 1939) Matthew 24:7.
2. Both World Wars had major Jewish implications -- the Holocaust and Zionist Movement.
3. State of Israel is established in 1948. Israel is established as a secular nation in unbelief for a future judgment known as a Time of Jacob's Trouble. The Bible speaks of a great gathering of Gentile Armies against Jerusalem. If this is true then the return of Israel in 1948 is a significant fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Ezekiel 20:33-35, Ezekiel 22:17, Zephaniah 2:1.
4. Jerusalem the capital of Israel is under Jewish control (1967) Daniel 9:27, Matthew 24:15 2 Thessalonians 2:3, Revelation 11:2.
Israel negotiates peace with Arab neighbours -- this sets the stage for the Non-Arab invasion of Ezekiel 38, where Arab nations will not be involved in this conflict because of the peace treaty. Non-Arab nations will come against Israel.
1. A Peace treaty with the Arab states will lead into non-Arab conflict involving an invasion of Israel. Ezekiel 38: Rosh (Russia), Cush (Ethiopia), Meshech (Moscow), Put (Libya), Tubal (Tubalsk, Siberia), Gomer (Germany), Persia (Iran), and Togarmah (Armenia).
2. The One World Government will be established -- (One Horn) Daniel 7:23.
3. One world government divides into 10 kingdoms (Ten Horns) Daniel 7:24a.
4. The Rise of Anti-Christ, (Anti-Messiah who opposes the real Messiah) is different from the other nations that ruled the earth. Some believe the Anti-Messiah will serve as a false Messiah for the Jewish People. This is not the case. He is the one world leader who takes over the Jewish Temple and claims himself as God. The Anti-Christ is of Roman origin, the prince of the people who destroyed the city. Daniel 7:24b.
5. Period of peace and false security (3 1/2 year period of false peace for Israel). Turmoil for the rest of the world. 1 Thessalonians 5:1-36.
6 *Blackout. Joel 2:31.
7. *Return of Eliyahu HaNavi (Elijah the Prophet) the forerunner of the Messiah. Malachi 5:4-6 , Malachi 3:1 , Isaiah 40:3 8.
8. *The Third Temple will be restored and sacrifices will be re-instituted at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Daniel 9:27, Isaiah 66:1.
*The order of these events is not confirmed until the events work their way out in the future.
When I wrote this WND column in 1999 it caused readers to begin thinking about the future and the possibilities of such a scenario and also resulted in an avalanche of mail, both pro and con.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Corbett Recalls Mining Nightmare

WITH THE HOPES of any survivors in the Huntington, Utah coal mine collapse ebbing into darkness and Thursday night's heartbreaking situation, it brought back a series of nightmares for me. For you see, my uncle, Carl Linkletter, a seasoned coal miner was killed in one of those dark dungeons, and another uncle, Lamont, was seriously injured in another one, this time in the infamous Springhill disaster of 1958.
Some time ago, I wrote, in part, about those devastating events:
***
Carl Linkletter at age 43 had everything to live for. He and his wife, Aggie, were expecting their third child.
As a coal miner, it was his job that day in January, 1943, to lay dynamite to bring down a "wall" in the Strathcona Coal Mine at River Hebert, a small community near Springhill, Nova Scotia.
However, it was to be a fatal morning, for Linkletter's "helper" apparently erred in wiring the dynamite sticks and the blast struck Linkletter with such a force that it caused enormous facial damage and "blew out his ears, his eyes, and the only thing left was his throat."
One of his last words were "take care of my two babies." And then he died.
Fifteen years later on Oct. 23, 1958, Carl's younger brother, Lamont, had just finished his shift at the Springhill coal mines when an "enormous bump" shook the small town at 8:06 p.m.
In the aftermath, 75 were killed and some 99 rescued from that deep pit.
Among the severely injured was Lamont Linkletter, one of the rescuers called "Draegermen."
Lamont and his crew went back down the shaft and one of the coal wall planks fell and hit him on the head. The force was so intense that it knocked Linkletter's right eye out.
In the following years, my uncle, Lamont, suffered intense "phantom pain" from losing his eye and would constantly see flashes of penetrating "bright lights."
Besides the world-wide publicity surrounding the Springhill disaster of 1958, there were others in the small community such as the one in 1956 and an even earlier one in 1891. Following the third disaster in 1958, DOSCO shut down their mining operations in Springhill and they were never reopened.
Today the mines, among the deepest works in the world and filled with water, provide Springhill's industrial park with a source of geothermal heat, according to al disaster website. It also provided information that Irish rock star U2 brought attention to the 1958 disaster when they performed Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's The Ballad of Springhill as part of their world-famous The Joshua Tree tour in 1987.
In the Nov. 1, 1956 disaster, which killed 39 with 88 being rescued, several cars of a mine train, hauling a load of fine coal dust to the surface, broke loose and ran back down the slope of the No. 4 colliery, derailing and hitting a power line. It caused a massive explosion.
Two years later came another major disaster.
It occurred in the No. 2 colliery with the enormous "bump" severely impacting "the middle of the three walls that were being mined and the ends of the four levels nearest the walls."
In explaining a "bump" it is caused "when coal is totally removed from a strata and the resulting geological stresses upon surrounding bedrock (shale, sandstone, etc. -- in most coal-bearing strata) can cause the surrounding pillars of the galleries to suddenly catastrophically disintegrate and the shaft collapses."
The small earthquake sent shock waves throughout the world as the disaster was the first major international event to be televised live on the CBC and even Prince Philip, who was visiting Ottawa at the time, as well as then-Nova Scotia premier Robert Stanfield came to the "wake" over a seven-day period.
In her book, Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster, Melissa Fay Greene, wrote: "From an oceanic depth, a ball of fiery gas threw off its stone layers, like a feverish child in the night angrily kicking off his covers. The deepest stone floor rose faster than an elevator. It smashed into the floor above it, and the two, stacked together, hurtling up into a third, like granite dominos falling forward. The stone-and-lumber pillars ... built by the miners to support the roofs over their head, were clapped to smithereens in an instant by the force from below."
Then she added: "At 8:06, a deep, powerful BOOM! sounded, shaking every building and street in town. Everyone in Springhill lurched at the same instant. The wetly combed children sitting cross-legged on the floor in their pajamas jumped like the hiccups and looked to their parents ... One hundred seventy-four miners were working underground when "the bump" happened. Seventy-five never came out. Of the 99 who escaped, 18 of them did only after surviving for an incomprehensible nine days in absolute, pitch-black night."
One of those "survivors" was my uncle, Lamont Linkletter. He died of natural causes in December 1988.