The High Sign

By David S. Heeren

What will be the celestial sign of Jesus’ Second Coming and why will it be important for Christians to recognize it when it appears?

These two themes are discussed at length in Jesus’ only sermon that fills four chapters of the Bible (Mt. 24-25, Mark 13, Luke 21). In this sermon, Jesus stressed the need for believers to be watc

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647531591

David S. Heeren

This is Heeren's 17th book, ninth with Christian theme, sixth about the end-time. The other eight are about sports, mostly basketball and internationally-used TENDEX statistical system for rating players. Author was an award-winning journalist for 40 years, winner of 15 honors. Book The High Sign re Jesus' return received maximum double-four-star rating from Online Book Club and was a book of the day for the OBC.

Book preview

The High Sign

Copyright © 2020 by David S. Heeren. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Print and Media.

1603 Capitol Ave., Suite 310 Cheyenne, Wyoming USA 82001

1-888-980-6523 | [e-mail]

URLink Print and Media is committed to excellence in the publishing industry.

Book design copyright © 2020 by URLink Print and Media. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64753-158-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64753-160-7 (Hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64753-159-1 (Digital)

30.12.19

CONTENTS

Author’s Preface

Part One: The Short Period

Chapter One: The Great Flood of Noah

Chapter Two: Demolition of Sodom

Chapter Three: Plagues of the Exodus

Chapter Four: Celestial Fallout upon Sinai

Chapter Five: The Long Day of Joshua

Chapter Six: The Double Orbital Cycle

Chapter Seven: David and Elijah

Chapter Eight: The Earth-Shaker

Chapter Nine: The Single Cycle

Part Two: The Long Period

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Chapter Ten: The Star of Him

Chapter Eleven: Two Mighty Earthquakes

Chapter Twelve: Babel and Eden

Chapter Thirteen: That Day: Second Coming

Chapter Fourteen: Comet Objects Shaping Up

Chapter Fifteen: Facts and Figures

Bibliography

Forty Reference Books

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The motion picture It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World began with Jimmy Durante telling a group of comical characters that they could find treasure by looking under the Big W in a park in a California coastal city. The treasure seekers scurried aimlessly about the park to the disgust of one of their wives. She watched their clueless search, shaking her head.

But suddenly a look of recognition appeared on her face and she said in a hesitant voice to a bystander, I know what it is. She was looking at the Big W: It was a cluster of palm trees, growing in the shape of a W, silhouetted clearly in her line of sight against a backdrop of sky.

An analogy can be stretched beyond reason, but, like the woman in the movie, I discovered something important at a time when I wasn’t looking for it. The Lord has called it a sign, and the purpose of signs is for recognition and identification. It isn’t supposed to be another Bible mystery. It will stretch across the sky in brilliant illumination to herald the Second Coming of Jesus, according to the account of the Lord Himself (Mat. 24:27-30).

I think I know what it is.

Here’s how this came about: Thirteen years ago I began reading the biblical book of Isaiah. When I came to the eighth verse of the sixth chapter, I stopped. Isaiah had heard the voice of God saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?

Responding enthusiastically, Isaiah said: Here am I! Send me. And the rest of the book of Isaiah consists of great visions given supernaturally to the prophet, including many about the Day of the Lord when Jesus will return.

After reading this verse I prayed the same prayer Isaiah had prayed, and I meant it. During the next few days, as I read through the book of Isaiah, I started seeing prophetic imagery associated with that day which I hadn’t noticed during many previous readings of the same Scriptures.

I compiled a list of the images and recognized what I thought were noteworthy similarities between them. I compared the Isaiah verses with each other and with Jesus’s words as recorded in Matthew chapter 24. By the time I had finished reading the book of Isaiah this thought was in my mind:

I know what the sign of Jesus’s return will be.

After more than a decade during which I have made frequent studies of the book of Isaiah and all the other biblical prophecies related to the Second Coming, I am more positive now than I was in the beginning. I feel like the woman in the park in the movie, knowing something, yet wondering: Will anyone believe me if I tell them the unconventional idea that I am convinced is true?

The sign of Jesus’s Second Coming will be a comet.

How, for the past thirteen years, have I been developing this thought? First of all, the evidence of about 20 cometic images in the book of Isaiah that originally put the idea in my head has grown over the years. By the time there were 40 of them, late in 2005, I wrote a book entitled The Sign of His Coming. Published in 2007, it didn’t have much impact at first. But now there are 54 of these images plus much more independent evidence.

Besides the 14 additional cometary images in Day of the Lord Scriptures, I have found evidence that 25 major events described in the Bible can be associated with the appearance of comets. These include the great Flood of Noah, destruction of the Tower of Babel, annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Exodus, the Red Sea crossing, the Long Day of Joshua and four events associated with Jesus.

A total of 131 pieces of factual information support the idea that the 25 are cometic. Nothing significant – not a single scientific fact or verse of the Bible that I have found – contradicts any of this, and I have located relevant texts in 53 of the Bible’s 66 books.

The first 24 of the 25 events already have happened, with descriptive details from many sources indicating that they were indeed associated with the appearance of comets. The only one of the 25 yet to occur is the return of Jesus. Identifying the celestial object that will herald the Day of the Lord, and encouraging believers on that day to proclaim the gospel of salvation with joy to multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, is what this book is about (Joel 3:14).

David Heeren

PART ONE

THE SHORT PERIOD

CHAPTER ONE

The Great Flood of Noah

One of my favorite pastimes is doing puzzles. I enjoy puzzles of all kinds, but especially crosswords, jigsaws and Sudoku. Usually there is a picture of a jigsaw puzzle solution on the cover of its box. A good way to start a jigsaw puzzle is to find and set apart the straight-edge pieces. After completing the frame, the next step is to collect pieces of similar coloring and assemble them into complete segments of the puzzle before fitting them all together to finish the project. It is helpful to take frequent looks at the picture on the box cover.

The theme picture of this book is a comet that has visited Earth three times and will make a fourth appearance to herald the Second Coming of Jesus on the Day of the Lord. The straight-edged pieces forming the frame of the puzzle are 54 objects mentioned in the Bible to signify this comet’s appearance. The inner portion of the puzzle includes a centerpiece of 25 biblical events involving comets and 131 important facts about these events.

The first biblical event we are to consider is the great Flood of Noah. Beginning with the Flood, using the jigsaw puzzle analogy, we shall show how God has employed comets for his purposes during critical times in world history. We shall conclude with three chapters giving evidence that He also will use a comet as the celestial sign heralding the Second Coming of His Son (Mat. 24:30).

And, finally, after completing the puzzle we shall have a clear view of the most important thing: God’s people, recognizing the sign of Jesus’s Second Coming, will have a chance to share the gospel of salvation with unbelievers, who will be terrified in the valley of decision during a time period of indefinite length before the Day of the Lord (Joel 3:14).

It is the Lord’s will that everyone be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). The Day of the Lord comet will be the last and perhaps the greatest evangelism tool in world history. If God’s people are faithful to do their part, millions upon millions of unbelievers will be urged to repent and turn to the Lord for eternal salvation during the final days of opportunity. All of Billy Graham’s crusade audiences combined didn’t have so much eternal potential.

The early part of the biblical book of Genesis makes clear that there was no rainfall during the first 1,656 years of human history. Earth was watered at that time by droplets, perhaps dews, condensing from a misty atmosphere (Gen. 2:6). There were no violent storms until the Flood of Noah, which produced the first rainfall and the first rainbow (Gen. 9:12-13). God designated that rainbow as the sign of his covenant with Noah that he would not destroy the Earth and its air-breathing creatures a second time by means of floodwaters (Gen. 9:14-16).

The Bible states that the direct cause of the Flood was the hand of God. He made the decision to inundate the Earth because of decadent behavior, especially an extreme of sexual immorality: The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. (Gen. 6:2)

Various interpretations of this verse have been offered. If the sons of God were men, marrying and having intercourse with women, this would have pleased the Lord, who established and hallowed man-woman marriage. So, these sons of God were not men. The only other creatures that could be described as sons of God were the angelic beings of God’s creation. Angels faithful to God would not have done such an unnatural thing as to copulate with human beings. But this type of depravity might have been engaged in by corrupted angels, now known as demons.

In a footnote to his translation of Josephus’s account of the Flood, translator William Whiston wrote: This notion, that the fallen angels were, in some sense, the fathers of the old giants, was the constant opinion of antiquity.[]

The traditional ways of interpreting the forty days of torrential rain described in Genesis chapter seven are to brush it aside as if it were a tall tale or merely a local event, or to try to explain it by saying a vapor canopy surrounding Earth suddenly condensed, producing torrential rainfall.

The first two options are out, for we dare not corrupt the inspired Word of God (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Moreover, for the water level to rise more than twenty feet above the 17,000-foot Mount Ararat, where the ark landed a year later, would require a worldwide flood, not a local one: The world-encircling ocean waters seek universal levels. This means that if the water reached a height of 17,000 feet in the Middle East, it would reach the same height everywhere else in the world. Noah’s Flood was indeed a worldwide event, for there are historical traditions describing it in the artifact remains of ancient cultures all over the Earth.[]

This leaves option number three. But if the suggested canopy contained enough water vapor to produce hundreds or even thousands of inches of worldwide rainfall, where did all that water come from? During the author’s lifetime, the most intense rainfall was 21 inches during a 24-hour period in Fort Lauderdale. Sustain this rate of precipitation for forty days and you would have more than 800 inches of rain. The impression is given from the wording of scriptures that there may have been even more than that during the first 40 days of the year of the Flood.

So much rain certainly did not come from a vapor canopy. If Earth’s atmosphere was that heavy with water vapor – and it is doubtful if it’s possible that this could be so – there would have been other torrential rains during the first millennium and a half of world history.

The only reasonable answer to this question is that, in order to produce the terrible sudden calamity that changed the face of a previously placid planet, there must have been an intrusive force. We suggest that this force was a comet.

A comet alone of all celestial objects known to approach the Earth contains a sufficient quantity of water to dump torrential rains for 40 days and 40 nights. The coma (head) of a comet is huge. It can be larger in dimensions than a planet, even as large as the sun. It consists of a comparatively small rocky core, surrounded by vast layers of ice and gases.

If a comet approached close enough to Earth so that it could be drawn at least temporarily into orbit around the planet, the interacting gravitational fields of the two large bodies would cause breakage on or near the solid surfaces of both. The comet’s gases would dissipate and its ice layer would be broken up.

With a weight much heavier than the comet, Earth would draw to itself much of the gas and all of the ice that was breaking off the comet’s coma. The ice would plummet through Earth’s atmosphere, and the frictional heat generated by the descent would melt the ice, causing it to fall as rain onto the planet’s surface. There is so much ice in the comas of many comets that this process could continue for 40 days, if the comet remained in proximity to Earth for that long. And this is something a comet is capable of doing.

In the book The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, author Donald W. Patten theorizes that a wayward planet, perhaps Mercury, caused the Flood. Patten’s model of the event was well-constructed. It suggested that during the year of the Flood the celestial visitor made two complete orbits around the Earth before escaping once again into space.

Patten speculated that the intruder’s two revolutions around Earth consumed about eight months of the year of the Flood. Early in that period of time ice breaking away from the visitor fell to Earth, melting along the way and generating the deluge.

It is possible that our comet premise and Patten’s planet both may be correct. Recent observations have disclosed that attached to Mercury is a rudimentary tail similar to that of a comet. Perhaps at one time the planet Mercury was a comet, which had its orbit changed and its tail shortened during a lengthy encounter with Earth that resulted in the Flood.

A Bible verse describing two early aspects of the Flood event is Genesis 7:11: In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

The second Jewish month was in early spring, one of two times during the year when it is feasible for a comet in its normal parabolic orbit to make an approach to Earth; the other such season is the fall. The aspect of the event we have just discussed is depicted in the quoted biblical verse as opening the windows of heaven. And so it must have appeared from an earthly perspective as, all of a sudden, from out of a sky that never before had produced a storm cloud, there was a sudden inundation lasting 40 days.

But this wasn’t all. There were also tectonic forces at work causing breakage in the crust of the Earth. This is described as the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep.

Before the Flood, there may have been huge bodies of water contained within subterranean pockets beneath the oceans. Seismic activity generated by the clashing gravitational fields of Earth and the intruder could have created enormous tidal disturbances in Earth’s massive magma interior. These, in turn would have exerted tremendous pressures on the planet’s mantle resulting in breakups releasing vast quantities of previously buried waters.

To ascertain how much pressure can be exerted by Earth’s liquid magma interior on its solid mantle, we need only these facts. Earth has a solid iron/nickel core surrounded by magma that extends all the way to the mantle. The mantle (surface) occupies 22 miles. The magma is more than 3,200 miles deep.

The earthquakes in which subterranean depths were fractured during the great Flood were described: "Enormous reservoirs of water were stored under the earth. This mighty collection of waters was called t’hom, ‘the great deep’ (cf. Gen. 1:2). These subterranean waters, confined by creative power on the second day of creation, were unleashed to pour forth in volume and in violence defying description. It was not an ordinary flood, but a giant tidal wave that broke suddenly upon a startled populace. Baqa indicates a terrestrial convulsion that split asunder every restraining barrier that had existed. It was a tumultuous breaking loose of indescribable destruction. Man cannot imagine the fury and the destructive might of the eruption, nor the awfulness of the display of God’s power to destroy sinful beings. The complete corruption of men was far worse than any of us can imagine. The destruction was necessary."[]

The combination of the fall to Earth for 40 days of enormous quantities of new rainfall, and the magmatic action beneath Earth’s mantle cracking open the subterranean pockets, produced the volume of new water described in Genesis 7:11. But even that was not enough to flood the Earth as it exists today.

The depth of the deepest ocean today is about 36,000 feet. If all the water in the world could be distributed over a flat surface, it would rise to a height of 12,000 feet above that surface.[] But of course the Earth’s surface is not now, nor has it ever been flat. From the beginning there was a land mass with varying elevations and a vast sea.

The new water resulting from a combination of rain from melting ice that broke away from the comet and tidal waves (likely more than one) produced by the breaking up of water-filled subterranean caverns could have brought about a worldwide rise in sea level of two or three thousand feet. But that was nowhere near enough to engulf a world boasting mountains topping off with Everest’s 29,029 feet. Even Mount Ararat’s 17,000-foot elevation would have stood far above the new waters generated by aspects of the Flood we have discussed so far. So how do we account for the Bible’s statement that the floodwaters stood 22.5 feet (15 cubits) above the tops of the mountains for five months (Genesis 7:20-24)?

A possible answer to this question is that Earth’s tallest mountains today did not exist before the Flood. At that time, the highest elevation of Earth was nowhere near the peak of Everest, or any other mountain taller than a few thousand feet.

But, if that is true, there must have been mountainous uplift at some time during the Flood year to account for the new heights of Ararat, where the ark landed, and other peaks. Ararat is known to be volcanic.[] It may have been uplifted during the massive seismic activity that broke up the ocean depths during Noah’s Flood. But is there any other evidence of such uplift during the Flood?

Psalm 104:5-9 discusses the Flood: Thou didst cover [Earth] with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the sound of thy thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place which thou didst appoint for them. Thou didst set a bound which they should not pass, so that they might not again cover the Earth. (rsv)

This summarizes key points during the Flood year. It concludes with God setting boundaries above which he promised floodwaters would not rise to cover the Earth a second time. Although there is a reference to creation in the same context, this part of the text is not speaking of the creation event but of the unique promise of God to Noah after the Flood that he would not destroy life on Earth again with floodwaters (Gen. 9:11). It could not refer to the creation for that would make God a liar. He did cause floodwaters to cover the Earth after creating it.

During the Flood God covered the Earth with the deep, a word commonly used for deep waters or oceans. The waters stood above the mountains describes most of the first 150 days of the Flood, when the entire land mass was covered and all air-breathing creatures other than those in the ark were drowned (Gen. 7:23).

Elsewhere in the Bible, when the creation is described, there is similar terminology. But nowhere in these contexts does it say that the originally created waters covered mountaintops. The Bible verse describing the peak height of the waters during the great Flood was this: And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the Earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered. (Gen. 7:19)

This verse supports the idea that much new water was introduced by the breaking up of the ocean depths and also by the ice melting into rainfall as it plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere after breaking away from the coma of the comet. It supports the idea that the Flood did indeed cover the entire pristine land mass of Earth, which would be impossible if the same topography existed then as does today.

The Hebrew word har usually translated mountains in the Bible, here in the New King James Version appropriately is rendered high hills. The translators of NKJV and the original King James versions may have had scientific insight, or perhaps Holy Spirit guidance, because they used high hills instead of mountains in Genesis 7:19, during the initial phase of the Flood. This word can mean mountains, high hills or a range of hills. Some translations of the Bible, in some contexts, render it hill country.

In Genesis 8:4 (NKJV), after most of the dramatic events involved with the Flood were finished, we find this: "Then the ark rested in the seventh month, the seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen."

This is the same Hebrew word. What seems to have happened is that after the fifth month, and before the tenth month, the magmatic interior of Earth was pushed and pulled so drastically by the presence of the celestial intruder that mountainous uplift occurred. It happened just as stated in Psalm 104:8: "The mountains rose, the valleys sank down