End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

On the night before his death, Nostradamus, who’d just returned from a trip to an embassy, called for a priest to give him last rites. The priest commented that Nostradamus seemed perfectly healthy to him. But Nostradamus assured him, “You will not see me alive at sunrise.”

The next morning, on July 2, 1566, Nostradamus’s family found him dead, lying between the bed and his bedside bench.

Contemporary Prophets Weigh In

In 1970, born-again fundamentalist Hal Lindsey published a book called The Late Great Planet Earth. Among his predictions in that book (all based on his interpretation of the Bible, particularly the books of Daniel and Revelation) were that Christ would physically return to Earth no later than 1988; that the United States would not be a significant geopolitical power by the time of the apocalyptic tribulations; and that there would be a ten-member United States of Europe that would evolve into a “Revived Roman Empire” ruled by the Antichrist.

The timing of the book’s publication undoubtedly contributed to its immediate success and fueled a renewed belief in the imminent end of days. The world’s memory was still fresh of the 1967 Six-Day War, the armed conflict between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In six days, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights, which became collectively known as the Occupied Territories. Just as sales of the Bible skyrocketed after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the Six-Day War heightened the urgency of that search for the truth about when this planet’s story will end. But The Late Great Planet Earth is still in print, has sold more than thirty-five million copies and has been published in more than fifty-four languages, so it’s not as if its popularity is just a passing whim.

Obviously the 1988 prediction was inaccurate, but Lindsey continues to believe that the apostle John, credited with writing the book of Revelation, was an actual “eyewitness to events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” On a 1997 television appearance on Fox News, he said, “The prophet [John] who wrote the book of the Revelation says, ‘I looked, I saw and heard.’ A first-century man was propelled up to the end of the twentieth century and he actually saw a war of technical marvel … An intercontinental ballistic missile warhead reentering the earth’s atmosphere; poison water, radioactivity, every city on earth virtually destroyed.”

I’ve read the book of Revelation more times than I can begin to count, and I reread it when I heard that declaration. I know Revelation is rumored to be a series of “encoded symbols,” but I can’t find even a hint of what Hal Lindsey was referring to. Of course, to be fair, Lindsey’s position is that only a “Christian guided by the Spirit of God” can accurately interpret the symbols in Revelation, so apparently the presumption is that those of us who have a whole different take on Revelation are simply misguided.

And then there are the Left Behind books, written by Baptist preachers Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. This series about the Second Coming of Christ has sold over sixty-five million copies, and the essential message is that the physical return of Jesus is quickly approaching. Their view is that the earth’s demise is quickly approaching too.

According to LaHaye, “We have more reason to believe that ours may be the terminal generation than any generation since Jesus founded His church two thousand years ago.”

The Left Behind series takes the position that what will cause the end of civilization is a worldwide conspiracy of secret societies and liberal groups whose purpose is to destroy “every vestige of Christianity.” Coconspirators include the ACLU, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, major television networks, magazines, and newspapers, the U.S. State Department, the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford