End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

Finally a man named Tim Stoen, a member of the upper echelon of the Peoples Temple organization and Jim Jones’s closest advisor, defected from the group, returned to the United States and formed a group of his own. It was called the Concerned Relatives, and its purpose was to liberate loved ones from the “concentration camp” of Jonestown and the grip of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. The Concerned Relatives’ efforts were so effective that in November of 1978, members of the media joined California Congressman Leo Ryan on a fact-finding trip to Guyana.

The residents of Jonestown put on a great display of communal harmony to welcome Congressman Ryan and his companions on their arrival, and Jim Jones assured the visitors that, contrary to the Concerned Relatives’ reports, all members of the Peoples Temple were free to leave the organization and Guyana any time they liked. That claim lost all credibility the next day when one of the reporters received a note from a Jonestown resident asking for help in escaping. A total of sixteen Peoples Temple escapees left for the airstrip with the Ryan party that morning. As they emerged from the truck to board the two planes that were waiting there for them, they were ambushed by a handful of Jim Jones’s gunmen. Congressman Ryan, an escaped resident of Jonestown, and three members of the media were killed. The rest of the group suffered severe injuries.

That horror was only the beginning of the unspeakable Jonestown tragedy on November 18, 1978. Jim Jones was well aware that international law enforcement would demand justice for the murders and attempted murders he’d ordered at the airstrip. He also knew that the Peoples Temple could never survive the inevitable impending media scrutiny. And so he gathered the residents of Jonestown in the community center and announced that the time had come for the mass exodus

from this evil world they’d prepared for as part of their commitment to him, their messiah, their Second Coming of Christ—in other words, he ordered the “revolutionary suicide” of every member of the Peoples Temple, from the elderly to the helpless children and infants. Most drank Kool-Aid spiked with cyanide and various tranquilizers. Jim Jones took a far easier way out, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. In the end, solely on his orders, more than nine hundred residents of Jonestown and five people at the nearby Guyana airstrip lost their lives that day. It’s hard to imagine that the nuclear holocaust he warned against with such fervor would have been worse than the cruel deaths the membership of the Peoples Temple suffered at the hands of the man to whom they literally entrusted their lives.

The Branch Davidians

In the early nineteenth century, a man named William Miller founded a group called the Millerites. Among other things, the Millerites predicted that the end of the world, heralded by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, would occur on October 22, 1844.

When that date came and went fairly uneventfully, October 22, 1844, came to be known to the Millerites, understandably, as the Great Disappointment.

The Millerites picked several more end-of-the-world dates, all based on their interpretation of certain biblical passages. When those dates proved to be as meaningless as had October 22, 1844, the membership of the Millerites declined significantly. Several members, though, persisted in their basic belief in an imminent, ultimate battle between good and evil and in the Second Coming of Christ. In 1863 they formed the Seventh-day Adventists, most definitely a church as opposed to a cult, and still thriving, with a current membership of more than twelve million worldwide.