Even great students of the teachings of Jesus never fully realized the significance of the words of their Lord. Now, everyone knew—but for hundreds of millions of people, the knowledge had come too late. This was the end of the age, and many would not survive it.

In his study, laid out rather like the bridge of a sailing ship at the top of the winding stairway in his expansive mountain home, John Edwards struggled to assimilate all that had been happening over the past weekend. Radios, televisions, computers, and a half-dozen satellite dishes on the property of El Refugio fed information into that room, spilling out billions of bytes of data per second.

John listened, deciphered, and made notes—often more like a machine than a man—on a simple yellow legal pad. He was attempting to put the pieces of a great puzzle together—no easy feat. Every free moment he had, he spent in his mountaintop study, writing. On Friday night he wrote:

When the meteor plunged into the Pacific Ocean last night, it set off a giant wave a mile high that traveled away from the center of impact in a 360-degree circle. The giant wave moved out from the Impact Zone at a speed of five hundred miles per hour, then slowed to three hundred miles per hour at a point two thousand miles away from the impact. As it traveled, the wave height diminished somewhat so that, by the time it reached Japan, its vertical height was five hundred feet.

The earthquakes resulting from the violent impact caused further dislocations in the ocean. Nothing could impede the movement of the first great wave. From then on, the tsunami wave action caused by earthquakes surrounding the Ring of Fire resembled a billiard ball careening off the sides of a pool table.

The Pacific Ocean became a seething caldron as the tsunami waves collided and reinforced one another, in turn sending repeated shock waves north, south, east, and west. Low-lying land areas ringing the Pacific were not lashed by one giant wave, but by repeated waves roaring upon them from unexpected directions and striking at unexpected locations.

He sat and reflected on what he had just written. It was as if the sea had gone mad. Its movements could not be predicted, could not be anticipated. Nothing could be done to quiet it as it raged on uncontrollably, angrily punishing over and over the land mass that contained it.

John Edwards reached over and opened his well-worn Bible and scanned the pages he had read so many times regarding the end of the age. His eyes drank in the words that Jesus Christ had spoken to His disciples in A.D. 30, that before His return, the “sea and the waves will be roaring.”