“That’s right, Dave,” John Edwards said. “Despite the popular notion of the last several years, the Bible never speaks of a ‘Battle of Armageddon.’ It says that the forces coming against Jerusalem will gather at a place called Armageddon. That’s what we’ve been seeing the past couple of days. True to Scripture, this is exactly where the Antichrist joined his forces. But the actual battle to be fought was never to be the ‘Battle of Armageddon.’ It’s the ‘Battle of Jerusalem.’”

“Wow!” Dave said. “That’s where they are now. Oh, brother!”

As the men and women at El Refugio and at other outposts around the world witnessed the unfolding events of the end of the age, they could not be certain exactly what had happened, or when. It all took place as fast as the blink of an eye. Somehow, at least in the closing moments, the time sequence of heaven blurred the elapsed time on earth. Events took a much longer time to describe than they took to happen, and they were not sequential. But they happened just as John the Apostle had described them two thousand years before.

John Edwards offered an interesting metaphor. “You know, Albert Einstein said in his theory of relativity that time slows down the faster an object moves through space. An astronaut hurtling through space at speeds approaching the speed of light might perceive from his on-board clocks that he had traveled in space for six months. But on returning to earth, he might discover that two hundred years has passed in his absence. So, time is not constant,” he said. “It’s relative. I suspect that’s why Saint Peter could say that one day at God’s level is like a thousand years to those who live on the earth.”

At one point, the Antichrist had wanted maximum worldwide television coverage of his triumph in Jerusalem. So, by satellite telecast and by every sophisticated means available, the world was allowed to witness the columns of UP troops rolling toward Jerusalem. The world was told that the Union for Peace had been victorious over the Israeli Air Force. When it looked as if the battle was going against them, both Carl and Lori Throneberry grew visibly agitated.

Sitting on the edge of her seat, Lori said, “People, I know what the Bible says about Israel winning, but without some kind of miracle, it seems to me they’re goners. Unless they want to do themselves in, like the defenders at Masada, or blow themselves up with an atomic bomb, I don’t see how they can get out of this alive.”

Just as she spoke the words, the satellite picture went dead.

“Lori, that miracle may be happening,” Carl said. “It wasn’t a bomb, though. I’ll bet anything our little friend in Babylon just cut the feed. There’s something happening that he doesn’t want the rest of the world to see.”