Good afternoon to everyone else as well and some of the visitors and guests we have here this afternoon for the Sabbath and a happy Sabbath day to everybody. Our solar system, our galaxy and our universe shows the wonder and glory of our creator God and some of the images captured by telescopes and cameras continue to astound us, as you see here with the Orion M42 nebula. Here’s the famous horse head nebula. And as you look as these slides you see not just stars, but some of those brighter spots are galaxies of their own as well, that contain millions of stars themselves. There’s the M16 nebula, which you may have seen in science magazines and on news reports. And as we look into the gasses and clouds and galaxies that are there, you begin to appreciate the wonder and glory of our creator. Psalm 8. We’ll read verses 1-5 here. Where David says…

Psalm 8:1. "…O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, Who have set Your glory above the heavens!"

So God is above and beyond all of this physical creation that we can see in the universe.

Verse 2-4. "Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, Because of Your enemies, That You may silence the enemy and the avenger. When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him?"

You know here we are just a little pinprick in all of the universe.

Verse 4. "…And the son of man that You visit him?"

The son of man came down to earth as you know.

Verse 5. "For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor."

I’d like to just for two minutes here play you a short clip about the Hubble telescope and what it sees when it looks deep into space.

"It took a dark unassuming patch of sky to find young galaxies twinkling at the edge of the cosmos."

"<inaudible> field it was important that we get a essentially unblocked view of the distant universe. We want it to be unblocked by anything in our own galaxy, that is bright stars or dust in our galaxy. We wanted to avoid any bright nearby galaxies that might have essentially dominated the picture, and so we had to do some studies to find a field of sky that was essentially boring in every way, so that we look at the distant galaxies."

"The team targeted Hubble’s continuous viewing zone, narrow patches of sky near the north and south poles where Hubble can stare for several days without being blocked by the earth. The long exposure brings out wispy detail and galaxies as far as twelve billion light years away, but the telescope also captures light that astronomers need to filter out."

"The problem is that the telescope itself is subject to radiation from charged particles, most of which come from the solar wind and those also leave little spots of light on the detector, so when you see one of the Hubble images that’s covered with these spots like measles, you have to take a whole bunch of pictures. These spots will move around because they’re not on the sky, but the galaxies and the stars will stay there, so you take a whole bunch and you combine them together keeping only the things that don’t change <inaudible>."

"In all it took three hundred fifty images with three different color filters for the team to piece together the final Hubble deep field image."

"Well, the thing that amazes me when I look at the Hubble deep field is first of all just how many galaxies there are, this tiny spot on the sky and almost everything you see in the image is a galaxy. Each of those galaxies has anywhere from a billion to a hundred billion stars in it. So we have before us in this image the history of the universe if we can figure out what it’s trying to tell us. In many ways, it’s like going out on a very dark night and staring up at the sky, and you realize how tiny a part of the sky it is and yet you’re seeing these vast systems and stars. What an amazing universe it is we’re looking at."

Now we rely on the foundation and stability of the universe and it seems to be unmovable to us, doesn’t it? The earth is a solid foundation upon which we build skyscrapers, huge bridges, we set our clocks by the universe and our calendars. Once again from King David in Psalm 148:1-6…

Psalm 148:1-6. "Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; Praise Him in the heights! Praise Him, all His angels; Praise Him, all His hosts! Praise Him, sun and moon; Praise Him, all you stars of light! Praise Him, you heavens of heavens, And you waters above the heavens! Let them praise the name of the Lord, For He commanded and they were created. He also established them forever and ever; He made a decree which shall not pass away."

And so we see the glory of the universe and mankind through great technology like the Hubble telescope is only able to peer just a little ways into what is truly out there. A couple of more nebula for you to look at, and as they mentioned in the clip a minute ago, some of those brightest clips of stars are galaxies within galaxies with millions and billions of stars. Now they’re hoping to go beyond that with the next generation of space telescopes and even see further into space as this will show you.

"Whenever you build a new way of looking at the universe, so that’s what a new telescope is, that goes beyond what you had last, it changes your view of the world. Hubble gives a gain over the human eye of ten billion times. That is we see ten billion times fainter with Hubble than you can with the unaided eye. We really are after four basic scientific questions, which are ultimately basic human or philosophical questions, and they include: 1) How did the universe originate? 2) How did we get here? 3) Where are we going? 4) Are we alone?"

"Hubble has made a great contribution of showing us that expanding cloud of hydrogen formed into these big things we call galaxies, the largest conglomerates of matter in the universe much, much earlier than theory had predicted. Hubble has proven that super massive black holes, these objects that are a billion or two billion times the mass of the sun and are so crunched down that the speed of escape from those objects is greater than the speed of light, so nothing can get out. Perhaps that says something about the ultimate fate of the universe. Will it all turn into a black hole sometime? We don’t know, but we do know that black holes are no longer science fictional; they are science fact."

"Hubble has made great contributions into showing us the existence of many, many planetary disk, that is disk of dust and gas around young stars that will slowly form into planets. They’re common. The process for producing planets is very, very common. So Hubble is just the first in an armada of space science satellites that will attack those four basic questions over the next hundred years."

"The next generation space telescope is designed to go so far beyond Hubble that we see the edge of light in the universe. The telescope will be more sensitive first just because it will be bigger. The Hubble telescope is about 2.4 meters in diameter. The next generation space telescope will be 8 meters in diameter. Because it is so much bigger, it will be that much more sensitive. So the pictures that will be returned from the NGST will look every bit as beautiful as the pictures of the Hubble except they’ll be almost a 1,000 times more sensitive, and they’ll be looking at objects in the very distant reaches of the universe that we haven’t yet seen because Hubble can’t go that far, and in a nutshell, that’s what we hope to see. We hope to see the place where there’s no more light."

"That will allow us then to watch this whole epic of galaxies being born, of the stars being created, the light turning on, assembling into galaxies, the galaxies assembling through collisions. Every time we put a telescope up, we discover new things."

So that’s what they hope to accomplish in the coming years with more sensitive telescopes, and it’s getting to the point where they can see like they say the edge of light, the edge of the universe and the things that we see in these images are things that happened billions of years ago because it took that long for the light to get to us, and so it’s like you’re looking at almost the creation as though as the way they see it. And you actually see galaxies and nebula and planets forming is what they theorize that they’re looking at in some of these shots.

And so the universe is an amazing and phenomenal part of what we are, and we’re just an infinitesimal part and David said, why do you care about us compared to all that you’ve created. Of course, you can go from large to small when you look at the wonder of creation. The timing of our solar system allows clocks to be set extremely accurately; however, sub-atomic particles are even more reliable. Atomic clocks keep time better than any clock. They even keep time better than the rotation of the earth and the movement of the stars. Without atomic clocks GPS navigation would be impossible. The internet would not synchronize and the position of the planets would not be known with enough accuracy for space probes and landers to be launched and monitored.

Atomic clocks are not radioactive. They don’t rely on atomic decay. The big difference between a standard clock in your home and an atomic clock is that the oscillation in an atomic clock is between a nucleus of an atom and the surrounding electrons. The long-term accuracy achieved by modern cesium atomic clocks is better than one second in a million years. Hydrogen atomic clocks show a short-term accuracy of approximately ten times the accuracy of the cesium atomic clock, and therefore, atomic clocks have increased the accuracy of time measurement about one million times in comparison with the measurements carried out by means of astronomical techniques.

But now we’re going to switch gears. I’ve covered all this in the first part of the sermon for a reason. Up to this point, we’ve illustrated some of the amazing parts of the universe, but I’m about to change tracks here now to switch gears and as I do so, please keep in mind the awesome beauty and power of the heavens as a backdrop to what we’re about to see.

Which book of the Bible contains some of the hardest prophecies to understand? Which book of the Bible is devoted practically entirely to prophecy? The book of Revelation, the revelation of Jesus Christ includes some amazing prophecies within its pages. There is one prophetic passage that we don’t hear a lot about that I would like to cover today. And this prophecy actually fits in rather well with the time period we’re in right now and that is the time leading up to the Feast of Trumpets, right here on God’s holy day calendar.

We’re going to take a look at what is called the sixth seal, the heavenly signs. What is the sixth seal found in the book of Revelation? When do the heavenly signs occur and what do they picture? There has been confusion over the centuries about, amongst Christian denominations as to what these heavenly signs of the sixth seal really are and so this afternoon in the remaining time we’ll examine the sixth seal found in Revelation 6, and we’ll see what it signifies and when it occurs. Let’s read Revelation 6:1 here.

Revelation 6:1. "Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals…"

So here we are with the seven seals.

Verse 1-2. "…and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, "Come and see." And I looked, and behold, a white horse."

So here we have listed the four horsemen of the apocalypse as they’re commonly called.

Verse 2-9. "He who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer. When He opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, "Come and see." Another horse, fiery red, went out. And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another; and there was given to him a great sword. When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come and see." So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the oil and the wine." When He opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come and see." So I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth. When He opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held."

That’s commonly called the great tribulation, that fifth seal.

Verse 10. "And they cried with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?"

There’s so much destruction during the first five seals. How long is this going to go on?

Verse 11. "Then a white robe was given to each of them; and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer, until both the number of their fellow servants and their brethren, who would be killed as they were, was completed."

So we have the sealing of God’s servants. And so we see that we’re now poised between the time of the great tribulation, the fifth seal and now the sixth seal. What is it? What do even the scholars of today say it is? Let’s go on then to verse 12.

    Verse 12-17. "I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood. And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"

    So we see the heavens being shaken here in this sixth seal and mankind being extremely frightened. I’d like to take a moment to read you two common explanations of this passage from Revelation. First from Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible. He says, verse 12…

    "A great earthquake] A most stupendous change in the civil and religious constitution of the world. If it refer to Constantine the Great, the change that was made by his conversion to Christianity might be very properly represented under the emblem of an earthquake, and the other symbols mentioned in this and the following verses."

    "The sun - the ancient pagan government of the Roman empire, was totally darkened; and, like a black hair sackcloth, was degraded and humbled to the dust."

    "The moon - the ecclesiastical state of the same empire, became as blood - was totally ruined, their sacred rites abrogated, their priests and religious institutions desecrated, their altars cast down, their temples destroyed, or turned into places for Christian worship."

    It says verse 15…

"The kings of the earth, &c.] All the secular powers who had endeavored to support the pagan worship…All hid themselves - were astonished at the total overthrow of the heathen empire, and the revolution which had then taken place…All these things may literally apply to the final destruction of Jerusalem, and to the revolution which took place in the Roman empire under Constantine the Great."

How about from Haley’s Bible Handbook…

"Whatever else this seal may refer to, it seems like a prediction of the <inaudible> of the Roman Empire. The Empire ceased its persecution of the church, emperor Constantine became a Christian issued an edict of toleration, made Christianity the religion of his court and in AD 325 he issued a great exhalation to all to embrace Christianity. He moved his capitol to Constantinople. Theodosis made Christianity the state religion of the empire and church membership compulsory. In A.D. 325 the empire was divided, the west with Rome, its capitol, the east with Constantinople its capital and this was the beginning of the breakup of the mighty world empire that had for 300 years tried so hard to destroy Christianity."

What I’ve just read is the basis in Christianity today for many explanations of the heavenly signs. It’s history. It was Constantine. It was the Roman empire breaking up. What does the Bible actually reveal? What will we find when we take a closer look into scriptures ourselves? Well, let’s compare what the Apostle John wrote, Revelation 6, with what Jesus himself said.

Matthew 24:29-30. "Immediately after the tribulation…" which is the fifth seal, right? "…of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."

You’ve got the tribulation; you’ve got things happening in the heavens and then you’ve got Christ returning. What we just read in Matthew and the passage in Revelation 6 are parallel accounts of the same events, and we immediately see that these heavenly signs are followed by the return of Jesus Christ and these are end-time events not A.D. 325 events. And Revelation 6 is followed by the seventh seal, the seven trumpets, which come late and picture the return of Jesus Christ, and so the parallel accounts show what is commonly called the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The first four seals are the first four horses and then the remaining three, the great tribulation, the heavenly signs and the seven trumpets. The heavenly signs follow the great tribulation. We know what follows the heavenly signs, the seven trumpets of Christ’s return. But notice it again, Revelation 6:17…

Revelation 6:17. "For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"

What we see here at the time of the wrath of God after the heavenly signs, before Christ’s return, the world is punished through the trumpet plagues. That’s something that we will look more closely at of course during the Feast of Trumpets itself. The Feast of Trumpets is not just about the seventh trumpet, it’s about all seven trumpets. Of course, culminating with the seventh and the return of Christ. And so I think today’s a good time to look at this in the chronology of things with the Feast of Trumpets being just a few weeks away. Look at what Joel wrote in 2:31. As he put the heavenly signs into perfect chronological perspective for us. Joel wrote…

Joel 2:31. "The sun shall be turned into darkness, And the moon into blood, Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord."

So as Revelation 6:17 and Joel 2:31 show the heavenly signs occur before the day of the Lord, which is the wrath of the Lamb, so the chronology you see here is the great tribulation, which is Satan’s wrath, Satan’s anger on mankind and on the church, then the heavenly signs and then the day of the Lord, which is God’s punishment, God’s wrath on a sinful world. The heavenly signs are not referring to Constantine or the establishment of the Christian or more correctly, the Catholic church of the 300s. It has nothing to do with Constantine, who is a reformed pagan, who actually helped introduce heresy and doctrinal error into the Christian world. He was no hero in God’s eyes.

So what are the heavenly signs? Well, now we know when these signs will occur; the chronological perspective, but what are they? Perhaps on of the best explanations would be to say that they are an immense cosmic disturbance of the heavens. They are a grim announcement from the power of the universe that the end of the world as we know it is at hand. Dramatic changes are on the horizon.

As you look at each of those verses in Revelation 6 referring to the heavenly signs you see earthquakes, but of course, by God. These are not necessarily natural phenomenon.

"The sun became black." Whereas the Phillips Modern English translation puts it, "The sun became black like coarse black cloth." The New English Bible says or, "The sun turned black as a funeral pall. The moon turned completely red." And Phillips Modern English says, "The full moon was as red as blood."

Can you imagine what it would be like to go out tonight and the moon was red? What would you think? "The stars of heaven fell to the earth," as the Living Bible says, "Then the stars of heaven appeared to be falling to earth." You know, meteors perhaps, when a meteor flashes across the sky it looks like a star, doesn’t it? I mean in the ancient world, they wouldn’t have known necessarily exactly what it was other than a shooting star, right? Stars falling to the earth. The sky vanished like it was rolled up. As Phillips says, "The sky vanished as though it were a scroll being rolled up." The sky disappeared. "And every mountain and island was jolted out of its place."

Now all of these events are caused by God as you’ll remember from Revelation 6:17 that the great day of his anger has come and who can survive it? All of these events are much more alarming than something like Haley’s Comet. You practically need a telescope to see. As it is recorded in another parallel account, Luke 21:26…

Luke 21:26. "Men's hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of heaven will be shaken."

In other words, people having heart attacks, they’re so frightened. Climbing into caves to hide, wishing that the caves would fall on them.

I’d like to take a brief look at some cosmic disturbances of our time. Nothing like the heavenly signs that are to come. This is from just this week, July 4th. ‘Asteroid May Hit Earth, But Don’t Panic Yet.’

"Astronomers are carefully monitoring a newly discovered 1.2 mile wide asteroid to see whether it is on a collision course with earth. Initial calculations indicate that there is a chance, the asteroid known as 2002 MT7 will hit the earth on February 1, 2019, but scientists said Wednesday that the calculations are preliminary and the risk to the planet is low."

"The threat is very minimal, Donald Edmonds of NASAs’ jet propulsion laboratories in Pasadena, CA told British Broadcasting radio–an object of this size would be expected to hit the earth every few million years. And as we get additional data, I think this threat will go away. The object was detected on July 9 when the <inaudible> asteroid research project in New Mexico. It orbits the sun every 837 days and NASA scientists predict its path could intersect with the earth’s orbit, but they say more observations over the coming month will help them plot its course more accurately, but they say that it is of minimal concern, giving it a zero on the Torino impact hazard scale."

I’m sure you’re very familiar with that. They gave it a zero, not too much to worry about, but this is about a 2 kilometer wide asteroid that may hit the earth in about fifteen or sixteen years from now.

Well, the time is coming, whether this one actually intersects the earth’s orbit or not. Comets and meteors do periodically hit the planets of our solar system and the earth. However, since the creation of Adam and Eve, only minor impacts have been recorded here. One look at the moon or the other planets in our solar system and you’ll see nothing but large impact craters. For example, you could look at mercury and it looks like the moon. It doesn’t matter which planet you look at they’re desolate and have been destructed by impacts, but there will come a time when the heavens will shake and the stars of heaven will appear to fall to the earth.

These signs will be powerful and immediate in our very heavens. They will be obvious. It will be a fearful time for mankind. Now we have some control over whether or not somebody pushes the button to detonate a nuclear bomb, but mankind will have absolutely no control over the fate of cities during the time of the sixth seal, just prior to Christ’s return. As the scriptures say, the great men, the wise men, the rich men will be fearful. There will be nothing they can do about it.

There was a most interesting impact on the planet Jupiter in 1994. A large comet broke up into two dozen pieces prior to impact. It was named the Shoemaker-Levy comet after the two scientists who discovered. From July 16 through July 22, 1994, pieces of an object designated as comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. This is the first collision of two solar system bodies ever to be actually observed, and the effects of the comet impact on Jupiter’s atmosphere have been simply spectacular and beyond scientist’s expectations, and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 consisted of at least 21 discernable fragments with their diameters estimated up to two miles. And you can see the trail there of the two dozen pieces. This is an actual telescope shot.

That little black spot up there is the shadow cast by Jupiter’s moon Io. They numbered all the fragments. A-W. And kept track of them as they headed towards Jupiter. Here’s the compilation of telescope shots and artist’s renderings showing the trail as they impacted and hit Jupiter. Here’s the impact of fragment "G" for example, of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter. The fireball is seen twelve minutes after impact. At 2.34 microns, the impact "A" site, the first one, is seen on the opposite limb of the planet. You see that little spec on the right there? That’s where "A" hit. Here’s the impact of fragment "K" of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter.

The scars of three previous impacts can be seen on the planetary disk. You see some of the previous impact points there. A little closer. Here’s the impact site. I think that is "G" and an enlargement of it there on the left, 18th of July 1994 the impact site I think of "G" once again. What’s fascinating is that that spot you see there, the impacts point and the gases that were released is larger than the earth. Jupiter is so many times larger than our planet, if Shoemaker-Levy had hit here with 21 or 22 comets like that, there would most likely be nothing left to talk about. I have a clip here from the scientist of what took place for me to show you for a couple of minutes. Comet crash.

"It’s happening tonight. Virtually every telescope in the world is going to be pointed towards Jupiter. We’ve never seen this before. This is totally new ground. Comet is coming. The comet is coming and astronomers all over the world are seeing good pictures of Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it smashes into the atmosphere surrounding Jupiter. CNN’s Miles O’Brien is in the middle of the action. Miles. Astronomers all over the world are getting a real eyeful of information as Shoemaker-Levy 9 continues its fiery meeting with Jupiter."

"When the initial images came in, it was time to break out the champagne and celebrate a little bit. They’re the co-discoverers of the comet. Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy: I think we’re very, very privileged tonight to see the event that’s not once in a lifetime, it’s once in a millennium. First, let me remind everybody what all the commotion is about. There is a comet called Shoemaker-Levy, it broke up into all these pieces, which have been labeled A-W just for identification purpose. News about outer space today, the planet Jupiter continues to take a pounding. Scientists have been watching as closely as they’re able. That large ring, that big smudge, you could easily fit the earth inside that diameter. This is one big impact site. I have one more thing I want to say. Go! HST results were spectacular. I loved sitting here listening to it. I was always amazed that the new reports, once we can combine our efforts and combine our data, we will know a lot more than we know already, and it’s going to be a lot of fun."

You see a lot of destruction in the universe itself when you look at the other planets. Perhaps from Satan’s war with God. We don’t know. But a lot that has to yet be repaired. The earth was repaired. Obviously, for a very special reason. That was for God’s plan. Only earth seems to be the beautiful spot here on earth, as some scientists say, in the universe I mean. Some scientists say that while there is order and timing in the universe there is a certain amount of chaos, especially when it comes to asteroid belts and comets. It can be quite random. Do you think it would take much on God’s part to give us all a good scare? Not much. Just a few things go wacky, and we’d be in fear of our lives.

So you think of it like this… What do we set our clocks by? The timing of the universe. What is the most constant unchanging predictable foundation that we have, the stability of the universe. What foundation do we build our tallest skyscrapers upon? The firm foundation of the rock of this earth. How is the temperature and global warming of the earth controlled? By the precise location of the sun to it. What gives us light by day? The sun. What gives us light by night? The moon and the stars.

There’s some fascinating images created by an artist and photographer named Donald Davis, and he has been commissioned by NASA and other agencies to illustrate their concepts, and he does a very good job of picturing an impact of an interstellar body with our planet. And just to start with, here’s the Galileo probe in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Now this is take from, I’ll read you the caption.

"The probe was elaborately modeled then placed against the background partially composed from art elements left over from NASA Galileo animations."

He does a very good job with his artwork. Here’s an artist’s concept, Donald Davis, of a catastrophic asteroid impact with the early earth. An impact with a 500 kilometer diameter asteroid would effectively sterilize the planet and then they speculate, the earth may have experienced such gigantic impacts in its youth, but fortunately today there are no projectiles this large to threaten our planet. The dino killer. Of course, that’s one theory as to what happened to the dinosaurs. We don’t know. That could have been part of God’s war with Satan, who knows. But of course, scientists will say maybe it was a big impact.

A large body of scientific evidence now exists that supports the hypothesis that a major asteroid or comet impact occurred in the Caribbean region at the boundary of the cretacious and tertiary periods in earth’s geologic history, and such an impact is suspected to be responsible for the mass extinction of the many floral and faunal species, including the large dinosaurs that mark the end of the cretacious period. They call it the KT event, meaning the extinction of dinosaurs at the boundary between the cretacious period K and the tertiary period T. And this orbital view of the KT event is some 45 seconds after the impact with an immense cloud of molten droplets of target and projectile materials spreading into space, and the ejected material is still climbing and widespread regions are on fire from the initial thermal heat flash from the shear brilliance of the entering <inaudible>.

So this is some of the artwork that Donald Davis does for NASA and for different magazines. ‘Nature Remodels the Coast Line’ is another one he did. And a large meteor similar to the object which deviated the forests of Tunguska. Remember that in Asia where all the trees were flattened for hundreds of miles around. Here’s an artist’s depiction of one exploding over Los Angeles.

On October 9, 1992, I’m going to talk about the Peakskill meteorite, thousands of people in the eastern United States witnessed a bright fireball and heard sonic booms as the fireball passed through the earth’s atmosphere. The twenty-seven pound meteorite fell in Peakskill, NY, and struck a 1980 Chevy Malibu sitting in its driveway. The meteorite penetrated all the way through the trunk of the car, barely missing the gas tank and then by analyzing its flight path to determine where it was orbiting around the sun before that, they didn’t know about it before.

On the cold arctic night of December 9, 1997, several momentous seconds were interrupted by a widely seen flash in the sky at about 5:11 a.m. local time. And this view by Donald Davis attempts to reconstruct the event as it may have appeared from the fringes of the atmosphere as the large fireball entered the atmosphere. So there have been minor impacts with the earth since Adam and Eve were on this earth, since, you know modern man as we would say it, since civilization was formed.

But what about the heavenly signs? Where there are going to be some major disturbances in the heavens. Will it be comets? It could be. Asteroids, meteors, other events, no doubt will be involved if the sun disappears, the moon turns like blood, mountains are shaken, islands moved out of their place. That could easily happen with a large impact. Just think when these things, that are the foundation of our universe become unpredictable, move from their orbits, blacken out, turn to red like blood and fall from the heavens, mankind will become so frightened that many will have heart attacks.

This incredible event where the creator of the universe shakes the heavens, it will announce that the wrath of the Lord is coming upon a sinful people. These events will happen. It’s prophesied in the book of Revelation to happen just before the day of the Lord and the return of Jesus Christ. The return of who is pictured by the upcoming Feast of Trumpets itself.

By examining related scriptures and studying the context of Revelation 6:12-17, we found that the heavenly signs occur after the Great Tribulation and just prior to the day of the Lord. The heavenly signs will be awesome, cosmic disturbances that bring the reality of the power of God to the forefront of the minds of mankind to the point where even the strong will be fearful. For who is able to survive the wrath of the Lord? Who is going to make it through this disaster, this catastrophe? Well, as Revelation says, except those who are the sealed servants of God. There will be protection for those who are sealed beforehand, those who God sets aside, and who are those sealed servants? Well that’s another topic found in Revelation 7 for another sermon on another day.