Angels swarming to the Holy Land - but why?

By DEREK CLONTZ
Your World Report

Optimists say it’s a good sign, pessimists say it proves the end is near

Thousands of true believers insist it’s true: Angels from Heaven are swarming to the Holy Land like bees to a hive, paving the way for the return of the Messiah and the establishment of Heaven on Earth, not in the distant future, but just months from now - in June.

“Hundreds of angels have appeared to thousands of eyewitnesses and make no mistake, these sightings are real,” Dr. Thomas Steris, the Portland, Oregon-based evangelist, told me exclusively. He is heading up a multinational team of clergymen and scholars now investigating the angel phenomenon from headquarters in Jerusalem.

“Perhaps even more exciting,” he continued in our interview, “is the fact that Christians aren’t the only people seeing God’s messengers - Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, even pagans, witches and Satan worshippers are seeing them, too.

“And more than seeing them, in many cases they are talking with them, touching them - even accepting miracles from them in full view of other witnesses who are now spreading the good news to men, women and children around the world over.

“There’s nothing new about the appearance of angels. And there’s nothing new about angels bringing miracles and hope in the hour of mankind’s greatest need.

“But the sheer numbers of angels flocking to Jerusalem over the past 12 months, and even more impressively, over the past few weeks, is unprecedented in recorded history. Why now?

“Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is coming home no later than June and possibly even sooner to usher in what the Bible tells us will be one thousand years of perfect happiness and perfect peace.

“On the day of the Messiah’s return true believers will rise up out of their graves whole, happy and alive while the wicked are cast into the fires of Hell and eternal damnation,” he added.

“And then, as the Bible tells us so clearly, the believers will help our Lord establish His Kingdom of perfect love and peace right here, on Earth, once and for all. His time indeed has come.”

Not everyone familiar with the angel sightings agrees with Dr. Steris that the phenomenon signals the end of the world as we know it.

In fact, spokesmen for Jewish and Muslim faiths - both of which are strongly represented in Jerusalem and throughout the Holy Land - have been reluctant to address the issue at all, calling it “an event of undetermined meaning for Christians only” or, in the words one Muslim leader, “the trickery of Satan.”

Don’t tell that to Paula Morgan, 23, of Perth, Australia. Visiting Jerusalem with a tour group, she reportedly stepped off a curb into the path of a speeding microbus that 27 eyewitnesses say would have hit and killed her if a “14-foot male angel with huge white wings” hadn’t appeared from nowhere and scooped up the woman, flying her 50 feet away to safety before kissing her lightly on the forehead and vanishing into thin air.

Ravi Ramadan, a 46-year-old Christian convert from New Delhi, India, would, as he puts it, “go to the wall” for the angels, too. In published reports, he claims to have received a miracle from an angel while he was touring the Holy Land alone.

Depressed over the loss of his business and the recent death of his wife, Ramadan visited the famed Garden of Gethsemane, asked God to forgive him and actually ran an 11-inch dagger deep into his gut, Samurai style.

“The pain was blinding,” he told me in an interview conducted by e-mail.

“I started to collapse. But I didn’t collapse. An angel in white and gold appeared from no place and I stumbled into her arms. She looked deeply into my eyes and pulled the dagger my from stomach. My pain stopped instantly and there was no bleeding - and there was no wound.

“The angel told me to tell my story to ‘all who have ears to listen.’ She said the Messiah is coming like ‘a thief in the night’. I asked if the Messiah is coming soon and she said: ‘The Messiah’s time is upon us.’”

Dr. Steris and his team and others - including the Israeli military and, reportedly, intelligence agencies such as America’s own CIA - are investigating the reports of angel sightings as rapidly as they can.

Estimates of legitimate sightings - those that are considered to come from reliable sources or have been verified by independent eyewitnesses - range from 2,000 to 5,000 depending the particular expert you’re talking to.

“Any way you slice it, we’re still talking about thousands of legitimate sightings,” Dr. Steris told me. “We’re not seeing an angel here and an angel there - we’re seeing an army of angels - God’s army.

“I certainly don’t see Satan and his demons showing their faces And I don’t think we will see them, either.”

In fact, while some observers have suggested that the angels are massing in the Holy Land in preparation for the beginning of the Final Battle between Good and Evil - Armageddon - Dr. Steris flatly states: “This is not the case.”

“Armageddon already has been fought and won in a battle that raged not on land, sea or air - but in the very hearts of men,” he said.

“In fact, The Book of Life already has been filled with the names of those who have been saved by God’s mercy - and the Book of Life is now closed.

“God is closing all the books on this sinful world,” he adds. “Now it’s simply a matter of our Savior returning to take the faithful to our final reward - to lead us into the Kingdom of God.

“In that regard, ‘getting right with God’ at this late hour may no longer be an option. At this point in human history, I firmly believe, you are saved or you are not saved.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do to change anything the Lord has written. At the threshold of eternity,” he concludes, “you truly are on your own.”

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