What is the significance of the title?
When the Towers Fall is a quotation from the prophet Isaiah, 8th century BC. He says there will come a time when the Teacher – the same God who appeared as Teacher two thousand years ago – will no longer hide himself from the Jewish people. Although they will be forced to eat the bread of adversity, God will then defeat their enemies, on a day of great slaughter, when the towers fall, and will bind up their wounds.
And the subtitle suggests that that will happen soon. Are you yourself prophesying that?
What must happen soon is a quotation from the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse, as it is also known. The entirety of the Bible’s revelation about who God is and what he has done ends with a puzzling series of prophetic visions whose significance only becomes clear when their fulfillment draws near. I think that time, although slow in coming, now is near and that consequently the fog preventing us from understanding the book is lifting. In the comfortable West it is of course very difficult to believe that these things could ever happen, but some already have.
Such as what?
The most famous vision is the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’. A rider on a white horse brings on a time of conquest, which I argue is the period from around 1870 when competing European powers began carving up what was left of the unconquered world, principally Africa and Indochina. This led directly to war in Europe itself, as symbolised by the sword of the second horseman. The third horseman symbolises the Great Depression, and the fourth another period of war. That war ended in 1945, so it really wasn’t possible to understand the vision before that time.
If those events now lie behind us, what do you think is still to come?
The disasters that accompany the sounding of Revelation's trumpets – sounded so that we might wake up, acknowledge God and all that we owe him, and thereby avoid the bowls of wrath that follow. At the first trumpet an angel casts fire on the Earth. This can only be fire from the Sun, in modern terms an extremely violent coronal mass ejection or CME. Interestingly, the coronavirus was so named after the Sun’s corona, because when the Sun is in its most active phase CMEs give the Sun a spiky appearance. I therefore see the recent pandemic as a portent.
Why do you think no one has made these connections before?
Commentaries on Revelation tend to be written by theological scholars, and theologians tend to focus on what is timeless rather than asking what the prophecy is saying about a future that is getting ever closer. They also read the text using habits of thought that keep their academic discipline in a sort of ghetto. Some of the phenomena in Revelation can only be understood in the light of modern science, a domain of knowledge that theologians tend not to be interested in. Although much of the text is a reworking of unfulfilled prophecy from the Old Testament, it is also an extraordinarily modern work.
What is your academic background?
At university I studied English Literature. A few years later, in the course of pondering some of life's fundamental questions, I became a Christian. As I explored what that meant, I got interested in ancient literature and history (I already knew Latin and some Greek), then prehistory and eventually geological history. So in my 50s it seemed right to go back to university and study geology at degree level, after which I spent 5 more years doing research. I concluded that the history of the world is not meaningless but moving towards a pre-ordained goal.
And what is that goal?
The present age is distinguished by the growth of civilisation, and can be divided into successive thousand-year periods. The final thousand years will be when the Son of God comes back not as Yeshua, or Jesus, meaning “God saves”, but as Christ, the “anointed” king of the nations ruling from Jerusalem over all the earth. He will restore the earth following its devastation and make man understand what true righteousness and justice are. This is 'the kingdom of God' that the Church has largely lost sight of.
Our civilisation has brought huge benefits: why would God wish to destroy it?
Today we think of modern civilisation more in terms of science and technology, which have indeed brought great benefits. But historically and spiritually, it is rooted in Christianity, and in recent years we have been witnessing its accelerating collapse. Lockdowns, cultural Marxism (‘Woke’), censorship, the sexual revolution, record low birth-rates are all symptoms of this. Europe has turned away from God, and even the Church hardly knows what the gospel is. The physical destruction of civilisation will be merely the coup de grâce.
Is this the central message of the book?
Revelation is so called because it is simultaneously an unveiling of the future and an unveiling of Jesus Christ. It is given to a community of believers that have lost sight of who he is and of the fact that we belong to a Jerusalem that comes down from above. We have become citizens of the world. So at the same time as an angel cries, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great!” God makes a heartfelt appeal to the Church: “Come out of her, my people.” These are the words that most linger in my mind. The fall of our civilisation will be traumatic. Nonetheless, after the tribulation, God assures us, the future is glorious. In the years ahead we shall need to hang on to that hope.
When the Towers Fall is a quotation from the prophet Isaiah, 8th century BC. He says there will come a time when the Teacher – the same God who appeared as Teacher two thousand years ago – will no longer hide himself from the Jewish people. Although they will be forced to eat the bread of adversity, God will then defeat their enemies, on a day of great slaughter, when the towers fall, and will bind up their wounds.
And the subtitle suggests that that will happen soon. Are you yourself prophesying that?
What must happen soon is a quotation from the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse, as it is also known. The entirety of the Bible’s revelation about who God is and what he has done ends with a puzzling series of prophetic visions whose significance only becomes clear when their fulfillment draws near. I think that time, although slow in coming, now is near and that consequently the fog preventing us from understanding the book is lifting. In the comfortable West it is of course very difficult to believe that these things could ever happen, but some already have.
Such as what?
The most famous vision is the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’. A rider on a white horse brings on a time of conquest, which I argue is the period from around 1870 when competing European powers began carving up what was left of the unconquered world, principally Africa and Indochina. This led directly to war in Europe itself, as symbolised by the sword of the second horseman. The third horseman symbolises the Great Depression, and the fourth another period of war. That war ended in 1945, so it really wasn’t possible to understand the vision before that time.
If those events now lie behind us, what do you think is still to come?
The disasters that accompany the sounding of Revelation's trumpets – sounded so that we might wake up, acknowledge God and all that we owe him, and thereby avoid the bowls of wrath that follow. At the first trumpet an angel casts fire on the Earth. This can only be fire from the Sun, in modern terms an extremely violent coronal mass ejection or CME. Interestingly, the coronavirus was so named after the Sun’s corona, because when the Sun is in its most active phase CMEs give the Sun a spiky appearance. I therefore see the recent pandemic as a portent.
Why do you think no one has made these connections before?
Commentaries on Revelation tend to be written by theological scholars, and theologians tend to focus on what is timeless rather than asking what the prophecy is saying about a future that is getting ever closer. They also read the text using habits of thought that keep their academic discipline in a sort of ghetto. Some of the phenomena in Revelation can only be understood in the light of modern science, a domain of knowledge that theologians tend not to be interested in. Although much of the text is a reworking of unfulfilled prophecy from the Old Testament, it is also an extraordinarily modern work.
What is your academic background?
At university I studied English Literature. A few years later, in the course of pondering some of life's fundamental questions, I became a Christian. As I explored what that meant, I got interested in ancient literature and history (I already knew Latin and some Greek), then prehistory and eventually geological history. So in my 50s it seemed right to go back to university and study geology at degree level, after which I spent 5 more years doing research. I concluded that the history of the world is not meaningless but moving towards a pre-ordained goal.
And what is that goal?
The present age is distinguished by the growth of civilisation, and can be divided into successive thousand-year periods. The final thousand years will be when the Son of God comes back not as Yeshua, or Jesus, meaning “God saves”, but as Christ, the “anointed” king of the nations ruling from Jerusalem over all the earth. He will restore the earth following its devastation and make man understand what true righteousness and justice are. This is 'the kingdom of God' that the Church has largely lost sight of.
Our civilisation has brought huge benefits: why would God wish to destroy it?
Today we think of modern civilisation more in terms of science and technology, which have indeed brought great benefits. But historically and spiritually, it is rooted in Christianity, and in recent years we have been witnessing its accelerating collapse. Lockdowns, cultural Marxism (‘Woke’), censorship, the sexual revolution, record low birth-rates are all symptoms of this. Europe has turned away from God, and even the Church hardly knows what the gospel is. The physical destruction of civilisation will be merely the coup de grâce.
Is this the central message of the book?
Revelation is so called because it is simultaneously an unveiling of the future and an unveiling of Jesus Christ. It is given to a community of believers that have lost sight of who he is and of the fact that we belong to a Jerusalem that comes down from above. We have become citizens of the world. So at the same time as an angel cries, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great!” God makes a heartfelt appeal to the Church: “Come out of her, my people.” These are the words that most linger in my mind. The fall of our civilisation will be traumatic. Nonetheless, after the tribulation, God assures us, the future is glorious. In the years ahead we shall need to hang on to that hope.