The Day the World Changed

Like many of you, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was in the bathroom shaving, enjoying a lazy start to the morning. The TV was on in the bedroom so I could listen to the news as I got ready. “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center,” the announcer remarked. I wandered out of the bathroom, shaving foam still clinging to half of my face.

That’s odd, I thought. I didn’t think planes were supposed to be in that airspace at all. At that point I was assuming it was a small personal craft—even though the smoldering hole in the tower suggested otherwise. As I stood there musing over what appeared to be a minor accident, I saw the second plane smash through the other tower.

This was no accident.

I picked up the phone immediately; Jean was on the other side of the country, three time zones west of me. My mother-in-law, still struggling to wake up, answered the phone. “Is Jean up?” I asked. 

“What’s the matter?” she asked me. “You sound like something happened.”

“Turn on the TV,” I said. “I think we just went to war.”

You probably have a few days branded onto your long-term memory by traumatic events: the JFK assassination (I wasn’t around for that one), the moon landing (I was in the womb, soon to be born), the day Reagan was shot (playing in the woods behind our house), the Challenger disaster (the high school band room), the collapse of the markets in 1987 (in the college laundry), and more. As notable as those are, none of them rival 9/11 for sheer impact. It wasn’t just the horror of helpless hijack victims slamming into a high-rise building or the panicky occupants of high floors choosing to jump instead of burn, either: it was this sick feeling that the world had just changed. Instinctively, we all knew that we had just turned a corner—perhaps a prophetic one.

During the next couple of days my office phone never stopped ringing. Some callers excitedly pointed to the writings of Ellen White. “The calamities by land and sea, the unsettled state of society, the alarms of war, are portentous. They forecast approaching events of the greatest magnitude. . . . Great changes are soon to take place in our world, and the final movements will be rapid ones.”[1]

“Wouldn’t you know it, Pastor?” one caller breathlessly told me. “It’s in the Testimonies . . . on page 11 of volume 9! 9/11! And in the same passage she describes the fiery destruction of buildings in New York City! It was prophesied!”

The plain message of the Bible is startling enough, without any need for sensationalist embellishment.

I understood the excitement; after all, for the most part, we all want last-day events to start unfolding quickly so that Jesus returns. If we have to go through hard times to get there, let’s get it over with. But attaching the Testimonies quote directly to the calendar? Color me skeptical; 25 years later I’m still not convinced that the passage was a specific reference to 9/11. Sure, it mentions (on the next few pages) the pride associated with New York’s impressive buildings, and it describes a fiery conflagration. That part, I’m willing to concede—as a general fulfillment of prophecy, it works. But the fact that her prediction is on page 11 of volume 9? No. I could be wrong, but that, I suspect, is a coincidence—admittedly a spectacular one.

Why do I doubt it? It’s an approach to reading our message that smacks too much of numerology or Kabbalism—a form of Jewish mysticism that seeks hidden or spiritual meanings. During the past 2,000 years there has been no shortage of people who sought hidden meanings hiding beneaththe obvious. The plain message of the Bible is startling enough, without any need for sensationalist embellishment. It’s true that we often have to work on our study, as with the symbolism in Jesus’ parables, or in Bible prophecy. It’s also true that Scripture uses numerical patterns—most notably the number 7—to help us dig deeper.

But the volume and page number? I find myself in agreement with former associate director of the Ellen White Estate William Fagal’s assessment:

“We might be able to impress some people today by claiming a prediction-fulfillment relationship between the statement in volume 9 and the World Trade Center, but for me the more important question is ‘Is the claim true?’ I find enough discrepancies between them to doubt that her statement applies to this event. I do not doubt her statement, only the application some are making to the events of 9-11. That is, to answer your expressed concern, I don’t believe she got it wrong; rather, I think those who apply her statement to this situation have gotten it wrong.”[2]

What discrepancies? Among other things, Ellen White said she was in New York when she received the vision, not that the vision was about New York. Also, the distinctive way the towers collapsed doesn’t quite match what she described. I’m willing to be wrong—I’m hardly omniscient—so maybe God did, in His divine foreknowledge, line things up so that the page number matched the calendar. But I’ll let God correct me on that.

Searching for Patterns

Here’s the part that really bothers me: This kind of code-finding tends to occupy the attention so completely that people get bogged down in searching for patterns rather than absorbing the message itself. 

It’s reminiscent of other questionable fads. A few years earlier, in 1997, Michael Drosnin’s sensationalistic book The Bible Code hit bookstore shelves. In it he promoted a phenomenon known as equidistant letter sequencing. If you take every nth letter of the Bible, he said, you would find hidden predictions. It didn’t really matter what the interval was: you could read every third letter, every fourth, every . . . well, just about any sequence would eventually yield some kind of message. That message was often a couple of words on the same page that seemed to be related. An example: he claimed that “Hitler,” “Auschwitz,” and “Holocaust” showed up together at fixed letter intervals in the book of Deuteronomy.[3] Never mind that he was digging in an English manuscript of a Hebrew text; he was convinced he’d stumbled onto a Bible-within-the-Bible.

People get bogged down in searching for patterns rather than absorbing the message itself.

The idea wasn’t original to him; he was building on the theories of Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips and others who, in 1994, published similar claims about the book of Genesis.[4] By feeding the text into a computer program, they found countless “predictions” scattered throughout the Scriptures.
At first blush it does seem amazing . . . but there’s a problem: The Bible is long enough—nearly 800,000 words in many languages—that of course you’re going to find words here and there when you start skipping letters at regular intervals. Michael Drosnin was so certain of his theory that he leveled a challenge against his naysayers: “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick,” he said, “I’ll believe them.”[5]

Unfortunately for Mr. Drosnin, Brendan McKay accepted the challenge. After feeding Moby Dick through a similar computer program, he found predictions of the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, Indira Ghandi, Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, JFK, Lady Diana—and more.[6]

Was Herman Melville inspired by the Holy Spirit? No.

The Bottom Line

Here’s the bottom line: The Scriptures don’t really need our help. The plain sense of God’s message to humanity is phenomenal enough that we do not need to add sensational. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ already boggle the mind—and they are far more important for sinners to grasp than supposed secret messages about modern political figures behind the text. The prophecies of Daniel and Revelation already contain enough to keep you busy until Jesus returns, providing evidence that the hand of God really was behind the Scriptures. You don’t need secret codes to augment that.

If you think about it, 9/11 had enough impact on its own, too. The whole world seemed to sense that something changed. It was almost as if history itself had been nudged off course. We all understood that going forward, it would no longer be business as usual. Even though we’ve experienced catastrophes this large elsewhere in the world, we knew that the fact that it happened on the doorstep of the second beast was likely a game changer.
Since that moment, the pace of last-day events seems to be picking up speed. Perhaps it was because we were suddenly paying closer attention, but an awful lot has happened since then: the loss of fundamental rights, vastly increased surveillance, dramatic centralization of government power, the persistent threat of war (and rumors of war), a pandemic, and more. We have been behaving much differently since the towers fell.

Again: We don’t need to find a dubious connection between 9/11 and a specific prediction on a given page number order to persuade people of our message or their need for Christ. We may believe that it adds to our credibility, but these kinds of theories are usually debunked—and when they are, they can leave our audience with the impression that the whole system of faith has been debunked. 

Since 9/11 the pace of last-day events seems to be picking up speed.

That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t occasionally line things up to get the world’s attention. As I’ve worked in evangelism around the globe, I’ve seen some pretty astounding things. When 9/11 happened, I had just handed out innumerable copies of the New Beginnings DVDs—a cutting-edge evangelistic tool at the time. The sermon dealing with signs of the times featured a visual depiction of fiery Twin Towers collapsing. During the months following 9/11, evangelistic audiences were stunned. “Are you saying that those visuals were made before the attack?” one attendee marveled. “How did you guys know that?”

Did God line things up so that Seventh-day Adventists appeared to have foreknowledge at that moment? Maybe. I wouldn’t put it past Him to give His church an occasional extra assist in capturing the attention of lost sinners—and I have no doubt that God can use catastrophe to get us to sit up and listen. Perhaps the artists were nudged by the One who can see the end from the beginning (Isa. 46:10). And maybe the same was true for the publishers of volume 9.

Maybe. But the three angels’ messages don’t need additional material to reach the heart. God knew what He was doing when He inspired John to pen them. The prophecies of Daniel and Revelation stand as time-tested proof that Someone is in control of this universe—and that Jesus is coming soon. And if we stick with the main thing—the Scriptures—we’re not going to have anything to retract moving forward.

This year, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, I’ll be thinking about the victims of 9/11, the families who continue to hurt, and the pressing need God’s people have to get our biblical message of hope into the hands of all those who are still trying to make sense of the way our world has been careening out of control since that day.

[1] Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9 (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1948), p. 11.

[2] Letter written in 2008; I’d encourage you to read the whole thing: https://ellenwhite.org/correspondence/183749.

[3] John Dart, “Does God’s Hand Write in Code?” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1997, retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-06-10-mn-1924-story.html.

[4] Don Witztum, “The Seal of God is Truth,” Jewish Action, Spring 1998, retrieved from https://jewishaction.com/opinion/seal-god-truth.

[5] Michael Drosnin, in Newsweek, June 9, 1997.

[6] You can read McKay’s Moby Dick findings for yourself at https://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html.