Known To The Unknown

By Peter Gilmour

Does God speak? Can the All Knowing One reveal things to those who know very little? In Known To The Unknown read of how God revealed future events to an unknown man through the reading of the Bible, prayer and the receiving of dreams. More importantly, read of how God's people have been deceived for centuries by an ungodly system that Jesus bids His people to come out of. See how both historical and modern deceptions are holding God's people back from reaching their full potential as followers of the Way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Gilmour
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393258377

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: EARLY LIFE, EARLY FAITH

Iwas walking to work , dressed in my work clothes with my rucksack on. My work uniform required that I wear a high visibility reflective vest, which was bright yellow and green. As I walked to work  I crossed a bridge which traversed a river. Without warning something crashed into the side of the bridge.  The whole bridge started to collapse so I quickly ran and jumped off the bridge to safety. However, many motorists were driving onto the bridge. They would fall to their deaths if they continued, so I started to wave at them before they got to the bridge. I even took out my extra high visibility vest from my rucksack to make myself more visible and started waving it in the air. I was shouting at them to not go on to the bridge. But no one seemed to see me, no one paid attention, they just drove on to disaster. So I ran home.  And then I awoke from the dream.

This is just one of the dreams that God, I believe, has shown me over the years.  I will reveal its significance later in the book, along with other dreams and messages from God that would reveal some of the major world events that have happened in the last 30 years.  This book is not written to impress people with prophecies that came true or wow people with amazing dreams.  These dreams and prophecies were given for a reason, to show the validity of the message that God has been showing me in the last few years.  This book is written so that you will read and hear the message from God.  I am just a messenger who God chose because He chooses the foolish ones of the world.  I am not alone as a messenger as there are others around the world to whom God is showing this message.  It is not a new message but can be found within the pages of the New Testament.  Yet many believers, if not most, do not see or realize the truth of that message.  But now we must go back to almost 50 years ago.

On Thursday 30 December 1971 at St Mary’s Maternity Hospital, Croydon (a suburb of London), a baby boy was born to Jim and Moyra Gilmour.  I was the second son born to my parents. I had an older brother who was called Andrew so my Dad suggested calling me Peter like the two brothers found in the Bible.  My brother had been born in Carlisle in the North West of England where my parents had met and married.

My mum was English while my dad was Scottish from Glasgow, just like his dad before him.  My great-grandfather had traveled over to Glasgow from Ballymena in Northern Ireland just after the end of World War One.  So our family was on a journey so to speak.  London was the start of my journey in life but we as a family would not be there long.  In fact my birth changed the direction of my family’s journey.

My parents and brother were not in London for long before they felt the need to move on from the capital.  So they began looking at the possibility of moving out of London.  My dad was offered a job working at the gold mines in Kalgoorlie, Australia (about 600km from Perth).[i]  This meant relocating the family to the other side of the world.  They had started inquiring about plane tickets when my mum discovered that she was pregnant with me.  This obviously changed things and it was decided to not relocate down under.

My birth may have put a stop to the Australian adventure for my family, but it would not prevent us from moving out of London.  It would not be a return to Carlisle or the north, but a moving on to the east of England.  To a little town called Thetford.  We moved to Thetford when I was still very young, under two years old.

Thetford is situated in the Brecklands region of East Anglia.  It is famous for its man-made forest.  Thetford had also become one of the official overspill towns for London, where inhabitants of the capital could move out into the countryside away from the crowded metropolis.[ii]

My dad got a job at the local train station and through this made friends.  They quite often met in a pub and my dad started drinking more and more.  He became violent at home and when I was around four and a half years old he left my mum for another woman.  Sometime after this my parents got divorced.

So now my mum was a single mum without a husband and without a job.  Thankfully God does not leave us alone in situations like this.  My mum had by now found a church that we attended each week.  However, we were quite poor.  We did not have enough income to buy what was needed.  At times we would eat bread and butter with sugar on for dinner.  My mum would also add water to milk to make it last a bit longer.  Some days she would not eat much so that us boys could have a little more.  And then there was a bread strike.[iii]

In September 1977, three months before my sixth birthday, mill workers across the nation went on strike for a 66% wage increase.  Bread production came to a halt.  Long queues were formed outside shops from as early as 7am in the hope of getting a single loaf of bread.  For us this was disastrous.  We did not have much else to eat and bread was healthy, nutritious, quite cheap and tasted nice with sugar on it.

One day my mum sat us boys down to tell us that we had no more food in the house.  She did not know where the next meal was going to come from but she said that we could ask Jesus to help us.  So we prayed. And Jesus heard our prayer. 

Almost immediately after the ‘amen’ was said there was a knock at the door.  I went to answer the door.  There was no one there but I saw the back of someone walking away from the house around the corner for a split second.  I did not recognize the person, but then I realized that there was a box at my feet.  In the box was a whole load of different types of food, including bread.  I carried it back into the house to show my mum and brother.  Joy and wonder filled my heart, that Jesus had answered our prayer in such an amazing way, and at such a needed time.  This increased my fledgling faith in Him, as I had given my life to Jesus around six months earlier.

Many years later I would ask the pastor of the church we attended if it was him who had delivered the box. He said it was not him and did not know who it could have been.  I am reminded of the verse from Psalms:

"I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his descendants begging bread."  Psalm 37:25

God is our loving Father who watches over us at all times.  He protects and provides for us.  I experienced this in a very real way when I almost died of a burst appendix in 1984.  I was 12 years old and just about to start High School when I got ill on holiday in Carlisle visiting my Dad (who had moved back there by now) and grandparents.  I was later told that if I had been operated on just 30 minutes later it would have been too late.  I believe God kept me alive for a reason.  I am still learning what that reason is (and we learn from Him our whole lives anyway), but now I believe a part of it was in hearing from God through the reading of His Word, through the Holy Spirit, and through dreams.  And it is being a messenger for Him.

Back then I was just a very shy and ordinary young man who liked football and was trying to follow Jesus despite my shortcomings and sins.  I was the youngest in my family and our family was pretty insignificant so I was the least of the least.  However, God in His grace chose to show the extraordinary to this ordinary lad.

CHAPTER 2: WORDS FOR THE IRA

Shortly after my baptism in the Holy Spirit in my early teens, I was in a church service one Sunday evening.  During the worship part of the service God impressed upon my heart the following verses:

"I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom:

Preach the word!  Be ready in season and out of season.  Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers;

And they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.

But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry." 2 Timothy 4:1-5

The thought came to me that I should share this with the congregation. I prayed that if that was God’s will then He would open an opportunity for me to share.  There arose an opportunity so I stood up to read the passage.  I was quite nervous as a 14/15 year old, but managed to read out the verses.  I do not think I said much else, and then returned to my seat.  The elder who led the service thanked me, and paid particular attention to the ‘itching ears’ part and turning ‘aside after fables’.  He said that he hoped this congregation would not turn aside after fables.  That seemed highly unlikely at the time.

However, over time the Word of Faith teaching crept into the fellowship. [iv] Another elder within the church started up a video ministry where people could come and watch teaching from some of the American Faith (prosperity) teachers.  Many of their books were bought by people in the church, and the teaching spread.  The elder who led the meeting I read 2 Timothy at, was strongly opposed to this teaching.  He was not alone in that and he proposed to study the doctrine of the teaching to see if it measured up to the Bible.  His conclusion was that the Faith teaching was heresy.  The other elder (who had the video ministry), rejected that assessment.

Things came to a head and there was open arguing with raised voices.  The pastor announced that there would be no more video ministry or official support from the fellowship for this teaching.  If people wanted to read those books or watch the videos in their own homes then that was fine.  The elder opposed to the teaching left the church, along with a few others.

At the time I thought that this teaching is either from God or it is not.  It cannot be both heresy and from the Holy Spirit.  So I decided to not read or watch any of that teaching anymore, just to be on the safe side.  I believe that God was warning the fellowship through what I read as a young teenager, but I did not realize it at the time.  Maybe only that elder did.

Later God would give me a dream where I saw many tornadoes blowing in Thetford, and one was aiming straight towards the church building.  But at the last minute the tornado turned direction and the church was not destroyed.  I believe that was in connection with the false teaching, as eventually the Faith Teaching fizzled out in the congregation.  However, in many local churches and in the whole church worldwide there are many false doctrines and deceptions.  Many  teach things contrary to God’s Word.

As I began to read the Bible and pray more, God started to show me things.  No one must think that I was praying for hours on end or was such a spiritual person that God spoke to me because I was so great.  No. I was, and still am, just an ordinary person.

My brother and I had a friend who had become a Christian a few years previously.  He was a good friend and we had a lot of laughs together.  We also had very good conversations about spiritual matters.  We would pray together and study the Bible.  But again, we were very normal young men.

One subject I liked to talk about was the situation in Northern Ireland and the threat of the Irish Republican Army (IRA)[v] to that land and the rest of the UK.  I do not remember how it started, but I had a real burden to pray against the work of the IRA, and followed the news closely when anything ever came up about the IRA or Northern Ireland.  This was before I knew about my great-Grandfather coming from Ballymena (I was told of my Irish ancestry at my Grandad’s funeral in 1997), or any other connections to Northern Ireland, other than that of meeting Ian Paisley as a baby, when we lived in London[vi].

On 6 September 1988 my brother, our friend and I had been praying and chatting together in the evening. After our friend had gone I went to my room and felt led by God to read Ezekiel chapter 21.  Up to that point I had not read through the whole Bible, so I did not know if there were 21 chapters in Ezekiel.  As I read the whole chapter some verses jumped out to me as if it were talking about the IRA and Northern Ireland.  Here are some of them:

"Thus says the LORD:’Behold, I am against you, and I will draw My sword out of its sheath and cut off both righteous and wicked from you...My sword shall go out of its sheath against all flesh from south to north...I will judge you in the place where you were created...and deliver you into the hands of brutal men who are skillful to destroy.’"  Ezekiel 21:3,4,30,31

These were the main verses that jumped out among others.  I believe the ‘brutal men who are skillful to destroy’ is a reference to the Special Air Service (SAS).[vii]  This is an elite section of the British Army, which is known to be ruthless in their dealings with the enemy.  Exactly six months before, on 6 March 1988, three Provisional IRA members had been killed by members of the British SAS in Gibraltar, which had led to reprisals back and forth between the IRA and the British Army that year.[viii]  I believed that God also showed me that there would be peace in Northern Ireland and that the IRA would cease its terrorist activities.  In addition, I believed that I would one day travel to Northern Ireland.

On 28 July 2005 I was in Turkey and saw the announcement on TV of the IRA’s formal end of its armed conflict.[ix]  There had been a ceasefire in the 1990s but this was the official end of its terror campaign.  And now there is peace in Northern Ireland, not a perfect peace, but God kept His Word and fulfilled His promise of peace.

But peace in Northern Ireland and the end of IRA violence seemed impossible in the late 1980s.  The news was full of terror threats, and the political solution was at a gridlock.  This reign of terror was not just confined to the UK though, but also played out in Europe.

On the night of 18-19 June 1989 as I was lying in my bed I was thinking about the IRA and how bad the situation was.  I believe God told me to get out of bed and pray against the work of the IRA.  I thought, what, now?  Yes, came the answer.  So, I got out of my bed and knelt down and prayed against the work of the IRA.  I prayed for a few minutes, went back to bed, and then slept until the morning.  Unbeknown to me something was happening that night in Germany.  Something bad that was aimed at many men sleeping in their beds.

Leonard ‘Bap’ Hardy and Donna Maguire were from Newry in Northern Ireland.  They were ‘volunteers’ for the Provisional IRA and had been sent out from Ulster to do their ‘voluntary work’ on the mainland of Europe.  Their task was to kill or injure as many servicemen of the British Armed Forces as possible.  This was done using such methods as car bombs, shootings or mortar attacks.  Another method was the planting of bombs at British Army barracks.

There was an army barracks in Osnabruck, Germany, and the plan was to blow it up.  Five bombs had been primed with plastic explosives which were placed on the night of 18-19 June 1989.  Hardy and Maguire may have been in love with each other (they would later marry), but they would not show much love towards the British soldiers sleeping in their beds that night.  However, God called me out of my bed to pray against the work of the IRA that night.  God intervened.  Completely by chance a civilian worker stumbled across Hardy and Maguire.  He alerted the military police and as a result Hardy and Maguire only exploded one bomb.  This caused only structural damage but no injuries to anyone.  No one lost their lives.  Hardy and Maguire got away but were later arrested.  Maguire for a time had been described as the most dangerous woman in Europe.[x]

On the morning of 19 June 1989 I saw the news of what had happened at Osnabruck.  I was amazed at what God had done.  Four years later, in 1993, God would take me to both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland for a short-term mission.  In the summers of 1990, 1991 and 1992 I had taken part in short-term missions work in Europe.  In 1994 I stayed in the UK but God would show me something in a dream that year, a tragic event that would affect many lives in northern Europe and be world news.

CHAPTER 3: THE SHIP

On the night of 27 th to 28 th September 1994 I had a dream.  It felt so real, as if what I saw in the dream was actually happening.  I dreamt that I was in a lot of water.  I cannot swim but I was not struggling.  However, all around me were people thrashing around in the water with their arms.  They were screaming and looked very scared.  I was in what seemed like a building as I could see a ceiling.  It was dark, but not pitch-black as I could see the people.  I wonder if there were some lights that kept flickering on and off.  Two young women stood out to me.  They were both blonde-haired and blue eyed.  I was that close to see their eye colour in the dim light.  One of them looked around 27 years old, whilst the other looked a bit younger.  They were both crying and looked very scared.  Then I awoke from my dream.

I was lying on my bed.  It was just a dream but yet it had felt so real, more than any other dream I had had up to that point.  I had ‘felt’ the water and seen the faces of these people.  I thought about the dream for a bit then drifted off to sleep.  Many miles away something tragic happened that night.

The Baltic state of Estonia was becoming a popular shopping destination for Scandinavian tourists, in particular those from Sweden and Finland.  Seeing as it was fresh out of the Soviet Union, Estonia offered a good standard of shopping at good prices.  In addition a ferry cruise offered the chance for tax-free shopping, a nice breakfast buffet, and some light entertainment.

The shipping company Estline had several ferries operating in the Baltic Sea, the MV Estonia being one of them.  At 7pm local time the MV Estonia left Tallinn, Estonia’s capital on 27 September 1994.  It was due to arrive in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, at 9.30am the following morning on the 28 September.

The Baltic that night was very rough.  The wind speed was measured at 15-20 metres per second which resulted in waves of 4-6 metres high.  The Estonia had a certificate from the Finnish authorities granting her permission to sail anywhere in the world.  This was a mistake as the Estonia was only designed to operate in coastal waters.

Due to the heavy pounding of the waves on the passenger ship, the front visor was weakened and then broke off from the ferry.  This then caused the front cargo doors to open which allowed the Baltic waters to flood into the car deck.  This happened at about 1.15am local time (11.15pm UK time, around the time I probably fell asleep).  The water could move around on the deck wherever gravity and the motion of the ship took it.  Because of this the Estonia was sent into a 35-40 degree list on its starboard side.  And 15 minutes later the ship had turned over at 90 degrees.

Most people were in their beds when all this was going on, and became trapped in their cabins.  Some may have just slept through it all and drowned in their sleep.  Those who were awake had to move fast.  Reaching the upper deck where the lifeboats were was not easy due to the ship turning on its side.  Stairs could not just be walked up anymore, and anything loose (including people) would now just fall down onto the walls, which had now become the floor.

Panic broke out among a lot of the woken passengers who rushed to find a way of escape. Survivors also told of people who did not scream or even seem to be aware of what was going on around them.  They became like statues and just stood, sat or lay there as the ship started to sink.  Others would do anything to escape, even hurting other people in the process.  (These were selfish and dangerous people.)

Some brave and (or) lucky people managed to reach a lifeboat.  Yet it would be many hours before they would be rescued by helicopter.  Many who survived the sinking of the Estonia did not make it in the lifeboats due to the cold.  It was truly a tragic event.  853 people lost their lives.  137 people survived.  No one under 12 years of age survived, and no one over the age of 55 survived.  It was mostly men who survived.  If you were not physically strong enough to climb out of the ship and then into a lifeboat you would not have survived.[xi]

On the morning of the 28th September I found out about the disaster at work.  It was a shock to hear about it, but then I thought of the dream I had had that night.  Had God shown me what had happened?  Had I ‘seen’ some of the passengers on the Estonia?  Was this dream just a coincidence even?  I find that highly unlikely.  What I saw in my dream seemed a perfect description of the inside of the MV Estonia.  And what of those people I ‘saw’?  And the two blonde women?  I read in a Christian newspaper some days later that there had been a Swedish bible school/study group of young women.  Were those two women in my dream part of that group?  I had many questions, but then maybe the biggest question was, why did I have this dream?  If it was from God, which I firmly believed it was, then what could I do with this dream?  It was not as if I could have warned anyone, as I had not fully understood what it was at the time. 

Back then I did not know why God had been showing me things like this.  There were other smaller, much less significant things that were revealed to me beforehand which also came to pass.  I just saw it as being a follower of Jesus means that we can hear from Him by the Holy Spirit.  If we read the Bible, then God will speak to us.  I still believe that to be true today, yet maybe at times what God would want to say to us, is too hard for us to accept at times, so we close our ears to Him.  More on that later in the book.

Over the next few years I started saving up to spend a year abroad as a student-missionary.  I got a job at a confectionary