Messiah Is Coming: Ancient Scriptures Speak Today of the Events of Tomorrow

By Yevgeny H. Wieliczko

At the dawn of the 21st Century, in a time when secular humanism and unbiblical religions are vying for the hearts, minds and souls of people all around the globe, MESSIAH IS COMING presents an overview of some of the messianic prophecies found throughout the Jewish Holy Scriptures, the Tanakh. Not a textbook; this is an Everymans perspective in a search for answers to one of our oldest riddles: if there is a GOD, why hasnt HE just taken over once and for all and delivered humanity from the tyrants of power, the poverty of many, the madness of war, the injustices that seem to escape our rules of law? Long ago GOD surely promised a Messianic Kingdom on Earth. Who, what, and where is the true One who can bring it about?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465328380

Yevgeny H. Wieliczko

With degrees in Law and Engineering, and years of advanced studies in both theology and psychology, Y.H. Wieliczko, born in New Jersey, retired from his primary career as an Intellectual Property Attorney in 2006. An award-winning pro-am jazz musician and award-winning amateur photographer, he now lives with his wife Susan in Northern Florida.

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Copyright © 2009 by Yevgeny H. Wieliczko.

Cover photo: Copyright 1988 Y. H. Wieliczko.

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Contents

PROLOGUE & CONFESSIONS

ASSUMPTIONS, PRESUMPTIONS AND PREREQUISITES

PROPHECY

CONTINUITY

CONTENDERS

THE PERSONAGE

THE PERSONALITY

THE COMING, PART ONE

CONTENDERS, PART TWO, FUTURE FALSE MESSIAHS

THE COMING, PART TWO

ENIGMATIC PROPHECIES

CONCLUSIONS AND SPECULATIONS

ENDNOTES

For Ira Berger and Barbara Smith-Berger,

dearest friends through thick and thin

PROLOGUE & CONFESSIONS

Being in awe of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;

But the foolish despise wisdom and discipline.

Proverbs 1:7 (ATMT)

Writers must read. I’ve been lucky. I know people who won’t read anything more challenging than a National Geographic’s photo-captions. But I have loved the written word since I was a young lad in the New Jersey countryside at a time when our family’s radio console was twice as big as our television set. Not only that, in our family’s beach bungalow on a dirt road on the Jersey Shore, there was no TV at all for the whole summer (today’s youth should be so lucky). While I suppose it may have something to do with my many hours of staring at the rich mahogany cabinet of the radio with nothing more visually stimulating than a glowing ON bulb, listening to The Shadow or Fibber McGee & Molly, I prefer to think that a disposition toward enjoying the pastime of reading is really one of GOD’s little gifts.

While I am no longer that young lad, I still do read a considerable amount. Of course a half century later I’m more interested in a good history than in Appleton’s Tom Swift In The Land Of Wonders. Yet I may read several books by the same author and—unless I take the time to go on-line and do the research—what do I really know about the qualifications of the author for him to be telling me the minute details about Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded?¹ At most, when I’m already finished, I may see a picture of the author with a hundred or so words of basic biography on the back page. Sometimes I may even read it.

Of course an author’s work itself, whether fiction or non-fiction, reveals much of the author’s own psyche. Every character in a good novel embodies bits-and-pieces of the author’s own soul. In a work of non-fiction, the accuracy—or lack thereof—of a description of factual events, the turn of a phrase, the extent of the bibliography, and the way hearsay is compiled and described, all lend something to our understanding about the author himself. But, in general, I think most of us rarely care about the author as long as we get a good read. Let’s face it, a week after finishing the work we can rarely remember his or her name: "Hey Jude, have you read Close to Shore by, um, you know, watshisname? Yet today, we look and listen and have no lack of pundits and writers of books alleging to be history who tell us, There was no Holocaust, or President Abraham Lincoln was a neurotic racist and not The Great Emancipator. And some of us even believe them. So, at least for non-fiction, in this Age of Spin" we find ourselves in, perhaps we should start caring more about the authors themselves.

The subject on which I write here is an important one. So before you delve into my work, if you’d like to know who has taken on the task of investigating and writing about nothing less than the One who will surely be the most important figure in all of human history, start here. If not, feel free to skip ahead to the first chapter.

I do not present here a text intended for deep scholastic scrutiny. I write for the common man of which I am surely one. While I am not a rabbi, nor even a professorial scholar as such, it has been my privilege for the past twenty-some years to have both time and the inspiration to study the Holy Scriptures. I have attended formal classes from time-to-time, but mostly on my own have studied various translations of the Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim—collectively commonly referred to as the Tanakh—many commentaries thereon, and many volumes of both a scholarly expository nature (delving into the original Hebrew or Greek, dealing with the historical context, comparing other religious beliefs of the relevant time periods, etc.), and those of a more popular bent. For those of you who insist on some credentials before accepting what I have to say, let it suffice to say that I have degrees in both Engineering and the Law from prestigious U.S. universities and that I have practiced both disciplines successfully since the late 1960’s. Perhaps I should have been a teacher instead. While as a child I was much too shy to consider such a path, as an adult I thoroughly enjoyed professional obligations that put me in front of a classroom or other lecture venue. Also being a part time jazz musician, I certainly do not mind the limelight! In hindsight, I often wish I had followed my cousin into a military career after high school as I was talented enough to have made Musician Third Class without breaking a sweat. It is what I would have chosen had I known then what Plato meant when he said, Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inner places of the soul. But presumably that was not the path GOD had in mind for me even during those periods when I, apparently, could have cared less, for which I also kick myself regularly.

When it was far too late to turn back the clock, I confess that during the endless business meetings and courtroom appearances in my hyperactive-attention-deficit-disorderly life, I was often actually wondering, What the heck am I doing here? The truth is that engineering bored me. Practicing law? Well, just insert your favorite lawyer joke here. I’m now a recovering attorney. In my last professional occupation, I was in fact a writer for more than a dozen years, although most of my published papers are of a highly technical and scientific nature. In fact, it was only this small segment of my career that ever truly appealed to me.

Those are my credentials, here is my focus. Over the many years of theological study, I have been impressed ever increasingly with a deep conviction that the Holy Scriptures are in and of themselves one of the greatest miracles of GOD. They are not merely a history book with a smattering of mysticism thrown in for interest. Nor are they a mere collection of myths and legends as some, such as the late Joseph Campbell or the current revisionists and pundits, would have you believe in furtherance of a humanist manifesto. Neither are they merely a compendium of humanistically-developed morality guidelines. It is my abiding belief that the Holy Scriptures are themselves a miraculous, Divine revelation.

This revelation, in part, speaks to us of yet another miracle. For I consider the history and the survival of the Jews and Israel—over several thousand years beyond those described in the Tanakh and despite all odds in a world generally and irrationally hostile to their very existence—to be still another Divine miracle. But yet even beyond that, the Holy Scriptures are the most profound compendium of Wisdom and Truth possible. They are a miracle over a thousand of years in the making of the very Wisdom and Truth of Jehovah GOD Himself. The Holy Scriptures, while progressively given to us through many divinely inspired authors spread over a period of many, many centuries, nonetheless contain a unified message: the Lord GOD is there, He cares, He listens, and He has and will provide for those who take Him at His word.

I am of the sincere conviction that the more one delves into the Tanakh, the more one is directed down a path of certainty, With perseverance, one will reach an undeniable conclusion that the Holy Scriptures are indeed a direct revelation by GOD given to mankind through divinely inspired authors as a guide book of how then we should live. The Holy Scriptures are His words, not ours. How is that possible? If GOD is, is anything for Him impossible?

Still, I can only guess at the process. Obviously, these words were not dictated as a businessman of the mid-twentieth century might dictate to a short-hand stenographer or into a tape recorder for transcription. But nonetheless they were written down through some form of divine inspiration. One proof is in their infallible prophetic content, such as is dealt with in more depth in this book.

It is a pity that none of the very first manuscripts have survived the millennia; perhaps the last having gone up in smoke in the fire set in the great library of antiquity in Alexandria, Egypt.² Yet we do know that, against all odds, the existing fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the like show the complete accuracy and harmony of most of our modern translations of the Holy Scriptures with original manuscripts.³ Moreover, the testimony of modern day archeologists are of near unanimous opinion that,

It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference . . . the almost incredibly accurate historical memory of the Bible, and particularly so when it is fortified by archeological fact.⁴

Professor Adam Zartal, Dept. of Archaeology, Univ. of Haifa has said:

After years of research, however, I believe it is impossible to explore Israel’s origins without the Bible. At the same time, the research should be as objective as possible. The Bible should be used cautiously and critically. But again and again we have seen the historical value of the Bible. Again and again we have seen that an accurate memory has been preserved in its transmuted narratives, waiting to be unearthed and exposed by archaeological fieldwork and critical mind work.⁵

Yet even today, many schools of alleged higher criticism, which arose just a few hundred years ago, continue to pound away at the Scriptures with theory-after-theory that our advanced intelligence over the peoples of so long ago render all the stories and theologies of the ancient past mere myth and legend, or poor history at best. It has been taught—in my opinion, disgracefully—in nineteenth through twenty-first century school rooms that our Age of Reason and Science has proven the invalidity of such traditions. Proponents of this higher criticism would relegate the Scriptures to the category of literature of legend, equating the biblical story of Methuselah to Washington Irving’s tall tale of Rip Van Winkle. Yet, to me this school of higher criticism begs the question; why is it, if we are so much more enlightened today, that we moderns continue the barbaric atrocities that have plagued mankind since, well, if I may borrow from the Scriptures themselves, since the immediate days after mankind’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden so many, many millennia ago? How is it