Introduction
About This Book
This is the third book in the series The Seven Mysteries, and it is the most personal of the three — for it is about coming home.
The first book followed the Bride: how the last Adam won back the crown and the bride that the first one forfeited, and how everything He won, He won by giving. The second followed the harlot: Babylon, high upon the beast, who grasps at the throne and falls. This third book follows the long road in between — not of one man and not of one city, but of an entire people: of Israel, through the Church, back to Israel.
Three hidden things carry it, and Scripture calls all three by the same name — a mystery: the hardening of Israel (Romans 11:25), the seven stars and lampstands (Revelation 1:20), and the change at the last trumpet (1 Corinthians 15:51). They belong together as three movements of one symphony. The first: a people that stumbles, and a clock that begins to tick. The second: a long night of two thousand years, in which seven lampstands burn — the Church, a light among the nations. The third: a trumpet, a resurrection, and a people that comes home at last.
The bridge over which all of this runs is a word from Hosea: "after two days [...] on the third day" (6:2) — two days of a thousand years each, and then the third. Hold on to that image; it is the backbone.
Two tracks run through the book, just as through the previous ones. The main text reads as one continuous story, meant to be read like a train — with deep valleys and high peaks, for such is the history of this people, plain and simple. The indented In Depth boxes dig into the source text, the typology, and the honest weighing, with three marks: well documented, weighed reading, disputed. You can skip them without losing the thread, or you can linger in them all the more.
And then the tone, for that deserves a word of its own. This book sounds different from the other two, and that is on purpose. It is the song of a people that has been hunted for two thousand years and still sings — raw, full of longing, with a tear and a wink at once, like the klezmer violin, which imitates the breaking voice of a cantor and, in a single stroke of the bow, can moan and rejoice in one. It laughs at itself, for otherwise it could not bear the pain. And it holds up a mirror to us, readers from the nations: each time we want to point at Israel's stiff neck, the sentence turns around and asks — and what about us? Do I do it any better?
The frame this book holds with a firm hand: there is a hardening, there is a bridge of two days, there is a third day. The dates it holds with a loose hand. The book begins in the depths — for every song worth singing begins there.