Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Latter Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we are living in. This episode has taken weeks to form. It began with a single verse from the book of Daniel, but the questions it raised took me to Genesis, to history books, and then to Hebrew commentators. What I discovered ended up as incredible insight from one of our patriarchs that no one even knows about. But this patriarch has become, for me anyway, an important signal for what is going on now and what is soon to come. For the sake of time, I am not going to name all the resources that I consulted, but I will include them in the description notes to this podcast.

Today's topic is the patriarch who signals the imminent day of the Lord. This patriarch has been hidden deep inside the Torah until the appointed time to be discovered, and my gut tells me it is now. Before I tell you the verse in Daniel that inspired the episode, I need to give you a little backstory on the book of Berishit. That is Hebrew for the book of Genesis. One of my study tools is a five-volume set of the Torah. Each volume features incredible commentary from rabbinical sages who lived and breathed the Torah for thousands of years.

Each volume begins with a rich overview that shows us God's perspective for each book. So let's look a minute at Genesis, because that is where we find our obscure patriarch. The sages write, "Genesis was not referring just to the physical creation of the universe and all of its hosts. Instead, the greater creation was the story of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, because God created the world so that there would be a nation who would accept the Torah and remain loyal to it. Everything that happened to the patriarchs were signs to show us what is likely to happen in the future."

There are several points here that I want to comment on. Number one, God created the world so there would be a nation, a people, who would receive His Torah. That was the main goal of creation from God's viewpoint, to have men and women capable of making a free-will choice to recognize, embrace, and then walk in God's ways. Number two, the Torah was God's blueprint for the universe. We read this in Jeremiah 33: "If not for my covenant, or if not for my Torah, day and night I would not have established the laws of heaven and earth." The traditional Jewish doctrine is that if our planet is the body, the Torah is the soul. Therefore, the Torah is not just an old document filled with antiquated laws meant to be replaced by the red-lettered passages of Jesus. The Torah is the heart and soul of the Father.

Number three, His Torah was to be passed down from generation to generation, all the while God looking to see whether that generation cherished it or dismissed it. If you examine history, one of the common threads of every period of spiritual turmoil, such as what we are living in now, is a targeted attempt by the enemy to destroy the credibility of and the necessity for the Torah. Why is that? Because it is in the Torah that God gives every clue and foundational principle that sheds light on what is going on, how to survive the mess, and how to pass on His ways to the next generation.

Our generation, frankly, is Torah-ignorant. Thousands of churches and congregations consider the Torah irrelevant. One of my most vivid memories is attending a conference of ministry leaders in 2013. I had just published the second edition of my book, The Levitical Calling, which made the Old Testament come alive to me and changed my life. So here I was sitting in this conference, and suddenly the speaker began renouncing our Levitical heritage. I could not believe it.

He said that as believers, we belong to the Melchizedek priesthood and therefore we no longer need anything to do with our Jewish forefathers. Now hear me, I have nothing against the Melchizedek priesthood, but the man went on to ask the entire audience to stand up and renounce before God all connection with our Jewish forefathers. Everyone in that audience stood to their feet to renounce their Jewish heritage except me. I was the only one sitting down. I tell this story because it is a perfect example of the trend in Christianity to dismiss and disregard as unimportant the Torah that God gave Moses and which became flesh in Yeshua.

The way I am going to lay out this episode is to look at our mystery patriarch in the natural from the Torah and then let his story teach us about what is to come. He is a signal. Remember, 1 Corinthians 10 tells us that those things that happened in the Old Testament were given to them as a warning but were written down for us as instruction. The verse in Daniel that inspired this episode is chapter 2, when the prophet interprets King Nebuchadnezzar's dream. As you recall, the king had a vision of four world kingdoms that would consecutively be in power leading up to the day of the Lord. The first was Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.

And then a strange image that Daniel struggled to describe in words. He wrote, "There shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things. And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom. As you saw the iron mixed with miry clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together." Look at how Holy Spirit drew Daniel's attention to the legs of iron, which reference the Roman Empire in Jesus' day. When the empire got too big to manage in the third century, Rome divided it into two distinct legs, so to speak, the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire.

As those legs extended down to the feet, the very last part of this kingdom before the day of the Lord, Daniel notes this strange mixture of elements that manifest in the ten toes, which I see as ten leaders who are jockeying for position and prominence now in the New World Order that is forming. As an aside, be discerning now to world leaders who try to do something newsworthy so the powers that be will take note of them. One of the adjectives Daniel uses to describe this ten-toed kingdom is what this episode is about. Daniel 2 reads, "It shall be a divided kingdom."

I looked up the word "divided" in Strong's Concordance and saw many words for the English word "divided." But the specific Hebrew word used for the Daniel 2 passage is Peleg, P-E-L-E-G, Peleg. The word Peleg means divided. What makes this Hebrew word even more unique is that Peleg is one of the patriarchs of our faith. Have you ever heard of him? Peleg, meaning division, is the man's name, and he was our 15th patriarch after Adam. Genesis tells us that the nation of Israel started with the ten generations from Adam and Seth all the way to Noah, who was our 10th patriarch.

The lineage continued with Shem, then with his son Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber, and then Peleg, patriarch number 15. When the generations are listed following the flood, what is interesting about Peleg is that Moses added something more than just his name. He added a phrase. We read in Genesis 10 the name Peleg, and then the word says, "for in his days the earth was divided." This got me thinking. None of the other patriarchs had a descriptive phrase, so what does it mean the earth was divided? I kept studying and found it again in 1 Chronicles 1.

God listed all the names of the patriarchs and then came to Peleg. He added, "for in his days the earth was divided." I want you to see the way God speaks. What He is doing here is saying, "Okay, whoever is reading this, I want you to see that I have repeated something unusual. Not only does the patriarch's name mean divided, but I am repeating that in his days the earth was divided. Look and see what I am talking about." What made this search so puzzling was that the only times the word "Peleg" is used in scripture for the word "division" were the times the patriarch's name was listed, and then all the way to the book of Daniel when he writes, "This fourth kingdom is a Peleg kingdom."

This is very significant. For whatever reason, God linked the name of our 15th patriarch with the final kingdom before the day of the Lord. So what we need to find out is what happened during the time that Peleg lived. Let me highlight seven findings that came from this study, and when I finish, I will do my best to bring the pieces together and present what I believe God is preparing us for. Finding number one, here is a brief timeline of when things happened. The flood occurred in the year 1656 after creation.

When the ark landed on top of Mount Ararat, Noah and his family left the ark heading south and they settled in the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They called it Shinar. This area is in the present-day Iraq, and everyone spoke one language, Hebrew, God's language. For the next 340 years, all of Noah's descendants lived in the same area building their civilization and seeing great success. Finding number two, Josephus records that from the beginning of this new civilization, God instructed the people to send out colonies all over so that they could populate the earth and cultivate it. But they refused, and they all stayed where they were.

Finding number three, Peleg was the patriarchal influence over this early rebellious civilization. But the people rejected his influence and began to rally around Nimrod, who was Ham's grandson. Nimrod grew into a charismatic tyrant and became the king. Sadly, he was led to avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers. Over time, the vision of Nimrod and his followers exceeded expectation in building the Tower of Babel to make war on God. Finding number four, in the ancient past before our biblical history, the recovered artifacts tell us that the land of Shinar had once been inhabited by the fallen angels.

So apparently, our early civilization was built upon the remains of the gods, which opened the door to idolatry in the people. This is also why these gods believe that our earth belongs to them since they were here first. Finding number five, Peleg died in the year 1996 after creation. But what is significant is that Peleg died in the same year that God destroyed the Tower of Babel and all of humanity was scattered over the face of the earth. What went on at the Tower of Babel was huge in the history books and is referred to as the Dispersion.

Finding number six, the sages took note of the fact that during Peleg's generation compared with the previous one, the people's longevity decreased by almost 50 percent. In other words, their lives were mysteriously cut short. Finding number seven, our patriarch Abraham was alive during much of this period. Nimrod, who was the king, was 40 years old when Abram was born. Nimrod's wise men saw a huge star in the heavens the night he was born and warned Nimrod that this child would grow up to become so powerful he would kill all of the kings of the earth and inherit their lands.

So they advised Nimrod to buy the child from his father Terah, who was Nimrod's second in command, and then to kill the child. This plot actually began to unfold, but Terah secretly substituted his son Abram with the child taken from one of his servants. Terah then hid Abram in a cave where he lived 10 years. When he came out of the cave, Abram went to live with Noah and his son Shem for 39 years. That is how our forefather learned the instruction of the law. So when God destroyed the Tower of Babel, he looked to Abraham and his descendants to carry His presence and teach the world His ways.

Let me go back to the Dispersion. The Dispersion is what God did at the Tower of Babel. The word "disperse" means to toss about, to winnow. The records show that God smashed the tower with storms and wind, and the sages record that He judged the people who were fighting against Him in three ways. Number one, He gave the people what they most feared, which was to be scattered all over the earth. Number two, He confounded their language so they could no longer communicate with each other. And number three, He destroyed their unity.

In closing, let me share seven things relative to the time that we are living in now. Number one, Peleg's father was named Eber. Eber is considered the father of the Hebrew people because of his name, Eber. The rabbis say that the naming of his son Peleg shows how great a prophet Eber was in naming him division, for Peleg's role seems to have been a fulfillment of that name by witnessing the culture leading up to the Dispersion, and then by his name being used as a signal by the prophet Daniel to announce that right before the day of the Lord comes, there will be another dispersion of mankind just like the first.

Number two, the rabbis teach that when the Bible records someone's death, that means his role is over. Peleg, as you recall, died the same year as God's destruction of the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of mankind. So the two events, division and dispersion, go hand in hand and they happen within a very short timeframe. When Peleg surfaces, the final dispersion is not far behind. Number three, Peleg also signals a timeframe when there is a sudden drop in life expectancy. We are witnessing that now with so many people dying mysteriously and prematurely.

Number four, metaphorically speaking, as the unified building of the New World Order tower reaches further and further into heaven in defiance against God's created order, people on earth will lose the ability to speak the language of God. God's word and His ways will be removed more and more from culture. The connection between Him and those who have aligned with this final kingdom will be broken and their fate sealed. Number five is the confusion of tongues. People are grouping now according to their beliefs and ideologies.

Their words and messaging about their beliefs will become even more centered on deviance from God's ways, such as transgenderism, homosexuality, and abortion, so much so that those of us who follow God will not be able to communicate with them because we cannot comprehend where they are coming from. And those people will lose the ability to understand us. Number six is a lesson I noticed from one of the sons of Shem named Asher. The sages noted that Asher became so concerned when he saw that his sons were starting to follow Nimrod, he moved the family and settled far away from that civilization in Shinar.

I believe we will see more and more godly people distance themselves from today's culture. Number seven, in looking at the Tower of Babel and what happened there, the latter days' fulfillment is foretold in Daniel 2. It says that in the days of those kings, the ten toes, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end and it shall stand forever. We read about it again in Jeremiah 25: "The Lord will roar from on high against all the inhabitants of the earth. The clamor will resound to the ends of the earth, for the days of your slaughter and dispersion have come."

And finally, we read what Jesus showed in a vision to his servant John in Revelation 16: "There came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, 'It is done.' And there were voices and thunders and lightnings, and there was a great earthquake such as was not since men were upon the earth. And the great city was divided, Peleg, into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. And there fell a great hail out of heaven, every stone weighing about 100 pounds." I want you to see that in Genesis we find the latter days signal of Peleg, division and dispersion.

The earth and all of its inhabitants will soon be sifted and winnowed, and those who have still not renounced the New World kingdom and committed themselves to the Lord God, they will be destroyed. What do I see coming? Because the Lord has revealed the mystery of Peleg as it relates to the final dispersion and division in the earth, we are very, very close to the end. In commenting on Revelation 16, end-times author and teacher Hal Lindsey comments on the Greek word for earthquake as "seismos," but said earthquake is not the only meaning.

The word itself simply means a great shaking of the earth. The earth could be shaken either by a literal earthquake or by a full-scale nuclear exchange of all remaining missiles. Lindsey leans toward the nuclear conflict. I lean toward that view as well because I know that the fallen angels battled each other with nuclear power before our biblical history began, and I see their fingerprints at work behind the scenes in today's political leaders who have nuclear capabilities. In commenting on the role of the United States, Lindsey wrote, "The United States will lose its role as the leader of the West and instead become part of the Western confederacy in Europe, which unifies nations against the great Asian power."

Now with the rise of NATO and America coming apart at the seams, it is interesting to me that Lindsey wrote his commentary in 1973, and we are seeing fulfillment of biblical prophecy unfold every day. Let me close by giving you comfort. When the Lord finally smashes the New World Order, divides that kingdom, and brings about this final dispersion of all humanity, His children will have already been taken at the resurrection. This is the most important promise to hold on to. The Lord will come for us. If you have any doubt whether or not you belong to the family of God, now would be the time to make your peace with God. We are that close. I want to thank you for being with me today. You will find this episode at candacelong.com/podcast and in the program notes I will put links to my resources. I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Latter Days. God bless.