ACT 1

Scene 1

Koriah and Leah enter stage right and start talking, while Simeon, and old man sitting in the corner on a bale of hay is sleeping, leaning on his staff.

Leah – Koriah! Look how old Simeon is getting.

Koriah – Yes, dear. I don’t know what will happen to him.

Leah gently approaches Simeon and touches him on the arm.

Leah – Uncle Simeon. It’s Koriah and Leah. We’ve come to see you.

Simeon shudders a little and slowly opens his eyes.

Simeon – Oh, oh. Koriah, Leah, it is good to see you.

In a very fatherly tone…

You are so good to come to see me. Thankyou, thankyou.

Koriah – Well, it’s been a month since we saw you last…

???

Koriah – What do you mean the old days, Uncle Simeon? I haven’t heard of anyone ever having a bad crop.

Sim

eon – Ah yes. That is because you were never a member of the old world, Koriah and Leah. You must understand that times were so much different back then. I mean, before the coming of Jesus Christ and the life that we enjoy so happily now. It is just such a joy to live now…

…and it all makes so much more sense now.

Leah jumps in.

Leah – What do you mean, Uncle Simeon? You speak of the old world before Jesus Christ was around as if it was a different planet, like people had difficulty farming and feeding everyone on the earth. Did you have difficulty farming in those days, Uncle Simeon?

Simeon – Ah, Leah. Times were completely different in those. Did I have trouble farming?! Leah, I wasn’t even a farmer. I was a sheet metal worker. Um…now…a sheet metal worker is someone who makes things out of metal. In fact, much of the time we used to make computer cases. Huh, but I guess, you don’t know what a computer is, do you?

Leah and Koriah shake their heads.

Simeon –Ah, computers were funny things. They allowed people in those days to save themselves time by storing large amounts of information and being able to retrieve that information very quickly when they needed it. They also allowed people to calculate things and ad up things very quickly, which was very handy, given the amount of commercial transactions that took place on a daily basis.

Koriah – Oh, I still don’t understand. I just can’t picture it.

Simeon – Yes, it is very hard to explain. But don’t let that worry you. Later, the computer became a communication device. You could send a message from your computer…say, for example, here…to another computer over the other side of the world.

Koriah – So you mean I could send a message from here to my friend Ben who I met in the Temple last year.

Simeon – Yes, that’s right.

Leah – But why wouldn’t they just use an Elohim? I mean, we can do that now. We just pass our messages through Uncle Daniel, our village Elohim, and he manages to contact our friends wherever they are through the Elohim in their villages.

Simeon – Yes, well, that’s alright now, but in those days, they didn’t have Elohim. Jesus Christ was not in the earth.

Leah – Well, tell us more about how Jesus Christ returned to the earth and the changes that took place. Why is everything so much better now?

Simeon – Well, from my point of view, I guess it all began one day when all the Christadelphians, and some others, disappeared from off the earth. They were a religious group of people that believed that Jesus Christ would come to the earth. But you must understand, not everyone believed this at the time. In fact, many didn’t even believe in God and many others who did believe in God did not believe that Jesus Christ would return to the earth, and held many other wrong teachings.

So when we woke up one day and found that all the Christadelphians were completely gone, we were staggered. I guess today, it would be like waking up and finding that our village had disappeared, except for the fact that the Christadelphians were spread throughout the whole world. The thing is, they were a very small group compared to everyone else in the world at that time and so, while it was very strange, and it shocked the world for a good year afterwards, eventually, things returned to some degree of normality.

Although for me, the world was never really the same again. I mean, I tried to get on with my life. I still had my job, of course, but the real thing that bugged me was that I knew and had worked with a Christadelphian, and he had told me that exactly this would happen one day. He hadn’t told me much – he was actually a quiet sort of chap. But he had told me that one day, he could disappear, and that would be a sign that Jesus Christ was ready to return to the earth.

I also remember talking to him about something called Armageddon, or a big world war to end all world wars. He also said this was right before Jesus Christ would return to the earth. So while I really hadn’t taken any notice of him then – I had just seen him as a bit of a quirky sort of preacher type person – now I was scared. Now that the Christadelphians had completely disappeared, I sort of wandered around almost in a daze for some 10 years or so. I kept a low profile. I tried to hide it. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I noticed some people claiming similar sorts of experiences with Christadelphians, but that they did believe that they would disappear, but I chose not to share mine. I just couldn’t talk about, I bottled it up inside me, I…I couldn’t get it out. I guess, deep down, I knew it was right, but, I thought it was too late and I couldn’t admit it to anyone. I just had to wait and see what would happen. So when this big world war called Armageddon did come, I knew that Christadelphian was right, but I also just knew that I had no way out. There was absolutely no one I could talk to about it.

And then, suddenly, I remember it quite distinctly now, Russia had invaded Israel and had a war for quite some months trying to destroy and completely annihilate Israel as a nation. They had just about succeeded. Half of the city of Jerusalem had been taken back into Russia. It looked like it was all over for the Jewish people. And then, suddenly and quite miraculously, they recovered. The few that were left managed to band together some kind of guerrilla army and the tables turned and Russia was on the back foot. And no sooner had Russia basically been defeated and retreating back to their country, when a world wide earthquake occurred that shook the whole planet to it’s foundations. I will never forget that day. The earth just shook and shook and shook for 4 hours straight, violently shaking us all. All we could do was cling to the ground of a shaking earth and hope like crazy nothing hit us. I guess I was one of the lucky ones. Although, I look back now and realise I was actually one of the blessed ones. Yes, it was then after that terrible earthquake, I remember falling into some kind of trance-like coma. I thought I was dead. And yet, and the end of all that turmoil, Elohim Daniel came and tapped me on the shoulder. I actually think he picked me up bodily and stood me on my feet and brushed me down and sort of gave me strength. I looked around in a daze. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The city in which I lived, Perth, Western Australia, was completely annihilated. I look back now at Ezekiel 38 and marvel at what a literal fulfilment that was. There was not one stone left on another on any wall in the whole of the city. The stones had been shaken to powder, just about. Thoughts like, ‘Where would I live?’ ‘How would I eat?’ and ‘What I wouldn’t do for a shower right now’ raced through my mind, and then I looked into Elohim Daniel’s eyes with question after question running through my head, like ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Why did this happen?’ ‘Who are you?’, and he sort of gave me a knowing glance and said that all would be explained very shortly. And so he gathered us together, you could say the survivors, into a large sort of shed that seemed to have been perhaps the only thing that survived the devastation and that, it seemed, could only have been by design. And so while there, Elohim Daniel explained to us everything, although very briefly about Jesus Christ being back in the earth and the fact that this was all prophesied long, long ago in the Bible. We had so many burning questions we wanted to ask, and many of us did, but we were also told that this would be a learning process that we would go through over a number of years as we learnt the full extent of God’s purpose and plan. And so, over many years, we did learn. In fact, over the next 30 or 40 years, we were set up with farms and houses and had to really learn a whole new way of life with the help of these Elohim…

…such an enjoyable experience. I so much understand how, you know, when the disciples went down the road to Emmaus, those two disciples, it says that their hearts burned within them went Jesus spoke to them and expounded the scriptures of everything that talked about him. We felt exactly the same in those days. Our hearts were burning within us as these Elohim spoke to us of all these wonderful ways. You don’t understand – it was so different to what you are experiencing today. In the old world, I mean. It was such a terrible, unpleasant place to live. There was so much hardship and sorrow. Many millions of people would go to bed each night hungry, starving, not getting enough food. Men and women would work all the day and half the night just for some money, some printed paper or a minted coin. They went to crazy extremes of building bigger and bigger houses when they only could live in a few rooms at a time. They would make their lives busier and busier going from one thing to the other in an attempt, I guess, to sort of cloud the reality of the futility of daily life. Ah, but there is only one thing I look for now. I realise I am just so blessed to have been brought through that old world and into the new. The new Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem. And now I just look to be made immortal, like unto the Elohim, that that is my hope, Koriah, Leah, that is our hope…

…never forsake the commandments of the Elohim.

Koriah – so, so tell me more about his old world. I don’t fully understand it, Uncle Simeon. You mentioned computers. I can sort of see how they would help if there were no Elohim around, but if there were no Elohim, how were the cities governed and ruled and how were laws implemented and how did the worship take place, and things like that?

Simeon – I can understand how it is hard for you understand. But then again, maybe you are not required to know all these details. You see, the people ruled themselves. There was no structured worship, per se. There were different religions and different people believed in God and as I said before, some didn’t believe in God at all. So people generally elected their own rulers, and these rulers were called politicians, who made the government of the day. In the whole, it was an entirely cumbersome and inequitable affair. The whole world system was based around greed and lust and the love of money and material possessions, not at all as we have it today. Worship was optional and there were so many different religions, everyone believed different things about God anyway. They were such terrible, terrible times compared to what you have today.

Koriah – So, if there were different religions that believed different things about God, and there were no Elohim around, then presumably, there was no one to say who was right – is that right, Uncle Simeon?

Simeon – Yes, that’s right. The Bible, of course, we had. But the real big problem was that religion had corrupted itself from the days when Jesus Christ was on the earth the first time. In fact, in our day, we had one big religion. It was called the Catholics, the Roman Catholics, and it was this major religion which influenced, or was the mother of all the other religions, as it says in Revelation 17. It was a terrible system. Through subtlety, it would deceive the hearts of many. So the vast majority of religious people on the earth really didn’t believe the truth about God at all. And as you rightly say, they couldn’t ask the Elohim. All they had to go on was the Bible. Which, by the way, should have been enough. But because the religious leaders had influenced the world so much, it seemed almost impossible to read it with an open mind. You can understand now, can’t you, why some of the judgments that were placed upon the world and this religious system in Europe over the last 30 or 40 years had to take place. God absolutely hates this system, because it has taken away the hope of salvation for many, many people.

Koriah – So, that’s an interesting concept. The people themselves would actually rule themselves in their own nations. I guess that

Suddenly, Elohim Daniel bursts in and there is much hearty greeting in the room.

Scene 2

Simeon – Ah, Elohim Daniel. It is so good to see you. I must, say, though, I am not feeling so well as I used to. I fear, perhaps, I am not going to be around much longer.

Elohim Daniel – Alas, it is the frailty of mortality. Something I fear, though, that will be hard for us to impress upon these young people, Koriah and Leah. After all, they are born into a very different world to what you were born into, Simeon.

Simeon – Yes, indeed. I was just telling them about it. But that is our hope, is it not? And the hope to which we aspire, and that you have already attained, Elohim Daniel. A hope which Elohim Paul once wrote is worth patiently waiting for. So tell me, Elohim Daniel, is it true that Koriah and Leah will die at a similar age to what I will? It seems to me that people age far less quickly than in the days prior to Jesus Christ coming to this earth.

Elohim Daniel – Well, that all depends, of course. Largely, however, though, now that the curse originally placed on man in the garden of Eden has been, well, not reversed, but certainly slowed in it’s application, it does mean that disease, the aging process and therefore death take a much longer time to take effect in a mortal person. However, they will still suffer pain from time to time, and there is certainly no guarantee on their life span. Unfortunately, we do have the occasional sinner or rebel who errs in the way and the judgment of God is swift upon these people. You must realise that, Koriah and Leah. Our God is not someone who you can take lightly. He demands obedience to his commandments and he requires your full and constant love and attention to his ways.

Leah – (somewhat horrified) You mean, Elohim Daniel, that Simeon is going to die soon? I…I don’t want him to die (almost crying – audience must realise the difficulty for Leah and Koriah to understand death and hence had not picked up the tone of the conversation in this regard before now).

Elohim Daniel – Leah, Koriah, it is only right that God should allow the things of the old world to take their natural course. Simeon here has been extremely fortunate. One of the few saved out of the earthquake and saved from the old world and brought into the new. If you like, as a token of God’s love for them and his willingness that none should perish. And they are a great example to you two of someone who has seen both worlds and knows the superior nature of this far more spiritual world in which he now lives and which we all enjoy. It is good for you to hear from him firsthand of the blessings that he enjoys in this life compared to the old. Yet, it is also very appropriate for Yahweh our God to demand the natural death of these people and of everything to do with that old world. The remembrance of that world will all but disappear over the ensuing years, with the only reminders being visual memorials of the horrific features of that age. So this new world will take over, and replace the corruptness of the old, as we have seen it done. And you will live longer and peacefully in this land which Yahweh your God has given you, as he promised to his people Israel many, many years ago.