In these last days, God will judge the earth with fire, not a flood. Yet there was a flood — this time not from God, but from the serpent.

(If you haven’t yet read the previous articles in our 2025 series, we recommend beginning with them.)

The year of this worldwide flood was 2022.

It was deeply personal for me: my hometown — including my church — was submerged by the largest flood in recorded history.

Here are some of the unprecedented floods that occurred that year:

Australia: Eastern Australia’s 2022 floods were among the worst on record. South East Queensland and coastal New South Wales endured their wettest week ever, with more than 50 sites topping 1m of rain. On 28 February, the Wilsons River in Lismore hit 14.4m, shattering the 1954 record of 12.11m.

Pakistan: Monsoon rains left 33 million affected. The Indus River rose to heights unseen in decades, making it one of Pakistan’s deadliest and costliest floods.

China: Southwestern provinces were inundated. Chongqing logged record rainfall, flooding entire districts and testing the Three Gorges Dam.

USA: “1-in-1,000-year” rainfall events struck Eastern Kentucky, St. Louis, North Texas, and Southwest Virginia.

Europe: Record rains swamped Tuscany and Greece, causing fatalities and major damage. In October, storms forced evacuations in Scotland and pushed Denmark’s waters to historic levels.

Africa: Cyclone Freddy set records for cyclone energy. Late-year rains in Kenya brought floods that killed at least 170.

South America: February floods and mudslides in Rio de Janeiro were the deadliest in its history. Bolivia’s Gran Chaco endured unprecedented flooding, Chile’s Atacama Desert flooded for the first time on record, and mid-year rains pushed the Paraguay River to record levels.

Middle East: Lebanon flooded in February from rain and snowmelt. March–April brought rare floods to Damascus and Iraq, while Jordan saw historic flooding in November.

2022 was exceptional for the widespread distribution of severe flooding: multiple continents were affected, hundreds of thousands of people were impacted, and several truly unprecedented local or regional floods occurred. In other regions — Pacific Islands, Central America, Southeast Asia, Israel — floods were severe but remained (just) within historical norms.

From a literal perspective, no other year in recent history embodies the ‘Days of Noah/Revelation 12’ pattern as clearly as 2022 in terms of:

In Noah’s day, the flood was delayed by the life of Methuselah. God told Enoch, his father, that judgment would not come until Methuselah died — and indeed, the flood arrived the very year he passed (Genesis 7).

Methuselah lived 969 years — longer than any other man recorded in Scripture — as if God was stretching His patience to the utmost. His extraordinary lifespan itself held back the flood.

Jesus explicitly told us that the last days would be like the days of Noah. If we apply the same countdown, counting back 969 years from 2022 brings us to the year 1053. This year is remarkable for several reasons, but one stands out above all.

Revelation 19:12 says:

What is this name? One possibility ties directly to the start of the final countdown and the sending of Elijah the prophet:

Jesus is “The Word” — but which word? A word no one knows but Himself. That word is LOVE:

But does anyone truly know love? The suggestion is that we do not — or would not, were it not for God first loving us. The passage from Malachi speaks of turning hearts — turning them towards love — and this would come first, before Jesus returned.

Here is where the symbolism becomes especially intriguing. In modern “leetspeak,” a playful system where letters are replaced by numbers that resemble them, the word LOVE becomes 1053 (using the Roman numeral for the digit 5). Remarkably, that is the same year the long countdown began, calculated from Methuselah’s 969-year lifespan.

Yet this is only half of what makes the year 1053 remarkable.

Prior to 1053, the world had experienced some tough times:

One of the most historically significant events of 1053 was the Battle of Civitate, fought on 18 June. This battle was part of the conflict between Pope Leo IX and the Normans in southern Italy. The Normans won decisively, capturing Leo IX. He was treated with respect and was later released.

Pope Leo IX was also active in church reform and in his dealings with Constantinople — developments that contributed to the East–West Schism just a year later, in 1054. The Schism formally and permanently divided Christianity into the Western (Roman Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) branches, the culmination of centuries of theological, political, and cultural differences between Rome and Constantinople.

From this point, the Christian world began a long, slow process of recovering and reshaping itself.

We can also trace the opening of the seven seals across this same period. Readers of our earlier article It’s Time You Sleeping Virgins Woke Up! will recall we placed the seals’ opening in the 20th century. That remains true for the final countdown. Yet Scripture often works in layers — wheels within wheels — the same pattern repeating at different scales. What follows is one such larger cycle, stretching across centuries.

The main events leading up to the dawn of the 20th century — the beginning of the last 120 years of the age — show both light and shadow, as the forces of good and evil struggled for mastery.

The reader will note that we have focused almost exclusively on Christendom — first Orthodox and Catholic, then Protestant — with the Crusades and Mongol invasions providing occasional contact with the wider world. This aligns with Revelation 6:7, which states that the four horsemen were given power over a fourth of the earth. Accordingly, we should not expect to see events of a global scale unfolding in these patterns at this stage of history.

This entire timeline encompassing the opening of all seven seals shows history’s jagged but steady movement upwards — preparing, shaping, and making straight the way of the Lord — until the fullness of His kingdom should come.

Summary of progress:

When Jesus returns, there will be a millennium of peace, but it will be built upon the foundation of the millennium that preceded it. This is an example of chiastic balance, echoing His first coming, although the individual ministries of John the Baptist and then Jesus were of much shorter duration the first time.

Jesus Himself likened His kingdom to a mustard seed, which would grow into a great tree, and to leaven in dough. These images suggest a gradual unfolding rather than an instant takeover. Many Christians — particularly those who anticipate a “Left Behind”–style rapture — have misunderstood this. The kingdom they are waiting to see appear is already present, though it is still engaged in battle against the forces of darkness. When Jesus returns, the darkness will be removed, and those in His kingdom will shine forth, just as the parable of the tares describes (Matthew 13:37-43).

We’ve now covered the two main prophetic countdowns that lead to the times of the end — a long count of 969 years and a shorter count of 120 years — and both markers — when aligned with observed historical events — demonstrate clearly that we are closer to the end than most realise. Those still waiting for a literal fulfilment of these events are misunderstanding the purpose of prophecy. To reiterate: prophecy is not primarily about predicting what will happen or when; it is about revealing the Author of the prophecy after the fact. And for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it most certainly has!

There is still much prophetic material to explore. At this point in our series, we have established a solid framework that will hopefully allow others to flesh out some of the details themselves. In our next article, we will examine another aspect of the final 120 years — pertaining to the Antichrist — and offer one possible interpretation of the number 666.

The challenge with delving too deeply into different prophecies now is that they are still, for the most part, like individual puzzle pieces. While we have laid out many of the edges, we do not yet have a clear picture of the finished puzzle. Our following articles will address this by going back further and showing the reader what the picture on the box looks like.