Author Kermit Zarley is a former PGA golf tournament winner and a Christian interested in the codes thought to be embedded in texts of the Bible, with their possible implications for our lives today and tomorrow. Particularly intrigued that Jesus arose from the grave on the third day and that the pattern of third-day events are points on a thread woven throughout the Old and New Testaments, Zarley set out to trace them all in order to decide where they are leading us.
Zarley’s writing is as precise as his golf swing - and as precisely researched - so that he misses nothing along the pathway of third-day events. In the beginning of his book, he lists the scriptural abbreviations he uses and the literary sources he chose in addition to five different modern translations of the Bible and two historical Hebrew scriptural texts. The sheer number of third-day references in the Bible is overwhelming and seems to be driving home some sort of point that we need to understand. To this end, the author has been quite thorough in researching, writing, and helping the reader to understand his story of the third-day thread. It strongly supports Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and His certain return, even putting a set of time parameters on the latter.
The chapter titles are fascinating, including “Joseph Imprisons His Brothers for Three Days,” “Turning Water into Wine on the Third Day,” and “Jesus was LEFT BEHIND.” Overall, the thread of third-day events seems to lead repeatedly to Jesus, to His birth, life, death, and resurrection. Apparently it leads strongly to His return, as well.
It is all very interesting reading, and while the Bible says that man will not know the hour or the day of Jesus’ return, Zarley has done a tremendous amount of work in order to narrow it down to a timeframe encompassing about 180 years. Even if that time span is incorrect, the thread of third-day events gives us a sense of organization and purpose, because it is hard to accept that this thread was woven by any other than a Greater Intelligence, to actually have spanned several thousand years and many chapters written by different authors in the Bible and Hebrew scriptures. It will prove fascinating and provocative reading for everyone.