Numbers and Nagasaki
Japan surrendered on Aug 15, 1945, but the signing of the agreement occurred later on Sept 2, 1945 aboard the US Battleship Missouri
The WWII destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have only one immediately obvious Biblical counterpart, I think. That would be the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And that has sometimes made me wonder if I was supposed to notice that. After all, anyone born after the dropping of those two bombs, and who also was acquainted with the Bible, might have noticed the similar destruction of two cities from the air.
It turns out that there are some interesting correlations that can be drawn between Japanese Christianity and the nuclear bombings that ended WWII in Japan. And even Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, that doesn't mean God meant them to correlate. But you can say that the correlations are a little bit interesting.
Saint Francisco Xavier is said to have introduced Christian missionary work to Japan on August 15, 1549, (he apparently first set foot on Japanese soil that day) and was allowed to do so partly because of a growing Japanese interest in conducting trade with Europeans. They especially were interested in the advanced military weapons that the Europeans had, and to have access to these and other desirable trade items they agreed to tolerate Christian missionaries. St. Francis incidentally had founded the Jesuit Order to which he belonged 15 years earlier on that same day in 1534, so he essentially first stepped foot onto Japanese soil for Christ on the 15th anniversary of his order.
In the years that followed, the number of Japanese who converted to Christianity was pretty astounding, really. Around three hundred thousand Christian Japanese is an estimate for the end of the 1500's.
There came a time of persecution, however. Concern grew in Japan that Europeans (Portugese, in particular) might use Christianity to colonize Japan. They had basically done this in other countries with which Japan was familiar, like the Philippines. On Feb 5th, 1597, violent persecution broke out against Christians, and there were 26 Japanese missionaries and Christians killed in the town of Nagasaki by means of Crucifixion, followed by stabbing with a spear. Pretty much an imitation of Christ's crucifixion and death. A sort of 'mocking' of our Savior. The little harbor of Nagasaki was no longer allowing the Pearl of Great Price.
*****Diverge for a second, if you will, for a short look at the very unusual number ...26: It is the number that you get if you add up the numerical value of the name of God in the Hebrew (YHWH: Y=10, H=5, W=6, and H=5), and also, using the 26 letters of the English alphabet the name GOD uses the 7th, the 15th, and the 4th letter of the English alphabet with 7+15+4 equaling 26. There are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet as well. The Jewish Talmud supposedly says that Moses was of the 26th generation from creation (i.e. - 26 generations from Adam to Moses.) Given that Moses received the WORD of God, and that Jesus is called the WORD, and is also a part of God, that becomes even stranger! There's more, but that's enough to make the point that 26 seems to be a meaningful number, and seems to relate to the personal name of God or Jesus!) Genesis 2:6 is the first place in the Bible that a 2 and a 6 show up together, and there it says: "but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the land." Is that related to martyrs? Not exactly...but...during the Inquisition, the tormentors of the Christians grew disgusted because the harder they persecuted the Christians, burning them at the stake, etc., the faster the church seemed to grow. One man said "The smoke from the pyre (that the martyrs were burned upon) falls to the ground as seed!" Is that a little like "but a mist went up from the Earth and watered the whole face of the land."? The 26 chapter of Genesis centers on how Isaac went to dwell among the Phillistines of Gerar and they stole his bride and greatly oppressed his herdsmen. God cursed their land until they gave Rebekah back. Then Isaac's herds prospered so much in their lands that they became jealous and began to torment Isaac's herdsmen (like martyring missionaries in Japan won so many converts that Japan grew fearful and persecuted them) and took over the wells Isaac's men dug, and tried to run Isaac and his men out of the land. But in the end, they saw that God only blessed Isaac all the more, so the Philistine King, Abimelech, came out to Isaac and asked Isaac for an oath of friendship and peace, and that very day Isaac's men dug a successful new well which they called Shebah ('Well of the Seven' or 'Well of the Oath'). There the city of Beer-Sheba was located.
And, later in the Bible, in Exodus chap 6 (Old Testament book #2, chap 6....another 26!) Moses is commissioned by God to go back to the Israelites in Egypt (who are tormented and enslaved by Pharaoh because they became too numerous and successful, and the Egyptians grew frightened and jealous) and Moses is told that he will lead them out of slavery and of Egypt with the help of God. And Old Testament Book 26 is Ezekiel, who's chapter 39 seems to speak prophetically of a far future time when what seems to be nuclear weapons will be used to destroy Gog and its armies, the people who are persecuting the people of God in Israel at that time. That destruction would presumably come from above. Next, New Testament Book 2, Chap 6 (Gospel of Mark chapter 6) the 12 (Apostles of Christ) are sent out by Jesus in pairs, and he specifically says to them "And whoever will not receive you nor hear you, when you depart from there, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony to them." Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgement than for that city!" That is interesting for several reasons. It refers to feet, and there are 26 bones in each foot, so there's that number 26 again. And it refers to Sodom and Gomorrah - cities utterly destroyed from the air above - when referring to the punishments which will befall those who reject the missionaries (the 12 Apostles) of Jesus. And, parenthetically as they say, it's on page 888 in the Bible I'm using today, a New King James translation. 888 is sometimes called Jesus' number - the numerical value of His name in some ancient languages! It's true, but I'm not really making too much of that. Anyway, back to the main subject, the number 26 really does seem to associate with trouble for God's people, even martyrdom for them, and God's reprisal against the enemies of His people, sometimes via destruction from the air.*****
In 1859, Japanese relations with the West were warming up again, and in 1859 the Japanese allowed Christian missionary work, but not until 1873 were the Christians allowed to openly meet in Japan. A most interesting thing was then discovered: some Japanese who were Christians in the 1590's, when the government outlawed Christianity and persecuted it, had merely gone 'underground', worshiping in caves.
So, 275 years later, when Christians were again allowed to officially meet, it was discovered that there was a secret community of about 30,000 Christians that had never quit worshiping, and they came forward at that time to worship openly. Before long they had built a church building of significant size in Nagasaki. It was found that their Christianity had lost touch with the truth a great deal, however, when they first came forward to reveal themselves. It had incorporated a lot of beliefs from native Japanese false religions.
Now, fast forward to August 6 and August 9 of the year 1945, and those are the days that the Atomic Bomb called Little Boy was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, and then three days later on the 9th the bomb called Fat Man was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. (Want a useful memory aid for which bomb was which? "If you drink too much Saki (Nagasaki) you'll plut on (plutonium) weight and become a fat man") Fat Man is the name of one of the two bombs. It tells you that Fat Man held Plutonium, and was dropped upon Nagasaki. If you want to remember which one was dropped first, just remember that in a foot race between a 'Little Boy' and a 'Fat Man' the 'Little Boy' comes in First. Little Boy was dropped first.
The immediate death toll was very high, and the subsequent deaths terrible also. Around 220,000 in the first two months from those two bombs. The casualty numbers vary.
So, on August 15, 1945, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender to the Allies in a radio broadcast to his subjects.
August 15, the same date when some sources say Christianity comes to Japan via St. Xavier (though he is not the very first, but he was then noted to be such).
And decades after Xavier introduces the faith, Christianity is rejected, and 26 people are martyred in a way that mimicked the death of Jesus. They were martyred in a Biblically significant way, let us say. Would God respond to this?
And on August 15, 1945 - 348 years after Japan received the gift of the Gospel (the Pearl of Great Price) - and at the cost of the deaths of 220,000 Japanese civilians, came the surrender of Japan due to the bombings.
The date of Nagasaki's bombing (the 26 were martyred here) was 08/09/45. 0+8+0+9+4+5= 26
Again, the number of martyrs: 26
How did we enter that war? The bombing of our own 'Pearl Harbor'. When did we declare war? A day after the bombing of 'Pearl Harbor': 12/08/1941
12/08/1941 = 1+2+0+8+1+9+4+1 = 26 (I included the '19' in 1941 this time. Cheating? Maybe.)
There's another 26. In a pact called the Pottsdam Agreement, on July 26, 1945 Great Britain, the USSR, the USA, and Chiang Kai Shek of China forwarded suggested surrender terms to Japan...which Japan did not accept at that time.
There are a fair number of 26's associated with this event.
Here's another shared element of WWII and Genesis. In the Genesis account, sulpher came down upon Sodom and Gomorrah at the rising of the sun:
Gen 19:23 "By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. Then the Lord rained down burning sulfer on Sodom and Gomorrah - from the Lord out of the heavens."
Where as, in 1945, the destruction rained down on a land called 'the rising sun'. Japan was known as 'the Land of the Rising Sun'.
Who knows?? Today Japan is about 2% Christian, and that's a pretty full scale rejection of God, though more may come to believe, and the ones that do believe are precious to Jesus. In fact, the ones that don't believe have souls precious to Jesus also, and He longs just as much for them to believe.
Are there further Biblical correlations?
The Japanese have no particular association with homosexuality to my knowledge, as Sodom and Gomorrah did. But, the actual word 'Gay' can be said to be associated with the situations of both Sodom and Gomorrah, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the first two Biblical towns, the gay men there wanted to drag the handsome angels outside and forcibly rape them. In the case of Japan, the Enola Gay was the name of the plane dropping the first Bomb. So, the English word 'Gay' with its several meanings is found to relate.
God expects faithfulness and obedience from those He created, so what of those who know of Him, yet reject Him? Both Japan and those ancient cities of the Bible had rejection of Yahweh in common, right? And let us carefully note that many nations today are rejecting God also, the USA being one of the chief among them.
But Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Sodom and Gomorrah are probably among the four cities that people would name most often (perhaps Dresden, Germany also) if you asked people to name cities destroyed by fire. And Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for their rejection of God.
In Japan during WWII the Emperor of Japan was literally worshiped as a God. Not Yahweh. So Japan too was a land rejecting towards the true God, and worshipful towards the false gods.
It could possibly be said that Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction was sent from the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (whom some call 'the Trinity'). In Japan's case, the destruction came, in a matter of speaking, from the Trinity Test Site, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA.
To continue the weirdness......Alamo means 'poplar' (like the tree) and 'gordo' means fat, but gordo can also be the word for a fat man. A 'gordo'. One of the two bombs, the second one, dropped on Nagasaki, was called 'fat man'. It was named after Winston Churchill. He was a 'popular fatman', and of course, the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Alamogordo can be said to translate to 'poplar-fatman', which sounds pretty similar to popular fatman. Strange, no?
And there were three visitors going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah in the account found in the book of Genesis, and as they crossed the desert, they came near Abraham's tents. He saw them and invited these strangers to come in, rest and eat. They accepted. One of them told Sarah (90 years old and barren still) that she would have a child. She laughed. But the angel (possibly Jesus in that form) scolded her, asking if anything was too hard for the Lord? A year later, she had Isaac, which is a Hebrew word relating to laughter. She was a solitary woman no longer!! She had a son, and great joy.
Three planes were sent on the bombing mission of Hiroshima: Enola Gay (Enola means solitary), so 'Solitary Happy'. That's sort of a tie-in with the account in Genesis of when solitary Sarah received the news and then was happy (O.K., maybe that's a stretch) The second was called 'Necessary Evil'. The third was called the 'Great Artiste'. Enola bombed it. The Necessary Evil carried instruments to gather data. The Great Artiste stayed back and looked on, taking pictures.
Again, it was a sort of 'Trinity' who brought the 'necessary disaster' (some in the US military saw dropping these bombs as a 'necessary evil', to prevent what they thought would be a blood bath if a Japanese land invasion was mounted) onto the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just as an angelic trio brought a necessary disaster onto Sodom and Gomorrah.
We could say that the grief brought upon Japan - and the destruction from above of two of its great cities - was a result of uniting with the Axis powers of Europe to cause WWII. And WWII more or less began with Hitler's invasion and annexation of Austria and the Sudentland in 1938.
It is therefore in keeping that we find the end of Sodom and Gomorrah's story in Genesis 19:38. Or at least we find Gen 19:38 in the verses describing the Sodom and Gomorrah account.
There in that section of Genesis is the continuation of the story of Lot and his two daughters, who survived the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They were rushed out of harms way by angels so that they didn't die with the evil people when fire came down from the sky. But their lives were about all that they escaped with. They lived on a hillside in a cave then, for a time. They didn't even seem to know if there were any other survivors for a time, judging by the actions of Lot's daughters.
A wine that Lot's daughters have given him to drink has caused him to pass out, there in that section of Genesis. He drank too much of it for two nights in a row. It made him pass out on both nights. He was a victim of his desperate daughters' plot. Two nights in a row, when he drinks it, he passes out. And on each night, one of the daughters sleeps with their unconscious father, each becoming impregnated with a child, with the founder of a people that will happen to go on to forever be an enemy of Israel.
These daughters suppose that all the world is destroyed, like the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah that they look down upon from their hillside cave. Their father Lot has just lost his wife. He is probably shattered with grief. Their former residences, that they look down upon from their cliff side cave home, are probably still smoking. Their valley below had been full of natural asphalt seeps, which are flammable.
Each daughter had been promised to a man in marriage, but now each of those men has died in the destruction they see below. In their wombs, from their father, one daughter has inside of her the founder of the Moabites, named Moab. One holds the founder of the Ammonites, named Ben-Ammi. Two peoples that will hate Israel and be jealous of Israel for time eternal it seems. As you read onward in the Bible from this point, the Moabites and Ammonites almost never show the regard for Israel that Abraham showed for Lot.
So here's another strange thing that is well known in the nuclear power industry: When nuclear reactions take place there are lots of otherwise commonly known elements which are created - otherwise commonly known elements, except that they are isotopes because they contain the wrong number of neutrons for their specific element. They are radioactive also, because of this. These elements are known, among other things, as 'radioactive daughter products'. They are atoms/elements which were created in an unnatural way, and are therefore dangerous and unstable. It's kind of like how the 'products' of the union of Lot's daughters with their passed out father were unnatural, and became dangerous destabilizers to their relatives. Unnatural daughter products.....an odd correlation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were contaminated by radioactive daughter products for a time, after being bombed.
As for anything in the history of the US bombing of Japan relating to that portion of the Genesis story which speaks of the birth of two nations that will go on to hate Israel, I do not know. Naturally, I wish I knew of some Christians that were miraculously rushed out of harms way in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but I don't. I've actually read about the opposite occurring - a targeted church building.
****Update!! An amazing salvation!! I found out that there were Jesuit friars (monks) who met at a house in Hiroshima that had an attached church. They met, prayed, did the rosary, and of course they tried to do Christian work there in Hiroshima. They gave mass in the church, as well. The Jesuit Order, amazingly, had Francis Xavier as one of its founders! The same man who introduced Christianity to Japan in the 15th century!
They were almost at the epicenter of the bomb on the morning it went off, (within about 1 kilometer) and yet weren't killed, or even harmed by radiation, though all around them were killed. Apparently everyone else out to 1.5 kilometers from the bombs epicenter died. Read about the account associated with this occurrence here on Deeds of God! ***
Yes, there are some interesting correlations between the Bible and these fairly modern events.
Yet, to make sure not to overlook facts to the contrary of what I was suggesting as a possibility, we have to consider that many Japanese people, ordinary citizens loyal to their government, were killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And all people belong to God, so he lost children in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
By contrast, Jesus does not condone or encourage killing for any cause in His teachings, but instead teaches patience, love, and forgiveness in the face of persecution. His people, living truly as He taught them to, could live in a country that became conquered by an enemy, and through love, peaceful ways, and the miracles of the Holy Spirit's gifts, win over that conquering power to Jesus, to become new Christians themselves after some length of years. Many Christians would die in the course of accomplishing this, no doubt. But it worked in ancient Rome, for example. And in meeting violence with violence, many die also, so you can't truly call passive acceptance a stupid policy, even from a worldly viewpoint.
Additionally, and tragically, when the plane named Bockscar flew over Nagasaki, attempting to positively identify certain pre-discussed landmarks in the town prior to bombing it, one of the landmarks they keyed in on was the large Christian church building which served some of the Christians there. And some people have written that all of those Christians belonging to that Catholic church group were killed in that bombing, though I think I'll look into that even further.
And there is a town called Kokura that was on the list as a target or backup target for both raids, yet through weather and other incidentals, was skipped each time. The Japanese have a phrase now about the 'luck of Kokura' that is widely known in their nation. Was Kokura like Lot?
In the end, it is a mixed bag. If God did play a part in engineering the timing and the location of the targets, he apparently did not go through the troubles that He did in Sodom and Gomorrah, and in the 70 A.D. destruction of Jerusalem, to make sure His people got out safely prior to letting His enemies know His wrath. I didn't find anything about it anyway. I'm still keeping an eye out. So, was God not the engineer of these details which have a sort of correlation to the Christian history of the area, or was it, for some reason, just a different sort of situation? (Update, as noted above....there was an amazing salvation of some missionaries near the epicenter of Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb!)
Whatever the case, these events reintroduced a new and dangerous era of possible nuclear warfare. A type of warfare which had not existed since those ancient days, thousands of years ago, spoken of pretty clearly in the oldest literature of India, when weapons that sound extremely similar to nuclear weapons were used by warring peoples. And a website called s8int has a section about possible ancient nuclear knowledge in which they mention a 3 sq mile area of Rajasthan India about 10 miles west of Jodhpur where the radiation is too intense to live even today, and where archaeological evidence of a possible nuclear bomb strike may exist. But the website 's8int' is an excellent place to study more about that, if it did truly occur.
Was there involvement by God in the specifics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's nuclear bombings? In truth, only God will be able to give us that answer. But, it did show all of us in this world just what a dark and dangerous path it is to use technology and scientific learning to pursue ever more effective ways to kill our fellow man. No good thing will result, in the long run, unless it's the coming of the Lord to save us from the pit we dig for ourselves.