Huge Luminous Bar of Light Captured on Video Over Spokane Valley, Washington

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus answers the disciples' question about the sign of His coming and the end of the age. He lists a series of birth-pangs: wars, earthquakes, famines, pestilences—and then adds 'terrors and great signs from heaven' (Greek: phobētra kai sēmeia ap' ouranou megala).

The word phobētra means 'frightening sights' or 'terrors,' indicating phenomena that inspire awe and fear.

Jesus places these heavenly signs in the same category as the other birth-pangs—they are not the final sign itself but precursors that intensify as the age progresses. The phrase 'great signs from heaven' is broad enough to encompass any extraordinary aerial or celestial manifestation that causes widespread wonder or alarm.

The Spokane Valley sighting—a huge luminous bar moving silently across the sky, captured on video and reported through a dedicated UFO app—represents exactly the kind of 'terrors and great signs from heaven' Jesus predicted. The witness's description ('It was like a giant light bar') and the object's unexplained nature evoke the fearful quality Jesus attached to these signs.

As such sightings multiply and become more widely documented through technology, they serve as one more birth-pang in the sequence Jesus outlined. They do not set a date for His return, but they do confirm that we are living in the season He described—a time when the heavens themselves bear witness that the age is drawing to its appointed end.

Ezekiel's vision of the glory of God begins with a description of a luminous, complex aerial phenomenon: a stormy wind, a great cloud with brightness, flashing fire, and 'gleaming metal' (Hebrew: chashmal, often translated 'amber' or 'electrum'). The prophet struggles to describe what he sees, using comparative language ('as it were,' 'like,' 'appearance of').

This passage is not a prophecy about UFOs—it is a theophany, a vision of the divine throne-chariot. However, the descriptive pattern (luminous object, metallic appearance, movement from the north, fire-like brightness) bears a striking structural parallel to modern UAP reports.

The point is not to equate the two but to note that biblical language for heavenly phenomena already includes descriptions that sound remarkably like what witnesses report today.

The witness's description of a 'giant light bar' with luminous, metallic appearance floating silently over Spokane Valley echoes the language Ezekiel used when he saw 'gleaming metal' in the midst of fire. While Ezekiel's vision was a direct revelation of God's glory, not a UFO, the parallel reminds us that the heavens are capable of manifesting phenomena that transcend our normal categories of explanation.

Christians should not rush to identify every UAP with Ezekiel's vision, but neither should they dismiss such reports as irrelevant to biblical faith. The same God who showed Ezekiel the 'appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD' (Ezekiel 1:28) remains sovereign over all the heavens—including whatever luminous bars pass over Spokane Valley in these last days.