The message was a warning to Rip Hunter that a war is coming.
"I can't risk putting anymore lives in danger, and neither can you," the future Flash says, voiced by Grant Gustin, in the message meant only for Rip Hunter. "Which is why you will keep what I'm about to tell you a secret. Even from the rest of your team. A war is coming Captain Hunter."
Now on tonight's Invasion Part 2 episode of The Flash, the entire message is played for the present-day Barry Allen and Oliver Queen, revealing the war is none other than The Dominators, and that nobody – including Barry himself – should be trusted in this timeline, which was altered when Barry went back to save his mother causing the Flashpoint timeline, which Barry then changed in a failed attempt to make things right, resulting in this timeline.
The full message from Barry 40 years in the future continues:
"A war is coming Captain Hunter and at some point you are going to be called back to Central City to fight it," The Flash from the year 2056 says. "So you need to know that while you and your team have been in the temporal zone, I made a choice that affected the timeline. As you know, whenever you alter the past those changes affect the present and get compounded in the future. When you return, you will be in the new timeline I created where everyone's past and everyone's future has been affected. Including yours. When you come back don't trust anything or anyone. Not even me."
Some of the changes to this timeline include that Diggle has a son instead of a daughter; that Cisco's brother died; that Caitlin received her Killer Frost powers; that Iris West in the future newspaper article changed, and that (I believe) Star Labs now looks like the Hall of Justice.
In addition, we also now apparently know that the changes have affected as much as 40 years worth of time in the future. Watch the footage from tonight's episode below. It will be interesting to see where The Flash series goes regarding the timeline changes as, in essence, they basically wiped out the first two seasons of The Flash. Will Barry again go back in time to try and correct things? Will the Legends of Tomorrow go back in time to correct Barry's time aberration? Or will the show(s) simply continue to go on in the present paradoxical timeline?
