The
Ten Most Important Scriptures
To Understand the Middle East and its Future.
(Part 2)
Sunday, April 14, 2002
5—There will be a rising tide of war and chaos.
Matthew
24:3-8 “As
Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him
privately. "Tell us," they said, "when
will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of
the age?" 4 Jesus answered: "Watch out that no one deceives you. 5
For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive
many. 6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are
not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation
will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines
and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth
pains.” (NIV)
Jesus is answering three
questions that overlap somewhat. He
emphasizes the general chaos both in terms of war and “natural” events that
cause havoc. At the foremost of these is
nation rising against nations and kingdom against kingdom. These kingdoms are the vast number of tribal
units into which the world is presently fragmenting.
4—Whole
cities will be decimated possibly in retaliation for the use of weapons of mass
destruction against Israel.
Isaiah
17:1-9 “An oracle concerning Damascus: "See, Damascus will no longer be a city
but will become a heap of ruins. 2 The cities of Aroer
will be deserted and left to flocks, which will lie down, with no one to make
them afraid. 3 The fortified city will disappear from Ephraim, and royal power
from Damascus; the remnant of Aram will be like the glory of
the Israelites," declares the LORD Almighty. 4 "In that day the glory
of Jacob will fade; the fat of his body will waste away. 5 It will be as when a
reaper gathers the standing grain and harvests the grain with his arm-- as when
a man gleans heads of grain in the Valley of Rephaim. 6 Yet some gleanings will
remain, as when an olive tree is beaten, leaving two or three olives on the
topmost branches, four or five on the fruitful boughs," declares the LORD,
the God of Israel. 7 In that day men will look to their Maker and turn their
eyes to the Holy One of Israel. 8 They will not look to the altars, the work of
their hands, and they will have no regard for the Asherah
poles and the incense altars their fingers have made. 9 In that day their
strong cities, which they left because of the Israelites, will be like places
abandoned to thickets and undergrowth. And all will be desolation.” (NIV)
I preached on this theme recently so
I will not further enlarge upon it here.
3---The future ruler (whom we call anti-Christ) will be
“Roman.” He will organize a multilateral
“covenant”
Daniel 9:25-27
25 "Know
and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild
Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven
'sevens,' and sixty-two 'sevens.' It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench,
but in times of trouble.
26 After
the sixty-two 'sevens,' the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing.
The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the
sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end,
and desolations have been decreed.
27 He
will confirm a covenant with
many for one 'seven.' In the middle of the 'seven' he will put an end to
sacrifice and offering. And on a wing [of the temple] he will set up an
abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out
on him."
I believe
this means that the anti-Christ will come out of the Roman world. When verse 26 speaks of the people who
destroyed the city and the sanctuary it is predicting the Roman destruction of Jerusalem
in 70 and 135 AD. When it uses the
phrase “the ruler who will come” it is making reference to the
anti-Christ. When the two sections are
combined we conclude that the future anti-Christ will be out of the Roman
world.
In my book, Chaos and the End
of Time,
I give my reasons why the Daniel 2 passage relating to the statue of Nebuchadnezzer describes a fragmented Roman
Empire as the final stage in human history. The feet of iron and clay, when people will
be a mixture and will no longer be united, prophesied how the old Roman world
would fragment into hundreds of ethnic and national groups. I believe that America
is part of that fragmentation of the Roman legacy. There is no “revived Roman Empire,”
as some have mistakenly suggested. There
is no empire at all. The illustration of
iron mixed with clay shows that there is no longer any cohesion to hold an
empire together.
The final covenant that precedes
Armageddon will be a multilateral pledge or agreement. The agreement of peace between Israel
and Egypt was
bi-lateral as was the agreement between Jordan
and Israel. The new agreement will be multilateral,
brokered by a strong figure who rises out of the old
Roman legacy.
There are three elements of a multilateral
agreement that have emerged recently. First, the war in Bosnia
opened the door to a whole new way of resolving wars, through multilateral
agreements. That war was not a United
Nations war as the Korean War was. The
Bosnian war was a NATO war. That is, a
group of nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, sponsored the war and
brokered the peace agreement. That agreement
was not an UN agreement but a multilateral agreement among the nations who were
driving the war. We are seeing a renewal
of that concept in the European Union’s effort to make Israel
withdraw by means of sanctions.
The second element is in the so-called
Saudi.Peace Plan that actually calls for a
multilateral agreement. The plan was
presented to the Arabs who generally agreed to it. For the Arab viewpoint, they thought the most
important part of the proposal was the reversion to the boundaries that
followed the Israel’s
War of Independence and lasted until the 1967 war. However, from a prophetic viewpoint, the most
important new idea is that Israel
would be a part of a multilateral agreement that might include such distant
nations as Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, and Iran
among others. These countries are not
even neighbors.
The third element comes from the United
States.
President Bush has responded to the conflict with repeated calls to the
heads of the various Arab nations to do something to help peace by not fueling
the conflict with their hyper-heated rhetoric.
He is trying to draw the Arab States into becoming partners in the final
settlement of the conflict. The final
“peace” will include the Arab States.
If the current developments end up
providing the final scenario, here is how it might look. Israel,
the Arab States
and the European Union, along with the United
States would enter into a multilateral,
seven--year agreement guaranteeing the peace and security of Jerusalem
along with the recognition of a Palestinian
State. This would be the “covenant with many for one
‘seven.’” That agreement would break
down after only 3 ˝ years. After that 3
˝ years the terrible things of Revelation would start to unfold all over the
world.
#2 Jerusalem will be attacked by a
combined army of all the nations.
Zecariah 14:2 “I
will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked,
and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the
people will not be taken from the city.
This “united nations” army will take over Jerusalem,
and I presume that would include much if not all the rest of that small
country. It will be a rather violent
takeover. Soldiers will go on a rampage. However, the violence will seem to be
directed against only half the city.
What might that mean?
It is possible that “half the city”
speaks of a city that has already been divided.
Under modern issues, it points to the fact that the Palestinians will
get their wish to have a foothold in Jerusalem.
#1—Jesus is coming again.
Zechariah 14: 3-4 Then the LORD will go out and fight against
those nations, as he fights in the day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount
of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from
east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north
and half moving south.”
This event,
called the “Second Coming”, puts everything on a different footing. It may be significant that Jesus comes to the
Mount of Olives.
We know that he left from that place.
The return fulfills the promise that just as you have seen him go you
will see him return. In addition, if the
conflict is one along modern lines, then his landing on the Mount of
Olives would put him in the center of Palestinian controlled
territory. In a war environment, this might be quite significant.
Now God will be calling the shots
on earth. Even then, some behavior will
have to be enforced. However, this will
be the first real peace in the Middle East. It will last for a thousand years. We know of this as the millennial reign of
Christ.
As to the
timing of all things these we cannot say.
No one knows the day or hour of the Lord’s return. However, if I understand the sequence
correctly, the actual touchdown on the Mount of Olives
occurs seven years after who are taken up in the rapture.