What is Happening in the Middle East and Why it Matters
What is Happening in the Middle East and Why it Matters
Major instability has rocked the Middle East since May 22, 2017. It is easy to see the symptoms of the instability, but for many it is harder to see WHY the instability is suddenly present. If you miss the" why" you will mostly miss the prophetic implications. This is an important principle in general: the more the end time prophetic fulfillments unfold, the HARDER they will be to see. This is because delusion is being allowed into the world at an unprecedented level, as was promised:
2 Thessalonians 2:10and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. 11And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie,
This is why Jesus comes at "midnight" in the darkest part, and seeing him requires the intentional act of "trimming a lamp.". The confusion that ensues among believers is unprecedented and will result in many going to the false prophets for any revelation. This is very unwise. Watching...getting an opinion on the events happening around us and learning the humity to have our opinion honed and re-shaped over time because the Holy Spirit is leading us deeper in Revelation is what it means to "watch."
Matthew 25:6 “And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ 7“Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. 8“And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9“But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ 10“And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut. 11“Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ 12“But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ 13“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.
Many wrongly imagine we are rapidly coming to the point where it is clear to see Jesus is coming. That isn't Biblical. It's getting harder to see Jesus coming outside of one reality, called "lamp trimming." Waiting for the "aha" moment will result in many cast into outer darkness. The "a-ha" moment was supposed to be salvation, where we gave the entire leadership of our lives to Jesus and began dying to ourselves completely for love, not because we suddenly could see He was about to return.
One of the main arenas we are called to watch as end time citizens of the Kingdom is the Middle East. The nations listed in the Bible are all middle eastern nations. Many carry significant prophetic realities that help us "trim our lamps" as we see them unfold.
Politics and history seem to be two topics many in the church struggle with. They seem complicated on the surface, and the nuances are fascinatingly complex, BUT, it is worth getting the gist of main points so we can notice prophetic fulfillment unfolding. I'm not making a political statement, but rather an observation related to prophecy. I don't care for the right or the left as a solution, and value the desires of both the right and the left in many ways.
One of the main gists that is helpful to see is that the Bible describes an end time east vs. west general struggle over the middle East that finds it expression in two coalitions of nations: Antichrist and Gog.
One coalition is the "antichrist" coalition, which represents the more stable power center of the last lone superpower, end time Babylon. The antichrist, who is a leader of the end time Babylon partners with 10 established horns (strong established countries) in the middle East, 10 somewhat stable partners, he removes three "horns" from the region to facilitate stability and order, and what accidentally results is a massive increase of instability. The plans of Satan always backfire. The antichrist coalition represents the "rulers" of the end time world system.
The second coalition of countries are described in the Bible as the "gog coalition" in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and are eluded to in Daniel 11:40-45 as countries from the "north and the east". The Gog coalition represents the instability of the underdog. Those viable countries with a different political outlook that are looking to cause instability in order to upset the global order in the hope that what shakes out will be better for them. God tells us the heart and the actual location of the Gog coalition...literally the countries that Gog and his partners represent.
Ezekiel 38:11“You will say, ‘I will go up against a land of unwalled villages; I will go to a peaceful people, who dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates’—12“to take plunder and to take booty, to stretch out your hand against the waste places that are again inhabited, and against a people gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell in the midst of the land.
This is a different heart and goal than the antichrist, who is looking to change the times and the law. The antichrist is literally looking to increase stability in the earth all the way to world peace:
Daniel 7:25He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand For a time and times and half a time. 26‘But the court shall be seated, And they shall take away his dominion, To consume and destroy it forever.
Here again in this Daniel passage describing the antichrist, we see the order and stability, as opposed to the disorder, looting, and opportunistic gain that characterizes Gog.
The antichrist empire represents the existing power structures in the earth, the Western nations, led by the last global superpower, the "Lady of Kingdoms" who is also the great merchant of the earth. She literally rides on the antichrist. She isn't the underdog, she's the overlord. This stabile empire partners with the most stable partners in the middle East, which would be Sunni Islam and the established leaders over the majority Sunni countries.
There is an important eschatological distinction we must make with regard to Islam in order to understand the middle East, that of Sunni and Shia eschatology. Sunni Islam holds that the stability of Islamic government, in the form of a caliphate, will cover the earth and in the moment of time stability begins to reign, the Mahdi, or tweltfth Imam, will return and lead the world in ovediencr to Allah. Sunni Islam believes stability invites the end times to unfold.
Shia Islam, underdog Isalm, believes in instability being the precursor to the return of the twelfth Imam. Shia Islam, a much smaller brand of Islam... the underdog... Believes that fomenting political chaos will invite the Mahdi to come and estabilsh the caliphate himself. Iran is home base for Shia Islam, which has proxy governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbijan. Shia Isalm is only about 20% of the total Islamic population.
According to the Bible, the Eastern power, namely Rosh, or Russia, also an underdog in the battle for world dominance, aligns with predominately Shia nations, but also a few Sunni nation's in the time of the end. This is incredibly unlikely, but is happening right now. We aren't supposed to miss this moment. When Sunni Islam partners with Shia Islam the world is supposed to take notice. Old alliances that have kept the middle East stable for over 100 years are shaking.
The Sunni nations that flip over to an alignment with Shias at the time of the end are specifically Egypt, Libya, and Sudan (identified as Ethiopia, and Turkey in this passage:
Ezekiel 38:3“and say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “Behold, I am against you, O Gog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. 4“I will turn you around, put hooks into your jaws, and lead you out, with all your army, horses, and horsemen, all splendidly clothed, a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords. 5“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya are with them, all of them with shield and helmet; 6“Gomer and all its troops; the house of Togarmah from the far north and all its troops—many people are with you.
This is very significant, because what we are witnessing in the events of our day is a seismic shift in Middle Eastern political alliances that all began in earnest with the election of President Trump. The false prophets of the charismatic church labeled Trump a "Cyrus", or "wrecking ball", they couldn't have been more factually right or more glib, while still missing entirely the spiritual reality...the negative connotations of what this means for the church. Cyrus is setting the world up to "need" the antichrist enough to make him a global leader, rather than a regional one.
Specifcally, the shift that took place in early 2017 was the shift of Egypt's alliances from the West to the east. Taking advantage of the Obama administration strong-arming of Egypt from 2013 until 2016, Vladimir Putin began courting and winning the favor of Egypt. This culminated with Russian troops entering Egypt in late 2016 and constructing a base in eastern Egypt to fight ISIS, an extreme representation of Sunni Islam.
Egypt, a Sunni majority nation, had gotten it's fill of Sunni extremeist ideology in 2011 and 2012, after the Obama administration helped overthrow Hosni Mubarak and installed Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader. The Muslim Brotherhood is the great grandfather of Sunni Islam political ends, which are a caliphate. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and even ISIS are all extremes brands of the Muslim Brotherhood, who the Obama Administration aligned closely with in order to promote democratic stability in the region, beginning with the first term of President Obama, where his first act as president was to go on a tour of Sunni Islam nations, beginning in Cairo, Egypt in the winter of 2009.
Vladimir Putin has been fomenting the resistance of Sunni Islam from being introduced in the wake of the Arab Spring, that great democratic revolution that washed throughbthe middle East and resulted in the toppling of three distinct secular rulers: Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Mummar Ghaddafi of Libya, and Bashar Al Assad of Syria. Putin saw the opportunity and began filling the vacuum of leadership in these areas even as the US was trying to use the Arab Spring to introduce stability through political Islam, or the Muslim Brotherhood.
The height of the US plan to coalesce against an extreme form of Islam, or ISIS, took shape on September 11 of 2014, when it was announced that 10 countries...10 stable Sunni-majority countries... had formed a coalition to defeat ISIS, even though some of those countries directly funded and equipped ISIS. The coalition was dubbed the 10-Nation Arab coalition. I believe this was clearly the 10 horns of Daniel 7 and Revelation 17. As the war with ISIS dragged on, the unity of the Arab coalition gree tremendously. The old stability of the Western powers was being solidified even as the influence of political Islam was growing. The Obama plan to decolonize the middle East by letting the middle East embrace Islamic democracy, as opposed to Western democracy, was working.
President Trump completely upset this apple cart. Not for the better...but rather prophetically for the much worse.
In May of 2017, President Trump began breaking every global promise President Obama had spent his presidency making: a global covenant for climate change, a global covenant with Iran, and specifically, a global alliance for order in the middle East. Even as Trump was threatening NATO and it's stability, at the very same time, he upset the political order in the Middle East by choosing Saudi Arabia openly as his partner to combat terrorism in the Middle East. The Saudi kingdom, although it governs a Sunni majority country, is not Sunni...in fact, it is diametrically opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood, which it sees as a threat to it's rule over Saudi Arabia. Donald Trump's picking of Saudi Arabia introduced a massive crack in Arab solidarity.
Suddenly, every major player in the Middle East, all 10 horns, started groping for a new place in this new middle eastern order. The wrecking ball of Donald Trump's shattered the fragile order negotiated by President Obama and pushed the middle East squarely into the reality described in the Bible as the moment of collapse. Everything feels apart on May 25, 2017, at the very same time President Obama was preaching an entirely new world order at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany at the celebration fobthe Protestant Reformation. At the same place Reagan decried "tear down this wall" to the world, President Obama declared no more walls globally, and President Trump demolished one of the main walls erected in the Middle East.
Everything is unwalled. That wasn't missed by Putin:
Ezeki 38:11“You will say, ‘I will go up against a land of unwalled villages; I will go to a peaceful people, who dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates’—
The end time political scenario is an east vs. west, Shia vs. Sunni, Gog vs. Antichrist, 10-offended-horns suddenly turning and burning the girl they have been carrying, reality, and we are literally witnessing the instability promised to usher it in. On the sidelines is a hero waiting for the right moment to swoop in and be the earthly Messiah the world is desperate for, and a political religious leader in Rome ready to anointing him as God's chosen son.
Revelation 17:11“The beast that was, and is not, is himself also the eighth, and is of the seven, and is going to perdition.
12“The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast.
13“These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast.
14“These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and King of kings; and those who are with Him are called, chosen, and faithful.”
15Then he said to me, “The waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues.
16“And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh and burn her with fire.
17“For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled.
18“And the woman whom you saw is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.”
Watch. Pray.
Major instability has rocked the Middle East since May 22, 2017. It is easy to see the symptoms of the instability, but for many it is harder to see WHY the instability is suddenly present. If you miss the" why" you will mostly miss the prophetic implications. This is an important principle in general: the more the end time prophetic fulfillments unfold, the HARDER they will be to see. This is because delusion is being allowed into the world at an unprecedented level, as was promised:
2 Thessalonians 2:10and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. 11And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie,
This is why Jesus comes at "midnight" in the darkest part, and seeing him requires the intentional act of "trimming a lamp.". The confusion that ensues among believers is unprecedented and will result in many going to the false prophets for any revelation. This is very unwise. Watching...getting an opinion on the events happening around us and learning the humity to have our opinion honed and re-shaped over time because the Holy Spirit is leading us deeper in Revelation is what it means to "watch."
Matthew 25:6 “And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ 7“Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. 8“And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9“But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ 10“And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut. 11“Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ 12“But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ 13“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.
Many wrongly imagine we are rapidly coming to the point where it is clear to see Jesus is coming. That isn't Biblical. It's getting harder to see Jesus coming outside of one reality, called "lamp trimming." Waiting for the "aha" moment will result in many cast into outer darkness. The "a-ha" moment was supposed to be salvation, where we gave the entire leadership of our lives to Jesus and began dying to ourselves completely for love, not because we suddenly could see He was about to return.
One of the main arenas we are called to watch as end time citizens of the Kingdom is the Middle East. The nations listed in the Bible are all middle eastern nations. Many carry significant prophetic realities that help us "trim our lamps" as we see them unfold.
Politics and history seem to be two topics many in the church struggle with. They seem complicated on the surface, and the nuances are fascinatingly complex, BUT, it is worth getting the gist of main points so we can notice prophetic fulfillment unfolding. I'm not making a political statement, but rather an observation related to prophecy. I don't care for the right or the left as a solution, and value the desires of both the right and the left in many ways.
One of the main gists that is helpful to see is that the Bible describes an end time east vs. west general struggle over the middle East that finds it expression in two coalitions of nations: Antichrist and Gog.
One coalition is the "antichrist" coalition, which represents the more stable power center of the last lone superpower, end time Babylon. The antichrist, who is a leader of the end time Babylon partners with 10 established horns (strong established countries) in the middle East, 10 somewhat stable partners, he removes three "horns" from the region to facilitate stability and order, and what accidentally results is a massive increase of instability. The plans of Satan always backfire. The antichrist coalition represents the "rulers" of the end time world system.
The second coalition of countries are described in the Bible as the "gog coalition" in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and are eluded to in Daniel 11:40-45 as countries from the "north and the east". The Gog coalition represents the instability of the underdog. Those viable countries with a different political outlook that are looking to cause instability in order to upset the global order in the hope that what shakes out will be better for them. God tells us the heart and the actual location of the Gog coalition...literally the countries that Gog and his partners represent.
Ezekiel 38:11“You will say, ‘I will go up against a land of unwalled villages; I will go to a peaceful people, who dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates’—12“to take plunder and to take booty, to stretch out your hand against the waste places that are again inhabited, and against a people gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell in the midst of the land.
This is a different heart and goal than the antichrist, who is looking to change the times and the law. The antichrist is literally looking to increase stability in the earth all the way to world peace:
Daniel 7:25He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand For a time and times and half a time. 26‘But the court shall be seated, And they shall take away his dominion, To consume and destroy it forever.
Here again in this Daniel passage describing the antichrist, we see the order and stability, as opposed to the disorder, looting, and opportunistic gain that characterizes Gog.
The antichrist empire represents the existing power structures in the earth, the Western nations, led by the last global superpower, the "Lady of Kingdoms" who is also the great merchant of the earth. She literally rides on the antichrist. She isn't the underdog, she's the overlord. This stabile empire partners with the most stable partners in the middle East, which would be Sunni Islam and the established leaders over the majority Sunni countries.
There is an important eschatological distinction we must make with regard to Islam in order to understand the middle East, that of Sunni and Shia eschatology. Sunni Islam holds that the stability of Islamic government, in the form of a caliphate, will cover the earth and in the moment of time stability begins to reign, the Mahdi, or tweltfth Imam, will return and lead the world in ovediencr to Allah. Sunni Islam believes stability invites the end times to unfold.
Shia Islam, underdog Isalm, believes in instability being the precursor to the return of the twelfth Imam. Shia Islam, a much smaller brand of Islam... the underdog... Believes that fomenting political chaos will invite the Mahdi to come and estabilsh the caliphate himself. Iran is home base for Shia Islam, which has proxy governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbijan. Shia Isalm is only about 20% of the total Islamic population.
According to the Bible, the Eastern power, namely Rosh, or Russia, also an underdog in the battle for world dominance, aligns with predominately Shia nations, but also a few Sunni nation's in the time of the end. This is incredibly unlikely, but is happening right now. We aren't supposed to miss this moment. When Sunni Islam partners with Shia Islam the world is supposed to take notice. Old alliances that have kept the middle East stable for over 100 years are shaking.
The Sunni nations that flip over to an alignment with Shias at the time of the end are specifically Egypt, Libya, and Sudan (identified as Ethiopia, and Turkey in this passage:
Ezekiel 38:3“and say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “Behold, I am against you, O Gog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. 4“I will turn you around, put hooks into your jaws, and lead you out, with all your army, horses, and horsemen, all splendidly clothed, a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords. 5“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya are with them, all of them with shield and helmet; 6“Gomer and all its troops; the house of Togarmah from the far north and all its troops—many people are with you.
This is very significant, because what we are witnessing in the events of our day is a seismic shift in Middle Eastern political alliances that all began in earnest with the election of President Trump. The false prophets of the charismatic church labeled Trump a "Cyrus", or "wrecking ball", they couldn't have been more factually right or more glib, while still missing entirely the spiritual reality...the negative connotations of what this means for the church. Cyrus is setting the world up to "need" the antichrist enough to make him a global leader, rather than a regional one.
Specifcally, the shift that took place in early 2017 was the shift of Egypt's alliances from the West to the east. Taking advantage of the Obama administration strong-arming of Egypt from 2013 until 2016, Vladimir Putin began courting and winning the favor of Egypt. This culminated with Russian troops entering Egypt in late 2016 and constructing a base in eastern Egypt to fight ISIS, an extreme representation of Sunni Islam.
Egypt, a Sunni majority nation, had gotten it's fill of Sunni extremeist ideology in 2011 and 2012, after the Obama administration helped overthrow Hosni Mubarak and installed Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader. The Muslim Brotherhood is the great grandfather of Sunni Islam political ends, which are a caliphate. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and even ISIS are all extremes brands of the Muslim Brotherhood, who the Obama Administration aligned closely with in order to promote democratic stability in the region, beginning with the first term of President Obama, where his first act as president was to go on a tour of Sunni Islam nations, beginning in Cairo, Egypt in the winter of 2009.
Vladimir Putin has been fomenting the resistance of Sunni Islam from being introduced in the wake of the Arab Spring, that great democratic revolution that washed throughbthe middle East and resulted in the toppling of three distinct secular rulers: Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Mummar Ghaddafi of Libya, and Bashar Al Assad of Syria. Putin saw the opportunity and began filling the vacuum of leadership in these areas even as the US was trying to use the Arab Spring to introduce stability through political Islam, or the Muslim Brotherhood.
The height of the US plan to coalesce against an extreme form of Islam, or ISIS, took shape on September 11 of 2014, when it was announced that 10 countries...10 stable Sunni-majority countries... had formed a coalition to defeat ISIS, even though some of those countries directly funded and equipped ISIS. The coalition was dubbed the 10-Nation Arab coalition. I believe this was clearly the 10 horns of Daniel 7 and Revelation 17. As the war with ISIS dragged on, the unity of the Arab coalition gree tremendously. The old stability of the Western powers was being solidified even as the influence of political Islam was growing. The Obama plan to decolonize the middle East by letting the middle East embrace Islamic democracy, as opposed to Western democracy, was working.
President Trump completely upset this apple cart. Not for the better...but rather prophetically for the much worse.
In May of 2017, President Trump began breaking every global promise President Obama had spent his presidency making: a global covenant for climate change, a global covenant with Iran, and specifically, a global alliance for order in the middle East. Even as Trump was threatening NATO and it's stability, at the very same time, he upset the political order in the Middle East by choosing Saudi Arabia openly as his partner to combat terrorism in the Middle East. The Saudi kingdom, although it governs a Sunni majority country, is not Sunni...in fact, it is diametrically opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood, which it sees as a threat to it's rule over Saudi Arabia. Donald Trump's picking of Saudi Arabia introduced a massive crack in Arab solidarity.
Suddenly, every major player in the Middle East, all 10 horns, started groping for a new place in this new middle eastern order. The wrecking ball of Donald Trump's shattered the fragile order negotiated by President Obama and pushed the middle East squarely into the reality described in the Bible as the moment of collapse. Everything feels apart on May 25, 2017, at the very same time President Obama was preaching an entirely new world order at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany at the celebration fobthe Protestant Reformation. At the same place Reagan decried "tear down this wall" to the world, President Obama declared no more walls globally, and President Trump demolished one of the main walls erected in the Middle East.
Everything is unwalled. That wasn't missed by Putin:
Ezeki 38:11“You will say, ‘I will go up against a land of unwalled villages; I will go to a peaceful people, who dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates’—
The end time political scenario is an east vs. west, Shia vs. Sunni, Gog vs. Antichrist, 10-offended-horns suddenly turning and burning the girl they have been carrying, reality, and we are literally witnessing the instability promised to usher it in. On the sidelines is a hero waiting for the right moment to swoop in and be the earthly Messiah the world is desperate for, and a political religious leader in Rome ready to anointing him as God's chosen son.
Revelation 17:11“The beast that was, and is not, is himself also the eighth, and is of the seven, and is going to perdition.
12“The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast.
13“These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast.
14“These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and King of kings; and those who are with Him are called, chosen, and faithful.”
15Then he said to me, “The waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues.
16“And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh and burn her with fire.
17“For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled.
18“And the woman whom you saw is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth.”
Watch. Pray.
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