THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
 |
| Sunrise from my balcony this week |
Burning like an oven,
And all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly will be stubble.
And the day which is coming shall burn them up,”
Says the Lord of hosts,
“That will leave them neither root nor branch.
2 But to you who fear My name
The Sun of Righteousness shall arise
With healing in His wings;
And you shall go out
And grow fat like stall-fed calves.
3 You shall trample the wicked,
For they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet
On the day that I do this,”
Says the Lord of hosts
Malachi 4: 1-3
The balcony of my apartment faces southeast directly towards Basra, once the capital of Edom, and from whence will come Yeshua on the Day He judges the enemies of Israel (Isaiah 63:1). I have always felt it significant that the Lord has placed me here, watching and praying for the coming of the Lord. I do not know when that will be, but the signs are that it could be soon, very soon.
The tide of darkness around us is gathering strength. The enemies of Israel are preparing a monstrous arsenal of weapons for the coming war and boasting of Israel's imminent destruction. To the east the forces of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) this week reached a new level of depravity and barbarism when they released on the social media footage of the burning to death of the captured Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh
 |
| Moaz al-Kassasbeh in the cage in which he was burned to death |
To the south, the "State of Sinai", a jihadist group linked to the Islamic State and previously named Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis, targeted 10 Egyptian military installations in three different cities, El Arish, Rafah and Sheikh Zuweid, at the same time, leaving more than 35 military personnel dead and 70 others wounded.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/02/04/violence-escalates-in-sinai-as-isis-linked-group-attacks-kill-dozens/
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/egypt-sinai-wilaya-attacks-army.html##ixzz3QxBdXqfT
Meanwhile also in the south, Hamas is preparing for the next round of aggression against Israel. Last week some 10,000 youngsters, aged 15 -21, graduated from a week-long military camp run by the al Kassam Brigade, the Gaza based military wing of Hamas. These youths underwent intensive military training, including the use of sniper rifles, simulated tunnel attacks, physical combat training and naval commando operations. The minds of the next generation have already been poisoned with hatred and violence.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4619982,00.html
In the north, Iran backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon are busy amassing rockets and missiles, including long-range missiles capable of hitting any target in Israel. Last week two Israeli soldiers, Captain Yohai Kalangel and Sergeant Dor Nini, were killed and 7 injured when Hezbollah fired a rocket at their unarmoured vehicle on Mt Dov in the Golan. This attack was in revenge for an earlier attack, attributed to Israel, on a convoy bringing missiles from Iran to Hezbollah killing 12, including Jihad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's commander of the Syrian Golan sector and the son of master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, Imad Mughniyeh Mohammed Issa, the head of Hezbollah's operation in Syria and Iraq, along with five other Hezbollah fighters and six Iranian military personnel - including Iranian General Mohammed Ali Allah Dadi of Iran's Revolutionary Guard (see my previous blog page).
The commander of Iran's Basij force, Brig.-Gen. Mohammed Reza Naqdi, has been quoted as saying that Israel should await a crushing response from Iran and that "they [the Zionists] should remain fully alerted until complete annihilation of the Zionist regime.”
This week an Iranian website, Shia Online, this week published an article calling for the assassination of the sons of Benyamin Netanyahu, Yair and Avner, and also the sons of former Prime Ministers, Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon.
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Iranian-website-threatens-top-Israeli-officials-posts-family-pic-of-PM-389204
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931549/Iran-encourages-terror-groups-assassinate-children-Benjamin-Netanyahu-following-Israeli-airstrike-killed-key-Hezbollah-leaders.html
On the stage of the world's press Israel is more and more being scapegoated as the cause of the turmoil in the Middle East. Israel is being blamed for everything from the 9/11 attacks in the USA, the recent attacks in Paris and even the Ebola outbreak in Africa! Iran's Press TV reported the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in a meeting this Monday with Jordan’s new ambassador to Tehran, Abdullah Sulaiman Abdullah Abu Romman, saying that the Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian territories is the root cause of problems in the Middle East.http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Iranian-website-threatens-top-Israeli-officials-posts-family-pic-of-PM-389204. This Lie is gaining strength everywhere and hardly a day passes where it is not expressed in the Press somewhere. Sadly even in the Church worldwide many are buying into this Lie.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a local and relatively minor component of the wider unrest in the Middle East. Historically the conflict with Israel is not based so much on the geo-political Palestinian issue but on a much deeper clash between Islam and the Judeo/Christian world view.
Although some Muslim clerics, notably Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hussaini, claim that the Koran legitimizes Israel's rights to the Holy Land, the mainstream Islamic view is that it rightly belongs to the Muslim Waqf, an inalienable religious endowment, and therefore no non-Muslim can be permitted to buy or otherwise usurp that land from the hegemony of Islam. That is the crux of the issue. According to Islam, the purchase of land by Jews from Muslims is anathema. The very existence of the Jewish State is anathema. The Muslim world as a whole does not really care about the plight, tragic as it is, of the Palestinian people themselves. One could ask why the Palestinian refugees of 1948, and their descendants, are still living in refugee camps in spite of the billions of dollars of aid that has been donated to better their lives. It suits the cause of Jihad to use the Palestinians cynically as a publicity tool and a justification for attacking Israel.
Apart from that, much of the current turmoil is being generated within the different factions of Islam itself, especially between the so-called moderate mainstream and the radical, fundamentalist jihadis. In addition there remains the age-old violent enmity between the Sunni and the Shiite streams of Islam. One could also argue that the so-called Arab Spring, the overthrow by popular uprisings of the regimes set up after WWII , such as that which occurred in Egypt, is the result of misrule and corruption by the leaders of those countries and the consequent poverty of a large discontented underclass - nothing to do with Israel at all.
The Middle East is an incredibly complex region with a long history of violence and warfare going back far into history, and beyond. To try and blame Israel for the current violence is simplistic and not based on any historical or current reality, much less a Biblical perspective. It is rather a resurgence of the type of anti-Semitism that lead to World War II and the Holocaust. Many of the Nazi leaders fled to the Middle East after the fall of the Third Reich and their influence can be seen in much of the rhetoric coming out of the Muslim world. Even the cartoons are adapted from typical Nazi propaganda.
We, who are followers of Yeshua, need to have His perspective on events. To get that we need to study the Bible and ask Him to interpret it to us through the Holy Spirit. We need to be lovers of the Truth and actively pursue Truth. We need to test everything we are taught by man (including every word I write in my blogs), or read or hear, to see if it is truly of the Truth and measure it up against Scripture, for if we do not love the Truth, we may be caught up in the Lie. Yeshua himself spoke of a falling away in the end times, because 'they believed the lie':
Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.
Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things?
And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.2 Thessalonians 2: 1- 12
