Monday, January 20, 2020 and Saturday, October 7, 2023 were two days in very recent memory that changed the world. On January 20, the CDC reported the first confirmed case of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the U.S. Samples verified that a man experiencing symptoms, who had just returned home to Snohomish County in Washington State, from halfway across the world, after having traveled to Wuhan, China, was positive. The 35-year-old man was hospitalized with pneumonia. His symptoms abated ten days later.
Saturday, October 7, to quote a past president, “a date that will live in infamy”, also shocked and horrified the world. The sheer audacity, brutality, and heinous acts perpetrated by Hamas are too terrifying to even consider possible today. Hamas’s savagery can only begin to be described using words like “satanic” and “demonic”. I don’t think the average person, filled with all the rage they could muster during an intense moment of passion, could think of doing such things, things like beheading even one baby let alone forty, committing beastly rapes, or wiring together and then burning whole families alive while eating the very meals the families had prepared for Shabbat.
The world spent more than two agonizing years and millions of dollars trying to find the source of the “Plandemic”. (Humans need to catalog events from their beginning for public and private sanity.) Careers would be destroyed, lives would be upended, many would be fired, and now we know, to our increasing horror, that many lives were unnecessarily lost. (The love of money and power can bring out frightening evil.)
For Christians and Jews alike, the God we remain loyal to and the faith we believe and practice are unlike any other God and religious system on the entire planet bar none. The God we serve challenges us to look at history, geology, geography, anthropology, and above all prophecy to know and keep up with what He is doing, to study them with a micro-sieve and with all the latest verifiable science academia can offer. What He and He alone can guarantee is that our faith is firmly rooted in history, geography, and anthropology and uniquely revealed in prophecy.
When we look at the anthropology behind October 7, one thing in particular is revealed: the nations now coming against Israel. Psalm 83 precisely names the savage Hamas perpetrators. Several of the ten enemy nations now have their modern names and the rest their ancient names. Current maps give precise geographical locations which have not changed. The ten kingdoms that are conspiring to “annihilate Israel from being a nation” in verse 4 are today immediately adjacent to Israel’s borders on every side.
Historically, we only have to go back to 1948. UN resolution
181, adopted November 29, 1947, provided for two states: a state still called Jordan for the "Arabs" and a much smaller area for Israel. Under David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, on Friday, May 14, 1948, Israel accepted the UN plan, and the Arabs soundly rejected it. Five nations—Lebanon, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq--attacked the nascent Israel the very next day—also a Saturday.
Lastly, as we read and listen to what God declares through His prophets, we are told that an ancient perpetual hatred would always drive the Arab world’s relationship with Israel, their brother. Ishmael and Esau would not only oppose but would, at every turn, seek the annihilation of Israel. Rachel, one of Israel’s founding matriarchs, a fitting representative of Israel, would continue to weep for her children. Psalm 83 frames the current war historically and geographically and tells us it’s happening in 2023 because the Arab enemies and their locations and alliances only now are in place.
History, geography, etc. confirm the most important truth we need to know: what this brutal war means spiritually. It's revealed in Psalm 76:10: Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: The remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain. A quote from the October issue of the militant Muslim magazine Al-Naba is a perfect example:
"Educate the generations that the battle with the Jews
is purely religious and ideological, not patriotic or
nationalistic,” and that the '"battlefield" is not limited
to Palestine and “incudes all places of the Jewish
presence.”
The enemies of God and Israel clearly recognize what too many others the world over fail to realize: the war is actually between the demonic Allah and the Holy and sovereign God of Abraham. The God of the Bible has long ago declared, in Psalm 2, that He would set His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, on His Holy Hill—Jerusalem. The Temple Mount is God’s Holy Hill, and that is why the enemy of God is so envious and is so desperately trying to stop the Lord Jesus from taking His rightful place on it, for the day that happens will change the world forever!
--A Message from Pastor John - October 28, 2028--
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