Yesterday's Headlines in Light of Biblical Prophecy - Program 1

The Nation of Israel

Introduction

Announcer: The Israeli-Arab conflict has been raging for 53 years. Suicide bombers, brutal attacks and reprisals are causing many people to wonder, “Is peace possible in the Middle East?”

Arafat: “We know but one word – Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad.”

Jimmy DeYoung: I believe that we’re at a spot in history when there is no way there is going to be peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. They want war.

Hal Lindsey: Well, there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and there’s only one thing that unifies them. They disagree over many things, but they all agree that they must liberate Jerusalem and destroy Israel.

Announcer: Today, Dr. John Ankerberg looks at world events from 1991 to the present in light of biblical prophecy.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Everywhere that I’ve gone in the last months of time, people are saying, “How do the events that are taking place in the Middle East, how do they square with what the Bible is saying?”

Lindsey: This is the first time in history that all of the prophetic scenario the prophets predicted would come together just before the return of Christ is actually in view.

Dr. David Breese: Jesus, when He delineated these things said, “And when you see these things begin”—not end but begin—“to come to pass, then lift up your heads and look up because your redemption draws nigh.”

DeYoung: Now, the Bible says all of that. I’m telling you what current events are in reality, but God’s Word prophesied over 2,500 years ago that’s the situation we’d be in the end times when all these nations, when all these people want to go against Israel and wipe them off the face of the earth.

Lindsey: I believe that the Bible is very clear that the last war of the world will start with a war over Jerusalem.

Announcer: What does the God of the Bible say will happen in the future? We invite you to join us for this very special program.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome! Today we’re going to look at: What does the Bible say will happen in the Middle East? Will there finally be a peace treaty that is acceptable to all sides? Or will there be further bloodshed that will spill over and affect the relationships and coalitions that exist? To examine what the Bible says. I want to go back to interviews with news correspondents and scholars that we have conducted over the past twelve years when major world events occurred, such as the Gulf War. As you listen, I hope you will be able to understand why we are facing the problems we are today. You’ll also learn what God says about where history is heading. I’d like to begin with a program we taped at the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991 with Hal Lindsey, Dave Breese and Dave Hunt. I asked them, “What does the Bible predict will happen to Israel in the future?” Listen:

Ankerberg: Hal, I’m going to come to you as we begin this topic, “What does the Bible have to say will happen to the nation of Israel?” You have said in your books that one of the most important signs that would signal Jesus Christ’s return to earth would be near is the nation of Israel itself. That it would sort of start the prophetic time clock moving, ticking, and when we see that, boy, our antenna better go up. Tell us what you mean.

Lindsey: Well, the whole centerpiece of the prophetic scenario rests around the nation of Israel. There are three things the Bible predicted would happen to the people of Israel just shortly before the return of Christ. First, there would be the miraculous rebirth of the state of Israel physically; second, they would recapture old Jerusalem and have sovereign control over it; third, they will rebuild the temple.

You know, it’s extraordinary that in the 1800’s there was a great resurgence of interest in prophecy, and men began to categorize it and take it literally, especially in England and Scotland. There were many in those days who began to say certain things that indicated they believed that prophecy would be fulfilled. For instance, Dr. John Cummings in 1864 said, and I quote, “As a nation they were cut off and dispersed and it is as a nation that Israel shall be gathered and restored again.” Well, in that time no one believed that was possible. In 1866, James Grant said, “The personal coming of Christ to establish his thousand-year reign on earth will not take place until the Jews are restored to their land and the enemies of Christ and the Jews have been gathered together and their armies from all parts of the world and besiege Jerusalem and are then destroyed.” In 1669, a Colonial preacher in New England, Increase Mather, said in his book, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation, that Israel would have to be reborn again in the last days. This was an impossible thing in the light of times then. Israel was scattered throughout the world; persecuted, from Russia all the way around to Morocco.

Ankerberg: Hal, I’ve got to interrupt you here because I want people to really zero in on what you’re talking about here. Those guys that you just quoted, Israel was not a nation when they said that.

Lindsey: Exactly. No hope of it.

Ankerberg: And they said on the basis only of the Bible verses that we’ve got in front of us, God’s going to somehow, someday gather them from all over the world and they’re going to become a nation. And the skeptics laughed.

Dave Hunt: John, let me just interject something here. You see, that’s our whole topic—prophecy. And the Bible is absolutely unique. It’s not only just about Israel but about so many other things. You’re not going to find any predictive prophecies like we’re talking about in the Qur’an, in the Hindu Vedas, in the Book of Mormon...I don’t care where it is, no religious writings will you find it. The Bible is absolutely unique. And, it happens to be true.

Ankerberg: Yeah. The reason, Dave, is God Himself gave us prophecy for that reason. God gave us biblical prophecy according to the Old Testament for this reason, quoting God, “So that all the people of the earth may know that the Lord is God and that there is no other.” God said in Isaiah 46, “To whom will you compare Me? To whom will you liken me? I make known the end from the beginning from ancient times what is still to come. I say, my purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please. What I have said, that will I bring about. What I have planned, that will I do.” God challenged anybody else in any other religion to come up with information like that which is found in the Bible.

Hunt: And right there is something incredible. Zechariah 12, God said, “In the last days I am going to make Jerusalem a cup of trembling for all nations.” A little later on He says, “A burdensome stone to all the peoples.” What do they have, Hal? One-sixth of one percent of the Arab land? This is what all this battle is about? And that little insignificant piece of nothing—it was swampland or desert—that [is what] the eyes of the world are focused upon this today. And everybody, I don’t care who you are or what you believe, you know that the last battle is going to break out over Israel.

Lindsey: Well, you can see how that is happening now. Since the Arabs have most of the oil, since our industrial bases need that oil, we can’t afford to offend the Arabs. And therefore whatever bothers the Arab bothers the world. They see to it. And yet, that which bothers them most is Israel. This latest crisis in the Gulf was really about Israel. Now, most of the nations fighting over there had no sense that they were there fulfilling a purpose of God. Scripture says,… in Ezekiel 36-39 it gives the sequence that once the nation of Israel is reborn, it will never be destroyed again. God will allow the people to go through great discipline, but they will never be destroyed again before the Messiah comes and sets them up as the Kingdom of God. Had the U.S. and Allied Forces not gone to fight Saddam Hussein, they could have, and I’m sure would have destroyed the state of Israel. That could not happen. So we had a Persian Gulf crisis. I believe that was the main significance of what just happened.

Ankerberg: Dr. Breese, we’ve talked about the fact that prophecy predicted that the Jews would come back and form a nation. That’s happened. The Bible prophesied that they would take over the capital Jerusalem, their holy place, again, and third, they would build the temple. The drawing plans are there. The utensils are actually being made. Right now George Bush [Sr.] is getting ready to go to the Holy Land and he wants to have the Jews give up land for peace. What is the Israeli strategy? Take us into the mind of a Jewish person. What would they be thinking as they see Bush and the world trying to force them to give up land so there will be peace?

Breese: Yes, we can certainly expect immediately the strong pressure for a peace conference. Now, the initial agenda will be peace in the Middle East. But agendas change, and soon it will be world peace but that will focus upon the critical, what shall we say, culprit of the Middle East being the state of Israel. And you can be sure that there will be pressure to give up land for peace. In my opinion, Israel will give up land to the Arabs when shrimps will learn to whistle! And the reason is that if the West Bank were gone, Israel would have a narrow waist about 15 or 16 miles wide that could be overthrown in seconds. It’s ridiculous.

I’ll never forget a conversation I had in the Knesset once upon a time as I talked with an Israeli in leadership for quite some time. We finished with the military situation, and he said to me, he said, “Dave, remember something. In the battles of the Middle East, the Arabs could lose many times and still come back. We can only lose once and it is all over.” And then he said, “To be or not to be, that is the question!” Well, if the question is to be or not to be, then you cannot afford those diplomatic niceties where you set up a conference and meet with someone three weeks from now and appoint a few committees and have a cocktail party and table the motion. They have got to decide now what to do about any threat. Consequently, it’s possible for the Israeli Chiefs of Staff to meet at midnight and that Air Force flies by 4 o’clock in the morning. They are the most instantly responsive military force in the world, and, of course, the reason is because the question with Israel is not, “What do you do to please the world?” and “How do you get along with so-called diplomats of the world?” but the question is, “How can we survive.” And when you are facing a person for whom the question is survival, all of the other niceties may be nice but they don’t mean a thing.

Ankerberg: Dave Hunt, why is it the Arabs want Israel?

Hunt: Let me just give you a couple of quotes. First of all, Yasser Arafat’s uncle who used to be Grand Mufti of Jerusalem fled to—you know, he was a friend of Hitler—fled to Germany. Over Radio Berlin during the Second World War, he said to the Arabs, he said, “Rise as one man and kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God and religion and God is with you,” okay? Arafat says, “Our struggle with Israel is such that when it is finished, Israel will cease to exist. There can be no compromise.”

Ankerberg: I agree that Israel believes it is fighting for its survival. However, a couple of years later when Israel started talking about being willing to give up land for peace, I asked Dr. Breese at that time if shrimps were learning how to whistle. You’ll hear what he had to say in weeks ahead.

But next, can anything be done about the Palestinian suicide bombers? Why is it young teenage boys, even girls, are willing to blow themselves up to hurt Israel? To help answer this question I want to show you some amazing footage that was given to the United Nations. We got a copy of it and we’ll see it right after our break.

Ankerberg: What can be done about the suicide bombers? Well, it was right after Bill Clinton had invited Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, to step onto the White House lawn and sign the Oslo Accords that we taped a program with news correspondent Jimmy DeYoung, who lives in Israel, and biblical scholars Dr. Elwood McQuaid and Dr. Renald Showers. The year was 1998, and we had just learned that the United Nations had received some disturbing video of what was being shown to children on Palestinian TV. These programs would be the equivalent of our Sesame Street for children. As you watch, think of what has happened in just the last few weeks with suicide bombers. I wonder if in 1998 we had some actual footage of some of the young Palestinian girls who became suicide bombers. This all came up in our discussion about terrorism and the new peace agreement that had just been signed. Listen:

Ankerberg: There are three secular columnists that wrote in different national publications right after the peace agreements were signed and I was amazed to see what some of them said. Let me give you just one quote. Jeff Jacoby, a Globe columnist, wrote: “For the fifth time in five years a peace agreement has been signed,” and he said, “that brings us closer to war.” Do you agree or disagree? Are we closer to war or are we closer to peace in the Middle East?

DeYoung: Current events back up everything he said. I hold here the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan and the other peace agreements that are not really working. They’re not being normalized as they’re supposed to be. And in fact, after the Palestinian Oslo Accord was signed, in the last five years that it has been in force there have been more Jewish people killed by terrorists than there were in the 45 years previous to the signing of that particular agreement.

So the peace agreements are not working. They are not guaranteeing peace in any way, shape, or form. Terrorism is running rampant in the Middle East and, by the way, America was touched with terrorism in their embassies there in Africa, so we had a taste of it. But that is only going to increase. When you look at the terrorists associated with Israel. Hezbollah, just in the southern portion of Lebanon, which are attacking the northern part of Israel. In the infrastructure of Israel itself you have Islamic Jihad and you have Hamas. And their stated goals—it’s not a question of do we really have to find out what their philosophy is—their stated goal is, “We want to rid the world of the Jewish people and we’ll do that if we have to in bits and pieces.” Yasser Arafat who makes one statement to us and another statement to his people is basically calling for Islamic Jihad, he is calling for war. You know, the Palestinian Covenant, over 30 clauses in that covenant which calls for the demise of the Jewish people, the destruction of the state of Israel.

They say they’ve changed it. They play back and forth word games. The President of the United States has Arafat several years ago into the White House to announce they’ve changed the covenant. And still, later on, at the Wye plantation, for example, that was one of the sticking points: you’ve got to change the covenant. Well, if you change the covenant, it doesn’t matter because the Palestinian educational system is infiltrated with every bit of the philosophy in the covenant and they’re teaching the children–I’m talking about children starting at six years of age through high school. They’re teaching them the philosophy that was contained within the Palestinian Covenant. “These people don’t belong here. We belong here.”

Ankerberg: I’d like to show you some very shocking video in this program that we secured from Palestinian television. Mortimer B. Zuckerman called my attention to this. He’s the editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report. In his report which was October 26, 1998, he wrote an editorial that, of all things, said that “Arafat harbors terrorists and seeks Israel’s destruction. Why trust him?”

He said, “When the world is not paying attention, Arafat constantly talks of Jihad.”

What’s Jihad? That’s “holy war.”

“His exhortations to the struggle against Israel can only inspire hatred among his people. How else are Palestinians and Israelis,” Zuckerman says, “to interpret the official Palestinian Authority television programs that are akin to Sesame Street which feature a summer camp that trains children in the use of automatic weapons as they chant the glories of dying as suicidal warriors.”

That got my attention. Is Palestinian television showing its children how to become suicide bombers? We would like to show you some excerpts and just kind of give you the flavor of what’s going on in the Middle East while the peace talks have actually been underway. I’d like you to listen:

Narrator: They call it the Children’s Club, a program broadcast in prime time by Palestinian Authority TV. The images are familiar, the messages are not. What does this young girl want to be when she grows up?

Young girl: “O my sister sing constantly/ About my life as a suicide warrior/ And we shall march as warriors of Jihad.”

Narrator: Five years after the Palestinians committed themselves to peace with Israel, this is what’s on TV.

Child 1: “On your life I foresee my death/ But I march quickly towards my death/ Ask from us blood/ We will drench you.”

Child 2: “I will come at the time of drought/ With my best efforts I will bring/ A machine gun, violence, anger, anger, anger, anger.”

Narrator: With the media tightly controlled, television programming reflects policies set within the upper echelons of the Palestinian Authority.

Crowd: “With our Souls and blood we will redeem you, Palestine.”

Narrator: In this program, a suicide bomber becomes a role model.

Child: “When I wander into entrance of Jerusalem/ I’ll turn into a suicide warrior/ In battle dress, in battle dress, in battle dress.”

Narrator: When school is out, summer camps are in, and the PLO covenant comes alive in the daily schedule. These excerpts were also screened on official Palestinian TV.

Child: “On your life, I foresee my death and I rush towards it/ The youth will be victorious/ We are ready with our guns./ My children’s children, my land/ In the suicide squad/ Fear not the armed car or tank/ As long as the mine explodes/ Shouting ‘Allah is great.’

Arafat: “We know but one word – Jihad, Jihad, Jihad, Jihad.”

DeYoung: Yasser Arafat said several years ago, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take this thing in stages. Whatever they will give us at the negotiating table, we’ll take that and we’ll use that then to launch our attack on the Jewish people.” I say to you that we are on the verge of war. Now, the Bible says all of that. I’m telling you what current events are in reality, but God’s Word prophesied over 2,500 years ago that’s the situation we’d be in the end times when all these nations, when all these people want to go against Israel and wipe them off the face of the earth. Take that little piece of property. When you think about less than one-tenth of one percent of the population of the world, less than five million Jewish people, are surrounded in their one little nation by 23 nations of over 350 million people. Why is it that they can’t coexist in a peaceful atmosphere? It’s because God’s Word says their hearts and their minds are going to be deceitful and gartered with joyful hearts they’re going to go forth to rid the world of the Jewish people. That’s where we are right now.

Ankerberg: Next week, what actions does the Bible predict certain Arab countries will take in the future? I hope you’ll join me then.