“But ye brethren are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief” (1 Thess. 5:4 and note vs. 5-8). We are surely the generation upon whom “the end of the world has come.” While we are not in darkness, we need to continually remind ourselves of the sure word of prophecy so we are not caught unawares.
We are at the end of the countdown to Armageddon that shows our Lord is at the door; indeed, we are at that time when there will be a joining together of the political powers with the psuedo Christian religions against Christ and the saints. “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called and chosen and faithful…He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son” (Rev. 17:14; 21:7).
God uses men and nations
In looking at prophecy, we note how God uses methods that sometimes seem unusual to us. Yet there is a consistent pattern in them of type and anti type, of shadow and reality. That can be seen in Daniel 2 when four secular empires point forward to the kingdom that will be set up by the God of heaven.
He uses the pagan king Cyrus to deliver Israel from bondage and calls him “my shepherd.” Why apply this Messianic title to this pagan? He must be a type of Christ (see Isa. 44:28 and 45:1-2) as he assisted Israel in returning to their land (Ezra 1-5).
And so it goes through all history: God dealing with the nations until He will bring about His kingdom upon the earth. When He does, Israel will be at the center of events as God’s purpose is brought to pass.
Considering the Middle East
We do well to turn our eyes to the Middle East. Russia and Israel will be the two main factors in the Middle East in the last days.
It is interesting to note Russia’s great interest in that area over the years. “In the Spring of 1853, the London correspondent for the New York Tribune tried to wake up the western world to an imminent danger: Czarist Russia, he warned, meant to seize the Middle East. It was then controlled by the decaying Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. The correspondent was Karl Marx, the father of Communism. Marx had published his Communist Manifesto five years before. He little dreamed that the country that would embrace communism first would be Russia. Nor could he have dreamed that when Communists seized Russia, they would continue to expand the Russian empire just as the Czars did.
“As a correspondent, Karl Marx thundered: ‘Let Russia get possession of (the Mid-East) and her strength is increased nearly half. She becomes superior to all the rest of Europe put together.
Such an event would be an unspeakable calamity to…democratic ideas and man’s native thirst for freedom.’ As Karl Marx warmed up to his job, he sounded more and more like the editorial page in your daily newspaper” (Countdown in the Holy Land, Lester Velie, Funk & Wagnalls, 1969).
Politics and religion
Velie goes on to make an interesting observation: “The Czars never did get possession of the Middle East, as Karl Marx had warned. But monuments to their efforts abound in the area in the form of Russian orthodox churches. These testify to the Czarist effort to seek a foothold in the Holy Land by trying to subordinate Middle Eastern Orthodox Church hierarchies to Moscow.
“The communists picked up where the Czars left off. When Joseph Stalin divided up the world with Adolf Hitler in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the Soviet Union — as a secret clause revealed later– staked out the mid-East as its preserve. Stalin tried again in 1945 with occupation troops which carved out a Soviet Socialist Republic from the northern half of today’s Iran. The United Nations, in one of its rare achievements of this sort, forced the Communists out.”
Do not be deceived
We could easily be deceived by Russia’s current policies. They assisted the West in the war on Iraq and they worked to bring about the current round of peace conferences. We are being told that the settlement of the age-old problem between Jew and Arab is very near. But let us not be caught unawares. “For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them” (1 Thess. 5:2-3).
As we saw with Cyrus, worldly rulers are manipulated by God to achieve His purpose. He raised a Pharaoh to further His plan and He used Russia to help give birth to the state of Israel.
Velie writes in his book, “One thing of which the Russian Bear was capable was to help give birth to the State of Israel. Russian and Arab school boys read in their histories that ‘Western Imperialists’ are responsible for Israel. But non-doctored history tells another story. Ironically, the United States and Great Britain did their best to prevent birth. The Soviet Union fought for it. Had it not been for the Soviet Union, there might not have been an Israel today…the Soviet Union and satellites intervened in three crucial stages of Israel’s birth and survival…
“First, the Soviet bloc helped Jewish underground fighters engineer the 1946 Exodus to Palestine which dealt the death blow to British rule there. Next, the Soviet Union battled for and won the United Nations partition plan that divided Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states. Then, when six invading Arab nations threatened to strangle the infant state at birth, the Soviet Union helped rush the weapons that saved Israel’s life. The Communists were as indignant over the ‘Arab Aggression’ as they were to be later over ‘Israeli aggression.”
Russia was pro-Israel
“The Soviet Union’s all-out pro-Jewish and anti-Arab role marks one of the most amazing and cynical flip-flops in Soviet foreign relations and in the Communist line. Pieced together from the archives of the United Nations and from the testimony of Israeli leaders who lived through it and from American and British intelligence officers who observed it, the story makes believe-itor-not reading.
“As far as the Soviet Union is concerned,’ Russia’s Foreign Minister, Andre Gromyko, once said, ‘there is only one kind of logic in foreign affairs: the logic of what is best for the Soviet Union.’
“What ‘was best for the Soviet Union’ after World War II was to get Great Britain, then the dominant power in the Middle East, out of the area. ‘That’s what we’re here to do,’ a Soviet delegate to the UN told a Jewish spokesman from Palestine. Left unsaid was the Soviet assumption that a new Jewish state, smarting from British repression, could be turned into a Russian proxy in the Cold War. It could serve as an anti-Western base for Soviet penetration of the Middle East — and beyond. The Russians never did understand the Jews.”
And, we add, they do not understand that, in God’s purpose, they will face a different and more formidable foe when they “come up to the land of unwalled villages” (Ezk. 38:11). At this coming confrontation, the Middle East problem will not be left to any nation but will be brought to its intended solution by God.
Current developments
The Soviet Union is no more. So who is the chief prince that God is against (Ezk. 38:2-3; 39:1)? “Chief” is from rosh, of which Strong says, “Chief, Rosh; from an unused root, whether literal or figurative, in many applications, of place, time, rank; and, among other, principal ruler.” Rosh can, therefore, mean a place as well as describing a rank. Who is the chief ruler of Rosh (located in Russia), Meshech (Moscow) and Tubal (Tobolsky)? Boris (bear) Yeltsin fits the role.
In connection with this, the following information compiled by Sis. Judith Birney should be consulted.
We are possibly the generation upon whom “the ends of the world have come.” May we see the wonderful culmination of God’s purpose — the countdown finished and the setting up of a kingdom that has no end, in which we can play a part.
Therefore, let us not sleep, as do others.
John Brewis, Fort Erie, ONT
Boris Yeltsin
Boris means “bear.”
An ethnic Russian born in 1931 in Butka, a remote farming settlement just beyond the Ural Mountains in western Siberia with a population of 5,000. It is 155 miles east of Sverdlovsk and about 120 miles west of Tobol’sk.
His religion is Russian Orthodox. He had a religious upbringing and was christened at the local wooden church.
He was educated in engineering at Urals Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk.
As the age of 45, he became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Communist Party, undisputed ruler of a province much larger than several small European states.
He is the chief prince of Russia -Rosh.
His headquarters are in the Kremlin, Moscow — Meshech.
His former position was ruler of area including Tobol’sk Tubal.
Boris Yeltsin “now governs 150 million people, controls three-quarters of the Soviet land mass; and has a hand on most of the former empire’s oil, gas, timber and gold reserves –and its formidable nuclear arsenal.” (The Financial News, Dec. 23, 1991)
“He seems to want to build a modern and democratic Russia, guided by his own firm rule. New Russia…seems to be heading back toward the ideas of the older Russia, which also stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, and was courted both by France and Germany for decades in the 19th century.
“Yeltsin plainly is going to do whatever he deems best for the new Russia. At the moment, that means co-operation with the United States and Bush’s dream of a new world order. But one day the confusion is likely to end in Russia, and then there could be two superpowers in the world again.” (The Toronto Star, Dec. 28, 1991)
“When Russia makes its grand move for the building up of its empire, then let the reader know that the end of all things, as at present constituted, is at hand”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One