12/08/05 more signs of the times...
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...Proposed communique from the summit of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Mecca. According to the article in the Bangkok Times (keep in mind Thailand is a Muslim nation), the summit urged Muslim states to fight terrorism and to develop educational curriculums to promote tolerance and understanding. Regarding political issues, the summit centered on the Palestinian situation, and called on Israeli forces to withdraw from Palestinian lands. They advised that this would help the peace process in accordance with the United Nations resolution; the Arab peace initiative; and the Roadmap peace plan.
...The summit also wants to ensure that Jerusalem preserves Islamic historical identities; to stop and dismantle Jewish settlements; and to stop construction of and to demolish the separation wall being built by Israel.
...Click the link above for an April 2003 BBC article regarding the implementation of the Roadmap peace plan, and this link for a followup December 2003 BBC article stating that the U.S. was still committed to the Roadmap peace plan, but was open to other ideas, and was talking to the architects of the Geneva Accord, a rival peace plan. The plot continues to thicken.
...The whole idea of the peace process in the Middle East is something to keep an eye on. The feuds here go back to Biblical times, and in my opinion, have great significance for our times. Both sides rightly claim Abraham as their father, although the Bible teaches that the true seed came through Isaac, not through Ishmael or Abraham's other sons via concubines.
...More to come on this later, don't have the time right now, but in brief, there seems to be two main positions (and many others, and different derivatives of these as well, I know) regarding end times: the premillennialists and the amillennialists. There are also postmillennialists, but a lot of things have happened in the past century or so to weaken the position that all is going to become light and roses and usher in the kingdom of God.
...The main branch, or at the least the most vocal so the most widespread, of the premillennial factions seem to be the dispensational premillennialists. They are the people, (i.e. Hal Lindsey et al), who teach that Christians will be raptured out of here, then the seven year great tribulation will take place. At the end of the seven years, Christ will come back, defeat satan and his minions, and set up a literal kingdom here on earth for a thousand years. At the end of the thousand years, satan will be loosed again to deceive the nations, and Christ will demolish him again, and then comes the final judgment and the eternal kingdom.
...The amillennialists generally do not believe in the literal thousand year reign of Christ on earth. Rather, they teach that the thousand years is a symbolical number relating to the period in between Christ's advent and his second coming, and that the thousand years basically refers to the church age and that the kingdom of God was already established by Jesus and is here already.
...As I said before, there seems to be a zillion variations off these themes, and on all the others. I have seen premillennialism, amillennialism, postmillennialism, pretribulationism, etc. etc. all proved beyond a doubt by learned and sincere people, all feeling that they were correct and being led to share their beliefs on the subject. I can point you to reference materials on all these viewpoints and others if you are interested, but that is not the point of this discussion.
...Rather, the point is that I think that the dispensational premillennialists and the amillennialists both miss it in regard to the physical nation of Israel.
...The dispensational premillennialists in general (I hate to keep making qualifying statements, but anytime one is talking about scriptural issues of this type there are so many alternate viewpoints and slight differences in interpretation that everyone gets bent out of shape on the wording - so if I forget, please keep in mind I am talking in wide brushstrokes and not trying to make an all-inclusive argument here.) teach that after the Christians have been raptured from earth, God will turn his attention to Israel. The nation will turn to God. They, along with the non-Christians who were left behind after the rapture, will endure the great tribulation. But at the conclusion of the seven years, Jesus Christ will return to defeat satan, bind him for a thousand years, and set up His kingdom on earth for the thousand year reign. Israel will, as Paul said in Romans, be grafted back into the olive tree. They almost seem to treat the entire Christian era as a parenthesis that occurs in between God's dealings with his real people, the nation of Israel.
...But with their emphasis on the rapture and their belief that Christians will be gone before all the catastrophes really get going, and that the peace contract brokered by the anti-Christ will take place after the rapture, I fear that they miss the significance of a lot of the events that are taking place right before their eyes. For example, any peace contracts signed now can't be the one referred to in the Scriptures because the Christians are still here - even though the rapture could take place any moment, the other endtime events that they believe follow after the rapture are obviously still to come.
...On the amillennialist side, they miss it in general in my opinion, because they believe that God broke off his dealings with Israel permanently, and that the church is true Israel, and that God is no longer dealing at all with the physical nation. So they miss the scriptural significance of the events that they see occurring in the Middle East. And they don't see the importance of another thing, among others, Jesus said in reference to Jerusalem - that Jerusalem would be trodden underfoot until the times of the Gentiles were fulfilled. So the amillennialists miss the significance of the historical fact that the nation of Israel took over control of Jerusalem, for the first time in about two thousand years, in 1967.
...In Luke 21:24, Jesus says "...and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." And Paul writes in Romans 11:25, "For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles come in." And that, dear reader, is the time in which we are living now.
...More to come.