As the conflict between Israel and Hamas persists, is it indicative of an impending apocalyptic scenario?
“We don’t want to jump to any sensational conclusions – sometimes things are just really bad, and they don’t have a specific biblical implication,” said Joel Rosenberg, editor-in-chief of the Evangelical Christian news website ALL ISRAEL NEWS. “However, there are some interesting questions that should be discussed.”
Battle of Armageddon
Before jumping into Ezekiel 38 and 39 and suspicions of the Battle of Armageddon, Rosenberg said to look to Psalm 83, which some Bible teachers believe is a prophecy not about a specific “End Times War” but a “prophetic window into the motivation of the actors that will attack Israel and try to wipe us out at the end of times.”
Psalm 83 talks about how Israel’s “enemies growl” and its “foes rear their heads,” with their leaders calling to “destroy them as a nation so that Israel’s name is remembered no more.”
Rosenberg said the verses in the psalm are similar to the sentiments expressed by Hamas and those countries who back it – meaning the Iranian leadership and others.
“You could drop Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ebrahim Raisi, Yahya Sinwar or Hassan Nasrallah into that Psalm; they all fit the description of the enemies in Psalm 83. That is interesting and worth examining,” Rosenberg said.
Looking at Ezekiel, he noted that nothing indicates the End of Days starts with a war. On the contrary, the prophecy begins with Israel being secure; the country does not have fences on its borders.
“We had a fence, but it was unguarded because the Israeli government thought there was no imminent danger,” Rosenberg said. “It was not that we did not think Israel had any enemies, but we did not think someone was going to attack us tomorrow. Israel felt secure on October 6.”
He said that if Israel has a massive victory over Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian nuclear threat over the next few months, Israel could rise to truly being secure and being the No. 1 most powerful superpower in the region.
“This would be incredible for regional deterrence and create tremendous prosperity,” Rosenberg said.
On the flip side, some believe that the Israel-Hamas war could turn into a regional war that involves Israel being attacked by Iran or Russia on behalf of Iran, which would more closely fulfill the prophecies described in Ezekiel 38 and 39.
Russia's romance with Iran
A FEW DAYS after Hamas invaded Israel and started the war, Pastor Greg Laurie, the senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, based in Riverside, California, put out a sermon on YouTube that garnered nearly 1.5 million views. In the video, he talks about how the Bible predicts that “Gog” – believed to be modern-day Russia – became close allies with Persia, today’s Iran, and attacked Jerusalem.
“It’s only recently that the Iranians and Russians have developed a special connection,” Lurie noted, highlighting Russia’s offer to Iran of an unprecedented level of military and technical support and Iran agreeing to sell Russia drones, bullets and mortar shells.
“The only way to stop Iran is with a credible military threat,” Lurie said. “So, how do you stop something like this? … Let’s just say, for the sake of a point, Israel decided to strike out at Iran because they’re funding [Hamas]. What would that product be? It could produce the conflict we read about in Ezekiel.
“If you get up in the morning and read this headline: ‘Russia attacks Israel,’ fasten your seat belt,” Lurie concluded. “You’re seeing Bible prophecy fulfilled in your lifetime, in real-time before your very eyes.”
Rosenberg said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has wanted to attack Iran since at least 2012. Now, with Iran enriching uranium to unprecedented levels and funding such a brutal attack against Israeli citizens, soon may be the right time.
“If we do not go to war with them in these conditions, when would we do it?” he asked. “It is not impossible that this could turn into the worst war described in the Bible. It could.”
However, there is not enough data to draw such a conclusion, according to David Parsons, vice president and senior spokesperson for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. He wrote in a column for The Jerusalem Post, “Today, Jews are still being freed to go home to Israel, but one day, the nations will regret letting them come back to the land and especially to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and they will lay siege to this city and nation.”
This confrontation is referred to as the Battle of Armageddon in Revelations and is also referenced in Joel and Zechariah. Parsons said that “this ingathering and deliverance will be greater than the Exodus itself, and it will usher in the time of Messiah’s reign for 1,000 years.”
But he said that only then will the world need to worry about the war of Gog and Magog.
For now, he told the Post, “We just keep it very simple: Israel is in a battle of good versus evil, and Israel is on the good side.
“We believe the Bible speaks of birth pangs – the birthing of the Messianic era or the age of redemption,” he continued. “This just seems to me another birth pang for Israel but a very difficult one. And we [the Christians] will help them through it.”