General Articles

Is Afghanistan Found in Bible Prophecy? :: By Nathan Jones

Published on: by RR7

Watching the news has been horrific lately, hasn’t it? Afghanistan has fallen to the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban. Iran’s Ayatollahs remain hellbent on developing a nuclear weapon to annihilate Israel. Islam’s might continues to rapidly spread and threatens the entire world!

The Biden Administration’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan has caused a mass exodus of people trying to flee the country after the Taliban retook the government, meeting almost no resistance. For a long 20 years now, the United States has been waging a war against terror, and in the process losing many American and allied lives in order to bring the Afghani people freedom from the Taliban and to make the West safer. But now the Taliban are back in force, killing Christians and American allies along their meteoric rise to national power.

Across the world, the situation has brought up a lot of bad feelings and troubled sleep. We grieve for the people of Afghanistan. We grieve for our servicemen and women and their families who’ve sacrificed so much, including their own lives. To know that our nation’s two-decades long sacrifice has funneled down the drain in a matter of mere days is both enraging and saddening. We feel for the Afghani people’s lost freedoms. And, we pray for the many missionaries there who are now facing imminent danger and inevitable martyrdom.

Looking at the terrible pictures of the Afghani people hanging onto our aircraft, desperate to escape strictly enforced Sharia law, will be burned into our minds for the rest of our lives. And, we feel outraged over the billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry — drones, missiles, tanks, and Humvees — left for the Taliban to turn and aim at Israel and the West. A dark time is looming over that nation, and ours as well.

It’s hard to fathom the roil of emotions. And yet, the Bible clears up the big picture as to where the course of history is heading and how Afghanistan fits exactly into end time Bible prophecy. Afghanistan can be found in a prophecy called — the War of Gog and Magog.

The War of Gog and Magog is set between a massive coalition of nations descended from Noah’s sons Japheth and Ham against Israel (Genesis 10:2-7). The nations are from the territories of ancient Rosh, Magog, Meshech, Tubal, Persia, Cush, Gomer, and Beth-Togarmah (Ezekiel 38:2-6). Their leader is called “Gog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” (Ezekiel 38:2-3). The battlefield is on “the mountains of Israel, which had long been desolate” (Ezekiel 38:8). The purpose of the invasion is to “plunder and to take booty” and attack the people of Israel (Ezekiel 38:12-16 NKJV).

Let’s now explore what the modern-day equivalents are for these ancient peoples.

Magog

We find Afghanistan within the following list of nations that will comprise Magog.

Some historians point to the former Soviet nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, as well as including Afghanistan, as encompassing the land of Magog. Historian Edwin Yamauchi explains that Magog was the “ancient Scythian northern nomadic tribes who inhabited the territory from Central Asia across the southern steppes of modern Russia.” These nations, today consisting of a population of 60 million, are united by one commonality — Islam.

Rosh

The word “Rosh” or “Ros” appears in Ezekiel’s list of nations in the New King James Version and other translations based on the Greek Septuagint, which other translations translate as the adjective “chief or prince.”

Tenth Century Byzantine writers, such as Ibn-Fosslan, identified a group of Scythians dwelling in the northern parts of Taurus upon the river Volga as the Ros. The early Byzantine Church claimed that the Ros were the people who lived far north of Greece in the area today known as Russia. Rosh is supposed to be “from the remotest parts of the north” (Ezekiel 39:1-2). No other nation exists more directly north of Israel and is more remote than modern-day Russia.

Meshech

The ancient Moschoi or Muschki or Musku tribe settled in Cilicia and Cappadocia, which is now part of modern-day Turkey. Ezekiel 27:13 notes these people traded in slaves to Tyre, and Ezekiel 32:26 refers to them as an ancient bandit nation.

Tubal

The people of Tubal would have hailed from the ancient Tibarenoi tribe. This land also resides in modern-day Turkey.

Gomer

The Jewish historian Josephus identified Gomer who “founded those whom the Greeks now call Galatians [Galls], but were then called Gomerites.” Gomer most popularly looks to reference the Gimirrai of the Assyrians, or Cimmerians, who lived in the Black Sea area adjacent to Turkey.

Beth-Togarmah

Togarmah, or Beth-Togarmah, which means the “house of Togarmah,” contains an etymological connection between the name Togarmah and the names Turkey and Turkestan. The Tilgaimmu resided between ancient Carchemish and Haran, which is modern-day Turkey and possibly the lands of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Persia

The land of Persia is ancient and long-running and the easiest to identify, only having changed its name to Iran during the last century in 1935.

Cush

Cush is another area easy to identify, having split into Ethiopia and the Sudan in more recent history.

Put

Scholars claim that Put is Libya with the possibility that the land also includes Algeria and Tunisia.

Many Nations

Ezekiel describes “Sheba and Dedan, the merchants of Tarshish, and all their young lions” as just observing the battle (Ezekiel 38:13). Sheba and Dedan were Shem’s descendants who settled in modern-day Saudi Arabia. Tarshish could refer to Tarsus located just northwest of Israel, or the island of Sardinia located just north of Carthage in the Mediterranean Sea. But, more than likely, the inhabitants of Tartessus, located on the southwest coast of Spain, denotes the Phoenician merchants who sailed as far as Britain. The “young lions” could then be referring to Spain and Great Britain’s colonies in the New World.

Noticeably absent from this list of Middle Eastern nations are those surrounding modern-day Israel, such as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula nations.

Why these “many nations” are not also actively involved in the Gog-Magog Battle is open to speculation, but a Psalm 83 scenario where the seer Asaph foresaw Israel subjugating their surrounding neighbors could be the scenario that grants Israel the peaceful precondition Ezekiel describes that precedes the Gog-Magog invasion (Ezekiel 38:11).

Aftermath

The end result of such a massive invasion by a seemingly invincible army on an unprotected Israel ends up surprising the invaders and shocking the world. The invading nations are, in truth, being manipulated by God, pulled out of their lands as with “hooks in your jaws,” so that those nations feel the Sovereign Lord’s fury (Ezekiel 38:4,18). God drags these specific nations to the “mountains of Israel” to “bring him to judgment with pestilence and bloodshed… flooding rain, great hailstones, fire, and brimstone” (Ezekiel 38:21-22).

God’s ultimate purpose for supernaturally obliterating the invading coalition is so: “Thus, I [God], will magnify Myself and sanctify Myself, and I will be known in the eyes of many nations. Then they shall know that I am the LORD” (Ezekiel 38:23).

God’s supernatural victory over the Gog-Magog invaders allows Him to reintroduce Himself to the world and declare in no uncertain terms that Yahweh is personally defending Israel. Should the people of the world doubt, they only have to look on Israel who “will go out and set on fire and burn the weapons… and they will make fires with them for seven years” (Ezekiel 39:9). As for the invaders’ corpses, “for seven months the house of Israel will be burying them, in order to cleanse the land” in the newly named “Valley of Hamon Gog” by a newly built “town called Hamonah” (Ezek. 39:11-12,16).

Timing

{Explore exactly what nations are involved in the coming massive Gog-Magog attack on Israel, when this war will likely take place, and how dramatically different the world will look after God steps directly into the fray in an academic presentation made by Nathan Jones titled Timing Gog and Magog.}

Pray

There’s something very important we Christians need to do — we need to pray. We need to pray for the safety of the Afghani people, the boldness of the Christian missionaries there, godly wisdom for our feckless leaders, and that our people make it out of the country before the Taliban’s fatal deadline.

{Find out just what Islam believes, their history and goals, and the end time views that fuel their desire to ignite an apocalypse. And, prepare yourself to witness to the coming influx of Islamic immigrants moving into your neighborhood — all of this and more in an all-new academic presentation made by Nathan Jones titled Witnessing to Muslims in Light of Islamic Eschatology!}

Lamb and Lion Ministries
https://christinprophecy.org

Earth’s Craziness Crisis :: By Terry James

Published on: by RR7

America’s total and swift abandonment of its U.S. Air Force base near Kabul, Afghanistan, has even mainstream news media anchors confused. They found it almost impossible to find the words to cover for the president’s inability to form a cogent thought in answer to questions. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mike Milley, said on Wednesday, August 18, at a press conference, “there was nothing that I or anybody else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

President Joe Biden stood before microphones the same day and ranted about how COVID vaccines would be mandated, with only secondary mention of the thousands of civilian workers Americans left stranded in Afghanistan while the vicious Taliban horde moved to take over Kabul and everything else. Biden seemed oblivious to pointed questions even from his mainstream news sycophants. While Afghan women and girls as young as five years of age were being taken as sex slaves and the families of Afghanistan were being slaughtered, Biden seemed to have no idea about how to deal with what the American or Afghanistan military should do to handle the cut-and-run strategy his administration—either by omission or commission—chose to employ.

Afghan women were seen literally tossing their little children across barbed-wire fences to American military personnel to get them out of the country on C-17 and other aircraft that the U.S. Air force were trying to fly out of the Kabul airport in the panic to evacuate as many as possible.

Some of those flights saw men hanging from anything they could grasp while the planes lifted off. Some fell hundreds and even thousands of feet to their deaths. One aircraft had to make an emergency landing because the landing gear would not fully retract. That was because some men, trying desperately to flee the Taliban, had tried to hide in the massive landing-gear area to fly to safety. They were crushed to death, of course.

This abandonment of the people of Afghanistan and even of American citizens, leaving them to face their fate at the hands of some of the bloodiest terrorists on earth, is indicative of abandonment of another sort. The abandonment of God. The sheer chaos and confusion, the biblical argument can be made, is the result of the loss of ability to think clearly. The diminution of thought processes comes from anti-God wickedness.

I listened to many retired former top admirals and generals—none of which was necessarily political as to favoring one party or the other. Almost each person was dumbfounded at the way in which the Afghanistan pull-out proceeded. Some said that the president should resign, or at the very least, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should resign in order to cover the president’s obvious ineptitude.

To me, this debacle—if one is so generous as to see it as mere debacle—is the coming to fruition of the madness we’ve witnessed in recent times.

The decision to pull out in a catastrophic manner from America’s obligations in Afghanistan comes on the heels of the political power responsible for the insane decision. The Democrat Party is the ideological bastion that long ago made it a point to kick God out of the party—i.e., to eliminate all mention of God as part of the party platform.

Since that decision, and even before, we have watched the so-called radical left take over the party in every respect.

They are the party, of course, who long ago championed abortion. At the same time, they championed causes of wildlife preservation, making certain animal mothers and their offspring are protected.

The party is the one that allowed the radicals to bring Critical Race Theory into the educational system, in effect instituting racism in reverse. They are the party that champions the evil Black Life Matters (BLM) rioters and looters. They use the killing of black men by police, which are far fewer in number than Caucasians killed by police, to give excuse to perpetrate their wickedness. At the same time, the ideology that supports BLM completely embraces abortion, which murders black babies by the hundreds of thousands every year.

This anti-God insanity declares that a person can be whatever gender they wish to be. Their birth certificate and sex at birth have no meaning in the transgender push in American culture.

They champion same-sex marriage and even every form of perversion between adults and children. This generation of anti-God adherents has come to the point that rational thinking is no longer possible, it seems.

Again, here is what God’s Word says happens and is happening in our nation and world today.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.” (Romans 1:28–32)

Having witnessed all the things just in the political arena as dissected above, can there be much doubt that God has turned a large portion of those who embrace such anti-God comportment over to upside-down thinking—to reprobate minds?

That wicked, reprobate thinking has, I’m convinced, been complicit in bringing fraudulent governance to this nation. Those anti-God forces have brought to the entire world leadership that is upside-down in thought and action. That is reprobate in every sense. It is an anti-God sort of thinking that is swiftly moving the nation and the world into an Antichrist global order.

We see the supreme, sardonic irony (God’s laughing the evil global principalities in high places to derision) in the fact that the office considered to be the leader of the free world is now occupied by a person who many, including renowned psychiatrists, believe to have progressing dementia; that’s another way of saying “having a reprobate mind.”

The craziness crisis through which we are living is a direct result of more and more people turning their backs on the One who created them. The dementia will get worse, and it will bring humanity near to the end of all flesh.

But first, Jesus Christ, our blessed hope, will call all of God’s children to Himself in the Rapture of the Church. Then God’s judgment and wrath will fall upon a world of rebels.

The only way to be rescued before this world must pay for its wickedness is, again, found in the following words of the Apostle Paul:

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9–10)