It seems observably true–to me, at least–that this generation stands on God’s prophetic timeline very near the time Daniel the Old Testament prophet described, as recorded in the following:

And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. (Daniel 2:40-43)

Daniel was given by God both the dream-vision that Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar had one troubling nightand its interpretation. The dream was of a huge, metallic, man image. The image, Daniel interpreted, was of four world powers, and a final, fifth world power, which would come on the scene at the very end of human history just before God judged earth’s rebellious governments.Then, the prophecy indicates, a new regime–headed by God himself–will rule and reign:

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. (Daniel 2:44)

Fifth and final world power
Daniel prophesied that the fifth world power will come out of the fourth. We know the order of world empires from history. The first Daniel interpreted, at the time he was giving the interpretation, was Babylon. The second would be the Medo-Persian. The third would be the Greek Empire, and the fourth would be the Roman Empire, represented in Nebuchadnezzar’s night-vision by the legs of iron. The fifth empire–the final empire, and the only one that is yet to come into being as fulfilled prophecy–is represented by the feet and toes of that metallic monstrosity.

To my understanding, at least, the five world empires given to Daniel in metallic representations–i.e., gold for the head, silver for the breast and arms, brass or bronze for the belly and thighs, and iron for the legs, feet and toes–is indicative of money and the power to rule over the inhabitants of planet earth. Metals have most always been at the center of any economy throughout history. And when the metals represented the power to mold and construct weaponry–e.g., spears, bullets, bombs, warcraft like tanks, planes, ships, etc.–the power of the metal and the economies of the world powers become understandable. Money is power, and power is control. These are inextricably linked.

The fifth world power will come from the Roman Empire, which disintegrated but is reforming, we who observe prophecy from the pretrib view believe. We believe that the European Union is almost certainly the nucleus out of which this last Gentile power is emerging. This is the area of central Europe in particular. Rome is the very heart of that nucleus.

Antichrist comes forth
Daniel also prophesied about the last world empire’s leader who would leap to center stage at just the right moment in Satan’s plans to bring him to power:

And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate. (Daniel 9:26-27)

Antichrist, “the beast,” as this vicious future tyrant is termed, will come to power and rule ruthlessly. His power will emanate from economics–the ability to call all to worship him through a mark and numbering system that will control buying and selling. (Read Revelation 13:16-18 to understand this 666 system of absolute control.)

Economics set the end times stage
We are witnessing economic rearrangements at present like no other generation has seen. Even the United States–as anyone with any sense of what’s been going on in the news will attest–is being forced into a mold of one-world economic order. It is all leading toward the mark and numbering system that will give Antichrist his power. (Read Revelation 17:12-13 to learn of the ten economic power blocs that will develop, then give power and authority to the beast–Antichrist, the ruler of the fifth and final world empire.)

Europe in upheavel
Europe today is in dynamic upheaval, struggling to stand on the feet and toes that will give the eventual Antichrist system its balance, its equilibrium. But just as Daniel the prophet foretold, the feet and toes are not made of purely a metal of strength. The EU is made partly of the governmental strength that was the ancient Roman Empire, but also is constructed of weakness intrinsic within the governments of contemporary times. This makes the whole structure that is the final form of all worldly economic-governmental power subject to crashing to final collapse. This is exactly what Daniel foresaw as given above in Daniel 2:44.

A story this past week gives, I believe, an excellent example of the struggle the reviving Roman Empire is unwittingly engaged in to construct that final world rule Satan seeks.

STRASBOURG, France—With the European Union’s single currency in the grip of the worst crisis in its history, the bloc’s new president is expected to use the growing alarm over debt levels to argue for a new form of “economic government” in Europe.

The leaders [meet] on Thursday at a summit meeting in Brussels, now certain to be dominated by worries about deficit and debt levels in Greece. [EU Commission president Herman] Van Rompuy’s proposal could take main responsibility for stewardship of economic coordination out of the hands of the 27 nations’ finance ministers, elevating it to the level of heads of government. The plan could also reduce the role of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm.

According to a draft of one of two documents circulated before the meeting, Mr. Van Rompuy (pronounced rom-PWEE) will argue that “recent developments in the euro area highlight the urgent need to strengthen our economic governance…Whether it is called coordination of policies or economic government,” it adds, “only the European Council is capable of delivering and sustaining a common European strategy for more growth and more jobs…Recommendations for the euro area as a whole and its member states should be strengthened, with a stronger focus on competitiveness and macroeconomic imbalances,” the draft says. “This would be in line with the importance of economic spillover effects in the monetary union and the challenges the euro area is facing.” (Stephen Castle, “European Debt Issues Top Agenda for Meeting,” NYTimes.com, 2/9/10).

Paul the apostle wrote of the economic reality that drives the world toward God’s judgment and wrath: “But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:9-10a).

Rushing toward the end
Certainly, the truth of God’s Word frames what is happening at this time in history, and where it all is heading as the rulers of this fallen sphere grasp for the wealth of this world and strive to cast off the bonds of governance God wisely placed upon the would-be masters of planet earth.

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you. (James 5:1-6)

We are in the end of the age era of the toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s night-vision.

Israel today stands in the bull’s eye of rage. This is true in the case of being targeted by the Jewish state’s perennial antagonists, the Arab and Persian Islamist enemies. It is true in the case of the entire international community, whose constituent nations see Israel as the congestive blockage to regional and world peace. But it is the growing antagonism by United States presidential administration operatives that is most disconcerting while this beleaguered planet wobbles toward a time of unprecedented trouble.

As a matter of fact, that coming time of unparalleled strife that will bring all nations to Armageddon is termed “the time of Jacob’s trouble” by Isaiah the prophet: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jeremiah 30:7a).

And, it is Jacob’s trouble–the prophesied end-of-days dastardly treatment of Israel by the nations of earth–that will cause the God of heaven to bring them to Armageddon. This is what the prophet Joel foretells: “I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land” (Joel 3:2).

Armageddon beckons
This will be the gathering of the nations of earth predicted in the book of Revelation:

“For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty…And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon” (Revelation 16:14, 16).

This will be the culmination of mankind’s dealing treacherously with God’s chosen people, the Jews. The promise made to Abraham by the Lord includes severe repercussions for anyone who would curse the progeny of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).

History  validates prophecy
God’s declaration is most dramatically validated by looking at twentieth-century history. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime made hatred of and genocide against the Jew their focus of the unalloyed evil they spewed. The ashes of the Fuhrer and of his Nazi colleagues are scattered in ignominious disgrace across the landscape that Josef Goebbels and the Nazi propagandists arrogantly boasted would be über alles the all-powerful homeland for their thousand-year Reich.

Any consideration in research of Germany’s history involving the last two years of World War II and the years immediately following that most terrible of earth’s conflicts to that point must acknowledge that it was as if the very wrath of God was upon the nation. Such documentation includes black-and-white film footage of German men and women forced by Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower to walk by the skeletal remains of thousands of Jewish corpses–thus, Eisenhower stated, so that the German people and the world would never forget the Holocaust. It’s aftermath would forever be recorded.

Yet today, even mainstream news journalists are observably fuzzy-minded in consideration of the genocide that took perhaps six million Jewish lives as well as the lives of other peoples. They show their loss of memory by not jumping full-force down the throats of diabolists like Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who regurgitates the lie that the Holocaust is a fable conjured by the Jews of the world. Rarely is there a repudiation of such blatant lies coming from the would-be destroyers of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Tragically, the refusal to educate generations subsequent to the time of World War II on the truth about the insane treatment of the house of Israel is leading to a future time of even greater atrocities, thus judgment, according to God’s prophetic Word. The God of heaven will react violently–according to Bible prophecy–more violently, even, than He reacted to the death-dealing of the Nazi demoniacs:

“The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him. Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.

And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it… it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem” (Zechariah 12:1-3, 29).

Will America betray Israel?
We come to the question posed by this article’s title: “Israel Betrayed by U.S.?” The article’s title is in the form of a question because like so much of this American administration’s dealings, the “transparency” presidential candidate Barack Obama and then President Obama promised is not forthcoming. Obama’s intended dealing with Israel is wrapped in an impenetrable fog of political doublespeak. Here is a news brief to begin pointing out the administration’s not-so-transparent thinking regarding U.S./Israeli relationship for the future:

“US President Barack Obama’s special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, threatened late last week to withhold financial aid to Israel if the Jewish state does not accept demanded concessions to get the stalled peace process back on track” (“Obama Admin Threatens to Withhold Aid to Israel,” Headline News, 1/10/10).

Next, we will look into whether America, the nation almost certainly brought into existence to stand with His chosen people during Israel’s rebirth into modernity, is leading the way into setting up the worldwide anti-Israel marginalization prophesied by Zechariah.

America’s “Christianity”?
Refusal of the current American presidential administration to acknowledge that God has any say one way or the other in the affairs of man, much less any business meddling in the conduct of the American state department’s dealing with Israel and its antagonists, is a foregone conclusion. After all, Mr. Obama has himself stated that America is not a Christian nation.

I must say that I agree with this president on that one point. The United States was never a “Christian” nation, in the sense that America turned en masse to total commitment to following Jesus Christ. That has never happened. However, this country, since its earliest stages of planning by the founding fathers, has had woven into its national documents of inception Judeo-Christian principles of God’s prescription for conducting life and government.

Based upon that easily provable truth–because all one has to do is to cursorily scan the founding documents to understand biblical influence–it’s easy to know that America is a nation under providential watchfulness, to say the very least. God, in starkly plain language, spoke through prophetic omniscience to what will happen when anyone, be it individual or corporate, deals treacherously with His chosen people. Therefore, for anyone–including the president of the United States or any other member of the government of this nation–to ignore what is said about interacting with Israel in the Bible, from which the founding fathers so obviously gleaned wisdom to form this nation, is foolhardiness.

Human government oblivious to God’s Will
I realize stating that governmental leaders don’t recognize God in their governing isn’t a profound revelation, because all of humanistic government ignores the Creator of all things. I just wanted to get the fact stated as to the real crux of the problem regarding lack of lasting peace in the Middle East and the world. The administration and the state department, it is obvious, gives God’s Word on the matter of Israel no weight whatever in considering policy toward the Jewish state. They forge ahead, setting timelines for producing a two-state solution to the “Palestinian problem” as they see it.

Mideast envoy George Mitchell recently stated that he saw the problem of Israel’s making peace with Palestinian leadership as something that must be done within two years. The former senate majority leader, chosen by President Obama to deal with the differences between the Palestinian Authority and Israeli leadership, made it clear how he–thus, how the Obama administration–views the hold-up to peace in the region.

Mitchell said, in an interview with acclaimed broadcaster and interviewer Charlie Rose just prior to Mitchell’s departure for Israel, when asked what leverage the U.S. has to get Israel to comply with Arab and international demands, “Under American law, the United States can withhold support on loan guarantees to Israel.”

Israeli Leadership fed up
Although a senior state department faux pas fireman, speaking with anonymity, said that Mitchell’s remarks were not meant as threats to Israel if compliance with American and international concession demands were not met, Israeli leadership wasn’t buying. Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz bluntly let it be known that Obama, Mitchell, and the U.S. State Department could keep their money. He said that Israel wouldn’t be needing loan guarantees because Israel wouldn’t be borrowing. The Jewish state, he said, had already raised enough money for foreseeable needs.

All of the back-pedaling the Obama Administration can do cannot obfuscate the truth. It is trying to hide its disdain for Israel’s perceived obstinacy in preventing this president from having a clear pathway to establishing the desired two-state configuration.

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton recently praised Israel’s decision to unilaterally make a gesture of good will toward the Palestinians by implementing a partial freeze on establishing new settlements. However, Israel is always met with intransigence when dealing with the Palestinian Authority, as with most all among the Islamic community. The Israeli leadership is growing weary of the one-sided abusiveness, and of the pressures from the American and international leaders who insist Israel is the problem in disrupting the “Roadmap to Peace.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in expressing his feelings on the matter, said, “It is the Palestinian Authority that needs to change its ways–certainly not the Israeli government.”

Support for Israel grows
Israel’s decision to go ahead with settlements then brought immediate, not-so-veiled threats by envoy Mitchell. There is no doubt that the former senator’s tone and remarks reflect the mindset of the president and those around him. They see the Jewish state as the holdup to Obama getting glory from making the perpetually elusive peace the international community seeks.

To answer the question within the article’s title–“Israel betrayed by the U.S.?” –it seems for now that substantial influence within the U.S. Congress is saying, “No.”

Visiting senior US senators told their Israelis hosts on Sunday that they disapprove of the Obama Administration’s attempt to pressure Israel by threatening to withhold aid, and vowed they would never let that happen.

Senator John McCain told a Jerusalem press conference that he expects President Barack Obama to explicitly announce that his administration is not planning to alter America’s policy regarding financial aid to Israel.

Senator Joe Lieberman promised that even if Obama did try to use US financial aid as leverage, Congress would never approve such a measure.

McCain and Lieberman were also joined by senators John Thune and John Barrasso. (“Senators Won’t Let Obama Freeze Aid to Israel,” Headline News, Israel Today staff, 1/11/2010)

Israel forever!
If America joins the rest of earth’s nations in the gathering against Israel, as prophesied by Zechariah in Zechariah12:1-3, her betrayal will mean America’s doom. All nations who come against the Jewish state, God says, will be cut to pieces. Israel, on the other hand, will remain no matter what, the God of heaven declares in the strongest possible terminology.

“This is what the Lord says, ‘He who appoints the sun to shine by day, Who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar–the Lord Almighty is His Name; Only if these ordinances vanish from My sight,’ declares the Lord, ‘will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before Me'” (Jeremiah 31:35-36).