What
a time to be alive. Think of it. God chose you and me to live at the time that
is almost certainly the wind up of human history. But the Christian has nothing to fear. The many things happening that
seem so troubling means that Jesus is about to return.
All
of the major signals that Jesus and Daniel the prophet foretold for the very
end of this present earth age are in our headlines today.
I
firmly believe that the European Union
in combination with the international
community is the forming final one-world
government of Daniel Chapter 2. The world’s religions coming together in
the name of unity and peace is the forming of the apostate harlot church
that rides the beast of
Revelation chapter 17. Huge banking and commercial institutions merging into
one economic power is fulfilling one-world economic
Babylon of Revelation Chapter 18. Great increases in technology, knowledge
and speed of travel exactly match things prophesied in Daniel chapter 12.
We
have seen the rise of false prophets.
False teachers pollute our broadcast airwaves with their false doctrines. Wars
and rumors of wars are a part of everyday life. We continue to witness famines
and pestilences in the form of new, incurable diseases. Earthquakes are occurring
often and everywhere. There are wondrous signs in the heavens, from man’s
walking on the moon to unexplained UFO sightings to unprecedented solar flares recorded by astronomers
and other scientists. All these things are eerily like Jesus said it will be
just before his return to planet Earth.
Mankind
demonstrates all of the wicked ways the apostle Paul predicted in 2 Timothy
chapter 3. As if all this were not enough, the prophet Ezekiel’s prophecies in
chapters 37, 38 and 39 loom heavily over the Middle East.
What
is the one thing that turns all news-gathering cameras and microphones toward
Israel and her hostile neighbors? The answer is oil. Because oil deposits
drench the Middle East, world economies are tied to that region as no other.
Therefore, all the leaders of the great world powers concern themselves with
every bit of news about Israel and her Palestinian adversaries.
The
Middle East indeed boils in oil anxieties, while the world storms toward an
uncertain future. But God is not worried. Neither does he want you to be
worried: “For God hath not given us the
spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy
1:7).
God
knows the end from the beginning. He has reported, in advance, the conclusion
of these matters in his Holy Word, the Bible. Study it and believe it to be
absolutely true. Do this and you will find your frown of worry fading into a
smile of anticipation. You will know his beloved son, Jesus, is about to return
to take God’s children home with him. (Read John 14:1-3.)
God
knew from before the creation that oil would focus attention on the Middle East
at the end of human history. He knew at the creation of the Garden of Eden that
its lushness of life would bring about the end-time energy source the nations
would covet.
EDEN’S END-TIME ENERGY
Genesis 1: 20-24
“And God said, Let the
waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that
may fly above the earth in the open firmament
of heaven.
And God created great
whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth
abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl
after his kind: and God saw
that it was good.
And God blessed them,
saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let
fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the
morning were the fifth day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after
his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind:
and it
was so.”
Let’s
travel for a moment back to the time God created these things with one majestic
sweep of his almighty hand. This was not just a few scatterings of created
beings and a mere smattering of vegetation. When the Creator of all things
spoke, all of these created things suddenly existed from what had been
nothingness only a fraction of a second before. And the earth literally burst
forth with dynamic life!
The
vast ocean waters surged with life, from the smallest organism to the biggest
whale. The brilliant, beautifully colored sky must have seemed suddenly cloudy
while the flying, diving, soaring birds of every description tested their
masterfully made wings and feathers. The dry land crawled, hopped, ran, leaped
and lumbered with marvelous reptiles and mammals of every sort. The sounds and
sights must have been too incredible to take into the senses.
God’s
creation power, not evolution,
produced abundant life in that electrifying second of early earth time. Nothing
crawled from primordial soup to
change over the next zillion or so years. Everything popped into existence
under the hand of the Living God. There were no accidents or errors in the
Lord’s action. He knew exactly what he was doing. In the process, Eden’s
potential end-time energy source –oil—was produced.
Genesis 2:4-8
“These are the generations
of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the
LORD God made the earth and the heavens,
And every plant of the field
before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the
LORD God had not caused it to rain upon
the earth, and there was not
a man to till the ground.
But there went up a mist
from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
And the LORD God formed man
of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.
And the LORD God planted a
garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
God
is omnipotent (all-powerful). He is omniscient (all-knowing). He is omnipresent
(everywhere, all the time). God, through his omnipotence, created the abundant
and vast array of life in one split second. He knew all about, in his
omniscient foreknowledge, the fall of man through sin. The Lord was, in his
omnipresence, already forward in time when petroleum (oil) was formed from the
dead, decaying things he was creating in that split second of bringing forth
those living things. He is already in the future when the last great battle of
history is being fought. He has told us
through his prophetic word that it will be fought in the Middle East. He calls
the place Armageddon.
The
rage in the Middle East today, the hateful conflict between Israel and her
radical neighbors, point to the reality that things are aligned precisely as
God foretold. Oil is certainly the ingredient that makes the great world powers
look to that region with concern.
So the present Mid-East
problems involving war and peace that tug the world toward Armageddon again go
back to the Garden of Eden and the fall of Adam through willful disobedience.
God
did not cause this calamity. In his love and concern for us, he simply
reported, through prophecy, the end of the matter. Is all of this about oil’s
connection to the creation scientifically possible? I believe it is more than
that.
Let
us look closer at what the scientific study of petroleum says. Then let us look
at what the Bible says about the catastrophic flood God used to judge sin and
cleanse the earth of sin’s corruption.
Today’s
scientists believe that crude oil was formed over millions of years from the
remains of small plant and animal life in the ancient seas. As this
life—primarily plankton and algae and other organisms—died, it sank to the sea
floor where it was buried with sand and mud.
Heat,
pressure, and bacteria compressed and “cooked” the material until it formed a
thick liquid we know as oil. Over time, the oil traveled upward through the
earth’s crust until its path was blocked by dense rocks. It’s under these
rocks, called caprocks, where we find most of our oil today.
I
suggest you read the following scriptures to get an overview of what the Bible
says happened, to produce the dynamics necessary to create the resource we call
oil.
Genesis 6:5-7; Genesis,
chapter 7.
God’s
creation, man, through his disobedience in the Garden, brought sin into the
world. The people of earth became so sinful that every thought they had was
only evil. God looked at his once-perfect creation, and its wicked condition
made him very sad. So sad, in fact, that he decided to destroy all life on
earth by sending a flood. It rained 40 days and 40 nights, and the ark God had
instructed Noah to build floated. The waters rose above even the highest
mountain top. All living things except those in Noah’s family, the animals Noah
had brought into the Ark, and fish and sea life, died.
Paraphrasing
that Truth, the Bible says in these verses that God sent a great flood because
of sin upon the earth. The water covered everything, including the highest
mountaintop, by at least 15 cubits. A cubit in
Bible
times referred to the average length of a man’s arm from elbow to longest
fingertip, or about 18 inches.
So
you can see that this catastrophe involved an incredible amount of water,
according to God’s account. This was not just some local flood as some would
have us believe. The Bible says that all flesh and plant life on the Earth’s
ground portions died in the flood. This means also, we must believe, that when
the water went down, many of the various forms of life in the rivers and the
seas were left to flounder and die on the drying ground. This included, of
course, the plankton and algae and other vegetation of the
rivers and seas.
The fossil record shows this
was true. Evidence of sea shells and other residue of sea life have been found
on some of the highest peaks in the world. When the waters swiftly withdrew,
huge chunks of earth, rock and other material broke off and became massive
mudslides. Many believe this is the reason the Grand Canyon was cut from the
earth as it was.
The
dead, decaying animal and sea life, as well as the birds that drowned were
covered by the mud. People, also, according to the Bible, died by the millions
and became a part of the mixture that formed within the pockets where oil is
now found.
Nowhere
on earth was there more lushness of plant and animal life than in the region
where God had planted the Garden of Eden. It is sensible to think, if one
believes the Bible, that the area of Eden –which is the Middle East—would have
the largest deposits of oil. Presently
that area of the Middle East is said to have two-thirds of all known oil in the
world. It is interesting to note that it is estimated that 77 percent of the
world’s total recoverable oil has already been discovered.[i]
Oil,
curse or blessing?
Genesis 3:17-19 To Adam he said, “Because
you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you,
‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful
toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and
thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of
your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it
you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 5: 28-29 When Lamech had lived 182
years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the
labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.
When
Noah and the seven others of his family stepped onto dry land from the ark,
they faced the curse God had pronounced on the earth. The curse had been issued
because of Adam’s sin of disobedience.
Noah
and his family, like all people since the fall in Eden, now had to work for
their food. They had to raise the animals. They had to first cultivate and sow
the ground with seed. They had to “toil” by the sweat of their brow to make a
living.
Hard
labor is not fun for most people. It certainly has never been fun to me! How
about you? There is usually a sense of accomplishment after a job well done
that makes us say as God said when he looked upon all he had created, “It is
good.” The actual doing of the work, however, can be back breaking.
Throughout
history, society has tried to come up with ways to create labor-saving devices.
For example, the aqueducts of ancient civilizations saved people from the hard
work of hauling water by bringing it directly into the cities. Later, the hand
pump to get water from deep wells became an important part of early American
life, even in frontier towns. And automated looms saved time and energy in
weaving cloth for clothing and other things.
Even
these earliest inventions required human power. Except in the few instances
where inventions could be driven by the wind or running water, man had to
physically generate with his own energy and strength the labor-saving invention
he used. He still “toiled by the sweat of his brow.”
But
the fantastic energy stored underground around the world soon completely
changed everything. The inventions the discovery of the power of oil inspired
are nothing short of phenomenal.
Think
of the progress! Up until the late 19th century, man could travel on
flat land no faster than the fastest horse could run. With the coming of
petroleum came the steam engine and other such inventions of locomotion. Man
could travel much faster than the fastest horse, for a much longer time before
having to stop.
The
20th century saw mankind go from the steam engine to the
computer-directed solid rocket engines that let man exceed 20,000 miles per
hour. And man walked on the moon!
All
of this happened in about the last 120 years. Before the discovery of the power
potential in petroleum, man remained basically unchanged in his ability to
progress so far as labor-saving devices were concerned.
Not
only did oil bring the electricity that powers the washing machines,
refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and all the rest, but it also created a
tremendous economic base that in turn brought about a leisure class.
Now,
there are those who laugh when they read that they are part of a “leisure”
class. They –we—still toil pretty hard.
Compared
to our ancestors, however, we Americans live like royalty. As a matter of fact,
when you think about it, with our modern conveniences and our ability to travel
to and from most anywhere on earth in only a few hours, we live far better than
did Solomon.
It
is estimated by the experts that On average, each American uses 25 barrels of
petroleum each year. The total petroleum consumption in the U.S. has grown at
an average annual rate of .5% over the past 25 years.[ii]
One barrel equals 42 U.S. gallons.
Most
stunning of all is the communication technology we enjoy. The Internet, for
example, is staggering in its present and future implications. Like the prophet Daniel prophesied in
Chapter 12, knowledge has increased beyond anything previously imagined. We
have only begun to realize the things that harnessing oil has made possible.
The Greed and Consumption
Begins
Genesis 11:6 The Lord said, “If as one
people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they
plan to do will be impossible for them.”
The
more work-saving devices, the better! This is the attitude of the people of the
industrialized world. And, more and
more nations are moving toward becoming industrialized.
People
in general, especially spoiled people with all the modern conveniences, want
more and more free time to play rather than work. Vacations, or even weekends
on the lakes with powerboats, are much more fun than working 8 to 5 to buy
those luxuries and pay the bills.
The
unquenchable need to buy more and more “things” is one form of greed. With
credit card debt at a staggering dollar amount in America, that greedy
addiction cannot be denied.
The
Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:1-4 that in the last days people will be
covetous and love pleasure more than they love God. Does that describe America
today? Everyone wants “things,” homes, cars, boats, etc., at least as good and,
hopefully, even better than the Joneses. When the warm days of springtime come,
even the true Christian churches seem to empty into the lakes and other
playgrounds on Sundays.
And
the plastic credit cards, themselves petroleum-based items, get Americans
deeper and deeper into debt. The greed factor gets much bigger. It grows like a
snowball rolling downhill. Companies rush to fill the consumers’ greed. Their
own greed and covetousness demand more and more production. Their manufacturing
depends upon more and more petroleum to provide the energy necessary for making
“things.”
And
this is where Mid-East war and peace come into the picture. Most of the world’s
petroleum is in the land God promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Not the tiny
strip of land-occupied by Israel today, but the total Promised Land (see:
Genesis 12:1-7, 13:14-16, 15:18, Deuteronomy 9:4-6, Joshua 1:1-11, 21:43-45.).
Today,
Israel’s neighbors claim most of the world’s petroleum. Most of Israel’s
neighbors are in a state of undeclared war against the tiny Israeli state. As a
matter of fact, the enemies of Israel are blood-vowed to push Israel into the
Mediterranean Sea.
The
mostly Arab governments who, when combined, control the vast oil fields of the
Middle East, are an economic superpower just as surely as America is a nuclear
superpower. They can bend the will of the rest of the world by raising or
simply by threatening to raise the price of oil. The lust for oil is probably
the major factor that will bring an invasion into the Middle East. But more
about that a bit later.
The
industrialized western nations have been lucky so far. The Arab countries, who
control two-thirds of the known oil reserves, are too busy fussing and feuding
with each other to get together and make demands so far as prices of petroleum
are concerned. They more often than not undercut each other’s prices and keep
the prices relatively low.
Recent
jumps in oil prices, thus gasoline prices throughout the U.S., are but a mild
taste of what might be on the horizon.
Oil,
then, is the one factor that is at the very heart of concern for world leaders.
This group, referred to by news media as “the international community” will do
all within their power to put a permanent peace into effect in that region
where the greatest oil supplies have been stored since the flood.
Pact With the Devil
Daniel 9:27 He will confirm a covenant
with many for one “seven” [i.e., one week of years]….
One
of the things we are to look for prophetically is a one-world government. Some
call it the “New World Order.” The
Bible says that at the end of this present age a powerful group of world
leaders will imagine to take over the world in all of its aspects,
economically, governmentally, technologically, religiously, etc. (Read
Revelation 17: 12-13.) That is what happened when Nimrod and his fellow
one-worlder friends wanted to establish a single government, economic and
religious world order. (Read Genesis, chapter 11.)
Humanism is the false religious
philosophy that drove Nimrod and the builders of the tower of Babel. Humanism
is still around, and growing as a philosophy through which to bring about total
control over all peoples of planet earth and all the wealth of the world. Oil
has a very high place in their big plans!
God
came down to earth and scattered the tower builders to all parts of the world.
He confused the language so they could no longer communicate well enough to
continue their satanic building project. Today’s similar building project
engineers are aided by the computer, which is helping them get around the
language barriers. God will again have to intervene, this time at Armageddon.
Today’s
would-be one-world builders probably think they are doing us a great service by
trying to bring us together in peace and unity. The Bible says, however, that
such a last days effort to do as Nimrod tried to do at Babel will end up
bringing about Antichrist and the worst time in the history of man. Humanism
says man himself can do it all apart from God. This is and has always been a
formula for utter destruction. Only God can and will take the war out of the
Mid-East war and peace equation.
The late Dr. John Walvoord
wrote:
“Now, most of the world is involved in the conflict in the Middle East, and the
prosperity of the world depends on some mechanism to guarantee peace and a
continued flow of oil from the region. This is precisely what biblical prophecy
predicts. The Middle East is the battleground for the road to Armageddon and
the second coming of Christ, the prophesied stage for the final drama of world
history. With world attention on the Middle East, Israel already back in her
ancient land, and the world in a mood for someone to guarantee peace, the major
components of the end time are in place.”[iii]
Deuteronomy 33:24-25 About Asher he said: “Most
blessed of sons is Asher; let him be favored by his brothers, let him bathe his
feet in oil. The bolts of your gates will be iron and bronze, and your strength
will equal your days….”
Some
very good students of prophecy believe Deuteronomy 33:24-25 concerning “oil”
and “Asher” to have reference to petroleum and the Middle East in the last
days. Other students, equally qualified, believe the reference of “oil” is
strictly to olive oil, the highly valued extract taken from olive trees. The
Middle East is, of course, well known for producing this natural product.
Still
others believe there is double reference in this Deuteronomy passage. They
think it could refer to both olive oil and petroleum, which is in even greater
abundance in the Middle East.
I
have not made an in-depth study in this particular prophetic area, so cannot
make even a good guess as to whether “oil” here might refer to one, the other,
or both. I do believe, though, that this passage is prophetic. The land given
to Abraham’s seed is guaranteed by God himself to receive a profound blessing.
It
is true that Israel and the area given the tribe of Asher have been blessed in
the ancient past. But Deuteronomy 33:24-25,
in my view, represents a great blessing at some future time, the likes of which
has not yet occurred.
Olive
oil is a well-known product of the region, to be sure. But olive oil is not of
enough significance in quantity or as a contributing factor to promise
tremendous blessings to either Asher or its neighbors as this prophecy seems to
suggest.
Neither
can we conclude that petroleum has been the kind of blessing implied in this
passage. To the contrary, oil has been more a reason for conflict in the region
than for blessing.
This
passage seems to mean that at some future time this region will be a genuine
blessing to all of Israel and all others of Asher’s neighbors. The oil referred
to will be of such great blessing that everybody will love the tribe of Asher.
The
tribes have not occupied their God-appointed territories in modern times. The
people of that tribe will not occupy that land until the Millennium. Therefore,
the promise of great blessings involving “oil” must be for that time when King
Jesus rules and reigns from Jerusalem.
There
is no way we can even imagine the things God has planned for that wonderful
era. But it is reasonable to wonder if the great petroleum reserves there now
might not be used at that future time in some marvelous way to bless the
nations.
I
can hear the environmentalists screaming, “There will have to be some
miraculous system to keep that stuff from polluting our air, if it’s going to
be a blessing rather than a curse!” I can hear some commuters hollering,
“prices will have to be better, or it won’t be heaven on earth!”
Regardless,
the oil is there, and in great abundance. This is not by accident.
Dr. Paul Feinberg wrote, in
respect to oil and Armageddon: “ Given the
oil reserves of this area and the economic power that comes from the
redistribution of the world wealth to this region, it is not hard to imagine
the prophecies of the ancient seers coming true. Though many regimes seem
grossly out of step with our modern, high-tech societies, there is wealth and
power enough to send all the nations of the world there to protect that they
see as their own self-interests.[iv]
Genesis 11:2-3 “As men moved eastward,
they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come,
let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone,
and tar for mortar.”
Middle
East soil cannot contain the petroleum substances that boil just beneath its
surface. The tower of Babel builders found the sticky stuff to be a devilish
blessing rather than a curse. They used it to paste together the bricks they
made to build the ungodly structure.
“Slime”
was the thick, asphalt-like material they found in abundance on the plane of
Shinar. It apparently was perfect for the project Nimrod was determined to
complete.
The
boiling petroleum broth has been a constant part of some areas of the regions
throughout recorded history. The south end of the Dead Sea was said to have
looked like a boiling cauldron of asphalt as recently as the late 19th
century.
Genesis 11:4 “…Then they said, “Come,
let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so
that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the
whole earth.”
Saddam Hussein left Kuwait in a hurry when
the Desert Storm coalition forces
pulverized much of his military in 1991. Before he left that small country he
had invaded for its oil riches, he set the oil wells on fire.
Millions
of petrodollars went up in black,
sky-darkening smoke. Oil fire specialists were called in to douse the flame and
smoke. The Iraqi dictator knew exactly where he could hurt the western
industrial nations most. The money lenders of the world –the great financiers
that control world economies—were, for the moment, helpless to stop their
losses. One big part of their tremendous power seemed to be literally going up
in smoke!
Those
black towers of steel represent, at least symbolically, the modern day tower of
Babel. The structures, looking like small Eiffel towers on the desert sand,
serve as monuments to the one-world gigantic monetary power structure being
built today. As stated before, this was the primary reason all of those
nations, including Saddam Hussein’s frightened neighbors, got together to stop
the rampaging tyrant.
We
watch and complain about the rising fuel prices. Oil and its costs affects us
in so many ways that that topic would itself provide enough material to make a
book. Gasoline is only one aspect of oil price considerations. Electricity and
all that involves, plastics for every manufacturing process you can name,
communications and its many aspects, all these and many more things are
impacted by the price of petroleum. The United States is particularly a sitting
target for price increase tyranny. The American people will yet suffer the
consequences of the one-world controllers’ intentions to gather to themselves
the wealth of the world.
The
vast wealth of the Middle East must be preserved at all costs. Even to the destruction
of national economies and of human life. The Middle East is the one area of the
world where the one-world tower builders will control, no matter the price.
Armageddon will be their final attempt to stop God from establishing Jesus
Christ’s throne in the heart of that land.
Real
Rags to Riches
Revelation 18:11-18 The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because
no one buys their cargoes any more—cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and
pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood,
and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble;
cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and
olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and
bodies and souls of men. They will say, “the fruit you longed for is gone from
you. All your riches and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.” The
merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far
off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn and cry out: “Woe! Woe,
O great city, dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and glittering with
gold, precious stones and pearls! In one hour such great wealth has been
brought to ruin!” Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors,
and all who earn their living from the sea, will stand far off. When they see
the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, “Was there ever a city like this
great city?”
As
has been demonstrated within recent years, the economic well-being of entire
nations depends upon availability of reasonably priced energy. The state of
California, itself having as large an economy as most nations, is a prime
example just within the United States.
Political
environmental extremists, by forbidding the building of new power plants and
prohibiting the development of energy resources, have greatly affected
California’s way of life.
Rolling
brownouts and blackouts of electricity in 2001 caused problems from inconvenience
to hardship on many Californians.
OPEC
(Oil Producing Exporting Countries) have the power to cause all nations to bend
to their will in a similar and more troubling way. Their power is based upon
their ability to control 1) production, 2) prices and 3) embargo.
They
are, in effect, a superpower. National economies rise and fall based upon the
petroleum they can distribute and withhold. Oil is the lifeblood of the
developed and the developing nations of the world.
Even
the rumor of supply shortages threatens the lifestyles of people in America,
Europe and Japan, the nations having the most to lose when OPEC turns down the
flow of petroleum. Energy, which is far and away fueled by oil more than by any
other source, is the thing that is at the heart of the developing one world
order’s ability to control the citizenry of planet earth.
Energy
is at the center of the power and wealth that provide livelihoods –and
luxuries. Revelation has much to say about the end-time Babylonian system of
economic control over people, as the Scripture passage above indicates. The
very souls of men, women and children are at the mercy of the elite who control
buying and selling.
That
system of commerce depends upon the ability to deliver the goods. Therefore,
they who control the oil that is used in the manufacturing and delivery of
merchandise are the masters of this world system!
The
sheiks and leaders of the Middle
East, with two-thirds of petroleum deposits of the world, are in a commanding
position as they deal with the one-world builders.
Jeremiah 17:3-4 My mountain in the land and
your wealth and all your treasures I will give away as plunder, together with
your high places, because of sin throughout your country. Through your own fault
you will lose the inheritance I gave you. I will enslave you to your enemies in
a land you do not know…
Much
of the tremendous oil riches lie beneath land promised to Abraham’s seed in
Genesis 17. Israel, however, refused to fully claim that promised land.
Worse,
God’s chosen people disobeyed God’s loving instructions on a number of
occasions. When they did, they were put out of the portions of the original
land grant territory they did occupy.
Other
peoples moved in and occupied the land. Intruders still hold on to the majority
of Israel’s land today. But, their land grab was, is, and will always be
illegal in God’s perfect sight.
Just
as Jeremiah prophesied, the land has yielded its treasures and substance to
those other than God’s disobedient people. Oil is the treasure and substance in
our day. The mostly Islamic Arabs now have the riches, as foretold in that
Jeremiah 17 passage.
With
the second industrial revolution
came an explosion of wealth for many of the tent-dwelling Arabs and others in
that land of oil. The most powerful of those people suddenly found themselves
among the richest on earth. This is because their petroleum was needed to run
the motorized machinery of industry’s production lines. The sheiks and kings of
the Middle East did literally go from rags to riches. From tent to high rent!
At
the same time however, despite their nations’ riches from oil sales, the
majority of those people remain under the oppressive dark force of Islam. Most
of the Arab and other populations of the Middle East live as poorly as did
their ancestors. Those royal families and other privileged people in high
places enjoy the limousines, the jet planes, palaces, etc. You might say:
That’s the way it is in America, too. Only the few have the wealth.
But
the difference is that Americans have the opportunity to work and worship as
they please. Religion, under the guise of government, does not hold an iron
grip around the throats of our people. Our heritage is filled with rags to
riches stories concerning men and women who have achieve great wealth.
The
right to worship without fear of having our heads chopped off for believing in
a way different from the state religion is at the heart of our true wealth.
This is a right we must not take for granted. There will come a time when the
whole world will be forced to live as many of the poor unfortunates in much of
the Middle East live today. The story of that future horror can be found in
Revelation, chapter 13.
Jeremiah 17:11 Like a partridge that
hatches eggs it did not lay is the man who gains riches by unjust means. When
his life is half gone, they will desert him, and in the end he will prove to be
a fool.
Riches
seem to most of us a blessing. We think of how wonderful it would be to come
into a lot of money. This covetousness is easily seen in the popularity of such
recent TV programs as “Who wants to be a millionaire?”
Daydreaming
about lots of money has not just recently become part of our culture. Some of
us remember a program called “The Millionaire.” In this series of stories, an
unknown donor gave away one million dollars each week to a very surprised
person. It was, of course, fiction, but it was a very popular show.
The
stories sometimes portrayed that the million dollar gift ended up being a
source of unhappiness rather than joy.
Ishmael
–remember him? Abraham’s son by Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid, was promised great
blessings by God.
Many
of the Arab people today legitimately claim Abraham as their father. Some
prophecy students believe that because the Arab nations have the greatest
amount of oil, that fact is fulfillment of God’s promise to bless Abraham’s
descendants—in this case, his descendents by Keturah, whom the patriarch
married following Sarah’s death.
But
we must look at the truth of the matter. The oil riches cannot be a blessing
from God. He did not promise this part of Abraham’s family the land they
presently occupy. Most of that land is rightfully the Jews land. It belongs to
Israel. God promised it to them.
Dr. John Walvoord said with
regard to God’s Word on the land grant promises to Israel: “This biblical account
clearly referred to a specific geographical land, not some general blessing or
a promise of heaven. The continued revelation of God to Abram elaborated the
promise again as recorded in Genesis 17. … The promise of the land is tied to
the promise of a continuing heritage…The meaning to Abraham and the early
readers of Scripture is clear. The land promised was Palestine, stretching from
the Sinai Desert north and east to the Euphrates River. This would include all
the holdings of present-day Israel, Lebanon, and the West Bank of Jordan, plus
substantial portions of Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.”[v]
Abraham’s
family by Hagar and later by Keturah will come into their full blessing during
the Millennium era. They will then become a great nation just as the Lord
promised.
Today,
however, they are under a curse, not a blessing.
God’s Word in the matter is absolutely true. The Arab people today continue to live under the curse of radical Islamic fundamentalists, who would just as soon murder their own as the Jews they hate so much.
The
internationalist one-world builders more often than not look the other way when
these poor, hapless people suffer atrocities by those over them. This is
because the world wants the vast oil deposits the Islamic tyrants hold in their
bloodstained hands.
Ezekiel - 38:1-3 “And the word
of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land
of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, And
say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince
of Meshech and Tubal.”
Ezekiel 38:10-12 “Thus saith the Lord GOD;
It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy
mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought: And thou shalt say, I will go up to
the land of un-walled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell
safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates,
To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate
places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the
nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the
land."
War
has been the way of life for people of the Middle East for centuries. We know
from our daily, even hourly, news reports from that region that the people
there live everyday under threat of a breakout of fighting.
Many
times these fightings involve gunfire and people are killed. Or terrorist bombs
are used to murder both Arabs and Jews who only want to live in peace.
There
is coming a time when God, himself, will intervene directly into this matter of
Mid-East war and peace.
Ezekiel
the prophet foretells this coming time of God’s intervention. The prophet says
this will happen in the “latter days.” The prophecy even predicts the reason
why the festering boil of hostility will come to a head. God will allow the
leader of those who hate Israel to “ think an evil thought.”
That
leader is called in the Bible, “Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.”
The “evil thought” will involve some sort of “spoil.” What is “spoil”? In this
particular meaning of the word, ”spoil” (as given in the KJV) are the material
things that are the reward of victory in war. The leader called “Gog” by God’s
Word will lust after something in the heart of Palestine that will promise him
great riches as his reward for victory.
It
isn’t a great stretch of credulity to believe that oil is chief among the
spoils of war the Gog leader will seek.
Of
course, the Bible says that leader and his forces will never achieve their
objective. God will supernaturally destroy all but one-sixth of the Gog-Magog
coalition. This will render forces of this area more or less impotent for
war-making for the most part.
This
is perhaps when Antichrist and his forces will move to fill the void left by
the devastated Gog-Magog armies. Other forces of greed and plunder will then
begin to beat the drums of war. Middle east oil will likely draw their
collective attention to the region.
Antichrist
will take notice of that ravenous desire to control what he has staked out for
himself. Here’s what God’s Prophetic Word has to say.
“But
tidings out of the east and out of the north shall trouble him: therefore he
shall go forth with great fury to destroy, and utterly to make away many.” (Dan
11: 44)
The
one place on earth that Antichrist will covet is Jerusalem, and in particular,
Mount Moriah, and the very place where the Holy of holies will sit in the
Jewish Temple, which will have been rebuilt by that time. Satan wants to claim
the very spot where the Ark of the covenant sat, because that spot seems to be the direct contact point between God and
man. Remember –this is where the veil was rent from top to bottom, signifying
men, women, and children now have direct access to God the Father through Jesus
Christ, His Son who died at that instant of the veil’s ripping for the sins of
the world.
All
armies will begin to march to the valley of Jezreel, on the plain of Esdraleon,
near the ancient city of Megiddo. They will come to do battle –no doubt, in
part at least, over the dwindling petroleum resources in the Middle East.
Actually,
however, God will be drawing them there to put an end to mankind’s madness. The
Lord says about that:
“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)
The
Lord will slaughter the armies of rebels that day at the final battle of the
war called Armageddon.
[i] National Academy of Engineering, 2000, “Greatest Achievements” website, “Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies”
[ii] Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review 1997, DOE/EIA-0384(97). D.C., July, 1998), Table 5.1.
[iii] John Walvoord, p. 15
[iv] Paul Feinberg, “The Mideast March to Megiddo,” Foreshocks of Antichrist, p. 269, Harvest House, general editor William T. James, 1997