Copyright © 2024 Michael A. Brown
The persecution and attempted
genocide of the Jewish people has been an oft-repeated pattern in history ever
since they became an ethnic people group in their own right. Whether it be the attempt of Pharaoh to kill off
the newborn Hebrew males in the book of Exodus; or whether it be Haman’s
attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish race in Queen Esther’s time; or whether
it be king Herod’s attempt to kill the Messiah as a baby, which resulted in the
callous murder of all the male Jewish infants under two years old in and around
Bethlehem; or whether it be the pogroms in Europe through the Middle Ages and
right into the twentieth century; or whether it be the Nazis’ ‘final solution’
which wiped out two-thirds of European Jewry, the story has been the same or
similar for millennia.
The
underlying spiritual cause at the root of all this is that Satan, the dragon,
has an unreasonable, unreasoning and unremitting envy and hatred of the Jewish
people. He has hated God the Father ever
since he was stripped of his position in heaven as an anointed guardian cherub
and was thrown out because of his sin (Ezek. 28:14-17). And he is also deeply envious and resentful
of the fact that Jesus as the Jewish Son of Man has been raised to the highest
place and reigns at the Father’s right hand, with all things placed under his
feet (Eph. 1:19-22). The angels have
been commanded to worship him, rather than Satan who desires to usurp God’s
throne and be worshipped himself (Heb. 1:6, Isa. 14:12-14).
Satan’s
hatred and envy for God and his Christ spills over onto those whom God chooses
and blesses in this world. The Jews have
been God’s chosen people with whom he has lived in covenant relationship; they
are the bearers of his promises; the channel through whom he revealed his word
and his Law to the world; the inheritors of the promised land; they are God’s
chosen ethnic group through whom he brought the Messiah Saviour into the world,
and therefore they are Jesus’ own ethnic kin (Rom. 9:4-5). Therefore, Satan hates the Jewish people
bitterly. This unreasoning envy and
hatred of the Jewish people has moved Satan repeatedly to try to steal their
land away from them, to destroy their material blessings, and to literally do
away with them time after time during history.
Although Christ did crush the serpent’s head through the
cross-resurrection event, yet the serpent for his part has repeatedly bruised
the heel of the Messiah by attacking his people and in particular those who
truly believe (Gen. 3:15).
We
can see this envy and hatred for Israel and the Jews displayed openly towards
them on many occasions by their geographical neighbours. The prophet Ezekiel tells of the ancient
hostility that Ammon, Moab, Edom and Philistia displayed towards the Jewish
people in the way they treated them (Ezek. ch.25). Furthermore, it was especially on the
occasions when Israel was disobedient towards God and his laws, and when
therefore God handed them over to their enemies, that we can see how these
neighbouring peoples treated Israel and the Jews. There are repeated examples of this in the
cyclical periods of judgement in the book of Judges. This hostility and envy towards the Jews can
be summed up in the following words from psalm 83:
‘With cunning they conspire against
your people; they plot against those you cherish. “Come,” they say, “let us destroy them as a
nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more... Let us take possession of the pasture-lands
of God.”’ (Ps. 83:4,12)
This unremitting envy and hatred of
Satan will move him to attempt once again to annihilate the Jewish people
during the Great Tribulation. By the
time that Antichrist arises, the majority of the Jews in the world will have
returned to Israel to live there, in fulfilment of many prophetic
scriptures. This will present Antichrist
with what he will think is the ideal opportunity to get rid of them once and
for all. They will mostly all be back in
their own homeland, and therefore in one relatively small enclosed geographical
place. So he will attempt to possess
their land for himself, to wipe them out, and to establish his own millennial
rule there, with his throne in Jerusalem.
This will be Antichrist’s own ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ (to
use the Nazis’ infamous phrase).
The
present ‘Middle East problem’ is not ultimately about borders and final status
issues in a two-state solution. It is
about Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation, and the right of Jewish
people to live in their national homeland.
Although some moderate Muslim Arab leaders might well pay lip-service to
this, in the interests of the ongoing peace process, yet the real, but often
hidden underlying attitude of the house of Islam generally is that the nation
of Israel should not exist and that Jewish people have no right to live there,
except insofar as it is under the rule of Islam. What many Westerners do not know or
understand is the Islamic belief that once a land or country has come
under the rule of Islam, it ought to remain so, because it has become ‘Islamic
land.’ The area of land that is
now Israel was under the rule of Islam from c629 AD until 1948, so it is
considered by Muslim Arabs to be Islamic land.
And therefore it must remain so.
The Arabic word nakba, which Muslims apply to the declaration of
the modern state of Israel in 1948, literally means ‘a catastrophe.’ In their thinking, Islamic land had reverted
to becoming infidel Jewish land. Hence,
the ongoing existence of the nation state of Israel is a contradiction of this
underlying Islamic belief, and it cannot therefore be Allah’s will.[1]
Hence, the underlying longer-term
aim of many Muslim Arab leaders, especially among the more dominant hardline
and extremist groups, is to re-possess this once-Islamic land and to restore it
to Islamic rule, which is Allah’s will for it.
Allied with this, these hardline and extremist groups also want to rid
the land altogether of Jewish people, except as they may convert to Islam. Israeli leaders all know that it is
their very existence, both as a nation and as a people, that is at stake in the
intermittent Middle East conflicts.
So, although generation after
generation of well-meaning Western leaders persevere in trying to bring a
workable solution to this Middle Eastern political conundrum, yet the West’s
hope of bringing lasting peace and harmony into this context, in the form of a
two-state solution, is ultimately vain. There
are too many in the house of Islam who simply do not want it. Although there will at some point be a
covenant between Israel and at least some of the surrounding Arab nations (as I
described in the previous chapter), there will never be a full and harmonious
two-state solution which brings lasting peace.
Ultimately, the modern state of Israel in its present form is only
temporary: the land will simply be invaded and taken over by Antichrist, and
his attempt to implement the ‘final holocaust’ will then follow.
Reading:
Revelation ch.12
1.
The woman and the dragon
The vision of the woman in
Revelation ch.12 calls to mind the second of Joseph’s dreams (Gen.
37:9-11). The woman is clothed with the
sun, the moon is under her feet, and she is wearing a crown of twelve stars. In Joseph’s dream, the sun, moon and stars
all came and bowed down before Joseph.
The difference between the eleven stars in the dream and the twelve in
John’s vision can be explained simply by the fact that Joseph as one of the
twelve brothers would be bowed down to by the other eleven.
In
Joseph’s dream, the sun, moon and stars represented the nascent Hebrew
community. Therefore, in the context of
the Great Tribulation in the second half of Daniel’s seventieth week, many
commentators agree that the woman of Revelation ch.12 represents Israel, the
ancient covenant people of God, many of whom will have come to true faith in
Jesus as their Messiah during the first half of the seventieth week.
The
fact that it is Israel whom the woman represents is confirmed in the symbolic
narrative which follows. The woman is
pregnant and gives birth to a male child, while her arch-enemy the dragon waits
in front of her to devour the child as soon as he is born. The allusion is clearly to Satan’s desire to
kill off the Messiah after he was born in Bethlehem, using king Herod. Satan is the dragon (v.9). The Messiah is here seen as having been born
into the family community of Israel, rather than simply being born of Mary his
physical mother. Herod’s attempt to kill
the Messiah failed, of course. The next
allusion is to the ascension of Christ, as the child is snatched up to God and
his throne. So the beginning and ending
of Jesus the Messiah’s earthly life are presented to us in two simple, brief
allusions one after the other (vv.1-5).
This vision of the woman and the
dragon then shifts immediately to the time of the Great Tribulation, in which
the woman is cared for and protected in the desert for 1,260 days (v.6). When Satan the dragon has been hurled to
earth, enraged and furious because he knows that his time is short, he tries to
attack the woman (i.e. Israel and the Jewish people, v.13). However, we are told that she is saved
out of his reach by God and divinely protected throughout the time of the Great
Tribulation:
‘The woman fled into the desert to
a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260
days.’ (Rev. 12:6)
‘The woman was given the two wings
of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the
desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out
of the serpent’s reach. Then from his
mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep
her away with the torrent. But the earth
helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon
had spewed out of his mouth.’ (Rev. 12:14-16)
When the dragon understands that
the woman is being divinely protected in the desert and that he cannot reach or
harm her, he returns and continues with his plan of attacking those Jews who
are still in the land of Israel:
‘Then the dragon was enraged at the
woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring – those who
obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.’
(Rev. 12:17)
So this vision tells us two major
facts about what will happen to the Jewish people during the Great Tribulation:
some of them will manage to escape from the clutches of Antichrist and will be
divinely protected in a desert place throughout this period, and the rest of
them, who have remained in the land of Israel, will go through the persecution
and attempted genocide that Antichrist will wreak upon them. These two aspects are addressed separately
below.
2. The
woman in the desert
When the ‘abomination that causes
desolation’ is set up in the temple, believing Jews are warned prophetically to
flee just as soon as they can from Judea, because they will know by this that
the end-times period of great distress, the Great Tribulation, is about to
begin:
‘So when you see standing in the
holy place “the abomination that causes desolation”… then let those who are in
Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one
on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house… Pray that your flight will not take place in
winter or on the Sabbath. For then there
will be great distress…’ (Matt. 24:15-21)
Those who hear and heed this
prophetic warning that Jesus gave, will escape from the horrors that Antichrist
will unleash, and they will be divinely protected during the whole of the
1,260-day period of the Great Tribulation.
Antichrist will not be able to reach them or harm them. Personally, I have no doubt that not every
true believer will heed this warning.
There are always true believers who either do not hear and receive God’s
prophetic word, or who simply ignore it.
It has always been that way amongst God’s people, and there is no reason
to think that it will be any different in the Great Tribulation. It will be a case of either ‘flee just as you
are and be protected,’ or ‘delay, stay and inevitably suffer.’ Those who heed and flee are represented in
the vision of Revelation ch.12 by the woman who flees into the desert.
It
is interesting that, whereas the woman flees into the desert, those who flee
from Judea are told to flee to the mountains.
So do we have a contradiction here between ‘desert’ and ‘mountains’? A good way in which commentators deal with
this is to bring several relevant prophetic strands together. That of the desert; that of the mountains;
that of the fact that Ammon, Moab and Edom (i.e. modern-day Jordan) are
delivered from Antichrist’s rule (Dan. 11:4); the fact that the woman is
protected and cared for during the entirety of the Great Tribulation period;
and the fact that the prophet Daniel tell us that prince Michael, the guardian
angel of Israel, will arise in this time to protect this remnant of God’s
people (Dan. 12:1).
So
there are many commentators who believe that this large group of believers will
escape from Judea (including from Jerusalem), and they will find refuge and
safety over the border in Jordan, in a place whose geographical location
provides a high degree of natural protection and security. It has been suggested that the ruins of
ancient Petra in Bozrah / Edom (which is now the mountainous desert region of
south-west Jordan) could well provide such a refuge. They believe that this community of believers
will be supernaturally sustained and provided for by God for the whole
1,260-day period of the Great Tribulation, while prince Michael provides
angelic protection over them. There are
several noteworthy examples of such supernatural provision in Bible
narratives. Furthermore, being that
these believers will be divinely sustained for the whole 1,260 days, it is
self-evident that they will not get raptured.
No doubt they will often cry out to God in prayer for deliverance for
their people from Antichrist, and their cry to God will be answered when Jesus
returns in his Second Advent and brings this deliverance. Commentators believe that the prophetic
reference to Bozrah in Isaiah 63:1 supports this interpretation (and this is
explained in chapter 23).
‘Then I will go back to my place
until they admit their guilt. And they
will seek my face; in their misery they will earnestly seek me.’
(Hosea 5:15)
3. Persecution
and the final holocaust
It is significant that in
Revelation ch.12 we are told that it is Satan the dragon, not the end-times
Beast of ch.13, who pursues the woman.
As I showed above, this emphasises that intermittent evil persecution of
the Jewish people has been a fact of their entire history, not just something
that will happen during the Great Tribulation.
And again, it shows that such persecution is rooted in unremitting
satanic hatred and envy. Satan has
always been there, lurking behind the scenes, watching, planning and waiting
for opportunities to attack them.
Antichrist, as the end-times Beast of ch.13, will embody and be
possessed by this same satanic hatred and envy, and he will be the particular
human channel through whom Satan will once again rise up against the Jews,
during the time of the Great Tribulation.
After
invading and taking over the land of Israel, Antichrist will begin to persecute
and seek to destroy the Jewish people, whether or not they truly believe in
Christ as Messiah:
‘He was given power to make war
against the saints and to conquer them.’
(Rev. 13:7)
‘[The Gentiles] will trample the
holy city for 42 months.’ (Rev. 11:2)
‘When the dragon saw that he had
been hurled to earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male
child.’ (Rev. 12:13)
‘Then the dragon was enraged at the
woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring – those who
obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.’
(Rev. 12:17)
Antichrist will persecute and seek
to destroy secularised or religious Jews who do not believe in Jesus as
Messiah, simply because they are the physical seed of Abraham. He hates them simply for what they are and what
they represent. He will also persecute
and seek to destroy those Jews who do truly believe in Jesus, because of their
living faith in him and the fact that they belong to the kingdom of God. And he will, of course, also persecute and
seek to destroy any and all Gentiles who may have come to faith in Christ
during the time since the rapture (and I have addressed that in the sections
above).
As
Antichrist’s evil intentions begin to unfold, the prophet Zechariah tells us
what will take place in Jerusalem: this divided city will be ethnically
cleansed of Jews, their homes ransacked, and the women raped:
‘I will gather all nations to
Jerusalem to fight against it: the city will be captured, the houses ransacked,
and the women raped. Half of the city
will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the
city.’ (Zech. 14:2)
Antichrist will then begin to
perpetrate what will prove to be an ongoing, massive act of ethnic genocide
against the Jewish people, attempting to wipe them out altogether. Commentators often refer to this as ‘the final
holocaust,’ drawing an obvious parallel with what happened during World War
2. Many, many Jews will die during this
time of Jacob’s trouble, but there will also be many others who survive:
‘“In the whole land,” declares the
Lord, “two-thirds will be struck down and perish; yet one-third will be kept in
it. This third I will bring into the
fire; I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer
them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The Lord is our
God.’”’ (Zech. 13:7-9)
‘These are the words the Lord spoke
concerning Israel and Judah: “This is what the Lord says: Cries of fear are
heard – terror not peace. Ask and see:
can a man bear children? Then why do I
see every strong man with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labour,
every face turned deathly pale? How
awful that day will be! None will be
like it. It will a time of trouble for
Jacob, but he will be saved out of it.”’
(Jer. 30:4-7)
‘He who has an ear let him
hear. If anyone is to go into captivity,
into captivity he will go. If anyone is
to be killed with the sword, with the sword he will be killed. This calls for patient endurance and
faithfulness on the part of the saints.’
(Rev. 13:9-10)
These verses are clear that there
will certainly be an attempt by Antichrist to perpetrate ethnic genocide
against the Jewish people during the Great Tribulation. Both secularised and religious Jewish people
will suffer in this time. Many Jews will
have become believers in Jesus as Messiah during the first half of the
seventieth week (through the ministry of the Two Witnesses and the 144,000
sealed believers), and, for those who did not manage to escape this time of
tribulation by fleeing into the mountains, it will be a time of deep testing
and refining for them. Others will no
doubt become believers during this time of tribulation. One third of all Jewish people in the land will
saved, tested and refined, and, through this, they will be grounded into living
covenant relationship with God through Jesus the Messiah. When Jesus returns in his Second Advent, he
will be coming back to many Jewish people who truly believe in him, and whose
faith and relationship with him has been thoroughly tested and refined through
the fires of persecution. Their cry for
deliverance from Antichrist will be answered through the divine intervention of
Christ’s Second Advent.
Just
as the horrific evil of the holocaust of World War 2 led to the establishment
just a few years later of the modern state of Israel and the return of Jews en
masse to their historical homeland, so the holocaust of the Great
Tribulation will lead to the intervention of Christ himself in his Second
Advent and the establishing of his millennial kingdom soon thereafter.
Copyright
Notice
THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
[1] The charter of
Hamas defines the territory of Palestine as an Islamic waqf, an endowment
bequeathed to the house of Islam by Allah as a consecrated possession which it
is their duty to guard and protect until the Day of Judgement. It is therefore incumbent upon Muslims to
engage in jihad, violent if necessary, to free this land from its present
Jewish ‘occupation’ and to bring it back under the rule of Islam. They believe that the Day of Judgement cannot
come until Muslims have fought and killed the Jews, obliterated the modern
state of Israel, and re-possessed this land.
See https://www.ezrafoundation.org/post/is-israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza, accessed
10.05.2024.
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