Salon: The Ancient Prophecy About the Iran War is a Modern Invention
Let's make one thing crystal clear at the beginning of this discussion. Trump is not God's chosen instrument for anything. He is the Antichrist, the epitome of evil, doing the work of Satan. That is the only Biblically supported conclusion that can be discerned from the scripture that is consistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Even for those who don't really express a belief in the spiritual side of Christianity, an academic study of the Bible would lead to this conclusion. There are no parallels that can be drawn, becausee the culture of the times in which the Old Testament was written no longer exists, and cannot be made applicable in a culture that is four thousand years distant.
Trump is not just an unrepentant sinner, or a "baby Christian" as some call him. He's not a Christian at all, having publicly denied any accepted Christian conversion experience in favor of believing in his own god, according to his own words. His narcissism, at any rate, would never allow him to submit to the Holy Spirit in the way that Christians teach conversion, and he has happily and openly denied any such submission, or, even that he has committed sin.
If one accepts that the Biblical record is accurate in its representation and revelation of the nature of God, then it is not possible to make the claim that "God sometimes uses fallen people to achieve his will" in the way that it is applied by those who try to make it fit Trump. The culture and society in which the Old Testament was written, and to which it applied, is long, long gone, and under the new covenant, established under Jesus the Christ, faith is an influence likened to salt and light, not to the power wielded by a single leader. That was only for the protection of Ancient Israel, which no longer exists. It's a theocratic rule that God hasn't offered to anyone else since then.
So in spite of claims to the contrary, there is no Biblical evidence or reason for Trump to bear a title of "God's annointed." He doesn't qualify anyway, since repentance is a requirement, and he openly denies ever having felt the need to do that. The only god he believes in is the idol he's made out of himself, and his worship of money.
Christian Dispensational Pre-Millenialism is False Doctrine
One of the first differences I discovered between the academic study of the Bible in a Christian Doctrines class in college, and what I had been taught in the church in which I grew up was that the "end times," as described by my Sunday School teachers and pastor was not consistent with what the gospel writers in the New Testament, or the Book of Revelation for that matter, said about "the end of the age." Other than a few general allusions, there is no specific "Armageddon calendar" that can be discerned from anywhere in the New Testament, or the book of Daniel, which often accompanies this kind of pretend prophecy.
It takes changing the standards for interpreting the Bible to come to a dispensationalist interpretation that includes end times calendars and events that are "signs of the times." None of the events pointed to as signs by dispensationalists fits the specific circumstances written in the New Testament. It's all sheer projection. The prophetic predictions of the New Testament come to an abrupt end in 70 CE, with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. In fact, it really ends with John's writing of Revelation prior to that time, because the evidence is clear that he wrote it before then.
If Revelation had been written after 70 CE, by John the Apostle, then he would not have failed to include a narrative of the destroyed Temple, which Jesus predicted, in his presence, just thirty years before. I do not think John would have missed recording the evidence of the accuracy of Jesus' prophecy. We do not have the complete historical record of events that occurred between Jesus' resurrection and the destruction of the Temple, so there is no way to confirm or deny that all of those events leading up to 70 CE didn't happen. My guess is that they did.
Most conservative Evangelicals will tell you that the "rapture," which is an event in which Christians are supposed to be physically lifted into heaven, is recorded as prophecy in the book of Revelation. The word doesn't apprear anywhere in the Bible, and it would be extremely difficult to draw the conclusion that this is some kind of future event from what few references there are to anything similar, because the verses that are used, in Thessalonians, are a historical reference, not a prophecy. This is actually a doctrine that did not appear in Christianity until the 1800's, and its proclaimer, James Darby, has no credibility, nor any accurate Biblical interpretation to use as evidence to support his claim.
But American Christians seem to be prone to believing false prophets when it comes to "end times" doctrine. There'a a long history of believing frauds when it comes to the "rapture" and the second coming and the end times. And the whole modern doctrine of premillenial dispensationalism is a colossal fraud perpetrated mostly on conservative Evangelicals who don't know how to interpret the Bible or understand its history and context.
So Let's Set the Record Straight
You will not find anything in the Bible that is prophetic, or which indicates in any way the inevitability of the current war in Iran, or that it has anything to do at all with the return of Christ or anyone's end times Armageddon calendar. The last Biblical prophecy, which is found in the book of Revelation, was fulfilled in history shortly after the establishment of the Christian church in Jerusalem. There are no future events left to be fulfilled, and what we have in the Bible is a historical reference to the founding of the Christian church, and the principles of theology and doctrine which define its practice.
Even for those who take the Bible seriously as an inspired, self-revelation give by God's inspiration, there can't be any literal application of a text that was not written to be more than inspiration, information and a word of caution to those who were its original audience. Yes, it does define Christian doctrine, reveals the core teaching of the Christian gospel and establishes the parameters for the existence and ministry of the Christian church. But it does not provide a list of events leading up to the end of the world, or the second coming of Christ. Jesus himself declared that such was not available.
More than anything else I could say, this is an absolute proof of why the separation of Church and statte is an absolute necessity in a democratic constitutional republic. And that is to protect the American people and their nation from the destruction its enemies, including these pseudo-Christian cults of conservative Evangelicals, are trying to achieve.
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