At Sodom’s Gate
My mind is impressed, as the day of Israel’s sixty-fourth birth into the modern era arrives, that God’s dealing with man seems about to make full circle. By that, I mean that the Book given to humanity that is his love letter and His manual for living life on this planet, given through His chosen nation, opens, in my spiritual mind, to the pages of the time of Lot and his life in Sodom.
It seems to me that we can sense, if we consider the headlines today, the angels of judgment at the gates of our own nation. Are they there, sent by the Lord of Heaven, after having entertained the efforts of God’s servants–like Abraham those thousands of years ago—to find, percentage-wise, ten righteous people who have a heart for the things of the Lord?
Israel is the prototype nation--i.e., all successive nations have had Israel to use as a template of how to act, not act, react, and conduct the affairs within the human conditions of their time in the spotlight of history. We are at just such a time of examination, in my estimation, of our own much blessed country.
It is striking to me that a first-time author has hit it big with a book that deals almost precisely with the premise of this commentary. The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn uses just such a template to dissect the Almighty’s dealings with Israel as juxtaposed against the recent history of America.
This isn’t a review of that book, so I won’t say a great deal about it. Suffice it to say that I find the relevant points of similarities between the two nations quite remarkable, as presented by the author. I recall my own opening remarks in a book written not long after the attacks on the U.S. of September 11, 2001, as I reflect on what Mr. Cahn has written.
Television screens across America and the world repeatedly flashed videotape of the huge passenger jet crashing full-throttle into the enormous building. Dazed people watched in awestruck disbelief while trapped victims leaped from the building’s top floors, some holding hands with others when they jumped. The massive twin towers disintegrated and crumbled to flaming rubble. It was the most heinous terrorist attack ever recorded. Almost immediately, angry, frightened people began demanding answers to the insanity now forever etched in their memories. Many churches were filled the Sunday following the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. There was an instinctive sense that those murderous acts of terrorism were somehow foreordained. That the carnage now known as “Ground Zero” and the uncertain future is, in some troubling way, linked by prophetic destiny. (Prophecy at Ground Zero: From Today’s Middle East Madness to the Second Coming of Christ.)
The author of The Harbinger reaches much of the same sorts of conclusions as did the authors who collaborated with me in our book, released in 2002. He gets much more specific about Ground Zero in Lower East Manhattan than did we, providing some really chilling similarities between things written in prophecy about Israel and their fulfillment, and what has happened in America since that fateful 9/11 date. He does a credible job of postulating–with strong scriptural backing—on how the U.S. judgment looks to have begun taking place in earnest at the time the towers fell on September 11, 2001.
The bottom line is that events just this past week bring home in an almost eerie way that the angels of judgment must be at the very gates of our own nation. We have long recounted the many signals of impending prophetic fulfillment. The nation Israel is at the center of hatred in the U.N.; the reviving Roman Empire is rearranging daily into prophetic configuration; the "Roadmap to Peace" plan is being pushed to make Israel conform to the wishes of the international community; the world is moving swiftly toward one world–especially toward global economy that threatens to bring the dollar down and install some sort of electronic funds transfer system.
As if that weren’t enough evidence of where we stand on God’s prophetic timeline, there is Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the whole Islamic world coming together in a way that indicates the Gog-Magog prophecy of Ezekiel 38-39 is shaping for soon fulfillment. China represents a growing hegemonic threat not only in all of Asia, but in the whole world, economically speaking.
And now, astonishingly, the first sitting president of the United States in history, on the heels of his vice president first doing so, puts America directly at the gates of Sodom with his declaration that marriage should be made legal as between a man and a man and a woman and a woman. That is, it would indeed be astonishing—except that the U.S. citizenry have been desensitized by years of news and entertainment media inculcation, putting forward the idea that there is no difference between heterosexual and homosexual relationships. So, where at one time–no more than a decade ago—an incumbent president proposing such a thing would have sealed his own defeat, we now have no way of knowing if it will adversely affect his election chances.
Again, we hear the words of Jesus echo in forewarning of when He will next catastrophically intervene into earth’s history: “Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed” (Luke 17:28-30).
--Terry