When you think of Armageddon, you might think about a bloody, fierce war. It’s a war that ISIS is actually trying to make happen. But what if Armageddon isn’t really the final military showdown many people think about? What if it has nothing to do with battle?

<p>When you think of Armageddon, you might think about a bloody, fierce war. It’s a war that ISIS is actually trying to make happen. But what if Armageddon isn’t really the final military showdown many people think about? What if it has nothing to do with battle?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Voice Of Prophecy

Shawn Boonstra

ISIS and Armageddon

Welcome to Disclosure, a brand new program brought to you by the Voice of Prophecy.

I'm Jean Boonstra and I'm your host for today's program.

And sitting across the desk from me in our beautiful new studio here in Loveland, Colorado is our guest, my husband, Shawn Boonstra, who is also the regular host of this program.

I know you went down this long list of exciting guests and everybody said no and so here I am in studio today that's all you could get.

Well no, we have a very interesting topic that we want to discuss today.

I think it's going to be interesting yeah absolutely I think the title of today's show if we were to title it something we would call it Isis and the Battle of Armageddon.

And that is definitely timely and very interesting and I look forward to our discussion.

So let me ask you here Sean right before we get started Armageddon, the final battle of Bible prophecy.

It probably scares a lot of people when they hear that name Armageddon.

I mean people say really you're gonna do ISIS in the Battle of Armageddon?

Is you trying to create like a scary show and should we turn it off for a kid?

Here's why I want to look at this topic, Armageddon.

I want to talk about it because everybody's heard about it.

I've worked on 6 continents and you ask people, hey have you heard of Armageddon?

And then you ask them to explain it and it's pretty obvious after a while that they really don't know what it means.

So I thought today, why don't we open the Bible and just see what it means?

Let's just see what the Bible actually says.

Let's see what it actually says and look at some of the context and so on.

That's reason number 1, just because people have all heard of it and nobody really knows what it is.

There's so much tension in the Middle East.

I mean there's always been tension in the Middle East our whole lifetime, but it's rising that tension.

We've had a civil war in Syria, I was recently in Serbia and in Turkey and could see refugees who were on foot trying to get out of Syria.

There have been millions now who have fled.

They're trying to marry church and state together.

A lot of people are looking at this and they're thinking about last day showdowns because there's always a threat of war now and if there's a last day showdown maybe there'll be the battle of Armageddon.

So people are looking at the crisis and they're getting a little bit nervous and and this isn't the first time people have gotten nervous About the Middle East it happens every time there is a crisis I remember during the first Gulf War right Saddam Hussein had evaded Kuwait.

And then we saw Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

And people in the Western world, Christians, Bible-reading Christians in particular, were watching that and started to get really nervous when they heard rumors that Saddam Hussein was going to drop a Scud missile on the nation of Israel.

He's going to attack Israel and they started thinking, ooh, Armageddon is coming.

If there's an attack on Israel, Armageddon is coming.

So Sean, the news of dropping a Scud missile, is that a prophetic scenario?

Will there be a last day attack on Israel?

Yeah, in a lot of people's thinking there is and I think today in our study I want to examine that claim a little bit.

But to a lot of people's thinking yeah an attack on Israel is part of a prophetic last-day scenario And 1 of the reasons for that, at least for our generation, is that back in the 1970s there was this book, The Late Great Planet Earth.

Many of our listeners will have heard of it.

I have 1 of my old copies laying here on the desk.

The New York Times called it the number 1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade.

That may have been a little bit of a grandiose claim because I think they sold 15 million copies.

A lot of people probably still have a copy kicking around the house.

Why did it influence people's thinking about the Middle East?

What it really was was a popular version of a school of thought on Bible prophecy.

Hal Lindsey was popularizing a school of thought that was about a hundred and 30 years old or so at the time.

Futurism is this idea that most of what you read in the book of Revelation is not going to happen until the last gasp of human history.

And usually they say the last 7 years of history.

And a lot of people look at that and they say, yeah, you know, everything after say Revelation chapter 4 happens in the last couple years, last 7 years of history.

And everybody thinks that that's what Christians have always believed.

What surprises them when they begin to dig into this thinking is that it's kind of a new idea as far as Christianity goes.

We weren't futurists for the first 1800 years of our existence as a Christian church.

For the first 1800 years, most Christians were what you would call historicists.

And a historicist is somebody who looks at a prophecy, say in Daniel or Revelation, and they understand that that prophecy would begin fulfilling right away in the day of the prophet and continue fulfilling all the way down through time until Jesus comes, or the judgment takes place, or some big last day event.

And the reason we believe that is that it was the biblical position, frankly.

Revelation 1 verse 1, John is told he's going to see some things and write them down, John, because they will shortly take place.

It's going to begin fulfilling right in his day.

And so the early Christians, all the way for the first 1, 800 years or so of Christianity, they understood Bible prophecy is not just for a last generation, and it wasn't just for a first generation either.

There are people who say that, look it's just for the first generation.

It was all about Nero and the early first century church.

Now we've got futurists, preterists, and historicists.

But the belief was for the first 1800 years is that you and I we can all find ourselves in the line of Bible prophecy because some of it happened in John's day, some of it in the third century, some in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, all the way down to the second coming of Christ.

Now, how Lindsay is divergent from those first 1800 years, and so are all the futurists.

The late great planet Earth really followed what a futurist would say about Bible prophecy, and it kind of runs like this.

They used to call this the secret rapture theory.

He sneaks out of the world with all the true believers, and then there's 7 more years of earth's history.

And that's where they really focus prophecy on these additional 7 years of tribulation.

The Antichrist appears, some say at the beginning of the 7 years, some say in the middle of the 7 years.

He makes a deal with Israel, then He breaks the deal with Israel, and so on.

There are probably 200 variations on the scenario, but the common thread is that it all takes place in these last few years of human history.

Okay, well let's just pause for a second because you said that for the first 1800 years people didn't see Bible prophecy with the futurist vision.

So are you saying then that how Lindsay's version of the Second Coming was a new concept?

I mean he really made something popular, but it wasn't entirely new in the 1960s or 70s.

What he was doing was building on the work of what you would call dispensationalists.

And dispensationalists believe that all of scriptural history is broken into a number of key dispensations.

You've got the dispensation of the age of innocence with Adam and Eve in the garden.

Moses would be called the dispensation of the law.

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ISIS and Armageddon

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