Antichrist Will Arise Out of the Ancient Assyrian Empire Territory,
It extended into what is now Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, & Iraq,
And Syria seems to be the Logical Place for His Revelation
To Mankind as the Long Prophesied End Time Antichrist.
November 29, 2010
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
ARCHIVE PROPHECY UPDATE NUMBER 66 ON MICAH 5
A Series from Archive Prophecy Updates 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, and 69
WHAT IS THE NATIONALITY OF THE ANTICHRIST?
Part 5
May 3, 2003
Micah 5:1-4 – Now gather thyself in troops, O daughter of troops: he hath laid siege against us: they shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek. [2] But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. [3] Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth: then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel. [4] And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God; and they shall abide: for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.
These verses, exposited in Parts 1 through 4, were written more than 700 years before the birth of Christ. And yet they present: Bethlehem as His birthplace, His rejection as ruler over Israel, His last Passover in the daughter of troops Jerusalem, His head beatings by the troops of Pontius Pilate, Herod, and the High Priest, His rejection as the judge of Israel, His Father’s siege against Israel because of their rejection of the Son (which has lasted some 2000 years), Christ’s temporary rejection of Israel, His Second Advent as Messiah after Israel’s travail of 1260 days in the Negev Wilderness, at which time His brethren will return with Him to the nation of Israel, and the first 1000 years of His eternal kingdom, which phases into the final heaven age when the present earth and
heavens pass away.
Micah 5:5 – And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into our land: and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men.
Now, in verse 5, we find that “this man” will himself “be the peace” because He personally brings it in by Himself when he returns to be “great unto the ends of the earth” for 1000 years. “This man” who brings “the peace” of a thousand years is, of course, Jesus Christ. He is the primary contextual subject from verses 1 through 5. What happens to motivate His return to bring in the millennial reign is the movement of the Assyrian into the land of Israel. It is the final defeat and destruction of “the Assyrian” that will mark Christ’s Second Advent, and the beginning of His millennial reign.
When Micah wrote his prophecies the Assyrians had already driven into the northern Kingdom of Israel, and all that remained of
Israel proper was its southern Kingdom of Judah. So what were the borders of the land
of Assyria when Micah wrote the fifth chapter of his book? The borders of the Assyrian territory stretched northward from roughly where Ramallah is located in the West
Bank to the present day southern border of Turkey, and eastward to the Mediterranean Sea to establish its western limits, then westward across the Euphrates River to the Tigris River north of modern Baghdad in Iraq. Technically, I suppose one might be able to say this future “Assyrian” might come out of southern Turkey, northern Iraq, or Lebanon, but since modern day Syria occupies some 85% of the area covered by the Assyrian empire at the time of Micah’s writings, I am persuaded the Assyrian antichrist will come out of Syria. The possible argument that Micah 5:5 was fulfilled during the old Assyrian invasion of Micah’s day, is thwarted by the context pattern of the four verses before it all still being unfulfilled at the time they were written, and then being linked contextually to verse 5 by “this man,” and “the peace.” Additionally, this argument is smashed by the verse that follows it.
Micah 5:6 – And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders.
From the time of Micah’s writings to the present day, Israel has never “wasted the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof.” I will exposit specifically on both these locations in Prophecy Update Number 67, Lord willing.
The “Assyrian” of Micah 5:5 is not a European, an American, a Russian, an Eskimo, an Aborigine, an Ethiopian, or a platypus. He is an Assyrian, who becomes chief prince of the land where the descendants of Meshech and Tubal were dwelling when Ezekiel wrote his prophecies. I will elaborate on this in future updates, Lord willing. The expression involving “seven shepherds and eight principal men” is most assuredly an oft used Hebrew idiom. It was the Hebrew manner of expressing “more than enough.” Seven is the Hebrew word for “complete,” implying “enough,” and when “eight” is added to it, the expression means “more than enough.” When the Assyrian comes into Israel, and treads within its borders north of Beersheba for 1260 days, then Jesus will return to restore peace for 1000 years on this planet. Christ’s Second Advent is accompanied by some 5/6 of the Assyrian’s armies being destroyed by the brightness of His coming. His destruction of the Assyrian and his false prophet will make whatever force Israel is able to muster up in the Negev for the battle of Armageddon “more than enough.”
When the Assyrian sets on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, as the willful King of the North preparing to launch his final attack on Israel at the battle of Armageddon, he will be beyond all help by men and Satan.
I Thessalonians 5:3,4 – For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. [4] But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.
Ezekiel 38:14-16 – Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say unto Gog, Thus saith the Lord God; In that day when my people of Israel dwelleth safely, shalt thou not know it? [15] And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army: [16] And thou shalt come up against my people of Israel, as a cloud to cover the land; it shall be in the latter days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before their eyes.
Zechariah 13:8,9 – And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, saith the Lord, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left
therein. [9] And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The Lord is my God.
Revelation 12:6 –And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
Daniel 11:45 – And he shall plant the tabernacles of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain; yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him.
II Thessalonians 2:8 – And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:
Revelation 19:19-21 – And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army. [20] And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before
him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. [21] And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth: and all the fowls were filled with their flesh.
Ezekiel 38:22 to 39:2 – And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone. [23] Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the Lord. [1] Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: [2] And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel:
Micah 5:5,6 – And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into our land: and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men. [6] And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders.
Begin Excerpt 1 from THE JERUSALEM POST
Why Turkey will emerge as leader of the Muslim world
By SONER CAGAPTAY
11/24/2010 23:04
The AKP is setting the stage for a total recalibration of Turkey’s global compass.
Turkey is not thought of as the Muslim country par excellence, but it is perhaps the most Muslim nation in the world. Due to its unique birth during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as a state forged exclusively by and for Muslims through blood and war, Turkey is a Muslim nation by origin – a feature shared perhaps only with partition created Pakistan.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secularization in the 1920s veneered the country’s core identity
with a Kemalist, nationalistic overlay. However, a recent perfect storm has undone Ataturk’s legacy: Whereas the events of September 11 have, unfortunately, oriented Muslim-Western relations toward perpetual conflict, the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara has helped reexpose the country’s core identity. When the AKP came to power in 2002, many expected that the party’s promise to de-Kemalize Turkey by blending Islam and politics would not only create a stronger Turkey, but would prove Islam’s compatibility with the West.
The result, however, has been the reverse.
The AKP has eschewed Ataturk’s vision of Turkey as part of the West, preferring a Manichean “us [Muslims] vs them” worldview. Hence, in the post- September 11 world, stripped of its Kemalist identity, Turkey’s self-appointed role is that of “leader of the Muslim world.” The country is, in fact, well-suited for this position: It has the largest economy and most powerful military of any Muslim nation. After years of successful de-Kemalization, the only obstacle that remains is convincing its Muslim brethren to anoint it as their sultan.
Turkey was created as an exclusive Muslim homeland through war, blood and tears. Unbeknownst to many outsiders, modern Turkey emerged not as a state of ethnic Turks, but of Ottoman Muslims who faced expulsion and extermination in Russia and the Balkan states. Almost half of Turkey’s 73 million citizens descend from such survivors of religious persecution. During the Ottoman Empire’s long territorial decline, millions of Turkish and non-Turkish Muslims living in Europe, Russia and the Caucasus fled persecution and sought refuge in modern-day Turkey.
With the empire’s collapse at the end of World War I, Ottoman Muslims joined ethnic Turks to defend their home against Allied, Armenian and Greek occupations. They succeeded, making Turkey a purely Muslim nation that had been born out of conflict with Christians. Religion’s saliency as ethnicity lasted into the post- Ottoman period: When modern Greece and Turkey exchanged their minority populations in 1924, Turkish- speaking Orthodox Christians from Anatolia were exchanged with Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete.
All Muslims became Turks.
Although Ataturk emphasized the unifying power of Turkish nationalism over religious identity, Turkishness never replaced Islam; rather, both identities overlapped. Ataturk managed to overlay the country’s deep Muslim identity with secular nationalism, but Turkey retained its Muslim core.
Turning to the post-September 11 world, states created on exclusively national-religious grounds are vulnerable to a Huntingtonian, bifurcated “us [Muslims] versus them” worldview.
Until the AKP, Turkey was successfully driven by large pro-Western and secular elites, and there was not much to worry about in this regard.
However, the AKP has replaced these elites with those sympathetic to the us versus them eschatology.
AKP leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with his government, believe in Huntington’s clash of civilizations – only they choose to oppose the West. The AKP’s vision is shaped by Turkey’s philosopher- king, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who summarizes this position in his opus Strategic Depth, in which he writes that “Turkey’s traditionally good ties with the West… are a form of alienation” and that the AKP will correct the course of history, which has disenfranchised Muslims since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Undoubtedly, the AKP’s us versus them vision would not have had the same powerful resonance had the group come to power before September 11. Because those attacks defined a politically-charged “Muslim world,” the AKP’s worldview has found fertile ground and has changed not only Turkey itself, but also the nation’s role in foreign policy.
To this end, the AKP took advantage of Turkish anger with the US war in Iraq, casting it as an attack on all Muslims, Turks included. This reinforced its bipolar vision. Recently, while visiting Pakistan (of all places), Erdogan claimed that “the United States backs common enemies of Turkey and Pakistan, and that the time has come to unmask them and act together.” He later denied making these comments, which were reported in Pakistan’s prominent English-language dailies.
The AKP’s foreign-policy vision is not simply dualistic, but rather premised on Islam’s à la carte morals and selective outrage, and therein lies the real danger. One case in point is to compare the AKP’s differing stances toward Emir Kusturica and Omar al- Bashir. The former, a Bosnian film director who stood with the Yugoslav National Army as it slaughtered Bosnians in the 1990s, was recently driven out of Turkey by AKP-led protests, resulting in threats against his life – a victory for the victims of genocide in Bosnia. The latter, the Sudanese president indicted for genocide in the International Court of Justice, was gracefully hosted by the AKP in Turkey. Erdogan has said, “I know Bashir; he cannot commit genocide because Muslims do not commit genocide.”
This is the gist of the AKP’s à la carte foreign-policy vision: that Muslims are superior to others, their crimes can be ignored and anyone who stands against Muslim causes deserves to be punished.
The reason this vision will transform Turkey is because the country changes in tandem with its elites. Ever since the modernizing days of the Ottoman sultans, political makeover has been induced from above, and today the AKP is poised to continue this trend, as it is replete with pro-AKP and Islamist billionaires, media, think tanks, universities, TV networks, pundits and scholars – a full-fledged Islamist elite. Furthermore, individuals financially and ideologically associated with the AKP now hold prominent posts in the high courts since the September 12 referendum, which empowered the party to appoint a majority of the top judges without a confirmation process. In other words, the AKP now not only governs, but also controls Turkey.
Like their close neighbors, the Russians, Turks have moved in lockstep with the powerful political, social and foreign-policy choices that their dominant elites have ushered in. Beginning with the sultans’ efforts to westernize the Ottoman Empire in the 1770s, and continuing with Ataturk’s reforms and the multiparty democracy experiment that started in 1946, Turkish elites have cast their lot with the West. Unsurprisingly, the Turks adopted a pro-Western foreign policy, embraced secular democracy at home and marched steadily toward European Union membership.
Now, with the AKP introducing new currents throughout Turkish society, this is changing. In foreign policy, the dominant wind is solidarity with Islamist and anti-Western countries and movements.
After eight years of AKP rule – an unusually long period in Turkish terms: if the AKP wins the June 2011 elections, it will have become the longest-ruling party in Turkey’s multiparty democratic history – the Turks are acquiescing to the AKP and its us versus them mind-set.
According to a recent poll by TESEV, an Istanbul-based NGO, the number of people identifying themselves as Muslim increased by 10 percent between 2002 and 2007, and almost half of them described themselves as Islamist. In effect, the AKP’s steady mobilization of Turkish Muslim identity along with its close financial and ideological affinity with the nation’s new Islamist elites is setting the stage for a total recalibration of Turkey’s international compass.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and coauthor (with Scott Carpenter) of Nuanced Gestures: Regenerating the US-Turkey Partnership (2010).
Begin Excerpt 2 from THE JPOST.COM STAFF AND ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘Turkey won’t be silent if Israel attacks Lebanon, Gaza’
By JPOST.COM STAFF AND ASSOCIATED PRESS
11/25/2010 16:50
In Beirut, Erdogan says Israel cannot “enter Lebanon with the most modern aircraft and tanks to kill women and children.”
Turkey will not stay silent in the event of an Israeli attack on Lebanon or the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in Beirut on Thursday, according to an AFP report.
“Does (Israel) think it can enter Lebanon with the most modern aircraft and tanks to kill women and children, and destroy schools and hospitals, and then expect us to remain silent?” Erdogan asked on the final day of a two-day visit to Lebanon.
“Does it think it can use the most modern weapons, phosphorus munitions and cluster bombs to kill children in Gaza and then expect us to remain silent? We will not be silent and we will support justice by all means available to us,” he added.
During the course of his trip, Erdogan met with officials and visited the north and south of the country.
On Thursday in Beirut, hundreds of Lebanese of Armenian descent clashed with army troops during a protest over the Turkish prime minister’s visit.
He was inaugurating a hospital in the southern port city of Sidon as hundreds of protesters gathered in the capital’s Martyrs’ Square.
When demonstrators tore up a large poster of Erdogan and pelted troops with rocks, security responded by beating up a number of them.
There were no reports of major injuries.
Lebanon has 150,000 Armenians, or nearly 4 percent of its population, which harbors deep animosity toward Turks over the 1915 killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians.
On Wednesday, Erdogan attempted to ease tensions in Lebanon over the soon to be released findings of the UN tribunal investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Erdogan, during a speech in northern Lebanon, said that if Hizbullah were found guilty of the Hariri assassination, it would impact the entire region.
He suggested that the tribunal delay releasing its findings for another year.
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