Biblical History of the Arab Peoples

Every year at 9-11, I always watch a little bit of the specials on television about what happened when, you know, it was a long time ago now, you know, in 2011 when the terrorists attacked the Twin Towers there in New York. And I get that same, I mean, the shock of watching that on television was amazing at the time. I mean, I remember a man calling me and saying, a plane has just hit one of the towers in New York and up to 50,000 people are dead. And I said, I'm not sure that's true. Let me check on that. So I turned on television and I remember they thought it was just a little like a Piper Cub at that point that it hit it. No one knew exactly what had happened. And then it was just a very short period of time. They're showing, no, this, you know, you're watching a giant aircraft fly into that plane or into that building on purpose. And it became real to the United States that there is violent conflict in the Middle East that no matter where you live in the world, it affects the way you live. No matter where you live. Russia has problems with Muslim populations. They don't live in the Middle East, but they're affected by that particular religion. And they've had all kinds of problems in their sphere of influence. In fact, the Russians thought they could take Afghanistan and they left. It became their Vietnam. You know, you can win the battles, but you have to kill everybody to win the war. And they just left. And you start to realize that, you know, if you ever study Middle Eastern history, of course, it's been a point of conflict for thousands of years.

Megiddo, we read about Armageddon in the Bible. Megiddo has been a field of battles. There's been more battles fought in that area than any other place in history. We're going to clear back to the ancient Egyptians fighting there. So we look at the Middle East and we look at what's happening today. Now, we have troops in Afghanistan, but you can't get away from Middle East conflict. Not only between Israel and the Arab nations, which is in constant conflict, but also between the Arabs themselves. Iran and Iraq. I mean, they fought a war in the 1980s where over a million people died. Now, we didn't pay much attention to it because it didn't affect us. Over a million people died in the war. You have what's happening in Syria, where the United States is trying to disengage from that, because it's just a quagmire. More and more nations are involved, so now Russia stepped in because other nations are constantly trying to get involved in what's happening there. One reason is control of oil. I mean, in 1956, you have the Israeli-Arab wars, the various wars that took place, starting in 1948. And you have the one in 1956. The one in 1956 were different than all the other ones because it wasn't Arab nations attacking Israel. What happened was Israel, France, and England decided they didn't like the fact that the Egyptians had literally just seized the Suez Canal, which borders their territory, with Russian help, and said, basically, we're going to govern the Suez Canal. So, suddenly, troops from England, France, and Israel crossed the Sinai, dropped paratroopers in, and seized the Suez Canal. It's very complicated. And then, of course, the UN came along and said, you don't have the right to seize somebody else's property. And they made the belief. So, they did, you know, the regulation of the Suez Canal isn't entirely Egyptian now. It is international. But that was a war just to seize that canal, where those three nations got together. The other Arab-Israeli wars had been caused by Arabs attacking Israel, with the desire to destroy them as a nation. There's a reason for that. We're constantly inundated with all this, you know, this far-off land that seems so unimportant to us in many ways. Now, we read about it in the Bible. We understand there's importance there. We understand Jesus is coming back to there. But we don't understand all this. And it's been complicated for a lot of years. I mean, complicated for a lot of years. When the Muslim religion formed, what they wanted to do was conquer all the Arabic lands, which they basically did. Now, when I say Arabic here, or Arabs, I'm going to use that in a very narrow way today. Arab means anybody that speaks Arabic. But not all...we're going to talk about Arabs today who are descendants of Abraham. We're going to talk about tribes of Arabs that are descendants of Abraham today. Not all Arabs are descendants of Abraham. The Iranians are the descendants of the ancient Persians. And if you want to offend an Iranian, call them an Arab.

The Egyptians, the original Egyptians, the original Turks are not Arabs. Now, they speak Arabic today. They've actually intermingled. There's a lot of marriage with Arab peoples. But the Turks and the Egyptians are not Arabs. But we call them Arabs because they speak Arabic. And because of Islam, they have sort of a common culture. But they're not Arabs in the way I'm using the word today. I'm going to use Arabs today to mean specific descendants of Abraham. Of the Abrahamic family. If not directly from him, at least from his family. Because when we look at all these things, whether it's the Islamic invasion of Europe in the 600s and 700s, where the Europeans drove them back, except out of Spain. They kept much of Spain for a while. But they drove them back. And then, you know, you get into 1000 AD up until 1200, 1300s. You have a constant attempt by the Christians of Europe to seize Jerusalem away from the Arabs. That's what the Crusades were. Most of the Crusades were the Christians invading the Arab lands, because the Arabs at that point controlled Israel, and seizing Jerusalem. The first time they did it, there was a reason for it. The reason was, they believed Jesus was coming back. They had the millennium sort of twisted around. And the 1000 years was the establishment of the Catholic Church to set up the kingdom on earth. At the end of the 1000 years, they were supposed to seize Jerusalem, so Jesus could come back. And so they went through and literally just slaughtered the Arabs, because they considered them, well, they're Muslims, they're not Christians. So Jews and Arabs, or Muslims, were just slaughtered by the Crusades. Then you have European colonialism that happened there, where, and we're going to go through this and understand, the Arab peoples are tribal.

They see themselves as tribal. They know which tribes they're from. One of the biggest problems we had when we took Iraq was to find out that the tribe that Saddam Hussein came from, wanted to still put one of their people in power. And so they tried to undermine everything we did because our tribes should be in charge of this country. We might be the same people, but we're not. We're tribal. They're very tribal in how they see the world and how they see each other. So, Americans, or not Americans, we didn't do it, but European colonialism, they divided the Middle East up and divided tribes. Tribes that were enemies for a thousand years, they put them in the same location. They said, you're a nation now. That's part of the problem. Part of the problem is the Arabs just fight each other all the time. They're tribal. I mean, look at Syria, look at Lebanon. Look at what's happening throughout. The Middle East, they're fighting each other. And then, of course, you have Islam. Islam is like saying Christianity. How many different Christianities are there? And if you study European history, there have been wars fought between Catholics and Protestants as they tried to destroy the other one so they could be the true Christianity. That's what happens in Islam, too. Especially these Shias and Sunnis. Shias and Sunnis disagree on how you interpret the Enchiran, and there could be only one way to interpret it, so they'll fight each other over it. We don't even understand that. We've had trouble going into Iraq and different places and not realizing sometimes we're fueling, fighting between the Sunnis and the Shias. Because we don't realize how different their viewpoints are on how the Qur'an should be interpreted. You have all these contributing factors. And like I said, you have to realize not everybody that's Muslim is Arab or a descendant from Abraham. The Kurds aren't. The Turks aren't. Most of the Syrians are. The only thing the Syrians and the Turks agree on is that they hate the Kurds. Because the Kurds aren't Arab. They're nobody. They're not Turks and they're not Arab. What are they? But they're Muslim. And so there's always fighting over the Kurds, of course, want to be a totally independent nation because we're not really... We have the same religion as you people, but we're not just like you people. We have our own way of doing things.

It is a very complicated part of the world. But if we're really going to understand it, we have to understand that the roots of all this go back to the Bible. The roots of all this that's going on go back to the Bible. And then we have to say, what's the solution to it? How do we get the Arabs to work with the Israelis and Israelis with the Arabs? Or even the other Israelite nations, let alone the Jews? How do we get all this to work out? How do we get all the other groups of people? I read an article, a very interesting article this week. It was from a German magazine. It was late earlier this month, but it was from a German magazine. There was a discussion among German leaders that they really realized, with the way the United States is going, they're not going to have any protection from oil coming from the Middle East. Now, you and I don't have oil from the Middle East today, and gas goes up to $4 a gallon. Okay, that's bad. But we lived through that, right? If it went $5 a gallon, we would live through that, wouldn't we? Oh, maybe we'd have to give up basic cable. Our civilization wouldn't collapse. You'd probably go 90 days in Central Europe without your Middle Eastern oil. They have no cars. They have no electricity. They have nothing. There's hardly any oil in Europe. There's some in the North Sea. The Russians have a lot, but they don't exactly want to sell it to France and Germany without a lot of strings attached. And basically, the discussion among these politicians in Germany was, if we don't build an army, sooner or later, we're going to be under the heel of the Arabs.

We have to understand the United States isn't going to protect us anymore. And we're going to have to create not only a German army, but a European army, with the power to enforce ourselves into the Middle East. Interesting discussion when you know the prophecies. And it wasn't some conspiracy theory. It was an open article in the news, in interviews with public officials.

So what's happening there affects the whole world. It has for thousands of years. We're going to look at the Bible today. We're going to look at where this started. It's not going to be anything new to you, but I think sometimes we have to go back and look at bigger pictures. We can get so caught up, and sometimes feel with such anxiety, over what's happening to the world, and forget what we're watching, we should understand, because we have a Biblical explanation for what's happening. When we look at the Arab peoples, and once again I'm talking about the descendants of a family, not just the people who speak Arabic or who happen to be Muslim. Not all Arabs, by the way, are Muslim. There are a lot of Christian Arabs. They tend to get killed or driven out. If you'd ever met Mrs. Fakori up in Nashville, she died here a couple years ago, her family was from the Middle East, and she had to flee to, I think it was from Syria to Lebanon. Because she spoke Arabic. She had to flee to Lebanon because her family was being persecuted as a Christian. There she had to learn French so she could attend a Christian school. But then what happened was they got started to be persecuted in Lebanon, so they had to come here. So she had to learn English. So she spoke three languages. Arabic, French, and English. And made the best Middle Eastern food you could ever eat. Here it's a bully, it was incredible. So there are Arabs that are Christians, but they are persecuted by fellow Arabs, depending on where they are.

That's one of the strange things is persecution on Christians was probably less in Iraq than other places before we went in, because they were more quote-unquote liberal in their viewpoint, and they were trying to adapt some western ways. And so they weren't as hard on Christians as, say, Saudi Arabia, which is our staunch ally. It's always a nasty game that we have to play to participate in Middle Eastern politics. And once again, a lot of times, it's just because of oil. Although in the United States there is or has been a Christian belief that Israel has to be saved. Israel has to be protected. That idea is getting less and less part of our society. That idea comes from the Bible. Why that nation has to be saved. When we go back to Genesis, I won't go there, but Genesis 10 and then in 1 Chronicles 1, we have, actually Genesis 10 and Genesis 11, a detailed chronology of the sons of Noah. And we have Shem. And when you go through 1 Chronicles 1, you go through Genesis 10 and 11, you see that Shem is from him came Abraham and Lot. Abraham and Lot both came from him. So let's review what happens here. Let's go to Genesis 12. This is just basic review, but we need to put all this in the context of the Bible. Because what's interesting in the scripture, in the prophecies, the major and minor prophets, there are dozens of verses that are prophecies about the Arab peoples. And we usually don't even look at those. There are whole sections of the major and minor prophets about... there's even sections about Egypt, which are not descendants of Abraham. They're not descendants of Abraham.

But there's lots of... and there's even prophecies about the Philistines, which are not descendants of Abraham. But what we have here is this well-known passage, but this is where we start.

So Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken to him and lot with him. So they moved and they went into what is now modern-day Israel. God had promised him the land and that he would make him a great nation. When we go to chapter 15... I'm just reading through this quickly because we're setting the stage then here. So he goes there. He does what he's told to do. And after these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision saying, Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield. You're exceedingly great reward. But Abram said, Lord God, what will you give me, seeing I go childless? And the error of my house is Eleazar of Damascus. Then Abram said, Look, you have given me new offsprings. Indeed, one board of my house is my heir. So basically, understand, it's a tribal system again. Eleazar is a slave. But he's not a slave in the way we think of slavery as it was in the United States. Slaves became part of the tribe. They were now part of the tribe. Now, so Eleazar is part of the tribe. He's the one that Abraham uses to manage everything he has, which is a pretty sizable tribe. He has hundreds of men who are warriors. It's a sizable tribe. It has to be a number of thousands of people. And he says, You know, my heir is Eleazar. And he's not my son. But he's the one who takes over the tribe when I die. So Eleazar would have become the tribal leader at his death. So we have to think in this terms... and even understand at least, you have to always think in terms of tribes.

How many of you have seen the movie Lawrence of Arabia? Okay. I talked to a man one time who had spent some time in Jordan. And he said, If you want to understand what happens among the Arab peoples, he said, watch that movie and watch the part at the end where they take Damascus and they finally have an opportunity to be independent. And they end up breaking up into tribes and arguing with each other. He said, And then you'll understand that this tribal loyalty is even there, and you'll understand what they say. Of course, the problem with World War I is the English just grabbed a whole chunk of the Middle East and said it's ours. So did the French and others. Divided it up. And so they just aggravated the problem that was already there. Of course, they had to do that if they were... Understand. Prophetically, though, they had to do that if the Jews were going to get back, which the Bible says they would.

A nation like England had to have control of what is now modern Israel in order for the Jews to go back after World War II. They couldn't go back on their own. The Arabs wouldn't let them. It was the English who let them come back. And then when there was enough of them, they were left.

And you had a few million people facing tens and tens of millions of Arabs. The English did them a favor, but in the end they didn't do them a favor. They just left them. But they're the reason they're there. And the reason they're there is because, well, England was part of the nations that won World War I. And they drove the Turks, who controlled the Middle East. The Middle East was controlled by the Turks, the Ottoman Empire. And they drove them back in the Turkey. And now they own the Middle East.

You know, you can't even separate the West. Think of this from an era viewpoint. These people are always fighting over our area in different European powers, or the United States. They're always seizing part of it. They're always controlling part of it. That's why when George Bush said, President Bush said, that we were going to launch a crusade against Iraq, the whole Arab world went nuts! It's amazing you got the coalition to come together. Because the word crusade means Christians coming in and killing us. That's what it means to them. Because that's what it was called when Christians came in and killed them. This is a very complicated history. And what we do is we break it down into our modern world and we see it so simplistic. And it's not.

So what we have then is that I don't have anybody. And God says, I'm going to give you a descendant and he's going to be from your body. You're going to have a son. Well, what happens is, of course, years go by and he doesn't have a son. And Sarah gets to the point where, of course, she cannot have children. And she was an age where she can't have children anymore. And we know the story. And this is the beginning of the Middle East turmoil. Four thousand years ago, well, a little less than four thousand years ago.

She says, and Sarah says, I can't have children. But the custom was that you can have a handmaiden, have a child, and it's yours. A surrogate mother, we say, isn't that barbaric? They would say artificial semination and semination is barbaric. That is unbelievable. That's so against nature and God. God would never accept that. Now, we see that differently. They would say, that was just barbaric. That's perverted. That's how they would see artificial insemination. No, this is my handmaiden. I own her. You have a child with her, and she's my child. That was how it was done throughout the whole Middle East at the time.

So, he did. And he ends up with this meal. He finally has his son, and he raises him to be the son of promise. God is going to bring through you a nation, and this nation is going to be great, and all the nations are going to be great, or blessed, because of what God is going to do through you, Ishmael. And then God says, no, you're wrong.

Let's go to Genesis 17. I've talked about some of this over the years, but I just wanted to go into a little more detail to get the story here.

And let's go to verse 15. First of all, it's interesting that God made a covenant with Abraham and said, you have to be circumcised. Ishmael was circumcised.

My son has to be circumcised. He's circumcised him. The Muslims today still circumcised their boys. Because they go back and say, no, Abraham circumcised Ishmael as a sign of what? The covenant.

You have to understand, part of what drives, especially the Arabs who were part of the family of Abraham, is someone stole the covenant. Someone stole the birthright.

God made a covenant with Abraham, and the sign of the covenant was circumcision, and Ishmael was circumcised. It was Ishmael that the covenant was made with. This is the beginning of it right here. Abraham made a mistake. God never intended for Hagar to produce the son of promise. He had told him it will be through you. You have a wife, so it will be with you and your wife. And Abraham and Sarah figured out another way to do it when it seemed impossible. Then God said to Abraham, As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her named Sarai, but Sarah, the mother of many nations, shall be her name. And I will bless her also, and give her a son by her, and I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations, king of people shall be from her. Kings of peoples. He says, amazing things are going to happen, just like I promised you. Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born to a man who is one hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety-nine years old, bear a child?

And then he makes a very interesting comment. The emotion behind this must be enormous. And Abraham said to God, O, that Ishmael might live before you, but I have a son. I love my son. I've been training him to be what you want him to be. He's circumcised. He is everything. He is my life. He's my son that you promised. And the next verse, God says, no, that's not the son I promised. I promised a son between you and Sarah, not between you and Hagar. And Abraham, you can just see, you know, the Father's anguish. Oh, can it be Ishmael? He loved him. He thought Ishmael, Abraham thought Ishmael was the fulfillment of God's promise and found out he wasn't. Can you imagine going to your son, who, at this time, is old enough to understand what's going on, and saying to him, I was wrong. You're not the son that God's going to promise to me.

And God goes on right there and tells him, that's not what's going to happen. And of course, Isaac is born. Sarah has a child. Isaac is born. And the animosity that this teenager, Ishmael, field-sourcing, and his mother, is terrible.

And finally, Abraham has to send him away. He's afraid Ishmael's going to kill him. I'm the son of promise. I'm the one that was circumcised first, not you, little Isaac.

I'm the one that my father, Abraham, said, I am the one that receives the land and all these promises from God.

And he has to send him away. Now, he promises that he's going to become twelve tribes. And he promises that, you know, you're going to have a great people, but you're not the son of promise.

The Ishmaelites, and they're called in the Bible, you'll see Ishmaelites. The Ishmaelites, from this point on, are in conflict with the sons of Isaac. Because it comes down to which of us really, really are the ones that God's working through. Which ones?

Now, to make this even more complicated, you have to understand there's other Arab tribes that come from the family of the Abrahamic family. They're not Ishmaelites, but they still come from the family. And they all feel that they have part of what God's given to Abraham.

And they do receive certain promises in the Bible, but they're not given the specific promises God makes through Isaac and Jacob and Joseph.

Especially the land.

Especially the land. The land is given to this group, and other land is given to another group. And God's blessings on this land, and God's blessings that He would give them great physical wealth.

There's a whole other group of people that get mixed in with the Ishmaelites. Genesis 25. This is mentioned in 1 Chronicles 2. In the Saradis.

Abraham... Okay, Saradis. Now this is verse 1. Abraham again took a wife. Her name was Katorah. And she bore him Zimron and Jokshan and Medan and Midian and Ishbok and Sharuah. And Jokshan... Oh, I'm sorry. No, this is then who they all began. They all had sons. Here's a whole series of sons from Abraham. And what did they get?

Ishmael's been kicked out. He's living out in the desert.

Verse 5. And Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac. But Abraham gave gifts to the sons of the concubines which Abraham had. And while he was still living, he sent them eastward, away from Isaac his son, to the country of the east. Every son born of Katorah, just like Ishmael, is given a gift and sent away. Go away.

Abraham's family was constantly torn apart because of these things that he did. Think of what those sons think. Now, Katorah's sons may not have been as angry as Ishmael because, okay, I'm not the firstborn and I'm not from the queen, okay, the queen of the tribe. So this would be normal. But where did they go? They all go out and they join the Ishmaelites. So you've got more and more tribes of people who are all pushed away from their father Abraham, who the Arabs believe was the greatest man of God in all of history.

Ask a Jew who's the greatest man of God. Abraham, Moses, that's cool. But Abraham's the founder, right? Ask any Christian who's the greatest person of the Old Testament, Abraham, right? There's three religions who all believe something but all have different interpretations of it.

And those interpretations are going to cause conflict. Because at the core of all three of those interpretations, you believe you're doing the will of God because Abraham is the center here.

So you have Katora and her sons. They're sent out. They join them. How about Jacob and Esau? Actually, Jacob and Esau have a huge part to play in the biblical story.

Because Isaac has two sons, and the one is supposed to get the birthright, right? He's the one God's make the promise through. Why? I'm the firstborn. It always goes through the firstborn. Just like Israel's like, but I'm the firstborn. And God says, no, I'm not going to give it to him. I'm going to give it to Jacob. And the problem is, is Jacob and his mother didn't have the faith to know that that was going to happen, and believe that God would make it happen. So they maneuver things, and they really commit fraud against Esau. Tricking Dad into giving that blessing to Jacob. It's absolute fraud. It's horrible. Of course, Esau had already given him the birthright because he sold it to him. But they tricked Isaac, thinking they were doing what God wanted. Actually, it was what God wanted, but he didn't want him to do it that way. So they did it the wrong way, and guess what happens? Jacob receives the blessing, and he runs for his life.

He spends years away from his family because Esau is going to kill him.

You stole from me what God was giving to me. No, he sold it to him. He didn't want it. But suddenly he wanted it. The descendants of Esau are the Edomians or the Edomites. How many times do you see in the Bible the Edomites? Herod the Great. The Herod family that you see all through the New Testament, he's an Edomite. In fact, when you read the history of the Herod family, some of the Herod's felt bad because they had converted to Judaism, but they weren't Jews, so they were trying to please the people all the time because, you know, I'm an Edomite. I'm not a Jew. But the Edomites felt cheated, too.

And so the Edomites and the Israelites were in constant war.

You just see it constantly. And he said, well, the Edomites are trying to seize what God gave to them. That's true. But it wasn't always as clean as that. Let's go to 1 Kings. 1 Kings.

Chapter 11. Chapter 12.

Verse 14 says, Now the Lord raised up an adversary against Solomon, Hey Dad, the Edomite, and he was a descendant of the king of Edom. For it happened when David was an Edom, that Joab, the commander of the army, had gone up to bury the slain, and after he killed every male in Edom, he killed every male in Edom. Well, not everyone, because Hey Dad was a child. And if you read the story, he and a bunch of Edomites fled to Egypt, where the Pharaoh took care of them. And then what happened when Hey Dad became a grown man? He had a tribe, right, because these people had grown in numbers. He comes back, and he spends his whole life trying to kill every Israelite again. Joab committed, tried to commit genocide against the Edomites. Now, there's no place God says for them to do that. God told them to kill all the Canaanites. He never told them to kill all the... all the cousins. You can't just go kill all your cousins, okay? He tried to commit genocide against them. This goes on and on and on. It's still going on today. And the Arabs, certain aspects of the Arab world, not all of them, certain people in the Arab world will attack any nation that supports Israel, because God tells them to, because the Jews stole the birthright God gave to Abraham. And it was Ishmael's. And they believe it. They believe it because this book right here, they've been reading it for over 1,300 years. This has shaped their society just like this book has shaped ours. They believe this is from God.

And since they believe the Qur'an is from God, it tells the real story of what happened. And this is a perverted story of what happened. Now we read the Qur'an and think, wow, that's just bizarre. They read this and say, well, that's just bizarre. This is a perversion of God's Word. They read this and say, that's a perversion of God's Word. And you know what? The center of it is. It all goes back to Abraham. What did God do through Abraham? Now you've got one more group of people here. By the way, in Psalm 137, the Edomites actually encouraged Babylon to take Judah. It was like, oh yeah, take it. We'll stand by. We won't fight. And other places you see where there were certain nations or tribes of these Arab peoples who went along with Assyria or along with Babylon. Others were attacked and almost destroyed by these major powers too. They always didn't work in conjunction, just like they don't today. It's hard to get those people to work in conjunction with each other because they're different tribes, but they're all related. They're all cousins. And they're cousins of the Jews over there. They're the bad cousins.

They're the bad cousins of the group. There's one other group, Genesis 19. Genesis 19.

See how complicated this is?

This is why the U.S. can't fix this. The Arabs can't fix it. The Israelis can't fix it. The Europeans can't fix it. I mean, the Europeans are now planning maybe having to invade them at some point.

Well, they've done it before. The Russians want it. The Chinese would like to have it.

Everybody wants to fix this problem. The Pope says, I have the solution. We will just take and make Jerusalem an international city where Christians and Muslims and Jews can all live together, and I'll rule over it. How's that?

He has this solution to it. Genesis 19, verse 30.

Then Lot, remember Lot was with him, right? Lot was with Abram when he came out of where he was, which was over in what is now Babylon, or Iraq. He came into what is now Israel. If you read the story here, he had to flee Sodom and Gomorrah. He ends up, his daughter is thinking everybody has died. There's nobody left in the world but us. They end up, you can cover the ears of the children here, they end up getting their dad drunk and getting pregnant by him. So they could have children. And verse 36.

Then both of the daughters of Lot were with child by their father. The firstborn bore a son and called his name Moab. He is the father of the Moabites to this day. Have you ever read of the Moabites? They're cousins of the Israelites, too. I mean, the Moabites really didn't have a nation. They were a nomadic tribe for much of the Old Testament. And they're always going into attacking Israel, just grabbing people, slaves, stealing things, and then running off back out into the desert. Israelites would do that, too, sometimes. And the younger, she also bore a son and called his name Ben Ami. He is the father of the people of Amond to this day. Have you ever heard of the city named Amond? It's the capital of Jordan.

Yeah, the Jordanians are cousins, too.

So they're all related. This is a blood feud. This is a blood feud between a family all fighting over who gets Jerusalem. So you have the Jews. They look at the Old Testament. They don't understand the New Testament. And they see the promises made to Abraham. And it goes through Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, and that's to them. And that's their land, where they are the special people of God. And they bring the praises to Yahweh, and they're the ones to whom the Messiah comes. And then you have Christians, and they have the New Testament. And they say, yes, there's all these promises made to Abraham, but how are those promises fulfilled? Galatians 3 And verse 16. Now to Abraham and his seed, where the promise was made. And he does not say, and to seeds, as of many, but as of one, and to your seed, who is Christ? That's why they'll later hear, he says, really, today, if you're in the church, there's no Greek, there's no Jew, there's no Gentile, there's no Israelite, there's no male, there's no female, we're all part of the same family. So Christians say, oh no, no, no, no, we've got to get control of Jerusalem, because Jesus Christ has come to back to be our Messiah. I'm saying Christians, that's... And even among Christianity, they all argue over what this means. Because some say that the promises God made to physical Israel still exist. And evangelicals believe that. That's why evangelicals fight so hard. To support Israel. That's one reason why so many evangelicals voted for President Trump. Because he supported Israel. And there's lots of other Christians that say, no, no, no, the promises made to physical Israel are now to the church. And God has abandoned those people, because they...and they're just looking specifically at the Jews. God has abandoned the Jews, because they have denied Jesus Christ. That's why up until 1962, until Vatican II Council, for a long, long time in the Catholic Church, if you were born a Jew, you were personally guilty at birth of the murder of Jesus Christ. Therefore, if you did not convert, you could be killed.

Because there's no promises to those people anymore. There's no promises to those people at all. That's the teaching. Now, that's changed some since then, because Vatican II said, nah, we can't do that to those people. We don't have the right just to go kill Jews, because they don't convert. But for a long, long time, hundreds and hundreds of years, that was the viewpoint of the Catholic Church. So they're divided on this, but we believe that there are promises still to the seat of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But we also see that those are fulfilled in Jesus Christ in His first coming to bring salvation, and His second coming. What does He do? He gathers together all these relates to lead them to do what they were supposed to do all along. And then you have the Arabs, the Muslims, or the Arabs that are Muslims. What they believe is that the promises were made to Abraham were supposed to come to them. Let me read something to the Quran.

This is probably the only sermon you'll hear when someone quotes the Quran. My Quran is starting to fall apart, and I don't think I'm ever going to buy another one, so it'll just have to fall apart. I don't recommend you go buy the Quran. I think I spent a buck for this one. When the Jew said Abraham was a Jew, and we are of his religion, and the Christian said the like, the following was revealed. So this is what Muhammad said was revealed to him.

O people of the scripture. O people of the scripture. Abraham... there are people of the book. They are people of the book. They see Christians and Jews as people of the book. It's just our books messed up. But there's truth in it, too. The Arabs actually believe that Jesus Christ is a great prophet, so they honor him actually more than the Jews do. They honor Mary in a surprising way.

They honor Mary. But they actually honor Jesus Christ more than the Jews do. They believe he's coming back for a short period of time to make all Christians Muslims, and then he goes back to him. I guess that's what it means. Take the truth. I can't figure out the Quran. It is so foreign to me. But I think that's what it means.

Because he doesn't really stay here. He goes back. But I think that's what happens. He's supposed to come back and convert all the Christians. Because they'll listen to him. He says, O people of the scripture, so wherefore do you argue respecting Abraham? So people of the scripture. People of the books. Asserting that he was of your religion. When the Pentateuch and the Gospel were not set down, but after him a long time. Say, wait a minute. Okay. The Old Testament and the New Testament were written long after Abraham. So ye, O people, have argued respecting that of which you have no knowledge concerning Moses and Jesus.

And have asserted that you are of their religion. Then wherefore do you argue respecting that of which we have no knowledge concerning Abraham? But God knows his case, and you know it not. Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian, but he was Orthodox.

That means he was Muslim. A Muslim, or one resigned, a unit, in other words, resigned. One who had submitted. Abraham, submission is the idea of a very strong idea in Islam. He is one who submitted to God. A Unitarian, and he was not of the polytheist. So there it is. He was a Muslim.

Moses and Jesus came to teach the Jews and the Christians how to be Muslim, and the people will follow them. They perverted their teachings. So we've got to get you all back to the original religion of Abraham. And that's how they describe Islam. It is the original religion of Abraham passed on to the people of the birthright.

That's why God's working for them. That's why you're never going to change their minds. Because this book has been the foundation of culture for about 1,300 years. And it has a totally different explanation of life and of the world. So here we are. It is very interesting, by the way, to study some of the prophecies in the Scripture about these descendants, whether it's the Ishmaelites or the Edomites.

Ezekiel 25, the entire chapter is about the descendants. Well, no, I think there's a whole part at the end about the Philistines. But most of it is about the descendants of the cousins. About the cousins of the Israelites. Obadiah is very interesting. We're going to start the series next month on the Mitre Prophets. Remember I gave an introduction to the Mitre Prophets as a sermon here a couple months ago. In January we're going to start going through the Mitre Prophets. When we get to Obadiah, Obadiah is fascinating because Obadiah is to the Edomites, the descendants of Esau.

And he was sent to tell them, and much of Obadiah has to do with the future. It hasn't been fulfilled yet. Much of Obadiah has to do with the future. And God's dealing with the Edomites in the future. If you go through the major and minor prophets, you will find sections written to these people. Sometimes we skip the other things too. We forget that Jonah was sent to the Assyrians. Well, they weren't Arabs. They're a whole different group of people. There's all kinds of prophecies about Egypt.

Egypt was not Arabs. They're called Arabs today, but they're not ethnically Arabs. The DNA is so mixed up now that some of them are. I met him at one time who said he came into a class at Ambassador College to teach a class because they had traced his DNA, and he was one of the few pure Egyptians still alive.

So he traveled all over and taught about Egyptian history. Who knows what he was or not? It was fascinating to have him come in and teach. All of North Africa is such a mixture of peoples. This has nothing to do with the sermon. I was looking up Berbers about six months ago. Who were the Berbers? Where did they come from? So I looked at all the pictures on the Internet about Berbers, and they went anywhere from Black African to Arab to blonde, blue-eyed, very fair-skinned. The blonde, blue-eyed, very... I know where that came from because the German Vandals conquered North Africa at one time and lived there for about ten years.

So there's Germans mixed in there. So you still find blue-eyed, blonde-haired people in North Africa. And it comes because back in the 400s, the Germans lived there for ten years. A German tribe did. It conquered. Anyways, so all I wanted to do today was to go through some basic information.

The complexity of this world is that complex. It's not just a matter of good Christians against bad Muslims. It's not that simple. And believe me, the travesties of the Middle Ages committed by Christians on Arabs is absolutely horrible. Absolutely horrible. Of course it was reciprocated. It wasn't like, oh, wow, the Arabs were good. No, they're very brutal people. Can be very brutal people. And that's how they see history.

They see history as, oh yeah, you people came down in here, you know, a thousand years ago, looked at an Arab city, and the priest blessed it and came in and killed everybody. Because the blessing was, if there's any Christians in there, let them please be saved. If they weren't saved, that just shows there were no Christians.

Actually, they wiped out in Turkey. The entire Christian city is not realizing they were Christians. They blessed them and thought they were all Islamic and killed all the Christians in the town, too. You study the Crusades. It was about as barbaric as anything you've ever heard of, especially the children's Crusades. God would protect the ten-year-olds, so they gathered up all the little children and sent them down to die. They starved to death. The ones who survived were captured by the Arabs and made into slaves. Thousands and thousands, little children, little helmets on, little swords, you know, send off your children. God will protect the children. It's barbaric. Both sides were. They see that history. They remember that history. But then they go beyond that. They go back to the Bible. They say, your Bible has got it all twisted up. My Bible has it right. This is why they're so fanatical. This is why it can't be solved. This is why it's interesting to read books like Obadiah and other places, where there's prophecies about those people in the future. When Christ comes back, He comes back for the world. He comes back for the physical descendants of Abraham and the spiritual descendants of Abraham. Anybody in the church is a spiritual descendant of Abraham, which is actually more important because you're part of the kingdom of God. He comes back for all peoples who become part of the church. But He also comes back for the rest of the physical family. He comes back for the rest of the physical family. Sometimes I think we can't learn to get along as the church. How in the world are we going to someday sit down with all those cousins and get them to stop fighting when they've been doing it for 4,000 years? I hope this helped a little bit. A little different sermon. But I wanted to help you understand or just review the complexity of the Middle East. It really is that complex. But we understand where it started from. We do understand that there's a positive response to this at some time. When Christ comes back, all this gets fixed.