Middle East Chaos

Thank you, Sean, and good afternoon to all of you here. I was coming up in Denver this morning, and I see the same thing down here. It's refreshing to see people wearing jackets and sweaters a little bit after a long hot summer. You can certainly tell that temperatures are changing, and the feast and holy days are going to be upon us quite quickly here. I have a question for you, and that is what news items have dominated the headlines over the last few years. Think about that for a moment. I'd like to give you a quick rundown of some of the trends and news that's been reported in dominating our headlines. Starting about three and a half years ago, there was the Arab Spring, so-called, when several Arab governments were overthrown in different popular uprisings there. Supposedly, this was a democracy movement. I hear from Cairo and Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered for days on end, with the end result being that the Egyptian president was overthrown and replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood leader, who has since been ousted in an army takeover there. That was one of the big things that's dominated the news lately. I say so-called Arab Spring because it wasn't necessarily a democracy movement. That was the way it was presented. But, as we know, in several cases, Islamic forces took over, as in Libya, and that's become a disastrous situation there now. Another item that's dominated the news quite a bit has been the civil war in Syria, which has claimed about 200,000 lives so far. You might think about how much coverage you've seen in the media over this conflict, in which 200,000 were killed, versus the Hamas and Israel war, which lasted a few months, in which 2,000 were killed. A hundred times as many killed in the Syrian civil war, but which got the majority of the coverage here. We know that, of course. So, yeah, it was a very, very devastating conflict that continues on with more deaths and dying to this day.

In the background of these two stories, we had another conflict brewing, and that was the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons. There were the Iranians have successfully stalled and delayed, put off negotiations and this kind of thing, with the net result that absolutely nothing has been accomplished in those negotiations other than the Iranians have managed to buy a lot more time, several years worth, to continue their development of nuclear weapons and pursuit of delivery systems for those. We've also been introduced in recent, the last year or so, to a movement called Boko Haram in Nigeria. Boko Haram is Arabic for loosely translated, Western education is forbidden. Haram is Arabic for forbidden. I think the meaning probably goes a little bit further than that to encompass anything Western is forbidden, because this movement is trying to stamp out basically Western influence in Nigeria, which is about half Christian, about half Muslim, and trying to convert it into an Islamic state.

They're well known for a very tragic incident where several hundred Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped from their school and taken away into the jungle there and disappeared. Then, of course, in more recent weeks, we have witnessed history being made with the establishment of the Islamic State, which Mr. Suhling alluded to in the announcements there, which spans much of the territories of Syria and Iraq. Here we see the two states of Syria and Iraq and the Islamic State, a new country that's been carved out of there. It's not every day that we see new countries established, and yet in recent months, we've seen, in effect, two new countries established in the Middle East formed out of this territory. One is the Islamic State, and although this hasn't made the news much, there is a de facto new state, Kurdistan, in this area up here, a homeland for the Kurds, a minority ethnic group in Iraq. So what we have known, spent all of our lives understanding, is the nation of Iraq is no more. It's now divided into three states. Iraq is, we've known it down here in the south, the Islamic State in the middle, and Kurdistan, a homeland for the Kurds in the north, which is, incidentally, a very oil-rich area as well. So that has been something that has taken place in dominating a lot of the news as well. And, of course, more recently we have seen reports of another war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, with Hamas firing, I believe it was over 3,000 missiles, mortars at Israel, and Israel responding in retaliation to that. We've seen a lot of news reports on that lately, so I won't go into much detail. Of course, these missiles are being fired from civilian areas, as we see. It would be the equivalent of somebody setting up rocket launchers right out here in the parking lot and launching them down into Colorado Springs, something like that. It would be a rough equivalent of what's been going on there. But what do all of these things have in common? I think we probably understand the answer to that, but why is it that we are seeing history written and rewritten right before our eyes, which is indeed the case? That is exactly what we are seeing. Why are we seeing so much chaos in the Middle East? And that is the title for today's sermon, Middle East Chaos. What is happening there, and why? Because we literally cannot understand what is taking place in the world if we do not understand what is taking place in the Middle East, and more importantly, why it is taking place. Because the Middle East is not the only place affected by these trends. They are increasingly affecting the rest of the world. If you have been reading the material that I have been sending you in our weekly e-newsletters, you probably immediately recognize what these events I have listed have in common, and that is Islam. They are all driven by Islamic beliefs and practices, what they read about in their holy book, the Quran. A copy of it I have here today I will be quoting from quite a bit today. But that is not where the story begins. We will actually begin the story back in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible approximately 4,000 years ago. It begins with a man named Abraham, an individual we are very familiar with, and some very foolish decisions that he made in trying to have a son by his wife Sarah's servant girl, an Egyptian woman by the name of Hagar.

She became pregnant. If you remember the story, Sarah, when she found out that Hagar was expecting a child, became very jealous and started treating Hagar harshly. Hagar went away into the desert to get away from Sarah. That is where we will pick up the story in Genesis 16. We will read it from the NIV. This is where an angel comes to Hagar, who is dying of thirst in the desert, and tells her here. This is the angel speaking to Hagar. The angel said, I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count. The angel of the Eternal also said to her, to Hagar, You are now with child, and you will have a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Eternal has heard of your misery. Notice this prophecy about Ishmael, who is the progenitor of the Arab peoples. He will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand against him. He will live in hostility toward all his brothers. I'm reading from the NIV because it translates this better than the King James and the new King James. It gives us a hint, a very strong prophecy here, of what the character of the Arab peoples would be. That is certainly indeed the case. Some of you who have studied much about the Middle East will understand that this is very typical of the Arab peoples. They have seldom been able to get along. In fact, about the only time they do get along, or are united, is when they are united against somebody else that they hate and fight with more than each other. The Arabs, the sons of Ishmael, have a long history of this. You've studied anything about history of the Middle East. It also has grave implications for the rest of the world because on September 11, 2001, a little less than 13 years ago, it was a group of Arabs who flew jets into the World Trade Center and also crashed a jet into a field in Pennsylvania that was apparently on its way to Washington, D.C. to be crashed either into the White House or the Capitol Building to try to decapitate the United States government and bring down the nation. So these people, the Ishmael Alliance, the sons of Ishmael, and if you talk to Arabs, they readily admit, acknowledge they are sons of Ishmael. They're very happy, they're very proud of that fact. So these are the ones who not only carried out these attacks, but the ones who also basically took over Afghanistan, turned it into a terrorist stronghold through the Taliban. Taliban in Arabic means students, students of the way of Islam, the way of Allah. They are also the ones who are still holding out in Afghanistan and fighting the forces that are left there. They are the ones who formed the backbone of the newly established Islamic State that we'll be talking about a bit here as well. They also, again, have not been united very long except when they are fighting someone else that they hate even worse than each other. There's another prophecy of the Ishmaelites over in the next chapter, Genesis 17, verses 10 and 11. And we find out more here in prophecy about Abraham's descendants. Here God is talking to Abraham, not to Hagar, but to Abraham regarding his son Ishmael. And God says here, and as for Ishmael, I have heard you. Behold, I have blessed, or will bless, speaking prophetically, Ishmael, and will make him fruitful and will multiply him exceedingly. He shall begat twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. But then the angel goes on to explain, or God goes on to explain, But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this set time next year. So the birthright promises that were promised to Abraham would be passed on through his son Isaac and not Ishmael.

That is rather interesting that in the Arab view in the Quran, it actually states that those blessings would be passed on through Ishmael, that Ishmael was the promised seed and not Isaac. So there has been that resentment and jealousy there because of that. Now, what about this promise that Ishmael and his descendants would become a great nation that actually has been fulfilled historically, beginning about thirteen centuries ago. From the Arabs sprang the religion of Islam. And beginning at about 600 A.D., the Arabs took that religion and spread it across roughly half of the known world. We see this in the dark orange areas here on the map. It started out here in Saudi Arabia, spread out from there, took over the Holy Land, spread up into what is today Asia Minor, spread out to what is today Iraq and Iran, the Persian remnants of the Persian Empire, spread across North Africa, up into what is today Spain and Portugal, took over all of those areas. They had a very effective evangelistic method, which was called convert or die. And it turned out to be very, very effective there. As we know, this is one reason why it was spread so quickly and was able to conquer so much territory there. Now, after this first wave of expansion that was started again in the 600s, Islam more or less lost its momentum and kind of stalled out and retrenched to consolidate the areas that they had covered there. And it went not necessarily dormant, but it did not continue its expansion then until a second wave of expansion in the 12th century. And that is reflected in these other yellow areas here. So Islam spread out and went much further than it had in the first wave. It spread, on up, taking all of Asia Minor, spread into the areas of Greece, Macedonia, the Balkans, up into what is today southern Russia, all around the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. It spread over much of what is today India. It spread much deeper into Africa and along the coasts. And then different Muslim traders also spread Islam down into Indonesia and some of the islands down in this area. That's how these somewhat isolated areas became Islamic. Incidentally, the most populous Muslim country today is Indonesia with about 250 million Muslims, almost the population of the United States. It's an island country and it's not Arabic here. This is how Islam spread far beyond the original Arabic areas in which it started there.

So this was the fulfillment of the prophecies that Ishmael would become a great nation with many offspring, many descendants. This was a great empire, one of the greatest empires that the world has ever seen in terms of the scope of its expansion and the number of people that it controlled there. And for several centuries, while Europe was in the Dark Ages, the Dark Ages is not released in part because Europe is largely cut off on its southern flanks and the Atlantic Ocean side and over here to the east by the Muslim empires and powers there.

But they studied a lot of the sciences, made great advancements in mathematics, astronomy, and really became quite a remarkable civilization there. This was the fulfillment of these prophecies about Ishmael's descendants there. Now, part of the reason in the world today for the jealousy, the resentment, the anger that Muslims have toward the Western world, one reason they hate us so much, is because they know that at one time they had this great empire, the most advanced civilization on earth at that time, but it came and went.

It fell. And if you go to the Muslim world today, you see the exact opposite of a great civilization. You see very backward civilizations. Tremendous amount of poverty, lack of education, lack of technological advancement. Basically, the only thing they have going for them today is all of their oil wealth, which is nothing they did other than take over the Western oil wells and oil fields and so on there.

So they are very resentful that the Western world has advanced so greatly while they have regressed in many ways. And in Islamic thinking, this is simply not the way things should be, because according to the Quran, Islam is to dominate the world. We'll see that here as we go further along.

So, in Islamic thinking, they're the ones who should be the greatest, the wealthiest, the most powerful in the world, and they are very resentful that the West occupies that position in the world and not themselves. This is another reason for the resentment and hatred of the West and their determination to overthrow that. But how do we get to the point in the world where it seems that so much of the world is in chaos, particularly the Middle East, because of Islam? There's a lot that we need to understand about it to get the whole picture, and we'll cover some of those key points today. I'll tell you in advance that most of what I'm going to be telling you is definitely not politically correct.

I thought about titling this sermon another politically incorrect sermon about Islam, but I decided some people might not take that too well, so I went with the other one instead. Nearly everything that I'll tell you is not reported in our media, and we'll discuss. We'll see why as we go along here.

If you would like to educate yourself on that, there are many good books, many good websites on that, and I'll be glad to refer you to some of that. They'll go into much greater detail about the things I'll be telling you. Also, if you want to go back and reference it on our Denver website, Denver.ucg.org, there's a three-part sermon series I gave on Islam four years ago in summer and fall about this.

It goes into a lot more detail about different topics or aspects of this. Today, I'm hitting the high spots and bringing in new information and a lot of information from the Quran as it applies to today's world. Let's get a little bit of an overview of Islam, its magnitude in the world. Today, there are approximately, out of a world population, about 7 billion. There are about 1.5 to 2 billion Muslims. About 1 out of 4 to 5 people in the world is a Muslim. Muslims make up more than half of the population in 55 countries. Those are the ones indicated in green here, the dark green. More than 50% Muslim.

Actually, most of these you look at are more like 80, 90, 95, 100% Muslim. Those in the lighter color are countries where the population is 10 to 50% Muslims. About 10 to half Muslim there, including, as you'll notice there, Russia has a significant Muslim population there.

Virtually the northern half of Africa is overwhelmingly Muslim. It's countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, places like that.

Also, Muslims control most of the world supply of the lifeblood of the world's economy, which is oil. So, because of their population, the number of countries they control... This is one reason Arab countries have so much cloud in the UN. With 55 nations that are predominantly Muslim, they have a tremendous amount of cloud at the UN because of the large numbers of nations there. So, all of these factors combine to make Islam a very large and growing factor on the world scene. Economically, politically, militarily, any way you want to look at it there.

Does Islam affect your life? You bet it does. Again, 9-11, 13 years ago, the world changed. And one day, you might think back about how life was here in the United States pre-9-11, as opposed to what it is today. It's a very different world that we live in today for many, many reasons here. We don't have time to get into all of that, but it is very different. How did we get to this point? And what is it in Islamic teaching, what is it in their holy book, the Quran, that has brought the world to the point where it seems like Islam is at war with the rest of the world? Well, to find out why the state of affairs exists and what's going on, we have to go back in the story again to Saudi Arabia about 1,300 years ago, jumping forward from the time of Abraham, about 4,000 years, up to about 1,300 years ago, with the birth of Muhammad, who was born about AD 570 in the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. There are three holy cities in Islam, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Mecca is one of their holy cities, because this is the birthplace of where Muhammad founded the religion of Islam. Muhammad had one thing that was unusual in his childhood. He seems to be more or less an average child from the accounts of his childhood. But one thing that was unusual is that he experienced strange visions. Some researchers believe that he may have been experiencing epileptic seizures because the descriptions of what he went through seem to correspond with the same symptoms of an epileptic seizure. There's no way to know for sure, but that is one possibility that has been advanced for these trance-like situations that he would occasionally go into as a child and not up into adulthood. Now, while he was passed out unconscious in this trance-like state, he said that he would receive visions. And then when he came out of this trance, he would relate these visions that he had seen to those people who are around him.

Now, about age 40, Muhammad again experienced one of these visions that he came to call visitations. And as a result of this visit, he claimed that Allah, the Arabic word for God, had appeared to him. And he told people that he had been asleep when the angel Gabriel, as depicted here in Islamic art, this is Gabriel, the angel, appearing to Muhammad, and called him and told him he was going to reveal his word to him. And that Muhammad was going to be a prophet. So Muhammad claimed that he was sent to restore the religion of Abraham, and that he was the last in a long series of prophets that included people like Noah, Daniel, Jesus, and others, Abraham, and so on. So Muhammad would go into these trances, and when he would wake up, he would recite word for word what had supposedly been revealed to him. And then his followers would record that. And that became what Muslims consider today their holy book, the Quran. These visions, these statements that Muhammad would utter after he would come out of these trances here. So this was the origin of the Quran. Now, as Muhammad began to gain a following and gain greater power, he announced that he had received a new revelation from Allah, and that was that Muslims were to fight unbelievers. They were to go to war against him to convert them. So Muhammad began to drive away people who didn't agree with him. He began to arrange for opponents to be assassinated there. He began to test his powers in making war. He sent some of his followers out to attack caravans. There were a lot of caravans that traveled back and forth through Mecca, Medina, these other cities there. And he would send out raiding parties. And after a while, he started leading these raiding parties himself to plunder these caravans, which usually carried a lot of wealth, spices, fabrics, gold, silver, things like that, attacking them and then taking captive the people that he would capture there. And his success built upon success, and more people started flocking to him to be blunt for the loot that they could, the plunder they could gain from attacking these caravans and other, you know, by towns, settlements, villages, things like this. It was also around this time that Muhammad decided that the Jews were not going to convert. Now, this may sound a little surprising considering today's world, but there were a lot of, there was a considerable Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula at this time. People who had fled from the Roman destruction of Israel and so on, and they were involved in the caravan trade and other trades there. So there were Jewish settlements, there were Jews involved in all of the trading system, the economic system of the Arabian Peninsula. So Muhammad tried to court them to the point that initially he adopted a number of Jewish practices, such as bowing and worship toward Jerusalem, such as keeping the Sabbath day. It was quite a surprise to me to learn that he kept the Sabbath day.

Keeping the food laws of the Bible. If you've traveled to Islamic lands, you know that they keep food laws that are very similar to the food laws of the Bible. The only difference is they will eat shellfish, oysters, mussels, lobsters, things like that, which are forbidden in the Bible.

So Muhammad, initially, while he was trying to court the Jews, had a lot of these practices and beliefs in common with the Jews. But later, when he realized that the Jews were not going to convert and follow him, then he began actively persecuting Jews and attacking Jewish settlements. There was a financial reason for this, as well as a religious reason. The financial one being, obviously, that the Jews had a considerable amount of wealth.

They were heavily involved in the gold and silver trade, so he would attack settlements where he could basically confiscate all of their property as plunder. There's one famous battle that took place where he besieged and captured a town. After the battle, had up to a thousand Jewish men beheaded and took their wives and children and sold them into slavery, or took them as slaves himself.

Muhammad had two great weaknesses, one of which was greed. Because of all the plunder, he became a very wealthy man from looting these caravans, different towns, settlements, and so on. He amassed a great amount of wealth for himself, his family, his tribe, and his followers. And his next great weakness was women. The Quran says that a Muslim man can take up to four wives.

Muhammad did a little better than that. He took 22. The first 16 were wives there. But he also took two others who were slaves or concubines. And he took another four who were neither wives nor mistresses, but were concubines, which were simply devout Muslim women who gave themselves to Muhammad to become his mistresses.

Muhammad's third wife, Aisha, was only eight or nine years old when Muhammad took her as wife, with all that that entails.

An American evangelist stirred up a hornet's nest several years ago when he said that Muhammad was a pervert in a child molester. This is what he was referring to, because he took a girl of eight or nine years old, married her, and had sexual relations with her. So all kinds of people apologize for this man's statement, but few had the courage to point out he was right. That Muhammad was a pervert and a child molester for that. After accumulating a great deal of wealth and power, Muhammad died in the year 632 AD. Since his two sons had died young, there was no successor to him, and he had made no arrangements for a successor. Because Muhammad hadn't spelled out what was to be done after his death, Islam soon broke into two major sects or divisions of Islam, called Sunni Islam and Shia, or Shi'ite Islam. They divided over who was to be Muhammad's rightful successors. It wasn't immediate this took place after several other successors, caliphs. A caliph is a ruler of the Muslim world. A caliphate is a Muslim world that is united under the rule of this caliph. This is what those terms mean there. So they divided over who could be the rightful caliph or successor or leader of the Muslim world after Muhammad's death.

The two groups indicated here on a map. The green indicates the Sunni Muslims, where they are concentrated. The darker the green, the heavier the population. Basically, the dark green is from about 70% up to 100% Sunni Islam. The dark red indicates the Shi'ite Islam. Those are concentrated basically in three countries. Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. There, that's basically where you have the Shi'ite population. So these divided again over who could be the rightful heirs of Muhammad. The Sunnis, who are the majority of the Islamic world, believe that any Muslim who is sufficiently righteous and a sufficiently devout follower of Muhammad could be a caliph, a ruler of the Muslim world. The Shi'ites, on the other hand, in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon believe that the only rightful caliph must be a direct descendant of Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali, who married one of Muhammad's daughters. So that is how the big divide came. They split over who would be the rightful leader of Muhammad there. So they've been basically fighting over that, and masking each other for the last twelve, thirteen centuries, over who could be the rightful successor to Muhammad. I should mention also that the religion of Islam is a lot like traditional Christianity, in that not all Muslims believe the same things. They are united in some beliefs, they are united in believing that the Quran is the word of Allah, and they must follow it. However, there are some differences in interpretation in that. And as a result, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sects and sub-sects of the Islamic world, and beliefs and so on. And that is one contributing factor to a lot of bloodshed in the Muslim world, because if you disagree with him, many Muslims consider you an infidel, and somebody worthy to be killed as a result of that. So again, Muslims are generally united when they are fighting and hating somebody else more than they fight and hate among one another. Now, going back to the map that we looked at earlier here, after Muhammad died in 632 A.D., his successors continued to spread Islam with a vengeance. And this, again, is this orange color that we see. They spread out from what is today Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula across North Africa. It took Spain and Portugal, spread out to India, up north in that area there.

So within a hundred years, they had conquered a great amount of territory. I might mention also here that as they went, Christians and Jews, who are called people of the book in Islam, in the Quran, rather, were given the choice to submit to a status called demitude. It basically is a social status, somewhere between slavery and free.

To become a demi, you give up a lot of your rights. You cannot possess a weapon, for instance. You have to pay a substantial tax to the Islamic rulers for the privilege of living. You cannot own and run certain types of businesses. You cannot wear fine clothing. You cannot ride a horse. These were some of the original laws that Jews and Christians, who would not convert to Islam, had to live under there, to show that they were a second or third or fourth class citizen under Muslims.

In no way could a Christian or Jew be perceived as being of greater social status than a Muslim. So they enacted these laws. You could not build a new church or synagogue. In many countries, even to this day in Egypt, you cannot repair your church or synagogue. If it's falling down, if it's 500 years old, you can't go in and repair it.

It has to be left in a state of decay. In contrast, the government will support and build mosques, brand new mosques, all over the place. But you cannot build a new church. That is very typical of what you see in the Arab world or the Muslim world there. So again, this first surge of Islam kind of stalled out after about a century there. So they dug in, and then several hundred years later, in the 12th century, there was another big wave of Islamic expansion that spread throughout much of northern Africa, spread up into southern Russia, into the Balkan region, and Greece. It took over much of India, and down into the Indonesian area, even into the Philippines, places like that.

One historian refers to the bloody borders of Islam. And I'll talk about that a little bit more as we go along. But this is where you see most of today's wars, is on the fringes on the outskirts of Islam, the borders of Islam. Where they are commanded by the Quran to make war against their neighbor.

And that is the source of virtually every war that you see taking place in the world today. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. A Muslim must recite what is called... well, let's see, actually, yeah, I've got to hit on myself. What are the basic beliefs and practices of Islam behind what we see in the world today, and particularly in the Middle East? The Arabic term Islam means submission or surrender.

Specifically, submission or surrender to Allah, their God. That means in every aspect of your life you are submitting or surrendering to Allah, and whatever he says in the holy book, the Quran. Some will say that Islam means peace. That is a deception. That is not true. The Arabic word for peace is Salim. You might think of the Hebrew word shalom and salim.

They're both from the same root. Islam is somewhat similar to Salim, but it does not mean the same thing. Islam means submit, submission, or surrender to Allah, not peace. People are telling you that. They're lying. Maybe purposefully, maybe not.

A Muslim is also required to recite the shadaa, which is the statement, There is no God but Allah. What that means is Allah is the only God. The God of the Jews is not God. Jesus Christ is not God. There's only one God that God is Allah. It's not the God of the Old Testament of the Jews, not the God of the New Testament of Jesus. Only one God, and that is Allah. And Muhammad is his prophet. Muhammad, no one else. Muhammad is the perfect man in Islamic theology, the one that everyone must pattern their lives after, not Jesus Christ, as we do. The shadaa is one of the pillars of Islam. This slogan, this statement, appears on the Saudi flag, Saudi Arabian flag.

We see here in green on the background. You may have wondered what this calligraphic script is. It is the shadaa. There is no God, but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, reading from right to left, like Hebrew does there. So that is on the flag of Saudi Arabia and several other flags, seals, that sort of thing of different countries that you will see. To reinforce the point about the seriousness of Islam, there is another symbol on the Saudi flag, which you see here. The sword reinforces again the seriousness of the command that there is no God, but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.

If you don't believe it, you face the alternative, which is the sword. A variation of this has been appearing. You might have seen this in the news. This is the black flag of the Islamic State. It contains the shadaa in a simplified form. Again, there is no God, but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. That is what this says here. This flag is starting to pop up in many places. If you're watching the news, this is a news photo from Europe.

Notice the flags. The Islamic flag here, another one here. Here's another flag that probably has the same thing in a calligraphic script. I can't see enough of it to tell for sure. But you can see this guy is practicing the way of Islam, trying to beat this police officer over the head with a flag that says there is no God, but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet or his messenger here.

Another news photo where this flag appears. It's a little bit hard to make out what's going on here, but there's an individual standing here, and his arm is holding a pole with the flag here. He is waving it over a group of Iraqi soldiers here who have shed their army uniforms and changed into civilian clothes. He is waving it over them to show the dominance of this movement before these men are let out to be executed.

Where do Muslims get their ideas and their practices? For the most part, again, they come from the Quran here. There's another set of works called the Hadiths. This is basically a collection of others.

There are other sayings and events from the life of Muhammad that were not recorded in the Quran, kind of a supplement to the Quran, you might say. We will stick to the Quran today, quotes from that, except for one. I want to quote from a Hadith that expresses Muslim belief quite well. Most Muslims consider the Quran to be authoritative. Most consider the Hadiths to be authoritative well in terms of how they are to live their lives, patterning them after Muhammad. I'll go through a lot of quotes now from the Quran rather quickly. You might just write down the scripture references. The Quran is divided into chapters called Surahs. S-U-R-A-H. So there will be a chapter and a verse reference there. You can write down. You can look these up online if you want, or look up a copy of the Quran. The ones I'm quoting are from the Dawood translation. There are several different translations of the Quran. The Dawood is one of the most authoritative problems you run into with a lot of translations of the Quran from Arabic and English. They water it down. They change what it says to make it more palatable and politically correct to the West. I'm going to read you a very close translation of what the Quran actually says. I didn't realize that when I bought this copy of the Quran 15 or 20 years ago, but found out later it is probably the most authoritative English version here. Again, that's the Dawood translation. If you look it up online, it may differ depending on which translation you're looking at here. What are the basic beliefs and teachings of Islam as revealed in the Quran? The first and most predominant one is Islam is to be the only world religion, the only supreme and true religion, which will win out ultimately over all other religions. Eventually, the entire world will come under Islamic rule. A few surahs that talk about this, verse 9. It is He, Allah, who has sent for His Apostle, Apostle in the Quran is always referring to Muhammad, with guidance and the true faith, Islam in other words, so that he may exalt it above all religions. Much as the idolaters, an idolater is anybody who worships a god other than Allah. It's not idolatry as we think of it with a physical idol and bowing down to that. An idolater is anybody worshipping any other god other than Allah. For Jews to worship Yahweh as they see it, or Christians to worship Jesus, that would be idolatry and Muslim belief. So an idolater would include Jews and Christians. So, again, so that Muhammad is sent with guidance and the true faith, so that he may exalt it above all religions, much as the idolaters may dislike it. So, in other words, you accept Islam or tough luck there. So if you do not worship Allah, you are an idolater.

And the penalty for idolatry is death. To be blunt about it, you are subject to death. Let's see another one. I wanted to read a very clear command here, Surah 2, verse 193. Fight against them until idolatry is no more, and Allah's religion, referring to Islam, reigns supreme. So Muslims are commanded to fight against others until there is no other religion than Islam and the world. That's what is commanded there. I might mention at this point that in Islamic theology the world is divided into two spheres, two worlds, you might say. They refer to it as Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. These are Arabic terms. The first one, which means the land of Islam. Dar is a very broad meaning. It can mean land, country, place, region, nation, that sort of thing. So, land is a good generic word for it. So all Muslim lands are called Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, where Islam is in its rightful place is the law of the land. The rest of the world is Dar al-Harb, which means land of the unbeliever, or sometimes called land of the struggle, or land of struggle. So in Islamic thinking, there is the world of Islam that is converted to Muslim, or Islam. And then the rest of the world is the land of the unbeliever, or the land of struggle. Why the land of struggle? Because Muslims must wage war against the rest of the world to convert it to Dar al-Islam. I might interject here, too, that it is basically the worst kind of abomination for land that was once Dar al-Islam, land under Muslim rule, to be lost and revert to Dar al-Harb, the land of the unbeliever, or the land of struggle. This is one reason why there is so much irrational Muslim hatred toward Israel, because for centuries it was under the control, it was under Muslim rule. Going back to Muhammad's time, when he drove out the remnants of the Byzantine Empire, took over the Holy Land, there was the Crusades, and recaptured the Holy Land for about a century, then lost it again, and it remained under Muslim rule up until World War I under the control of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks.

Then they lost it, and in 1948, remember, the nation of Israel was established. So now land that was Dar al-Islam became Dar al-Harb. And in Muslim theology, again, that's an utter abomination. It must be reconquered and turned back under Muslim control. So this is one thing that unites a lot of Muslims in their hatred of Israel. Another thing, there's a number of different factors, but this is a major one. So our Western leaders just simply do not grasp this. This is why John Kerry has been going over there, pressuring Israel to, why if you just give up land, it'll make the Arabs happy. It's why we basically forced Israel to give up Sinai to Egypt, and now we're trying to pressure them into giving up the West Bank for a Palestinian state, thinking that will appease the Arabs. No, it will not, because of this concept. That's why a common saying among Hezbollah and Hamas, these other Arabic terrorist groups, is we want Palestine from the sea to the sea, from the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, and drive the Jews into the sea, because they want the whole land. They're not going to be satisfied with the West Bank. They're not going to be satisfied with Gaza, which they already have, this kind of thing. They're not going to be satisfied with anything less than all of the Jews being driven out or exterminated from the land. They say that very bluntly. It's in the Hezbollah Constitution and in the Charter of Hamas, the group that rules Gaza, that Israel must be destroyed, and we will struggle against that until there is no more state of Israel, until there are no more Jews living here. So how is this to happen? How is the land of Dar al-Harb to be converted to Dar al-Islam? Well, this is where another word comes into play, jihad, or holy war. It is something, as we'll see in the next few verses, that is required of Muslims. Holy war to spread Islam. A few verses, Surah 9 and verse 5. Notice, well, I'll get into that later. When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters, anyone who doesn't worship Allah, wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. So note here that the followers of Islam are specifically ordered to fight dirty, to lie in ambush people, to slay them wherever you find them there, to fight dirty, to lay in ambush, not to fight them out in the open there. So this is very typical of the terrorist methods of Muslims. This brings out one big difference between Allah and the God of the Bible, and that is the cruelty, which is ordered in the Qur'an. We'll talk about that a little bit more here. Surah 9, verse 73, this is a command to Muhammad, prophet, Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home, an evil fate. Here we see Muhammad justifying, when he says deal rigorously, that means deal brutally, do whatever it takes, in other words, to deal with those who oppose you.

So this is Muhammad stating Allah is justifying him for whatever methods he wants to use to convert others to Islam. So any barbaric act that is committed against unbelievers is okay in the Qur'an, because it's justified because they're going to hell anyway.

So anything you do, any way, any torture, any cruelty, any barbarism you practice against somebody to try to get them to convert to Islam is justified. Because if you convert them to Islam, then they're saved. And if you don't convert them, well, they're going to hell to be tortured for all eternity anyway, so what difference does it make? So you're free to do whatever you want to to try to convert somebody else to Islam. Whatever barbaric torture you want to inflict on them is okay. This is really the way Muslims understand this verse and explain it there. Another one, Surah 9 and verse 123. When I talk about the bloody borders of Islam, this is what I'm referring to here. Notice this command.

So again, this is why virtually every war you see in the world today is somewhere along the fringes of the Muslim world, where they are doing what this verse tells them to do, to make war on the infidels who dwell around you. That's behind all this conflict in Nigeria with Boko Haram. They commit horrific acts. They are bombing and blowing up churches right and left. In Iraq, I can't count the number of Christian churches that have been bombed and blown up. People coming in with machine guns during services. Same thing in Egypt. This is why Christians are fleeing the Middle East and drove by the thousands, hundreds of thousands. And they are getting to the point where there is virtually no Christian presence throughout much of the Middle East. You can read a lot about that on the Internet. I don't have time to go into it. But it's based on this verse. They are simply doing what their holy book orders them to do. Let's see. Another verse. Let's see. Surah 9, verse 39. This is rather interesting here.

This tells us that Allah will punish those who do not wage jihad on the non-believers as He commands. Surah 9, verse 39, says, If you do not go to war, Allah will punish you sternly and will replace you by other men. What this means is basically if you don't wage jihad against others, you're going to go to hell. Allah is just going to pick out somebody else in your place who will wage jihad on others in the name of Allah. Another point I mentioned here is that in Islamic thinking, you are not assured of going to paradise. Because Allah is fickle to be blunt, to put it in English terms. You can never be quite sure that you're good enough to make it into paradise if you're a Muslim. Except for one thing. There is one surefire ticket to get to Islam. And that is by dying in jihad against the infidel. That is the only way you are assured of going into paradise. You might wonder how Muslims are able to recruit so many people to become suicide bombers.

This is how they do it. Because this is the one and only way you are assured of a place in paradise. By killing yourself in war against the infidel. So suicide bombers are eligible as soon as they press that detonator on their explosive vest, or the car or truck bomb they're in. They instantly go to paradise to get their 72 virgins with a wheelchair eternity forever in Islamic thinking.

This is the driving force behind the motivator behind a lot of Muslims waging war. Because they know if they win in battle, if they live, they get the spoils of war. The women captives, the loot, the plunder, this kind of thing. The property they've taken. And if they die, hey, they get their ticket punch to go to paradise and get their 72 virgins there.

So this is what is driving a lot of that thinking there. Another aspect of commands in the Quran is that it commands using terror and cruelty. The Quran commands using terror and cruelty. Let's look at a few verses here. Let not the unbelievers think that they will ever get away. They have not the power so to do. Muster against them all the men and cavalry at your command so that you may strike terror into the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides them who are unknown to you but known to Allah. So there's a specific command here to strike terror into your enemies as you spread Islam.

And this is why the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State are so horrifically brutal, as we've read in the news reports there. They're following this verse. They are using terror to strike fear into the heart of their enemies, to demoralize them and make them give up their will to fight. As we see depicted here, they have two lines of Islamic fighters, and these are captured Syrian or Iraqi soldiers being marched off to suffer this fate, to be machine gunned to death in the desert. And there's just incredible examples of brutality there on the Internet you can go. You don't want to see a lot of the pictures that are out there.

So those whom they execute are Sunni Muslims. The ones they're executing are Shiite Muslims, whom they consider to be apostates and infidels who are worthy of nothing but death to be sent to hell because, after all, that is your fate. So they execute them in accordance with what they read in the Quran.

The Quran also mentions specific ways in which to terrorize your enemies. We see this in Surah 8, verse 12, Allah revealed His will to the angels, saying, I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads. Strike off the very tips of their fingers. In other words, you behead them and you cut off their hands. They are to strike terror into them. So when you see things like the beheadings of two American journalists that have taken place over recent weeks, they're just simply doing what the Quran orders them to do, to strike terror into their enemies. So when the Quran tells them to cut off heads, they cut off heads. Some of you may remember or may have viewed some of the news reports back five, six years ago, something like that, when beheading videos were first being widely distributed through media. It would typically go like this. It would be a group of men in the background, and they would grab the captive and behead them. I don't recommend you watch those videos. I didn't. I chose to stop watching it before it got to that part.

Another thing you might do is, if you happen to watch those, or if you choose to do so, you'll hear two things in the soundtrack of that. One is shouts of, Allah Akbar, which means Allah is great or greater than all other gods. Allah is supreme, in other words. And you'll hear a lot of chanting in Arabic in the background.

What are they chanting? They are chanting scriptures, like that, that strike off their heads. They are simply quoting scripture, which tells them to cut off their heads of their enemies. That's what is going on in the background of a lot of those videos here. In case you're ever wondering about that, I wondered and I looked it up, and that's what the facts are.

Let's see, another surah that illustrates Allah's cruelty, Surah 5, verses 34 and 35. Those that make war against Allah and his Apostle, Muhammad, and spread disorder in the land, shall be slain or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides. You can find photos of that on the Internet. Again, I don't recommend it, but they're there.

They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter. Here we see commands for the types of punishment to instill terror in people's hands. One of which is listed here is crucifixion, and you can find photos of that. This is a more tame photo that I found. These are some Syrian military soldiers who were captured when their base was overrun. You see two of them here have been crucified, and apparently they have welded together a crucifix out of steel pipe as a portable crucifixion instrument to crucify their enemies. I don't show these men face-on because you can see the injuries to their torso and their faces there, but notice the crowd standing around taking pictures, taking videos of this. Again, they take these commands very, very literally. I might mention also that the Scripture mentioned cutting off hands and feet on alternate sides. Again, this is barbaric to maim someone the rest of their lives that way. In Islamic lands ruled by Sharia law, which is law according to the Quran, the punishment for stealing is to cut off the individual's right hand. Why the right hand? Well, because hygiene conditions in the Muslim world are pretty primitive. They don't have a lot of running water, they don't have a lot of toilet paper. So you always eat with your right hand, and when you go to the bathroom, and you don't have toilet paper, you wipe with your left hand. So a thief always has his right hand cut off so that for the rest of his life, he has to eat with the hand that he wipes himself with. This is crude and blunt. But this is why they cut off the right hand and leave the left hand. So the person is maimed, humiliated, labeled as a thief for the rest of his life. In Islamic law, there is no allowance for forgiveness, for repentance, for changing. Think of the prescriptions in the Bible for stealing. We've covered this before in an earlier sermon, but the prescriptions are you restore what you stole several times over, depending on the specific circumstances, what you stole. You have opportunity for repentance. You restore what you stole. You hopefully learn your lesson that crime does not pay, and you repent, hopefully, and don't steal again. But there is no permanent maiming, no permanent crippling, no permanent penalty to identify you for the rest of your life as a thief. Because God believes in repentance, in forgiveness, in mercy, in allowing a person to change. Allah believes in cruelty, in maiming, in labeling somebody as a sinner for the rest of his life. In that way, huge difference between the approach of the Bible, and the God of the Bible, and the approach of the Quran and Muhammad. Continuing on, let's look at another section of the Quran. What about Christians and Jews? What does it say? You've probably heard, as I did, and believe for a number of years, well, Muslims have respect for Christians and Jews because they're people of the Book.

They believe that the Bible is inspired as the Quran is inspired. Well, that's a half-truth at best. What Muslims actually believe is that the Bible, as it was originally written, agreed with the Quran. In one of my earlier sermons, I covered a lot of differences between the Bible and the Quran, like the one I just mentioned about the punishment aspect of things. But what Muslims actually believe is that the Bible was corrupted by Christians and Jews and changed. They don't tell you that, but that is really what they believe. Christians and Jews believe in a corrupted version of the Bible, which really agrees with the Quran, and the Quran supersedes the Bible. It is really Allah's true revelation, not the Bible. What does the Quran say about Christians and Jews?

There's one verse, one passage. The unbelievers, and again, who is a believer in an unbeliever in Islamic thinking? The believers are the true Muslims. Unbelievers are anybody who doesn't follow Allah. So the unbelievers among the people of the book, which is referring to Jews or Christians, and the pagans shall burn forever in the fire of hell. They are the vilest of all creatures. So this is how Muslims really believe Christians and Jews, or what they really believe about Christians and Jews.

They certainly carry that out in practice. When you hear Muslims fout that they respect Jews and Christians as people of the book, don't believe that. I used to believe it before 9-11, when I started researching the subject of Islam, and I don't believe it anymore. Now, earlier I mentioned the Hadiths, the other supplemental books, supplemental sayings and stories about Muhammad.

I do want to read one Hadith, which is a prophecy about the Jews uttered by Muhammad, and this explains also some of the Islamic hatred toward Jews. It says, Allah's Apostle, again, Muhammad, said, the hour, referring to the hour of the Last Judgment, will not be established until you fight with the Jews. And the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.

So what this is saying here is that Jews are so contemptible that at the period of the time of the end, before Islam rules the whole world, Muslims will fight the world, and Jews are so contemptible that the earth itself will cry out and say, There's a Jew hiding behind this rock, come kill him. Do me a favor, the world is saying, kill this Jew who is hiding behind me. So this shows what Muslims really think about Jews, and you wonder why there is such an inordinate, irrational hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.

This is part of it. This is part of their thinking. Again, combined with the resentment, the birthright promises, other factors that we've talked about earlier. So they just utterly hate the Jews. I prepared in this, and I'm not going to have time to cover it, but the Charter of Hamas and Hezbollah, I alluded to this earlier, they absolutely hate Israel.

They are determined to wipe Israel out. They will not settle for any peace agreement. They state very openly peace agreements are a waste of time. They're just a deceit to get Muslims to give in. We will not stop until every Jew is cleansed from Palestine, and it is restored to Islamic rule. They're very open about that. You can look up Charter of Hamas. I may have even sent you one of my email updates a year or so ago, but it's very plain what they believe. So I don't have time to get into that. But this explains some of the hatred that Muslims have for Jews. This is why they do things like train their children from childhood.

Here's a parade. I don't recall whether this is Hamas or Hezbollah, but they've taken a little boy here. These men dressed up as suicide bombers, ready to go in their wedding clothes, ready to go meet their 72 virgins. And they've got this little boy dressed in a fake, albeit, suicide bomber vest. This is why they have summer camps, as they've done for years, in the Gaza Strip, in Gaza, training their children not to do basket weaving and crafts, not taking them on nature hikes, but teaching them how to use assault weapons and how to throw hand grenades and stuff like that, to fight against the Jews, to indoctrinate them in this way.

Moving on, what does the Quran say about women? Interesting topic here. I won't go into it a lot of detail, but let's cover it very briefly. Surah 4, verse 34, Men have authority over women, because Allah has made the one, the men, superior to the other. Good women are obedient. As for those women from whom you fear disobedience, this is directed to husbands. As for those women, or wives, from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them, and beds apart, in other words, go in a separate bedroom, don't sleep with them, and beat them.

Then, if they obey you, take no further action against them. And the unsaid part is, if they don't obey you, beat them again. An Islamic cleric got in hot water several years ago when he ruled that men could... Well, yeah, let me back up a little bit. This beating them doesn't involve just hands and feet. You can kick your wife, you can beat her, you can slap her, you can bunch her. An Islamic cleric got in hot water several years ago when he issued a religious ruling that husbands could beat their wives with a stick, so long as it was no bigger around than their thumb.

That was the biggest stick you could use against your wife. I guess before his ruling you could use a baseball bat. I don't know. So, this clarity, what's tragic about the story is he was surprised at the outrage because he thought he was being generous to women. He can't use a stick any bigger than your thumb. He thought he was doing women a favor. He can't use a bigger stick than that.

So he was surprised at the outrage from the West when word of this ruling leaked out to reporters. So, yeah, sad story there. So Muslims are allowed to, explicitly allowed in the Qur'an, to beat their wives. Of course, they are allowed to have up to four wives. This is in the Qur'an. I had it, but didn't include it for lack of time here.

In practice, however, because it's so easy for Muslim men to divorce, that in effect they can have virtually as many wives as they want, so long as they can afford them there. In Islam, there is also a practice called temporary marriage. This has been referred to in some of the email updates that I send you from time to time. In this, this temporary marriage, as it's called, a man and a woman can contract for a temporary marriage for any length of time, from about one hour to several hours to a day or a week or a month, or even up to several years.

And once that contract is over, the contract specified, the time contract specified in the contract, then they're free to separate and go about as though they had never been married before. Why was this instituted? I haven't been able to find the answer to that. I think probably it was instituted as a way to legalize prostitution. That a Muslim man who wanted to have sex with a woman could sign this temporary marriage agreement and say, I'm married to you for an hour, have sexual relations, and then the marriage is over. But it's legal in Islamic thinking, and it's widely accepted. I don't know how widely practiced it is, but it is widely accepted by Muslim clerics, theologians there.

So it's no big deal in Muslim societies for these temporary marriages. So any Muslim man can enter into one of these temporary marriages for sexual purposes for however long he wants. Another aspect of the Quran is, what about slavery? Well, the Quran explicitly commands slavery. Slavery is not politically correct to say, but it's widely practiced in the Muslim world today.

Widely practiced there. Much of the slave trade in the United States from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, if you go into it and research it, where did the slaves come from? Most of them were actually captured by Arab slave traders from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, places like that. They would go down into Africa. They would take raid villages, take Africans as slaves, and sell them to white slave traders out of the ports along the coast of Africa. And then they would be brought to the Western Hemisphere here, the United States, Caribbean, South America, places like that. But it originated with Arab slavers there. And you can again go back and verify that historically. But it was all okay with them because it had the official Quran seal of approval in verses like this, or a 47 in verse 4. When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads, which we've covered. And when you have laid them low, when you have defeated them, bind your captives firmly. So they are allowed to take captives or slaves, in other words. And we looked at this picture earlier. So when a Muslim takes a captive, you can cut off his head, or you can enslave him. It doesn't matter. Quran approves either one. So take your pick. If you need a slave and he looks like a good slave, hey, make him a slave. If not, peace. Two rebellious, two hospal, cut off his head. And that will teach him there. So this is perfectly approved, acceptable in the Quran. The Quran also allows sexual slavery, the taking of women as slaves, sexual slaves. Here, there are a few verses that talk about that. We'll cover a few of them. Surah 33 and verse 50. We well know the duties we have imposed on the faithful. This we here, the capitalized we, is Allah speaking in the royal plural, as it's called. We well know the duties we have imposed on the faithful, Muslims, concerning their wives and slave girls. We grant you this privilege of sexual relations with your slaves so that none may blame you. Another one here, Surah 23, verses 1 through 6. Blessed are the believers, Muslims, who are humble in their prayers, who avoid profane talk, and give alms to the destitute, who restrain their carnal desires, except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them. In other words, you want to rape your female slave? Go at it. The Quran sanctions it and approves that to satisfy your sexual desires. When we hear things like the horrific kidnapping of these hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria, we just can't fathom the mindset that is behind that, and rightfully so. It's just so foreign to our thinking that it's incomprehensible that somebody would do something like that. I mean, schoolgirls, junior high, senior high, students, teenagers, take them out, kill their teachers, attack the school, haul them off into the jungle. What's behind this? The scriptures we just read. It's perfectly lawful in the Quran to take girls like this who are infidels, Christians, whatever, turn them into your sexual slaves, for your satisfaction there.

Let you in on a little secret, and that is that the world seems obsessed with hoping that these schoolgirls can be rescued. We've been operating drone flights over the jungles of Nigeria, trying to locate these 300 girls approximately together in the jungle. Some are hoping that maybe we can send in a rescue mission. Well, I'll let you in on a secret. They're not there. They're not there to be rescued. They're gone because they've been sold off to be sexual slaves, to Muslim men.

Who knows where? Nigeria, neighboring countries, perhaps, to Arab countries, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia. We have no way of knowing, but they're not there. They're no longer gathered in a group. The West would approach this, well, they're holding them for ransom, and if we can identify them and find them, we can rescue them or pay enough ransom. No, they've already got their money for them.

They've sold them to be sexual slaves or wives. And that is the fate. That is the unfortunate fate of these girls. You can bet on it. Some of them were reported to have converted to Islam, and I don't doubt that at all. If you were in their position, you might do that to try to save your skin, knowing the fate. It would be better to convert to Islam and at least become a wife, so you have at least some rights as opposed to being sold to be a sexual slave for the rest of your life, and traded around, and sold, and bought, and so on.

It's just a horrible fate. And yet, it is perfectly okay in the Qur'an to do things like this. So, these are some of the beliefs that drive Islam that are so contradictory to the true God that we know and understand, and to the Bible. But Islam is not going away again. There are one and a half to two billion Muslims in the world.

But how might I want to shift gears here and talk about Bible prophecy, and how some of these recent developments might lead into some of the things we understand or think we understand. And I believe we do, about end-time prophecy, and how Islam might play a role in that. So, let's take, in our remaining time, take a look at Daniel 11, a famous prophetic chapter, the longest continuous prophecy in the Bible, verses 40 and 45. This talks about the kings of the north and the kings of the south. And we see here in verse 40 a time marker, at the time of the end.

So we see here, at the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack him, and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind. King of the south and the king of the north, just very briefly, this refers to... Daniel is written in the time of the... basically the end of the Greco-Roman Empire, the beginning of the Persian Empire. After Alexander the Great died in the 300s BC, his kingdom was divided up among four of his generals, one of whom became the king over Egypt, the king of the south, south being relative to Jerusalem, focal point of Bible prophecy.

So Egypt is to the south. Egypt became the king of the south, or the leader of Egypt became the king of the south. To the north of Jerusalem was the kingdom of Syria. This became the king of the north. And Daniel 11, you can read this online in our Bible reading program, or in the brief outline in the Middle Eastern Bible Prophecy Booklet, but describes the interaction between the king of the north and the king of the south, because it's not one individual. It covers several centuries. It actually goes from Daniel's time on down to the time of the end, as we see here.

The titles refer to different individuals, depending on the time frame you're looking at in that prophecy. But this, at the time of the end, tells us the king of the south shall attack the king of the north, and the king of the north will come against him, will invade, in other words.

Now, who might this king of the south be? I think what we've seen in recent months in the Middle East with the establishment of the caliphate, the Islamic State, and the caliph, the individual who's leading that, has invited all Muslims in the world to pledge allegiance to him, to come, to help him expand his state, to encompass the entirety of the Islamic world. So, this end-time king of the south may be an individual like that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this caliphate is this king of the south. I don't believe that because, to be blunt, he is so brutal. Their tactics are so brutal, I don't see him getting any kind of widespread following in the Islamic world. Even they have enough sense not to follow a madman of sadists like that. However, it does show and illustrate the desire among so many Muslims to have a caliphate. The caliphate, there's an article in this latest good news, I suggest you read it, about the caliphate.

Islamic caliphate declared what does it mean right in the center spread. This gives you a good summary of the history of the caliphate and what is going on. To be brief, after Muhammad died, there were caliphs, there were leaders over the Muslim world, up until World War I with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. There has not been a caliph, a ruler over the Muslim world, since then.

But there is a great desire for that. The Muslim Brotherhood expressly stated in its founding documents, they wanted to establish a caliphate. Osama bin Laden stated many times he wanted to see an Islamic caliphate established. This is not new. This is a long-time dream of Muslims to establish a united world under Islamic rule. We saw that in the Quran. That is what drives this belief. So this caliphate, or leader of this caliphate, I think is the most likely candidate for the end-time King of the South. Somebody will rise up, unite the Muslim world, and attack the King of the North. Who is the King of the North? Well, anciently, in ancient times, the Syrian Empire was absorbed into the Roman Empire. It was a part of the Roman Empire for a number of centuries there. So the King of the North essentially became the Roman Empire. We know from other Bible prophecies that in Revelation and Daniel, the Roman Empire will rise again, and a new form. We see that also in embryonic form taking place in Europe right now with the European Union, with a common constitution, a common currency, the euro.

They're working on a common military. And you can bet with recent events like the Ukraine, where Russia has invaded Ukraine, and that's why it was. There was a peace agreement, a truce just announced within the last day there. But you can bet that that has got a lot of Europeans thinking seriously about the need for a military force to counteract the growing Russian aggressiveness, as evidenced by their invasion of Ukraine there, and their belligerency, their threats to cut off oil and gas from Europe during the winter time to make European starve if they don't buckle under to what Russia demands of them. So you can bet things like that. You can bet things, well, as Arthur just mentioned, ten leaders of different countries coming together and announcing they're going to act, have to act, against this Islamic State. Again, these are mostly, if not all, European leaders. So they're recognizing they need a military to fight off this new threat coming out of the Middle East. So I think we are going to see Europe unite militarily as well with a defensive force.

Another interesting prophecy, this isn't found in the Bible, but in Islamic prophecies, many Muslims believe in what is called a Mahdi, M-A-H-D-I, a Mahdi, who is, you might call him, or refer to it as an Islamic Messiah, who will arise sometime in the time of the end, in a period of chaos, confusion in the world, who will unite Muslims worldwide. They essentially do the same thing that a caliph would do. It's interesting, the Middle East is in total chaos right now. The conditions would be perfect in Islamic thinking for a Mahdi to arise and unite the Muslim world.

This may sound rather odd to us, but there have actually been about a dozen men over the years who have risen up and claimed themselves to be this prophesied Islamic Mahdi. The most recent one was this individual here in 1979. So that's how recent it was, just in recent decades.

He raised a group of followers who took over the Kaaba in Mecca in Saudi Arabia. There ensued a gunfight in which 300 people were killed, slaughtered in that attempt to take over, including many of his followers there. So this is not a new idea. This is not an outlandish notion.

As recently as 1979, this man declared himself to be the Islamic Mahdi and tried to take over the most holy place in Islam in Saudi Arabia. So these are not crazy ideas. This is more or less mainstream Islamic thinking that drives the exact type of conditions we see in prophecy, where a leader will arise and attack in some form, perhaps terrorism we don't know, in Europe. So let's go back to our prophecy we were reading again. At the time of the end, the king of the south will attack the king of the north.

Let's look at that on a map.

As I mentioned earlier, it is considered an abomination for lands that were once under Islamic control to lose Islamic control. We mentioned specifically Israel there. But notice also Spain and Portugal were once under Islamic control. Muslims commonly talk about Andalusia. That's a term you might come across. That's their name for Portugal and Spain. They are determined to reconquer Andalusia. Portugal and Spain. You may remember the horrible train bombings in Madrid several years ago that killed hundreds of Spaniards because of this. The area of Kosovo back in the 1990s in the Clinton administration, the United States got involved in a war in Kosovo. This area right in here, who was fighting? The Serbs, who were Christian, Orthodox Christian, versus Albanians and the Kosovars, who were Muslim. They weren't new. It didn't start in the 1990s. They had been fighting there back since the 1500s, when Islamic invaders reached the gates of Vienna, Austria before they were defeated by a Christian army and had to turn back.

So Muslims believe all of this, much of what is today Eastern Europe, Greece, Macedonia, former territories of Yugoslavia, are to be reconquered and converted back to Islamic lands. They also have a desire, let's take a look at a few quotes, to conquer Rome and use it as a beachhead for taking over Europe.

This first quote is from Muammar Gaddafi, who was a leader in Libya until he was considered, how would we say, too moderate and was killed by Islamic nut jobs several years ago. But notice what he said before he died. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe, without swords, without guns, without conquest. The 50 million Muslims of Europe, and there are many millions more now, will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades. Another quote here, this is from a Muslim cleric who is a member of the Palestinian parliament.

Very soon, Allah willing, so he's not talking centuries away, very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was. What was Constantinople? It was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for about a thousand years before it was conquered by the Muslims, and now it is Istanbul in Turkey.

As was prophesied by our prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs, this is a common derogatory term Muslims use for Jews, the brothers of apes and pigs, so again, they love their people of the book, in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam.

This capital of theirs, referring to Rome again, will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquest, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, talking about North America and South America, and even Eastern Europe. So again, this is what they're seeing. I have many more quotes, I'll just read this one last one here, from the Jordanian Minister for Religious Endowment.

Islamic lands that were occupied by the enemies will once again become Islamic, so he's talking about Dar el-Harb and Dar el-Islam. Furthermore, we will reach beyond those countries which are lost at one point. Notice, lost at one point, meaning we're going to retake them. We proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once, and as it will be conquered again, America will come to its end, and they have begun to realize that their end is near. Again, I've got at least as many quotes from different Muslim clerics and leaders here about this. So Muslims clearly admit they have designs on taking over Europe, and it's not something they see far off in the future. They're thinking in the near future here. Perhaps you've seen photos from some of the British protests in London by British Muslims and noticed some of their signs that they carry. Islam will conquer Rome. Jesus is the slave of Allah. Islam will dominate the world. Freedom can go to hell. Sharia, the true solution. Freedom, go to hell. Islam will dominate the world again. Several signs there. Look at a few more. Europe is the cancer. Islam is the answer. Another one, Jesus will rise the sword of Islam. In Islamic prophecy, Jesus is a Muslim, and he will return to slaughter those who oppose Islam. Notice this sign, may Allah curse the Pope. And again, over here. Another one, Trinity of Evil. Trinity, in their view, is worshiping multiple gods other than Allah, so they hate that. Pope can go to hell. Some more signs. Kill those who insult Islam. Liberalism, go to hell. Butcher those who mock Islam. Behead those who insult Islam. Europe, you'll come crawling when the Mujahideen, that's practitioners of Jihad, come roaring. Another one, you can't see all the signs, but it says, Europe, you will pay Fantastic Four on their way. This Fantastic Four is referring to the suicide bombers several years ago, who blew themselves up on the red double-decker buses in London and on the subway there. So Europe, you will pay the Fantastic Four. In other words, other suicide bombers are on their way. So does this sound like something that's far off in their thinking? No, not at all. These are their plans. These are their designs. This is what they're saying. We will conquer Europe. So getting back to our prophecy, then, I think this helps us see and understand what this attack, this push of the King of the South, this leader of some sort of Islamic alliance against the King of the North, will entail. Probably terror attacks in some sort. They've already done terror attacks in Spain, as we've mentioned, in London, in Germany, other countries there. So continuing on, we see the King of the North counterattacking where this attack has come from. Verse 41, He, the King of the North, shall also enter the glorious land, Israel, or the Holy Land, and many countries shall be overthrown, but these shall escape from his hand. Edom, Moab, and the prominent people of Amman, that's referring to the peoples of Jordan today, they will not be invaded. He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and the land of Egypt shall not escape. So he will capture Egypt. He shall have power over the treasures of gold and silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt.

Also, the Libyans and Ethiopians shall follow at his heels. So this invasion is going to encompass Egypt, Libya, and Ethiopia. Looking at that on a map, here's Egypt, here's Ethiopia. Sudan didn't exist as a separate country then, so it would encompass Sudan as well. Here's Libya right here. So this King of the North comes down and takes over this part of Northern Africa, as well as much of Israel, but stops and doesn't invade Jordan here. What happens next after this King of the North has invaded this area? Well, first of all, it's considered the Islamic attitude. How are they going to view this? They're going to view this as another crusade to take over Muslim lands.

Continuing in Daniel's prophecy, But news from the east and the north shall trouble him, the King of the North. Therefore he shall go out with great fury to destroy and annihilate many. So this is describing a Muslim counterattack against which this King of the North, as it says here, goes forth with great fury to destroy and annihilate many. So we are seeing here another great war, the final war, that is commonly called the Battle of Armageddon. And he shall plant the tents of his palace between the seas and the glorious holy mountain. The seas being the Mediterranean Sea and the glorious holy mountain being the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet he shall come to his end, and no one will help him. So again, looking at a map, we see these tidings from the north and the east, from Jerusalem to the north. We have Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, all overwhelmingly Muslim countries. North of that there are various Chechnya, places like that. To the east we have Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, all these other Muslim states where there are literally millions upon millions of Muslims. Revelation goes on, we won't cover that, but describes a 200 million man army that crosses the Euphrates River, apparently in this tidings from the east and the north that trouble the king of the north. So apparently this 200 million man army arises out of all of these Islamic countries over here, or perhaps it is also including some from Russia or from Communist China further out. This 200 million man army sounds absurd considering the size of modern-day armies. We only have a US military of a few million, but consider there are up to 2 billion Muslims in the world, a 200 million man army is only 10% of the Muslim population, so it's certainly not a huge stretch of the imagination to come up with an army of that size. So any one of three things that this king of the north does could trigger this kind of reaction in the Muslim world. First, invading North Africa, these Muslim world lands. Second, invading the Holy Land, which Muslims consider it their Holy Land. And also taking control of Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. So any one of these three events, much less all three, could provoke a huge uprising in the Islamic world against what they see as a new crusade coming into that area there. So this is what I think is happening. I think this is why this news of a new Islamic caliphate is so significant there. Again, I don't think that is it. I don't see that forming or transforming into an in-time caliphate, but it does illustrate the desire of Muslims for something like that, a desire to unite Muslims throughout the world into that. So I do think what we are seeing is the stages for these conditions, this prophecy, to be set up to be fulfilled in this way or something very similar to it. So this is an overview of the current Middle East chaos of what is happening and why. And I hope now you can better understand exactly what is taking place and why it is significant and how it might fit into the fulfillment of in-time prophecy. And I also hope that it will encourage you in your own life knowing that our Messiah's return is closer than ever. I had originally planned to have some time for Q&A afterwards, but we're running. I've waxed a few elephants here and got a little bit long-winded. But if you do have any questions about this afterwards, feel free to come and see me.