2016: Signs of the Anti-Christ

Russian nuclear-capable Iskander missiles deployed in Syria

Republished from A sclerotic goes to war  
By Joseph Wouk via servehiminthewaiting.com
Source: Russian nuclear-capable Iskander missiles deployed in Syria

Russia has deployed its most advanced tactical missile system, the Iskander-M, in Syria in the last few days, debkafile reports exclusively from its military and intelligence sources.

The Russian Iskander is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and has never been made available to any foreign army for operational use.

No nuclear-capable surface missiles were deployed in any Arab country bordering on Israel since 2007 when Chinese DF-21 missiles were installed in Saudi Arabia.
The Russian missiles (NATO codenamed SS-26) have a range of 500 kilometers (see map).
The Iskander’s transfer to the Kaliningrad enclave in the Baltic Sea in 2015, putting it in range of Central and Western Europe, was a mark of heightened tensions with the West over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

Its deployment in Syria, amid a bloody five-year civil war, is a game changer in terms of the balance of strength in the Middle East. Its range – from the Russian Hmeimim base in western Syria – covers all of Israel up to the southern town of Beersheba, points in Turkey up to the outskirts of Ankara and the eastern and central Mediterranean including Cyprus.
The Russian decision to scale down its forces in Syria was only part of the picture: Warplanes and bombers are being pulled out, but as fast as they leave, they are being replaced by the most advanced missile systems in the Russian arsenal.

On March 15, Moscow announced that the formidable S-400 ground-to-air missiles would stay in Syria after the withdrawal. Ten days later, on March 25, the Iskander-M systems were in place. The Iskander-M is rated the top short-range ballistic missile in the world.
The combination, say debkafile’s military sources, makes the Hmeimim base the hub of the most sophisticated missiles in the Middle East.
Its mobile launching vehicle carries two missiles. It only takes a few minutes to prepare them for launch; each may be fired separately. In flight, its operating team can retarget the weapon, adjusting it if necessary to hit  moving targets such as missile launchers, tank columns or supply convoys.

Another special feature of the Iskander-M is the control of its warhead by an encoded radio signal that even UAVs or AWACS cannot intercept. The missile can therefore lock on the target without being shot down. The missile’s computer receives an image of the target, locks on it and zooms toward the target at supersonic speed.

The Iskander-M is adaptable for use against small or large targets and can easily evade air defense batteries. Its targets can be set by satellites, surveillance planes, intelligence mechanisms or even field soldiers directing artillery fire from images scanned to their computers. Furthermore, its independent navigation system is not affected by poor weather conditions, including fog or darkness, like other ballistic missiles. It is moreover almost impossible to pre-empt the launch of the Iskander-M due to the mobility of its launching system.

Our World: The subversion of American Evangelicals by Caroline Glick

Republished from jpost.com
The largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel.

Evangelical Christians from around the world wave their national flags along with Israeli flags as they march in a parade in Jerusalem to mark the Feast of Tabernacles . (photo credit:JNS.ORG) 

Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last? One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand.


Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Evangelical support for Trump is that he takes these positions as he runs against primary opponents who all wear their faith on their sleeves. All of his opponents have records of standing with the Evangelicals on social and other salient issues – including support for Israel.

What are we to make of this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon? At least as far as Israel is concerned, the readiness of Evangelicals to support the most anti-Israel candidate running for the Republican presidential nomination is no surprise.

To understand why this is the case, the Christ at the Checkpoint conference taking place this week in Bethlehem is a good place to look.

According to its website, the mission of the biennial conference “is to challenge Evangelicals to take responsibility to help resolve the conflicts in Israel/ Palestine by engaging with the teaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God.”

The problem begins with the organizers’ interpretation of those teachings. College officials, among them keynote speakers at the conference, embrace and teach replacement theology. That theology maintains that God’s covenant with the Jews ended with Christianity.

In recent years, replacement theology has extended its biblical revisionism from Jews as people reviled for their rejection of Jesus and their supersession by Christians to Israel. The Jewish state is reviled as a religiously prohibited entity whose very existence is a sin against God.

According to current replacement theology, Jesus was not a Jew. He was a Palestinian. The Jews are not a people. They have no rights to the land of Israel.

Israel, it is asserted, has no historical or theological right to exist. Rather, according to the rewritten scriptures, the Palestinians are the chosen people.

Jews are colonialist invaders who have taken the land of Israel away from their rightful, biblically sanctioned owners.

This basic view is encapsulated in the very name “Christ at the Checkpoint.”

Today a Jewish Jesus would be prohibited from entering Bethlehem. Jews are barred from entering Palestinian population centers because Palestinians have a habit of murdering them. Indeed, just last week two IDF soldiers who accidentally entered a Palestinian village north of Jerusalem escaped a lynch mob by the skin of their teeth.

On the other hand, a Palestinian Jesus can be in Bethlehem. But to leave he has to go through an Israeli checkpoint (to ensure that he isn’t a terrorist, to be sure, but whatever).

So the image evoked by the name “Christ at the Checkpoint” ignores the reality of Palestinian terrorism.

And it leaves us with an image of the repression of a Palestinian Jesus at the hands of the Jews.

The replacement theology at the heart of the conference was made explicit by Rev. Jack Sara, president of the Bethlehem Bible Conference, at the 2012 conference. In his speech Sara edited Chapter 37 of the book of Ezekiel to transform the dry bones prophecy. That prophecy, of course, is one of the most Zionist passages in the Bible. God speaks to Ezekiel and tells him that the people of Israel will be reborn. They will be gathered from the four corners of the earth, return to Israel and restore the Davidic kingdom.

Yet in Sara’s revised version, the people of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, are replaced by the Palestinians.

Sara preached, “The hand of the Lord was on me and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and sent me in the middle of the West Bank – Bethlehem, Jenin and Salvit and Nablus and Ramallah.

It was full of bones.... He asked me, ‘Son of Man, can these bones live? Can the Palestinian people live?’ Then He said to me ‘prophesy to these bones and same to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’” Sara then said, “You see, the Palestinian people were and are a lot like this valley of dry bones that is in need of the Church to come and prophesy life on them.”

Last March the Bethlehem Bible College posted a promotional video ahead of a summer Christ at the Checkpoint conference directed toward young adults.

As Tricia Miller, who works as a senior research analyst for CAMERA noted, Christ at the Checkpoint director Munther Issac billed the conference as a means to empower Palestinian Christians.

The conference website said that the conference’s aim was “to motivate Palestinian Christian youth to take an active role as followers of Christ in spreading justice and peace, through discussing the challenges of our societies from a biblical perspective.”

Yet, as Miller noted in an article in The Times of Israel, the promotional video for the conference made clear that the conference had no intention of “spreading justice and peace.”

The video interlaced footage of Palestinians walking in heavy traffic and waiting to cross into sovereign Israel with footage from Islamic State (ISIS) videos showing hostages about to be beheaded and burned alive. Israeli flags flapping in the wind were juxtaposed with the ISIS flag.

And then, apropos of nothing, the video showed the cellular structure of the H1N1 swine flu virus.

The implied message was clear. Just as Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as viruses, so the Christ at the Checkpoint video depicted Israel as the moral equivalent of ISIS and the medical equivalent of swine flu.

In 2014, David Brog published in article in Middle East Quarterly detailing the key role the Bethlehem Bible College plays in a wider campaign directed toward American Evangelicals whose goal is to undermine and eventually end their support for Israel.

Key figures in this undertaking bring American church leaders and academics to Bethlehem and feed them a diet of anti-Israel propaganda and outright lies masquerading as biblical teaching and objective assessments of reality. These American Christian leaders have taken up the cause of ending support for Israel among Evangelicals upon their return home.

Key financiers, like Mart Green, the heir of the Hobby Lobby fortune and the chairman of the board of trustees of Oral Roberts University, and financier George Soros have been instrumental in disseminating these positions to all levels of the Evangelical community in the US.

In September 2014, Senator Ted Cruz spoke before Middle Eastern Christians, who convened in Washington ostensibly to discuss the genocide of Christians in the Middle East. Cruz was booed off the stage after telling the audience, “Today Christians have no greater ally than the Jewish state.”

Cruz added, “The very same people who persecute and murder Christians right now, who crucify Christians, who behead children, are the very same people who target and murder Jews for the very same reason.”

Cruz’s statement marked the first time a major US political leader stood up to the Jew hatred of Middle Eastern Christians and pointed out its irrationality and self-defeating core.

It could have been a seminal moment in the discourse on Islamic persecution of Christians. But rather than be embraced for his willingness to speak the truth to those who reject it even in the face of genocide, Cruz was assaulted as undiplomatic by Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin. His message was largely ignored outside of policy circles.

To be sure, the largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel. Yet, as Brog noted, the long-term trends are discouraging.

Moreover, the readiness of Evangelical voters to support the only Republican candidate who says he will be neutral in his handling of the Palestinian conflict with Israel indicates that anti-Israel Christians may already be having a profound impact on their communities.

This trend represents a strategic threat to US-Israel relations. Those who wish to maintain those relations in the long term must fight this trend head on, beginning with this week’s Christ at the Checkpoint conference.

John Haller´s prophecy update 2016 03 13 - Too much to cover

Special guest Bill Salus with Pastor Tom Hughes

John Haller prophecy update - 2016 03 06

Hal Lindsey Prophecy Update Feb. 26 2016

Eternal Security for Tribulation ? - Qs and As

Republished from gracethrufaith.com

Monday, February 29th, 2016

• Great Tribulation
• Once Saved Always Saved

Q. You have stated that you feel the post rapture believers will be on their own when it comes to staying faithful to their belief in Christ as their Lord and Savior. In Revelation (7: 1-9) it says that the Angel of God will put a seal on the foreheads of the “servants of God”. It goes on to show that the 144,000 from the 12 tribes (Jews) were at least part of this group, but then it moves right into discussing the “multitude” in white robes that were “serving God and The Lamb” day and night.
I believe the multitude are the tribulation Saints and that they are being included in the group that were sealed on their foreheads by the Angel of God, identifying them as “servants of God”. Also, I don’t think the gentile Christians during this period would be left to suffer the stings of these demonic creatures of Rev. 9 so they must have the seal. In summary; I believe that the tribulation believers will not be able to lose their salvation. Do you disagree with this?

A. Rev. 7:1-3 shows the four winds being held back by four angels. Then another angel with the seal of God comes forward, telling them not to harm the land or sea until he puts the seal on the foreheads of the servants of God. Rev. 7:4 says the number of those who are sealed is 144,000 and then Rev. 7:5-8 lists 12,000 from each of 12 tribes of Israel. From this I conclude that the 144,000 are the only ones sealed. This all happens on Earth.

After that John sees the multitude, but they are before the throne of God (Rev. 7:11). That’s in Heaven, and the elder tells John they’ve come out of the Great Tribulation. The Greek word translated “come out of” applies to both location and time. In essence it means they will have been martyred and come to heaven before the Great Tribulation begins. They and the 144,000 are not part of the same group. In the first place the 144,000 are all Jews. The martyrs are from every nation, tribe, people and language.

Your concern for Tribulation believers is commendable but I don’t think it’s consistent with Scripture. Both Rev. 14:12 and Rev. 16:15 indicate Tribulation believers are responsible for remaining faithful. Matt. 25:1-13 confirms this. Eternal Security is a special blessing given only to the Church.

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