The following link is an excellent source to get us thinking on a very important issue. The article was written by Walid Shoebat, a name familiar to all of us who hold to the Islamic Paradigm. It was posted on my favorite prophecy blog, Midnightwather’s Blogspot. The comments following the article are quite revealing of the different perspectives on this issue (including “yours truly”). I recommend it for your reading and comment, if the Lord leads you!
Where is America in Bible Prophecy? « MidnightWatcher’s Blogspot.
thanks jack!
some good scholars on there, including you.
I really like Walid Shoebat’s excellent prospective and truly insightful views on Bible prophecy; in most instances he’s far better at being objective as an outsider who sees the prophetic picture from the other side, or the Muslim world view, but still I do feel that he can be just as biased about the Bible’s prophetic picture of America’s true end-time position in prophecy as many in the Evangelical teachers who seem quite blind to the fact about America. When you consider there being over 70 very distinctive prophetic feature as is found in the all the prophecies about Babylon in the Bible and how that no other country on earth today even comes close to fitting them as do America does.
To give but one example, what other nation on this earth is the number one “consumer” nation that buys all of the rest of the worlds goods, as is shown to be the greatest characteristic of the end-time Babylon in Revelations chapter 18?
Even with America’s economy close to being totally bankrupt with trillions of dollars worth of unservicible debt that is impossible to pay off now, and the whole world’s global economy in near collapse so scarily, she still borrows billions of dollars from other nations to finance even more consumer goods for herself.
So how does brother Shoebat deal with this thorny problem, why he shows us pictures of little Qatar with all its scary opulences of near-empty sky-crapers and gold on everything you could name.
Is this the Babylon of the Bible, I ask you? Is there any place in the Middle East that even comes close to America on just this one characteristic?
Lord help us
Servant
Servant – I concur with some of your thoughts. However:
– Saudi Arabia fits better than America. Borrowing is not a characteristic of the harlot (mystery Babylon); rather, the harlot makes the nations of the world rich through the “wealth of her sensuality.” Rev 18:3 NASB. “The merchants of these things, who become rich from her, …” Rev 18:15 NASB. “… all who had ships at sea became rich by her wealth, …” The petroleum is the fruit through which the entire world becomes addicted and from which the merchants of the earth have become rich and wealthy. Without petroleum, America would not be rich. It is from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia that America and the world has drunk of the “waters” of the harlot. Rev 17:15 NASB. There is no hint of borrowing in Revelation 17 or 18. The harlot is wealthy in her own right. She has no need to borrow. America has borrowed from China not because we are wealthy but because we are broke. I put a 2nd mortgage on my home to pay the cost of publishing my book not because I was rich but because I was broke. Nobody borrows unless they have no other choice. I think you forcing your view here, Servant. You are certainly entitled to it, and there was a time when I saw America as the harlot prophesied in Rev 17/18 but that was before I learned about Islam, and its birthplace, Saudi Arabia.
Hi Jack
thanks for your reply. I follow your blog, and its always very informative, and I know I can speak to everyone else who also reads them, when I say that I thank God for your courageous teachings on Islam.
But, Jack, I never even hinted at the suggestion borrowing was a prophetic characteristic of end-time Babylon.
And as an American expat living here in Sweden, I am well aware of the sons of Allah in this neck of the woods, since a local Imam called himself putting out a Fatwa on me here in my city. I’m as muscular in my beliefs in the Living God, Yahweh, and our Lord, Yeshua, as they ever could be in theirs with the Devil himself. Wherever they gather in the squares here, I come and stand against them and unflinchingly debate them, to counter their claims and use the Koran and the Hadiths to accuse them of being unrighteous. It really undermine and hurts them, because they, at least some of them, are earnest and truly believe what they do is right.
They’ve become a little gunshy of me because when they tried to intimidate me saying “we have put a Fatwa on you, man!”, I retorted, no, “I put a Fatwa on you!”
A Muslim acquaintance took me aside and quietly told me, “they think you’re CIA!”
I understood, then, why in the past year they have all but stopped attacking me in the streets anymore.
I guess they don’t have the stomach for the fight anymore, because they are way too scared of being deported.
So, I do know a little about Islam, and I have listened to ALL Brother Shoebat’s arguments, but I just don’t buy it. when it comes to the subject of Babylon in prophecy.
I think he overlooks the pregnant fact that only a Christian nation could possibly be The Daughter of Babylon, as Jeremiah calls here in Chapts 50 and 51. In Scripture, a woman cannot be called a Whore unless she was formerly married. So it is for any nations that was Christian but has turned her back on Him.
But Babylon is called the “Mother of harlots”, because she was formerly considered a wife.
Where in the Middle East is there any such country with the “Great Voice” which influences the rest of the world? What country in the world is there, where its people are grossly overweight but keep right on eating, that Jeremiah could say “they are fat cows [still] at the grass”, besides America?
And these I have listed are only four of the 70 characteristics!
Keep up your good work brother
God Bless
Servant
Hi again Jack
We all know just how great a service your sacrifice, financial and otherwise, has very likely been in alerting the world to Islam, and I count myself among all those who are students of your work, as well as brother Shoebats’, nor would I even so much as attempt to “force” my opinion upon you a fellow worker in Christ.
Should we not allow the Scriptures to speak for themselves, though? The Book of Revelations is not about Islam, but it is the Unveiling of Christ. At the very outset, we know this book is not about the Church, or even for the Church, as the ministry of this third most important apostle John is very much restricted to the circumcision, just as Paul’s is to the Gentile, therefore, the great whore of Babylon could not be from Arabia, but is apostate Israel, the wife who committed adultery, all of the ancestors of Jacob which now compose the Western nations of the Babylonian system: globalism and the buying and selling in lawlessness, and at the head of which is the Mother of all harlots, America herself.
The Western nations are of the 12 tribes of the house of Israel, and from out of which, as we are told by John, the 12 Tribes composed of 12,000 of each tribe, or the 144,000, will be returning to the Land in the far greater 2nd Exodus as the firstfruits of a far, far greater number which no man can number of Israelitish peoples, which cannot be Christians.
Why, because John sees the Temple open in Heaven exposing the Testimony and the Law and all are thus judged according their works. But Christians under Grace, have no works and they neither made a covenant with Yahweh and are no under the Law as all these are so condemned by the Law.
So these are just a very few of the reasons why I say that brother Shoebat is very mistaken in his teachings that the Babylon of Revelations could possibly be located in the East.