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IRAN IN THE BIBLE – Prophecies_ Origins_ and Where It Stands Today · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: Iran appears in the Bible long before it was called Iran.
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  Speaker 1: From the very first war recorded in scripture to the
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  Speaker 1: prophetic coalitions that point to the end of days, this
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  Speaker 1: land and its people are woven into the Biblical narrative
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  Speaker 1: in ways most people have never been shown. This video
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  Speaker 1: is divided into four parts. In the first, we go
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  Speaker 1: back to the beginning, to Noah, to Shem, and to
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  Speaker 1: the ancient civilization of Elam that rose in the land
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  Speaker 1: we now call Iran. In the second, we follow the
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  Speaker 1: rise of the Persian Empire and the extraordinary prophecies surrounding Cyrus, Daniel, Esther,
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  Speaker 1: and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. In the third, we enter
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  Speaker 1: the apocalyptic visions Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah and examine what
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  Speaker 1: the prophets set about Persia's role in the final events
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  Speaker 1: of history. In the fourth, we arrive at today, the
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  Speaker 1: Islamic Revolution, the Proxy wars, the nuclear program, and the
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  Speaker 1: signs that ancient offices may be reaching their moment of fulfillment.
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  Speaker 1: This is part one. We're going back to the very beginning,
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  Speaker 1: to the moment the world was repopulated after the flood,
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  Speaker 1: and to the ancient people who first settled the land
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  Speaker 1: we now call Iran. The flood recedes and the world
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  Speaker 1: is repopulated. The water was finally gone. After months of silence,
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  Speaker 1: rain and destruction, the flood had done its work. The
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  Speaker 1: earth was washed clean, and a new beginning was possible. Noah,
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  Speaker 1: his wife, his sons, and their wives stepped out of
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  Speaker 1: the ark onto dry ground, and for the first time
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  Speaker 1: in what must have felt like forever, they breathed open
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  Speaker 1: air under an open sky. God spoke to them. He
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  Speaker 1: told them to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth,
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  Speaker 1: and that is exactly what they did. From those eight survivors,
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  Speaker 1: the entire human race was rebuilt. Every nation that exists today,
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  Speaker 1: every culture, every language, every people group on every continent
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  Speaker 1: and traces its roots back to that small family that
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  Speaker 1: walked out of an ark somewhere in the mountains of Ararat.
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  Speaker 1: The Bible documents this rebuilding in what is known as
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  Speaker 1: the Table of Nations, found in the tenth chapter of Genesis.
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  Speaker 1: It is one of the most remarkable passages in all
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  Speaker 1: of Scripture. A genealogical map of the ancient world, tracing
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  Speaker 1: the descendants of Noah's three sons, shem Ham and Jayfith
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  Speaker 1: each son became the father of a branch of humanity,
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  Speaker 1: and each branch spread out across the earth, slowly, generation
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  Speaker 1: by generation, forming the civilizations and empires that would shape
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  Speaker 1: all of recorded history. Genesis ten opens with these words,
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  Speaker 1: these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem,
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  Speaker 1: Ham and Jayfith sons were born to them after the flood.
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  Speaker 1: And among those sons, among all those branches spreading out
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  Speaker 1: across the known world, hidden in the middle of the
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  Speaker 1: genealogy of Shem is a name that most people have
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  Speaker 1: never stopped to think about. A name that carries the
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  Speaker 1: weight of an entire civilization behind it, A name that
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  Speaker 1: connects the most ancient past to a nation that appears
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  Speaker 1: in the news every single day. That name is Elam.
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  Speaker 1: It may not sound like much when you first hear it,
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  Speaker 1: but follow that name forward through history and you will
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  Speaker 1: find that it leads straight to the land of Iran,
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  Speaker 1: to the same territory, the same people, the same ancient
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  Speaker 1: roots that shape a nations still standing on the world
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  Speaker 1: stage to day. Of Noah's three sons, Shem is the
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  Speaker 1: one the Bible pays the most deliberate attention to. He
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  Speaker 1: is the ancestor of the Semitic peoples, the line that
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  Speaker 1: would eventually produce Abraham, and through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and
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  Speaker 1: the twelve tribes of Israel. But long before any of that,
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  Speaker 1: Shem had sons of his own, and the Bible names
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  Speaker 1: them clearly in the tenth chapter of Genesis, to Shem,
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  Speaker 1: also the father of all the children of Eber, the
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  Speaker 1: older brother of jayfith children were born the sons of
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  Speaker 1: Shem Ilam, Asher apatshad Lud and Aram. Ilam is listed first.
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  Speaker 1: He is the first born of Shem, and his name
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  Speaker 1: does not just belong to one individual. It becomes the
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  Speaker 1: name of an entire people, an entire territory, an entire civilization.
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  Speaker 1: In the ancient world, that was how it worked in
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  Speaker 1: Man's descendants carried his name, and wherever those descendants settled,
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  Speaker 1: that name was planted into the ground with them. And
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  Speaker 1: the children of Elam went east. While other descendants of
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  Speaker 1: Shem spread across the Fertile Crescent and into the regions
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  Speaker 1: around Mesopotamia, the sons of Elam moved steadily toward the
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  Speaker 1: land east of the Tigris River, a land of dramatic
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  Speaker 1: mountains and fertile lowlands of long rivers and deep valleys,
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  Speaker 1: a land that would become one of the most consequential
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  Speaker 1: regions in all of early human civilization. Elam was not
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  Speaker 1: a minor or forgotten figure in history. His descendants built
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  Speaker 1: cities and formed armies. They established one of the most
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  Speaker 1: powerful empires the ancient Near East had ever seen. His
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  Speaker 1: name appears in Babylonian records, in Assyrian inscriptions, in Egyptian texts,
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  Speaker 1: and again and again throughout the pages of the Bible,
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  Speaker 1: from Genesis to Isaiah to Jeremiah to Ezekiel. He was
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  Speaker 1: not a footnote in the story. He was a foundation,
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  Speaker 1: and his land, the land of his children and their
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  Speaker 1: children's children across many generations, is the land the world
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  Speaker 1: today calls Iran. To understand who the Elamites were, you
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  Speaker 1: have to understand the land they settled in. Because land
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  Speaker 1: shapes people. It determines what they grow, how they fight,
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  Speaker 1: where they build, and how they see themselves. Picture the
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  Speaker 1: great Mesopotamian Plain, the flat river fed land between the
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  Speaker 1: Tigris and Euphrates, where Babylon would one day rise, and
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  Speaker 1: where the earliest cities of the world were being built.
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  Speaker 1: Now look east from that plain, the ground begins to rise,
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  Speaker 1: slowly at first, and then all at once it lifts
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  Speaker 1: into a towering wall of stone. The Zagros Mountains one
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  Speaker 1: of the longest and most dramatic mountain ranges in the
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  Speaker 1: entire Middle East, running from what is now northwestern Iran
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  Speaker 1: all the way south toward the Persian Gulf. On the
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  Speaker 1: western slopes of those mountains and in the rich, low
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  Speaker 1: lying plains between the base of the mountains and the sea,
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  Speaker 1: the children of Elam built their world. The region, known
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  Speaker 1: in ancient texts as Ilam and called Kuzistan to day,
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  Speaker 1: is a wide, flat, river fed plain in southwestern Iran.
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  Speaker 1: It was watered generously by rivers descending from the mountains,
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  Speaker 1: fertile enough to support large populations, and positioned at the
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  Speaker 1: natural crossroads of trade routes connecting Mesopotamia to the vast
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  Speaker 1: Iranian Plateau. Stretching eastward to the south, The land open
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  Speaker 1: to the shore of the Persian Gulf, giving the Elamites
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  Speaker 1: access to sea roots and to the commercial networks that
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  Speaker 1: moved goods between civilizations. Their great capital city, Susa, the
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  Speaker 1: same city that would appear centuries later in the Book
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  Speaker 1: of Ester sat in that lowland plain, a city so
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  Speaker 1: ancient that archaeologists digging through its layers have found human
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  Speaker 1: habitation going back thousands of years before Abraham was even
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  Speaker 1: a thought in any one's mind. This was not a
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  Speaker 1: forgotten corner of the earth. This was prime territory, rich soil,
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  Speaker 1: strategic location, mountain protection on one side, open sea access
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  Speaker 1: on the other. The people who claimed it were not wanderers.
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  Speaker 1: They were builders, and they built to last. Long before
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  Speaker 1: the Bible gives the Elamites a speaking role in the
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  Speaker 1: story of Nations, they were all ready constructing something extraordinary.
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  Speaker 1: While the descendants of Ham were raising the towers and
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  Speaker 1: temples of Babylon and Suma in the western plains, the
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  Speaker 1: Elamites were developing a distinct civilization on the eastern side
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  Speaker 1: of the mountains. They had their own writing system, among
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  Speaker 1: the oldest ever discovered anywhere in the world. They produced
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  Speaker 1: their own art, maintained their own religious traditions, organized their
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  Speaker 1: own governments, and trained their own armies. Susa was not
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  Speaker 1: a secondary city looking across the mountains with envy at Babylon.
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  Speaker 1: It was a cultural center in its own right, with
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  Speaker 1: its own gravity, its own identity, its own pride, Archeological
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  Speaker 1: excavations at Susa have uncovered beautifully painted pottery, detailed administrative
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  Speaker 1: records on clay tablets, monumental temples, and public archael texture
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  Speaker 1: that speaks of a people who took their civilization seriously.
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  Speaker 1: The Elamites were not imitating anyone. They were building something
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  Speaker 1: that reflected who they were and where they came from.
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  Speaker 1: Their language, called Elamite, was entirely unique. It belonged to
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  Speaker 1: no known language family and bore no relationship to the
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  Speaker 1: Semitic languages of their Mesopotamian neighbors, which is remarkable given
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  Speaker 1: how closely they lived together and how much they interacted.
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  Speaker 1: Even their closest neighbors could not fully understand them. Their
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  Speaker 1: religions centered on a goddess named Kiririsha and a god
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  Speaker 1: named Inshushinak, the Lord of Susa, whose temple stood at
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  Speaker 1: the heart of their capital, but they also absorbed religious
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  Speaker 1: influences from the cultures around them, adapting and adjusting over
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  Speaker 1: centuries in the way that all ancient civilizations did. By
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  Speaker 1: the time the Bible mentions them by name in the
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  Speaker 1: context of military conflict, the Elamite were not an emerging power,
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  Speaker 1: still finding its footing they were an empire with deep roots,
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  Speaker 1: long memory, and the confidence of a people who had
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  Speaker 1: been strong for a very long time. The first war
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  Speaker 1: recorded in the Bible is not a small skirmish between
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  Speaker 1: neighboring villages. It is a regional conflict involving nine kings,
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  Speaker 1: multiple nations, and the most dominant military power of its time.
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  Speaker 1: And leading that dominant power is a king from Elam.
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  Speaker 1: His name is Chedorlaomer. He is identified in the fourteenth
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  Speaker 1: chapter of Genesis as the King of Elam, and the
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  Speaker 1: opening verses of that chapter established something that would have
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  Speaker 1: been immediately understood by any reader in the ancient world.
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  Speaker 1: This man was not just a king, He was the
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  Speaker 1: king other kings answered to. The text explains that five kings,
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  Speaker 1: the rulers of cities in the region of the Plain,
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  Speaker 1: including the kings of Sodom and Gommorra, had served Cchedoloma
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  Speaker 1: for twelve years, twelve years of paying tribute, of bowing
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  Speaker 1: to his authority, of acknowledging his superiority. But in the
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  Speaker 1: thirteenth year they rebelled, they stopped paying, they decided they
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  Speaker 1: were done. Chedolauma's response was swift and total. In the
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  Speaker 1: fourteenth year, Chedolama and the kings who were with him
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  Speaker 1: came and defeated the refaiem In Ashtaroth Kanaim, the zuzim
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  Speaker 1: in Harm, the emim In Schevekiiathim, and the Horites in
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  Speaker 1: their hill country of Seyer as far as Elparan on
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  Speaker 1: the border of the wilderness. This was not a raid.
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  Speaker 1: This was a campaign, a methodical military march through the region,
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  Speaker 1: defeating one people after another before arriving to confront the
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  Speaker 1: five rebellious kings in the valley of Siddim. The battle
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  Speaker 1: that followed was decisive. The five kings lost, two of
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  Speaker 1: them fell into the tarpits of the valley trying to flee.
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  Speaker 1: Sodom and Gomorah were plundered, their goods carried off, and
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  Speaker 1: among the captives taken by Chedoalaumers coalition was the entire
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  Speaker 1: population of Sodom. This is the oldest detailed military campaign
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  Speaker 1: in the Bible, and it is led by a man
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  Speaker 1: whose power base was the ancient land of Elam, by
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  Speaker 1: a descendant of the firstborn son of Shem, by the
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  Speaker 1: children of the man whose name was planted into the
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  Speaker 1: soil of what is today Iran. The ancestors of Iran
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  Speaker 1: are not waiting patiently in the background of scripture. They
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  Speaker 1: are already in the first chapters of recorded conflict, standing
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  Speaker 1: at the front of the story. Among the prisoners carried
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  Speaker 1: off after chedor Lama's victory was a man named Lot.
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  Speaker 1: Lot was the nephew of a shepherd who lived in
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  Speaker 1: the region, a man then called Abram, who would later
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  Speaker 1: receive from God the name Abraham. Abram and Lot had
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  Speaker 1: traveled together from their homeland. They had shared roads, shared camps,
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  Speaker 1: shared flocks, before eventually separating to manage the land between them.
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  Speaker 1: Lot had chosen the well watered plain near Sodom. Abram
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  Speaker 1: had moved in a different direction, and now Lot was
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  Speaker 1: a prisoner in the hands of the king of Elam.
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  Speaker 1: When a fugitive came running to bring Abram the news,
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  Speaker 1: Abram did not hesitate and did not spend time calculating
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  Speaker 1: the odds. He armed three hundred and eighteen men from
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  Speaker 1: his own household, trained men, men he trusted, and he
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  Speaker 1: went after the army of Chedorlaoma. What followed is one
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  Speaker 1: of the most surprising military moments in the Book of Genesis.
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  Speaker 1: And he divided his forces against them by knight. He
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  Speaker 1: and his servants and defeated them and pursued them too Oba,
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  Speaker 1: north of Damascus. Then he brought back all the possessions
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  Speaker 1: and also brought back his Kinsman Lot with his possessions
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  Speaker 1: and the women and the people, a man with a
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  Speaker 1: personal household force attacking at knights, striking a coalition that
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  Speaker 1: had just defeated five kings, and swept through an entire
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  Speaker 1: region and winning. Lot was freed, the captives were released,
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  Speaker 1: the plunder was recovered. The army of Chedorlaoma was driven
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  Speaker 1: northward and did not return. This moment is significant beyond
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  Speaker 1: its drama. It is the first recorded encounter between the
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  Speaker 1: ancestor of the Hebrew people and the power of Elam,
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  Speaker 1: the ancestors of Iran, and it is a moment of
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  Speaker 1: direct confrontation of opposing purposes of two lines crossing in
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  Speaker 1: the dust of an ancient valley. After the battle, a
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  Speaker 1: mysterious figure named Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of
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  Speaker 1: God Most High, came out to meet Abram and blessed him,
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  Speaker 1: and Abram gave him a tenth of everything the blessing
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  Speaker 1: landed on Abram. The victory was his, but the line
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  Speaker 1: of Elam and the line of Abraham had met, and
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  Speaker 1: it would not be the last time. The relationship between
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  Speaker 1: Elam and Babylon was one of the defining tensions of
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  Speaker 1: the ancient world, and it was never simple. For centuries
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  Speaker 1: after the events of Genesis fourteen, the two great powers
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  Speaker 1: of the region, Elam to the east and Babylon to
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  Speaker 1: the west, pushed and pulled against each other in a
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  Speaker 1: rivalry that made and unmade kingdoms. There were long stretches
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  Speaker 1: when Elam held the upper hand. Elamite kings imposed their
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  Speaker 1: rule on Mesopotamian cities, collected tribute from peoples who lived
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  Speaker 1: in the shadow of the western plains, and extended their
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  Speaker 1: influence far beyond their own borders. The dominance that Cchedorlaoma
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  Speaker 1: exercised in Genesis fourteen was not an isolated incident. It
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  Speaker 1: reflected a pattern that ran through Elamite history for generations.
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  Speaker 1: But Babylon was persistent, and it was not going to
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  Speaker 1: remain subordinate forever. Under powerful kings, among them Hammurabi, whose
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: law code became one of the most famous documents of
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  Speaker 1: the ancient world. Babylon eventually pushed back hard against Elamite influence.
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  Speaker 1: Old alliances broke, battles were fought, the balance of power shifted,
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  Speaker 1: and Elam found itself on the defensive, giving back territory
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  Speaker 1: it had held for generations. What made the relationship so
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  Speaker 1: complex was that it was never simply war and never
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  Speaker 1: simply peace. Trade flowed between the two powers. Diplomatic marriages
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  Speaker 1: linked their royal families. There were periods of genuine cooperation
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  Speaker 1: when it served both sides to be allies rather than enemies.
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  Speaker 1: The Elamites absorbed Babylonian cultural influences. They used Cuneiform script
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  Speaker 1: for administrative purposes, They engaged with Mesopotamian religious traditions, They
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  Speaker 1: built commercial relationships that stretched deep into the Babylonian heartland.
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  Speaker 1: And yet through all of it, they remained distinctly themselves.
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  Speaker 1: The Elamite language never disappeared, their own religious identity persisted.
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  Speaker 1: Their kings still carried Elamite titles and ruled from Elamite cities.
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  Speaker 1: Even under pressure, Elam did not become Babylon. The two
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  Speaker 1: empires were too close, too strategically important to each other,
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  Speaker 1: and two evenly matched across different periods to allow either
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  Speaker 1: one to simply absorb the other. They circled each other
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  Speaker 1: for centuries, rivals who could not destroy each other, neighbors
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  Speaker 1: who could not ignore each other, and two powers whose
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  Speaker 1: intertwined history would eventually produce the conditions for something neither
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  Speaker 1: of them saw coming. There came a time when the
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  Speaker 1: Empire of Elam began to fracture. It did not happen
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  Speaker 1: in a single catastrophic moment. Empires rarely do. What usually
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  Speaker 1: happens is a long, slow wearing down, a series of
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  Speaker 1: military losses, internal divisions, shifts in the balance of regional power,
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  Speaker 1: until the nation that was once feared above all others
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  Speaker 1: finds itself reduced, diminished, and struggling to hold what it
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  Speaker 1: once possessed with ease. For Elam, that erosion came largely
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  Speaker 1: from the north, driven by an empire even more relentless
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  Speaker 1: than Babylon had been, Assyria. The Assyrians were among the
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  Speaker 1: most fearsome military forces the ancient world had produced. They
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  Speaker 1: were methodical, brutal, and thorough in a way that set
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  Speaker 1: them apart from every power before them. They did not
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  Speaker 1: simply defeat their enemies in the field. They dismantled them systematically.
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  Speaker 1: They relocated entire populations to break their identity leveled cities
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  Speaker 1: to erase their pride and rebuilt their empire on foundations
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  Speaker 1: of total submission. Resistance was answered with overwhelming destruction, and
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  Speaker 1: the ancient records they left behind make no effort to
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  Speaker 1: soften what they did. Assyrian clay tablets and stone inscriptions
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  Speaker 1: recovered from the ruins of their cities mention elam repeatedly
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  Speaker 1: across hundreds of years. The Ylamites appear in those records
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  Speaker 1: as adversaries, as tributaries, as a people who sometimes fought
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  Speaker 1: back with surprising effectiveness and sometimes suffered devastating defeats. There
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  Speaker 1: are boastful accounts from Assyrian kings describing campaigns against Elamite territory,
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  Speaker 1: Temples stripped of their contents, royal statues carried off, cities
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  Speaker 1: left in rubble. The most crushing blow came in the
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  Speaker 1: seventh century before Christ, when the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal launched
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  Speaker 1: a campaign against Ilam that the ancient records describe in
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  Speaker 1: terms that leave no room for interpretation. Susa, the great
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  Speaker 1: capital that had stood at the heart of Elamite civilization
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  Speaker 1: for thousands of years, was sacked. Its temples were demolished,
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  Speaker 1: the statues of its gods were taken to Nineveh as
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  Speaker 1: trophies of conquest. The Elamite Empire as a political and
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  Speaker 1: military force was broken. Looking at this moment from the outside,
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  Speaker 1: a person might conclude that Elam was simply finished. That
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  Speaker 1: a people who began with the firstborn son of Shem,
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  Speaker 1: who had built cities and commanded coalitions and brought their
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  Speaker 1: way across the ancient world, had run their course and
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  Speaker 1: passed into the silence of history. But there was someone
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  Speaker 1: who had not forgotten Elam. At the beginning of the
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  Speaker 1: reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah, the prophet Jeremiah received
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  Speaker 1: a message from God that was not addressed to Jerusalem,
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  Speaker 1: not to Babylon, not to Egypt or Moab, or any
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  Speaker 1: of the great powers that dominated the conversation of that age.
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  Speaker 1: It was addressed to Elam. This is unusual enough to
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  Speaker 1: stop and notice. Jeremiah was a prophet to Judah. His
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  Speaker 1: ministry was centred on Israel's covenant with God, on the
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  Speaker 1: coming judgment against Jerusalem, on the crisis that was bearing
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  Speaker 1: down on his own people. But in the forty ninth
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  Speaker 1: chapter of his book, God speaks past all of that
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  Speaker 1: and directs a specific, pointed word to a nation far
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  Speaker 1: to the east, a nation whose empire had already been
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  Speaker 1: shattered by Assyria, whose cities lay in varying states of
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  Speaker 1: ruin and decline, whose greatest days seemed to belong entirely
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  Speaker 1: to the past. God had not forgotten Elam. The word
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: he spoke was severe. It began with judgment, clear and unmistakable.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Thus says the Lord of Hosts. Behold, I will break
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: the bow of Elam, the mainstay of their might. And
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: I will bring upon Elam the four winds from the
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: four quarters of heaven, and I will scatter them to
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: all those winds, and there shall be no nation to
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: which those driven out of Elam shall not come. The
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: bow was the signature weapon of the Elamite military. Their
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: archers were famous in the ancient world, a force to
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: be reckoned with on any battlefield. When God said he
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: would break the bow of Elam, he was saying, the
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: thing you have built your power on, the thing you
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: have trusted to protect you and make others fear you,
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: I will take it apart with my own hand. And
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: the scattering he described was total, four winds from four directions,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: a diaspora so complete that there would be no nation
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: on earth that did not have Elamites living within its borders.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: The judgment continues, I will terrify Elam before their enemies
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: and before those who seek their life. I will bring
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: disaster upon them my fierce anger, declares the Lord. I
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: will send the sword after them until I have consumed them.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: And I will set my throne in Elam and destroy
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: from it king and officials, declares the Lord. God would
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: set his throne in Ilam. He would remove its kings,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: dismantle its officials, and establish his own sovereign authority over
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: the land. The empire that at once commanded other kings
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: would find itself answering to one it could not negotiate
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: with and could not defeat. But then, in the very
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: last verse of that passage, something extraordinary happens. After everything
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: that has just been said, after the breaking and the scattering,
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: and the sword and the fierce anger, after a judgment
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: so thorough that it seems designed to leave nothing standing,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: God says this, But in the latter days, I will
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: restore the fortunes of Elam, declares the Lord. One sentence,
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: seven words of promise, after everything that came before them,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: and those seven words change everything. About how you read
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: the story of this ancient land. The same God who
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: spoke the judgment spoke the promise. The same voice that
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: announced the breaking announced the restoration. Elam was not passed
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: away and forgotten. It was judged, and then it was
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: promised a future, the land of the Elamites, the ancient
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: soil of the first born son of Shem, the territory
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: that would go on to become the Persian Empire and
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: eventually the nation of Iran. That land was still on
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: God's mind, still in his plan, still the subject of
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: a promise that had not yet been fully fulfilled, and
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: that promise was still waiting. We are now entering part two.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: The Empire of Elam has fallen, but the land did
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: not stay empty. Something new was rising from those same
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: ancient roots, and God had already written its story before
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: it even began. When Elam collapsed under the weight of
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: a Syrian conquest, the land did not disappear. The rivers
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: still ran down from the Zagros mountains, The plains were
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: still fertile, the cities still stood, even the damaged ones,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: and the people, scattered and diminished as they were, was
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: still there. What changed was who held power from within
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: that same ancient territory, from the same soil that elam
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: had claimed for centuries, a new dynasty began to emerge.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: They were called the Achaemenids, and the empire they built
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: would become one of the largest the world had ever seen.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: History would call it the Persian Empire, and its shadow
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: would fall across every page of the Old Testament from
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: this point forward. The Persians did not come from nowhere.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: They had lived in that region for generations, moving through
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: the highlands of what is now southwestern and southern Iran,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: slowly consolidating strength while the empires around them rose and fell.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: They absorbed elements of Elamite culture. They even used Elamite
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: as one of their administrative languages for a time, and
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: they built on the foundations that the ancient land had
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: already laid. When Cyrus the second came to power, everything accelerated.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: He defeated the Medes to the north, absorbed their empire
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: rather than destroying it, and formed what became known as
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: the Meadow Persian Empire, a union of two powerful peoples
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: under one crown. Then he turned his attention westward toward
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: the kingdoms of Lydia, and eventually toward the greatest prize
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: in the ancient world, Babylon. But before any of that
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: happened in history, it had already happened in prophecy. The
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: prophet Isaiah lived and wrote in Jerusalem during the eighth
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: century before Christ. He ministered under several kings of Judah,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: and during his lifetime, the great threat to Israel was Assyria,
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: not Babylon, not Persia. Babylon was not yet the dominant
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: power it would become, Persia was not even a recognizable empire.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Yet Cyrus was not born, his father was not born,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: his grandfather was not born, and yet Isaiah wrote his name.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: In the forty fourth chapter of his book, God speaks
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: through the prophet in a way that is almost startling
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: in its specificity. He says, who says of Cyrus, he
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: saying of Jerusalem she shall be built, and of the
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Temple your foundation shall be laid. Then in the very
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: next chapter, God goes further. Thus says the Lord to
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: to subdue nations before him, and to loose the belts
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: of kings, to open doors before him, that gates may
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: not be closed. Read that carefully. God calls Cyrus his anointed,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: a word used elsewhere in scripture for the kings of Israel,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: for the high Priest, and eventually for the Messiah himself.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: He says he has taken Cyrus by the right hand,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: that he will subdue nations before him, open gates that
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: cannot be closed, level mountains, shatter bronze doors. And he
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: will do all of this for a specific reason, which
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: he states plainly just a few verses later, for the
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: sake of my servant Jacob and Israel. I chosen. I
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: call you by your name. I name you though you
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: do not know me. Cyrus would not know God, he
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: would not be a believer, not in any covenant sense.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: But God would use him anyway, would call him by name,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: would equip him, would position him, all for the sake
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: of his people, who were still at the time Isaiah
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: wrote these words, living freely in their own land, with
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: no exile yet in sight. This is one of the
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: most precise predictive prophecies in all of Scripture, a specific name,
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: a specific mission, written more than a century before the
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: man existed. It is the kind of prophecy that does
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: not allow for comfortable ambiguity. Either it was written before
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Syrus was born or it was not, and the historical
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: and textual evidence places Isaiah firmly in the period when
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Cyrus was still generations away. God was not reacting to history,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: he was writing it. Babylon, under King Belshazzar, had grown
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: comfortable with its own invincibility. The armies of the Meadow
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Persian Empire were outside the walls, but Babylon's walls were
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: among the most formidable ever constructed, wide enough, the ancient
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: accounts say for chariots to be driven along the top.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: The city had stores of food and water to last years.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Belshaza was not afraid, so he threw a party. The
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: fifth chapter of Daniel describes that night with the kind
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: of detail that makes it feel immediate, almost cinematic. A
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: thousand lords and nobles gathered, wine flowed, and then Belchaza
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: made a decision that crossed a line no king should
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: have crossed. Belshazzar, when he tasted the wine, commanded that
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: the gold and silver vessels that nebucad Nezar his father
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem be brought
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: that the king and his lords, his wives, and his
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: concubines might drink from them. The vessels from the Temple
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: of God, sacred objects taken from Jerusalem during the conquest,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: were filled with wine and raised in a toast to
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: gods of gold and silver and bronze and iron and
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: wood and stone. It was an act of deliberate contempt,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: performed in public with an audience. And in that same
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: hour something appeared on the wall. Immediately, the fingers of
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: the wall of the king's palace, opposite the lampstand, and
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: the king saw the hand as it wrote. Then the
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: king's color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him. His limbs
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: gave way, and his knees knocked together. The words written
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: on the wall, Mene mene tekel Parsin, were brought to
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Daniel to interpret, and what Daniel told the king was
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: not a comfortable message. God had numbered the days of
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: his kingdom and brought them to an end. He had
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: been weighed in the balance and found wanting His kingdom
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: was to be divided and given to the Medes and
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: the Persians. That very night, Belshaza was killed and the
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: army of Cyrus, which had found a way to divert
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: the river that ran under Babylon's walls and entered the
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: city through the river bed was already inside. Babylon fell
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: without the kind of battle its walls suggested would be required.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: The gates, just as Isaiah had written over a century earlier,
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: were opened. The city that had seemed untouchable was taken
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: in a single night, exactly as the prophecy had described,
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: in exactly the manner no military strategist would have predicted.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: The Persian Empire had arrived. There was a man who
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: lived through all of it. Daniel had been brought to
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Babylon as a young man, taken from Jerusale during one
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: of nebucad Nezza's early campaigns against Judah. He had been
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: trained in the language and literature of the Babylonians, given
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: a Babylonian name, and placed in the service of the
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: empire that had destroyed his homeland. He had served through
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: the entire reign of nebucud Nezza and through the reigns
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: that followed, and now he was an old man, watching
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: a new empire take the throne from the one that
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: had taken him captive, and the new empire kept him.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: The first chapter of Daniel establishes who he was from
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: the beginning, one of those who had no blemish of
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding, learning,
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: and competent to stand in the king's palace. But more
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: than his intelligence or his appearance, Daniel had something that
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: no training could produce. God was with him. He interpreted
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: dreams that no one else could interpret. He read writing
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: on walls. He survived lions, He outlasted kings. Under the
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Persian ruler Darius, Daniel was appointed as one of three
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: high officials set over the entire kingdom. His excellence was
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: so consistent that the king was considering placing him above
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: the other two. His rivals, knowing they could find no
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: fault in his work, targeted the one thing they could
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: not take from him, Assipudiu, his faith. They persuaded the
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: king to sign a decree forbidding prayer to any one
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: but the king for thirty days, and Daniel, who knew
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: the decree had been signed, went to his house, where
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: He got down on his knees three times a day
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: had done previously. He did not hide it, He did
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: not adjust his schedule. He prayed as he had always prayed,
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: toward the city that still lay in ruins, to work
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the God who had never abandoned him, even when everything
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: around him had been taken away. The lions did not
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: touch him. The king, who had been tricked into signing
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: the decree, was relieved, and Daniel continued serving, praying, receiving visions,
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: and writing them down for a generation that would not
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: come for centuries. In the first year of his reign
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: over Babylon, Cyrus issued a decree. It was the kind
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: of decree that no one saw coming, not from a conqueror.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Conquering kings took things, they did not give them back.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: They dismantled foreign temples and carried off the sacred objects
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: and the skilled workers and the royal families, and built
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: their own prestige from the ruins of what they had taken.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: That was how it worked. Cyrus did something different. The
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: first chapter of Ezra records his proclamation in full. Thus
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: says Cyrus, King of Persia, the Lord, the God of
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Heaven has given me all the kingingdoms of the earth,
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: and he has charged me to build him a house
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: of all his people, may his God be with him,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah,
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: He is the God who is in Jerusalem. He acknowledged
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: the God of Israel. He authorized the return of the exiles.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: He released the sacred vessels that nebucad Nezar had taken
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: from the temple, thousands of gold and silver objects counted
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: and cataloged and handed back. And he instructed the people
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: of his empire to support those who were returning, to
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: give them silver and gold, goods and livestock, free will
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: offerings for the House of God in Jerusalem. A Persian king,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: who by his own admission did not know the God
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: of Israel in a personal covenant sense, became the human
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: instrument through which one of the great prophetic promises of
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: the Old Testament was fulfilled. The people who had gone
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: into exile in Babylon, who had wept by the rivers
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: and hung their harps on the willows, and wondered if
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: God had forgotten them. Those people were going home. Ezra
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: records that more than forty two thousand people made the
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: journey back to Judah. They went, with the blessing of
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: the Persian Empire, financed in part by its treasury, carrying
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: the sacred objects of their temple back to the land
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: where the temple would be rebuilt. Isaiah had said it,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: Jeremiah had said it, and Cyrus unknowingly faithfully made it happen.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Generations after Cyrus, the Persian Empire was still standing, still powerful,
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: and still deeply entangled with the fate of the Jewish people,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: this time in a way that threatened to end in
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: their complete destruction. The king was Xerxes, known in the
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Hebrew text as Ahasueras. He ruled from his palace at Susa,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: the ancient Elamite capit over a kingdom that stretched from
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: India to Aethiopia. His queen had displeased him, and in
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: her place he had chosen a young Jewish woman named Esther,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: who had been raised by her cousin Mordecai after the
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: deaths of her parents. Esther had not told any one
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: in the palace that she was Jewish. Into this situation
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: came a man named Hayman, whom the king had elevated
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: above all the other officials in the empire. Hayman required
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: that everyone bow to him when he passed. Everyone did,
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: except Mordecai. The Book of Esther does not give a
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: detailed explanation of why Mordecai refused. It simply records that
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: he would not bow and would not pay homage. And
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: when Hayman found out that Mordecai was a Jew, his
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: anger spread far beyond one man. He decided that removing
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: Mordecai alone was not enough, but he disdained to lay
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: hands on Mordecai alone. So as they had made known
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: to him the people of Mordecai, Hayman sought to destroy
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: kingdom of Ahasuerus. He went to the king, presented a
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: distorted picture of the Jewish people as a disruptive and
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: dangerous element in the empire, and obtained permission to issue
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: a decree ordering their annihilation on a specific date chosen
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: by casting lots, a practice called pur The decree went
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: out to every province in the empire. The date was set,
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: and it must have seemed to anyone reading the situation
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: from the outside that the people of God were finished.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: But God had placed a woman in the palace. When
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Mordecai heard what had been decreed, he tore his clothes
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: and put on sackcloth and went through the city, crying
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: out with a loud and bitter cry. When Esther heard
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: what he was doing and sent to find out why,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: he sent her a copy of the decree and a
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: message that left no room for comfortable inaction. Do not
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: think to yourself that in the king's palace you will
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: escape any more than all the other Jews. For if
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: rise for the Jews from another place, But you and
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: have not come to the kingdom for such a time
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: as this, for such a time as this. It is
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: one of the most quoted phrases in the entire book,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: and it contains a theology that runs throughout the whole story,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: the conviction that a person's position, their access, their moment
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: in history is not an accident. That God places people
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: where he places them on purpose. Esther fasted for three days.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: Then she went to the king uninvited, which under Persian law,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: carried the penalty of death unless the king extended his
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: golden scepter. He extended his scepter. What followed was a
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: series of banquets and reversals that read like a masterfully
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: constructed story, because it is one. Hamen, convinced at one
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: point that he was about to be honored by the king,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: found himself instead ordered to publicly honor Mordecai, the very
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: man he had been plotting to kill. The gallows he
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: had built to hang Mordecai were used instead to hang him.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: The decree against the Jews was counted by a new
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: decree allowing them to defend themselves, and on the day
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: Hayman had chosen for their destruction, the Jewish people throughout
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: the Empire were in stead victorious against their enemies. The
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: Book of est closes with the establishment of the Feast
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: of Purim, named after the Purr, the lot that Hamen
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: had cast to choose the date of destruction, now redeemed
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: as a day of celebration, feasting, and the sea sending
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: of gifts. Therefore, the Jews of the villages who live
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: in the rural towns hold the fourteenth day of the
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: month of Adda as a day for glare, madness and feasting,
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: as a holiday, and as a day on which they
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: sent gifts of food to one another. A plan designed
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: to erase a people became the foundation of a celebration
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: that the same people still observed today. The Persian Empire,
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: which had hosted the plan for their destruction, had also,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: in the hand of God, hosted its reversal. Decades after
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: Cyrus had authorized the return of the exiles and the
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: rebuilding of the temple, Jerusalem was still not fully restored.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: The temple had been rebuilt, but the walls of the city,
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: the walls that were the visible symbol of a city's dignity, safety,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: and future, were still broken, still charred, still lying in
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: the rubble of nebuchad Nezes. The conquest, a man named
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: nea Mayah, serving as cup erer to the Persian king
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: art Exerxes, heard about it and wept. As soon as
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: I heard these words, I sat down and wept and
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: the God of Heaven. He prayed, He fasted, and then
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: when the moment came, he asked. The king noticed that
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: Naemiah's face was sad, something that was apparently unusual enough
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: to prompt a question, and N'emiah, after a silent prayer
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: that the text captures with the kind of honesty only
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: a real account produces, told the king what was weighing
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: on him. Jerusalem, the city of his ancestors, lay in ruins,
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: and its gates had been burned. The King's response was
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: not indifference. He asked what Ne'emiah needed. Ni'emiah asked for
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: letters to the governors of the provinces he would cross
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: on his way to Judah, for a letter to the
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: keeper of the king's forest, requesting timber for the gates
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: and the wall and the house he would stay in.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: And the king gave him everything he asked for. In
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: the King granted me what I asked for. The good
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: hand of my God was upon me. Nehemiah arrived in Jerusalem,
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: surveyed the damage in secret by night, and then gathered
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: the people and spoke plainly, you see the trouble we
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins, with its gates burned.
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: Come let us build the Wall of Jerusalem, that we
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: may no longer suffer derision. The people replied, let us
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: rise up and build. They built despite opposition from neighboring
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: officials who mocked them, threatened them, and plotted against them,
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: despite workers who grew discouraged, and enemies who tried to
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: draw Neemiah away from the work with schemes and false prophecies.
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: Half of them worked, half of them held weapons, and
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: they built with one hand and stood guard with the other.
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: In fifty two days, the wall was finished. The nations
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: around them, who had spent those fifty two days watching
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: and calculating, understood something. When it was done, and when
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: all our enemy heard of it, all the nations around
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: us were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem,
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: for they perceived that this work had been accomplished with
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: the help of our God. A Persian king had provided
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: the authorization, the materials, and the protection. A Jewish man
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: with grief in his heart and faith in his God
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: had done the rest. And the city that Nebucanesa had
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: broken was standing again, walls and gates, intact fulfilling what
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: the prophets had spoken, and setting the stage for everything
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: that was still to come. Before all of this had happened,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: before Cyrus had conquered Babylon, before Esther had stood before
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: the king, before Nehemiah had picked up a trowel, Daniel
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: had seen it all in outline. In the third year
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: of Belshazar's reign, while Babylon was still standing and the
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: Persian Empire was still in its rise, Daniel received a
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: vision in the city of Susa. He saw himself standing
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: beside the ul canal. When he looked up and saw
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: a ram standing before the canal with two horns, one
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: horn higher than the other, the taller one coming up last.
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: The ram charged westward, and northward and southward, and nothing
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: could stand against it. It did as it pleased and
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: became great. Daniel did not have to guess at what
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: it meant. The angel Gabriel came and stood before him
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: and explained it directly. The vision, Gabriel said, concerned the
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: appointed time of the end, but its immediate meaning was
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: not hidden. As for the ram that you saw with
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Two horns, two peoples united under one empire, Media on
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: one side, Persia on the other. The taller Horn, coming
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: up last. Just as Persia eventually dominated the Meads even
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: within their alliance, the ram charging in every direction, unstoppable,
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: building the largest empire the world had seen to that point.
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: Daniel unders stood that what he was seeing was not
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: just about the present. The vision extended forward, passed Persia
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: into the rise of Greece, into the turbulence of the
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: centuries ahead. Gabriel mapped a sequence of empires and conflicts
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: that would carry enormous consequences for the people of God.
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: But what anchors the vision at its foundation is the
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: identification of Persia by name, not a vague reference, not
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: a symbolic hint requiring creative interpretation. The Angel says, clearly,
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: this is Media and Persia, the land of the ancient Elamites,
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: the territory that had given rise to the Achaemenid dynasty,
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: the empire that had freed the exiles and rebuilt the
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: Temple and restored the walls of Jerusalem. God had been
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: watching that land from the moment elam first settled in
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: the shadow of the Zagros Mountains. He had judged it,
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: he had used it, he had named it in prophecy
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: before its kings were born, and he was not finished
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: with it yet. We are now entering Part three. Everything
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: we have seen so far, the ancient Empire, the fulfilled prophecies,
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: the Persian kings who shaped Biblical history, was preparation for
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: what comes next, because the prophets were not only looking back,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: they were looking forward, and what they saw involves this
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: land in ways that have not yet fully happened. Ezekiel
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: was a priest who had been taken into exile in
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: Babylon along with thousands of other Jews before Jerusalem was
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: finally destroyed. He ministered among the exiles beside the Chibar Canal,
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: and the visions God gave him were among the most
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: dramatic and detailed in all of scripture. In the thirty
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: eighth chapter of his book, God gives him a vision
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: that does not belong to his own time. The setting
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: is explicit. This is something that will happen in the
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: latter days. In a future moment, when the people of
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: Israel have been gathered back to their land after a
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: long scattering, God tells Ezekiel to set his face toward
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: a figure named Gog and prophesy against him. And then
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: God lists the nations that will march with God among them.
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: Stated clearly and without ambiguity, is Persia, Persia cush and
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: putta with them, all of them with shield and helmet.
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: Gomer and all his hordes beth to Garma from the
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: uttermost parts of the north, with all his hordes. Many
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: peoples are with you. This is not a symbolic or
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: metaphorical reference. Persia was a known name nation when Ezekiel
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: wrote these words, the same empire that would free the
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: Jewish exiles, the same land whose ancient roots stretched back
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: to Elam and the sons of Shem. And here in
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: a prophecy about a future coalition marching against the restored Israel,
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Persia stands among the nations aligned against God's people. The
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: vision continues with God addressing God to directly, describing the
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: attack a great force like a cloud covering the land,
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: descending on a people living in safety. And God says
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: that when it happens, he will act, not through human armies,
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: not through political alliances. He will act personally. But on
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: that day, the day that God comes against the land
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: of Israel, declares the Lord God, my wrath will be
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: roused in my anger, for in my jealousy and in
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: my blazing Wrath, I declare on that day there shall
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: be a great earthquake in the soong land of Israel.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: The nations that come against Israel in this vision do
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: not win. What they walk into is not a battle
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: they calculated correctly. They walk into the direct intervention of
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: the God who placed his name on that land. The
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: identity of God and Maygog has been discussed and debated
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: by scholars and students of prophecy for a very long time,
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: but the text itself provides more guidance than is often recognized.
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: Gog is identified as being from the land of Magog
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: and as the chief prince of Meshek and Tubal. Looking
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: back at the table of Nations in Genesis ten, Magog, Meshek,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: and Tubal were all sons of Jayfith, Noah's son, whose
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: descendants spread primarily into the northern regions into what is
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: today Russia, Turkey, and the surrounding areas. The ancient Jewish
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: historian Josephus associated Magog with the Scythians, a people from
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: the region north of the Black Sea in the territory
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: of modern Russia and Ukraine. Many scholars across centuries have
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: identified the leader of this coalition as a figure associated
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: with the far North, a nation of great military power
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: that will descend from that direction toward the Middle East.
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: Ezekiel describes Gog as coming from the uttermost parts of
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: the North. When you draw a line directly north from
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: the land of Israel on a map, the line passes
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: through Turkey and continues into the heart of Russia. The
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: geographic language of the prophecy points in one direction, and
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: scholars who have mapped it carefully have consistently arrived at
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: the same conclusion. The nations listed around gog include peoples
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: associated with Turkey, Libya, Soudan, and stated plainly, Persia. Together
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: they form a coalition drawn from the south, the North,
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: and the East, converging on a land that sits at
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: the crossroads of all three directions. What makes Ezekiel thirty
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: eight so remarkable is not just what it predicts, but
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: the specificity with which it names the participants. These are
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: not vague symbolic forces. They are nations with names, with
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: identifiable histories, and with geographical positions that can still be
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: traced today. Of all the nations named in Ezekiel thirty eight,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: Persia modern Iran is perhaps the one whose current posture
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: most visibly matches the prophetic description. Ezekiel sees a coalition
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: marching against Israel with the explicit intent of taking plunder,
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: seizing wealth, and turning their hand against a people living
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: in recovered land. The text describes the nations in the
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: alliance as coming prepared with shield and helmet, armed and
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: ready for a military campaign. Iran today openly states its
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: hostility toward the existence of the state of Israel. It
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: funds military organizations on Israel's northern and southern borders. Its
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: leadership has called for the elimination of the Jewish state
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: in terms that no diplomatic translation can soften, and it
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: sits precisely where Ezekiel's text places Persia to the east
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: and south of Israel, geographically positioned along the route that
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: a coalition moving toward the land of Israel would naturally follow.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: The theological weight of this is significant. Ezekiel was not
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: writing about Israel as it existed in his own day,
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: a people in exile, their city, destroyed, their temple, a ruin.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: He was writing about a future Israel, a gathered Israel,
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: a people back in their land and living in what
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: he describes as a condition of restored security. The prophecy
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: could not have been fulfilled in Ezekiel's lifetime. It required
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: a set of conditions that did not exist until the
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: modern era. Those conditions now exist. That does not mean
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: the fulfillment is tomorrow. Prophecy does not operate on human schedules,
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: But the alignment of nations that Ezekiel described, a coalition
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: including the land of Persia positioned against a restored Israel,
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: is no longer a scenario that requires imagination to picture.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: It is a description of a geopolitical reality that is
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: already visibly forming. Daniel E. Leven opens with a precision
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: that is almost uncomfortable to read, because what it describes
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: as future was so thoroughly fulfilled in history that critics
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: have often argued it must have been written after the
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: events it describes, which would make it history disguised as
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: prophecy rather than actual prediction. But the opening verses of
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: that chapter concern Persia, and they were written before Persia
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: had even reached the height of its power. The Angel
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: speaking to Daniel says, and now I will show you
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: the truth. Behold, three more kings shall arise in Persia
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: and a fourth shall be far richer than all of them,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: and when he has become strong through his riches, he
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: shall stir up all against the Kingdom of Greece. Three
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: kings would follow Cyrus. Then a fourth, richer than all
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: the others, would provoke a confrontation with Greece that would
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: set in motion a sequence of events stretching far beyond
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: his own lifetime. History identifies that fourth king as Xerxes,
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: the same king who appears in the Book of Esther,
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: whose massive campaign against Greece, though ultimately unsuccessful, lit the
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: fuse that would eventually bring Alexander the Great marching eastward
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: in conquest. What follows in Daniel eleven is a detailed
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: account of the wars between the kings of the North
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: and the kings of the South, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: empires that divided Alexander's conquests after his death. The correspondence
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: between the prophecy and the historical record is so precise
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: that scholars who have traced in verse by verse have
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: found matches for nearly every king, every alliance, every betrayal,
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: and every military campaign described. And the chapter does not
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: end with fulfilled history It transitions in the later verses
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: into territory that has not yet fully happened, a final
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: king whose behavior echoes but exceeds anything in ancient history.
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: The pattern of Daniel eleven is the pattern of all
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: prophetic scripture. God shows that he can predict the rise
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: and fall of empires with perfect accuracy, so that when
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: the unfulfilled portions arrive, there is a track record already built.
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: Persia opens that chapter, what closes it still waits. Isaiah
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: twenty one is one of the harder chapters in the book. Dense, urgent,
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: almost breathless in its language. It opens with a vision
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: described as a harsh and disturbing whirlwind sweeping out of
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: the desert, and Isaiah responds to what he sees with
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: physical distress. Therefore, my loins are filled with anguish pangs
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: have seized me, like the pangs of a woman in labor.
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: I am bowed down so that I cannot hear. I
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: am dismayed so that I cannot see. But in the
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: middle of the vision, God gives Isaiah a clear instruction,
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: go set a watchman, let him announce what he sees.
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: And the watchman watches and what he eventually sees approaching
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: coming in formation across the landscape. Is this here come
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: riders horsemen in pairs, and one answered fallen. Fallen is
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: Babylon and all the carved images of her gods he
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: has shattered to the ground. Among the forces the vision
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: shows approaching Babylon. The text names two peoples specifically, go
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: Uppo Elam lay siege o Media Ilam, the ancient land
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: that would become the Persian heartland, and Media, the northern
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: partner of the Meido Persian alliance. Together they are called
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: to execute judgment on Babylon. This vision was given in
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: a time when Babylon was not yet the dominant empire,
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: when Persia was not yet a unified force, and when
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: the fall of the city that would eventually be described
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: as the center of the world was still generations away.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: And yet Isaiah saw it a watchman reporting riders approaching Elam,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: advancing Babylon falling. The oracle in Isaiah twenty one carries
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: something that is easy to miss if you read it
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: only as historical commentary. It is a vision of judgment
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: that uses Persia as the instrument, but the judgment itself
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: belongs to God. He calls Elam to go up. He
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: calls media to lay siege. They are not acting on
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: their own initiative, they are summoned. That pattern God summoning
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: a nation to execute his purposes, even a nation that
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: does not know him, is one of the most consistent
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: threads in all of prophetic scripture, and it runs directly
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: through the ancient land of Iran from the first pages
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: to the last. By the time you have traced Iran
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: through all the pages of the Bible, from Elam in Genesis,
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: to Persia in the Prophets, to the Coalition in Ezekiel
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: emerges that is impossible to miss. This land has been
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: used by God as an instrument of redemption, and it
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: has also been named as a target of his in
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: times judgment. Both things are true, Both things are in
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: the text, and they apply to different moments in the
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: unfolding story. In the era of Cyrus, Persia was the instrument,
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: the conquering power that did not destroy the Jewish people,
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: but released them the empire that financed the Temple and
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: authorized the restoration of Jerusalem. God called Cyrus his anointed,
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: took him by the right hand, and used him to
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: accomplish something that Israel could not accomplish for itself. That
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: was not Israel's enemy at work, that was God's chosen tool.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: But Ezekiel sees a different Iran, a future Persia standing
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: in a coalition of nations that has come to take
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: and destroy, marching against a restored Israel under the banner
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: of military ambition, aligned with forces that carry the same hostility.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: The ancient enemies always carried the same land, two completely
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: different roles, separated by centuries and by the sovereign choice
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: of God, who assigns purposes to nations the way a
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: builder assigns different functions to different materials, using each one
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: where it fits at the moment it is needed for
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: a plan larger than any of them can see. The
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: prophets did not predict a simple story for this land.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: They predicted a complex one, a story of judgment and restoration,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: of service and rebellion of an ancient people who descended
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: from the first born son of m and who have never,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: through all the rise and fall of their empires, left
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: the attention of the God who named them at the beginning.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: We are now entering part four. Everything we have seen
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: the ancient ancestors, the Persian kings the prophetic visions needs
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: here to to day, to the nation the world watches
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: on its screens every evening, and to the question that
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: ties all of it together. For most of recorded history,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: the land was called Persia. That was the name the
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: Greeks used for it. That was the name that appeared
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: in the diplomatic correspondence of ancient empires. That was the
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: name under which Cyrus conquered Babylon, under which Xerxes launched
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: his campaign against Greece, under which Darius built his palace
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: at Persepolis. For over two thousand years, the world looked
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: at that land and said Persia. In nineteen thirty five,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: the government asked the international community to begin using a
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: different name, Iran. The word was not invented, It had
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: ancient roots in the region, derived from the same linguistic
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: family as the word Aryan, and it had been used
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: internally for centuries. But its formal adoption as the official
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: international name marked a deliberate moment of national repositioning. The
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: country was declaring something about its own identity, reaching past
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: the Greek label and claiming a name from deeper in
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: its own history. Then came nineteen seventy nine. What happened
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: in Iran that year was not simply a change of government.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: It was a complete transformation of the nature of the state.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: The monarchy that had ruled for decades was overthrown, and
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: in its place rose an Islamic republic built on the
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: principle that religious law should govern political life. The revolution's leader,
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: Ayatola Komeni, returned from exile to a reception that filled
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: the streets of Tehran with millions of people. What he
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: established was a government in which religious authorities sat above
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: political authority, a structure unlike anything else in the modern world.
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: The Islamic Revolution did not merely change who was in charge.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: It changed what Iran unbelieved it was for. The new
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: state defined itself in explicitly religious and ideological terms. It
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: declared enemies not just on the basis of national interest,
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: but on the basis of religious obligation. And near the
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: top of that list of declared enemies was the state
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: of Israel, the ancient land of the Elamites, the soil
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: of Cyrus and Esther and Nehemiah's timber, had become something
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: its ancient kings would not have recognized, but the God
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: who had spoken over it in Jeremiah forty nine, and
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: Ezekiel thirty eight had never lost sight of it. He
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: had written about its latter days, long before the word
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: Iran existed in any language. The hostility of the Islamic
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: Republic toward Israel is not a recent development, and it
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: is not a secret. It has been stated plainly, repeatedly,
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: and at the highest levels of Iranian leadership since the
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: revolution established the new government in nineteen seventy nine. It
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: is written into the ideologlogy of the state. It is
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: expressed in the slogans painted on missiles. It is spoken
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: from podiums at international forums with no attempt at diplomatic softening.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: This matters to any one who has read the prophets carefully,
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: not because political hostility between nations is unusual, but because
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: of the specific character of this hostility and the specific
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: nation it is directed at. The Bible is not silent
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: on the subject of nations that set themselves against Israel.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: In the thirty third psalm Us have praise about exactly
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: this kind of alliance. Do not keep silence, O God,
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: do not hold your peace, and do not be still,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: O God, for behold your enemies make an uproar. Those
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: who hate you have raised their heads. They lay crafty
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: plans against your people. They consult together against your treasured ones.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: They say, come, let us wipe them out as a nation.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: Let the name of Israel be remembered no more. Those
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: words were written over two thousand years ago. They describe
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: a posture toward Israel that has appeared in every generation,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: the desire not merely to defeat Israel militarily, but to
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: eliminate it entirely, to erase the name from history. The
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: language used by Iranian leaders about Israel in the modern
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: era carries precisely that character our coexistence with adjusted borders,
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: not a negotiated peace elimination. What the Bible consistently shows
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: is that this kind of hostility toward Israel is never
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: only political. Behind every human coalition that has sought to
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: destroy God's people, the prophets see a spiritual dimension, an
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: opposition that is older than any of the nations involved it.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Run's pasture toward Israel today is the latest expression of
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: something the Biblical narrative has been tracings since the earliest pages.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: One of the most striking features of Iran's strategy toward
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: Israel is not what it does directly, but what it
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: does through others. Over decades, the Islamic Republic has invested
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: heavily in building, arming, training, and financing a network of
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: military and political organizations positioned in the countries surrounding Israel.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: In Lebanon to the north, Hezbolah, funded, equipped, and ideologically
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: shaped by Iran, has built one of the largest non
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: state military arsenals in the world, pointed southward toward Israeli cities.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: In Gaza to the southwest, Hamas has received Iranian weapons, money,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: and tactical support. In Yemen to the south, the Hawthy
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: movement has launched drones and missiles toward Israel from a
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: distance that would have seemed operationally impossible a generation ago.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: Look at a map, then look at what the prophet
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: Psalm eighty three describes. The Psalmist records a prayer against
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: a coalition of peoples surrounding Israel, listing nations from the north,
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: the south, the east, and the west, all moving together
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: with one objective. They have said, come and let us
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: cut them off from being a nation, that the name
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: of Israel may be no more. In remembrance the specific
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: nations in that Psalm belong to the ancient world, but
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: the geography is identical, the intent is identical. The encirclement
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: enemies pressing in from every direction, coordinated around a common goal,
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: is a pattern the biblical narrative keeps returning to Iran
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: does not share a border with Israel. It has found
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: a way to make that irrelevant. Through its proxies. It
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: has effectively placed armed and hostile forces on Israel's northern border,
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: on its southern border, and within range from the direction
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: of the Red Sea. The encirclement that the Psalmist described
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: in prayer asking God to intervene is a physical reality
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: on the map of the modern Middle East. There is
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: a detail in Ezekiel thirty eight that careful readers have
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: noticed for a long time. When God describes the nations
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: coming against Israel in the latter days, he describes them
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: as a force that comes suddenly, confidently and in great strength,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: a force that clearly believes it can succeed. The nations
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: in the coalition are not sneaking in under cover of
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: night hoping to avoid confrontation. They are marching. They are organized,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: They believe they have the power to do what they
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: intend to do. You will come up against my people
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: Israel like a cloud covering the land in the latter days.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: I will bring you against my land that the nations
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: may know me when through you ogog, I vindicate my
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: holiness before their eyes. What gives a nation that kind
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: of confidence? What makes a military coalition believe I can
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: march against a nation that has in recent decades demonstrated
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: significant military capability and that operates under a nuclear ambiguity
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: that every regional power understands perfectly well. One answer that
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: analysts and students of prophecy have both considered is this
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: a nation that possesses nuclear capability of its own does
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: not fear nuclear deterrence from the other side the same
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: way a non nuclear nation does. The balance of threat changes.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: Iran's nuclear program has been one of the most closely
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: watched geopolitical developments of the past two decades. Multiple rounds
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: of international negotiations, sanctions, agreements signed and abandoned, facilities built
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: underground and reportedly targeted. The entire world has been watching
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: a country pursue a capability it insists is peaceful and
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: that almost no outside observer believes is purely peaceful. Whether
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: that programme advances to its apparent goal or not. The
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: question it raises, in the context of Ezekiel thirty eight
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: is not a small one. Is the world watching the
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: slow construction of the military confidence that would allow a
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: coalition to do exactly what Ezekiel described. The prophecy does
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: not require a nuclear weapon, but it does require a
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: force convinced it can win, and the nature of that
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: conviction has not been fully explained by anything in the
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: text of Ezekiel, which means it remains an open question
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: that current events keep pressing closer to the surface. In
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: the middle of all of this, the hostility, the military posture,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: the nuclear ambitions, the declared ideology of the Islamic Republic,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: something else is happening inside Iran that the evening news
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: rarely covers with the attention it deserves. People are turning
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: to Jesus Christ at a rate that missiologists and church
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: researchers describe as extraordinary. By some estimates, the church in Saide,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: Iran has grown faster over the past few decades than
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: the church in any other nation on Earth. Not a
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: church that meets in public buildings with government permission. There
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: is no such church available to Muslim background believers. But
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: a church that meets in homes, that spreads through personal
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: relationships and through satellite broadcasts and through the Internet, that
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: grows precisely because the government that opposes it has never
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: been able to reach all the way into living rooms
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: and family conversations and the quiet moments when a person
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: reads a verse they were never supposed to read. This
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: matters because of what God said to Elam in Jeremiah
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: forty nine. After all the judgment, after the broken bow
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: and the scattered people and the sword, the final word
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: was but in the latter days, I will restore the
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: fortunes of Elam, declares the Lord. The restoration God promised
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: was not given a specific shape in that verse. It
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: did not specify a political restoration or an economic one.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: But in a land where the ancient promise still stands,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: where people descended from the first born son of Shem
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: are turning in extraordinary numbers toward the God of scripture,
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: it is not a stretch to ask whether what is
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: happening in Saide Iran today is part of what God
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: was pointing toward when he chose to end that oracle
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: with a promise instead of a period no political regime
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: has been able to stop it. Arrests have been made,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: sentences have been handed down, and the movement has continued growing.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: The God who placed his name on that land in
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: Jeremiah forty nine does not appear to be finished with
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: what he started. There, stand back far enough and look
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: at the whole picture. A man named Ilam, firstborn son
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: of shem grandson of Noah, settles his family in the
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: shadow of the Zakras mountains in the land we now
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: call Iran. His descendants build cities, form armies, and become
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: They appear in Genesis, leading the first Coalition War. In scripture,
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: they receive a direct prophetic address from God through Jeremiah,
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: a judgment that ends with the promise of restoration. They
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: rise again as Persia free. The Jewish exiles fund the
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: rebuilding of the temple, shelter esterand Mordecai, and give Nehemiah
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: the materials to restore Jerusalem's walls. A prophet named Daniel
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: identifies their empire by name in a vision. The angel
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: Gabriel himself explains Ezekiel calls them by name in a
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: coalition that will march against Israel. In the latter days,
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: Isaiah hears their name called in a vision of Babylon's fall.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: And today the same land, renamed but not relocated, changed
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: but not erased, sits at the center of the most
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: what geopolitical tension on earth, while inside its borders a
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: spiritual awakening grows in the spaces the government cannot reach.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: There is a verse in the Book of Isaiah, in
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: the eleventh chapter that speaks of a future day when
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: God gathers his scattered people from every corner of the earth.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: Among the places named as sources of that return is
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: a specific location. He will raise a signal for the
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: nations and will assemble the banished of Israel and gather
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: And in that same chapter, among the lands where the
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: dispersed will be found Ilum. From Genesis to Isaiah, to Jeremiah,
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: to Ezekiel to Daniel, the land of Iran has never
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: been absent from the story. It is pla different roles
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: at different moments, instrument and adversary, shelter and threat, background
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: and foreground, but it has never left the page. The
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: God who knew Elam's name before the first city was
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: built in the lowlands of Khuzistan, has not lost thee
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: thread from the sons of Noah to the evening news.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: That thread has run without breaking, held in hands that
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: do not drop what they have chosen to carry. If
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: this video opened your eyes to something you had never
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: seen before, share it with someone who needs to see
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: it too. There are people in your life who are
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: watching the news and feeling confused and afraid, and this
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: is exactly the kind of content that puts the pieces
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: together for them. And if you are not subscribed yet,
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: now is the time. There is much more of this
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: coming because the Bible has far more to say about
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: the nations of our world than most people have ever
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: been shown. And that is exactly what this channel is
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: here for. We will see you in the next one.