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Hey, everybody.

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Today, I want to talk about something that's on a lot of our minds, and that is Iran,

and particularly focused on a question that someone asked me over the past week.

After Israel's bombing of Iran, a friend told me about a preacher that he had heard that did a whole chart about how

Gog and Magog in the book of Ezekiel represents Russia. Iran represents the nations that are

rushing Israel at the end of time and that we might be moving right toward Armageddon right now.

Are we going to do this again? My friend said. I knew what he meant. By this, he meant this tying

of prophecy charts to contemporary geopolitical events in a way that can leave audiences hyped up or terrified

and then ultimately exhausted and even cynical.

Now, this prophecy chart fever tends to skip a generation.

One cohort might grow up hearing. It's clear on the words on the page that the

Bible teaches no more than 40 years will pass between the founding of the nation of Israel in

1948 and the second coming. But it's harder to do that after 1988 comes and goes.

A generation accustomed to hearing that the Soviet Union is almost definitely the beast of revelation will be less open to the same sort of confidence when they're told Iraq is a new Babylon, Saddam Hussein, a new Nebuchadnezzar, and therefore the rapture is right around the corner.

And you can go through history seeing this happening rather repeatedly.

The prophecy church always come back, though, and eventually they gain an audience.

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