Explainer - The Iran War and Armaggedon [0:00-5:06]

Hi, I'm Bruce Maples, publisher of Forward Kentucky, and in a lot of some recent news, I thought it might be worthwhile to do a very short explainer about how the war in Iran could tie into the battle of Armageddon. Now you may be thinking, well, that's crazy. Well, it may be, but let's talk about it together. So before we start, let me share three notes with you. One is, I do have a seminary degree. I have taught about eschatology in the past, and if you're sitting there thinking, okay, what's eschatology? Eschatology is the study of the eschaton or the end times. This is only for connecting the beliefs of some Christians to the war in Iran, and is not to be any sort of comprehensive coverage of any of these topics. And so therefore, don't at me. Don't come back at me with, well, you didn't cover this or that, or your beliefs are crazy or whatever the case may be. So here are some terms that you need to know. First of all, the second coming. I think we all know what that is supposed to be, but it's the bodily return of Jesus Christ to the earth. The millennium is a thousand years of worldwide peace, and it could be either preceded by or following the second coming, and we'll talk about that. Tribulation, a period of widespread evil, persecution of Christians, that's the key point of the tribulation. And finally, Armageddon is a massive battle between the forces of good and evil. Now, I said that it could come either, that the millennium could come either before or after the return of Christ. So that leads us to these three views. Here's the pre-millennial view that Christ comes and then we have the millennium. The possible millennial view is that Christ comes after the millennium. Well, you're thinking, okay, well, how does the millennium happen? Well, it's brought in by human efforts. This was a very popular belief at the beginning of the 20th century, and in fact, there's a gospel song that we use to sing in church that ends with, and the darkness shall turn to dawning, and the dawning to noonday bright, and Christ's great kingdom will come on earth, the kingdom of love and light. So that's a post-millennial hymn. Then there's Ombalennial, which believes that the millennium is not an actual thousand-year period, it is a symbolic concept, and that trying to tie it into some sort of actual period of time is just mistaken interpretation. So what does this lead to? Well, post-millennialism is not part of this picture, and obviously, Ombalennialism is not either. The only thing that ties in here is pre-millennial beliefs. And there are two kinds of those, believe it or not, they get split further. One is post-tribulational pre-millennialism, don't you love these words? So we have the tribulation, the persecution to Christians, the second coming, and then we have the millennium, and then we finally have the last judgment. So we have to have the tribulation first, and then Christ comes back, and then we have the millennium. The pre-tribulational, dispensational pre-millennialism believes that there is a rapture where the Christians leave the earth. They are raptured up into heaven, and they don't go through the tribulation. They don't have to. And the second coming is not just with Jesus and angels, but it's all these Christians who got raptured come back with Jesus at the time of the second coming, and we have the millennium. Well in both of these timelines, according to most of the people who preach and teach these, here's where the Battle of Armageddon fits in. It fits in at the second coming. So as part of the second coming, there is this battle, this huge battle in the Middle East that ties into that. Now if you're sitting here thinking, well that's an awful lot of timeline work, well let me show you something. I went out and I did a search, Armageddon timeline images. You can try this. Go to Google or Bing and search for Armageddon timeline and choose images, and you'll get something like this, and you can see that there are people who have done really intense work on trying to parse out everything the Bible might say about the second coming. Okay, so why am I talking about this? There are some reports that seem to be verifiable that certain leaders in our military forces