Some Christians find theological message in Mideast fighting

(Article reprinted from the Daily Breeze)

Hundreds of parishioners gathered at a Hope Chapel service in Hermosa Beach last weekend to hear a sermon titled "What the Heck is Going On?"
By Kate McLaughlin
DAILY BREEZE

With war raging in the Middle East, the ominous words at the top of this page, which according to the Bible were spoken by Jesus to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, have a clear meaning for many evangelical Christians:

The birth pains signal the end times.

The apocalypse is upon us.

Pastor Mike Maffe is one of the believers.

Hundreds of his parishioners gathered at a Hope Chapel service in Hermosa Beach last weekend to hear Maffe deliver a sermon titled "What the Heck is Going On?" when he addressed the coming end times.

"What's going on in the Middle East is not a land grab or a political war," Maffe told the congregation. "It's a spiritual battle. [Christ's return] could be a week from Thursday or it could be 40 or 60 years from now. I don't know. No one knows. But I believe we're living in the last days."

After noting that war is unquestionably bad and that he had no political bias or geopolitical position to further, Maffe supported his position by citing scriptures from the Old and New Testament, including Matthew 24.

Maffe said the war between Israel and Hezbollah signifies the beginning of the end-time birth pains, and that as time passes the "contractions get closer and more intense."

Such belief in the power of the end-time prophecy, and in the centrality of the nation of Israel in that scenario, predates the current conflict.

Author Hal Lindsey has been analyzing biblical omens for decades. His best-selling Late Great Planet Earth came out in 1970 and went on to become the best-selling Christian book of the decade.

More recently, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have enjoyed tremendous success with their Left Behind books, a series of apocalyptic novels that tell of the Rapture, a prophesied period when the righteous will be taken into heaven while sinners are left on Earth to suffer through the battle of Armageddon. The 16 Left Behind books have sold 63 million copies.

Basic to the views of an approaching apocalypse is the belief that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 was a necessary precondition for the end times. Now that Israel is once again at war -- and missiles are raining down upon Haifa, 15 miles north of the biblical site of Armageddon (literally, the Mount of Megiddo) -- the stage is fully set.

The New Testament's book of Revelation, with its dramatic images of destruction and tribulation, of dragons and serpents and battling beasts, has been interpreted as a prediction of Israel's involvement in the final showdown between good and evil.

And Israel's importance is clearly stated in Old Testament prophecies such as Zechariah 12:3-9:

"I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves. On that day I will strike every horse with panic and its rider with madness ... but Jerusalem will remain intact in her place ... On that day I will set out to destroy all the nations that attack Jerusalem."

Perhaps more ominous are the opening lines of the preceding chapter in Zechariah:

"Open your doors, O Lebanon,
so that fire may devour your cedars!"

Such passages are persuasive for believers such as Maffe.

"We are watching prophecy unfold on TV live," he told his congregation.

But not all evangelical Christians are convinced.

"I don't think the tension in the Middle East and the establishment of Israel have anything to do with biblical prophecies," said Paul Viggiano, pastor of Branch of Hope, an orthodox Presbyterian church in Torrance. "Anybody who has any understanding of Middle Eastern history knows that as long as there has been sand there, there's been trouble. It started 4,000 years ago with Isaac and Ishmael."

Viggiano said he believes Jesus will return, but only to preside at the last judgment, not to fight at Armageddon.

"The passages that are used in terms of Israel and the significance of Israel and the great tribulation, I think, are misused," Viggiano said, citing as an example the oft-used Matthew 24. "If you look at the time context of those prophecies used to argue [for the end-times scenario], they almost unanimously indicate that the cataclysmic things Jesus was talking about were going to happen in the generation that he was living."

In the passage from Matthew, Viggiano pointed out, Jesus listed the signs that would herald the end of an age, which included an increase in wickedness, nation rising against nation, famines, earthquakes and a worldwide preaching of the Gospel. In the scripture, he told his disciples that when these signs were evident, the end would be near and

"this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened."

"Jesus was at the Mount of Olives talking to a group of people," said Viggiano. "When [Jesus] says 'you,' the second person plural, to an audience of people sitting there listening, are those people assuming he's talking to them or to a generation that wasn't going to be in existence for another 2,000 years? What Jesus is talking about [in Matthew] is the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 and the siege of Jerusalem. That was a gigantic event."

Ken Zanca, professor of philosophy and religious studies at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, shares Viggiano's skeptical view of the Bible's purported fire-and-brimstone predictions.

"When you see horrible destruction in the Holy Lands," he said, "it's easy to look in Revelation for the equivalents, but that's a very naïve, superficial understanding of revelation.

"It's anemic theology to think the world ends in destruction," Zanca said. "From the second century on up to the 20th century the Christian church renounced the idea of the world ending by destruction and hellfire."

Scripture, he noted, was interpreted as symbolically representing "the victory of good over evil; it was never meant to be a map for later centuries of the end of times."

"Armageddon was fought on Good Friday. Evil was vanquished on Good Friday. That's the good news of the Bible," Zanca said. "The end of the world in John's vision [in Revelation] is not the destruction of the world, it's the perfection of the world."

The message of the Bible, Zanca said, is one of comfort and consolation.

"Christianity is a religion of hope and confidence," he said. "The God of Jesus is one of love and creativity, not vengeance and destruction, and whatever the end is, it's not going to be a mushroom cloud.

"And maybe the world is not going to end," Zanca said. "Maybe the world is the stage for an individual to reach a relationship with eternity, and while each individual has an end of their world in death, the stage is always there.

"Like Jesus said, the kingdom of God is always within you."