Kingdom Come

The two legs of the image of Daniel 2…portray the eastern and western divisions of the Roman Empire. The unequal duration of the eastern empire, which continued long after the western empire had fallen apart, is not seen in Daniel’s prophecy because it occurs in the period of the present church age…The unfulfilled aspects of the prophecies provide the clue for the future revival of Rome. Any other view has never achieved majority status among evangelicals at least because the prophecies taken literally lead to this conclusion.

How can Evangelical Christianity be so blind to the Muslim leg of the Fourth Empire? Must be ethnocentrism.

This is easy to see, however, when we overlaying a map of the classical Roman Empire with the same territory during the Middle Ages. From the 600s onward, the Eastern, which became Islamic, Roman Empire stretched from the Black Sea to the Atlantic and waxed and waned from its home base of Asia Minor, Greece and Eastern Europe over Germany, France, Italy and Spain

According to Daniel chapter 2 and Daniel 7:19-20, key identifiers of the fourth kingdom are that it

• joins West with East,
• is diverse from all kingdoms, polishing its autocratic rule by a veneer of Republican power-sharing bodies like senates and parliaments.
• devours the whole earth – controls a great amount of the world 
• treads down and break it in pieces  – whatever it can’t incorporate, it crushes and tears apart as a threat to its authoritarianism.
• Last, but by no means least, imposes a new religious orthodoxy. There is no denying this fact, yet it seems to have escaped the attention of many ostensibly Bible-believing fundamentalist Christians.
  • 45 BC Julius Caesar becomes first emperor of Roman Empire, accepts all pagan religions, monotheistic Jews granted privilege of exemption from emperor worship.
  • 395 Emperor Theodosius establishes a paganized New Testament Christianity as Rome’s state religion, including transforming Jesus Christ’s identity into the pagan sun god and saints as the lesser gods. This exclude all Old Testament Jewish elements. Jews are reviled and persecuted as well as Gentile believers who maintain Jewish elements of faith and practice.
  • 610 Muhammed leads his pagan Arab people to return to the original monotheism of the prophets Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon and Jesus with submission (Islam) to the will of God. This religious faith spreads like wildfire through the next centuries, taking over the Roman Eastern and African territories.
    • 636 AD – Islam’s era-marking Battle of Yarmouk. Islam’s first battles were against the Roman occupied Byzantine states of Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon.
    • 637 AD Battle of Qadasiya first milestone in conquering Iraq over the next dozen years. Within a few years the Muslims had also conquered parts of Egypt to the South and Asia Minor and Armenia to the North. 
    • In the 1500’s AD Babylon, Persia and the Levant were absorbed into the Turkish Ottoman Empire based in Asia Minor.

In 1099 ce, Muslim Jerusalem fell to the European forces of the First Crusade. The devastation caused by the Crusaders is well documented. Meron Benvenisti writes that the Crusaders, drunk with victory, conducted a massacre in the city, such as has seldom been paralleled in the history of war. The troops ran amok through the streets of the city, stabbing everyone they encountered4 (Muslim, Jew and Orthodox Christian alike). The few thousand people remaining from a population which had numbered 40,000 were assembled near the gates and sold into slavery. The Crusaders controlled the city from 1099 to 1187 ce, proclaiming their Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

In 1187 ce, Salah Al-Din Al-Ayyubi—known in the West as ‘Saladin’—recovered Jerusalem. In contrast to the Crusaders’ slaughter when they conquered Jerusalem, he granted amnesty and free passage to all common Catholics and to the defeated Christian army, as long as they were able to pay a paltry ransom for themselves. Salah Al-Din allowed the native Christians to remain and alowed Jews expelled from Jerusalem by the Crusaders to resettle in the city. Salah Al-Din also restored the rights of pilgrimage to several eastern Christian denominations whom the Crusaders considered heretics. 

The Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy during much of its existence. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the sultan sat at the apex of a hierarchical system and acted in political, military, judicial, social, and religious capacities under a variety of titles. He was theoretically responsible only to God and God’s law (the Islamic شریعت‎ şeriat, known in Arabic as شريعة sharia), of which he was the chief executor. His heavenly mandate was reflected in Islamic titles such as “shadow of God on Earth”.

The Eastern Islamic ruler was absolutely the equivalent of the Western Christian ruler claiming rule over the whole earth.

Beginning in 1902 Abdulaziz Ibn Saud had been fighting his way up the political ladder the old fashioned way, uniting regions of Arabia into a single state with his Ikhwan (Arabic for brothers), an Islamic religious militia. Made up of rough-living Bedouins dedicated to the purification and the unification of Islam, cosmopolitan Ottoman society was uprooted, and Wahhabi culture was imposed as compulsory social order. He was so successful in seizing control of much of the Arabian Peninsula that he was able to make a politically advantageous arrangement with the Ottoman Empire during WWI. 

A rival chieftain, Hussein bin Ali, the sharif of Mecca and ruler of the state of Hejaz, used the opportunity to outbid Abdulaziz for regional power by making an alliance with the British. He recruited and led an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire on the promise of being rewarded a kingdom stretching from Syria to Yemen on successful conclusion of WWI. 

Hussein could deliver manpower, but who could deliver oil?

Shortly after WWI Abdulaziz Ibn Saud met with a mining engineer who was convinced that much oil would be found throughout his territory. Just as they would do in the next decade while debating an alliance with Germany, the autocratic British monarchy practiced appeasement while Abdulaziz invaded and incorporated  Hussein’s Hejaz. The British recognized Abdul-Aziz’s independent realm with agreed-upon boundaries.

When Abdulaziz’ powerful Ikhwan pressed him to continue their jihad into British-held Arab territory he established his political boundaries by massacring the troops who raised him to power. In return, the British granted Abdulaziz Ibn Saud a kingdom within their Empire, thereby providing assurances of protection by the British.

Contrary to the declared aims of establishing self-determination of the peoples freed from the Ottoman Empire’s control, Saudi Arabia was not set up as a democracy. Named after the ruling / owning family, Saudi Arabia possesses and controls Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam, rendering the kingdom the highest religious status in the Moslem world.