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Bible prophecy describes a powerful man who will rule the world for a short period before the return of Christ. He is called by many names, including Antichrist, Man of Sin, Little Horn, the Beast, Son of Perdition, and that Wicked.
“But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief” (1 Thessalonians 5:1-4).
Here we have a description of the Antichrist’s peace program. Like Antiochus Epiphanes and Hitler and Stalin and many other tyrants, the Antichrist comes as a man of peace.
In Revelation 6:2 he arrives on the scene at the very beginning of Daniel’s Seventieth Week, and he is riding on a white horse with a bow but no arrows. He has military power but he is not using it at this point. He enlarges his power through deception. Daniel says he will destroy by peace (Dan. 8:25).
Daniel 9:27 says he will make a seven-year covenant with the Jews but will break it at the halfway point. The Antichrist will doubtless propose a plan that will solve the Middle East crisis and allow the Muslims to live peaceably with the Jews. I believe that it is at this point that the Third Jewish Temple will be built. The peace plan will make headlines throughout the world and will be blazed across the Internet. It will get 24/7 coverage on cable news networks. People the world over will rejoice, thinking that mankind is entering a millennium of glorious peace and prosperity.
This program is exactly what the Jews are longing for today. They just want peace.
The Jews are tired of fighting. Most Israeli citizens, including women, must serve in the military. They serve three years active duty (two for women) and continue to serve in the reserves until age 45. Most Israelis know someone who has died or has been wounded in the fighting since 1948. Most of them know someone who died in the Holocaust. Our guide, a fairly conservative Jew who believed in the God of Israel, represents the yearning for peace. He spent many years in the military, and all his children are presently serving in active duty.
Israel has a secular government that is “left leaning” and that has repeatedly shown its willingness to compromise over its own land and over the governance of the Temple Mount for the sake of peace.
This is why Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Dayan returned control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf in 1967 and why that decision was ratified by the Israeli Knesset.
This is why Israel’s prime minister Ehud Barak, in 2000 at the Camp David II Summit, offered to give Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority sovereignty over the entire top of the Temple Mount.
It must be understood that a large percentage of Jews today are “secular.” They might observe a few Jewish traditions and rituals, but they have no belief in the divine inspiration of Scripture and no passion to know God and obey Him.
Even the leaders of the Zionist movement that ushered in the modern state of Israel were, for the most part, “secular, non-observant, Jews, and many were even anti-religious” (Price, The Battle for the Last Days Temple, p. 250).
Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, was not motivated by religion but by nationalism (New World Encyclopedia). He stated in his diary that he was “agnostic.”
Many of Israel’s most revered leaders and war heroes since 1948 were “secular Jews.” This includes Israel’s first prime minister, David ben Gurion. His vision was “of a new type of Jew, ‘emancipated from religion,’ whose Judaism would be expressed by a national framework” (Motti Friedman, “The Making of the State,” The Jewish Agency for Israel, July 1998). Ben Gurion held “radically anti-Halakha (Jewish Religious Law) views” (“Judaism in Israel: Ben Gurion’s Private Beliefs,” Israel Studies, Vol. 4, Iss. 2, 1999, p. 64).
In the official proclamation of the modern state of Israel in May 1948, there was no mention of “God”--only one vague reference to the “Rock of Israel.” This was because many of those who founded the state were staunchly opposed to any reference to God. For example, Aaron Zisling of the Labor Party said, “I cannot sign a document referring in any way to a God in whom I do not believe” (cited from My Life, Golda Meir, p. 223). David Ben-Gurion supported the more ambiguous “Rock of Israel” because it could be “considered a symbolic and secular reference to the ‘strength of the Jewish people.’” The word “Redeemer” was left out of the announcement for the same reason.
Golda Meir, one of the greatest of modern Israel’s heroes, said, “I wasn’t at all pious” (My Life, p. 104). Her autobiography gives no glory to God for the restoration of Israel and no faith that God’s promises to Israel will be fulfilled. Her “vision of our future” was merely that Israel “remains a flourishing democracy and a society resting on social justice and equality” (My Life, p. 460). She was a feminist who basically abandoned her husband to pursue her socialistic dream of nation building.
Moshe Dayan, a prominent Israeli leader (Minister of Defense, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces), was a “secular Jew” whose faith in God was vague to non-existent. He gave God no glory in his autobiography, ending it with the following purely humanistic sentiments: “But our foremost duty is to live up to the vision of ourselves, to fashion a pioneering state, a creative society that flourishes from the fruits of its own labor, a courageous state prepared to fight to the death to defend itself, a people of ideas and ideals striving to achieve their national and historic purpose--the revival of the Jewish nation in its homeland” (Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life, 1976, p. 621).
Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s Prime Minister in 2009, the first Prime Minister to be born in Israel since it became a state. In A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993), Netanyahu doesn’t mention God or His laws and covenants. For Israel’s military victories he gives glory to the military rather than to God (pp. 274, 371, 397). He says that Bible prophecy does not tell us what to expect for the future (p. 372). He attributes the modern rise of the Jewish state to “a human spirit that refuses again and again to succumb to history’s horrors” (p. 401).
What Israel is looking for is not God but peace. Golda Meir said, “There is nothing Israel wants so much as peace. There is nothing Israel needs so much as peace.”
Each year in celebration of Israel’s Independence Day, a poster is designed. These are displayed at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Ten of them have had a peace theme. Many feature the white dove of peace. One says, “Peace and tranquility will I bring to the Land.” Another says, “Yearning for peace.”
It is a simple matter to see how that the modern state of Israel will eagerly board the Antichrist’s peace train, and any protests will be swept away in the general and very wild euphoria.
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