The Antichrist and Israel
December 9, 2025 (first published October 9, 2012)
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The following is excerpted from the book Jews in Fighter Jets: Israel: Past, Present and Future, which is available from www.wayoflife.org --
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, Hitler, Stalin, and many other tyrants, the Antichrist will come 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 (Da. 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 in all of its complicated facets and allow the Muslims to live peaceably with one another and with the Jews. It is at this point that the Third Jewish Temple will be built. We see it being measured in Revelation 11:1-2 in the first three and a half years of the Antichrist’s reign. 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.
Israel is 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 1947. Most of them know someone who died in the Holocaust.
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). He “was by no means formally religious, and it is said that in all his years in Israel he stepped into a synagogue only one time” (Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Torah Sage and General, p. 32).
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, Israel’s current Prime Minister, is a Bible student, but he doesn’t believe Bible prophecy. 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 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). In Bibi: My Story (2023), there is considerable bragging about Israel’s chutzpah. There is a vague reference to the rebirth of Israel being a miracle, but God Himself, by name, gets no credit for Israel’s preservation. The book ends with these words: “Through three millennia we never gave up on our dream to live as a prosperous and free people in our homeland, the land of Zion. Having restored our independence, we cannot, we will not, let anyone bring an end to this miracle. We need not fret about the future. ... The Book of Samuel says, ‘The eternity of Israel will not falter.’ Throughout our journey, including in the tempests and upheavals of modern times, this has held true. The People of Israel Live!” So Netanyahu mentions “the eternity of Israel” but not the eternal God of Israel. Our prayer is that he will wake up to a true understanding of the Bible he reads. Some of Israel’s worst days are still ahead in “the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer. 30:7).
Israel is not looking for God; Israel is looking for peace.
Golda Meir said, “There is nothing Israel wants so much as peace. There is nothing Israel needs so much as peace” (My Life).
Each year in celebration of Israel’s Independence Day, a poster is designed. In 2010, these were displayed at the Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Ten of them had a peace theme. Many feature the white dove of peace. One said, “Peace and tranquility will I bring to the Land.” Another said, “Yearning for peace.”
When Bill Clinton brought Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together to sign a peace accord in 1993, they held up T-shirts for the news media inscribed with “Seeds of Peace.” Clinton called the agreement “the peace of the brave.”
The Yitzhak Rabin Museum focuses on the search for peace. One of the statements placed in a prominent place says, “When we achieve peace ourselves individually with our surroundings--together we will reach world peace.”
This is the type of humanistic mysticism that dominates Israeli thinking. It is the power of positive thinking, which is empty of real power.
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 wild euphoria.
But it will be a deception. The Antichrist will turn out to be the greatest Jew hater of them all. He will set himself up as God in the Third Temple and instigate global terror.
“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” (1 Th. 5:3).
“When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Mt. 24:15-21).
“That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Th. 2:2-12).
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, Hitler, Stalin, and many other tyrants, the Antichrist will come 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 (Da. 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 in all of its complicated facets and allow the Muslims to live peaceably with one another and with the Jews. It is at this point that the Third Jewish Temple will be built. We see it being measured in Revelation 11:1-2 in the first three and a half years of the Antichrist’s reign. 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.
Israel is 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 1947. Most of them know someone who died in the Holocaust.
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). He “was by no means formally religious, and it is said that in all his years in Israel he stepped into a synagogue only one time” (Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Torah Sage and General, p. 32).
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, Israel’s current Prime Minister, is a Bible student, but he doesn’t believe Bible prophecy. 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 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). In Bibi: My Story (2023), there is considerable bragging about Israel’s chutzpah. There is a vague reference to the rebirth of Israel being a miracle, but God Himself, by name, gets no credit for Israel’s preservation. The book ends with these words: “Through three millennia we never gave up on our dream to live as a prosperous and free people in our homeland, the land of Zion. Having restored our independence, we cannot, we will not, let anyone bring an end to this miracle. We need not fret about the future. ... The Book of Samuel says, ‘The eternity of Israel will not falter.’ Throughout our journey, including in the tempests and upheavals of modern times, this has held true. The People of Israel Live!” So Netanyahu mentions “the eternity of Israel” but not the eternal God of Israel. Our prayer is that he will wake up to a true understanding of the Bible he reads. Some of Israel’s worst days are still ahead in “the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer. 30:7).
Israel is not looking for God; Israel is looking for peace.
Golda Meir said, “There is nothing Israel wants so much as peace. There is nothing Israel needs so much as peace” (My Life).
Each year in celebration of Israel’s Independence Day, a poster is designed. In 2010, these were displayed at the Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Ten of them had a peace theme. Many feature the white dove of peace. One said, “Peace and tranquility will I bring to the Land.” Another said, “Yearning for peace.”
When Bill Clinton brought Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together to sign a peace accord in 1993, they held up T-shirts for the news media inscribed with “Seeds of Peace.” Clinton called the agreement “the peace of the brave.”
The Yitzhak Rabin Museum focuses on the search for peace. One of the statements placed in a prominent place says, “When we achieve peace ourselves individually with our surroundings--together we will reach world peace.”
This is the type of humanistic mysticism that dominates Israeli thinking. It is the power of positive thinking, which is empty of real power.
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 wild euphoria.
But it will be a deception. The Antichrist will turn out to be the greatest Jew hater of them all. He will set himself up as God in the Third Temple and instigate global terror.
“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” (1 Th. 5:3).
“When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Mt. 24:15-21).
“That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Th. 2:2-12).
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