It would be wise for Christians not to try to connect the current war between Israel and Iran to specific prophecies in the Bible in an effort to determine where we might be in the end times, said Dr. Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today.
The recent news from the Middle East can lead us to “want to see signs we can track, to hear the approaching hoof beats by which we can know that the final judgment is upon us so we can not worry about it, until now is the time to worry about it,” said Moore in the audio version of his weekly newsletter, “Moore to the Point.”
“But Jesus told us that what would shock people about his return is not the drama that’s leading up to it,” he said, “but the ordinariness.”
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Russell Moore Warns Against Jumping to Conclusions About the End Times
After Israel bombed Iran, a friend of Dr. Russell Moore’s heard a preacher explain “a whole chart about how Gog and Magog in the Book of Ezekiel represents Russia, Iran represents the nations that are rushing Israel at the end of time, and that we might be moving right toward Armageddon right now,” said Moore.
“Are we going to do this again?” the friend asked.
“By ‘this,’ [my friend] meant this tying of prophecy charts to contemporary geopolitical events in a way that can leave audiences hyped up or terrified and then ultimately exhausted and even cynical,” Moore said.
Moore explained that “this prophecy chart fever tends to skip a generation,” the reason being that people become disillusioned after Christian leaders make end times predictions based on current events and those predictions fail to come to pass.
For example, Moore said that some Christians used to believe that Jesus would return in 1988, 40 years after Israel became a nation. “But it’s harder to [believe such claims] after 1988 comes and goes,” he observed.
“A generation accustomed to hearing that the Soviet Union is almost definitely the beast of Revelation will be less open to the same sort of confidence when they’re told Iraq is a new Babylon, Saddam Hussein the new Nebuchadnezzar, and therefore the rapture is right around the corner,” said Moore.
“The prophecy charts always come back, though,” Moore said, “and eventually they gain an audience. And we need to understand why.”
