Book Review: The Mideast Beast, by Joel Richardson

In The Mideast Beast, Joel Richardson argues that the antichrist of Revelation, the beast of Daniel, one and the same, will lead an Islamic nation or coalition, potentially a revived Caliphate. The various passages he considers and the logic he presents vary in depth, but certainly are worth considering. The fundamental premise he challenges is the widely held belief that the antichrist will head a revived Roman Empire, or at least have a European base. 

His strongest argument is the map. A comparison of the three empires unambiguously identified in Daniel 2:36-39 - Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece, compared to maps of the Roman Empire at its height and the Islamic Caliphate at its height, is compelling.  The fourth empire of Daniel 2:40-43 geographically is much more aligned with the Rashidun Caliphate or the Ottoman Empire than the empire of the Roman Caesars. The argument for the Roman paradigm is time. Rome conquered the remains of the Greek empire and ruled in its place. The Islamic Caliphate appeared almost a thousand years after the Greek domains of Alexander’s successors were conquered. Is time or geography more important?

There is also a discussion about the scope of the domain of the antichrist. If the antichrist leads a revived Islamic Caliphate covering the regions identified by map, he would not have the authority to force all people in the inhabited earth to take his mark in order to buy and sell. (Revelation 13:14-17) Some possible options: 

• Islam dominates the entire earth, not just the mid eastern region where it is currently predominant. The worldwide migration of Muslims might set the stage for this possibility.
• The passage in Revelation is speaking metaphorically or poetically about everyone who dwells in the kingdom of the beast, not literally the entire inhabited earth. Daniel 2:39 describes Alexander the Great’s empire as ruling over the whole earth, even though we would today call it a regional power.
• The beast of Revelation and the evil ruler of the fourth empire in Daniel are different, the events are in different eras, and the map of the Islamic empire is irrelevant to the prophecies of Revelation.

Another item of dispute is the identity of the people of ‘the prince who is to come’ (Daniel 9:26) with Rome. Although Titus was the commanding Roman general of the legions that destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD (and later emperor of Rome, 79-81 A.D.), the troops were a conglomeration of subject peoples. Richardson presents evidence that these people were from the nations surrounding Israel, her perpetual enemies, and not ethnically Roman. 

Are the enemies of Israel are identified by ancestry or geography? There are many conflicting theories about where the descendants of the peoples named in Daniel and Ezekiel have migrated to. It is an inarguable fact of history that the people living in the lands that surround Israel have consistently hated the Jews. Projecting this to the future, the geographic origin of Israel’s future invaders will be will be unambiguous, whereas their ancestry could be arguable.

The book concludes with a heartfelt plea for reaching Muslims with the gospel. Muslims are devout people who seek God with ardor, but have been taken in by error. God loves them and wants to reach them with Truth. He hears the cry of Ishmael’s seed. Even if the hypothesis of this book is wrong, the Islamic world represents the largest unreached people group in the world. Can we receive the heart of Christ for the lost?

What is Truth? Pilate asked Jesus this question (John 18:38), because he was not at the Last Supper (John 14:6). Richardson does not address this question in depth, but it is critical. Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet. Believing this does not meet the standards that Jesus set. The Bible identifies three types of things necessary to belong to Jesus.

• We must believe specific things, primarily that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised Him from the dead. (Romans 10:9)
• We must do the things Jesus commanded, not Pharisaical rule following but acting from the heart. (Luke 6:46)
• We must have a relationship with Him, so that we know His voice, and He knows us. (John 10:14)

This is not a multiple question exam. These gifts of God’s grace are more like three sides of a triangle. If the triangle represents salvation and peace with God, these are the stuff that the triangle is built of. They depend on and interact with each other. Being God’s child is vastly more important than knowing the future nationality of antichrist. A good bottom line on Richardson’s book.

Fractal Time and Biblical Prophecy

God’s Fractal Time

Envision time as a one-way street whose direction is fixed by entropy. The second law of thermodynamics fixes its irreversibility - no backing up! How do we reconcile this with Biblical prophecy and the doctrine of predestination? 

Using distance as a metaphor for time, we can imagine a second dimension (or more) perpendicular to our time-street. Imagine turning right 90 degrees. As we proceed in this direction, time on the original line is unchanged but seems to continue advancing for us. Imagine a grid of such streets. We advance on the cross street until encountering another street, and turns right again (imagining that entropy flows differently on Main Street than on our side street). Two more such maneuvers and we are back to the original time-line but upstream of our starting point. 

One might wish for such a trip, but such are not possible for mere mortals, as physics apparently confines us to our current timeline. We might think God inhabits some multidimensional continuum, and perhaps the angels, but there are still questions. If God desires all men to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), how does He orchestrate time to give each individual, give each individual the best possible opportunity to be saved? When He allows prophets to see future events (e.g., Daniel, Revelation) is He allowing them a view from afar through this multidimensional time fabric, or recording future events on a heavenly DVD and playing it back for the prophet, or allowing them a short trip outside our timeline?

The story gets more complicated as we contemplate the hints that God may not be limited to integer time dimensions. Suppose our space-time continuum is constructed by God with fractional time dimensions. A one-dimensional one-way time street manifestation of fractal time might be self-similar constructs on different scales. For example, the concept of a Sabbath rest occurs on a weekly basis (Exodus 20:8-11), a seven-year span (Exodus 23:11) a 49-year span (Leviticus 25:8-11), and a 490 year span (2 Chronicles 36:21)). It is difficult to imagine how this would manifest in a multi-dimensional time construct.

What does this have to do with prophecy and predestination?  Our common sense concept of cause and effect is a tiny subset of the nature of God and the universe He constructed. Some consider causality to be a gift of God to humankind, given so that we live in a universe we can comprehend and act in with purpose. The angels behold God’s face, yet a third of them rebelled, knowing and experiencing the consequences (being eternally exiled and imprisoned in the lake of fire), and yet rebelling anyway. We have free will, but not seeing God eye to eye, the consequences of our choices are not visibly evident at the time of decision, so we accept or reject Him by faith. For most, the choice is offered more than once, so that when the curtain rings down, no one can say God didn’t give them a chance. 

Thus prophecy and predestination may be manifestations of God’s use of time, as a construct in which future events are foreshadowed by earlier incidents on a smaller scale. The one difference is freewill - humans can change their mind and repent, and turn to Him. This disturbs the symmetry of fractal constructs, but serves God’s ultimate purpose. If, on a later iteration of a sequence of events, we choose His path, and stick with it, the ultimate consummation is changed. The concept of fractals and the concepts of prophecy, foreshadowing, and repetition are not identical, but related in how we experience time. This dynamic is poetically described in The Four Calls, by Isaiah Baltzell (as L. Baltzall)