Open your doors, O Lebanon – that fire may destroy your cedars! (Zechariah 11:1) – Part One

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on David’s Tent, a ministry of Israeli believers Avner and Rachel Boskey. The Boskey’s have ministered at Tabernacle of David, and we consider them trustworthy and Biblically sound.

The world’s media is focusing a fear-filled spotlight on the tinder-box of Lebanon. Those who turn on the nightly news are shown to a ringside seat and where they can gaze at what may well be a coming bloody confrontation. Even some Christian sites are engaging in a measure of prophetic voyeurism about what may happen on the Israel-Lebanon border.  Here are questions currently being raised on TV:

 

  • Will this tension explode into regional or even world war?

 

  • Will Iran and America get involved?

 

  • How many people might die – Lebanese and Israelis?

 

  • Some Christian media are asking if this is the opening shot of the Gog and Magog campaign (Ezekiel 38-39), or perhaps the lead-up to Armageddon (Revelation 16:14-16)

 

  • Do these fast-paced events have biblical or apocalyptic significance?

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once stated: “Wir lernen aus der Geschichte, dass wir überhaupt nichts lernen” (‘We learn from history, that we mostly learn nothing at all’). Yet some things can be learned from history, from understanding religious motivations, and from mining biblical and military strategic contexts.

 

 

“From the River to the Sea”

 

  • The popular war-chant (‘from the River to the Sea’) which has been shouted at violent pro-terrorist demonstrations on US campuses in recent months, is a direct counterfeit of what the Bible declares to be true.

 

In Deuteronomy 4:44-46, Moses coaches the Jewish people, recounting to them the entire Mosaic Covenant as they camp in modern Jordan, waiting to invade and conquer Canaan. Moses pronounces to Israel, on the authority of the God of Jacob, that “every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the [Negev] desert to the Lebanon and from the River – the river Euphrates – to the western [Mediterranean] Sea” (Deuteronomy 11:24). According to the God of Jacob, ‘from the River to the Sea’ means the borders of the Promised Land that YHVH gave to the Jewish people – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. No other people has sovereign and divine right to those territories. These territories include Gaza (Joshua 15.47), what is known today as the West Bank (Numbers 34:1-12), northern Jordan (Deuteronomy 3:11-18), a large section of modern Lebanon (Joshua 12:7) and part of modern Syria (Genesis 15:18; Joshua 13:1-5).

 

Claims by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority to Gaza or to the West Bank, and claims by Hezbollah to southern Lebanon – these flagrantly violate YHVH’s word regarding the biblical borders of the Promised Land.  These are the vain imaginings of the nations that Psalm 2:1 mentions, and they run roughshod over God’s prophetic promises to His Jewish people:

 

  • Therefore ADONAI YHVH says this: “Certainly in the fire of My jealousy I have spoken against the rest of the nations, and against all Edom, who appropriated My land for themselves as a possession with wholehearted joy and with contempt of soul, in order to make its pastureland plunder.” Therefore prophesy in regard to the land of Israel and say to the mountains and to the hills, to the ravines and to the valleys, “This is what ADONIA YHVH says: ‘Behold, I have spoken in My jealousy and in My wrath because you have endured the insults of the nations’” (Ezekiel 36:5-6)

 

In light of the fast-paced events now happening in Israel and the Middle East,  it’s worth remembering that the Bible does not ask the question: “How does Israel fit in with superpower strategies or Islamist jihadi plans?” Rather, the question that the Bible raises is: “How do all these superpowers and Islamist nations fit in to YHVH’s good plans for Israel?”

 

Psalm 83 notes prophetically that, at the End of Days, Lebanon (Gebal and Tyre) will be actively at war with Israel. Lebanon will join Edom, Ammon and Moab (Jordan and the West Bank), the Ishmaelites and Hagrites (Egyptian Sinai, Saudi Arabia), the Philistines (the region of Gaza), and Assyria (northern Iraq) in an attempt to commit genocide against the Jewish people:

 

  • “God, do not remain quiet; Do not be silent and, God, do not be still. For behold, Your enemies make an uproar, and those who hate You have exalted themselves. They make shrewd plans against Your people, and conspire together against Your treasured ones. They have said, “Come, and let’s wipe them out as a nation, so that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered.” For they have conspired together with one mind; they make a covenant against You” (Psalm 83:1-8)

 

 

“They make shrewd plans against Your people” (Psalm 83:3)

 

The present jihadi army in Lebanon is called Hezbollah (in Arabic, Ḥizbu ‘llāh; the Party of Allah). It is also known as al-Muqāwamah Al-Islāmīyah fī Lubnān (‘The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon’). Hezbollah is a Shia Islamist jihadi group with two wings – a paramilitary/terrorist Jihad Council and a political party in the Lebanese Parliament know as the ‘Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc.’ The Secretary-General of Hezbollah is Hassan Nasrallah. The group was founded around 1982, toward the close of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). That war was waged primarily between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Lebanese Christian Maronites. Hezbollah’s administrative center gradually situated itself in south Beirut’s Shiite Dahieh neighborhood. Hezbollah’s training grounds eventually were located in the Bekaa Valley. And South Lebanon became their operational ground, from where attacks were made against Israel and the IDF.

 

Beirut was once known as ‘the Jewel of the Mediterranean’ or ‘the Paris of the Middle East.’ But the 15 year-long Lebanese Civil War reaped a grisly harvest of over approximately 150,000 dead Lebanese. Sniping, ambushes, kidnappings, car bombs and IEDs – life in Beirut gradually became a nightmare for many. Daily life in Beirut was characterized by cruelty and violence, and Hezbollah flourished and blossomed in that bloody soil.

 

The most famous/infamous terror operative associated with Hezbollah was Imad Mughniyeh, born in 1962 in the Lebanese village of Tayr Debba, not far from Tyre. He joined Yasser Arafat’s Force 17 special forces as a teenager and fought against Lebanese Christian and Druze forces in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.  After Israel expelled the PLO from Beirut to Tunisia in August 1982, Mughniyeh and four others helped found the Islamic Jihad Organization, a Shiite terror arm of Hezbollah under the tutelage of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley. He was directly involved in or had responsibility for the following terror acts, often working as a team with Mustafa Badreddine. The two men were known professionally as ‘the ghosts of Beirut:’

 

 

 

  • Bombing of U.S. Marine Barracks, Beirut (October 23 1983) – 241 casualties. These two events caused U.S. forces to retreat from Lebanon

 

 

 

  • Kidnapping, 15 month torture and then the murder of Lt. Col. William F. Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut and possibly Iran – March 1984 through June 1985. This led to the Iran-Contra affair. Buckley’s kidnapping was depicted into a scene in the film ‘Syriana’ starring George Clooney.

 

  • Kidnapping and six-year imprisonment of Associated Press chief Mideast correspondent Terry Anderson, Beirut – March 1985

 

  • Hijacking of TWA Flight 847; torture and murder of U.S. Navy Seabee diver Robert Stetham, Beirut – June 15 1985. Mughniyeh was indicted by the U.S. with a $25 million bounty on his head

 

  • Kidnapping of more than 50 foreigners, including Terry Waite (special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury), British journalist John McCarthy, Malcolm H. Kerr, Father Lawrence Jenco, Rev. Benjamin Weir, American University President David Jacobsen, etc. – Beirut, 1984 and following

 

 

 

 

  • Bombing of Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia (residence for USAF and families) (June 25, 1996) – 20 killed, 372 injured. This event was depicted in a scene in the recent film ‘The Kingdom’ starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner

 

  • Kidnapping of Colonel Elhanan Tannenbaum (IDF Reserves), kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers Adi Avitan, Benny Avraham, Omar Sawaid.- October 2000

 

  • Oversight of PLO/Hezbollah joint weapons ship Karine A, captured by Israeli Special Forces Shayetet 13 (IDF Seals) – January 3, 2002

 

  • Kidnapping and murder of 2 Israeli reserve soldiers (Ehud Goldwasser, Eldad Regev) on jeep patrol (July 12, 2006). This event triggered the Second Lebanese War.

 

‘Hajj Radwan’ (Mughniyeh’s professional alias) had his fateful encounter with divine justice on February 12, 2008, at approximately 22:15 hours. This master Hezbollah terrorist was blown up as he approached his Mitsubishi Pajero on a dark Damascus street in the fashionable Kafr Soussa neighborhood, not far from an Iranian school, a Syrian police station and a Syrian Intelligence office.

 

 

“They conspire together against Your treasured ones” (Psalm 83:3)

 

The goals and strategies of Hezbollah are based on their philosophy and principles. These have been clearly stated by the organization from the outset: “These are our objectives and these our enemies.” On February 16, 1986 Sheikh Ibrahim al-Amin publicly read the document ‘The Hizballah Program’ at the al-Ouzai mosque in West Beirut. It was simultaneously published in as-Safir, a leading Arabic-language daily newspaper in Beirut. The article was titled ‘The Hizballah Program, an open letter to all the Oppressed in Lebanon and the World.’ An English pamphlet was published in 1987. Here are some selections from the CIA translation of that document:

 

  • We are moving in the direction of fighting the roots of vice and the first root of vice is America, All the endeavors to drag us into marginal action will be futile when compared with the confrontation against the United States. Imam Khomeyni [Iran’s Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Khomeini] has repeatedly stressed that America is the reason for all our catastrophes and the source of all malice. By fighting it, we are only exercising our legitimate right to defend our Islam.

 

  • For the sake of the truth, we declare that the sons of Hizballah’s nation have come to know well their basic enemies in the area: Israel, America, France and the Phalange.

 

  • Our objectives: Our sons are now in a state of ever-escalating confrontation against these enemies until the following objectives are achieved Israel’s final departure from Lebanon as a prelude to its final obliteration from existence and the liberation of venerable Jerusalem from the talons of occupation.

 

 

The unabridged version of the Hezbollah Program includes the following instructive paragraphs:

 

  • Necessity for the Destruction of Israel: We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world.  It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve.  This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.

 

  • Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people.  Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated.  We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated. We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.  Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev’s and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.

 

 

“The mouth speaks from that which fills the heart” (Matthew 12:34)

 

Hezbollah’s heart-attitudes (see Genesis 12:3) towards Israel reveal a virulent anti-Semitism rooted in classic Islamist texts.

 

In July, 1985, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (the spiritual mentor of Hezbollah) stated in an interview: “We believe there is no difference between the United States and Israel; the latter is a mere extension of the former. The United States is ready to fight the whole world to defend Israel’s existence and security. The two countries are working in complete harmony.”

 

According to a video posted on Saudi news channel al-Arabiya, Nasrallah declared in a 1988 speech Hezbollah’s commitment to a worldwide Shiite Islamist Caliphate dictatorship: “Our plan, to which we, as faithful believers, have no alternative, is to establish an Islamic state under the rule of Islam . . . Lebanon should not be an Islamic republic on its own, but rather, part of the Greater Islamic Republic, governed by the Master of Time [the Shiite messianic figure known as the Mahdi], and his rightful deputy, the Jurisprudent Ruler [Persian: Velâyat-e Faqih] Imam [Ayatollah] Khomeini.”

 

In a 1998 speech marking the Shiite Day of Ashura, Nasrallah’s official website quoted him referring to Israel as “the state of the grandsons of apes and pigs – the Zionist Jews” and described the sons of Jacob as “the murderers of the prophets.”

 

Speaking at the Shi’ite Day of Ashura flagellation ceremony (tatbir) on April 9, 2000, Hassan Nasrallah declared: “The Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities. It is clear that the numbers they talk about are greatly exaggerated. They can speak of fabricated or exaggerated massacres that occurred during the Second World War.”

 

On May 26, 2000, Nasrallah gave a speech in the Lebanese village of Bint Jbeil, from where the IDF had withdrawn a few days previously. Nasrallah crowed: “Several hundred Hezbollah fighters forced the strongest state in the Middle East to raise the flag of defeat . . . The age in which the Zionists frightened the Lebanese and the Arabs has ended . . . Israel, which possesses nuclear weapons and the most powerful air force in the region – this Israel is weaker than a spider’s web.”

 

On September 4, 2002, Hezbollah-affiliated Ayatollah Fadlallah stated to the British newspaper ‘The Telegraph’: “I was not the one who launched the idea of so-called suicide bombings … but I have certainly argued in favor of them.”

 

On September 27, 2002, Nasrallah spoke on al-Manar (Lebanese Hezbollah TV), proclaiming: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute . . . I conclude my speech with the slogan that will continue to reverberate on all occasions so that nobody will think that we have weakened. Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America!”

 

In an October 23, 2002 article in the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star, journalist Badih Chayban quoted Nasrallah saying, “Among the signs . . . and signals which guide us, in the Islamic prophecies and not only in the Jewish prophecies, is that this State [of Israel] will be established, and that the Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ (i.e., al-Masīḥ ad-Dajjāl) and the end of the world, but rather that Allah the Glorified and Most High wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place, and there the final and decisive battle will take place.” Nasrallah’s speech is available in Arabic on Hezbollah’s website. More recently, the relevant excerpt from the speech, along with Arabic transcription and English translation, have been published online.

 

In Jeffrey Goldberg’s October 14, 2002 article in ‘The New Yorker’ titled ‘In the Party of God’, Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Mousawi states that the “Jews are a lesion of the forehead of history.”

 

On February 18 and 19, 2005, Hezbollah-connected TV al-Manar aired Nasrallah’s speech of February 2, where he stated: “Israel is our enemy. This is an aggressive, illegal, and illegitimate entity, which has no future in our land. Its destiny is manifested in our motto: ‘Death to Israel!’”

 

In 2006, Sheikh Nasrallah said: “There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.”

 

On August 2, 2013, Nasrallah spoke on Quds Day in Beirut, saying that Israel was “a cancerous growth that must be eradicated . . . The only solution is to destroy it without giving it the opportunity to surrender . .  The elimination of Israel is not only a Palestinian interest. It is the interest of the entire Muslim world and the entire Arab world.”

 

On August 14, 2014, Nasrallah gave an interview to the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, stating that: “Israel is an illegitimate entity and it is a threat to the region. It is a constant threat to the whole region. We cannot coexist with this threat. That is why the ultimate goal of the [Arab and Islamic] nation is to end Israel’s existence irrespective of the problems, sensitivities and everything that has happened and could happen between Palestinians and non-Palestinians, Shia and Sunni, Muslims and Christians.”

 

On November 30, 2009 Nasrallah announced Hezbollah’s new ‘Manifesto’ at a live press conference in Beirut, 24 years after the publishing of its original ‘Hezbollah Program.’ The scholar and Neubauer Research Fellow Benedetta Berti at INSS, explains that “Hizbollah shows complete continuity both regarding its worldview and its strategic goals” in both documents.

 

 

“Certainly in the fire of My jealousy I have spoken against the rest of the nations!” (Ezekiel 36:5)

 

The prophet Jeremiah spoke forcefully about the divine judgment which will fall on every nation who disparages or dismisses YHVH’s calling on Israel and His love for His own Jewish people:

 

  • “Therefore all who devour you will be devoured. And all your adversaries, every one of them, will go into captivity. And those who plunder you will become plunder, and all who plunder you I will turn into plunder. For I will restore you to health and I will heal you of your wounds, declares YHVH, because they have called you an outcast, saying: ‘It is Zion; no one cares for her”’ (Jeremiah 30:16-17).

 

Hezbollah and Iran are not the first groups to find themselves blacklisted in the Bible. The divine gavel is about to come crashing down in the courthouse of the Most High.

 

 

How should we then pray?

 

  • Pray for followers of Yeshua worldwide to understand these evil and destructive thoughts and plans of Hezbollah and Iran, and to pray for the Middle East in light of them

 

  • Pray for the physical rescue of the approximately 120 Israeli hostages (including babies) kidnapped by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP/PLO.  At this moment some hostages are being tortured, raped and starved (this based on testimonies of recently released hostages). Sadly, many of these hostages are dead; Hamas is holding on to the corpses of Israeli citizens in cold storage to be used by them as bargaining chips

 

  • Pray for Hamas’ cruel terror dictatorship in Gaza to be decisively shattered and for all chains broken off the Palestinians living there, and for Iran’s role in jihadi deception, dissimulation and anti-Semitism to be exposed and opposed by world leaders

 

  • Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth

 

 

Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

 

In Messiah Yeshua,

 

Avner Boskey
 
Donations can be sent to:

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BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

 

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal or credit card) through: www.davidstent.org

 

The post Open your doors, O Lebanon – that fire may destroy your cedars! (Zechariah 11:1) – Part One appeared first on David's Tent.

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