History to Prophecy
Even though all of the angel’s overview of Israel’s history from 535BC to the end of the age came to me in advance, the first 35 verses of chapter 11 have already been fulfilled and documented as historical fact as you have seen. But now, again without skipping a beat and without a word of explanation, he jumped forward to a time still in the future even for your generation. These “fast forwards” occur with surprising regularity in prophetic discourse, most of them omitting the time when Israel didn’t exist as a free nation, from 70 AD till 1948. It seems the Lord has always stopped counting time when His people were either under foreign rule or, as in the case of the Babylonian captivity and the Great Diaspora (scattering) after the Romans destroyed our country, ceased to exist altogether.
In Isaiah 11:10-12 God promised to reach out a second time to re-gather His people as a nation (the first was after Babylon during my lifetime) and in Amos 9:11-15 He declared that after the second re-gathering we would never again be dispersed. This second re-gathering began in 1948 and continues to this day. But as far as our LORD is concerned the time between 70 AD and 1948 simply didn’t exist for Israel. That time belonged exclusively to the Church, and sadly many in the church concluded that my people were gone forever, and that all the blessings God had promised Israel now belonged to them. They seem to have forgotten that James explained just as the Diaspora was beginning that for a time the LORD would focus on taking a people for Himself from among the Gentiles, but that after He was finished He would return to re-build His relationship with Israel (Acts 15:12-18). People who don’t understand that the LORD’s concept of time is way different from ours, and who don’t take His Word literally, try to relegate all of prophecy to the past. To say they’ll be surprised when He comes back to wrap things up is an understatement of massive proportions.
But my angel informer had no such problems and roared headlong into the still distant future to focus on the missing last 7 years of our 490-year allotment of time. He said that during that time another King, who you know as the anti-Christ, will exalt himself above all mankind and say unheard of things against God. The Apostle Paul even predicted that he would actually claim to be God (2 Thes. 2:4). Remember Antiochus called himself “Epiphanes”, meaning god made manifest, and this guy will be a lot like him although even worse. He will deny his Creator and his Savior (among my people every woman desired to be the mother of the Messiah which is why the angel called Him the desire of women) and exalt himself even above them.
Instead, he will bow to the Devil himself and with his help attempt to conquer the world and defeat the forces of God once and for all. At the End of the Age, the last Kings of the North and South will engage him and, after he defeats them, troops from the North (Europe and Russia) and from the East (China, India, Japan, etc) will try to sneak in and surprise him, but in a great rage he will take them on, too. Only one spot on the globe will be safe for my people, the Red Rock canyons of southern Jordan known as Petra. Just as the Messiah warned them to do, my people who believe in Him will flee there and be protected.
The anti-Christ will nearly succeed in conquering the world, even entering the Holy City and setting up his command center there. My people will be attacked, the city split in two, and it will seem if evil has triumphed over good after all.