The "Christian" view of the Israeli-Lebanon thing
From the Wall Street Journal (hat tip to Kevin Drum):
By the way, the rapture index now stands at 156 -- pretty high on the rapture scale.
Last week, as Israel's armed forces pounded Lebanon and worries of a wider conflagration mounted, Mr. Hagee presided over what he called a "miracle of God": a gathering of 3,500 evangelical Christians packed into a Washington hotel to cheer Israel and its current military campaign.God's love and the universal gift of freedon = a sea of human blood? Ah, the rapture must be at hand.
Standing on a stage bedecked with a huge Israeli flag, Mr. Hagee drew rapturous applause and shouts of "amen" as he hailed Israel for doing God's work in a "war of good versus evil." Calls for Israel to show restraint violate "God's foreign-policy statement" toward Jews, he said, citing a verse from the Old Testament that promises to "bless those who bless you" and curse "the one who curses you."
…Mr. Hagee is a leading figure in the so-called Christian-Zionist movement. This evangelical political philosophy is rooted in biblical prophecies and a belief that Israel's struggles signal a prelude to Armageddon. Its followers staunchly support the Bush administration's unequivocal backing of Israel in its current battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
President Bush sent a message to the gathering praising Mr. Hagee and his supporters for "spreading the hope of God's love and the universal gift of freedom." The Israeli prime minister also sent words of thanks. Israel's ambassador, its former military chief and a host of U.S. political heavyweights, mostly Republican, attended.
…"The battlefield will cover the nation of Israel!" he writes in "Jerusalem Countdown," his recent work, describing a "sea of human blood drained from the veins of those who have followed Satan."
By the way, the rapture index now stands at 156 -- pretty high on the rapture scale.
posted by walldon | 8:42 AM
3 Comments:
I think, should the rapture (or "simply", the 2nd Coming) occur, that quite a few people will be surprised at the outcome. On the one hand, God is strikingly more gracious than people tend to think; and on the other hand, God expects a bit more graciousness (as in us not killing each other all the time) than people tend to practice.
Rapture language was originally offered for the sake of deeply oppressed and likely-to-be-murdered people. If anyone, innocent Lebanese civilians are the ones who need rapturing, "leaving behind" the rest of us (and it is "us", ain't it?) who are responsible for the violence to face the fruits of our actions.
The Rapture Index is a sick joke. In the first place, the "precursors" that are supposed to show how near the "pretribulation rapture" is are on earth even AFTER it and are fulfilled DURING the tribulation and actually point to and announce the second coming to earth! So how can events that take place years after the rapture be signposts that precede the rapture? In the second place, the notion of a pretribulation rapture was dreamed up by a young girl in Scotland in 1830 and never taught by any church before then! Many trace the rapture concept back to John Darby, but even he admitted that it was then (in the 1830s) a "new" (his terminology) view - and his contemporaries agreed that it was unheard of before then. Now you know why Todd Strandberg has a perpetual grin on his face in his photos on his Rapture Ready site cause he knows things that many others don't know!!!
I just sent the above anonymous comments and failed to mention that some Google articles throw light on the Rapture Index, the rapture, etc. Type in, on Google, "Pretrib Rapture Diehards," "Open Letter to Todd Strandberg," and "Pretrib Hypocrisy." Good reads.
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