Last Sunday, waiting for the morning service at church to begin, I overheard a woman from a few pews back say to a friend, “I’m finding people today are suddenly interested in what the Bible says. They’re realizing it’s true.”

From what I’m currently experiencing, people’s interest in the Bible often relates to what it predicts about the “end times,” or “last days.” Stuff like the wild weather, and the earthquake in Haiti, and Iran building nukes—not to mention the ever-increasing immorality and promotion of homosexuality, etc., etc.—has those with even a superficial knowledge of what Jesus Christ warns about in the Gospels, or what John has visions of in the Book of Revelation, thinking we’re heading full-blown into apocalyptic times.

*****

So, just last night, in listening live over the internet to a Q & A session that was part of a weekend Bible conference in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., in which Jordan was the keynote speaker, a woman in attendance asked about what to make of all the heightened attention given end-times prophecy by Christians.

Jordan responded, “When you hear people talk about Bible prophecy being fulfilled, the question I always ask is, ‘What specific verse do you have in mind?’ Some people say, ‘The re-establishing of Israel.’ Most people say, ‘The budding of the fig tree,’ which, by the way, has nothing to do with the re-establishing of Israel.

“There are four trees in bible that represent Israel and the fig tree represents the religious life of Israel, not Israel as a nation. It’s the vine tree that represents Israel as a nation. The budding of the fig tree would represent the establishment of Israel’s religious system.

“Of course, in Matthew 21, Christ cursed the fig tree and said it will never bear fruit again. Well, if the fig tree is the nation, then Israel can never bear fruit again. But if it’s the religious system, which was the Mosaic system, that isn’t going to bear fruit, but it is going to be re-established by the Anti-Christ.”

*****

Jordan continued, “So when you see the Anti-Christ re-establish temple worship, the people who see that are going to see the Second Advent, but in prophecy you don’t know it’s been fulfilled until after it’s been fulfilled.

“Seven hundred years before Christ, Scripture (prophesied) He’d be born in Bethlehem, but until He was born in Bethlehem, it wasn’t fulfilled. So an event takes place that looks like maybe it’s leading up to it, but you don’t know it’s fulfilled until afterward.

“There are things that have happened in last couple of years that for 1500-1800 years weren’t there. Israel was not a nation; they are now. But, you see, if the Arabs went in there and just wiped them out tomorrow, that wouldn’t disturb me because what’s happening now, there’s no verse that’s been fulfilled. Maybe it’s a foreshadowing, but maybe it’s not.

“I don’t know of any prophetic Scripture about the ‘last days’ that you can look at and say, ‘That verse has been fulfilled.’ All the verses about Israel being in the land—okay, they’re in the land, but in those verses, He says, ‘I will gather you.’

“Well, if you know how Israel got put back into the land and made a nation and so forth, with the Balfour Declaration and all that stuff, boy, there was more UNgodliness than godliness in any of that!

“Now, God works through all kind of means, but I don’t know about that particular thing.

They’ve certainly been re-gathered in unbelief, and that’s the way Scripture says it would be re-gathered. They will not only have to be in the land, they’ll have to be in control of Jerusalem—they’ll have to have a temple, so on and so forth.

“Maybe some of that is a foretaste, but then if I tell you it is, and they got wiped out, what’d I do to Bible prophecy? I said it didn’t come through. So I can’t guarantee it. Sure, I’d be happy if it was. I’m not trying to throw cold water on something, I’m just saying you got to be careful because you can’t just assume they can’t get wiped out.

“People used to talk about Russia coming down and invading them. Well, that’s not what Ezekiel 38 and 39’s about, but when we were scared of Russia, it made good press.

“The Anti-Christ, by the way, arises out of Turkey. Rev. 2:13 says Satan’s seat is in Pergamos (ancient Turkey) . . . In the 21^st Century, people who prognosticated what’s going happen in the next 100 years (which is a stupid thing to do but people do it) said there are three potential places for there to be world wars.

“One is in the American West. You know it was just a little over 100 years ago there was the Mexican-American War and we took possession of Texas to California. Our country’s only been here a couple of hundred years so we think of it as monolithic, but it’s not necessarily that settled, so there’s that potential. That’s not a very big potential, but that’s one of the places they say.

“I was in Arizona last fall and I listened to one of these whack jobs on the radio, and some guy calls in and he’s just hollering, ‘That land belongs to us; we need to take it back!’ He was a Mexican Independent, whatever. And the commentator did something I thought was brilliant. He said, ‘Let me get this right. You want to give New Mexico and Arizona back and what you want is for the Mexican government to run this part of the world and have the Mexican economy?’ The guy says, ‘Oh no, I don’t mean that!,’ and the conversation just kind of faded away.

“The other place (predicted) is Poland, northern Europe, but in third place, and I consider this the most likely for there to be a war in the next 30 years, is Turkey. Turkey is the land bridge into Europe from Asia.

“Turkey is the secular Islamic state that is very westernized. That part of the world has a tempestuous history and when I read about that I said, ‘Whoa, considering the things the Scriptures say will happen in the last days in that part of the world’ . . . You see, if I’m looking for something, I’m looking there because I know the Anti-Christ has to do these certain things, and has to be in control and things of that nature.”

*****

Later on in the same Q & A, addressing a question specifically about whether or not modern-day Israel’s legacy has been supernaturally steered, Jordan said, “The reality is in May of 1947, the Israeli government did a very gutsy thing. They said, ‘We declare ourselves a nation based upon these resolutions,’ and about 15 Arab nations attacked them the next day.

“I salute them for their courage and for all that they’ve done. You know, though, we talk about the ’67 war and all that stuff . . . listen, it was American pilots that won that war. They may have been Jewish, but they were still American pilots.

“And the last war when they beat Egypt, if you read some of the history about how they did that . . . there was nothing supernatural about it; it was just absolute smart gamesmanship.

“The No. 1 reason that the Israeli army credits beating the Egyptian army is that they had learned about how to keep their soldiers hydrated. The idea that if you’re going to fight in the dessert and be fresh, you need to have water. The Egyptians didn’t do that, so the Israeli soldiers had enduring capacities.

“My point is it really wasn’t supernatural stuff. It kind of looked like it when you don’t know the dessert, but when you see them analyze it, they don’t give credit to supernatural things. The people who did it are all materialistic atheists; they’re not Believers.

“I just had a lady in our assembly just get back from a (secular tour) in Israel and she told me their guide was an Arab who’s a Believer and had a clear testimony of salvation. You don’t meet Jews . . . the Jewish community there forbids you to hand out gospel tracts. Stand on the Jordan River and watch people get baptized in the thing but you can’t give a gospel tract to somebody for fear of being arrested. It’s that way in Greece too.

“But the lady told me that whenever they’d come to a biblical place, the guide would get out his King James Bible and read about it and people said, ‘What’s he reading the Bible about that for?!’

“So there are Believers there but Israel is there in rank unbelief. But it’s still a nation and if it is a pre-cursor, a foreshadowing, certainly before the Anti-Christ comes it has to be there as a nation.

“And when God says He’s going to re-gather them like in Ezekiel 36—‘I’ll gather you from among the nations’—really the way He’s going to re-gather them is to DRIVE them from among the nations and they’re being driven today, in large part from the persecution and so forth.

“But Israel being ‘born in a day’ is talking about the nation right at the very end and it’s not talking about the political structure of the forming of the nation, it’s talking about the redemption and the ‘so all Israel shall be saved as it is written.’

‘There’s an awful lot of sensationalism associated with these things that for the large part, and I don’t mean to be a snarly-snot about it, is designed to part you from your money and I think there are more honorable ways to do that.”