Ya might wanna go back and read the post about the four winds and what they represent :-).
I'll try and make it brief but there is so much here that is so important.
Seven letters to churches
There are seven letters to churches in the Book of Revelation.
Take a guess where all seven are located.
Yep, modern day Turkey.
That alone should tell you something.
One of the churches was the church at Pergamum.
The city had a temple to Zeus.
"The alter of Satan" the book of Revelation says was located there.
German archaeologist excavated it in the late 1800's.
It was returned to Germany.
This type of architecture was emulated during Nazi Germany.
Albert Speir used it in his design of the Zeppelinfeld at Nuremberg where the large Nazi rallys were held.
Hilter's fascination with the occult is well documented, it was all about maximizing evil.
This is nothing to play around with.
Turkey today.
There was an attempted coup in Turkey a lil over a year ago.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkeys President has managed to purge the intelligentsia from the country's university's, as well as purging the judiciary and more recently, experienced officers of the military.
All three major civic institutions have now been effectively purged.
Recently, narrowly passed constitutional reforms pretty much make the Turkish president an Islamic Dictator.
Don't forget Turkey is a member of NATO, and after the US has the largest military in the alliance.
The people who were purged from academia, the judiciary and the military?
All replaced with younger, loyal Islamist.
BTW, the only Western leader to congratulate Erdoğan on his consolidation of power via constitutional reforms?
The Donald, go figure right?
I firmly believe that the US staged the attempted coup against Erdoğan.
Think about that for a second.
If true?
We attempted a coup against a NATO ally with the second largest military in the alliance.
Why do I think we were behind the coup?
We don't like the direction the country is headed.
The main reason I think we were behind it?
We waited way to long to see how things played out before we condemned it.
It's our NATO ally.
There was a coup attempt.
If we weren't behind it why didn't we condemn it in the strongest possible manner immediately?
It took us 12? 14 hours? before we did so.
No way the Turkish military takes on a task like that without some large outside force backing it.
My son, and others, think it was a false flag event exercised by Erdoğan to give him an excuse to purge the military.
The night of the coup the plotters had Erdoğan's jet in their cross hairs.
They didn't shoot it down. The pilots told the fighter pilots they were a civilian flight.
This is why my son thinks it was a false flag episode.
My problem with that is, if it was a false flag event?
Why let it be known that Erdoğan's jet was in the fighter pilots cross hairs?
Wouldn't that be something you would want to conceal?
Anyway, (Said in my best Ricky voice :-)
The coup attempt was discovered just hours before it was to take place, this along with a whole host of other reasons is why it failed.
How did they find out about it? Sources credit the Turkish intelligence agencies.
I think we have all seen a state player (Russia) that has exceptionally keen cyber abilities.
Perhaps they offered an assist? Did all those back-doors in Cisco products (internet routers and switches) placed there by the NSA now come back to haunt us just like many of us thought they would?
Maybe, who knows.
I do know this, speaking as a former Network Operations Control Analyst, any back door put (alternate method to reach device electronically) on a router or switch to be used by one entity to gather data could be exploited (hacked) by another entity for the exact same purpose.
To think it couldn't be is a fools folly.
But that's a whole different post.
False flag event or not, the effects are still the same.
Purges, stifling of dissent, crackdown on media, consolidation of power etc.
So what is the point in all of this?
Turkey sits at the crossroads of east and west.
It has and will continue to be, strategically important due to the Bosporus straight.
Look where Russia is.
Russia has always wanted easy access to the Mediterranean.
Why do you think we wanted Turkey in NATO in the first place?
What do you think the Russians would want?
Many of the officers that were purged in the Turkish military had 20+ years of contacts with their counterparts in NATO.
That doesn't exist any more.
Gone. For good. Never coming back.
Why else would you do that unless you planned on leaving the alliance sometime in the near future?
The Antichrist
Now think about this for a second, how big of a hero would a President of Turkey be to the Islamic world, and what better way to thumb your nose at the west than to remove yourself from NATO?
That individual would almost certainly be worshiped as a God in the Islamic world.
Yeah, the Antichrist, I'm going there.
Daniel 7:23-25
“He gave me this explanation: ‘The fourth beast is a fourth kingdom that will appear on earth. It will be different from all the other kingdoms and will devour the whole earth, trampling it down and crushing it. The ten horns are ten kings who will come from this kingdom. After them another king will arise, different from the earlier ones; he will subdue three kings. He will speak against the Most High and oppress his holy people and try to change the set times and the laws. The holy people will be delivered into his hands for a time, times and half a time."
I remember sitting in on of Brother Joe's bible study sessions on the book of revelation and he stared talking about Turkeys role and I already knew about the academic and judicial purges that had taken place and it was like the gears in my head all started to mesh together like, "Oh my goodness this makes perfect sense to me now", much more so than the reunification of The Holy Roman Empire scenario did to me at an earlier time. (See below).
I don't really believe Erdoğan's the guy.
But the chess board is clearly being set up.
Revelation 17 8-11
The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because it once was, now is not, and yet will come. This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. They are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while. The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction.
"The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven" .
There have been seven kingdoms, empires etc that have ruled over Jerusalem:
Egyptians
Assyrians
Babylonians
Medo-Persians
Greek
Roman
Ottoman Turks (1493-1909)
"Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come"
The five who have fallen are the Egyptians
Assyrians, Babylonians, Medo-Persians, and Greeks.
The "one is" at this time would be The Romans at the time of John writing the Book of Revelation.
"The other has not come yet..." would be the Ottoman Turks ...
"The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven."
Of the seven kingdoms listed above, which one has the greatest likely hood of being the eighth king (Kingdom)? Egypt? With all it's inner turmoil gonna take on Israel? Same for the Syrians. Iraq? (Babylonians) Oh it's gotta be the Persians then right? (Iran). Why? Haven't they already thumbed their nose at the west enough? What would be the shock value there? The Shia only make up 16% or so of all Muslims. The Greeks are gonna rule over Jerusalem? Again, with all their inner turmoil, it just doesn't seem to make much sense.
The Romans?
This one gets interesting. I worked with a guy who was really into all of this years ago. He thought the formation of the European Union was the putting back together of the Holy Roman empire and that through the European Union, Rome would once again rule over Jerusalem. The temple in Jerusalem will again be destroyed by the same people who destroyed it the last time which would have been The Romans, so this makes sense, or so the case for this scenario went.
The historian Josephus, who witnessed the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. noted that while it was the Roman Legion who destroyed the temple, the legion was based out of Antioch (Our favorite place again, Turkey) and consisted mainly of Arab and Turkish conscripts from that area.
Why would the Ottomans be considered "The Beast" mentioned in Revelation 17 8-11?
Oh, I don't know, maybe for the genocide of the Armenians, many of them Christians.
To this day Turkey (The remnant of The Ottoman empire), refuses to acknowledge the genocide.
Islamic caliphate, or Sunni vs. Shia anybody?
The last last Sunni Islamic caliphate? The Ottoman Caliphate, under the Ottoman dynasty of the Ottoman Empire. (I'm not counting ISIS here, however they did bring back the idea of a Caliphate ruling over the area) I watched and interview with Jake Sullivan the other day. He said there were twenty five million Sunni Muslims living between the Shia strongholds of Baghdad and Damascus. They are displaced militarily, socially, politically and economically. We may very well defeat ISIS, but this is just going to keep reforming and reconstituting until it eventually results in a new Islamic caliphate.
Daniel 2 40-43.
Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
Islamic resurgence anybody?
Revelation 13:3
One of the heads of the beast appeared to be fatally wounded. But the mortal wound was healed, and the whole world was astonished and followed the beast.
The Bible is also just filled with verses about army's coming from the north to overtake Jerusalem.
So much for brevity :-).
Closing
I do what the voice in my head tells me :-).
I really struggled with this piece, way more than others I've ever written.
That voice just said, "Just get started, I'll help you piece it all together, just keep plugging away."
I do what I'm told...mostly...sort of...:-).
I always do what I'm told in regard to that voice :-).
There is hardly an original thought contained here.
Others know way more than I do about what I've written.
That is why I made the links available.
This is merely the synthesis of things I have read over the last year or so.
I know better than to pretend I have it all right.
Nich told me one time about something I believed:
"That doesn't make any sense".
I told him, "It only needs to make sense to me, why does it need to make sense to anyone else?"
This is pretty much the same kinda scenario.
If it helps make the world make more sense to others?
Then I did my job.
People are like "You don't work".
I'm like, "Really? You try it for a while." :-).
Just like Brother Joe says, Christians shouldn't be scared or worried.
There is a blueprint available for whats going on in the world today.
The whole point here is this, whether or not there are pieces here that are correct and others that are not?
The geo-political chess board is being set up, the forces of light and darkness are being assembled.
I just wish other could see it as clearly as it has been laid out for me.
