There are significant spiritual dynamics at play in the Middle East conflict, Ali Siadatan, an Iranian author and commentator, told ALL ISRAEL NEWS.
He was recently invited to Jerusalem by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to share his expertise on Iran and the eschatology of the Islamic regime.
Now based in Canada, Siadatan looks at Iran through a wide-angle lens. He not only sees the geopolitical elements on the ground today but looks back over its sweeping history and beyond the physical realm to the spiritual aspects of the conflict as revealed in the Bible.
Israel’s return: A theological threat to Iran’s revolutionary vision
The Iranian-born educator contends that one of the main problems with Israel, from the point of view of the regime, is that it proves the Bible is true.
“The whole returning to the land puts a lot of flesh on the bones of the ancient writings of the prophets. And it becomes, therefore, a theological threat to the other utopia systems,” he said.
According to Siadatan, we are watching the regime fall in slow motion. The death of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was the most significant event of the war, and a death knell to the regime, in his estimation.
“The experiment is over,” he states, seeing the Islamic regime as a failed attempt to marry seventh-century theology with the practicalities of managing a state in the modern world. “They can't make nice for the world and have an economy that functions for everybody.”
The ability to successfully administer a state may have been lost, but the ideology behind it certainly has not been. Driven by an eschatological vision of the future, Islam, like Marxism and Nazi ideology, offers a counter to the Messianic millennial rule and the kingdom of God described in the Bible.
The Nazis sought their own vision of a thousand-year rule of the Third Reich, while Islam wants to administer a universal caliphate as the final revelation of Allah.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been increasingly captivated by the dream of ushering in the messianic figure of the Mahdi and is obsessed with Israel and Jerusalem.
Describing Jerusalem as a “pillar” – the epitome of Western Judeo-Christian culture – Siadatan explained that he believes spiritual forces are focused on the Israeli capital, which impacts the whole of the Western world.
“They draw from the same well of [the] occult to then [wage] war with Jerusalem and the Jerusalem pillar of the West, by extension,” he says, through “competing visions of the future.”
According to Siadatan, the existing culture and systems of the West must be destroyed in order to make way for the new.
Speaking about the Marxist-Islamic alliance, he claimed, “It erases the Bible, and then invites that culture to march into an alternative vision of the future than the one revealed by the Bible. And therefore it finds itself [in] competition or war with the agents that are carrying out that older biblical vision.”
Inconveniently, the arc of biblical history continues to develop despite all attempts to destroy it.
“Nothing has brought it to life more than the birth of the state of Israel, the revival of the land, the people, and Jerusalem coming to become part of the Commonwealth of the Jewish people after a very miraculous war in 1967,” Siadatan said.
He pointed out that today most Jews live in the English-speaking world, England, Australia, Canada, and America – a fact that he believed was not inconsequential.
“The English [-speaking] world is unique,” he explained. “It's based on the idea that man is made [in the] image of God. It draws from the books of Moses to give individual rights, while Islam and Marxism are collectivist ideas that adhere to prescriptive knowledge administered by institutions that you have to believe or you're in the bad books.”
Jerusalem, the Mahdi and the battle of competing futures
Siadatan pointed to a verse written by John in the New Testament:
“Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already” (1 John 4:3).
“The Greek word Antichristus, it means counterfeit Messiah,” he clarified. “As the Holy Spirit goes out, this other spirit goes out, and the wrestling of these two spirits forms the DNA of two thousand years of history. And so Islam and Marxism are more like these winds – like in the Hebrew word “ruach” (which means both spirit and wind) they don't have boundaries…they go everywhere.”
“When these two winds combine to weaponize the scepter of Persia against Judea and against the Jerusalem pillar, it's a powerful combination, a sandwich,” he stated, seeing the geographically untethered “winds” of Islam and Marxism as different from regional principalities.
The Prince of Persia: Spiritual forces, biblical prophecy and the war over Israel
Siadatan is currently writing a book about this subject, and explained how his thought process began while researching the discrepancies between the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic texts.
“There's a great passage in Deuteronomy chapter 32 that I discovered around 2001,” he said. “In the song of Moshe, in the Masoretic text, in the Aleppo codex, it says that when God divided the nations and set their boundaries, He did so according to the number of the sons of Israel. But in the Septuagint it says according to the sons of God.”
“When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage" (Deut 32:8-9).
Genesis 46:27 says that 70 people were counted among the sons of Israel as they entered Egypt, a number that has come to represent the nations in Jewish tradition because of this verse. However, this passage may also refer to the “sons of God,” which Siadatan equates with the spiritual forces that have dominion over specific geographical areas.
“There are these glimpses into spiritual forces behind the nations… the Prince of Persia, the Prince of Greece,” he explains, adding that when Jesus was tempted in the desert, Satan offered to hand over dominion over all the kingdoms of the world as if they were under his control to give.
“It is within the imperial system of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, as one of the load-bearing imperial jurisdictions of the world order. Because out of that comes Rome, and from Rome comes Europe, and the modern world,” he continued, pointing to the book of Daniel where the Prince of Persia is named.
“So these are the spiritual authorities over the nations,” Siadatan continued. “They demand worship, they become idols, they give scripture, but God's Bible is very different because it tells the future before it happens.”
When compared with ideological manifestos or other religious texts, the Bible stands apart in that its prophecies have consistently come to pass and are continuing to do so.
“The prophetic historical underplay of the narrative is the unique feature of the Hebrew Bible, into the New Testament, where only the aspects of the Messiah's life are recorded to fall within the scope of the Hebrew Bible's predictions of the Messiah.”
“The Islamic Marxist movement didn't just take Iran or topple the Shah,” posits Siadatan. “It is the center of an entire principality that governs the whole region, even through Turkey, and Egypt, and the Arab world fall within the realm of the prince of Persia, but it seems that the headquarters does emanate out of the Iranian plateau.”
Siadatan commented on the way that this alliance has seized control of political parties, media, education systems and even churches to indoctrinate an entire generation. The ground had been readied and the tinderbox set, so when Oct. 7 came, it ignited a firestorm, he suggested.
“Now the match is thrown and the flame was fanned on October 8th… and as the word 'Hamas' (חמס) appears famously in the parashah of Noah, a week after that it fills the whole earth,” he said, referring to Genesis 6:11, which appeared in the Torah Portion the week that it happened:
“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence [Hamas חמס].”
But that’s the thing with the Bible. It is mysterious and prophetic, accurately describing and even predicting events before they come. So as much as the principalities and spirits at work against Jerusalem may rage, the Book of books continues to unfold before our eyes.
He said, “The reason these guys want to destroy Israel is because [it proves] the veracity of the Bible. The legitimacy of this Jerusalem pillar lies in the fact that the words of the Bible have come true on the stage of history. There is a truth to it.”
Please take a moment and join others who are praying for Israel at this very moment by adding your light on the live prayer map with a simple click at prayforisrael.live.
Jo Elizabeth has a great interest in politics and cultural developments, studying Social Policy for her first degree and gaining a Masters in Jewish Philosophy from Haifa University, but she loves to write about the Bible and its primary subject, the God of Israel. As a writer, Jo spends her time between the UK and Jerusalem, Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for sharing. Blessings on your head from the Lord Jesus, Yeshua HaMashiach.
Steve Martin
Founder
Love For His People
Charlotte, NC USA