The eyes of the world are once again riveted to the escalating fighting and chaos erupting in the Middle East. As expected, the tiny nation of Israel once more finds itself fighting a war on both physical and political fronts.
Those who had mistakenly misread Israel's pullback from occupied territories as a promise of coming stability and peace are getting a wake-up call that when it comes to the Middle East, there is no peace. Arabs misreading the pullbacks as the growing weakness of the Israeli government, and fading will of its people, now find missiles and bombs falling in profusion around them.
Arab militias backed by Syria and Iran—Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon—are dedicated to the annihilation of the nation of Israel, and have pushed hard to destabilize the shaky Middle East peace process. These militant groups now find themselves being targeted, with deadly accuracy, by war planes responding to missile attacks on Israeli cities.
While the United States refuses to condemn the Israelis defending themselves, even some Arab groups have begun to question the methods of militant Islamic groups attempting to destabilize peace efforts. Several European countries, in surprisingly muted tones, have deplored what they call Israel's "overreaction," perhaps realizing that it is Muslim militants who continue to unsettle the region, not to mention Europe itself.
Words, weapons; more words, more weapons— and even more words followed by even more weapons. It has become glaringly obvious no one really has a solution to this conflict. While world leaders grasp hopefully at every proclamation of peace, they appear ignorant of the underlying causes—those described in Bible prophecy.
The prophet Jeremiah proclaimed: "Why do we sit still? Assemble yourselves, and let us enter the fortified cities, and let us be silent there. For the Lord our God has put us to silence and given us water of gall to drink, because we have sinned against the Lord. We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and there was trouble!" (Jeremiah 8:14–15; c.f. Isaiah 59:8).
Tomorrow's World presenter Richard Ames, in his booklet The Middle East in Prophecy, wrote: "Arabs and Israelis have been at war since the modern state of Israel was established. Peace has often been proclaimed in the region, but has never been realized. More than 25 years after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat gave hope to the world, flying to Israel to offer a dramatic overture of peace, the process he hoped to encourage has stalled, if not stopped. At present, there is little human prospect for lasting peace among Middle East nations."
Weapons of war and words of peace are like oil and water; when shaken together they appear to mix, but they soon settle into their distinctive components because they lack the main ingredient to neutralize their distinct properties. Mankind, of itself, does not have the solutions to its problems because it rejects the true solution—the main ingredient—the word of God (Psalm 119:165).
Mankind's problems are not just physical; they are deeply spiritual and require a spiritual solution. It will take the return of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, to neutralize the war of weapons and the war of words (Isaiah 9:6–7).
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The above is adapted from one of the many commentaries, discussing vital topics facing our world, available at the www.lcg.org and www.tomorrowsworld.org Web sites.