Dear Friends,

I don’t want to overdo this, but May 29th is the time you should be going to Israel! The Israeli government has now advised its citizens that precautions related to Iraq are no longer necessary. Not only will the territory be perfectly safe for travel (we would never go when it was not), but the End Times appear so near that the Rapture might interrupt your plans for a future trip!

Even if you want to ignore suggestions of an experienced pilgrim like myself (I’ve made 75 trips in 30 years with not a single incident of any danger), then at least know a good bargain when you see one. Right now we only have 23 people signed up for this tour; we have had up to ten times that many on past trips! Experienced travelers prefer one-bus tours. Smaller groups permit easily engaging the guides and leaders plus allow you to see more sites.

Those interested in this tour should call Tony at once for more information (214-696-9760).

As this is written, the US Operation Iraqi Freedom has been going on for a little over three weeks, and the war appears to be all but over. So it is important to look at what will unfold after this war, including the horrific “Road Map” to peace with which the US appears intent on saddling Israel. (In the prophecy analysis below you will see that this so-called Road Map actually may lead to an invasion of Israel, identified in Ezekiel 38 and 39 as the invasion of Gog and Magog.)

Our nation’s efforts in Iraq are well intentioned and had to be done, given the criminal nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. We’re doing this job competently, and I agree completely with the Bush administration’s stand on everything in the Middle East except for the President’s “vision for a Palestinian state.”

The idea of a Palestinian state is, of course, ungodly, counterproductive, and arguably just plain stupid. You can’t make a country out of a society that’s proved to consist basically of murderers. The Jerusalem Post recently ran an article titled “Blurred Vision,” which commented on the “Road Map.” The article noted the foolishness of the idea that an area run by terrorists could somehow peacefully coexist next to the nation it has targeted for destruction.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, speaking recently to Orthodox Jewish leaders, was contemptuous of the Road Map. “There is a confluence of deluded thinking between European elites, elements within the State Department bureaucracy, and a significant segment of the American intellectual community,” DeLay said. “This consortium of complacency, these inadvertent servants of tyranny, and these neo-appeasers… are dead wrong about Iraq. They’re dead wrong about Israel. At this moment, this collection of fancy thinkers is attempting to coerce the president into accepting what they innocuously call a ‘Road Map.’ This absurd scheme flows from an ethically obtuse obsession with establishing moral parity between [Israel and the PLO]. So let’s drop the Foggy Bottom temporizing and be perfectly clear about this. As President Bush has made clear, there’s only one real Road Map to peace: Free minds, free markets, free elections, and the freedom to worship.”

While we have done the right thing with Saddam, we unfortunately are trying to appease others in the Middle East, including Arafat, the Saudis, and the Iranians. If we ever become serious in disarming our worst enemies, then we will win our war on terrorism. By starting with number five on my list — Iraq — we are at least making a beginning. (My personal list of our enemies goes this way: Number one is Saudi Arabia, financier, religious authority, and home of most of the 9-11 terrorists; two, Iran; three, Syria; four, the Palestinian Authority; and five, Iraq. After that almost any and all of the other Arab Muslim nations might be added to the list.)

For those who wonder why the Muslims have such malice toward the US and Israel (or why the Communists, Nazis, or any number of other killers have acted against good people all the way back to the time of Abraham), the reason is our worship of God. By their nature, evil men hate goodness, and consequently are quick to embrace depravity. “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). This makes them satanic for all intents and purposes.

We see this to be the case particularly during the Tribulation period with its worship of a false religious dictator, the Antichrist. This misfortune has been foreshadowed throughout the history of Islam, with Muslim imams performing as religious dictators. The fruits of their preaching in the Middle East have been poverty and violence as well as the 9-11 attacks against our World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The war in Iraq is ushering us into the Tribulation period in a most direct way. As I alluded to in the previous Levitt Letter, wars against Israel keep escalating while the Arabs strive for basically one goal: To murder God’s Chosen People and anyone friendly with them (like us Americans). I stated that the war in Iraq followed a succession of previous Arab attacks on Israel and that the future invasion of Gog and Magog would logically fit into this pattern. That latter war seems to be in the offing, and in some ways we are provoking it by attacking in exactly the part of the world where the main invading force will originate.

The famous dry bones vision in Ezekiel 37 establishes the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, which in our generation we are seeing unfold. The next chapter of Ezekiel takes up the invasion by a power called Magog, led by a leader called Gog, and its allies. This northern power is usually characterized as Russia; Dr. McCall and I wrote a best seller in the early 1970s (The Coming Russian Invasion of Israel) about this. The book has been updated several times and is now available from this ministry as Coming: The End — Russia and Israel in Prophecy. Because of this impending fulfillment of prophecy, I think current events make this the most important of our books at this time.

It should also be noted, before looking at how the invasion by Gog and Magog may unfold, that despite their efforts to remain neutral and even placate the Arabs and especially the Palestinians, America and Britain are under attack because of their efforts to oust Saddam Hussein. Already both nations are being called “The Zionist Enemy.”

If it weren’t so dangerous, this choice of words by the Muslims would be amusing because it’s hard to accuse even American Jews of being Zionists. Most are actually left-wing liberals, all but indifferent to preserving Israel as a Jewish state. Likewise the general public in America is not overly supportive of Israel, despite that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. And the idea that the anti-Semitic British are Zionists is laughable.

Yet “Zionism” is the label that the Arabs hang on the US and Britain with the hope that they will have a sort of excuse for “retaliating” against America and England — by attacking the true Zionists in Israel.

Despite this deficient logic, the Arabs may have some surprising allies in their attack, especially from north of the region. Before the fall of the Soviet empire, Russia was thought of as a godless society. However today that has changed, with Russia encompassing, or being bordered by, many areas populated by Muslims, particularly in its southern area in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. When the Soviet Union dissolved, we discovered that those southern Russia republics were mainly fundamentalist Muslim, and presently these nations are very friendly with Iran.

All of this is interesting when one studies the nations allied against Israel as listed in Ezekiel 38:5-6: Persia, Ethiopia, Libya, Gomer and Togarmah. These ancient names don’t mean much to most people today, but when one studies what modern-day countries correspond to these areas, everything becomes relevant. Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and a few other small Mesopotamian nations constitute what was the Persian Empire of Ezekiel’s time. Looking at a map, we see that Iraq and Iran therefore probably represent the eastern and northern powers mentioned in this Bible passage, while Libya is to the west, and Ethiopia (which may include present-day Sudan) is to the south. Gomer corresponds to today’s Bosnia, located to the northwest, and ancient Togarmah has become the Cossack area of southern Russia north of the Caucasus Mountains.

These are all committed, fundamentalist Muslim areas. And they totally encircle little Israel.

The Persian and Mesopotamian powers are east of Israel. Why then does Ezekiel specify that the Persians come from the north? Because that’s the only practical way into Israel from those territories given the geography of the place. Just as Abraham journeyed through Syria and Galilee on his way to Canaan, these eastern powers will be forced by geographical conditions to move their mechanized equipment down from the Golan Heights into northern Galilee, and probably will try to attack at the Valley of Armageddon (the Battle of Armageddon will follow this invasion by seven years). So while an attack from due east would be a shorter route, it would entail crossing a great deal of arid, open desert, and then demand a terrific mountainside climb in order to mount an assault on Jerusalem. The land rises from the Jordan River valley to Jerusalem by 2,500 feet in elevation within a distance of only 15 miles and would therefore be a very problematic route for moving tanks and the like, according to Capt. Will King, our military consultant.

Thus Ezekiel’s prophecy seems perfectly accurate. Jerusalem will inevitably be assaulted from the north by these foreign powers.

But all that might and strength arrayed against Israel will fail. We learn that this invasion will be repulsed, to say the least, at the end of Ezekiel 38 where the Lord says, “And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.” Then in Ezekiel 39:2 we learn there will be an eighty-four percent casualty rate: “And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee.” (The Russian army suffered a catastrophic casualty rate of seventy-five percent during World War II. This will be even worse.)

It’s possible that Israel will employ its nuclear weapons to repel this very unfair and seemingly overwhelming invasion. While today public opinion prevents nations from using these weapons, Israel may realize that its only option for survival is to “go nuclear.” Of course the invaders may also be destroyed through an act of God to protect His Chosen People and their Promised Land (something well in keeping with the Scriptures throughout Biblical wars).

You would think that those Satan inspires to attempt the annihilation of Israel would have learned their lesson with such a defeat, but in fact they will come again to Armageddon with the same sort of attack seven years later, this time bolstered with the assistance of an amazing 200-million-man army of the “King of the East.”

Fortunately in our current war with Iraq, Israel has not been assaulted by the Iraqis or by the Palestinians — except for the usual attacks mounted by suicide bombers. The reason the Palestinians can’t initiate any serious assaults is excellent police work by the Israeli army, not Bush’s promises for a Palestinian state (though we will probably hear such a claim being made).

If the President has his way, terrorists will be able to attack Israel on a daily basis from the safety of their own new nation. I’m aware that what the President is saying may just be a smoke screen designed to appease Arab compatriots, like the prince he hosted at his ranch, or the murderous imams and other Islamic personalities he invited to the White House for Ramadan. But I am fearful that he cannot open his mouth in this manner without in effect cursing the Chosen People and in the process deeply offending our Lord.

It’s sad that many people don’t realize how the dictators in the Middle East maintain their power. For generations they have vilified the Jews, with these lies reaching a fever pitch when Israel became a nation. These dictators tell their people, “The murderous Israelis are on our borders. We’ve got to protect ourselves from them.” And this “protection” means creating a draconian society based on hatred with a lack of freedom, which is generally tolerated because citizens believe it necessary to combat Israel. Generation after generation of Arabs have been taught from the time they are children that the Jews are butchers and monsters. While the Jews have done the Arabs no harm at all, the propaganda argues otherwise and that is all most Arabs ever hear.

This tactic has kept a few Arab families rich, but the vast majority in these nations remains poor and ignorant. If the Arabs would cooperate with the Jews, the Lord would bless them. As I have noted in the past, with Arab money and Jewish brains, the Middle East would be paradise. But the selfish interests of those in power within these nations won’t permit this.

Of course the hatred of the Jews is more than a delusion employed by dictators to stay in power. It would, after all, serve the Enemy’s purpose to kill all the Jews; each murder of a Jew gets him a little closer to that goal. The Enemy can’t stand up to God, so he instead attacks God’s Chosen People.

Like a boxer trying to win a match on points, Satan knows he can’t score a knockout punch against the Lord but hopes to create enough Jewish deaths to survive his contest with God. If the Enemy could possibly eliminate all the Jews, then the Bible would become a relic of an extinct people, and nobody would pay attention to it at all. (While as Christians we know this won’t happen, that doesn’t keep the Enemy from trying to achieve it anyway, in the same way that a suicide bomber may hope to kill Jews because of his hatred, even though he realizes his act will do nothing to improve the conditions for Palestinians.)

Most leaders in the secular world don’t recognize this conflict for what it is: A real, even the ultimate, battle between good and evil. Martin Sheen and other Hollywood protesters seem to think that the conflict in the Middle East is some sort of gentleman’s disagreement that might just as easily be solved with negotiations as by war. What they fail to realize is that Saddam Hussein is truly evil, even satanic.

It takes real faith to understand that there are both good and evil forces battling for control of our planet. Those who look at Christianity as some sort of quaint aberration can’t see this, and likewise can’t truly understand evil or even recognize that Saddam Hussein represents the epitome of evil. Worse, many of these people claim that Bush and Blair are evil because of their actions taken to rid the world of the dangers presented by Saddam Hussein. Thus these protesters fulfill the picture of worldly confusion and amorality which was presented by Isaiah when he wrote, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…” (Isaiah 5:20).

During the upcoming summer I’ll be speaking on these issues at colleges and churches in the Midwest, as we have been announcing. Depending on the situation in Iraq at that time, I will be teaching about the topics in this letter as well as events that are current when I speak. Prophecy is racing toward fulfillment, making it hard to predict a message even a few months in advance! And some of those prophecies are thousands of years old! Of course I will also be dealing with topics including the various visions for a Palestinian state as presented by our President, the European Union, the United Nations, or anyone else. It is essential that Christians learn why they should be opposed to weakening Israel; this is the most important battle in the world today.

My schedule for speaking at colleges across America’s Midwest is filling up but there still may be days open. Since I’d like to visit as many places as possible, church and school officials in the Midwest can still give Claudia a call at (817) 417-0059 as soon as possible and we may be able to work a few more stops into our calendar.

May 29-June 8 will be our Pentecost Tour of Israel plus an excursion to Petra and, as I mentioned before, this promises to be the tour of a lifetime. Call (214) 696-9760 for your brochure during office hours or 1-800-WONDERS anytime. Experienced travelers to that region know that the best time to visit is just following some cataclysmic event. Things will be quiet for some time after Iraq capitulates and this promises to be a fantastic trip. Going now will also help demonstrate that American Christians support Israel.

Finally, June 14-15 is our Father’s Day Tour in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which includes the famed Passion Play. Please contact Tony for your free brochure, (214) 696-9760.

Remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Your Messenger,

Zola

P.S. Our ministry typically consults with people active in their fields. Our military consultant Capt. Will King has received orders to report to the front in Iraq. We ask for your prayers for his safety.

Zola Levitt Ministries is ECFA approved and has Charity Navigator’s top rating of 4 stars.

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