The Book of Jonah

April 3, 2025
Before we turn to the book of Jonah, turn very briefly please to the book of Acts chapter 2:24 and 27. 

"And God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power."

 

In verse 27 we have a quote from the book of Isaiah and the Psalms,

Because thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades, nor allow Thy holy one to undergo decay.

It was impossible for death to hold Jesus in its power: it was a theological, spiritual and logical impossibility.

We are told in the book of Hebrews that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son – as a type of Christ – because even then he knew that God could raise his son up from the dead to fulfill his purpose. (Heb 11:17) It is an example of how God puts somebody in a “death situation”, with the assurance that his resurrection power is going to be found in it.

With these things in view turn with me to the book of the prophet Jonah.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.” But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up. Then the sailors became afraid and every man cried to his god, and they threw the cargo which was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone below into the hold of the ship, lain down and fallen sound asleep. So the captain approached him and said, “How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish.” Each man said to his mate, “Come, let us cast lots so we may learn on whose account this calamity has struck us.” So they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah.

(Now in Proverbs 16:33 it says: the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.)

Then they said to him, “Tell us, now! On whose account has this calamity struck us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?” He said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land.”

Then the men became extremely frightened and they said to him, “How could you do this?” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. So they said to him, “What should we do to you that the sea may become calm for us?”—for the sea was becoming increasingly stormy. He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you.” However, the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them. Then they called on the Lord and said, “We earnestly pray, O Lord, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O Lord, have done as You have pleased.”

So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. Then the men feared the Lord greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.

We're not told it was a whale. The Jews translate this literally as in modem Hebrew leviathan. Whales are not usually indigenous to the Mediterranean, we don't know what kind of fish it was, we just assume it was a whale. (Strictly speaking, of course, a whale is a mammal not a fish – it has no gills).

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish, and he said, “I called out of my distress to the Lord, And He answered me. I cried for help from the depth of Sheol; You heard my voice. For You had cast me into the deep, Into the heart of the seas, And the current engulfed me. All Your breakers and billows passed over me. So I said, ‘I have been expelled from Your sight. Nevertheless I will look again toward Your holy temple.’ Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, Weeds were wrapped around my head. I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, But You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. While I was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, And my prayer came to You, Into Your holy temple. Those who regard vain idols Forsake their faithfulness, But I will sacrifice to You With the voice of thanksgiving. That which I have vowed I will pay. Salvation is from the Lord.”

Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land.

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim to it the proclamation which I am going to tell you.” So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days’ walk. Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk; and he cried out and said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Now the word here for overthrown is nechpakeh. It's the same word used in Genesis for the destruction of Sodom, the most terrible destruction and judgment on a city that the Jews had a record of in the Torah. By using that particular term nechpakeh it would have conjured visions of what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah. - -

Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. He issued a proclamation and it said, “In Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let man, beast, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat or drink water. But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth; and let men call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way and from the violence which is in his hands. Who knows, God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish.”

When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it.

But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. “Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.” The Lord said, “Do you have good reason to be angry?”

Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city. So the LordGod appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered. When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, “Death is better to me than life.”

Then God said to Jonah, “Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “I have good reason to be angry, even to death.” Then the Lord said, “You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

Now understand that this is a very arid climate – it's not that the air conditioning isn't working – this was a grueling situation to be in.

Now the idea of not knowing the difference between their right hand or their left hand in the Hebrew text is this: you'd have the term “yad”, right hand is “yemani”, as in If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, may I forget my right hand." Im eshcacak yerushalim tishcah yemani (the King James mistranslates it "my right hand forget her skill" – it's not what it says in the Hebrew).

The Right Hand of the Lord in the Bible

“The Lord will bring salvation with his night hand”. Isaiah has the same 'to whom has the arm - same Hebrew word yad - of the lord been revealed?' The Right Hand is a type of Jesus in the Old Testament. What it is basically saying is, "these pagans don't know the way of salvation, they don't know the difference between the right hand and the left hand they don't know how to save themselves." It's the right hand of the Lord that brings salvation. That would be the implication from the Hebrew term: the right hand.

Quite a story! It was probably written during the reign of Jeroboam, somewhere between 814 and 783 BCE. We also know from history that there was an Assyrian king who became a monotheistic king, his name was Adad-Nirari III who reigned roughly from 810 to 782 (there was actually one Egyptian pharaoh who became a monotheist and there were a couple of kings of Babylon who became monotheists – see the book of Daniel). It may have been this king who turned to the true God.

Jews were always called to be lights to the Gentiles – even in the Old Testament. They didn't do it the same way we do it now but if salvation was to come from the Jews, as Jesus said in John chapter four, they were still to be his witnesses to these nations and show them the true God. Today rabbis complain about "Christians" proselytizing Jews, forgetting that the Jews themselves, based on what Moses originally decreed, were supposed to be out trying to win people to believe in the true God! The very fact that they are not doing that, shows that they are no longer practicing a true Judaism.

The Story of Jonah

He was reluctant to go to Nineveh and not without good reason. These were, to say the least, not the nicest people in the world: they were “bad people”; they were total heathens! More than that, as a Bible-believing Jew, he would have read the prophecies of his predecessor the prophet Amos and he would have seen what God decreed and predicted through Amos about Nineveh. So he would even have had a biblical basis for not wanting to go there. It was not just that he knew God would have compassion on them but that they might kill him. He knew that, on the face of it, they were destined for judgment as the prophet Nahum had predicted (and this happened at a later point when they turned back to their pagan ways). He had good reason not to go.

But let's begin with Jonah's name. “Yonah”, meaning, in Hebrew, “a dove”. What images would this conjure up? One is in John 2:16. Jesus drove the people out of the temple who were selling doves. (This comes from Leviticus 14. A dove was an animal deemed suitable for sacrifice and as such it was a type of Christ – as all these animals were). In the Song go Solomon 1:5, he tells the lover that her eyes are like doves.

“Eyes” because doves are monogamous birds and they only have a relationship with their partners, they don't procreate with other doves. So too in Genesis 8, first Noah sends out a bird that the Torah would later decree to be “unkosha” – a raven, but the second bird he sends out is a dove. All these images would have been conjured up in the minds of Jews. In the New Testament Mathew 3:18, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as a dove. All these images might highlight some aspect of Jonah and his character but probably the most important is found in the Psalm of David 55:4-6,

My heart is in anguish within me, And the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, And horror has overwhelmed me. I said, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.

The idea is this: wanting to escape from the calamity that has come upon you; and Jonah was a man that wanted to escape

But what about this calamity? What does it mean for us? What we have to understand about Jonah is the first thing we have to understand about all the Hebrew prophets: every single Hebrew prophet is a type of Jesus, a type of the Messiah, every one of them foreshadows Him, who he would be and what he would do. There is no Hebrew prophet whose life does not foreshadow or typify the Messiah who would come after them to bring in the Redemption which they prophesied.

Let's Look at Jonah as a Type of Jesus

Turn with me please to 2 kings 14:25 . That's the first place we read about Jonah in the Bible.

He [Jeroboam] restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which He spoke through His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher.

Notice that Jonah was sent to his own people the Jews first. Only after this was he sent to the Gentiles. In Matthew 15:24 we read the following:

But Jesus said, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. "

Jesus was first sent only to His own people, then only at a later point was He sent to the non-Jews. We are told that Jonah was from this particular area Gath-hepher. Gathhepher is in walking distance from Nazareth. Now there was something unique about Jonah in this.

Turn with me to John 7:52 – something here that the Sanhedrin overlooked!

They answered and said to him, "You are not also from Galilee are you? Search and see that no prophet arises out of Galilee." (or as they say in the same chapter, verse 41) "The Messiah is not going to come from Galilee, is he?"

No prophet comes from Galilee? They were wrong. Jonah came from Galilee! He's the only one except for Jesus who was from Galilee.

Jonah : 4-6, a terrible storm comes, and the word for “wind” in Greek in the New Testament is “pnuema” and in the Hebrew it is, of course,” ruach”, but in both it is also the word for “Spirit”. In this storm sent by God, during the storm Jonah sleeps in the boat and the other people are frantic about this, "How can you be sleeping in the boat during the storm?"

[We have a tape on this, The boats of the bible on Mark chapter 4 and 6, where we explain the typology of the boats in greater depth]

But let's look very briefly at Mark 4:37-38.

And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up. Jesus Himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?”

What happens to Jonah prefigures what will happen to the Lord Jesus. Jonah becomes a type of Christ.

Now let's understand this a bit more. Jonah 1:12, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea then the sea will become calm for you." Jonah, of his own choice, was willing to lay down his own life to bring salvation to others, including gentiles. John 10:17-18,

For this reason the Father loves me because I lay down my life that I might take it again, no one is taking it -from me but that I lay it down of my own initiative.

Jonah was willing to lay his life down to bring salvation and deliverance to others, so the Messiah, who Jonah prefigures, was willing to lay His life down so salvation would come to others.

Turn with me now please to Luke 11:30…

For just as Jonah became a sign to the Israelites, so shall the son of man be to this generation.

We know from Kings that Jonah was the son of Arytittai. He prophesied during the reigns of Jeroboam, both of them a very bad man and king. There were two Jeroboams: one was as bad as the other. At the preaching of Jonah the Gentiles repented when the Jews would not; at the message of Jesus the Gentiles accepted what He said at a time most Jews did not. Not all Jews rejected him – not all Jews rejected Jonahm, but basically it was the Gentiles not the Jews who repented in the days of Jonah and it was the Gentiles not the Jews who repented in the days of Jesus.

Jonah 1:17 tells us this: The Lord appointed a great fish.

The Lord Sent the Storm

Jonah prayed in the stomach of the fish…he said. “I called out of my distress…and He answered me”, etc.

The Lord appointed the storm, the Lord appointed the great fish. Now this was a “death experience”. Some argue from the Hebrew text that Jonah may have actually died biologically, from the implications of what “Sheol” could mean. But certainly the connotation would be there of a “death place”. It was the Lord who appointed Jonah to a place of death; the Lord consigned him to it.

In Acts 2:23 we read,

'this man, delivered up by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God.

Isaiah 3:10 it was the will of the Lord to smite him. Jonah was delivered up by the foreknowledge of God to a place of destruction, Jesus was delivered up by the foreknowledge of God to a place of destruction. Jonah “died” in the sea. He died, as it were – his death experience. (Whether he died or not people may debate but his death experience took place in the sea.)

Turn with me please to Psalm 69. This is of course a Psalm of David which is Messianic prophecy in the literary genre of Hebrew poetry. It is in this Psalm, for instance, we read in verse 21,

they gave me gall for my food and they gave me vinegar to drink,

…a prophesy of what would happen when the Lord Jesus was on the cross. However, this Psalm which looks ahead to the death of Jesus begins,

Hoshanna Elohim: save me oh God from the waters that have threatened my life.

Metaphorically then the death of Jesus is represented in Hebrew prophesy as a drowning experience.

Now we just sang this wonderful hymn, "When peace like a river attended my soul; when sorrows like sea billows roll". This was written by Mr. Stockwood but what many people don't know and what I didn't know until five or six years ago is that he composed it after his family drowned where, of all places, a building of the American colony hotel now stands in Jerusalem. It was after his family died that he actually wrote it in Jerusalem. The idea of “sea billows roll” is the drowning experience that happened to his family, but also in biblical typology particularly the Psalms you see, when people are under this kind of death experience, it is alluded to as drowning and points to Jesus.

Jonah 3:8,

But both man and beast in sack cloth and ashes repented after Jonah had told these people, "Repent, repent, repent, God will destroy this city in forty days."

And he goes on to say,

"perhaps if you repent God may turn back - (in verse 8) he may relent."

Recently I actually had a long email from somebody trying to justify people who predict things that don't happen. He was trying to justify Rick Joyner, Gerald Coates and these guys by saying, "Well, was Jonah a false prophet? Look at what Jonah predicted and it didn't happen." That was his argument to justify these false prophets! However, the text of Jonah makes it very clear that it was a conditional prophecy that says "if you don't repent this is what's going to happen." He never said that it was going to happen full-stop. It was conditional. It's an unfit comparison, but they always have to pervert the Bible out of context.

Nonetheless we see that Jonah gave a direct message of “repentance because the judgment is coming.” In the Gospel of St. Matthew 4:17, Jesus began to preach, "repent because the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Jonah gave a message of repentance so that judgment could be averted, so it was with Jesus and his disciples. "Save yourself from this wicked generation."

Jonah 2:4,

So I said, "I have been expelled from thy sight from before Thine eyes. "

The Hebrew says that Jonah was expelled “from before the presence of God”. God could not look upon him, God wouldn't look upon him, he was cast away from before God's eyes. We look at the Gospel of St. Matthew 27:46, "Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani" - "my God, my God why have you forsaken me". Jonah was cast away from the presence of God's sight, God would not look upon Jonah, so God would not look upon Jesus.

Jonah 1:17, he was three days and three nights in the stomach of the great fish and, as Jesus of course tells us in Matthew 17:39-40, that's a picture of the resurrection. As Jonah was three days in the stomach of the great fish, so Jesus would be three days in a tomb. Jonah is, like all of Israel's prophets, a type of Jesus. He teaches about the Messiah who would come after him; every Hebrew prophet does. When you read their lives carefully, they teach something about the Messiah and Jonah is no exception.

Jonah is given over to this death experience but there were things in Jonah's life that were blocking him from being conformed to what God wanted him to be.

  • He resisted God's will. He didn't want to do what God wanted him to do and, again, not without good reason: he knew what Amos had said about this nation that he was been sent to, he knew these people were bad. Who wants to be sent to a place like that where you might get killed?
  • Secondly, he lacked the compassion of God. He understood the judgment and anger of God but he lacked the compassion of God and he was very good at something which we say in Yiddish: treching, complaining. Trech, trech, trech, complain, complain, complain. Somebody who with good reason doesn't want to do what God wants them to do. What God was asking him to do was very difficult, to go to a people he didn't even like, a people who were going to hate him because he wasn't one of them. In terms of the ancient world, he was from the West they were from the East.

Just by virtue of the fact that he was a Hebrew, a believer in the true God – not a pagan – and that he was from the West of the known world and they were from the East, that made him a target just by going there. His complaint was not without good reason. The things he was concerned with were valid points, humanly speaking. It was difficult for him to understand how God could have such compassion on such barbarians.

 

You know for me it would be like, I suppose, going to fundamentalist Muslims who put a bomb on an airplane at Lockerby, or who want to kill my Israeli family, or perhaps like a Jew being sent as an evangelist to the generation of Germans who carried out the Holocaust. There were good reasons, humanly speaking, why he could not feel or experience the compassion of God for these people. These were bad men.

The Jonah within Us

It says the word of the Lord came twice to Jonah. Now the word for “word” in Hebrew is “davar”, but in Greek its “logos”. It doesn't mean a message so much as it means a person. Jesus is the Logos/davar in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament the Holy Spirit was only for certain people at certain times: high priests, kings and prophets, But the Holy Spirit still communicated Jesus to them the way He does us. It was only Jesus' identity that was not there but it was still Him: "the word came", it means "the Lord Jesus came", it was a christotological encounter with Christ in Old Testament terms. Again, when Adam heard God walking in the garden, that was Jesus. When Jacob wrestled with the Metatrone (angel of God), it was Jesus. Jesus was in the Old Testament the same as in the New. When the word of the Lord came, it was an encounter with Christ.

When the Lord asks you or me to do things we don't want to do, or when there are things in my character or your character that are blocking what God wants, the Lord's not going to give you just a message, he's going to come to you. Jesus is going to stand in front of you, you're going to “see” Him. The message is going to be obvious once He comes and you'll know what's wrong with you! It's the encounter with the person, not just the word or the message or a letter or a telegram, a fax, an Email – it's the person. When Jesus comes to us we'll know where we stand, when we stand in front of Him.

The Name of Jonah

In the Hebrew part of the world today Jews normally name their children after dead ancestors but in the Bible they named them after biblical characters in Israel's history. In Hebraic thought, “son of” does not simply mean offspring – biological descent or pedigree – it means “in the character of”. Turn with me please to Matthew 16:17. Jesus said, "Blessed are you Simon bar Jonah" – that's of course Aramaic and not Hebrew. The Hebrew would be “ben Jonah”. Now why is Jesus calling him by his surname as well as his first name? True his father's name was Jonah but there's more to it than that: it's providential that Peter's name was “Bar Jonah”. He's in the character of Jonah – and so are you and so am I.

Here they go to the place Caesarea Philipp,: a place where the Greeks had worshipped Pan and a place where the Romans worshipped Caesar Augustus. Here in Matthew 16:22 Peter was very angry and wanted Jesus to deal with and judge these pagan Gentiles for defiling the holy land just as Jonah wanted the Lord to judge the Gentiles. Jonah didn't want to go to the Gentiles did he? Neither did Peter – in the character of Jonah. In Acts I0, the story of Cornelius and the “non-kosher” food, Peter did not want to go to the Gentiles just as Jonah didn't. "You are Bar Jonah"; "Peter, you are in the character of Jonah, you don't like these Greeks and Romans, you're in the character of Jonah, he didn't like the pagans either, you're in the character of Jonah. He didn't want to go where I wanted him to go."

Look at John 21:18,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to gird yourself and walk wherever you wished; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will gird you, and bring you where you do not wish to go.”

Peter, in the character of Jonah who didn't want to go.

Look at Galatians chapter 2:11-12. Jonah had an attitude…

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision.

Jonah didn't want to get involved with these Gentiles, nor did Peter bar Jonah want to get involved with Gentiles!

There are a lot of people I don't want to get involved with. As a younger believer I went through terrible, terrible battles of hatred and I mean hatred. I remember I saw the film The Hiding Place - Corrie ten Boom and what the Nazis did to these Christians, these believers in Holland who protected Jews: how they murdered the old man and raped the women and so forth – and I was so angry. I began praising God for creating hell not just for Nazis but for Germans - I hated Germans. When we take our tours to Israel and go to Yad vashem [the Holocaust Memorial] I stay in the bus. I don't go in there. I remember once I visited the Nazi death camp at Dachau where the Germans did the experiments on the Jewish children. I just think of my own children. I think even of that little girl hiding in the movie Schindler's List. I could just picture my son Eli in that situation. I battled with hatred towards Germans.

My father was in the American military in the second world war. His family was from Merseyside. His mother was from there. (She left before the war and came back after the war) When my father came with the American navy, he saw what the Germans did to Liverpool, how they destroyed everything including where his mother was from. And I had this hatred of German people. It took me a long time through the Lord bringing German people into my life – whom I love and who are believers – to lose this hatred.

There were some people who hated gypsies: "these people were crooks, they're connivers", but there was someone along the road who had the compassion of the Lord for the gypsies and now they're the fastest growing church in the United Kingdom, lives radically changed.

To take another example: I've been attacked by Muslims even in England – physically attacked by gangs on Speakers' Comer for preaching the gospel – and it's not a racial thing: I love Asian Christians: they're great people. But when I read what the Muslims do in Pakistan to Christians or what they do to Christians in Saudi Arabia I get angry. I look at the Amnesty International website and I just get so angry. One of the great blessings of my life, one of the great thrills of my life, was when I spoke about Islam in Auckland, New Zealand and some Iranians, who had just come to New Zealand from Iran, Shia Muslims, repented and accepted Jesus and renounced Mohammed and the Koran and became believers. I know people who were anti-Semitic before they got saved: some crooked Jewish landlord did something to their aunt Milly thirty years ago and so they hated Jews. But after they got saved the Lord gave them a love and a burden for the Jews they couldn't explain and they couldn't even understand.

There's things in us, things that are not irrational, things that have some logical basis – sometimes even an apparent biblical basis. There were reasons Jonah didn't like these people. He had read what Amos said about them, he had read what God was going to do, so it was not totally irrational. In fact, it was totally rational. There were good, logical reasons humanly speaking. But he could not see and understand the compassion of God. No matter how bad these people are, when the word of the Lord comes to us and we stand before Jesus, we see that no matter how bad they are (even compared to us); we're all infinitely bad compared to Jesus. You know the sort of thing.

"Single mothers on council estates be warned: you've got five kids from three different yobbos and we're having to support them. Why do I have to pay taxes and support my family? To pay for these kids? Why don't these yobbos that you pick up in the pub support their own kids? Why should I have to?" It's rational but where's the compassion of Jesus for these single mothers? When I see them on the news doing these things, throwing bottles at football games, they don't care about football – they just care about getting drunk and throwing bottles. It's tribalism. "Please beat their heads in", that's me! Not altogether irrational but where's the compassion of Jesus? I've known yobbos who've got saved, I've known Muslims who've been saved, and I've known prostitutes who've been saved, and I've known drug addicts who've been saved: I used to be one! Where is the compassion of Jesus?

So Jonah gets plunged, God creates a storm, God appoints a death and there he finds himself buried in the guts of a fish, underneath the Mediterranean somewhere between Turkey and Tel Aviv. Now this particular experience is one of the things in the Bible which theologically teaches about life after death. But it also is one of the things that reveals something about what will happen to Jesus. When He died on the cross for our sin, when His Father couldn't look upon Him, when His Father's voice went into the depths of Sheol and raised Him from the dead. We are told in Acts 2:24 that death itself could not contain Jesus Christ, the grave was not strong enough to contain him, death itself was not strong enough to control Jesus or to hold him in.

Turn with me please to 2 Corinthians 4:8-14 

we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you. But having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed, therefore I spoke,” we also believe, therefore we also speak, knowing that He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and will present us with you.

As the prophet Hosea puts it in chapter 6:2, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is our resurrection because his death is our death. Look at what Hosea says, He will revive us after two days; and the third day he will raise us up that we may live before him.

Because Jesus’ death is our death. His resurrection is our resurrection, could death contain Jesus? No! Can death contain you or I? Because of Jesus, no! There are no shortage of things in my life that block what God is wanting me to be and things in my life that are blocking me from really doing what God is wanting me to do. Sometimes I feel like I am being put to death when I complain about my neck, when I complain about being rejected by so much of the popular church because I won't go along with what's going on. Then I get a copy of Brother Andrew's News Letter and I read of Christians living in almost sub-human poverty, imprisoned and their families unable to support themselves. My kids have a roof over the' head – what do I have to complain about? Yes my neck hurts but I have pills. There are people whose necks hurt and they don't have the money for a pill. I have a pill in my pocket if my neck goes into spasm, I carry it around with me. All that bothers me. Why am I being put to death?

Why is it that ministries who teach the truth are always struggling for money but the ones who are corrupt rake it in? Because they struggle for money too, only they are expanding their corruption! Honest ministries are trying to expand the truth; they have to struggle and trust God. Death works in me. Why, Lord, if I am teaching the truth? I was only upholding the Trinity yet people who were part of Moriel began using my name a few weeks ago to endorse people who denied it. When I took the stand, they slandered me, they said I was mentally unbalanced from my automobile accident. Maybe I am unbalanced, but not from my automobile accident. Who needs this. What those people did was wicked but the real question is why did God allow it? What is God saying to me in this? God will deal with them but what is He saying to me? When my neck hurts the way it does today, (I am going to have to take a pill pretty soon!) what's God saying to me? What's God saying to you, when you are in the fish's guts? Remember Jesus said He's like Jonah. It seems like God himself banishes us from his presence. We are behaving in a way we think is reasonable and at least it's not irrational. We had reason on our side but we are in this bad situation. Sometimes lousy employment, sometimes no employment, financial hardship, health problems, problems in the church, problems in the ministry, problems in the family, problems in the marriage – problems, problems, problems. It seems like the Lord has banished us from His presence. He put us in a tomb, h=He left us in a grave. Oh! not the Ninevites, not the Mormons or the Muslims, not the yobbos or the prostitutes! He puts us in the grave.

He's banished us from His sight. But death could not contain Jesus and death cannot contain you either. I've said a thousand times the test of a true Christian is not that they don't have trials. On the contrary, if you don't have trials you're not a Christian. You have tribulation in the world. The test of a Christian is not that you don't go into the fish's guts, the test of the trial is what happens when you're inside of it.

Turn with me to Psalm 18:4-6. There are direct parallels in the Psalm to what happened to Jonah in that fish's gut.

The cords of death encompassed me, And the torrents of ungodliness terrified me. The cords of Sheol surrounded me; The snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried to my God for help; He heard my voice out of His temple, And my cry for help before Him came into His ears.

We may have been banished from his sight but not from his ears. Psalm 42:7,

Deep calls to deep at the sound of thy waterfalls and all breakers and waves have rolled over me

Just like Jonah.

Psalm116:3-9

The cords of death encompassed me And the terrors of Sheol came upon me; I found distress and sorrow. Then I called upon the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I beseech You, save my life!” Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; Yes, our God is compassionate. The Lord preserves the simple; I was brought low, and He saved me. Return to your rest, O my soul, For the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. For You have rescued my soul from death, My eyes from tears, My feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the Lord In the land of the living.

Even if you die there is a resurrection, there is a millennial kingdom.

(verse 15) Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his godly ones.

Even if we die we see him not in the land of the dead but in the land of the living. What does Job say? (Job 19:25-27)

“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will take His stand on the earth. “Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God; Whom I myself shall behold, And whom my eyes will see and not another. My heart faints within me!

Even if we die we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. "Out of the depths I cry to thee O Lord", wrote David. (Psalm 130:1)

When you're in the depths you've been banished from God's own presence. Your arguments are rational – at least to your own mind, certainly they are logical and even to a degree biblical. There you are in the stomach of the fish, the waves have overtaken you, you are not only drowning but are perhaps drowned. The bars of Sheol give you no way out and you can't even see the Lord: He has banished you from His presence. But these Psalms don't tell us He looks upon us, they say he hears. Then and only then did the fish regurgitate Jonah out onto the beach. He must have looked a mess and smelt even worse but he was ready for action! When you go through a mess like this you might not look so good.

 

Staying the course amidst isolation

By David Passmore • May 30, 2026
Staying The Course Amidst Isolation Rubin Rothler LLB, LLM Living in Israel one gets the feeling that the metaphorical walls are closing in. Israel's reputation is being tarnished all over social media and the mainstream media, and this is reflected in massive public disdain towards this country. We are constantly told that there is near consensus amongst academics and commentators that a genocide was committed in Gaza. The very legitimacy of the state is brought into question. The majority of Americans are now hostile towards Israel. There is real fear that the next U.S. administration will turn against Israel. Even if this were to happen passively, by the U.S. refraining from exercising its veto power towards Security Council Resolutions condemning Israeli actions this could be catastrophic. Internally it is a fractured society leaning increasingly right wing which further alienates Israel from world opinion. An example in point is how Ben Gvir mocked the most recent participants of a global aid flotilla to Gaza. Such conduct further agitates outrage at Israel. The left-wing media presents the ruins of Gaza as a mortal wound in Israel's side. When the world observes this level of carnage no degree of public relations can ameliorate the sense of indignation towards Israel. We can liken the situation of Israel to that of a depressed person. All he sees is hopelessness and gloom. But this isn't the first time that the Jewish nation has been faced with such darkness. Things change and we don't know how the geo-political map will reconfigure in the future. We need to ride out this storm and keep going. On a historical note, the situation is reminiscent of what our ancestors faced when we returned from the Babylonian exile to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Nehemiah was faced with constant lies and conspiracies designed to entrap him by hostile actors: Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arab. They employed deception, slander and ridicule in order to maintain their political eminence. There was also a certain sense of abandonment amongst the Jews in Israel then as in our own day. We read in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah about the anguish of the leadership in Israel concerning the lack of assistance from the Babylonian diaspora towards the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem and the Temple. Only 20% of the exiles returned to the land. It was largely the poor who returned. Most of the affluent, established Jews remained in Exile. This is a continuing theme in Jewish history. It is also important to observe that from its very beginnings there were bible believing Christians who spearheaded the return of the Jews to their land. The idea of organizing a return of the Jews to Israel began as a Protestant Restorationist objective that can be traced to 17th century Puritan England. The protagonists of the Cromwellian Republic viewed themselves as the new Israel fighting the Papist forces of Satan. Alongside this, interest grew in the notion that biblical prophecies pertaining to the return of the Jews to Israel were a necessary precursor for the return of Christ. The growth of the British Empire in the 19th century lent political clout to Christian Restorationism with specific missions to the Jews established. Although there had been a longing to return to Israel as written in the thrice daily Amidah prayer, Jewish Zionism arose in the midst of mid nineteenth century nationalism and was further fermented by European antisemitism. It was an altogether secular enterprise. Although Israel's situation appears rather stark, we can draw strength from the Providence afforded to our ancestors in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah when they too were faced with defamation. This is also an opportunity to grow closer to our natural allies in the evangelical world who from the beginning of Zionism were steadfast supporters of the project to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel.  (Author is an Israeli American lawyer academically qualified in British and in U.S.A. law, and a graduate of the School of Oriental & African Studies, London. He is a Jewish believer in Jesus and is currently based in Israel).

Signs of the Times - Tony Pearce

By David Passmore • May 25, 2026
Signs of the Times Tony Pearce ‍ ‍ Left, right or center – is our democracy in danger “Things fall apart, the center does not hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” W.B Yeats ‘The Second Coming. ’ ‍ ‍ Labour’s losses in the council elections and the battle for succession to their unpopular leader Kier Starmer have raised the possibility that we may soon have our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. Local elections saw Reform and the Greens make sweeping gains, leading Green Party leader, Zack Polanski to say that we are seeing ‘the end of the old two party system’. Maybe we are. In which case what comes next? Will we head to the far left, the far right or will the center hold on to power? Or will it end with ungovernable chaos as unqualified people take control of local and national government? Behind all this there are fundamental questions, ‘What is government for? Who does it represent and where is it going?’ ‍ ‍‍ ‍ According to the Bible (Romans 13) the purpose of government is to promote good and restrain evil. The government has the right to raise taxes for the common good of society and people should pay them. In 1 Timothy 2 Paul encourages us to pray for the government that ‘we may live a godly and peaceable life’. In other words, pray that the government will create an orderly and peaceful society and not interfere with our right to set up communities that teach and preach the Word of God. The situation becomes more difficult when we see government promoting things which are harmful and restraining things which are good and clamping down on freedom of speech with a threat to our ability to live a ‘godly and peaceable life’ ‍ Since becoming a Christian in my early twenties, I have wrestled with the question of how our faith applies to contemporary political issues. I started this quest on the left politically after leaving university and working as an English teacher with sympathies for Marxism. I then became a born again Christian in 1970, and joined my late wife Nikki in evangelizing the radical left, by handing out leaflets at their marches and demonstrations in London and attending their meetings to discuss matters of faith and politics with them. ‍ ‍‍ ‍ We had some good discussions with people and hope we made some consider the Christian alternative. However as we looked at Marxism from a Christian point of view and its practice in Communist countries, we understood that behind this ideology there is a strong anti-christian spirit. It denies the existence of God and promotes the idea of human perfectibility by our own effort. This is exemplified in the words of the Internationale, the socialist battle hymn, ‘No saviour from on high delivers, no faith have we in prince or peer, our own right hand the chains will shiver, chains of hatred, greed and fear.’ This Antichrist spirit led to the persecution of Christians in the Communist countries of eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China. Far from creating the socialist paradise on earth that Lenin wrote about in ‘Socialism and Religion’, it created a society ruled by hatred, greed and fear, controlled by secret police, prison camps and responsible for the death of millions. ‍ ‍ In western society we have witnessed the growth of ‘cultural Marxism’ a movement aimed at infiltrating and changing society from within, rather than fomenting the workers’ revolution. Labour’s Fabian Society, with its (now discarded) logo of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, has been engaged in this process since the beginning of the 20th century. Social change really took off with the permissive society in the 1960s, which succeeded in changing traditional values, especially in the area of sex and the family. It replaced biblical values with a new ‘morality’ that is fundamentally anti Christian. These ideas have permeated large swathes of our society including the education system, the judiciary, the Civil Service, much of the media, mainstream political parties (including even the Conservative ‘wets’ and parts of the established church). ‍ ‍ Melanie Phillips describes the results of this in her book, ‘The Builder’s Stone.’ ‘Having decided that the West was rotten to the core, western elites set out to create a new culture that would usher in the brotherhood of man and eradicate hatred, prejudice, and war. Their Brave New World junked biblical religion with all its constraints on behaviour and revolved instead around self gratification. Everybody had the right to live as they wanted; nobody could say that their way of life was better or worse than anyone else’s; no one had the right to say that their culture was better than any other culture. That was ‘racism.’ At the heart of all this was the doctrine that there was no such thing as objective truth. Everything was relative; everything was a matter of opinion. Because there was no truth feelings became more important than facts. So the West abandoned the codes of morality, conscience, truth and lies, personal responsibility, and duty to others in favour of a culture of the self. In the process it junked its inherited traditions and biblical codes on which western culture was based.’ ‍ Britain changed from being a society that respected values based on the 10 Commandments and the teaching of Jesus Christ to one that discarded them for relative values. Ideas of ‘diversity, inclusion and equity’ became the norm, together with and a form of ‘tolerance’, that is really very intolerant if you oppose it. This ‘tolerance’ means accepting the virtues of multiculturalism and humanism and believing that all gods are equally valid or true (or none are). We must also accept that all lifestyles and family arrangements including homosexual and transsexual ones are just as valid as traditional two parent heterosexual families, with a father and mother committed to each other in lifelong matrimony looking after their own children. ‍ As society accepts this radical change in how we view culture, morality and religion, we are told not to criticize other cultures and world views or imply that they are anything less than equal to the culture, morality and faith derived from the Bible. ‍ All this has not improved society. Instead we have a collapse of values with no central idea to hold it together, just a group of competing ‘communities’ which are often only united in opposition to the traditional values and culture of Great Britain. A good example of this is the ‘red – green alliance’ of radical leftists and Islamists who come together to denounce Israel and campaign to ‘globalise the Intifada’. In practice this means a world wide war against Israel and Judaeo-Christian society and a desire to replace it with their version of either Islamism or Communism. However if one of them were to come to power, you can be sure that the Islamist’s would get rid of the leftists or vice versa. In fact that happened in Iran’s 1979 revolution, when Islamist supporters of Khomeini and Communists came together to get rid of the Shah. Then the Islamists seized power, turned on the Communists and wiped them out. ‍ Alisteir Heath wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Ruined by decades of political vandalism, the Britain we knew and loved, a land of stability, pragmatism, and ancient freedoms, is no more. Today’s UK is uglier, impoverished, volatile and disorderly. We’ve lost our level-headedness. Anger and frustration have become our defining emotions. Our institutions have wasted away, and we have been taught to despise our history. The decline of family, community and faith have led to alienation, dependence on welfare and the rise of novel ideologies, mostly secular but also sectarian, turbocharged by social media. While the state becomes unnervingly authoritarian, the air reeks of insurrection and every variety of extremism. The British public’s sense of betrayal is as well-founded as it is dangerous. The machinery of state is incompetent and self-serving, a vehicle for social engineering in the global interest.’ ‍ ‍ ‍ Criticism of this process now risks being classed as ‘hate crime’ with a growing authoritarian society monitoring social media posts and public teaching of alternative ideas in ways which risk shutting down free speech in our society. A Christian teacher Enoch Burke is currently in prison in Dublin after he was suspended from his job and jailed after refusing to accept and teach transgenderism in the school. ‍ ‍ ‍ Nick Timothy, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, got into trouble when he questioned mass Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square. He wrote: ‘Mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination. The adhan – which declares there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger – is, when called in a public place, a declaration of domination. The domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook.” He is right in this. Allah hu Akhbar actually means Allah is greater, greater than your God, Muhammad is greater than Jesus and the Koran is greater than the Bible. ‍ ‍ ‍ Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern for our Nation wrote: “The fact that we have mass Islamic prayer in Trafalgar Square at all is indicative of the massive culture change that we have seen in the last few decades. A culture change that was not voted for or ever agreed to by the British people. And, a culture change that can hardly be described as having been entirely beneficial to our culture as a whole. I only need to mention grooming gangs involving mostly Pakistani Muslim men , sharia courts, honour crimes, terror attacks, the assassination of an MP, an attempt to blockade Parliament, mass antisemitic marches through London, a convicted terrorist standing for local elections, sectarianism, and many other examples to make the point. Earlier this month, the Government gave Muslims special protection with the adoption of an official definition of anti-Muslim hostility .” ‍ ‍ ‍ You are not really supposed to question this in public life today. A message circulating on social media is an apt commentary on all this. ‘First they overlook evil, then they permit evil, then they legalise evil, then they promote evil, then celebrate evil, then persecute those who call it evil.’ Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn wrote: ‘A Communist system can be recognised by how it spares criminals and criminalises its opponents.’ ‍ ‍ ‍ The root cause of all this is the rejection of God and biblical values. The 18th-century French philosopher Joseph de Maistre coined the phrase "people get the government they deserve." David Pawson followed up on this idea, arguing that in democratic societies like ours, the moral and spiritual condition of a nation's citizens is directly reflected in the leaders they elect. If the general public abandons moral truths, they will inevitably vote for governments that reflect those same compromises. David Pawson taught that God may use governmental leadership to judge or bless a nation, depending on the people's obedience. He noted that Hebrew prophets saw wicked rulers as a form of divine judgement on a society that has strayed from God's laws. Therefore a nation's ultimate hope rests on repentance rather than just political change. His conclusion is that Christians should actively stand for moral truth in society. He believed that the church is meant to influence culture upward, and that a decline in national morality inevitably leads to deteriorating governance. ‍ ‍ ‍ Sadly much of the church today has become the ‘salt that has lost its savour’ through compromise with antichristian forces in society and government. It may be too late to save our country and western democracy as social and economic pressures create a collapse of democracy and push us either towards anarchy or dictatorship. ‍ ‍ ‍ Yeats’ poem quoted at the beginning of this article ends with the enigmatic line ‘Some rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.’ Most likely he is referring to the coming anti-Messiah who is labelled the Beast in the book of Revelation. Many believe his is now waiting in the wings to replace the true Messiah (born in Bethlehem) and bring in the dictatorship prophesied in Revelation 13. The Bible indicates that the Beast or Antichrist will have power for a moment, but it will be short lived and doomed to destruction at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to the earth. Then the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our God and of His Messiah and He shall reign forever and ever (Revelation 11.15) and the ‘government shall be on His shoulder’ (Isaiah 9.6). ‍ ‍ ‍ Maranatha come Lord Jesus. ‍ ‍ ‍ Water, water nowhere and not a drop to drink. (Apologies to the Ancient Mariner) ‍ ‍‍ ‍ While nations worry about supply of oil and gas as a result of the war in the Gulf and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a much more vital commodity for human survival is water. And it is in short supply in a growing number of nations. ‍ ‍ As of 2026, over 25 countries face extremely high water stress, with the most severe crises located in the Middle East and North Africa. This region is home to the world's most water-stressed nations, including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya. India and Pakistan face critical water scarcity due to overexploitation of aquifers and population density. Much of Africa , Somalia and Ethiopia in particular are facing severe shortages due to drought and climate change. Mexico and parts of the United States (particularly Texas and the west coast) are experiencing significant water shortages and declining groundwater levels. ‍ ‍ ‍ Iran is facing a severe, multi-year water crisis as of May 2026, with major cities like Tehran, Mashhad, and Karaj approaching the point where taps could run dry due to depleted reservoirs. Groundwater is depleted across most of the country, and nineteen provinces are experiencing severe drought. The crisis is driven by a combination of climate change and decades of poor water management, including excessive dam construction and inefficient, water-intensive agriculture. China is facing a severe, multi-faceted water crisis defined by extreme scarcity in the north, widespread pollution, and mismanagement, threatening its food supply and economic growth. ‍ ‍ ‍ Several countries are significantly affected by upstream dam construction that reduces downstream water flow, causing, environmental, and diplomatic crises. These countries include Iraq, heavily impacted by dams built on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by Turkey and Iran, leading to reduced water for agriculture, destruction of forests, and increased sandstorms. Egypt and Sudanface significant water security risks due to the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laosare affected of dams built by China on the upper Mekong River ‍ ‍ One country which bucks this trend is Israel. Israel manages its water resources by transforming a chronic shortage into a surplus through large-scale desalination, extensive wastewater recycling, and a centralised national water carrier system. The agriculture sector has shifted away from freshwater, using treated effluent instead. Advanced drip irrigation technologies are widely used to minimise waste. Israel has exported its water technologies to countries around the world, particularly Africa where it has given advice on how to use limited water resources to great effect. ‍ ‍ ‍ Without water no society on earth can survive. Bible prophecies indicate that water shortage and pollution will be a global problem in the last days. Most obviously no water equals no food, so famine is an inevitable result of water shortages. Jesus warned of this as a sign of the last days in Matthew 24.7. Revelation 8.10-11 speaks of something called ‘Wormwood’ falling on rivers and springs of water causing it to become bitter and many to die from drinking it. ‍ ‍ Prophecy speaks of the two great rivers of the ancient world, the Nile and the Euphrates, being affected by a crisis causing the Euphrates to dry up (Revelation 16.12) and the Nile to become contaminated and its waters turn foul (Isaiah 19.5-11). Isaiah 24 speaks of a curse devouring the earth in the last days causing the earth to be ‘defiled (or polluted) under its inhabitants.’ ‍ ‍ ‍ According to the New Scientist, there are massive amounts of water hidden deep beneath the Earth's surface. Scientists have found evidence of a reservoir of water three times the volume of all surface oceans combined, located roughly 250–400 miles underground within the mantle. ‍ ‍ ‍ It may be that the Lord will release this water to replenish and clean up the earth in the Millennial kingdom when ‘waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. The parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.’ Isaiah 35. Zechariah 14.8-9 says, ‘In that day it shall be that living waters shall flow from Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and half of them toward the western sea; In both summer and winter it shall occur. And the Lord shall be King over all the earth.’ Zechariah 14.8-9. See also Ezekiel 47. ‍ Rethinking Russia ‍ Things are not going well for Vladimir Putin in his ‘special military operation’. Four years after invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia is not making advances and actually losing ground. Russia is losing as many as 25,000- 35,000 casualties a month and over 1.2 million have been killed and wounded since the war began. Ukrainian skills in drone warfare have destroyed large quantities of Russian equipment, tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery and rocket systems, helicopters, and naval vessels. ‍ ‍ Russia is spending an estimated 40% of the entire federal budget on the war effort. As a result of this and western sanctions, Russia is increasingly unable to fix chronic infrastructure problems at home. During the bitter Russian winter thousands of people were left without heat, light, or even water. All forms of transport, trains, trucks and planes, are facing logistical problems, making it difficult to transport goods and people across the vast Russian regions. Russia is on the way to an infrastructure collapse that will likely take decades to recover. ‍ ‍ Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov warned the State Duma that Russia's faltering economy risks stoking a 1917-style revolution. He demanded urgent financial and economic measures by autumn to avert a potential economic collapse. This raises the danger of the Russian Federation fracturing. The Caucuses are restive, the far east is looking to China and Siberia is facing an acute problem as a result of melting permafrost, causing buildings, bridges and pipelines to collapse. ‍ ‍ In the present circumstances it is hard to see how Russia could lead the Gog and Magog invasion of Israel (Ezekiel 38-39). Some have said that it is more likely that Turkey is the lead power in the War of Gog and Magog. They say that Meshech and Tubal are not Moscow and Tobolsk, but regions of modern Turkey. Erdogan’s Turkey is backed by an Islamist world view hostile to Israel, seeking the recovery of its Ottoman Empire. He has his eyes on taking control of Jerusalem. Turkey is possession of a large land army already stationed in the region, some of it occupying part of Syria. ‍ ‍ The alternative is that the War of Gog and Magog is some way off, possibly part of Armageddon, giving time for Russia to recover from its present distress. We wait and see, but meanwhile spare a thought and a prayer for the people of Ukraine and Russia, suffering as a result of Putin’s futile war, oppressed by his corrupt dictatorship and facing an economic and social collapse caused by his failed policies. ‍ ‍

Trumps visit with Xi

By David Passmore • May 25, 2026
Trump's Visit with Xi Rubin Rothler LLB, LLM The tempest path of Sino-U.S. tensions came to a head during Trump's first term in office with the outbreak of Covid. Many commentators believed that the deterioration in relations was in terminal decline and that a major confrontation in the straits of Taiwan was fast looming. Trump held China responsible for the spread of Covid, insisting that he would pursue reparations. The election of Biden halted this commitment. Biden sought a non-confrontational policy towards Beijing. In the aftermath of the disastrous premature withdrawal from Afghanistan handing that country over to the Taliban and the Russian invasion of Ukraine under his watch, Biden became too preoccupied to assertively engage with China. Chinese State media portrayed Trump's visit as being rather unremarkable in the context of other foreign dignitaries lining up to meet Xi, pointing out that just a week later Putin would arrive in Beijing. China manifests that it is winning the trade war that Trump began in 2018, beating America at its own game of capitalism. They frame the U.S. as being in a position of weakness because China is able to source whatever products they buy from the U.S. elsewhere like oil from Canada, and soybeans from Brazil. The oil, soybeans and 200 Boeing's Xi agreed to purchase from Trump were presented as a mere gesture to placate Trump as China has already bought 350 Air Buses in the last year. China would have the world believe that it is only semi-conductors where America has the edge. Here China hints that it is not likely to buy H200 Invidia Chips because it would mean that China will always lag behind the U.S. in building their AI tech. China's major contention and concern is that the U.S. may impose export controls to contain China. China's strategy instead is to invest massively on indigenous innovation. China wants to become an innovation powerhouse that will export its own Chips to the Global South. China is fast catching up with America's lead in AI with the launch of Deep Seek and they claim similar progress with Chip making. China is now ostensibly only eight months behind the U.S. on Large Language Models. Running contrary to this narrative Trump insists that China is desperate to trade with America. China's economy has now peaked. Emblematic of this stagnating growth is rising youth unemployment. China is no longer America's biggest trading partner. Trump has shifted manufacturing back to the U.S. and Trump believes that China can't revive its economy without America. Lined up to meet Xi with Trump were the heads of some of America's biggest Tech Corporations. Corporations like nvidia seek a relaxing of export controls for Chips as they want short term profits, ignoring the risk that China will reverse engineer this technology. More broadly, China and the U.S. are playing a geopolitical chess game spanning the globe. Trump outmaneuvered China in Latin America with the removal of Maduro from power in Venezuela. China is exploiting its influence on Iran in order to get Trump to refrain from taking more active steps towards the defense of Taiwan. Indeed, Trump didn't say anything about Taiwan during his visit. Trump's instincts are of a transactional approach towards alliances, where he is only willing to underwrite defense assistance if allies pay up as an insurer would. It is also important to note that saber rattling the Taiwan card also serves the CCP agenda to distract internal dissent concerning the state of the Chinese economy. Most imminently Trump needs China to pressure Iran to open the Straits of Hormuz and get oil prices down before the midterm elections. China has largely insulated itself from the Gulf energy impact due to stockpiles. Trump would also like China to stop providing Iran with GPS for its missiles. Other Chinese weapons systems and technology sold to Iran have failed to perform well against U.S. and Israeli military hardware. Matters boil down to a leverage between whatever Trump can do on Taiwan, China can do on the strait of Hormouz with Iran. Human Rights concerns, espionage and the alarming rate of Chinese acquisition of U.S. land have been placed on the back burner for the time being.  (Author is an Israeli American lawyer academically qualified in British and in U.S.A. law, and a graduate of the School of Oriental & African Studies, London. He is a Jewish believer in Jesus and is currently based in Israel).

Prayer request for Phil Malone

By David Passmore • May 17, 2026
Moriel & Jacob Prasch request prayer for Phil Malone and family “Please keep me and my family in prayer. My mum passed away on 13th May at the age of 93. It's a time of mourning, but may it be a time for the Gospel of Christ to be preached to my unbelieving family, especially my brother.”

Please Pray for Joanne Rizzetto, Pastor Dave Rizzetto's wife

By Mea Fredrickson • May 13, 2026
Moriel & Jacob Prasch request prayer for Sister Joanne Rizzetto, wife of Pastor Dave Rizzetto of Church of The Open Door in New York City. Joanne has developed painful complications and adverse side effects from medications following knee surgery. May The Lord intervene for healing and give guidance to her physicians. Lord, we humbly ask you to intervene in the life of our dear sister. We know you can do all things and that you hear our prayers and consider your servants. Please put a stop to the adverse reaction. Restrain and reverse its effects and restore our sister so that she can continue to serve you in the ministry that you have called them to. We do glorify Your Name. We don't ask as those who treat you as our debtor, but as those who have tasted your goodness and found such mercy and compassion at your feet. Grace and peace and mercy be with Joanne and Pastor Dave.

Will Lebanon miss its golden opportunity?

By David Passmore • May 5, 2026
Will Lebanon miss its golden opportunity? Rubin Rothler LLB, LLM Converging new facts on the ground have transformed the political landscape in Lebanon. With Assad removed from power in Syria, a vital lifeline of arms supplies for Hezbollah originating in Iran has diminished. Hezbollah suffered considerable losses in its last round of fighting with Israel. The decapitation of its leadership with the targeted pager attack inflicted a severe blow. Hezbollah's new leader Naim Qassem is a weak substitute for the charismatic Nasrallah who was assassinated by Israel in 2024. Hezbollah in its frail state foolishly fell into line with Iran's instruction to join the fighting against Israel following the recent American-Israeli war with Iran. This was contrary to the wishes of the Lebanese government which was fearful of the inevitable destruction that would be wreaked by the Israeli response. The differing attitudes to Israel amongst Lebanon's population is reflective of its ethnic composition. The predominant groups in order of plurality are Christians, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims with a smaller minority of Druze. The major concern of most Christians in Lebanon is the dire state of their economy. They have no appetite to further their plight by invoking Israel's rage. During the colonial inter war period the French envisaged the demarcation between Lebanon and Syria as carving out enclaves for Christian and Druze control. Within Lebanon there would be a shared government that by convention would have the Executive power split between a Christian President, a Sunni Prime Minister and Shia Speaker of Parliament. The Christians in southern Lebanon (particularly Maronite Catholics) saw themselves as being anthropologically descendants of ancient Phoenicians as opposed to an Arab identity where the Arab Christians were largely Eastern Orthodox. The schism between the Maronites and the Arab Eastern Orthodox dates back to the time of the Crusades. The Maronites were culturally French, speaking French as their main language and held precedence in much of the Lebanese economy. The first threat to Lebanese stability and cohesion was settled by the U.S. Eisenhower administration in 1958 which landed Marines in an amphibious operation. A repeated attempt at this by the Reagan administration in 1983 ended in a military disaster for the U.S. due to suicide bombings by Iranian controlled terrorists. Israeli efforts to bring in stability during the Lebanese Civil War in conjunction with its Lebanese Christian allies led by Major Saad Haddad likewise came to calamity when the Sabra and Shatila revenge attacks took place following the assassination of Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel. The ''Good Fence'' policy of an Israeli friendly free Lebanon zone in Southern Lebanon eventually ended badly following Menachem Begin's second incursion into Lebanon called ''Shalom HaGalil'' aimed at stopping the PLO rocket attacks on Israeli border communities like Metulla, Kiryat Shmona, Naharya, Rosh Hanikra, Tzfat and Carmiel. The proxy Israeli occupation from the Israeli border to the Litani river became an imbroglio that many in Israel viewed as Israel's Vietnam with widespread domestic protest and a collapse of morale within the IDF. Eventually Israel absorbed Christian war refugees from Lebanon, while the Vatican and most of the Christian world turned their backs on the Lebanese Christians. Lebanon was then saddled with two states within a state. The first was in the aftermath of Black September in 1970 when King Hussein of Jordan defended his Hashemite throne and government from Yasser Arafat's attempt to take over Jordan due to Jordan having a 70% Palestinian Arab demographic majority. The Jordanian legion drove tens of thousands of its pro Arafat Jordanian citizens into Lebanon, creating a population base for the first state within a state under Arafat. However the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other factions had their niche interests. Courtesy of the Israeli Air Force Arafat relocated what he saw as his government in exile to Tunisia. This was a missed opportunity by the Lebanese government to assert its autonomy and full territorial control by making a Camp David type peace with Israel inclusive of economic and mutual security provisions. Instead an Iranian backed Syrian intervention replaced Arafat's state within a state with a new one that morphed into Hezbollah. The fall of the Assad regime and the Israeli counter-offensive against Hezbollah re-presents Lebanon with the opportunity that it once lost. The predominantly Christian controlled Lebanese military could and should operationally coordinate with the IDF, to obliterate and remove Hezbollah as the Israelis relieved Lebanon of Arafat's state within a state. Such a rapprochement would likely have strong American and possibly French and British support, allowing Lebanon to be at a non-combative peace with Israel along the lines of Egypt and Jordan, and now some of the Emirates. The natural comradery of the Lebanese Druze community with the Israeli Druze and the pro-Israeli Druze of Syria would additionally re-enforce a regional harmony, as would the Maronite Christian community in Israel with their co-coreligionists in Lebanon.  (Author is an Israeli American lawyer academically qualified in British and in U.S.A. law, and a graduate of the School of Oriental & African Studies, London. He is a Jewish believer in Jesus and is currently based in Israel).

Pastor John Angliss

By David Passmore • May 5, 2026
PASTOR JOHN ANGLISS It is with profound sadness that we learned of the temporary separation from our friend and brother Pastor John Angliss. We look forward to being reunited with John in the millennial reign of Christ and indeed in God's Eternal Kingdom. Jacob Prasch visited John a few weeks ago in the UK while John was in hospice care having been diagnosed preterminal in his illness. While medically correct, it was of course a misdiagnosis. John is now cancer free and is alive and well in the presence of Jesus awaiting us in glory while his mortal body is being renewed for resurrection and immortality. In the meanwhile, during this temporary season of bereavement we do request prayer for his beloved wife Mary and for his congregation, The Ark Fellowship in England near Reading, England. Because he has recently arrived in the USA and is scheduled to address the Moriel Canada branch conference in Winnipeg, Jacob Prasch will regrettably not be able to attend the memorial service in Britain. Our condolences however are very much with Mary and our brethren in the UK who like us knew and loved Pastor Angliss. John was one of a minority of faithful voices who upheld a traditional biblically based Pentecostalism in the era of counterfeit revivals and apostasy that overtook most of British Pentecostalism. John was a faithful friend of Israel & The Jews standing on the prophetic purposes of God for Israel and the salvation of the Jews. John was a loyal friend to Moriel and Jacob Prasch and a colleague of David Pawson and Derek Prince, both of whom likewise stood by God's promises to Israel. John was also a founding leader of CMFI - the Christian Ministerial Fellowship International, former pastor of Three Mile Cross fellowship , and former board member of Focus On Israel (a Pentecostal Ministry to the Jews). While this separation is temporary, John's eternal gain will be our temporary loss. O GRAVE - WHERE IS THEY VICTORY, O DEATH WHERE IS THY STING ? Hosea 13:14 / 1 Corinthians 15: 55-57

We made it this far: Israel at 78

By David Passmore • April 28, 2026
We made it this far: Israel at 78 Rubin Rothler LLB, LLM Since the last anniversary milestone of Israel at 75, we have been embroiled in relentless wars. Citizens had little respite to enjoy this year's festivities, coming on the heels of a lull in fighting on the Iranian and Lebanese fronts. We are constantly waiting for a breakthrough on the horizon that will normalize our relations with our neighbors and secure our position on the world stage. It is acutely exhausting to be the focus of the world's attention. But also there is a sense of inevitability accompanying the Zionist project. Specifically that Israel is destined to be central in the wider region and global affairs. Why is this? Is it due to it being a western transplant? Being geographically positioned on the crossroads of three continents? Religious believers would point to prophetic fulfillment. It is short sighted to only look at how our problems are rooted in today’s' reality. Greater forces are at work that will dictate the direction that Israel is heading. The Jewish diaspora will likely find itself in a growing precarious position that will lead to increasing Aliyah (immigration to Israel) and will perhaps ferment the emergence of a second Jewish commonwealth that will not need to heed international pressure in the same way that todays' polity finds itself doing. In this light it is interesting to ponder how our posterity would view our predicament and gains. And I frame matters in these terms with intentionality. We are enmeshed in a seemingly intractable conflict with the Palestinians, and yet Israel has made great gains particularly in the technological fields. There is a current of thinking that perceives Israel's way out of its quagmire is by making itself indispensable to technological advancements. We don't know how tomorrows' world will be shaped by the rapidly advancing AI revolution but so far Israel has proven to be uniquely adaptable and innovative to technological change. This has proved to be a boon to Israel's economy, as have offshore natural gas discoveries being developed in concert with Greece, Greek Cypriot and American energy interests that are geographically and strategically removed from any Straits of Hormuz shipping impediments that strangle the Persian Gulf deposits shared by Qatar and Iran. On another note we should contextualize the situation. How different are Israel's challenges from other nations? Is Israel any less stable than other countries (particularly in the region)? Israel doesn't find itself uniquely challenged to define its identity (most European countries do also, particularly in light of immigration). Nor does the government experience any more volatility than other comparable democracies. Israel's real problems lay in the nature of how its Jewish citizens desire to govern themselves. It is arguable whether the judicial reform protests that occupied public discourse in pre-October 7th Israel would have led to serious civil strife. But it is without doubt that this impasse was allayed by the external attack. The underlying tensions remain unresolved and there are many ways that they could play out. It has been framed as a battle for Israel's soul. Israel's enemies predict that Zionism is imploding and that the State won't survive another 5-10 years. Supporting this claim, they point to Israel's increasing alienation and growing pariah status on the international stage. Our Prime Minister has been indicted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Even public opinion in our staunchest ally the U.S. has turned sharply against Israel. With 80% of the Democratic Party being anti-Israel in a growing climate of anti-semitism we have even witnessed the shift of Alan Dershowitz to the Republican Party which must be seen as emblematic of a trend. There is apprehension in Israel of a post-Trump America dominated by the Democrats. However, these seeming incontrovertible facts may be offset by other measures of fortitude. This may be partially countered by the high investment by Silicon Valley in the Israeli Hi-tech sector, making Israel an asset for purposes of Research and Development in America's AI race against China. New opportunities for economic relations have also been opened with Arab nations through the Abraham Accords and with the powerhouse India. Furthermore, it is difficult to imagine a world in which Israel's technological prowess will not carry the sway of western decision makers in the long run. Israel's 78th anniversary is a moment to take pause and not catastrophize what the future may behold. The entire world is currently in a state of transformation and Israel is not an outlier in this context.  (Author is an Israeli American lawyer academically qualified in British and in U.S.A. law, and a graduate of the School of Oriental & African Studies, London. He is a Jewish believer in Jesus and is currently based in Israel).

Council attempts to shut down and censor local church’s evangelism efforts.

By David Passmore • April 23, 2026
Please click this link:https://mailchi.mp/christianconcern.com/action-alert-street-preaching-22-04-26?e=f1df30be3f

A critical juncture in NATO's future

By David Passmore • April 14, 2026
A critical juncture in NATO'S future Rubin Rothler LLB, LLM NATO was originally established in 1949 to keep the Russian hordes at bay from toppling those European countries not forked over to the Soviet sphere of influence at the Potsdam conference. Europe lay in ruins. Britain had passed on the torch of global hegemony to the U.S. by tacitly acquiescing to the decolonization of its Empire when Churchill and Roosevelt agreed terms of the Atlantic Charter for the post-war new world order in 1941. So from its start NATO was very much an American driven endeavor. American money with the Marshall plan was propping up western European economies and its military might was forming the bulk of their defensive capabilities. The lopsided nature of this dynamic has informed how tensions have persisted and recently erupted in the Alliance. During the Cold War the U.S. felt obligated to shoulder the costs of underwriting Europe's security in light of the broader interests to keep the Soviet's in check. Following the fall of the Iron Curtain European complacency became a sticking point with the 'peace dividend' further exploiting American largesse. European NATO allies spent ever smaller percentages of their GDP on defense expenditure at U.S. expense. Now in a multi-polar world U.S. and European perceived threats are less aligned. This was first tested in the aftermath of September 11th when for the first time NATO elected to trigger its article 5 collective defense protocol. And since then the U.S. has sought to continue to expand the traditional theatre of operations beyond Europe's borders. No longer is Russia perceived by America as being a proximate existential threat to its interests, but rather containing Chinese expansion in the Pacific arena. Parallel to NATO a discrete 'five eyes' intelligence sharing alliance comprising the Anglo-sphere (the U.S., U.K., Canada and New Zealand) emerged. This stands at the center of the U.S. – U.K. 'special relationship'. A relevant question would be can this signals intelligence (NSA-GCHQ) partnership persist should the U.S. withdraw from NATO? Conventional thinking would have led one to believe that with Brexit the U.K. would naturally pivot towards closer U.S. relations but under Starmer the U.K. is distancing itself. European powers misrepresent the present conflict as an aggressive, rather than defensive U.S. adventure while they themselves are more likely to be at risk. In this the Starmer government resembles the Labor party led committee for nuclear disarmament in the 1980's. It opposed the Thatcher supported deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in response to the Soviet SS20's pointed at Britain's cities. The British left branded their response to Soviet strategic escalation to U.S. aggression. This time however there is for the moment no Thatcher to bring common sense into an equation dominated by emotionally driven ideologies in the face of an aggressor with definite aims. In terms of the Russian-Ukraine conflict we are reverting to the old question dating back to the Napoleonic war era: to what extent is London happy with the European nations fighting it out alone for dominance of the continent. Britain was never willing to accept a single power in control. Many variables will dictate what kind of world emerges from the current conflicts in Ukraine and Iran. How will power be extracted from potential gains? What will be the strategic impact of this? What is sure, in the age of Trump this pattern of reliance on U.S. muscle is becoming quickly exhausted. Dating back to the Roman Empire, a factor in the decline of major powers has always been astronomical military spending, a budgetary demand that the U.S. under Trump is no longer willing to shoulder alone. (Author is an Israeli American lawyer academically qualified in British and in U.S.A. law, and a graduate of the School of Oriental & African Studies, London. He is a Jewish believer in Jesus and is currently based in Israel).