by John Hagee
Iran’s new president will negotiate to play for time in order to reach an industrial-size nuclear weapons capacity and a nuclear breakout which will allow Iran, without detection, to produce enough weapons-grade uranium or separated plutonium for one or more bombs. The election of [Hassan] Rowhani, a master of nuclear deceit, doesn’t get us any closer to stopping Iran’s nuclear drive.3
History does repeat itself; we are living 1938 all over again! This time let us not be silent in the face of evil.
World War II was brought to an early close through the scientific genius of Albert Einstein, who was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb. America’s military experts predicted that at least seven hundred and fifty thousand American lives were saved that would have otherwise been lost in a land invasion of Japan.4
How did that affect Israel? The shortening of WWII ended the Holocaust. One-third of European Jewry had been “wiped out”—Hitler’s goal was total extermination.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the global media to film the unspeakable hell of the Holocaust. General Eisenhower feared there would come a day when there would be “Holocaust deniers” who would declare it never happened.5
Today, Iran’s radical Islamic leaders, who have promised to wipe the Jews off the face of the map, are indeed Holocaust deniers.6 Sadly, their venom is gathering international support.
From the tears and tragedy of World War II came the rebirth of the State of Israel in May 1948. Ezekiel prophesied concerning God’s promise to bring the exiles home to Israel:
For indeed I am for you. . . . I will multiply men upon you, all the house of Israel, all of it; and the cities shall be inhabited and the ruins rebuilt. . . . For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. . . . Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be My people, and I will be your God.
(EZEKIEL 36:9–10, 24, 28)
WORLD WAR III
World War III is coming!
We can see the storm gathering in the Middle East and, again, Israel is the key. Russia, Iran, Germany, Turkey, Libya, and the Arab Spring nations have surrounded Israel, the island of freedom and democracy, in an ocean of terror and tyranny.
God is watching!
The final drama is unfolding before our eyes as you read it on the front pages of your newspaper and watch it on the national news almost every night.
The second rider of the Apocalypse will ride in on a red horse, bringing war and bloodshed. God will destroy the enemies of Israel in the most supernatural display of His power ever seen since He crushed Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea. God will protect Israel—and the course of history will be changed forever.
KINGDOM SHALL RISE AGAINST KINGDOM
I believe Jesus’ prophecy that kingdom shall rise against kingdom (Matthew 24:7) is a description of the kingdom of light versus the kingdom of darkness. It’s the final battle between the Author of truth and the father of lies, the battle of good versus evil.
The battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occult . . . the demonic . . . the satanic . . . the practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular books . . . the open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society.
Our children are being programmed to be slaves of the socialist state; there will come a time when they will believe the government over the Word of God.
Recently, a forty-seven-year-old recording of one of America’s foremost radio personalities, Paul Harvey, was released. With his trademark insight, Paul Harvey described the battle of the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness with chilling accuracy:
If I were the devil . . . If I were the Prince of Darkness, I’d want to engulf the whole world in darkness. . . . So I’d set about however necessary to take over the United States.
I’d subvert the churches first—I’d begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper that “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what’s bad is good, and what’s good is “square.” And the old, I would teach to pray, after me, “Our Father, which art in Washington . . .” In other words, if I were the devil I’d just keep right on doing what he’s doing.7
If America is to survive, there must be a time of national repentance for our sins and a return to the eternal truths of the Word of God. Selah!
CHAPTER 9
Famine, Earthquakes, and Anarchy
When he opened the third seal, I heard the third
living creature say, “Come and see.”
So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he
who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living
creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius,
and three quarts of barley for a denarius;
and do not harm the oil and the wine.”
—REVELATION 6:5–6
The vision John had while on the isle of Patmos describes the third rider of the Apocalypse. John sees a rider on a black horse, who is carrying a pair of scales allowing him to exactly weigh the wheat and barley he is selling for a denarius. John the Revelator is painting a portrait of a global famine.
A denarius was the equivalent of one day’s earnings for the average working man (Matthew 20:2). John is saying that a typical family will pay a full day’s wage for a quart of wheat. How long would a quart of wheat feed your family?
After you’ve spent your entire day’s salary for one day’s food ration, what must you do to pay for your housing and upkeep, for your clothing and medical expenses, or fuel—which alone will be worth its weight in gold?
During this time of famine the church of Jesus Christ will be in heaven sitting at the marriage supper of the Lamb as honored guests of the Master. But what about those who are left behind? What will they experience?
Americans are isolated from the famines the world is already experiencing. The World Hunger Organization reported that in 1996 up to 3.5 million people were the victims of famine in North Korea. In a six year span, between 1998 to 2004, the Democratic Republic of Congo reported the deaths of 3.8 million people due to famine.1
The American Red Cross, in their annual survey, estimated 17.2 million American households (1 out of 7) were “food insecure.”2
After a time of war (red horse) there is always a time of shortage; this time will be no different. The world, including America, is inching toward a time when we will no longer be able to produce the food it takes to feed our people.
THE DEMISE OF THE FAMILY FARM
The family farm in America is being systematically wiped out of existence. “According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from 6.8 million in 1935 to only about two million today.”3
Farming in America is now dominated by major oil companies and agribusiness conglomerates, making it impossible for the average farmer to compete. “According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good. . . . A very large percentage of family farmers are in their fifties, sixties or seventies . . . only 6 percent of all farmers are under the age of thirty-five.”4 There is no “Joshua’s Generation” to carry on the American family farm.
Not only are major conglomerates driving the average farmer out of business . . . not only is farmland becoming a prime target for real estate investors . . . not only is the exponential trend of migration from rural to urban life a major factor partly because the next generation views farm life as nothing more than a twelve-hour-a-day sweat shop with little or no profit. But America now has wealthy foreign investors like China5 and Japan who alre
ady hold most of the US debt in the form of federal notes (treasury securities), purchasing large amounts of American farmland. As this book goes to print, China is trying to purchase the largest pork production enterprise in America. All the pork produced in this plant will go directly to China.
In addition, the IRS death tax, which can exceed 50 percent of a farm’s total value, is lurking in the wings hastening the inevitable demise of the American farm. For example, if your father owns a farm valued at one million dollars at the time of his death, the IRS will be on your doorstep demanding as much as 50 percent of the value of your deceased father’s property. You will be forced to sell the farm to raise the $500,000 to pay the IRS or lose your land.6
This ever-worsening crisis of foreign-owned American farmland will eventually lead to massive food shortages. America is slowly selling the source of our food (our land) due to the indifference of the next generation or due to the burden of paying massive death taxes. The famine is coming. It’s just a matter of time.
THERE WILL BE PESTILENCES
I was twelve years old when my grandfather, John Christopher Hagee, passed away. I can only remember seeing my grandfather twice in my lifetime. The first time was in 1948 at a Thanksgiving family reunion, and the second time was at his gravesite in a small town in Oklahoma in the summer of 1952.
While my father, his five surviving brothers, and Grandmother Hagee were hugging each other and saying their goodbyes after the burial, I started wandering through the small country cemetery. Almost immediately I noticed that many of the tombstones of both the elderly and the young cited their date of death as being in 1917.
As I rejoined my father, who was leaving the cemetery, I asked him, “What happened here in 1917?”
He replied, “In 1917 the swine flu swept through our town, and half of this town died in just a few months. I saw horse-drawn hearses carrying two bodies in one casket—a mother holding her baby, both dead with influenza.”
“Why didn’t these people get a shot?” I asked.
“There was no shot to get—no medicine would touch it. The strong lived and the weak died.”
Almost one hundred years have passed since that deadly flu epidemic, and the finest scientific minds in the world warn us that there are viruses that have mutated and are immune to any vaccine that we have created.
Nothing can stop a plague once it starts. It will be just as my father described with the epidemic of 1917—the strong will survive, and the weak will die.
Global scientists are warning the world of a potential pandemic flu outbreak, which usually strikes three to four times a century. Pandemic flu is a strain of flu virus that is capable of spreading rapidly from person to person worldwide. Because we now have metropolises with millions of people living in close proximity, the rate of infection can spread like a prairie fire driven by a fierce wind.
Just a few weeks ago, I was talking across the fence to my neighbor while working on my ranch. He served as a US congressman and now works in Washington, DC, studying the potential of a pandemic bird flu outbreak in America and around the world. My neighbor, who is not an alarmist but a well-reasoned man of outstanding intellect, made a statement that shocked me. He told me without hesitation, “Pastor, it’s not a matter of if; it’s only a matter of when we will have a major pandemic bird flu outbreak in America. When it does happen, gather all your family on your ranch and isolate yourselves for several months. That will be the price of survival.”
I shook my head as I said my good-byes and walked off toward my truck with Jesus’ words ringing in my ears: “There will be . . . pestilences” (Matthew 24:7).
When I got home I picked up the April 16–17, 2013, weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and saw a picture of the Chinese killing chickens because of their deep concerns about a new avian flu strain. The CDC is concerned that this deadly bird flu virus could begin to spread from bird to human and then from human to human at any moment.
An outbreak of the H7N3 bird flu virus in western Mexico in 2012 led to the slaughter of more than 22 million hens, causing price increases in chicken and egg products.7
America is not immune to pestilence. A new strain of the H3N2 virus is spreading across the United States at a record-breaking speed. According to the Department of Health, the state of Missouri alone reported a nearly 2,000 percent increase in positive flu tests. The Center of Disease Control and Prevention had reports of this virus in forty-one states.8
In spite of our medical sophistication, there will be global pestilence.
THERE WILL BE EARTHQUAKES
God uses earthquakes to get the attention of those who are spiritually hard of hearing. God is saying, if you can’t see the signs in the heavens, if you refuse to recognize the obvious signs of prophecy fulfilled, let me shake the ground under your feet; let cities be swallowed, mountains leveled, and islands of the sea disappear.
God used an earthquake in the original “Jailhouse Rock.” The apostle Paul and Silas were thrown into prison for preaching the gospel. Rather than pout and whine over their persecution, they decided to sing praises to God in the midnight hour.
God shook the foundations of the earth with a “violent earthquake” to bring down prison walls and allow Paul and Silas to make a convert out of their jailer (Acts 16:25–28).
God used an earthquake on resurrection morning as the angel of God “rolled back the stone from the door [of the tomb], and sat on it” (Matthew 28:2). The stone was not removed to let Christ out but to let us in; the greatest news the world has ever heard came out of the graveyard—He lives!
God promises that all nations who battle against Jerusalem “will be punished by the LORD of hosts with thunder and earthquake and great noise” (Isaiah 29:6).
God forewarns planet earth that the greatest earthquake in human history is coming! John the Revelator describes it with these words:
There was a great earthquake, such a mighty and great earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth. . . . And the cities of the nations fell. . . . Then every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.
(REVELATION 16:18–20)
Can you imagine an earthquake so globally severe that the Rocky Mountains, Mount Everest, and Kilimanjaro are shaken until they become pebbles leveled to the ground? Can you visualize planet earth’s geography being transformed by an earthquake so great that major islands of the sea like Hawaii, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and Great Britain will fall below sea level?
Most Americans are aware of the San Andreas Fault on the West Coast; one strong earthquake near this crevice and millions will experience massive and instant destruction. Can you visualize San Francisco falling into the Pacific Ocean with cities from San Diego to Sacramento ablaze from ruptured gas lines . . . destroyed freeways making the assistance of first responders impossible . . . countless thousands trapped in the rubble of collapsed high-rise apartments and office buildings? That’s only a glimpse of the immense destruction of a major earthquake that America’s finest geologists confirm as “the Big One is coming.”
Few are aware that the Army Corps of Engineers has identified a major fault running the full length of the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Canada. Experts are stating that one major earthquake could split America in half.9
The United States Geological Survey reports that global occurrences of earthquakes from 2008 through 2010 totaled 107,135 with 25,449 happening in America alone.
How great is our God? Far greater than the mind of man can imagine, and far greater than anything we’ve seen in the history of the world! He is crying out to us—the Big One is coming!
THE UNITED STATES OF ANARCHY
Jesus told His disciples that before He returns, lawlessness will abound (Matthew 24:12). We hear the words of the Jewish Rabbi speaking to His generation—words that could dominate the headlines of every media outlet in America tomorrow: “Anarchy in America.” Jesus painted the portrait of our nation in three words: “Lawles
sness will abound” (Matthew 24:12).
The Bible identifies the Antichrist as “the lawless one,” and his claim to power and to deity is proved by signs produced through satanic power. He is received as a god on earth and as a ruler because of the blindness of the people who will follow him.
And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.
(2 THESSALONIANS 2:8–11)
The Bible says the “spirit of the Antichrist” (1 John 4:3) is alive in the world today. Certainly we see the spirit of rebellion exploding in America. Anarchy is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority.”
The last verse in the book of Judges records, “In those days there was no king in Israel [no national leadership]; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (21:25).
When authority goes out, anarchy comes in.
America has a lack of leadership within our government, and we are seeing anarchy on a national level never seen in our history.
Not long ago, protesters rioted in the streets of Wisconsin as unions fought for control of the government.10 The Occupy Wall Street mobs of Union Square in New York were the clear portrait of lawlessness in America. For example, “according to a memo written by the FBI’s New York field office in August 2011, bureau personnel met with officials from the New York Stock Exchange to discuss ‘the planned Anarchist protest titled “Occupy Wall Street,” ’ scheduled for September 17, 2011.”11
