In light of what's been happening in the Middle East over the last three weeks I notice that people have once again started paying attention to prophetic passages in the Bible.

Making a push to head deeper into Lebanon, Israeli ground forces are probably the central focus of most of the world's news media today, but in the back of the minds of millions the world over, people are wondering what sort of significance these events hold in the prophetic scheme of things.

As a result of that, one of the Christian websites I frequent with a nod to things prophetic (and one with one of the largest bandwith capacities) was overloaded and had to quickly regroup to get access to all of the site back up, because of the incredible number of hits it has experienced in these last weeks.

If people have been watching the coverage of the conflict, they should have a pretty good grasp on how things work at this point. Iran and probably other Arab nations are funding the army of Hezbollah fighting now out of Lebanon. They fund Hezbollah through the aid of Syria.

The Arab world hates Israel with a passion. Iran in particular demonstrates a completely vitriolic attitude towards Israel. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has stated publicly in several ways since he came to office that Israel needs to be utterly wiped out. In his view the world cannot abide Israel and the world won't be "right" until Israel ceases to exist.

In my July 27th post I stated, "I tend to view Biblical prophecy in two categories; fulfilled and unfulfilled." Isaiah 17:1 reads, "The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap." That hasn't happened yet.

If I were a citizen of Damascus, I wouldn't want my country to be helping Muslim extremists attack Israel if I knew this prophecy was hanging over my city's head. I think I'd move. Better yet, I think I'd ask Jesus into my heart and life and then move. If this sounds just a little jovial for the situation I don't mean it to be. The Bible is full of fulfilled prophecy, and people should take the time to read it.

I was speaking with a young man a couple of days ago. He stated that he didn't believe in God, but that after the funeral of his friend that same day, having heard some things said by the pastors at the service he was reevaluating his beliefs.

I asked him what he considered to be his source of truth. He didn't know what I meant by that, and I asked him how he made life decisions and what he based them on. I told him that my source of truth was God and His Word, the Bible.

He said he hadn't read the Bible but that he had heard that people regard it as the Word of God. We spoke for a bit about the character of God and also about fulfilled prophecy and the gentleman decided that he should read the Bible and see what it says for himself. I told him I thought that would be a very wise thing to do.