Have you ever played the game of “What If”? You know, “If I do this, then that ought to be the outcome”? It’s a game of speculation. A game of logic. “If this, then that ought to occur.” Students say, “If I study real hard, I might be able to pass this test,” hoping that their hard study will produce the desired result of passing the course. Parents do this with their children, “If we put our children in this school, if we allow our children to play in these sports, if we buy our teenagers this car, will they take care to do well in whatever they do?” Mere speculation. Businesses do it all the time. “If we invest in this venture, then the result we hope to occur will happen.” Folks who play the stock market are asking themselves, “If I buy this particular stock, will it result in a greater gain when I sell it?” Again, mere speculation. “If we do this, that ought to take place.”
Well, I’m going to play a little game of “What If” myself, and ask you to play along with me, only I want to add a little bit of Biblical reality to it. Here’s my first “What If?”. What if what Israel and the United States are doing over in Iran is not just bringing about the end of a regime, the end of an evil empire, but what if what is really happening, even without our noticing it, is not the “end”, but the beginning of the end of all time? Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prophet nor do I possess the gift of prophecy, I’m just a spectator, a reader, an observer, playing a game of “What If” with world history.
Here is a second “What If?” What if what you and I call “current events”, “the news of the day” is not “current events” to God, but “history”! In other words, what if what we are seeing every day over the news is nothing new at all to God but “prophetic history” that He predicted would happen some seven, six, and five hundred years before the New Testament era ever began? Isaiah, some seven hundred years BC, spoke about a king that had not even been born yet by the name of Cyrus, who would become the King of Persia, modern day Iran, and would come and conquer the Kingdom of Babylon and change its name to Persia, the name Iran had before it became Iran, and who, by God’s design would set the people of Israel, who had been held captive by Babylon, free to return to their homeland of Israel in the year 538 BC! And what if today that meant that not only Israel, but the whole world would be set free from the threat of such an evil empire?
