Implosion (2 page)

There is nothing wrong with doing so. To the contrary, all leaders should feel comfortable asking honest, genuine questions about what the Bible says on any subject, including their nation’s future. Most of us, however, simply would not expect such questions from our national leaders. In many ways, this is new, uncharted territory. Yet given the state of our economic and cultural troubles, these are the questions people are asking these days.

And it’s not just politicians. In my experience, people at all levels of business, media, the arts, sports, ministry, education, and elsewhere are asking as well.

The Most Frequently Asked Question

Until recently, the question I was asked most frequently when I spoke and did interviews in the U.S. and around the world was, “Joel, how can you be Jewish and believe that Jesus is the Messiah?” Within the last few years, however, that important question has been significantly eclipsed by another one. These days, the question I am most frequently asked is this: “What happens to America in the last days?”

I also get plenty of variations on the theme:

• Is America simply in decline, or are we like the Roman Empire, stumbling toward collapse?

• Do you believe America’s days are numbered?

• Are we approaching the end of America as we have known it?

• Are we living in the last days?

• What does the Bible say about the future of the United States?

• Is America even mentioned in End Times Bible prophecy?

• Is America mentioned, described, or hinted at in the Bible at all?

Christians are certainly wrestling with such questions. But I find that Americans from a variety of religious backgrounds—including Jews, Muslims, and others—are asking these and similar questions as well. Indeed, often when I am on a secular talk radio show, I’m invited to talk about geopolitical issues related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and radical Islam. The conversation tends to come around to my views of how Israel and the nations of the epicenter fit into Bible prophecy, and then it’s not uncommon for the radio host to ask me, “So what about America? What does the Bible say about our future?”

Some people ask because they are certain America
is
, in fact, described in the Scriptures as a significant or even major player in the End Times, and they want to know more. They are looking for hope that we are going to weather the economic, political, moral, spiritual, and other storms now battering us so intensely. Others, however, ask because they are fearful the U.S. is
not
described in the Bible, and they are wondering, “Why not? And if not, what will happen to us, and how much time do we have left?”

My wife, Lynn, and I have lived in and around Washington, DC, since 1990, and neither of us recalls hearing such questions—much less being asked them ourselves—during our first decade in Washington. During those years, my professional life was immersed in researching and advocating various economic/social/cultural/educational reforms and working on political campaigns for a variety of U.S. and Israeli leaders, not teaching Bible prophecy. I’m not saying such questions weren’t being asked and answered by others during this time. I’m just saying that I, apparently, wasn’t tuned in to such conversations.

Over the course of the last decade, however—and even more so in the last few years—as such questions have come up more and more, I’m increasingly aware of and focused on this conversation, more so than at any other time in my life, ever since I left the campaign trail, went through what I call “political detox,” and began writing books about the growing geopolitical, religious, and economic threats facing America, Israel, and the church in light of Bible prophecy. My sense is that more people are asking these questions more often—and more openly—than ever before. A growing number of Americans fear that this period of our history is different and the crises we face today—and those coming up over the horizon—may be far worse than anything we have experienced in the past.

Why Are People Asking?

Indeed, Americans are asking such questions, in my experience, with growing frequency and urgency because of a gnawing and steadily intensifying anxiety they and their families and their neighbors have that, as challenging as things are in our country today, they very well could get catastrophically worse. Many Americans genuinely fear that God is preparing to remove his hand of protection and blessing from our country—or perhaps already has. They fear that unlike previous dark times in our national history, God may not intend to help us turn things around and get us back on the right track.

Understandably, such thoughts can be both unnerving and perplexing. The more optimistic among us ask questions like “Surely, God
must
have a plan and purpose for America going forward, and it must be a good and wonderful plan, right?” Yet even these are signaling their doubts by asking the question.

When people in other countries ask what the future of America holds and whether America will continue to lead the world in the twenty-first century—and they do ask, with ever more frequency—they tend to do so, I believe, for one of two reasons: Either they honestly fear what the world will look like without an economically, militarily, and socially vibrant United States of America playing a central and starring role in shaping the future of the globe. Or they secretly long for a day when the U.S. is humbled, weakened, and even neutralized so that other nations can take the lead and reshape the future of the globe.

Such are the times in which we live.

Some Context

Before we go any further, let me just say it has been difficult for me to write this book. To be perfectly honest, there were many times when I simply didn’t want to finish it. I didn’t want to study the data or examine the trends, much less draw any conclusions about the future of our country. The process was, at times, depressing, and if I’m not careful, I can still find myself becoming anxious or gloomy.

I dearly love my country. I was born here and grew up here, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to America. I don’t want to imagine worst-case scenarios, much less write about them. I don’t want to suffer through such times if they come. Nor do I want Lynn or our four sons—Caleb, Jacob, Jonah, and Noah—to suffer through such times. I don’t want our extended family and friends, spread out all over this beautiful land, to go through such times, either. Maybe none of us will. Maybe the worst-case scenarios will be avoided. I certainly hope so.

Yet I live and work in the nation’s capital. I regularly and extensively travel this country. I see what’s happening all around me, and it is deeply disturbing. Marriages and families are imploding. Our federal debt is exploding. The tide of cultural pollution is rising. Our educational system is collapsing. Friends and neighbors are abandoning God and the church. The list of horrifying trends seems to grow longer each and every year. At this point, even a blind man can see the handwriting on the wall. The question is, what does the handwriting say, and what does it portend for the future of America?

The apostle Paul once said that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation” (Acts 17:26). In other words, God decides precisely where on the planet and precisely in which period of history each man and woman is going to be born.

Centuries before Paul, David—the Jewish shepherd boy from Bethlehem who unexpectedly rose to become the beloved king of Israel from whom the Messiah would humanly descend—wrote that God “formed my inward parts” and “wove me in my mother’s womb.” In a remarkable prayer of gratitude to the Lord, David wrote, “I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made . . . Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them” (Psalm 139:13-16). David, too, understood the sovereign will and power of God. He understood that God is the creator who fashions each one of us with a plan and a purpose. He understood that God both knows and decides exactly where and when each one of us will be born, and he makes these decisions for a reason.

Such truths point us to another truth. God could have chosen you to live in another time and another place. You could have lived in the times of Moses or the times of David or the times of Jesus and Paul. But in his sovereign will, God decided you and I would live in these times. What’s more, he chose the very family and language and country into which you and I would be born. It wasn’t an accident. It was part of a plan. Most of those reading this book are likely to be American citizens. Have you ever taken time to consider why God chose you to be an American? What purpose are you to serve in this country? What role in the future of this country has God planned for you to play? Given the high stakes of this moment, I would encourage you to take some time to give these questions serious thought. Discuss them with your family and friends.

For those who are living in the United States but are not American citizens, I would encourage you to take some time as well to consider why the Lord has brought you to this country. What action does he want you to take at this critical hour? For those of you who are reading this someplace else, as citizens of another country, it is probably fair to say you would not have picked up this book unless you had an interest in the future of America. Take some time to consider why you care, what you’re hoping to learn, and what role God has for you to play in the future of America as well as in your own country’s future.

Jews, Gentiles, and the American Dream

Every American citizen has his or her own “American story,” a heritage to be treasured and celebrated. My family is no different.

My family on my father’s side was made up of Orthodox Jews who escaped from the “old country”—anti-Semitic, totalitarian, czarist Russia—during the pogroms against the Jews in the early 1900s. They made their way to America searching for religious freedom, freedom from persecution, and the opportunity for a better way of life.

Given that both of my paternal grandparents died before I was three years old, I never had the chance to talk to them and ask them their stories. Sadly, neither of my grandparents told my father or his brother many stories from the old country. They passed down few documents to us. So it’s been challenging to piece together their journey. About the only story that has been passed down through our family is that when our Orthodox Jewish relatives wanted to leave Russia, some of them had to escape in a hay wagon that was crossing out of Russia into a neighboring country. (The best we can surmise is that they went into Poland.) Czarist soldiers plunged their swords into the hay to see if there was anyone hiding in there. By God’s grace, no one was injured. By God’s grace, my relatives weren’t discovered. And by God’s grace, having gotten out of Russia, they didn’t decide to settle in Poland or Germany or anywhere else in central Europe. Many Russian Jews did settle there, of course, escaping the horrors of the Russian pogroms only to experience the horrors of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

Called by freedom and the promise of a new world, my family kept moving across the continent of Europe until they got to a port, scrounged up enough money to pay for passage on a steamship, made their way to America, and settled in Brooklyn.

A few years ago, my wife and I found an actual copy of a 1930 U.S. census record showing that my great-grandfather Maximilian “Max” Jaffe lived in Brooklyn and that he was a tailor, from Russia, Jewish, with no formal education but could read and write. The records also indicated that Max arrived in the United States in 1903 and that his wife and his daughter, Selma—my father’s mother—arrived in the U.S. five years after him in 1908.

What my Jewish grandparents and great-grandparents found here was more than they could have hoped for, dreamed of, or imagined. They were finally free to go to a synagogue and celebrate the Jewish holidays in peace, establish and raise a family in safety, and seek to give their children and grandchildren better lives than they had. Selma Jaffe would later marry Herman Rosenberg, also of Russian Jewish heritage. Together they had two sons, Jerome (my uncle Jerry), and Leonard, my father. Both brothers are first-generation American citizens. My father was born in Brooklyn in 1939 at a time when Adolf Hitler was on the move in Europe, seeking to take over the world and preparing to exterminate 6 million Jews, including more than a million Jewish children. My father was the first on his side of the family to ever graduate from college, and he was the first to become a licensed professional—in his case, an architect.

My family on my mother’s side were Gentiles—white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Christians who came to the New World fleeing religious persecution from the state-controlled churches of Europe and seeking more economic opportunity. My maternal grandmother, Esther Cagwin, was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, her family having come to the colonies from England before the Revolution began. The ancestors of my maternal grandfather, Walter Copia, were Germans. His grandparents, Joseph and Elizabeth Copia, were from Baden and Berlin, Germany, respectively. Unfortunately, I know very little about them, their history, or their dreams and aspirations. My maternal grandfather abandoned the family and filed for divorce, leaving my grandmother, Esther, all alone to raise my mother, Mary, an only child, in a small city called Rome, New York—not far from Utica and Syracuse. My grandmother (Grammie), a public school teacher, was a heroic woman and one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met. Since her husband had left her long before I came along, and since my Jewish grandparents passed away when I was just a toddler, Grammie Copia was the only grandparent I ever knew, and I loved her dearly and missed her terribly after she passed away in 1982.

Even with painful and at times tragic chapters, my family’s story is an
American
story. We have truly had the opportunity to live the American dream. My forebears chose to leave the countries of their birth and travel to the New World despite many hardships. They wanted to be Americans, pure and simple. In God’s sovereignty and by his grace, that’s exactly what they became. For our family, America has truly proven to be a home for both Jews and Gentiles. For us, the verse at the base of the Statue of Liberty is not trite. It has real and personal meaning.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Members of my family were once part of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” America opened her “golden door” to us, and we will forever be grateful. But now, I am deeply concerned about the future of this country that has been so good to us.