Mainstream orthodox Muslim websites now predict that Jesus Christ will return to earth as early as 2022, and that He will terminate the Islamic State of Iran and Syria (ISIS).
This is significant because ISIS believe they are fighting on the side of the angels and have a key role in the approaching Armageddon; which in Islamic prophecy will unfold over the next seven years.
The Islamic State believes that the (western) armies of Rome will be defeated by the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with the Anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a Sunni Islam, and is pursuing a path towards the Day of Judgment.
ISIS wants to establish a caliphate to eventually cover the whole world. Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. Executions of Muslim apostates and Christians are frequently reported in areas of ISIS control.
Its approach to Islam has appealed to tens of thousands of Muslims and other recruits who have joined ISIS from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places. The Islamic State says all its major decisions and laws are based on following the prophecy and example of Muhammad in detail.
Followers of the Islamic State believe ISIS has re-established Islam which had no caliph (supreme leader) from 1924 to 2014, and is the only righteous government on earth.
Writing in the Huffington Post Online on February 24, Dr. David Liepert who is a Canadian Muslim leader, spokesperson, author and educator says that the predictions about the return of Jesus Christ are immature, but believes that the approaching world events will all be about Him.
Dr Liepert says: “Because regardless of what the next years bring or which faith we follow, we are all waking up and realizing that we all need Jesus, peace be upon him.”
This debate should show that from whichever way you look at it, Jesus Christ is so pivotal in human history that you cannot possibly ignore Him and make sense of life away from Him. It is time to come to terms with this enigmatic Person that the world has for centuries fought and opposed, loved and revered, persecuted and hated depending on the territory, the epoch and the rulers.
Towards the Second Coming of Christ which the Bible has long taught about, Dr Liepert outlines Islamic prophecy as follows:
•    First, the Euphrates River should soon be uncovering a mountain of gold, with the Arabian Peninsula becoming filled with meadows and rivers;
•    Then, some Muslims throughout the world will be transformed into apes and pigs because of trying to legalise significant major sins. Dr Liepert believes this is aimed squarely at al Qaeda, Boko Haram, al Shabab and ISIS and their associates, and their rather liberal views regarding murder, tumult, oppression and slavery;
•    Then, shortly thereafter the Mahdi will come, uncovering of the Ark of the Covenant of Moses and evangelising of a significant proportion of the world’s Jews, who will awake to oppose Israel’s oppression of Muslims and Christians in Palestine;
•    Then, there will follow the coming of al-Masih ad-Dajjal who will be the false Messiah or anti-Christ;
•    Next there will be the descent of ‘Isa ibn Maryam (‘alayhis-salam) which is Jesus, who will defeat the Anti-Christ followed by the war of Ya’juj and Ma’juj (Gog and Magog), followed by:
•    The rising of the sun from the west;
•    The appearance of the Beast of the Earth;
•    The wind that will take the souls of the believers;
•    The ruin of al-Madinah (Medina);
•    The destruction of the Ka’bah in Mecca by the Abyssinians; and
•    And the fire that will come from the Yemen to gather the people in Sham before the coming of Judgment Day.
Before we discuss ISIS, let us put matters in context.
CONFLICT
There is an ancient conflict among Muslims that is now playing out in the Middle East today.
WIn the seventh century after Christ, the Muhammad the founder of Islam died. After that, his companion Abu Bakr became the new leader, or caliph, of Islam, despite the protests of the supporters of Muhammad’s cousin, Ali.
Ali did eventually become caliph, but five years later, he was assassinated and his followers rejected the subsequent leaders of Islam. Ali’s descendants became the Shiites, while those opposed became Sunnis.
Today, the populations of majority-Muslim countries have both Sunnis and Shiites. For instance, Iraq is a blend of the two, Iran is predominantly Shiite, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, Jordan is Sunni, and Syria is a blend.
In 1991, Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq and Kurds in the country’s north began an uprising against Saddam Hussein who was a Sunni.
To prevent his overthrow if Shiites in Iraq joined forces with Shiites in Iran, Saddam launched a brutal crackdown, massacring tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds, which set off a power struggle that still rages today.
The US invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam in 2003, and the US installed a government headed by a Shiite, Nouri al-Maliki, whose rule disadvantaged the Sunnis. Analysts say Maliki’s policies enabled the anti-Shiite militants known as the Islamic State group, known as ISIS or ISIL, to rise and thrive in the country.
The war in Yemen is a power struggle between the Houthi (a Shia insurgent group in northern Yemen and south-western Saudi Arabia) and other tribes, but on a larger scale the war has positioned Sunni Saudi Arabia against Shiite Iran which supports the Houthi. The warring countries are battling to prevent one another from attaining regional predominance.
Not only is Yemen a strategic point of access to oil terminals and pipelines, but it is the home base for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Saudi Arabia fears that AQAP may grow stronger and that Houthi territorial gains could push members of AQAP over the border and into Saudi Arabia.
In November, the Islamic State released a video tracing its origins to Osama bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi, who headed al?Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed by two other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi, the ISIS caliph.
ISIS and al-Qaeda both identify closely with the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih, the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are Muhammad himself and his earliest adherents, whom the Salafi honour and emulate as role models for all aspects of life.
The geographical extent of ISIS is seen in a statement made to the Saudi Press Agency last September.
“Today we face a very dangerous situation where terrorist cells have turned into armies … that extend to all of Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen,” Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said. Such armies now include Islamist groups worldwide that have affiliated to ISIS, including Boko Haram and al-Shabab.
After Saudi Arabia announced its entry into an international military coalition against ISIS, the group declared its intent to overrun the country. ISIS seized Mosul in Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. The Islamic State requires territory to remain legitimate, and has a top-down civil and military structure to rule its provinces.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been the leader of ISIS since May 2010. On July 5 last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in 1000 years—raising his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims.
That address, along with many other teachings and materials, went viral on the web and has sparked large inflows of jihadist recruits worldwide. Note that the Internet now enables the secretive and widespread mass recruitment of ISIS supporters.
Unlike most other caliphs before him, this ISIS leader is Qurayshi, of the same tribe as the Prophet Muhammad. He is seen as the eighth of the 12 legitimate caliphs anticipated to lead Islam before the end of the world.
ISLAMIC
Some western analysts, as opposed to western governments, agree that ISIS is an Islamic group, because it actually follows Islamic theology.
Graeme Wood reports that Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, has observed that “politically correct” Muslims may deny that ISIS is Islamic because of their embarrassment. However, ISIS follows Sunni Islam and has not distorted Koranic texts.
“Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”
The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.
Wood states that leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years.
“What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”
Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of 18th?century Arabia who conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia. Their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there.
ISIS holds to beliefs that certain acts can remove a Muslim from Islam.
These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates.
The Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet. That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death.
Also doomed are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.
Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they submit and pay a special tax, known as the jizya. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
JESUS CHRIST
Muslims do not accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and they also do not accept that Isaac, the promised son of Abraham, is the person through whom the Most High planned to fulfill His plan of the salvation of mankind. They see Abraham’s first son Ishmael, born though Sarah’s maid Hagar, as the route the Most High has used. Muhammad descends from Ishmael, the father of all Arabs.
However they see Jesus Christ as the One who will defeat the Anti-Messiah.
An Anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.
The ISIS factor calls for extra alertness among all Christians. The world is changing, and Christians should attempt to understand and interpret correctly what is happening. Time is now to accelerate the biblical preaching of salvation through Jesus Christ.
The Bible states clearly that Jesus Christ, ruler of the kings of the earth (Revelations 1:5) will return to judge the world at the end of Armageddon. He said in Matthew 24:36 that no one knows the day of His coming, but He is the One who will close history.
And whether you are concerned about this or not, you will face Him at the judgment. Why not respond to His love, shown when He died to pay for all sin on the cross, by committing your life to Him today?
The resurrected Christ, appearing to the blind apostle John, said in Revelations 1:8, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, who is, and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
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