Epicenter 2.0

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “The security in Iraq is deteriorating,” explained one of the leaders of the Iraqi evangelical movement over breakfast, “but the ministry is increasing compared to any time in church history. It’s not that complicated really, Joel. When human beings are under threat, they look for a strong power to help them—a refuge. Iraqis look around and when they see believers in Jesus enjoying internal peace during a time of such violence and fear, they want Jesus too.”333

  But, I asked, how can you share your faith and lead people to Christ with all the suicide bombings, car bombings, snipers, and other troubles?

  “We’re doing what we can, and especially getting Bibles into the hands of people who want them,” he explained. “And people can now watch Christian preaching and teaching on satellite television and get our Bible studies and other materials off of the Internet. But the truth is, God is doing something else that is amazing.

  “People are being healed. Many of them. We don’t have much experience with that but we’re seeing it happen anyway. . . . And that’s not all. Muslims are seeing visions of Jesus Christ. He is coming to them and speaking to them, and they are repenting and giving their lives to him. Shiites! I’m talking about Shiite Muslims seeing visions of Jesus and becoming his followers. In fact, I actually haven’t personally met any Shiites who have come to Christ who were converted because someone shared the gospel with them. They have all come to faith through dreams and visions. They are coming to us already persuaded. Our job, then, is to help them study the Bible, meet other believers, and grow in their faith.”

  This pastor was not alone in telling me about the enormous number of Muslims who are coming to Christ through dreams and visions. It is a message I heard from nearly every Middle East Christian leader that I interviewed. What’s more, they believe all this is a fulfillment of God’s message through the Hebrew prophet Joel and the apostle Peter. In Acts 2:17-20 Peter, quoting Joel 2:28-31, says, “‘In the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams . . . before that great and glorious day of the LORD arrives.’”

  One night in a Middle Eastern country I cannot name, I had dinner with an Iraqi pastor from Baghdad. I asked him to paint me a picture of what he was seeing God do in his country. He graciously agreed.

  “You know, Joel, the best way to think about Iraq right now is to think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,” he said, referring to the famous story found in Daniel 3. “Remember, they were captives in Babylon, and they refused to bow down and worship the idol that King Nebuchadnezzar had built. So the king ordered that the fiery furnace be heated seven times hotter than usual, and then he threw the men in there. But when the king looked into the furnace, he was stunned. He asked his officials, ‘Didn’t I throw three men in there?’ And they said, ‘Certainly, O king.’ And then he said, ‘But look! I see four men walking around in there, without chains on their hands, and without being harmed—and the fourth is like a son of the gods!’

  “This is what we are facing today. When you look at the news, you see Iraq on fire—seven times hotter than before—and that’s true. Things are very difficult. There is much violence and bloodshed. But that is only part of the story. That was the view from the outside. On the inside, it looked much different for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Yes, they were inside the flames. But they were also free, and they were walking with Jesus. That’s our situation today. For the first time in our lives, we are free, and Jesus is walking with us, guiding us, helping us be a blessing to our fellow Iraqis who need his love and his salvation so desperately. We couldn’t be more excited about the miracles God is doing here. We just ask the church outside to keep praying that we are brave enough and worthy enough to bear the name of Jesus.”334

  THE PASSION IN PERSIA

  Perhaps the most dramatic story unfolding in the Middle East is the explosion of Christianity inside Iran, arguably the most fiercely Islamic and diabolically anti-Christian country on the face of the planet, certainly on par with Saudi Arabia.

  “In the last 20 years, more Iranians have come to Christ [than in] the last 14 centuries,” said Lazarus Yeghnazar, an Iranian-born evangelist now based in Great Britain. “We’ve never seen such phenomenal thirst. . . . I believe this phenomenon [will] snowball into a major avalanche. This is still a rain. This is not the avalanche coming . . . but it will be happening very, very soon.”335

  At the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there were only about 500 known Muslim converts to Jesus inside the country. By 2000, a survey of Christian demographic trends reported that there were 220,000 Christians inside Iran, of which between 4,000 and 20,000 were Muslim converts.336 But according to Iranian Christian leaders I interviewed for this book, the number of Christ followers inside their country has shot dramatically higher since 2000.

  In fact, the head of one leading Iranian ministry, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, told me, “Based on all the things we are seeing inside Iran today, I personally believe that if every Iranian who secretly believes in Jesus could come forward right now and declare his or her faith publicly, the number would top a million.”337

  Such numbers are impossible to verify given the current political conditions, but the trend lines are clear, and the increasingly panicked reaction of Iranian authorities in recent years does point to unprecedented growth of the Iranian church.

  In April 2004, Iranian Shiite cleric Hasan Mohammadi delivered a stunning speech at a high school in Tehran. He urged the students to “safeguard your beloved Shiite faith” against the influence of the evangelicals and other so-called apostate religions, and warned, “Unfortunately, on average every day, fifty Iranian girls and boys convert secretly to Christian denominations in our country.”338

  Mohammadi had been hired by the Ministry of Education to teach fundamental Shiite Islam to the country’s youth, who are increasingly dissatisfied with the Islamic Revolution and are looking elsewhere for fulfillment. But as one father whose son was in the audience told a reporter, Mohammadi “unknowingly admitted the defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a theocratic regime in promoting its Islam.”

  By September of that year, the Iranian regime had arrested eighty-six evangelical pastors and subjected them to extended interrogations and even torture.

  In October 2004, Compass Direct reported that “a top [Iranian] official within the Ministry of Security Intelligence spoke on state television’s Channel 1, warning the populace against the many ‘foreign religions’ active in the country and pledging to protect the nation’s ‘beloved Shiite Islam’ from all outside forces.” The news service went on to report that this security official had helped interrogate ten of the arrested evangelical pastors, had complained that Christian activities in Iran had gone “out of control,” and was “insisting that their church do something to stop the flood of Christian literature, television, and radio programs targeting Iran.”339

  The rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to a dramatic acceleration of government-directed persecution of Iranian Christians—particularly pastors, many of whom have been arrested, interrogated, beaten, and even worse.

  Compass Direct reported in November 2005:

  An Iranian convert to Christianity was kidnapped last week from his home in northeastern Iran and stabbed to death, his bleeding body thrown in front of his home a few hours later. Ghorban Tori, 50, was pastoring an independent house church of covert Christians in Gonbad-e-Kavus, a town just east of the Caspian Sea along the Turkmenistan border. Within hours of the November 22 murder, local secret police arrived at the martyred pastor’s home, searching for Bibles and other banned Christian books in the Farsi language. By the end of the following day, the secret police had also raided the houses of all other known Christian believers in the city. According to one informed Iranian source, during the past eight days representatives of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) have arrested a
nd severely tortured ten other Christians in several cities, including Tehran.340

  Only a few days before the pastor’s murder, Ahmadinejad met with thirty provincial governors and vowed to shut down the country’s growing house-church movement, reportedly saying, “I will stop Christianity in this country.”341

  Nevertheless, evangelical leaders inside Iran say they are seeing Jesus’ words in Matthew 16:18 come true before their very eyes: “I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (KJV).

  “Before the [Islamic] Revolution, there was a very small response to the gospel,” one Iranian pastor told me. “In the summer of 1975, our ministry shared Christ with nearly 5,000 people. Only two people showed any interest. But [in 2005], 98 out of every 100 people we shared with showed interest, and we saw many decisions for Christ.”342

  He added that a Farsi-language broadcasting ministry he works with received 50,000 calls in 2005 from Iranians wanting to receive Christ despite the fact that they had to make long-distance calls at their own expense, knowing the lines could be tapped and facing the threat of persecution, jail, and torture.

  Radio and satellite-television evangelism ministries are big factors in getting the gospel to millions of Iranians who would otherwise have no access to the truth. And God is using other creative methods to reach Iranians as well. Back in 2003, for example, when Iranians heard that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was anti-Semitic, they couldn’t wait to see it. Neither, apparently, could the mullahs and the government authorities, thinking that anything negative about the Jews had to be good for Muslims. So despite the fact that Islam forbids the visual depiction of Jesus—and teaches that Judas was crucified in Jesus’ place, and thus was never resurrected—The Passion actually played in Persia. True, only one theater ran it. But there was a ten-day waiting list for tickets. What’s more, tens of thousands of bootlegged copies of The Passion are now circulating throughout Iran, and the official version is actually available in Iranian stores, as it is in most Muslim countries throughout the region.343

  Ultimately, though, I’m told that many Iranians are not coming to Christ primarily through The Passion or the Jesus film or radio and satellite-TV ministries or even the work of the mushrooming house-church movement. These resources are vitally important. They are giving many unbelievers initial exposure to the gospel, and they are certainly strengthening the faith of new believers and those who have been following Christ for some time. But they are not enough to bring some Iranians to a point of decision. What is bringing these Iranians to Christ is dreams and visions of Jesus, just as in Iraq, though in much larger numbers.

  As one Iranian pastor explained, “A factory manager recently showed up at a church. We didn’t need to share the gospel with him. We didn’t need to persuade him of anything, which was good, in a way, because many in our congregation are terrified to share their faith. But this man already believed because Jesus had spoken to him in a dream. In fact, he said that Jesus had been personally teaching him the way to follow him for two hours a day for an entire year. Now he finally had the courage to identify himself with other believers, and he wanted to worship Christ with us. It was amazing. But things like this are happening all the time in Iran.”344

  In my third novel, The Ezekiel Option, I tell the story of two Christians driving through the mountains of Iran with a carful of Bibles. Suddenly their steering wheel jams and they have to slam on the brakes to keep from driving off the side of the road. When they look up, they see an old man knocking on their window asking if they have the books. “What books?” they ask. “The books Jesus sent me down here to get,” the old man replies.

  He goes on to explain that Jesus recently came to him in a dream and told him to follow. When he awoke, he found out that everyone in his mountain village had had the same dream. They were all brand-new followers of Jesus, but they did not know what to do next. Then the old man had another dream in which Jesus told him to go down the mountain and wait by the road for someone to bring books that would explain how to be a Christian. He obeyed, and suddenly two men with a carful of Bibles have come to a stop right in front of him.

  This was one of my favorite passages in The Ezekiel Option, but it’s not fiction. I didn’t make it up. It’s true. I got it directly from a dear friend of mine who is the head of a ministry in the Middle East. He personally knows the men involved. I simply asked if I could change their names for use in the novel, and my friend agreed.

  Yet for all the good news that is happening in Iran today, it is just the beginning. The avalanche of God’s grace is coming, and it may be coming very soon. A few years ago, while I was writing The Ezekiel Option, my wife and I invited some friends to dinner, a dear couple; the wife is Iranian and a passionate Muslim convert to Christ. She had actually never heard of the War of Gog and Magog or the prophecies of Ezekiel 38–39. However, as she listened to me explain them, she said they struck her as very similar to a prophecy all the Iranian believers on the Internet were talking about from Jeremiah 49:34-39.

  In “the last days,” Jeremiah says, God will scatter the people of Elam—ancient Iran—to “the four winds” and “there will be no nation to which the outcasts of Elam will not go” (NASB). Our friend explained that this is exactly what happened after the Islamic Revolution in 1979: Iranians found themselves scattered all over the world, unable to return home, and today the Persian diaspora tops 5 million. Next, the prophecy says God will bring his “fierce anger” against Elam “and destroy out of it king and princes” (Jeremiah 49:37, 38, NASB). But then, declares the Lord, “it will come about in the last days that I will restore the fortunes of Elam” (Jeremiah 49:39, NASB).

  The buzz among Iranian Christians today is that this prophecy is about to be fulfilled, that the leaders and deputies of Iran will be destroyed by the God of the Bible, who will then pour out his Holy Spirit and bring the people of Persia into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ in a manner that will stun the world. What’s more, many believe this prophecy may be directly connected to the events of Ezekiel 38–39.

  REACHING HAMAS FOR JESUS

  There are many, many more wonderful stories of what Jesus is doing in the Middle East that I wish I could share with you, but space does not permit. As the apostle John once wrote, “Jesus also did many other things. If they were all written down, I suppose the whole world could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). Still, I would be remiss if I did not end this chapter with the amazing story of how one man set out to reach the leadership of Hamas for Jesus.

  In October of 2004, my wife and I had the privilege of having lunch in Southern California with a man named Brother Andrew, one of the most remarkable missionaries of this century and the last.345 He is the founder of Open Doors International and the author of the mega–best seller God’s Smuggler, describing his efforts to penetrate the Evil Empire with the gospel. Brother Andrew is now the author (with Al Janssen) of a powerful and unforgettable book called Light Force: A Stirring Account of the Church Caught in the Middle East Crossfire, which describes his efforts to penetrate the Muslim world with the gospel.

  What struck us first about meeting him in person—aside from what a kind and gentle and grandfatherly figure he has become—is the man’s boldness and incurable confidence. He doesn’t just say he believes in a God who can “open doors” to the most closed countries and the most closed hearts on earth. He really means it.

  Over salads and iced tea, Andrew humbly told us how he personally shared the gospel with Yasser Arafat, with Islamic ayatollahs, and with Palestinian terrorists exiled to Lebanon. But the story that affected me most was about his unforgettable experience of preaching the gospel to four hundred Hamas leaders in Gaza City. I did not take notes at that lunch, so let me just quote here from Brother Andrew’s book.

  “I can’t change the situation you face here in Gaza,” Brother Andrew told the Hamas leaders. “I can’t solve the problems you have with your enemies. But I can offe
r you the One who is called the Prince of Peace. You cannot have real peace without Jesus. And you cannot experience Him without forgiveness. He offers to forgive us of all our sins. But we cannot receive that forgiveness if we don’t ask for it. The Bible calls this repentance and confession of sin. If you want it, then Jesus forgives. He forgave me and made me a new person. Now I’m not afraid to die because my sins are forgiven and I have everlasting life.”346

  Hearing the story, I felt both amazed at this man’s faith and ashamed at my own lack of faith. I had to confess to Brother Andrew that it had never dawned on me to pray for—much less preach the gospel to—Hamas leaders. But isn’t that what Jesus tells his followers to do—to love our enemies and bless those who persecute us? What made the story all the more remarkable was that rather than lynching Andrew for trying to convert them to Christ, the Hamas leaders actually invited him to speak to other Muslims.

  “Andrew, I believe you know that I teach at the Islamic University,” said one. “To my knowledge, we have never had any lectures about Christianity. While you were talking, I was thinking that it would be helpful for our students to know about real Christianity. Would you consider coming to the university and giving a lecture about the differences between Christianity and Islam?”

  Even the Palestinian Christian leaders who accompanied Brother Andrew to the event were taken aback.

  “I think my God is too small,” said the head of the Palestinian Bible Society. “I never thought that a Christian could speak to radical, fanatical fundamentalists. But even if someone did have a chance, it never occurred to me that they would actually want to sit and listen to the gospel. Today God showed me how big He is.”

  Such are not the stories being told by the mainstream media today, and they are only the beginning of what God will do in fulfillment of Ezekiel 38–39. But they raise an important question with which I would like to close this chapter.