Category Israel & biblical history

Feb 16 2011

2011 Egypt and prophecy

Read something quite amazing on the blog of Walid Shoebat, an ex-Palestinian terrorist who came to Jesus.

http://www.shoebat.com/blog/archives/753

This passage from the bible specifically mentions current events in Egypt:

Isaiah 19:2-4 “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian— brother will fight against brother, neighbour against neighbour, city against city, kingdom against kingdom.  The Egyptians will lose heart, and I will bring their plans to nothing; they will consult the idols and the spirits of the dead, the mediums and the spiritists.  I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them,” declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.

Something not mentioned on the news at all, is the Suez Canal.  This man made water highway through Egypt is a shortcut to get goods in from Asia to Europe and North America.  That includes oil just in case it wasn’t expensive enough already.  A new Egyptian administration could chose to tax this route higher or close it altogether.   Obviously this affects everywhere meaning more inflation could be on the way.

Reading this part and making my own conclusions:

Daniel 11:43 He (the AntiChrist) will gain control of the treasures of gold and silver and all the riches of Egypt, with the Libyans and Cushites in submission.

This also has great significance, as I read today (16th February 2011) not only has historical items been looted from a museum in Cairo in recent weeks.

Libya is on the news today here.

Cush refers to a nation in north east Africa, possibly Ethiopia, or, in this case today on the news there has been the birth of a new nation, South Sudan which breaks away from the main part of Sudan, this is a place where Christians have suffered one of the highest rates of persecution in the world.  South Sudan will become autonomous in July 2011.

I do pray that Egypt gets a better leader and a government, but I am not optimistic.  A likely side effect of all the trouble in many middle east nations at the moment as this scripture says is lots of Arab people come to Christ as they get disenchanted with Islam and their government.

Feb 14 2011

LCD picture frames for promoting web sites and business marketing

Something I saw when i was just about to leave the UK to do my volunteering work, a couple of small businesses have some of those cheap LCD picture frames in the window of their premises.

I really like this idea, often a normal PC is used for this job, and using an LCD picture frame for simple slideshow of a companies products and services, doing it this way rather than a PC, means no messing about with Windows updates and patches, antivirus updates, a bulky box that has got to sit somewhere, etc.  Most of these just require a low cost SD card (2Gb is about £5.99 from play.com) to load on pictures as a slide show.

A high street bank here in Jerusalem has a clunky old 19″ CRT monitor for customer notices outside, but seems to be off.  This pharmacy store has a LCD picture frame on a counter.

I am thinking about these LCD picture frames could be good for the charity I work for.   The food bank which helps poor Israelis is likely to have people walking past when it is shut and does not have much information on the front of building.    Images on the screen could promote our organisation, and have information in English, Hebrew and Russian (which 15% of Israelis speak)   These devices are cheap and don’t consume much power.   I don’t know if they are reliable enough for 24 hour operation.   Staff could easily compile content onto SD cards from their own PCs without needing much help from IT administrators.

My good friend Ed Ross promotes a podcast called Geeks & God that provides discussion for churches looking to improve their web sites and use of IT.  I would be quite curious to know if anyone has deployed these in the windows of their charity, church, youth centre or retail shop to promote themselves.

For web designers I think these are also of interest.   A web design or marketing agency could resell these picture frames to their clients with content shared from the web site to get a web site noticed by people walking past a shop.  A bright and creative theme for a web site could have some of the pictures played back on the picture frames, and could help to point potential clients to a web site, if say, people walk past a business outside of business hours on the way to the pub, takeaway or whatever.  Realistically you are only going to get 10-30 seconds of notice from the public, but some people may walk past these places every day often perhaps.

Here in Israel, I have seen some of these picture frames but seems to be specifically aimed for on a shop counter, this one is from a pharmacy I was at the other day.   There are some (with 10 or 12″ screen I think) in all the branches of Aroma coffee shops I see here in Israel, but the normal picture frames in retail electronics stores like BUG, Kravitz etc, only sell 7 or 8 inch screens.

Feb 11 2011

Jerusalem Assembly

The weekend before last I went to a different church with a friend, this time to Jerusalem Assembly congregation in Talpiyot.

I ended up not going to my normal church (King of Kings) due to needing to stay in the house as my room mate was coming back and he would not have any keys to get in.

This service was great as Jerusalem Assembly, the service has two speakers, one in Hebrew and repeated in English.  Like some Hebrew only services in other churches you can rent these small radio receiver units, to get a translation, but at this church translations are offered in French, German, Spanish, Arabic and Russian!!

I thought this was quite amazing given the amount of work involved to do this, after the service there was soup and pastries and cake offered and a good chance to meet and chat with different people.   I got see some Israeli believers I work with, as well as other Jewish, Arab and foreign Christians working or volunteering in the land from different congregations.  The word and the worship was really good here.

www.jerusalemassembly.com

Feb 10 2011

Chinese made MG cars for sale in Israel?

Back in 2005 I worked for a vehicle leasing company, the same year the British car manufacturer MG / Rover went bankrupt, and a famous name associated with motor manufacturing in the West Midlands disappeared.

Before I went off to a bible study group, I sat in a coffee shop and there were no English newspapers there, so I flipped through a Hebrew paper there and this ad caught my eye.  There had been rumours of a rebirth of this brand, albeit with the cars made in China to start with the intention of kick starting the factory in Longbridge, Birmingham after that.   This seems enormously challenging given that the car industry has suffered the most during the recession.

This car built by SAIC Motors, China and this appears to be an entirely new model.  It would seem enourmously difficult to convince the public to buy new cars when a recession is on, and also how do you convince the previous dealerships to stock these model cars again?  The other problem is people don’t always associate Chinese manufacturing with quality, it may be hard to shake off this stigma.

Cars are way more expensive in Israel than they are in the UK or Europe.   I think a basic model 1.4 Peugeot 207 costs about £8000, where as in Israel I saw this car listed at the equivalent of £15,000.

Most of the cars I see here are very bland Mazda, Toyota or Hyundai models.  I rarely see any MG or Rover cars from before 2005 here, so this is most unusual seeing this ad here.  I hope MG has great success.  Check out www.mg-israel.co.il

Feb 5 2011

Mount Hermon snow trip: Part 4 Nimrod’s Fortress

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock

Back past this Arab town on a steep hill we saw earlier, Rachel tells us this town is called Majdel Shams which is one of the largest Arab Druze communities in the Golan.

Driving out of Mount Hermon, we travelled south only a little bit to see another place, on the way down from the hill there are some small sheds with people selling fruit and vegetables by the side of the road.   Reminds me of some similar stands I saw on some highways in Jordan in 2009.

The stretch of road leading up to the fortress has some slightly scary sights, I can see a glimpse of three wrecked cars at the below the side of the steep hill, yikes!

Nimrod’s castle is interesting, there is a mention of this in the book of Micah:

Micah 5 : 5-6 And he (Jesus) will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land and march through our fortresses.  We will raise against them seven shepherds, even eight commanders, who will rule the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod with drawn sword. He will deliver us from the Assyrians when they invade our land and march across our borders.

Like the Golan Heights and Mount Hermon, this section of the top of Israel, was owned by Syria and claimed back by Israel in 1967 Six day war, this prophecy is spot on!

These stairs lead into underground rooms in the fortress, but you can walk around the sides to see all kinds of history.

The fortress was built by Al-Aziz Uthman in 1229 who was a Sultan of Egypt and stands 800 metres above sea level.  Nimrod himself dates back from Genesis.

Genesis 10 : 8-9 Cush was the father of Nimrod, who became a mighty warrior on the earth.  He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; that is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD.”

An earthquake damage the fortress in the 18th century.   I was looking today on the new version (6 beta) of Google Earth to find if earthquake faults are documented, but shows the Galilee marked with a zone marked ‘Dead Sea’  oops, (epic geography FAIL!)  Maybe another time I will be able to to research this.   I do know earthquakes do happen in this country, not that I have seen but there was at least two small ones in the north a few years ago.

In my last story of this trip I will show you some mysterious biblical animals that roam around the top Hermon….

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock

Feb 2 2011

Somewhere out in the internet, bloggers have a twin…

Who is your blogging doppleganger?

Doppleganger, a German word is described as someone as having a twin or someone else with the same name.
See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doppelganger

A while ago, I found this chap who not only has the same first and second name as me, from the US, who is interested the bible and IT stuff.

Check out his site at: www.jonathanscorner.com

Only I am in Israel, where the old testament was written in Hebrew, and Christos Jonathan Hayward studies Greek Orthodox Christianity, Greek being the language of the New Testament.

My name; Jonathan Peter is a Hebrew name and a Greek name.  Christos Jonathan, has a Greek then Hebrew name.   See the originals of the name Jonathan here

I wonder how many bloggers and writers have similar sounding counterparts with some paradoxes?

If you have discovered someone with unusually similar interests feel free to comment.

Feb 1 2011

Weather in the desert

This is out of my bedroom of my flat yesterday morning (31st January)  We have rain, and plenty of it!!

Someone did tell me of storms this week that were due.   Not only is the rain a blessing and desperately needed, its probably a good thing for the Egyptians if they get some, as I doubt if troublemakers will want to be protesting and looting out in the wet!   Last night there was a brief bit of thunder and lightning, and I think some more light rain.

Jan 31 2011

Yad Vashem uses Google to document the holocaust

I have always been a big admirer of Google, they always have exciting projects on the go, I like the fact they are the most innovative company on the planet, driven by creativity, leveraging a vast number of talented people to make all kinds of large records accessible to everyone previously not possible.

One of the ugly sides of the internet is hate groups.  Quite a significant amount of this is antisemitism, and quite a significant portion of antisemitism is holocaust denial.

Google are now inviting those who had family lost or survived the holocaust to submit pictures and data to this site as a big collaborative project, to stop history from being forgotten or revised, especially as the number of people survived this ordeal are getting few.   Google use a fair bit of their own OCR software to turn scanned text into searchable data.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/explore-yad-vashems-holocaust-archives.html

Jan 30 2011

Mount Hermon snow trip: Part 3, Sloping off

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock

The ski lift was good fun, I don’t think I have been on one of these before.   I have never been skiing in my life, and despite snow, there isn’t enough to justify a proper skiing season at the moment, even if there were, without sounding like a total wuss, my travel insurance doesn’t cover skiing I don’t think.   Only one of the 4 ski lifts was running, its more of case its fun to come up here and see some scenery that’s very different from the rest of the middle east.

These plastic sledges can be rented from a small shed, but they feel extremely cheaply made, they are highly thin, like the plastic used to make ice cream tubs, and some stress lines I saw in the middle, felt it wasn’t going to last very long, still it was fun to propel down the this short hill.   There was an official looking steward to stop people colliding into each other, and make sure they walk around the side back up the top.

Also at the top was border control.  There is a DMZ (demilitarised zone) in between Syria and Lebanon up here, ie: a gap of land between the borders.   Said a quick hello to the soldiers and asked if it was ok to take pictures.

They seem to oblige 🙂  They might of been more comfortable guarding a base in Eilat maybe though 🙂

Dave decided to build a snowman, and felt that he should have hands free access to a phone 🙂

The cafe has an extra redundant piece of the machinery that operates the ski lift in the cafe as decoration.  It was nice and warm in this cafe, and got some great views from the top of Hermon.

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock