Zyuganov burst into Gogolov’s office.
“The Israelis just put their nuclear missile forces on full alert.”
Gogolov finished lighting up a cigar and stared out over a rain-drenched Moscow.
So, the great chess game had been joined at last. Didn’t Doron know he was already in check? Soon it would be mate, and then it would be the Americans’ turn.
“Very well,” Gogolov said calmly. “Do the same. But first, hold a press conference accusing Israel of pushing the world toward another Holocaust.”
Bennett turned off the radio.
The notion of another couple of hours, much less days, thinking about the magnitude of enemy forces now converging on Israel made him sick.
“By the way,” he asked abruptly, looking for a new topic, “what’s in all those boxes in the backseat?”
They were now winding their way through the high-peaks region, along narrow, muddy roads, around too many hairpin turns to count. Only a native of these parts would maintain such speeds unless he was crazy.
“Farsi New Testaments,” Hamid replied, driving with one hand, taking another swig from a water bottle with his other. “I get them from Turkey every few weeks and distribute them among the house churches. You are wondering why I brought them with us?”
“We don’t have enough to worry about?” asked Bennett.
“It was Nadia’s idea, actually. She was worried the government might force her to let troops stay with her overnight while they are passing through. She just thought it would be safer not to have so much contraband in the house.”
“So you thought it’d be better for us to have them, in case we get pulled over?”
“There is nothing to worry about. I do it all the time, and I have not had any trouble yet.”
The car swerved. Hamid barely made the next turn.
If he was about to plunge off the side of the road into a gorge at least a mile deep, Bennett figured the Bibles were the least of his worries.
“So let me ask you something, Hamid.”
“Fire-way, my friend.”
Under other circumstances, Bennett might have laughed. But not now. “All this Ezekiel stuff I’ve been talking about. What do you think?”
During the last few days at Hamid’s home, Bennett had explained Mordechai’s theory in great detail. Thus far, however, neither Hamid nor his wife had given him much of a reaction.
“It is fascinating; I will grant you that,” Hamid said. “And it rings true. But honestly, Nadia and I never paid much attention to those passages before. So much of Ezekiel is hard for us to understand, and we have very little access to commentaries or the kind of research Dr. Mordechai used.”
“That’s OK,” said Bennett. “I was just wondering.”
But Hamid was not finished. “I wonder if what Ezekiel wrote could be a parallel to the prophecy against Elam?”
“I’ve never heard of it,” said Bennett.
“You would if you lived in Iran.”
“Why?” Bennett asked.
“I do not know if you are aware of it, but the number of secret followers of Christ inside Iran has exploded in the years since the revolution of 1979 and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”
“No, I had no idea,” said Bennett.
“Few people outside Iran know the incredible spiritual awakening going on here, which is probably just as well. We live under tremendous persecution and spiritual warfare. And the more intense the persecution becomes, the more people become followers of Christ. It is incredible. Before the revolution, we estimate there were only two to three hundred Iranian believers in Christ. Today, we say there are more than sixty thousand, but that’s just to confuse the secret police. The truth is there are far, far more than that, and the numbers are growing every day.”
“You’re serious?”
“I am. Just like the Lord said through Peter in the book of Acts and the prophet Joel in the Old Testament, ‘And it will come about in the last days that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.’
“What Joel predicted is happening all over. Even the most radical Muslims are seeing visions that are turning them into followers of Christ. They are getting baptized. They are forming clandestine house churches. And not a few, my friend. I am talking about thousands of them. Never in the history of the church of Iran has anything like this happened.”
“That’s amazing,” said Bennett. “But what was that about a prophecy against Elam?”
“Yes, yes, I am coming to that. As the numbers of Persian believers have surged, we have all looked to see if God has a message for us in the Scriptures. And that’s when people began studying the prophecy against Elam in Jeremiah 49:35–39.”
“Which says what?” asked Bennett.
Hamid proceeded to recite it from memory.
Bennett was still confused. “What does that have to do with Ezekiel?”
“Elam is the ancient biblical name for Persia,” Hamid explained.
“Elam is Iran?”
“Yes. This prophecy began to make sense in 1979. Before the revolution, there had never been a scattering of the Iranian people all over the world like Jeremiah predicted. But when the revolution began, Iranians who could flee the country did. Iranians working abroad feared for their lives and refused to come home. Iranians studying abroad refused to return as well. Many applied for asylum in whatever country they were in. That is why over the last several decades — for the first time in history — Iranians have been scattered all over the earth. At least four million Iranians now live abroad. Some say the number is closer to eight million. In the U.S. alone, there are more than a million Iranian expatriates.”
Bennett was intrigued.
“And in the meantime, those stuck in Iran have been shattered, just as the Bible foretold. Persians used to be the envy of the world in art and literature and medicine and science, but look at us now. The mullahs have caused a spirit of fear to settle over the people. Our economy is horrible. Unemployment here is unbelievable. And the secret police are everywhere. This is all the judgment of God, but it is only part 1.”
“What’s part 2?”
“Jeremiah says that God, in his ‘fierce anger,’ is going to bring ‘calamity’ upon Iran until He has ‘consumed’ us. None of us know for sure what that means. But many believe it to mean two things: First, that God is going to destroy Iran’s spiritual leaders once and for all — the ayatollah, the mullahs, and the teachers of radical Islam. And second, that God is going to ‘destroy’ Iran’s government and military leaders — her ‘king and princes,’ as Jeremiah says.