There are moments which we experience which become stamped on our minds. The pictures of people on the Berlin Wall pecking away bits of concrete is one of mine. I'm sure the images I have in my mind were impressed there over a few nights' news, but they are all one indelible moment in my mind.
It so dramatically changed the world that those who were too young to remember late 1989, don't even understand why it was so powerful an event for my generation.
The world I lived in feared USSR and USA facing each other in a nuclear war. In 1985 we studied in school 'Z-for Zachariah', a book about the last person alive after a nuclear war. I sensed the book had power as the class believed that global nuclear annihilation was possible, and this could be their life. I noted this, perhaps, because I had another belief.
I firmly believed that Europe would unite and then Messiah (Mashiach) would come and that didn't fit with the idea that the planet would be a nuclear wasteland. Whereas in 1985 the idea that Europe would unite was clearly nonsense, the fear of nuclear war was reasonable.
The year that changed everything was two words: Glasnost and Perestroika . In late 1987 they were the new Russia, led by Gorby. The nick name underlined the new openness. There were new treaties to learn the acronyms for, and the world was run by Reagan, an actor, and Gorby. But the world was still East and West.
I was studying US-Soviet relations and collecting clippings through the first half of 1989 for my history studies. I didn't see any hint of the events that would occur later that year. Though I was sure Europe would unite, I saw no sign of a real change in the status quo.
The power of my memory today, of the image of people on the Berlin wall in November 1989, was the shock of it.
It's only been 20 years, but it seems both a life time ago and like yesterday. It is like yesterday as the images in my mind are still vivid, in colour. But it seems like a lifetime ago as the world is radically different.
East and West is gone. Europe has united.
It is fitting to remember the 9 of November as the day the wall was taken down. November 9 is the end of the failed 1848 revolution in Germany 141 years before, and, of Kristallnacht 51 years before. There is a peculiar irony in the success of the 1989 revolution occurring on the day of the failure of the 1848 revolution. There is a symmetry in the date ending the fear and imprisonment of many Germans being the same as the date that began the fear and imprisonment of Jews in Germany.
It is fitting to remember the 20th anniversary as a landmark day for Europe as it is only just recently that an almost unnoticed event occurred in Czechoslovakia. In 1989 it was Czechoslovakia whose relaxing of border restrictions led to a flow of people leaving East Germany, and to the East German officials being forced into relaxing their border restrictions. The recent event in Czechoslovakia may seem to many to be unimportant.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus reluctantly endorsed the European Union's crucial reform treaty on Tuesday, ending his efforts to block the proposed pact and paving the way for it to finally enter into force. EU Lisbon Treaty signed in Prague, Jerusalem Post
This treaty is the grounds for a unified, politically potent United States of Europe. The European Union (EU) will now have a foreign policy chief. Approximately 499.7 million people will have one voice. The United States' population is approximately 304 million. The EU with nearly 500 million people is a superpower. It was born from a divided Europe in just 20 years.
The EU was actually born in 1986-7 in Luxembourg with the Single European Act (SEA) which was the first major revision of the Treaty of Rome forming the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957-8. Retrospectively the word for that treaty was also Perestroika, as it was a restructuring of Europe that Eastern Europe providentially fell into.
The EU was conceived by the same man who gave us the name “iron curtain” for the divide in Europe. On the 19th of September 1946 Winston Churchill at Zurich University said, “We must build a kind of United States of Europe”.
History may yet remember Winston Churchill as kind of Dr Frankenstein. The EU is somewhat bigger and less controllable now in 2009 than the entity the British would have hoped for in 1946. But then, the United Nations an organisation named and virtually set up by Winston Churchill of Britain and Franklin Roosevelt of the USA is also much less controllable by these nations than it was in 1946.
Retrospectively, 1989 was the end of the post World War II era.
In 1985 it was unlikely that Daniel the Hebrew prophet could have been right when speaking of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, where the Eastern and Western remnants of the Roman Empire would unite (though 'partly strong and partly brittle') as the last 'kingdom', the inheritor of the power that Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome once held. But now in 2009 it cannot be denied that the 27 nations of the EU are partly strong and partly brittle, and they are beginning to act as a great nation.
Daniel explained to Nebuchadnezzar his dream of a great statue,
You, O king...are the head of gold, But another kingdom will arise after you, inferior to yours; then yet a third kingdom...But the fourth kingdom will be as strong as iron...You saw the the feet and the toes, part potters clay and part iron; that means it will be a divided kingdom; it will have ..some of the stability of iron...the kingdom will be in part strong and in part brittle” (Daniel 2:36-42) JPS
The partly strong partly weak confederation of Roman iron and the clay of humanism is emerging as a mighty kingdom.
If in 20 years Europe can go from conquered and divided to superpower, what will the next few years bring? Already Europe is dictating to the Middle East, as they, as a superpower, no less than the Americans, wish to establish connections for obtaining energy supplies. But the EU path into the Middle East includes Iran, previously known as Persia. And Persia was the second great kingdom, or superpower.
America in not defending Georgia and in not offending Russia over NATO, has lost its grip on Europe. In pulling out of Iraq, America removes a barrier to Iranian expansion towards Syria, via Iraq.
Twenty Years on from the 'Peaceful Revolution' of 1989, as of November 3, 2009, welcome to the new world superpower.
Europe is now the United States of Europe that Winston Churchill called for in 1946, being the impossible accident of a peaceful revolution. It is the superpower Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of, that the Hebrew prophet Daniel explained to the world.
Ironically, the world has encouraged the very unification that Hitler desired for his 3rd Reich. The idea of Reich is associated the unity of the lands the greater Germanic peoples ruled in the past, from Italy (where the Goths once ruled the Roman empire) to Spain and from Belgium to Poland. Bismark's unification of Germany to make the second Reich was a key factor in the lead up to World War I. The word Reich means 'realm' or 'empire'.
What was impossible for half my life due to the iron of the statue in the book of Daniel making an iron curtain, became in the other half of my life the slow standing of a curious multi-leader superpower. In German, a language of the European Union, after the November 2009 vote by Czechoslovakia, the Union is a Reich.
What is next? Daniel said,
“And in the time of those kings [rulers] the God of Heaven will establish a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, a kingdom that shall not be transferred to another people. It will crush and wipe out all these kingdoms, but shall itself last forever- just as a stone was hewn from the mountain, not by hands, and crushed the iron, bronze, clay, silver and gold [statue]. The great God has made know to the king what will happen in the future. The dream is sure and its interpretation is reliable” (Daniel 2:44-45 JPS).
It's not 'if' then, but 'when'.
Daniel was told that too.
Over all of history the servants of God have known the signs of the times: their times. They have seen the direction of events toward the Kingdom of God on earth replacing the kingdoms, republics and democracies of humans.
We were asked what early documents establish that Rosh of Ezekiel 38 is Russia. The answer is in 2 parts, as we explain the trajectory from fulfilled prophecy in history to prophecy yet to be fulfilled.
The Revelation 12 Sign
There is much written about the sun, moon and planets aligning on in September 2017. We have many reasons for suspecting that 2017 will be a prophetically significant year, and the time of the Jewish feast of Sukkot could be more significant than any other time, but we need to understand the scripture before we consider the stars.
An article prompted by National DNA day April 25 celebrating the understanding of DNA.
