By Joel C. Rosenberg
 (Washington, D.C., April 29, 2008) -- Well, it was a fascinating week. Hard to summarize, but fascinating, to say the least. Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News had me on his program every night last week to discuss geopolitical events in light of Bible prophecy. Then on Friday, he had me on for a one-hour, prime time special entitled, "Honest Questions About The End of Days." He asked great questions -- tough, but fair. He admitted he would probably be a lot more popular if he had me on his show to mock me. But he was honestly curious. I think he, like many in the U.S. and around the world, increasingly sees events accelerating in the Middle East that simply do not make sense if they are viewed only through political or economic lenses. He wants answers. And there aren't many around offering the Bible as a credible sources of answers. There are certainly others more knowledgeable and academically trained to discuss Mideast events in light of Bible prophecy than me. But it was an honor to answer Glenn's questions as best I could. For those who watched, I hoped it was as intriguing and fun for you as it was for Glenn and me. For those who weren't able to see the broadcast, here are excerpts. The full transcript is available on my weblog.
TRANSCRIPT FROM "THE GLENN BECK SHOW"
CNN Headline News
"Honest Questions about the End of Days"
April 25, 2008
GLENN BECK, HOST (voice-over): Hillary Clinton says she will retaliate with force against Iran if they attack Israel. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin embraces one religion. Jimmy Carter meets with Hamas to forge Middle East peace.
JIMMY CARTER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If there is success between Abu Mazen and the prime minister of Israel...
BECK: Could these current world events be signs that we`re closer to the end of days? Author Joel Rosenberg, hailed as a modern Nostradamus, has a new book out. It`s called "Dead Heat." It takes you inside a presidential race and asks what role, if any, does the U.S. play in the last days? It may be fiction, but tonight it will seem a little more real. Tonight, honest questions about the end of days, with Joel Rosenberg for the full hour. (END VIDEOTAPE)
BECK: Well, hello, America. I -- it`s one of these shows that -- I mean, this puts me into Crazytown. It really does. I want to spend a full hour with you talking about stuff that people just don`t talk about. You know? Because the people who talk about it and think, jeez, some of these things look familiar in the news today. Could we be at the end of the day? You know, or end of days? The chaos in the world looks eerily familiar. And somebody who has written about current events in his novels and knows how it relates to Bible prophecy is Joel Rosenberg. He is the founder of The Joshua Fund and author of "Dead Heat," a work of fiction that veers scarily close to fact, I think. In fact, let me just give some of the -- some of the things that you have not really -- you wouldn`t call these predictions. I mean, you`re not Nostradamus.
JOEL ROSENBERG, AUTHOR, "DEAD HEAT": No.
BECK: Yes, you`re just -- you`re writing about them because they make sense, right?
ROSENBERG: Right.
BECK: You have written -- about nine months before 9/11, you said -- you wrote a story that had a kamikaze plane attack on a U.S. city. Five months before there was actual war with Iraq, you had a story line that included war with Saddam. Arabian leader vowing to annihilate Israel and Russia and Iran forming an unpreedented military alliance, this one happened the date of publishing the book. Right?
ROSENBERG: Right.
BECK: And I know what books are like. I mean, I`ve got a book coming out this Christmas. It`s due next week.
ROSENBERG: Absolutely.
BECK: The death of Yasser Arafat, radical Islamic terrorist, trying to seize the West Bank and Gaza. Thirteen months later, Arafat was dead and that`s exactly what they did. Does it ever spook you that...?
ROSENBERG: It does. I don`t know what you`re going to say. But yes.
BECK: You know, it must spook you that you -- you feel like, this is the logical thing. If I know prophecy and, this should happen. And you write about it. And then it does.
ROSENBERG: Yes. Because when people say, "You`re basing your political thrillers on Bible prophecy." But, Yasser Arafat isn`t mentioned in Bible prophecy.
BECK: Right.
ROSENBERG: Saddam Hussein isn`t; kamikazes aren`t. No, that`s true. So I start with end-times Bible prophecies and I say, "OK, these are things we know. Now let`s back them up and say what`s a plausible geopolitical scenario that gets us from where we are today..."
BECK: Sure.
ROSENBERG: "... to where these prophecies are?" And then I just do some guess work. I mean, I`m not trying to predict it. This is the way it`s going to happen. I`m just saying this is a way it could happen. Because I think a good political thriller starts with "what if"? What if these events the Bible says will happen, happens in our lifetime?
BECK: I don`t know if you`ve ever heard of a guy named Vilakovsky, but he was a discredited scientist, you know, some of it wrongly so, back in the 30s and 40s. And what he did was he said, "Let`s stop dismissing the Bible. Why don`t we look at the scriptures, sacred scriptures from all over the world. Instead of saying, he couldn`t have parted the Red Sea, why don`t we look for natural causes that may have caused those things? Was there anything else that was happening on the planet at the same time in somebody else`s religious scripture that might tie into these things?" And I think that`s the problem with scriptures. So many people just dismiss it. Oh, well that`s nothing but, you know, spooky stuff or whatever. They dismiss it. Instead of saying, "OK, I read Revelations, I read Ezekiel," they were describing it in the terms that they understood at the time. ROSENBERG: Right.
BECK: So what could cause those things today? And unfortunately, today there`s a lot of those things.
ROSENBERG: There certainly are.
BECK: That are coming our way. And it`s the -- is it the first time really -- people have been talking about this for 2,000 years. The first time, really, that we can say -- a lot of the big ones are now in play?
ROSENBERG: Absolutely. You know, we say on Passover, why is this night different from all other nights? And people ask me, "Joel, why is this period of history different from all other periods of history?" I mean, Jesus said, "In the last days there will be wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes, famine." We`ve had that for all of the last 2,000 years. So why is this period different? And the answer is Israel. The only document on the face of the planet that said Israel would be reborn as a country in the last days and Jews would re-gather into the holy land after centuries of exile, was the Bible. And this Bible prophecy, most people in the world didn`t believe it. Actually, many Christians didn`t even believe it. It`s a whole replacement theology that got developed. God was done with the Jews. But May 14, 1948, almost exactly 60 years ago, Israel was reborn. And now we`ve got a situation that makes this period of history different, because Israel is what Bible scholars call the super sign. The fact that it has been reborn sets into motion all of the other prophecies.
BECK: Right. You know the reason why I like you, Joel, is you`re normal. You`re a political guy. Your background was much more political. You`re not a Bible-thumping preacher or anything like that, right? What made you turn? What...
ROSENBERG: It wasn`t easy. I mean, first of all, failure. I had helped a lot of political candidates lose their elections. Helped Steve Forbes lose twice. You know, I was on former Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu`s, "comeback" campaign team in 2000.
BECK: You were good.
ROSENBERG: Oh, yes. I worked for Natan Sharansky, the former deputy prime minister of Israel. He got so frustrated with politics he just retired completely. So after that, I said to myself, "All right. I need to do something else with my life." I had two tracks in my life, and I kept them separate. I had my political track. And I had my interest as an evangelical Christian studying Bible prophecy. My father`s family was orthodox Jewish and escaped out of Russia. My mother`s side is Gentile, English. But because of that Jewish background, because of my interest in the scriptures, and because Saddam Hussein in 1990 was invading Kuwait, and Babylon, that country was suddenly in the news again after thousand of years of not being in the news, all of these things were happening in two separate tracts. Once I kind of got -- went through political detox -- I`m out, I`m clean. I`m going to do something else with my life.
BECK: Right.
ROSENBERG: I said, what do I really love? What I really love or I`m fascinated with is Bible prophecy and how it could come true in my lifetime. Since we`ve seen Israel come true -- come to pass, and since Jews are returning to the holy land. And I thought, you know what? People say write the novel that you know. That`s not really true. I think you should write the novel where you live in your mind. Where I lived in my mind was "what if?" What if in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children this could happen? What would it look like? What would it feel like? Would I and my wife and kids have the courage to go through it?
BECK: When you first started writing it, then, was it more of a "what if" -- was it fiction? And now it`s more of -- don`t want to put words in your mouth -- more of a watchman on the wall kind of a Ezekiel 34 kind of thing?
ROSENBERG: It has accelerated into the second point, for sure. What happened was this prophecy of Ezekiel 38 and 39, where Russia will form an alliance with Iran and Libya and these other countries in the last days. I`d always been fascinated with that. But I was on a plane from Washington, D.C., to New York City in the fall of 2000 with Natan Sharansky, the former deputy prime minister of Israel. And while we were chatting, I said to him -- we got chatting, and he said -- he started telling me the story of how, when Benjamin Netanyahu was the prime minister and Sharansky was a cabinet minister, Netanyahu sent him to Russia to meet with then KGB chief Vladimir Putin to talk about the threat of Russia selling nuclear technology and weapons to countries like Iran and Iraq. And that Netanyahu as prime minister was worried about a Russian-Iranian alliance, in particular. Well, here is my political track. I`m just helping Sharansky get his message out. But now suddenly my prophetic side kind of clicked in. And I don`t mean I`m a prophet. I mean that -- my interest in prophecy. And I thought, "Wait a minute. Did he just say that the prime minister of Israel is getting worried about a Russian-Iranian military alliance? Because that has never happened in 2,500 years." And when that...
BECK: That`s Gog and Magog.
ROSENBERG: That`s Gog and Magog. That`s Ezekiel 38 and 39, which I thought for many years, I believe it`s going to be true. But that must be 1,000 years off. I mean, it`s not close to happening back in the 1990s when the Soviet Union was collapsing. And that moment on that plane on the way to New York City, I began to think, "Wait a minute."
BECK: OK.
ROSENBERG: I might be living in a time where this could accelerate. I want to write a novel that looks at how this could play out.
BECK: OK. When we come back, we`re going to do a couple of things. We`re going to take you through the news of the day. We`re going to talk to you all about, you know, food and crisis, and political leaders, and what things might actually be coming our way. And what plays into the end of days. All this week, by the way, Joel has been writing exclusive articles for the end of days, only available in my free daily e-mail newsletter. You can go over to GlennBeck.com and sign up. Get your free copy today at GlennBeck.com. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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