Dear Intercessors and those who have signed up to receive Discerning the Times,
I hope all of you are doing well. I have so appreciated your emails and responses to recent notes asking for discernment and prayer about the wave of the Holy Spirit into which PRMI is caught up. I try to answer you personally as much as I can. Please know when I don’t respond, I still consider your contributions carefully and when possible include them in a Discerning The Times.
First – I have received amazing responses to the guidance I shared from Kim about asking for a specific amount of money by a specific date. We are called to ask our Father for $93,000 by Dec 31, 2013.
We did receive clear guidance. We acted upon it. I do not see this as guidance applied to this single instance, but rather as a directive to continue to pray specifically in like fashion for the Lord’s provision in the year to come. One danger is daring to tell our God what to do!
The other danger is not being specific enough in our asking. The key, of course, is to ask according to the Will of God. So, we ask the Father to provide precisely as the Holy Spirit directs us to pray in Jesus’ name.
Some our staff prayer time was spent at the Community of the Cross’ Ascension Point. It was a very cold day! The Lord clearly told us to ask Him for what we needed to break even by the end of the year. This ended up being $93,000.
Now, if the Lord were to send more than that, we would rejoice. Within that amount, there is no start-up for 2014. That knowledge leaves us a bit weak-kneed. However, since $93,000 is the number the Holy Spirit gave us, we have to believe our Father is teaching us simple, radical, moment by moment obedience. We could be tempted to name a higher figure, “fudge it” by asking for more than we need to finish 2013 in the black and so have a good start for next year. We refuse to do that. Thank you for your continued prayers as we are stretched in our prayer relationship with our Father finishing this year and heading into 2014.
Some of you sent in numbers of 1.5 million and even 5.5 million. The interesting thing is that the 5.5 million is what is needed to complete the major building projects at the Community of the Cross that are already listed in the 10 year development plan. We felt that this may be something to pray into and receive guidance about for next year and the next three years.
In prayer, we saw ourselves as the disciples who had fished all night and caught nothing. Then Jesus tells them to cast their nets on the other side. This came as assurance for us to expect the Lord to lead us to new and unexpected opportunities for obedience. Actually, that is already happening!
Second – We must not grow weary in our intercessions to block the demonic stronghold that Satan is building into Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons with which to “wipe Israel off the map.”
By harping on this subject, I feel that I am running against the tide of hope and public opinion. Still, I move forward. I believe the Holy Spirit is revealing to me, and my analytical self confirms it, that the Obama Administration and their supporters are so eager to work for peace with Iran and seem so naive about the nature of evil, that contrary to their hopes, their efforts are actually laying the foundations for a terrible disaster with devastating fallout.
As far as I have discerned things, the radical clerics of Iran continue with unabated zeal at Satan’s urging and direction their construction of demonic structures designed for global calamity. I admit to you that I struggle with this since I have so little confirmation from other intercessors in this discernment.
There is, indeed, great passivity in the US press about this looming threat. On December the 11th , however, Norman Podhoretz wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which he warns of the disaster that is ahead if appropriate action is not quickly taken. Read the article below with care and Holy Spirit discernment.
Ask the Lord how you may be called to intercede. Now, it may be that the Lord is not moving you into the gap to pray. If not, take up, instead, the work of Aaron and Hur by supporting those of us who are called by your prayers.
I know that I must engage this work. In fact, I was ready Sunday morning to attend worship at Christ Community Church when I knew the Holy Spirit was calling me to spend the time instead on the mountain in prayer. As I obeyed, I was intensely aware of the Holy Spirit praying through me in the following ways.
First off we need to focus our prayers on those in Iran around whom this demonic stronghold of death is being built.
As we have noted before in past Discerning the Times, most of these leaders are looking for the 12th Imam who is to return as the Mahdi. The terrifying thing about this deception is the belief that the Mahdi’s return may be hastened by actions that would bring chaos and death into the world – launching a nuclear weapons attack against Israel, for instance.
Of course such an action would result in a massive counter-attack by Israel that would most probably lay waste to Iran leaving many more millions of Iranians dead than Israelis. But the problem is that the threat of retaliation does not function as a deterrent to those through whom Satan is building the stronghold.
From the article below,
The second consideration was that the prospect of being annihilated in a retaliatory nuclear strike, which had successfully deterred the Soviets and the Chinese from unleashing their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War, would be ineffective against an Iran ruled by fanatical Shiite mullahs. As Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary authority on Islam, put it in 2007, to these fanatics “mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already [from the Iran-Iraq war] that they do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. . . . They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights.”
So what are we to do and how are we to pray? How are we to deal with such religious fanaticism, inhumanity and irrationality? The normal processes of diplomacy and deterrence do not seem to work.
They did not work with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cult, around which Satan built a demonic stronghold with the exact same stated aim of destroying the Jewish people that is embodied in the fanatical Shiite mullahs who presently rule Iran.
So I believe we must step into the gap. Consider the following:
1. Let us pray for a great wave of the Holy Spirit to move through Iran and bring Muslims, including the mullahs, to faith in Jesus Christ. Since the Iranian Christian community is so persecuted and subjugated, ask the Father to send Jesus to Muslims in visions and dreams. May our Father use signs and wonders and angelic visitations to present Jesus to the people. I offer here a quick reminder why we need to pray in this way. Surely the Triune God of Grace loves the people of Iran more than any of us ever will—why would He want or need us to request this from Him? The reason is in the mystery of the dynamic of divine-human cooperation: the Lord of the universe has chosen to work through our prayers.
2. Ask the Father to reach and touch the Mullahs in leadership and the embodiment of the cult of the 12th Imam by breaking Satan’s power and deception over their minds and hearts. Pray that if our Father chooses not to convert them to Jesus, that He will remove them from power entirely.
3. Pictured below is “Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei” who on November 20, 2013 stated that, “Zionist officials cannot be called humans, they are like animals, some of them,” said Khamenei. “The Israeli regime is doomed to failure and annihilation,”
We cannot be sure but it may well be that he is one around whom this demonic stronghold of “death to Israel and death to America” is being formed, and he may well be the embodiment, or one of the embodiment’s, of the deception concerning the 12th Imam.
4. The best case would be for the Holy Spirit to give them visions of Jesus Christ accompanied by angelic messengers and complimented by timely Iranian Christian witness in order to bring them to saving knowledge and experience of the Lord Jesus. They would become modern day versions of St. Paul by ending their persecution of Christians as pawns of Satan, and establish them as leading witnesses for Christ to proclaim Him as the way of life to the Muslim world.
My desperate prayer is that this demonic stronghold which Satan has spent decades developing will be dismantled before either of the terrible possibilities predicted by Norman Podhoretz of a conventional-weapons attack against Iran or an all-out nuclear war in the Middle East must take place.
Please pray into this. We need to work the process: I do not want to be deceived.
Brad Long
Norman Podhoretz: Strike Iran Now to Avert Disaster Later
A conventional-weapons attack is preferable to the nuclear war sure to come.
By
NORMAN PODHORETZ (Dec. 11, 2013 7:12 p.m. ET) Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com
Not too many years ago, hardly anyone disagreed with John McCain when he first said that “the only thing worse than bombing Iran is letting Iran get the bomb.” Today hardly anyone disagrees with those who say that the only thing worse than letting Iran get the bomb is bombing Iran. And in this reversal hangs a tale.
The old consensus was shaped by three considerations, all of which seemed indisputable at the time.
The first was that Iran was lying when it denied that its nuclear facilities were working to build a bomb. After all, with its vast reserves of oil and gas, the country had no need for nuclear energy. Even according to the liberal Federation of American Scientists a decade ago, the work being done at the Iranian nuclear facilities was easily “applicable to a nuclear weapons development program.” Surprisingly, a similar judgment was made by Mohamed ElBaradei, the very dovish director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The second consideration was that the prospect of being annihilated in a retaliatory nuclear strike, which had successfully deterred the Soviets and the Chinese from unleashing their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War, would be ineffective against an Iran ruled by fanatical Shiite mullahs. As Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary authority on Islam, put it in 2007, to these fanatics “mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already [from the Iran-Iraq war] that they do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. . . . They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights.”
Nor were the rulers of Iran deterred by the fear that their country would be destroyed in a nuclear war. In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who brought the Islamist revolution to Iran in 1979: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. . . . I say let this land [Iran] go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” (The quote appeared in a 1981 Iranian collection of the ayatollah’s speeches. In later editions, that line and others were deleted as Iran tried to stir up nationalistic fervor amid the war with Iraq.)
And here, speaking in particular of a nuclear exchange with Israel—that “cancer” which the mullahs were and are solemnly pledged to wipe off the map—is the famous “moderate” Hashemi Rafsanjani, in an Al-Quds Day sermon at Tehran University on Dec. 14, 2001: “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” Mr. Rafsanjani, an earlier president of Iran, is the sponsor and mentor of its current president, that other celebrated “moderate,” Hasan Rouhani.
The third consideration behind the old consensus was the conviction that even if the mullahs could be deterred, their acquisition of a nuclear capability would inevitably trigger a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East. Because the Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere throughout the region were all terrified at the prospect of being lorded over and held hostage by an Iran ruled by their ancestral enemies the Shiites, those regimes would rush to equip themselves with their own nuclear arsenals.
Such an arms race would vastly increase the danger that these weapons might go off, if not by design then by accident. Retired Col. Ken Allard, a former dean of the National War College, explained why last week in the Washington Times: “Even with the steady injection of technology, U.S. and Soviet permissive-action links and fail-safe systems still needed a fair amount of luck to avoid an accidental detonation. What about Iranian, Saudi or even Egyptian nuclear forces? If they build such weapons, will they also invest in the technologies and practice the unforgiving disciplines needed to avoid the worst of all man-made calamities?”
Just as almost everyone agreed that Iran must be prevented from acquiring a nuclear capability, there was a similarly broad agreement that this could be done through a judicious combination of diplomacy and sanctions. To be sure, there were those—myself emphatically included—who argued that nothing short of military action could do the trick. But we were far outweighed by the proponents of peaceful means who, however, willingly acknowledged that the threat of military action was necessary to the success of their strategy.
Yet as the years wore on, it became clear, even to the believers in this strategy, that the Iranians would not be stopped either by increasingly harsh sanctions—or by endless negotiations. One might have expected the strategy’s proponents to conclude, if with all due reluctance, that the only recourse left was to make good on the threat of military action. Yet while they continued to insist that “all options are on the table,” it also became increasingly clear that for Western political leaders as well as the mainstream think tanks and the punditocracy, the stomach for the military option was no longer there, if indeed it had ever been.
And so began the process of what Col. Allard calls “learning to love the Iranian bomb.” The first step was to raise serious doubts about the old consensus. Yes, the Iranians were determined to build a bomb, and, yes, the mullahs were Islamist fanatics, but on further reflection there was good reason to think that they were not really as suicidal as the likes of Bernard Lewis persuaded us. That being the case, there was also good reason to drop the idea that it would be impossible to deter and contain them, as we had done even with the far more powerful Soviets and Chinese.
It was the new consensus shaped by such thinking that prepared the way for the accord reached by six major powers with Iran in Geneva last month. The Obama administration tells us that the interim agreement puts Iran on a track that will lead to the abandonment of its quest for a nuclear arsenal. But the Iranians are jubilant because they know that the only abandonment going on is of our own effort to keep them from getting the bomb.
Adherents of the new consensus would have us believe that only two choices remain: a war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or containment of a nuclear Iran—with containment the only responsible option. Yet as an unregenerate upholder of the old consensus, I remain convinced that containment is impossible, from which it follows that the two choices before us are not war vs. containment but a conventional war now or a nuclear war later.
Given how very unlikely it is that President Obama, despite his all-options-on-the-table protestations to the contrary, would ever take military action, the only hope rests with Israel. If, then, Israel fails to strike now, Iran will get the bomb. And when it does, the Israelis will be forced to decide whether to wait for a nuclear attack and then to retaliate out of the rubble, or to preempt with a nuclear strike of their own. But the Iranians will be faced with the same dilemma. Under these unprecedentedly hair-trigger circumstances, it will take no time before one of them tries to beat the other to the punch.
And so my counsel to proponents of the new consensus is to consider the unspeakable horrors that would then be visited not just on Israel and Iran but on the entire region and beyond. The destruction would be far worse than any imaginable consequences of an Israeli conventional strike today when there is still a chance to put at least a temporary halt, and conceivably even a permanent one, to the relentless Iranian quest for the bomb.
Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960-95. His most recent book is “Why Are Jews Liberals?” (Doubleday, 2009).
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