The current dominance of Western Civilization, basically a Romanized German Cultural Empire, has been in decline for at least a century. We can point to conscious efforts among certain elements to bring this about, though it was quite obviously not precisely what they had in mind. Rather, it’s the result of very ill conceived efforts to take over and rule. In so doing, they have broken everything which supported what they hoped to rule.
This business of conquest, whether by direct military confrontation, or by the more subtle cultural shift, is the nature of human existence after the Fall. This is what God’s Word says, so it’s not subject to debate. We are in a cyclical wash of civilization after civilization, and the current empire is crumbling. It was built on sand, and it cannot stand. So the cycle continues and we wonder what comes next.
I feel certain it will be a Neo-Islamic one. One of the primary flaws of Western Civilization is the assumption there is nothing after this life. The degree there was any genuine Christian influence on early development, even the mass of Christendom operated as if there were no eternity. It was totally worldly in focus, utterly lacking the biblical other-worldly vision. But it was so subtle, yet overwhelming, no one seemed to notice. Except God. He noticed, and He was not pleased. Without that presumption of mystical input into human understanding of the world, what was left was utterly in the way of Babylon — Everything has a price, and that’s all that matters. The Tower of Babel, among other things, was meant to place control of the Universe in human hands. Pulling the mysteries of eternity down to human intellectual grasp won’t happen. Sorry, but without that mystical input into the formula, all you get is a flash in the pan, and something with more patience will take over. In this case, that means the modern version of Islam.
No civilization has been exclusive, so there will surely be others in this world, but Islam is the one we in the US will have to face more than any other.
What matters is ours has been so empty from the start. All we have ever had was a keen understanding of what this world is right now, and how things seem to work, but certainly we have assumed God really had no interest. Again, even the very fundamental assumptions among Western theologians has been just that. I say that because no one wants to assert clearly, at length and in detail, just how and why God gets involved. Instead, our very most fundamental frame of reference has been He probably doesn’t, and we can’t really understand it. No, not in the mystical sense of knowing the mind can’t rise into the Spirit Realm, but the West has assumed there is no way to know what we can do about it. It’s as if God had never revealed Himself, because the entire base of thinking and knowing assumed His actual revelation out of existence, in favor of some other standard. Trying to hold God to a standard He did not promulgate Himself is, at the very least, folly. So while we had a clear grasp on the mechanics of things internally, we refused to acknowledge that higher level at which things operate, because such higher operations are not subject to our direct observation and analytical evaluation.
We rejected the frame of reference, so we had no means to measure what really mattered. We thus assumed what really mattered simply didn’t exist. In our calculations, we defined out of existence God’s moral controls on His Creation. The result was apparently effective because we have no idea how God sees things. We never saw this collapse coming, and many cannot even accept the notion the West is collapsing.
Let’s assume for a moment we can expect things to progress rapidly. The deciding factor in how fast things change is how fast information travels, and these days it’s about the speed of light with the Internet. So everyone on the whole earth at the same moment can grasp the facts, and many of the ideas, all at the same time. The Bilderbergers are kidding themselves, because they only control the West — wherever things are Western, and to the degree they are Western. At the very moment they believe they have the means to openly assert their control, there is nothing left to control. So we can justify thinking much of the shift would come before I, approaching my 54th birthday, would die of natural causes. (I’m working out and watching my diet, and my genetic heritage points at lasting into my 90s.) In less than 50 years, the world could take a shape we cannot imagine today.
The trick is to notice which of the competing civilizational forces are rising, and which are relatively close to God’s wishes on His terms. That is, we have to evaluate His standards from the frame of reference He used for revealing them, which happens to be Ancient Near Eastern culture. As a man born in the West, I’ve made a stab at pulling my mind into that frame of reference, so to the degree I’ve failed, my guesses will be wrong. Take me with a grain of salt, because I certainly don’t take myself that seriously. What I find, though, is the Lord favors Islam right now because no other civilization is close. They come closest to fulfilling the terms of His Covenant of Noah, which is the proper measure of what to expect from God in supporting human political activity.
And who might be leading this charge? I vote for Turkey. Of all the various Islamic countries, they have struggled most fully to colonize the West. What they could not conquer under Ottoman Imperial military might, they have taken by other means. I could go on at length, but it won’t be hard to find better scholars to support my contention. In my opinion, the recent rise of a somewhat more assertively Muslim social milieu, when they stopped trying so hard to ape the Western notion of secular statism, was a very smart move. Turkey was just handed in the past weeks a very powerful opportunity to place themselves at the fulcrum of events, and it appears they have seized it. Barring a nuclear obliteration of their country, the momentum is in their favor, and they have what it takes to gain a prominence no Western government can deny them. Never mind the bitter contest of arms between modern nation states. Having painted herself into a corner, Israel can’t win, even if she defeats her critics militarily. It won’t be Turkey ruling the world, but as the focal point of something much bigger.
