P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

THE FIRST BLITZKRIEG

When the dust and rubble had settled, it was over a lot faster than most people had predicted. Instead of a long, drawn-out Vietnam quagmire, Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, particularly places like Mazar-e-Sharif literally collapsed overnight. With the success of the Northern Alliance, and the technology of American weaponry, Taliban forces in their little Toyota pickup trucks didn’t have much chance.

Speaking of dust, we’re studying an ancient Bible prophecy found in the Old Testament book of Daniel. God’s faithful prophet watches in living digital color as four massive beasts come storming out of the raging seas: a lion, a bear, a leopard, and then a horrible, mutant creature right out of Jurassic Park. And a common element of this nocturnal image is WINGS. The lion has wings. So does the leopard. And what the wings represent, according to scholars, is speed of conquest. Armies that travel quickly. Campaigns that bear immediate fruit.

While we’re on the topic of “quick,” the Boston Globe’s Fred Kaplan got some material from a book, Warfare in the American Age, written by a retired major general, Robert Scales. He describes a scene from the recent Afghanistan conflict, and maybe you remember stories like this one in TIME or Newsweek.

“A U.S. Special Forces soldier,” he writes, “sitting on a horse” — that’s an interesting setup — “spots a Taliban target. He types out the information on his laptop computer” — a 50-gig Pentium laptop on a horse — “and transmits the data to a Predator, a new unmanned drone flying 25,000 feet overhead. The Predator relays the data to commanders in Saudi Arabia, who direct the drone to the target for a closer look — and take a look themselves through its real-time video transmission. The commanders then send the target’s coordinates to a U.S. bomber pilot in the area, who punches the coordinates into the computer of a ‘smart bomb.’ The bomb is fired, and explodes within THREE FEET of the target.”

Sometimes ground forces are able to electronically “paint” a target, from several safe miles away, and then let the computers have at it. And how long does the whole process take? Nineteen minutes. During the Gulf War of 1991, the same procedure took three days. One reason it goes better now is that the bombs, Kaplan writes, “are a lot smarter.” In the recent conflict, our military forces used JDAMs, also known as Joint Direct Attack Munitions. They’re guided by Global Positioning Satellites, which means they never go off course. Smoke or dust or the murky darkness of a 2:00 a.m. attack order matters not. And while we’re on the subject of speed and wings, Kaplan concludes:

“The transforming aspect of this war lies not just in the improved accuracy of the weapons, but in the accelerated flow of information.”

Ironically, as you read in the Bible about ancient armies and Babylonian battalions, there are still striking similarities between warfare 500 years B.C. and what just happened in places like Mazar-e-Sharif. Those Northern Alliance forces were sleeping in caves, riding on horses, and in many cases, toting guns that dated back almost to our own Civil War. Even their legendary Kalashnikov AK-47s dated back to . . . 1947. This Boston reporter quotes a Robert Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, who explains:

“You still need troops on the ground. You need a hammer-and-anvil strategy. Air power is the hammer. Ground power is the anvil.”

Well, after 209 years of being the ruling empire of the world, ancient Medo-Persia must have felt like they got hit by both the hammer AND the anvil. The great lopsided bear of Daniel’s vision came to power in 539 B.C. and held onto the reigns of world domination until 330 B.C. Now, let’s pick up the rumblings of an impending invasion in verse 6 of Daniel 7.

“After that, I looked, and there before me was another beast, one that looked like a leopard. And on its back it had FOUR wings like those of a bird. This beast had four heads, and it was given authority to rule.”

Now, those four wings don’t belong to a Predator drone or even a B-1 bomber. But historians of all eras stand back in amazement in recounting how, with such devastating swiftness, a very young warrior named Alexander the Great took over the world. In the year 336 B.C., this kid barely out of his teens took over the throne of Macedonia. Six years later, with an army of just 35,000 men, 70 talents in petty cash, and having embarked with just one month’s supply of MREs – “meals ready to eat” – he had already conquered Persia. “The celerity [or speed] displayed by Alexander,” says one historian, “in his leadership of the Greeks has aroused the admiration of the world.” One Bible commentary notes as follows:

“The fabulous riches of the world’s greatest empire lay open to the young king, 25 years old.” Then the same writers add: “The symbolic vision represented the animal with wings added to it, not two but four, denoting SUPERLATIVE speed.” We should note that leopards are kind of speedy on their own, wings or no wings! “The symbolic vision most fittingly describes the lightning speed with which Alexander and his Macedonians in less than a decade came into possession of the greatest empire the world had yet known.” And mark this down: “There is no other example in ancient times of such rapid movements of troops on so large and successful a scale.”

We could almost add “in modern times as well.” A Newsweek military report back on September 16, 2002, outlined five possible war plans or scenarios for invading Iraq to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. One of them, dubbed “Desert Storm Two,” would involve 250,000 ground troops moving in “from multiple points.” What’s the drawback? It would take three months to get them in place. Not much “element of surprise” there. Even with cargo planes and aircraft carriers steaming to a global “hot spot,” it just takes a long time to move soldiers and matériel from Point A to Point B.

A good web site called ChristianCourier.com has a Bible report by Wayne Jackson, who reminds us that in Daniel chapter 8, this invading power moves so quickly its feet don’t even touch the ground. Then he writes:

“Alexander came to the Macedonian throne when he was but twenty years of age; by the time he was twenty-five he was virtual master of the Eastern world. At the battle of Arbela” — without the use of JDAMs, by the way — “with an army of less than 50,000 men, he defeated Darius whose army was 600,000 strong.”

C. Mervyn Maxwell, in his standout volume, God Cares, adds the tragic P.S.:

“Beginning almost from scratch Alexander united contentious Greece and conquered mighty Persia in twelve lightning years. He conquered Persia and died by the time he was only thirty-two!”

Other sources say 33. Web sites and historians go around and around on how he died — poison, fever, or drunken debauchery – but there’s a common picture of the young general, deathly ill on his bed, June 10, 323 B.C., with his military leaders coming into his room and filing past his bed one by one. According to one old story, one follower asked: “To whom do you leave the kingdom?” and he was barely able to respond: “To the best (the strongest!)”

That part, by the way, is uncannily predicted right here in the Bible. Keep in mind, this is several hundred years and two global empires BEFORE Alexander the Great even showed up, but the prophet Daniel descriptively writes:

“This [leopard] beast had four heads.”

And after that devastating deathbed scene, Greece’s empire was split up into four quadrants or territories, each under the dominion of one of Alexander’s generals. For a period of time, Alexander’s “weak-minded half brother, Philip,” tried to rule as a regent king under the generals. Then Alexander’s posthumous son, born after he died, also named Alexander. Both died in bloody internal struggles. Lysimachus took Asia Minor, Ptolemy commandeered Egypt and Palestine. Seleucus established himself as the ruler of Syria and most of eastern Asia, while Cassander seized control of Greece itself. All of this happened over the period of about 22 years, culminating, writes Maxwell, in the Battle of Ipsus, which essentially ended the efforts of Antigonus and his son Demetrius to keep the empire of Greece intact under one head.

Well, you know, we read about great, bloody wars in the year 323 B.C., and then turn on Headline News and have to fall on our knees and pray about wars impending or happening right now, March of 2003. Soldiers move faster than ever, but they’re still soldiers and they still die. One group hated another group 25 centuries ago, enough to pick up weapons and march out to the battlefield, and it’s not a whole lot better now. A web site for that Kalashnikov rifle I mentioned describes how it uses bullets that are “humane”; they explode in an enemy’s body and create such a gory chasm that death is swifter than ever. And I’ll tell you: you just log off the internet, and get down on your knees and thank the Lord in heaven that Bible prophecy predicts an end to all this blood. One day soon the kingdom of heaven will arrive, the stone cut out without hands hurtles down on its divine mission, and it brings all the wars and rumors of wars to an end.

Yes, friend, great generals come and great generals go, but the Prince of Peace is soon on His way.