Graeme Gibson’s letter (Tomorrow, war, August 9) regarding prophecies of invasion by foreign powers shows his biblical interpretation is flawed. Most books written by well-meaning “dis-pensationalists” who are waiting for the end of days scenarios are off the mark.
Any political analyst could come to the conclusion that we should spend more money on defence and be aware of the potential danger of invasion from foreign countries.
Most of the prophecies of Revelation were fulfilled in 70AD when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the inhabitants either fled or were killed or taken captive to Egypt.
The end chapters of Revelation says that there will be a little season of persecution of Christians and the Lord will return. The wars and rumours of wars that Mr Gibson appears to be talking about all happened in the 40 years between Christ’s death and the destruction of Jerusalem.
Google UK Apologetics: ‘What is Preterism?’ by James Patrick Holding.Lesley Chapman
Graeme Gibson tells us that China is gearing up “for conflict in her region” which is clearly not supportable. He wants us to spend more on defence. Graeme, if we quadrupled our defence spending, we might be able to fight off China for an extra ten minutes.
He quotes Jack Burrell as a reliable source of knowledge and tells us there were “prophesies and visions about an incursion”. I can’t find anything in Revelation about China attacking Australia, although Revelation did tell us that locusts came to earth shaped like horses with crowns of gold, faces like men, hair like women and tails like scorpions. Maybe they mistook kangaroos for big fat locusts. If the guy who wrote Revelation wasn’t licking cane toads, he was smoking some seriously good wacky weed.
The prophecies and visions were Jack Burrell’s who was an Aussie version of Nostradamus. Poor old Jack wasn’t quite sure whether the invader was going to be Russia (USSR in those days), China, Japan or Islam and he wasn’t going to hazard a guess until ‘God’ spoke to him about it. (I think Jack was just hedging his bets by naming over half the world’s population as potential enemies.)
He even said that the invasion was to halt at Byron Bay. He was happy about that because he lived at Ballina. Unfortunately, ‘God’ didn’t think it was important enough to tell him who it would be before he died, so some of us will have to make up something to be scared of.
Prophets like Jack are harmless until people start to take them seriously then, all of a sudden, we have a new religion.
Adrian Wollaston
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