I watched the “Special Investigations Unit” tonight on the CNN - Christiane Amanpour’s piece “Ahmadinejad: Soldier of God”, she interviewed an imam (or some other religious functionary) at a place called the “Bright Future Institute”, a Shi’a think-tank expressly set up to divine the future arrival (or rather, revelation from his 1200-year old hiding spell) of the imam Mohammed al-Hassan Mahdi.

My question is: Could Islam, and in particular, Shi’a Islam, set the stage for the rise of the end-time final Antichrist prophesied in the Bible, along with becoming the Mystery of Iniquity — the end-time mystery religion that will deceive all but those Christians who completely trust in Christ?

Not everything lines up - given the diversity of religions in the world, it would make better sense to unify them (in the ecumenical movements which both the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI have pursued, or the efforts of ecumenist bodies such as the World Council of Churches) than to “conquer” as in the only manner allowed by fundamentalist Islam.

With some 1.2 billion adherents of Islam around the world, it is not surprising that the spiritual children of Ishmael (and physical children: the Arabs) are so numerous. The Bible tells us that God would prosper the sons of Ishmael as collateral descendants of the Patriarch Abraham, and distant relatives to Israel. Nor with numbers such as those — it is possible that within a two or three generations, that much of the world could indeed be enslaved to Islam.

Especially if the last strongholds of the former Christendom - the Western civilizations of Europe and her offspring in North America fall before the ever-increasing waves of acquiescence to Islamist agitation. Again, this is a lot of speculation on my part; there are theories which suggest that the driving forces of Wahabbist and Salafist (extremist Sunni) schools could be consumed together with a fight against the Twelver Shi’ites, or that both of them be displaced by another end-time Luciferian religion.

One of the noteworthy things that I picked up on during Amanpour’s special interview with a director at the “Bright Future Institute” was that a pre-condition for the “re”-appearance of Mahdi is that all forms of ideology, religion and government will fail. Of course, that includes (according to Ahmadinejad) a failure of Christianity and modern representative democracy. Convenient, eh? Unfortunately, with both American politics tracking the way it has been over the past few decades, and Christianity being softened up into a laughable luxury gospel of prosperity (as evidenced by the failure of the McMegachurch movement of compromise and capitulation to loving the world and the things of it)… Ahmadinejad may be speaking more to the effects of our turn away from (the True) God than we may want to hear.

Again, I’ve got to think that in light of Bible prophecy, that much of Christendom (Western Europe) and the USA really don’t have that much direct mention, aside from Scofieldist Dispensationalist interpretations supplying a “revived Roman Empire” out of the European Union:

Could it be that the scripture “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.” (2 Thessalonians 2:7) refers to the Western Powers being somehow a restraint against the global advance of radical Islam?

If indeed the USA in particular, and what remains (very little) of Christian Europe falls, then we might very well see the final Antichrist (Mahdi) and his false prophet arise out of Iran (the Biblical Persia)… or with Islam set to dominate Europe (given the Dispensationalist view)… that Europe itself could become the Islamist sea from which the Beast (Mahdi) arises.