By Walid Shoebat
After Saudi Arabia executed 47 men convicted of terror-related offences, including Nimr Al Nimr, an Ayatullah dissident Shia cleric, three strongest reactions came from Iraq’s former prime minister Nouri Al Maliki who declared Al Nimr’s death would “topple the Saudi regime” and Hizbollah promising an “assassination” while Iran’s Supreme Leader warned Saudi’s rulers would face “the divine hand of revenge”.
What is perhaps unconsidered in the West is that the Prophet Muhammad’s own grandson, al-Husayn bin ‘Ali, was killed in the course of defying such a regime seeing this to mimmic their main bone of contention on the Sunni Shiite divide when their messiah was killed.
While Shiites constitute 21-35% of the Muslim world, one needs to consider that by large, they surround Arabia, the mother of oil exports. Saudi has a huge number of Shiites in its own country, Iraq next door is also ruled by Shiites and all the way to Iran and Yemen to the south has the Shiite Houthis who are also hungry for Saudi blood.
Don’t forget to notice the branches “similar to Shiites” in Turkey, the light green
Saudis are terrified about the U.S. Iran deal. The United States aiding Saudi Arabia is no more. The threat environment has changed dramatically where the Gulf states are facing a three-front war from chaos in Syria and Iraq, violence that is headline news in every household in the Gulf and on Saudi Arabia’s southern border with Yemen linked to Iran and on Egypt’s border with Libya, ISIS and in the Red Sea, Iranian leadership looming control of navigation through international Bab al-Mandab as what is going on with the Strait of Hormuz in the east.
All this caused Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to realize that a noose is getting tighter and have caused them to develop a new aggressive posture since the U.S. is pulling back from the region and that U.S. relations with Iran are warming up.
But this is not the whole picture. The bigger picture is that all high oil prices have been dashed. It is here that we need to pay close attention to two prophetic commodities: the oil and the wheat in Revelation 6:6, but first, a short history ‘for dummies’ of the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran:
Now that you know the dummy-version of this history on the contention between Iran and Saudi Arabia, watch this to understand how the prophecy is being fulfilled, how oil plays a major role, and how this will unfold globally. George Friedman is an analyst worth his salt when it comes to geopolitical predictions:
To explain this from a prophetic perspective, Arabia uses her “wine of fornication”, last year we wrote: “Saudi Arabia which over a billion Muslims worship towards its direction for prayers began its war using oil to control both Russia and Iran. This war will not hurt the U.S. much, but will cause Mecca’s destruction. How all this will unfold must be explained from all angles, biblical, Islamic, economic and demographic to see how Iran will eventually pull the Saudi rug right from under her.”
All this relates to Revelation:
“A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine!” (Revelation 6:6)
It is these little hints that pack tremendous meaning for the signs of the times that we live where wheat prices will increase while this ‘oil’ and ‘wine’ is not harmed and is found in abundance.
The wine and oil here is petroleum which I will explain later. With Grain consumption which directly supplies nearly half of our calories, today roughly 40% of the world grain harvest comes from irrigated land. The worst curse of falling water tables and the shrinkage of irrigated agriculture is in Saudi Arabia, a country as water-poor as it is oil-rich. The Saudis announced in early 2008 that, with their aquifers largely depleted and have reduced wheat planting by one-eighth each year and by 2016 production will completely end.
2016 is now and in Saudi Arabia, wheat has already depleted to zero while oil has increased production.
What John was telling us is simple: when the wheat is scarce and the oil is plenty, look out, the curse on Babylon (Arabia) is near.
Regarding this wine and oil, Gill’s exposition renders the verse saying “…oil and wine, which may be spared, and men can live without; but upon the necessities of life, particularly bread … ” it is the other way around. Jamieson-Fausset-Brown “the oil and wine were to be spared …”
In other words, biblical interpreters unanimously agree on one crucial sign of the times is that bread will skyrocket, while this mysterious oil that is also equated with wine will be abundant. The latter will keep its price low.
If what is meant here is oil, as in olive-oil, and wine as in grape-wine, does it make any sense that wheat prices will soar while the price of grapes to make wine and the price of olives to make olive oil crash?
Maybe. This will mean that “when the Lamb opened the third seal” to announce this “black horse, its rider was holding a pair of scales” he simply announces a lightweight famine where only wheat is harmed but not oil and grapes. This puzzled many interpreters.
One could argue that if it is severe famine of shortage of wheat, it is also severe famine of shortage of grapes and olives, unless of course, this “wine” and “oil” is a product not known at the time John wrote his prophecy. Interpreters like Gill wrote his interpretation of a complete reverse between the price of wheat and oil when petroleum was of no use.
For my theory to be correct, as to equating this ‘oil’ and ‘wine’ with petroleum, I would need to glean the Scriptures for more biblical references to find such support.
And when we do this, we find ample evidence in Joel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah when they spoke particularly of the oil, not olive oil, but the petroleum type, linking it to Babylon, while Joel prounonces judgments using such allegory during the judgment of the nations because they “traded a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl for wine that they may drink” (Joel 3:1-3).
Did the nations trade the saints for booze? No.
Joel tells us that the saints are sold out for the sake of two: a “harlot” and “wine” which John says that she “the harlot” intoxicated the nations with her wine and is the reasons for the persecution of the saints.
So why does Joel combine both the “harlot” and her “wine” just as John did, in a single theme, where this happens “at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem” (Joel 3:1) and this is when Arabia’s oil soared and led the nations captive.
And at some point in time, the famine is even lifted, when the angel “coming up from the east” calls “the four angels who had been given power to harm the land and the sea” and orders them: “Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.”
It is perhaps then when such an abundance of oil and the refrain of harming it will also come to an end. And it is then that we find Isaiah predicting the literal destruction of Arabia’s oil: “And the streams of Edom shall be turned to pitch [Hebrew Zepheth/Petroleum] and her soil to sulphur; Her land shall become burning pitch; Night and day it shall not be quenched and its smoke shall go up forever …” (Isaiah 34:9-10).
Here the text is not speaking of grapes or olives, but literal “pitch” (petroleum), and Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest reserves of this curse. Israel a producer of food at this time will gain while Arabia a producer of solely oil will plummet into utter destruction. Israel after all, is invaded for its food (see Ezekiel 38) and “Edom” in Isaiah 34:9, is no doubt Arabia, as Ezekiel confirms it to be “Teman” and “Dedan”:
“I will stretch out my hand [that is Christ Himself] against Edom and cut off from it humans and animals, and I will make it desolate; from Teman to Dedan they shall fall by the sword”. (Ezekiel 25:13)
Isaiah even lumps “Kedar” (Isaiah 21:16) “Dumah” (Isaiah 21:11) and “Arabia” (Isaiah 21:13) in his theme of “Babylon is fallen is fallen” (see Isaiah 21:9, Revelation 18:1-2 and Revelation 14:8) and they will fall by the sword of “Elam”, that is Iran (Isaiah 21).
WHY ARABIA
Most ignore that God is the best mathematician and it is Saudi Arabia that is the causer of more death of Christians than any other entity from the dawn of time by her production of two; Islam and Oil.
The biblical “pitch” (oil) was the means that Babel was built and Arabia is a main provider of an allegoric “wine” that intoxicates the nations (Revelation 17:2). Both John and Isaiah tell us that this “harlot” exists geographically in a “desert” region surrounded by seas (Isaiah 21:1), while the “kings of the earth” figuratively commit adultery with her in order to obtain her “wine” in exchange for betraying God’s people.
How could this be “grape wine” or booze, when Arabia has no such production? And what desert “wine” intoxicates the earth, and causes this desert region to “live in luxury” and grow rich? What false religion teaches that the blood of saints should be shed? What desert nation today is the geographical womb from which this false harlot religion was birthed riding all these powerful nations like the bear (Iran) and Turkey (the Leopard) who will ultimately get off her back and come for her destruction?
There is no doubt that the prophets intended oil and they literally mentioned it. But the sign of the end is that oil prices will plummet (which we are beginning to see happen) and the kings of the earth will do away with her intoxicating wine.
Islam caused so many nations throughout history to butcher millions upon millions of Christians. Islam and oil are the only two that Saudi Arabia produces. Few even realize that historically, at the time of Christ, Arabia’s harlot was Salome during Christ’s first coming where she lured and will lure every Herod to decapitate, not just John the Baptist, but every Baptist. What few know is that according to Josephus, John the Baptist was not beheaded in Jordan but in Arabia. This is significant for it catapults a meaning in our time when Antichrist seeks the head of Christians who refuse to bow to “the image of the beast” at Mecca where an asteroid like the Black Stone qualifies as an “image” (see Acts 19:35).
Arabia will be abandoned including its Wahhabist ideology. Even the rising Antichrist, Erdogan of Turkey, did not support Saudi Arabia’s latest beheading of Shiite Nimr Al-Nimr and called Iran “friend”. Sufi Islam, which Erdogan adheres to believes that the center of prayer at some point in time will be towards the Mahdi which Erdogan desires to do and is why he entered the Kaaba last week. Even Erdogan’s favorite Muslim scholar, Jalal al-Din Rumi, by far the most prestigious sufi scholar in Islam’s entire history, explained how Mecca, the Kiblah of Islam (Kiblah is the ‘direction of prayer’) will be no more the direction of prayers to Muslims and instead it will be the Mahdi himself:
the Light of God to face the wall of the prayer niche (direction of prayer) has assuredly turned his back on Mecca, since God’s Light is the soul of the Kiblah [the Kaaba] (Rumi, Service done for God is proof of divine favor, in The Complete Discourses of Jalal al-Din Rumi, discourse 3, p. 17, ed. Louis Rogers)
The Mahdi will become “God’s light”. Every time the Sufi practices Fana, becoming the essence of Allah, a theology rejected by the Wahhabists, that the leader (Mahdi) becomes the centre of worship. In order for this Muslim leader to become the Kiblah (centre of prayer), this Mahdi-Caliph must declare that he is the light of God, and Muslims from all over the world will pray towards him instead; he will become the new Kiblah, with the multitudes of Muslims praying to his direction.
How all this will come to pass must first begin with the Shiite preference of Karbala over Mecca which it will ultimately cause the destruction of the Kaaba. According to Shiite theology, Allah tells Mecca “Don’t try to prevail over Karbala in importance (as that is not possible). Else I will be displeased with you and throw you in Hell.’ (Kaamil al-Ziarat, p.267, tradition 13, narrating from Imam Ja’far al-Al-Sadiq also see here)
And if the devil has it all figured out, the saint should be as wise as the serpent.
HOW SAUDI ARABIA BLACKMAILS THE WORLD AND HOW THIS IS ENDING
With about 20 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and producing between 10 and 13 percent of the global oil usage, Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading oil producer ahead of the U.S., China, Iran and Canada.
Perhaps more importantly, with its developed and easily accessible oil fields, Saudi Arabia has some of the lowest “lifting costs” in the world. Some estimate that it only costs the Saudis less than $5 to extract a barrel of oil from its fields. This is stark contrast to the much higher costs in rival countries and offshore and of shale producers. This permits the Saudis to withstand a protracted price slump far easier than other countries. The Saudis can use this ability as a weapon to achieve its strategic ends.
While the current dip in energy prices clearly does hurt Saudi Arabia, it thinks that it hurts her enemies far more, particularly Iran and Russia, which has been a key enabler of Iranian power and an international pariah on its own. Putting pressure on Russia has also become a key strategic interest of Washington’s politics, unless of course, Donald Trump becomes president, he would care more about Shale-oil than hurting Russia. Petroleum sales are 50% of Russia’s income, and are also central for Iran and Iraq.
The Saudis are using cheap oil to wreck Iran’s economy including Russia and discourage American energy exploration. The latter doesn’t seem to be working too well, but the former sure is.
The Saudi approach is clever because it devalues Iranian exports. Riyadh is “flooding the market,” a technique it has used in the past, of pumping a lot of oil even in the face of weakening market demand, thus driving the price down. Saudi Arabia is annoyed at Russia over Moscow’s support for the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus which supports the US in the latter’s annoyance with Russia over Ukraine. Saudi is also perpetually annoyed with Iran, its Shiite rival that also supports al-Assad and the civilian nuclear enrichment program of which it fears for its dual-use, weapons potential. And Saudi Arabia is threatened by the rise of hydraulic fracturing as a way to produce petroleum, which detracts from the centrality of the vast Saudi reserves, the very element which made her sleep at night thinking that she has no end.
While Arabia thinks this tactic works, all this has a price, Saudi Arabia is ticking off not only Russia, Iraq, Iran and Oman, over the slump in oil prices, but also its ally, the U.S. and all this will signal to these nations that allowing Iran to end Saudi Arabia is the solution to all their trouble.
Mecca’s method to hold the world hostage, was used since the first oil shocks following the 1973 Middle East War, the Saudis have understood the role they can play in regional and world affairs by turning the taps on and off and with Islam, the Haj being a pillar of Islam, it rules and rides the region.
But the latest Saudi Arabia solar power project is part of a massive $US100 billion investment in solar energy. Arabia is worried. The Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics counts 800 policies and laws aimed at curbing emissions worldwide. Even the efforts of the environmentalists will aid in ending Arabia’s control. People are driving more energy efficiency cars. Many countries no longer have any oil fired electric generating facilities. The US Department of Energy is funding a project by the universities of Michigan, Stanford, and Chicago, in concert with the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories to work of alternative energy. The Japan Science and Technology Agency has its own project in Osaka. South Korea and China are mobilising their research centers. A regulatory squeeze is quickly changing the rules of global energy. Goldman Sachs expects ‘grid-connected vehicles’ to capture 22pc of the global market within a decade. A team of Cambridge chemists says it has cracked the technology of a lithium-air battery with 90pc efficiency, able to power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge. It promises to cut costs by four-fifths, and could be on the road within a decade. The oil sheikhs are seeing the renewable writing on the wall and with Persia, we can see a re-fulfillment of “mini mini tekel upharsin” (Dan 9:25) where persia defeats Babylon which in this case is Arabia.
The Saudi Arabia’s poker game is loosing her lovers, recently, as the US upped its production, it would have been reasonable to assume that Saudi would have correspondingly cut surplus supply to maintain a healthy balance sheet. But instead Mecca has done the opposite fulfilling Scripture as not to “harm the oil and the wine”.
From Mecca, the world looks like a grim place, and the Saudis have a host of concerns that they feel are not being addressed adequately, either by their allies in the West or by their partners in the region, her end is near and her doom is certain. Many experts talk of a Cold War between Saudi and Iran, where on every major issue of regional concern an Iranian gain is viewed by the Saudis as a loss, and for the House of Al Saud alarm bells are ringing. In their view the US has effectively caved in, and allowed Iran off the hook.
The Iranians were not supposed to be allowed any domestic uranium enrichment capacity, let alone get paid $7bn for the privilege. We have been predicting Iran’s success in uranium enrichment for over a decade now, while all other predictions of Israel or U.S. military strikes to end Iran’s nuclear are proven false. Today all one has to do, to see how accurate Isaiah, John, Ezekiel and Joel were, is to view the outcry by Iran to destroy Arabia from the streets of Tehran. The Shiites, the lovers of Ali, Muhammad’s nephew are screaming out. “Ali is the vicar of Allah” one song goes which permeates the language of the streets in Tehran and Iraq. “We will defeat our opponent and we will uproot that evil state”–that is Saudi Arabia. “The anger of Ali is exploding, Allahu Akbar, we came to renew Khaybar, we have pin-pointed our target”. This time, the “Khaybar, Khaybar O Jews” have transferred to Al-Saud who are suspected to have Jewish bloodlines. This target is Saudi Arabia. Khaybar is Saudi Arabia. It is the move of Elam to annihilate Arabia as predicted by the ancient Jewish prophet Isaiah:
“The burden against Dumah” (Isaiah 21:11)
“The burden against Arabia” (Isaiah 21:13)
“All the glory of Kedar will fail” (Isaiah 21:16)
How could all these so-called ‘prophecy experts’ miss this, where a simple Middle eastern shepherd can read it plainly? These are all in Arabia, which is destroyed by Iran “Elam” (Isaiah 21:2). So crucial is this prophecy that Isaiah levels a prophetic oracle against it calling Arabia “Babylon” using the same announcement in Revelation 18:1-2 and Revelation 14:8: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen”.
So how long can this harlot, Saudi Arabia, keep her game up? Realistically a few months, but if the price of oil keeps falling (which it will) there are no strategies left. Eventually she will pay the price for the Baptist St. John the Revelator, for His blood, which still cries out through Smerna and the Armenians who are in heaven. God will even direct the very people whom she shed their blood to shed her blood and dash her little ones against the rocks:
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks. (Psalms 137-8-9)
One need to ask: why is Saudi Arabia having recent mega-arms purchases? Saudi Arabia is planning to purchase 10 billion worth of armored vehicles, a deal that was struck when Erdogan visited Mecca last week. The US has cleared a sale of more than 19,000 smart bombs for Saudi Arabia, a week after key allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) raised concerns over an excuse of dwindling supplies of weapons.
The ‘wheat’ and the ‘wine’ will play significant factors in end times events. Again, the price of wheat is addressed in Revelation 6:6 “a quart of wheat for a denarius”. A silver denarius per quart of wheat is written there for a reason. In New Testament times, the silver coin weight was 3.65 grams. A U.S. mint quarter has 5.625 grams of silver. If we take a measure of wheat to be a quart (32 ounces) and the price of wheat at an average of $332 per 2000 pounds (metric ton) which is 32 cents a quart in today’s prices, then a silver denarius (3.65 grams) is at $3.24. This would mean that the price of bread will increase to 10 fold.
“And he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.” Scales or balances are the emblems of justice or equity (compare Job 31:6; Psalm 62:9; Proverbs 11:1;Proverbs 16:11); and when joined with symbols that denote the sale of grain and fruit by weight, become the symbol of scarcity. Thus, “bread by weight” Leviticus 26:26 denotes scarcity. So in Ezekiel 4:16, “And they shall eat bread by weight.” The use of balances here as a symbol would signify that something was to be accurately and carefully weighed out.”
This gives us clues on what to expect in the coming years. The Euphrates in Iraq will see a similar cataclysmic event as in the Nile. The Turkish Anatolia Project (GAP) is an ambitious development project meant to control, sustain, and distribute the water resources of this river basin from within Turkey, the nation which serves as the source of 88% of the Euphrates’s water and 43% of the Tigris River (Lupu 2002). The Nile and the Euphrates, both are in the news and both are in the Bible; the Nile drying in Egypt and the Euphrates drying up in Iraq. It becomes clear then that a major drought while it effects the world, it concentrates primarily in the Muslim world. Findings of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) sponsored by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre, notes that between 2003 and 2009, the Tigris-Euphrates basin comprising Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and western Iran “lost groundwater faster than any other place in the world except northern India”.
Infertile Crescent: Waters run dry in Iraqi marshes
What Saudi Arabia is not projecting is that to get wheat from major producing nations which in the future can only sustain themselves, the issue becomes a skyrocket wheat prices. In Mexico the demand for water is outstripping supply. In the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by six feet or more a year. In the north-western wheat-growing state of Sonora, farmers once pumped water from the Hermosillo aquifer at a depth of 40 feet and today they pump it from over 400 feet.
Aquifer depletion now also threatens harvests in the big three grain producers – China, India and the US – that together produce half of the world’s grain where in China a whopping four-fifths of China’s grain harvest comes from irrigated land from the Yellow and Yangtze rivers while in India, three-fifths of its grain is irrigated, mostly with groundwater. For the US, only one-fifth of the harvest is from irrigated land. The bulk of the grain crop is rain-fed, produced in the highly productive Midwestern Corn Belt where there is little or no irrigation.
Syria’s grain production dropped a whopping 32% and Yemen 50% while Pakistan is already one of the most water-stressed countries in the world while Saudi Arabia’s grain production is now 0%.
It is no wonder, that with the Muslim world, a society that is already conspiracy theory driven, that Israel will be blamed (see Ezekiel 38:12) for their stravation which is eminent: “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine!” (Revelation 6:6). This is all linked to Revelation 16:
“And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared,” (Revelation 16:10).
A hungry Muslim world can easily muster this number if you consider Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan uniting with Turkey Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistanand, even Indonesia east of the Euphrates with several kings, this is becoming more feasible, especially with the rise of a Caliphate in Turkey.
What John was telling us is simple: when the wheat is scarce and the oil is plenty, look out, the curse on Babylon (Arabia) is near.
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