Israel, Iran and Bible prophecy of the end times

After Israel’s recent bombing of Iran, a friend told me about a preacher who asserted that Russia might be the Gog and Magog of the Book of Ezekiel, that Iran might be one of the hostile nations pictured by the prophets, and that all of this just might be pointing toward the imminence of the literal apocalypse.

“Are we going to do this again?” my friend said.

By “this,” he meant the tying of prophecy charts to contemporary geopolitical events in ways that leave audiences hyped up or terrified and then exhausted and even cynical.