Unleashing the Beast

T HE H ANDWRITING ON A MERICA ' S W ALL / 291

situation. With this in mind, certain key passages in Isaiah 30 take on very alarming ramifications. For our purposes, the story should really begin in Isaiah 30:8. The prophet is told, "Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever." In the Hebrew text, the phrase, "time to come" is yom acharon , literally meaning "the last day." When Bill brought this to my attention, I was reminded of when he and I were working on another project in which this Hebrew word acharon showed up. The word acharon is very interesting because it is used in other key prophetic passages which speak of the last generation (Psalms 78:4,6; 102:18) Thus, verse 8 strongly infers that the message Isaiah was to receive from God contains a message for the last day —this generation. As the chapter continues, God accuses Israel of trusting in people and idols rather than in Him. They had taken to themselves strange gods, and had told their spiritual teachers to "prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things" (Isaiah 30:10). In other words, Israel succumbed to the same temptation that Paul predicted would seduce a portion of the end-time church: "For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears" (2 Timothy 4:3). Longsuffering though He may be, God finally allowed adversity to overtake Israel, no doubt, so that they would acknowledge their sins and turn back to Him. After adversity had visited them, we learn that they turned away