There is a prophecy sitting in the pages of your Bible that the Dispensational Industrial Complex has spent a century making sure you never find. It names your ancestors, explains your history, and glorifies your God. And those threatened by it are the ones who have built an entire theology on the assumption that only one nation ever mattered to God.
In March of 2004, I was in Iraq on a U.S. State Department visa to teach American government to universities in Kurdistan. We had planned to drive in from Jordan on the same route they took in the movie War Dogs, through the infamous “Triangle of Death,” but a convoy had just been attacked on that route, so at the last minute we flew into Baghdad and drove north to Erbil instead. But the State Dept visa and the teaching gig were a cover. I went to share Jesus and rendezvoused with a missionary who had been undercover during Saddam’s reign of terror for more than a decade, and days later, I found myself near Turkey, high in the Zagros Mountains, because my missionary guide said there was someone I had to meet.
The mud huts looked ancient, and some of them were. The Citadel of Erbil is the oldest continually inhabited structure in the world, and the mountain homes in the Zagros were built of the same mud-brick construction that has survived since the decades immediately following the Flood, when the Sons of Noah descended from Mt. Ararat. The only difference in appearance is that when I visited, they all had satellite dishes. The man we traveled up a mountain to see was blind since birth and paralyzed from the neck down. The village was Chaldean Catholic, but affiliations are practically meaningless that far away from “regular civilization,” and he believed in Jesus. The impressive feat, which the missionary wanted us to see, is that despite being blind, he had the entire Bible memorized, from start to finish, because his mother read it to him every day of his life, and he enjoyed showing it off. It was, to this day, the most impressive intellectual feat I’ve ever seen.
Here I was, a graduate student, university instructor, and pastor from the greatest nation in the world, being absolutely humbled by a blind, paralyzed man who God Almighty had squirreled away for Himself a few miles away from where the ark had come to rest, whose village had been quietly passing the gospel down from generation to generation, snuggled between two authoritarian Islamic regimes, spared by nothing but God’s providence and the fact regimes have no beef so long as they get their taxes. Incredible. But what fascinated me, equally to all that, was the passage he wanted to recite.
"In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will serve with the Assyrians. In that day Israel will be one of three with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the land, whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, 'Blessed is Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My inheritance” (Isaiah 19:23-25).
“That’s about us,” he said, with a glowing smile from ear to ear and nary a tooth in his head, like a gummy smile from a toothless, half-dressed, immobile mummy, speaking in some magical tongue I couldn’t understand with my interpreter. He exulted in the fact that the Bible prophesied that God could call his people “the work of my hands.”
The interpreter smiled and said, “He likes how nobody knows that,” speaking of the other missionaries who had gone up the mountain to see him, because we weren’t the first.
Darn right, nobody knows that. Nobody knows that because American Christianity has been so conditioned to not know or not care about prophesies that don’t relate to ethnic Jews, that it’s completely lost to us that God has plans for every nation under the sun. It’s one thing to argue that the Bible centers its redemptive history on the family lineage of Christ, and therefore, on the ethnic Jews. But it’s an altogether different thing to be so blinded by the “Jew Goggles” as to not know that other such prophecies exist. And I’m here to tell you that this man’s fascination with finding himself in the Sacred Text as a forethought of God is a blessing that ought to be better enjoyed by the sons of Japheth.
If you’re reading this and you are American, British, Russian, Indian, African, Asian, or anything in between, God has plans not only for you, but for your people. Jews do not have a monopoly on Biblical prophecy, and neither have they cornered the market on God’s blessings. In fact, my blind, paralyzed friend is infinitely more a Son of Abraham than any unbelieving Jew who has ever lived. But beyond that, the Bible prophesied of his nation, and yours, too.
A GOD OF NATIONS
Dispensationalists would have you believe that only one race matters. Racial Gnostics would have you believe that no races exist, or if they do, there’s one, and it’s the Race of Man. Some might stretch it to two: the Race of Adam and the Race of Christ. And those make fine points in an argument against Critical Theorists, but the problem is that it’s dumb. It is a matter of Biblical fact that races - as God defines “ethnos” - exist, because the Table of Nations in the Book of Genesis gives us a diagram of their development, and they’re still around in the End Times of Revelation. I know, all that work to craft a perfectly good argument to defeat the Cultural Marxists, and it turns out to be unbiblical, but that’s just how it goes sometimes, and you have to adjust your arguments to accord with sound doctrine. And the fact is, God has a lot to say about those nations.
Egypt is called “My people” by God Himself in Isaiah 19:25. Assyria, the ancient empire centered in what is now northern Iraq, is called “the work of My hands” in the same verse. Elam, the ancient nation corresponding to southwestern Iran, receives a promise of restoration in Jeremiah 49:39, where God declares, “I will restore the fortunes of Elam in the latter days.” Moab, despite its judgment, receives a promise of future restoration in Jeremiah 48:47, where God says, “I will restore the fortunes of Moab in the latter days.” Ammon receives the identical promise in Jeremiah 49:6, word for word. Ethiopia appears in Psalm 68:31 with a remarkable eschatological promise: “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God.” Greece, Persia, Arabia, Tyre, Lebanon, Sidon, Syria, Edom, Jordan, Gog and Magog, and Gaza are all nations prophesied of in the Scripture, most of them favorably, and God promises to save and redeem them. And the Table of Nations demonstrates that God has unique plans for every unique people He created.
And whatever you do, do NOT tell Dispensationalists that God has promised the land of Israel to the nations in Isaiah 2:2-3 and Micah 4:1-2. Do not tell them that Isaiah 56:6-7 promises that foreigners who join themselves to the Lord will be brought to Zion, or that Isaiah 65:9 declares that God's elect from all over the world shall inherit the Promised Land, and that modern Israel will one day belong to Gentile Christians. Don’t mention that Psalm 2:8 shows God expanding the Promised Land from a strip of Mediterranean coastline to the entire earth, not for Jews, but for the followers of Jesus exclusively. They’ll have a heart attack.
Jews do not have a monopoly on biblical prophecy. They never did. The Dispensationalist prophecy chart leaves that impression because it was built around a theological commitment, not a reading of the Text, and that commitment is that ethnic Israel is the hinge upon which the door of all prophecy turns. Everything else gets filed under background noise. When you build your entire prophetic framework around finding Jews in every passage, you develop a kind of exegetical tunnel vision that filters out seventy nations’ worth of prophetic material, including the prophecy that names the ancestors of the people sitting in your own pew.
WHY THE CRITICS ARE FREAKING OUT
The first Japheth article disturbed people, and it reveals the “Jew Goggles” problem. The argument was simple. Noah prophesied a blessing over Japheth. Genesis 10 tells us who Japheth’s descendants became. The Jewish commentary tradition from Josephus and other Jewish historians, and the Protestant commentary tradition from the Church Fathers to Calvin onward, both identified those descendants as the European peoples without serious controversy. History confirms that the blessing was delivered on a civilizational scale without parallel in the record of human achievement. That argument produced reactions ranging from nervous discomfort to outright accusation of “rrrRACISM!”, and the accusations followed a really consistent pattern.
Critics reached immediately for the language of racial ideology and ethnic exceptionalism, as though reading Genesis 9 and Genesis 10 together and following where they lead constitutes a thought crime. It didn’t matter that the article, heck, even the subtitle, denied claims of ethnic superiority. It claimed European civilizational superiority, placed the credit on God’s fulfillment of prophecy, according to the divine council of its own will, rather than on ethnicity, and credited the gospel as the mechanism God used to accomplish that prophetic fulfillment. If you had a problem with that, the problem is prophetic Jew Goggles, in which you bristle at the idea that God has glorious plans for other nations, which are fulfilled in the Great Commission. That’s sad, because it steals from God His glory as the Architect of the Ages who declares the end from the beginning, and minimizes the full impact of the Gospel.
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The attitude of others was, “What you said was true, but why say it?” Apparently, they felt that it’s controversial, or perhaps could be used by White Supremacist Neo-Nazis to push Aryan racial theory or something. But we said it because the Bible says it, and we exult in what the Bible says. It is glorious and good.
WHAT THE ARTICLE SAID AND WHAT IT DID NOT SAY
Several specific objections were raised against the Japheth article, and each one rests on a misreading serious enough to warrant a direct response.
The first objection imported the term “white people” into an article that never used it. Granted, some who tweeted the article used the term, and we can hardly blame them. Certainly, the terms are very correlational, but not identical, and the article didn’t use it. The article used “European” and then named the specific people groups that Josephus and the biblical text identify as Japheth’s descendants. To be clear, we are talking about, in modern terms, the Celtic stock of France and Western Europe, the Scythians, the nomadic people of the Eurasian steppe, the Iranians, the Greeks, the Spanish (and broader Iberian peoples), some in modern Turkey, the Muscovites and Russians, Bulgarians and the broader Balkan world, the Germanic peoples, the Welsh, and one more group, according to John Gill, the Ashkenazi.
Three of these - Grecians, the Turks, and the Persians- are believed by many to be modern Ashkenazi, when in Turkey circa 200BC, Greeks and Persians, along with certain Turks, converted to Judaism and later migrated to Eastern Europe. That theory aside, characterizing Japheth as “white people” is not wrong, per se, but it’s a simplification, and it’s not exhaustive of who these people became. But regardless, it was enough for the Protestant Reformers to look at Noah’s prophecy about Japheth and credibly allege that this explains the reason for European dominance on the world stage. Anyone who denies this out of hand is doing it for reflexive instinct because they’re so used to not focusing on prophecies not dealing with ethnic Jews, they presume those prophecies to be imaginary or contrived.
The second objection assumed that acknowledging God blessed a people presupposes a claim that those people deserved it. That assumption was never in the article, and inserting it is eisegesis applied to a polemical argument rather than a biblical text, but the error is the same either way. The article stated explicitly, in terms clear enough that no honest reader could have missed them, that the greatness of what Japheth’s descendants built was not racial or ethnic in its origin but theological and providential. The blessing was declared prophetically before Europeans existed as a civilization. It was tied to Gospel fulfillment, not bloodline merit. Importing the assumption that speaking of God’s blessing on a people implies a claim of their worthiness is a race theory tenet, and it belongs to the critics, not to the argument they are criticizing.
It was even said that our argument, which was less of an argument and more of just telling you what the Bible clearly says, was “bizarre” for Calvinists to believe, on account of Reformed Theology denying meritorious salvation. But the article did exactly the opposite. If Europeans took to the gospel like a duck to water because God so willed it, to fulfill Noah’s prophecy, then the reason clearly wasn’t innate biological compatibility with the gospel. It placed all credit on God’s prophetic fulfillment, not ethnic superiority. In this view, our position is kryptonite to any claim of purely biological superiority, because the credit is being given to the fulfillment of a prophecy before Europeans ever existed.
Calvinist criticism of our article was itself bizarre, becuase John Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis 10, wrote that “according to the division of the earth into three great portions, Europe, Asia, and Africa, speaking generally, Japheth was the progenitor of the Europeans, Shem of the Asiatics, and Ham of the Africans.” Calvin did not consider this observation controversial. He considered it a straightforward reading of the Table of Nations. We also quoted Albert Barnes, Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown, as well as other Protestant scholars, who all said the same. We could do a whole other article on Reformed thinkers who pointed to Noah’s prophecy to Japheth for the reason of European dominance of the world stage. The fact that this is controversial, especially to Reformed people, shows you the real and substantial damage that “Judeo-Christianity” has done to American Christianity.
The third objection claimed that the article advanced an argument of ethnic supremacy by noting European civilizational dominance. European dominance is not a claim. It is a census. By any honest accounting of law, science, medicine, philosophy, institutional governance, missionary expansion, and technological development, the civilizational record of Japheth’s descendants stands without a serious competitor for the title. The article noted that record and pointed to its prophetic source. Critics who find that observation offensive are not disagreeing with a racial argument. They are disagreeing with Noah, and they are welcome to take it up with him in the resurrection.
Some even suggested that pointing out European hegemony in the world is “boasting against the branches” or some kind of sin. Acknowledging facts has never been, is not now, and never will be a sin.
The West had better figure out, and figure it out right now, that the cause of our civilization’s dominance is becuase of F.I.RE. The FUEL for Europe’s dominance is the Gospel; the INSTRUMENT for European dominance is the Church. The ROOT of European dominance is God’s prophecy to Japheth through Noah, and the ENGINE of European dominance is our submission to Christ as King.
THIS IS NOT HIGHLANDER
The deepest confusion in the critical response is the assumption that identifying a prophetic blessing on European peoples requires claiming that Europeans are the only prophetically blessed people, or the most blessed, or the exclusively chosen of God. Nobody said that. Nobody implied it. The article did not say it, and the theology behind it does not require it. There can be only one is a movie premise, not a hermeneutical principle, and the sooner that confusion is cleared away, the more productive this conversation becomes.
God addressed the nations. All of them. The blind man on the mountain knew Isaiah 19 because his people are in Isaiah 19, and he found it glorious that God had named them. That response is exactly right, and it is available to every nation under heaven, because every nation under heaven appears somewhere in the prophetic canon. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 catalogs 70 nations and traces where each went. Revelation 21:24-26 shows the nations bringing their glory into the New Jerusalem, which means nationhood itself survives into the age to come and is redeemed rather than erased.
This is the point the critics miss when they reach for the language of ethnic exceptionalism. The argument is not that Europeans are the most special nation above all other nations. The argument is that Europeans are a nation, that nations are real, that God made them and named them and prophesied over them, and that the sons of Japheth have as much right to find themselves in the Sacred Text as anyone else. Acknowledging God’s providential role in Europe’s greatness as prophetic fulfillment precludes any claim of meritorious blessing. It was God’s doing.
RACIAL GNOSTICISM AND THE SPIRITUAL MELTING POT
There is a strain of thinking in the broader Christian Nationalist debate that treats nationhood, ethnicity, and the distinctions between peoples as embarrassing artifacts of the Fall rather than features of God’s design. The nations, on this view, are a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be honored, and the Gospel’s work is to dissolve them into a universal spiritual community where the old distinctions no longer apply.
God made from one man every nation of mankind, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their dwelling place. God set the boundaries. God determined the times. The nations are not an accident or a curse. They are a design feature of creation that God built into the human story from the Table of Nations forward and carries all the way into the New Jerusalem.
The insistence that nations, ethnicities, and people groups have no real theological significance, that they are social constructs to be deconstructed rather than God-ordained realities to be honored, is a form of what might fairly be called Racial Gnosticism, the idea that the material and ethnic particularity of human beings is spiritually irrelevant or embarrassing, and that true Christianity floats free of such earthly categories. Scripture disagrees from Genesis to Revelation.
OUR ARGUMENT IS THE ANTIDOTE, NOT THE POISON
Without a prophetic explanation for European civilizational dominance, the available explanations are limited and ugly. Perhaps Europeans prospered because they are genetically superior. Perhaps Europeans prospered because God has ethnic favoritism for certain bloodlines. Perhaps Europeans prospered because they were smarter or wiser or more virtuous than the peoples they surpassed. All of those explanations are, in fact, biological supremacy claims, and all of them are wrong, and the Japheth prophecy is what makes them wrong. The enlargement was declared before Europeans existed as a civilization, before they had built anything worth building, before they were sacrificing to Odin in sacred groves and settling disputes with blood feuds. The blessing was not a reward for virtue. It was a prophetic declaration tied to Gospel fulfillment, announced at the foot of Ararat by a man who had never heard of the Anglo-Saxons, and delivered across centuries by a God whose purposes do not track with human impressiveness.
The Calvinist critics who find the Japheth argument uncomfortable would do well to recognize that their discomfort points in the wrong direction. The argument that God enlarged Japheth not because of anything in Japheth but because He said He would is the most Calvinist argument available on this subject. It glorifies God’s sovereignty. It excludes human merit. It traces the greatness of a civilization not to the quality of its people but to the faithfulness of God to a promise He made before their ancestors had names. Resisting that argument because it sounds like ethnic pride is not the Reformed position. It is the position of a man so conditioned by a century of Dispensational Israel-centeredness that he cannot recognize a straightforward fulfillment of biblical prophecy when it involves people who look like him, because he has been trained his whole Christian life to expect that kind of language to be reserved for Nazis and not Baptists who know their Bible.
I had mentioned earlier that the blind, paralyzed man in the mountains of Northern Iraq “exulted” in the fact that the Bible prophesied of his people. That’s not a word we use much anymore, but it means, “to rejoice triumphantly or celebrate with intense joy, usually in a victorious, proud, or emotionally overflowing way.” The accusation toward The Prophecy of Japheth I is that it is “ethnic boasting.” But Psalm 68:3 says, “But the righteous shall be glad; they shall exult before God.” It is good and proper to exult in what God has done to call for Himself an elect out of every tribe, tongue, and nation and to preserve those tribes, tongues, and nations from the days of Noah to the days foreseen by John the Revelator, and well into the eschaton for His own purposes and glory. The Jewish people are not the only ones who can show God’s providential care and preservation, and it’s not wrong for them to exult in it, or for us to exult in ours, either. Neither does exulting in God’s preservation of tribes and nations diminish or undermine what God has preserved for others.
The civilization that has carried the gospel on our backs to the uttermost parts of the earth for centuries, the one that has built cathedrals and universities and hospitals and printing presses and sailing ships and mission societies and translated the Scripture into thousands of tongues and buried its sons and daughters in foreign soil to plant churches in places most Christians today could not locate on a map, the civilization that produced Augustine and Athanasius and Luther and Calvin and Tyndale and Spurgeon and Carey and Livingstone and a thousand others whose names fill the annals of church history, the civilization that gave the world the Reformation and the abolition of slavery and the scientific method and constitutional government and the very concept that a ruler stands under law rather than above it, has taught its own children to hang their head in shame for the sin of having been great. We are a people robbing ourselves of our own prophetic inheritance, and it is being done by men and women who have swallowed a framework so thoroughly Israel-centered that they have no category for a God who also prophesied of Japheth. Noah saw you coming. God put you in the text. The only people who do not know are those who have been trained not to look.
Thank you for your analysis. “And whatever you do, do NOT tell Dispensationalists that God has promised the land of Israel to the nations...” is a particularly enlightening paragraph.
I sometimes think that Evangelicals' fixation on modern day Jewry as God's chosen has less to do with Biblical eisegesis, and more to do with current attitudes toward Jews themselves. In the US, 2.4% of the population is Jewish, but that percentage controls outsized elements of finance, media, government, law, politics, psychoanalysis, advertising, sociology, and higher education, representing a kind of Jewish Oligarchy. As per sociological analysts like E Michael Jones and Kevin MacDonald, Jews are naturally at the forefront of social upheavals, controlling the levers of change.
“Antisemitism!”, “antisemite!” There's always a pejorative slur they've formulated to squelch any attempt at rational analysis of the glaring issues they've foisted off on society. These are overloaded with pseudo-morality to make the accused immediately sink into abject guilt, despair, and passivity.
But what we see from the history of nations where Jews wander in and settle, is a type of rampant semitophilism and semitoidolatry, mindless Jew love and worship of Jewry. This is the basic problem that underlies everything. In each society, especially western ones, Jews have conditioned the populace to believe that Jews are their moral authority and intellectual superiors.
All of this conditioning is the result of one glaring but deliberately unexamined talent that Jews have perfected over the centuries. This talent falls under the category of verbal acuity, for which Jews have been tested and found superior to other segments of the population. The Jewish religious practices of pilpul and hasbara are direct offshoots of thousands of Rabbis interpreting and reinterpreting the Talmud over the centuries, in order to develop argumentative techniques that justify any so-called religious conclusion they desire.
Why have they done this?
Historically it makes sense, because Jews as wanderers and intruders into other's lands, have developed non-physical weapons with which to subtly control the populace. Overt physical weapons would have gotten the Jewish diaspora immediately kicked out of their host countries. But weapons of semantic deception were used instead. They amount to a weapons cache of subtle lies, verbal tactics, and semi-logical techniques which seem convincing on their face, but are in fact completely deceitful. These verbal tactics have done wonders in getting non-Jews to accede to the Jewish agenda and Jewish moral values. In the US it has consisted of myriad attack vectors such as the Schofield Bible, the Hart-Celler Act, Abbie Hoffman, Gloria Steinem, hate-speech laws, ADL, AIPAC, SPLC, Holocaustianity, confirmation bias Nobel prizes, the Frankfurt School, Barbara Spectre, leftist praxis (https://beautifultrouble.org/team ), and on and on and on it goes.
Until and unless the masses wake up and stop believing that Jews are their moral and intellectual superiors, this country will just continue to slide down the 3rd-world toilet into the civilizational sewer. Quite frankly, an old aphorism is the best...
Segregation is the only moral solution.
Great article. Thank you. Can you expand on this topic by writing about what peoples comprised the enlargement of Japeth? And can you do an exposition or a breakdown of the blessings pronounced by Jacob over his twelve sons? I'm interested in understanding how those blessings have been fulfilled and manifest today.