I’ve already explained the pervasive doomsday belief of the Iranians and how this makes it impossible to come to any sort of rational conclusion to the Iran conflict. They will lie, cheat, drag their feet while feigning compliance, and ultimately, break any agreement signed or otherwise agreed to, in order to advance their obsession with the “End Times.”
But the Iranians aren’t the only ones obsessed with the return or arrival of their Messiah. For those who are unfamiliar with this, there is actually a view within “Dispensational Evangelical Christianity” that shares the Iranians’ point of view. They also obsessively focus on the End of Times and have their own unique perspective on how to advance its arrival.
Now, at the core of the beliefs within the three Abrahamic religions is the belief that the Divine Messiah will appear at the End Times to dispense judgment upon man and establish peace and order in this otherwise chaotic world. What differentiates the three religions is how the Messiah arrives.
Dispensational Evangelical Christianity in the Schofield Bible teachings is as obsessed with the end times as the Iranians, except that they don’t have missiles and drones nor seek a nuclear weapon to start it. They instead believe that they have to get as many Jews into the Middle East as possible, because that’s going to destabilize the region, which will in turn create the chaos required for, according to those teachings, the Christian savior to return.
As for Messianic Jews, their beliefs about Jesus align closely with traditional Christianity – Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, but they believe that you can believe in Yeshua and still be entirely compatible with living a Jewish lifestyle. They often worship in synagogues, keep kosher diets, and observe biblical holidays and the Sabbath.
Many in the Messianic movement utilize the Jewish rabbinic concept of two messianic roles. They believe Jesus fulfilled the role of “Messiah Ben Joseph” – the suffering servant- during his first coming. His second coming will complete the Messianic mission as “Messiah Ben David” – the conquering, reigning king, physically fulfilling the remaining unfulfilled Hebrew prophecies and establishing his literal, millennial kingdom, centered in Jerusalem.
As to when the Messianic Messiah will return, they have no timeline, and they play no part in ushering in the End Times. It is all up to God, which follows the words of the Christ in the New Testament, when Jesus explicitly said, “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” That’s the difference between them, Dispensational Evangelical Christianity, and the Iranian’s point of view.
Their traditional belief holds that the Messiah will come either when humanity is in desperate need of divine intervention or when the world has achieved sufficient spiritual merit, and that there is nothing they can do to accelerate Messiah Ben David’s return.
This is where Messianic Judaism follows a different path from the Iranian Shia Doomsday Cult’s point of view of creating enough chaos in the world by the destruction of Israel to usher in the return of their Islamic Messiah, or that of Dispensational Evangelical Christians’s unrestricted support for the state of Israel and bringing as many Jews as possible into the Middle East to create chaos.
So that is the perspective on where the Iranians line up regarding the “End of Times” compared with the other two Abrahamic religions. I must again emphasize that neither the belief of the Iranians nor the prevailing view in Dispensational Evangelical Christianity is shared by traditional Christianity – the Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church, both of which align more with Messianic Judaism.
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