Joel C. Rosenberg - Epicenter Study Guide

Wars and rumors of war. Jihadists in Jerusalem. Chaos in Gaza. Missiles in Lebanon. Suicide bombers in Iraq. Genocide in Sudan. An Iranian president vowing to wipe Israel off the map. Millions convinced the Messiah is coming. Poverty. Illiteracy. Hardship and suffering. Yet always a fervent prayer for peace.

No wonder the eyes of the nations are riveted on Israel and her Islamic neighbors, the epicenter of the momentous events that are shaking our world and shaping our future.

What will tomorrow bring? How will the rumblings in the Middle East affect your world and change your future? Does the Bible actually give us advance intelligence as to what is coming, what it means, and how we can be ready?

As you embark on a journey to find the answers to these important and increasingly urgent questions, I hope that you will find this Epicenter Study Guide helpful. I wrote it for several reasons:

1. To help readers of my nonfiction book Epicenter continue and even accelerate their own personal quest to understand the Middle Easts past, present, and future.

2. To help pastors and other religious leaders better explain Gods plans for the people of the epicenter.

3. To create a resource that would encourage small group studies and discussions of the epicenter.

4. To inspire a new generation of evangelical Christians with a passion for compassion, a burning desire to bless Israel and her neighbors in real and practical ways.

5. To mobilize a global movement of millions of people praying daily, knowledgeably, and faithfully for the peace of Jerusalem and the entire region, according to Psalm 122:6.

What are your goals for reading using this guide? What do you hope to learn? to achieve? Knowledge is important. So is faith. But the Bible says, faith without works is dead (James 2:26). I agree. For me, its not enough to know the history and future of the Middle East. Nor is it enough simply to believe that God loves all the people of the Middle East Jew and Gentile alike and has a wonderful plan and purpose for their lives. For me the question is, so what? How will you and I act on that knowledge? How will our knowledge and our faith spur us to love and good deeds? How will what we know and what we believe change us? How will it shape what we are willing to say and what we are willing to do? These are the questions that matter most.

If you arent open to having your life change radically, I would recommend you skip this study altogether. But if you are truly serious about pursuing truth and truly open to letting God take you on an adventure more exciting that you could have hoped for, dreamed of, or imagined, then by all means, please proceed.

Along with study questions for every chapter of Epicenter, this guide includes five additional studies with new material that will help you explore what the Scriptures say about the epicenter. As you begin, a few quick thoughts.

First, I recommend that you carve out at least thirty minutes a day, preferably in the morning, for at least five days a week to work on the questions in this guide, read the Scriptures that I cite, chew them over, and have some time for prayer. This will help you get the most out of the material and help you establish the wise habit of a daily appointment with the living God, if you dont have such an appointment already.

Second, in addition to studying through this material on your own, I recommend that you find a friend or a group of friends and meet together once a week over a cup of coffee to compare notes, discuss what youre learning, and pray together. Proverbs 27:17 tells us that just as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. You may not always agree with the views and perspectives others have on this material, but you will more than likely think deeper and more carefully if you dont study in isolation. Plus, youll have more fun and hopefully develop stronger friendships along the way.

Third, I recommend that you use a New American Standard Bible (NASB) to answer the questions in this guide. There are many excellent translations of the Bible available, to be sure, and you would be wise to cross-check passages with the NASB and other translations. But I have found that studying Bible prophecy requires as precise a word-for-word translation from the Hebrew and Greek as you can possibly get. My experience, along with conversations with Bible scholars and Hebrew and Greek experts, has led me to trust the NASB the most for my own personal study of prophecy.

That said, I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe (Ephesians 1:18-19). May God bless you as you begin your journey.

Joel C. Rosenberg

J ERUSALEM , I SRAEL

J ANUARY 2008