WISDOM INSIGHTS NO. 5 – MORE WISDOM FROM GENESIS, PROVERBS & EPHESIANS

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her" Ephesians 5:25

A highlight of my week was listening to the inaugural (and I think as yet only) podcast by James Wilkinson called the Generational Knowledge Pod

James interviewed his father Steven Wilkinson who writes the weekly “Pitchfork Papers”  – always stimulating and provocative. It is worthwhile listening to the almost 90 min podcast featuring insightful questions and thoughtful answers. It was impressive to see a young man, 21 years of age seeking advice and thoughts from the next generation. At the heart of the Book of Proverbs, this is the focus – advice from a father to a son about “lady wisdom”.

It does seem today that as we give the thumbs up to every new and potentially destructive idea: embracing the digital tracking system, the surveillance state, loss of individual liberty in the name of what is deemed best for the collective and imagined “rights” and “scientism” - - collective amnesia has gripped the Western world. It’s hard to imagine but only 20 years ago there was no facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Ten years before that, email did not exist and mobile (cell) phones were a rarity and the size of a shoe box. Somehow, people communicated, business was done and we did not feel deprived. However, there is an ongoing attempt to pull us all into a digital world and now facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has bet billions of dollars that soon we all will be living in the “metaverse”.

We need to take much more seriously the plans of the manipulative World Economic Forum (WEF), which advertises itself as the “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation” (does this sound a bit like some notorious European countries in the 1930s?). In 2016, one of the WEF’s Young Global Leaders – Ida Auken – wrote a detailed vision about life in 2030 , published in Forbes Magazine. Previously I had read extracts of this article but I was arrested when I read the whole story. We should study what she wrote and take it seriously because this is the direction into which we are being herded. It is the opposite course to that for which God created us. This  new “utopia” is the inevitable outcome of one where mankind is seen as the “enemy” of the earth. It is important to understand what is being planned by the “wisdom” of man in contrast to the wisdom of God. I have included the full text of this 2016 missive because it is important to understand the globalists’ intentions: Ida writes:

The WEF Vision for Society in 2030

“Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city." I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

In our city we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Once in a while, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy - the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well-being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

Shopping? I can't really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don't really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.”

You can see that from this WEF “dream” that we are being pushed towards:

• Owning nothing

• Digital control and dependency

• Having no products, only services

• No rent (because our “free space” is up for grabs by anyone)

• Free energy (controlled by the overlords)

• Work done by AI and robots

• No independent transport (apart from push bikes)

• Individual choice made by the algorithms of tech companies

• No privacy

• Small communities of “losers” confined and living hand to mouth outside the big “smart cities”

This is undoubtedly the road that the UN, the WEF and their supporters are proposing for us. So called, “new “wisdom” is being widely embraced by most of the key influencers and just in the last few days, the Dutch government has announced its intention to shut down 3,000 farms – to curb carbon emissions, when food shortages will be a major threat to humanity in 2023. It seems impossible to resist the global agenda, the “metaverse” and its accoutrements, without living completely outside the system, which will be increasingly difficult in the years ahead.

This nightmare is the result of an inexorable move over time, away from God and to trying to become “like God”, deciding our own morality and whether we realize it or not,  inevitably into a destiny as slaves. This sounds extreme but when you realize that the intention is for us “to own nothing” then inevitably, a small group will own everything and it won’t be “we the people”.

The Rebellion in Eden

Despite all our “advances”, remarkably, the heart of mankind is unchanged from the rebellious couple in Eden and their descendants Nimrod and his men who decided in the Land of Shinar to “build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). We are like Adam, who having being told not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17), supported Eve and ate the fruit because Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise..” (Genesis 3:6). We too have embraced this idea, as part of a succession of generations who all were “wise in their own eyes”, wanting to be independent from God.

It is interesting in the Genesis narrative that we also see the first recorded “fake news”. Eve tells the serpent that God said: “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die’” (Genesis 3:3). However, God had not mentioned “touching the fruit” and one wonders how Eve came by this idea? It must have been passed on second hand from her husband Adam, to whom God had given just one rule in the Garden – “don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. If mankind was not capable of following just one rule then unsurprisingly, the 613 laws/commandments identified by the Jewish rabbis in the Torah - provide a hurdle that is impossible for us to clear. One must come back to the central idea that God’s intention from the very start was to bring us into a relationship with Him, not just obedience to a set of rules.

God’s Plan for Marriage and the Family

This is a long introduction to my thoughts on wisdom this week but I hope that the journey in my thinking this week may be helpful in understanding the daily challenges to my central theme: how to live wisely in the modern world.

As I was reading the early part of Genesis and reflecting on its meaning for us today, I realized that this ancient text contains God’s truth that challenges every part of the accepted norms for family and society today. The embrace of fault-free divorce, gay marriage, gender fluidity and gender equity are all examples of setting our faces in a direction that is opposite to God’s law and purposes.  The consequences I believe are increasingly evident: family dissolution and conflict, mental health disorders, sexual immorality, gender confusion, and even murder and suicide. These are the results of turning away from God’s plan for an intimate and lifelong relationship between a man and a woman.

There is a remarkable and often overlooked passage in Genesis 2:21-22 where we are told, that after Adam named all the animals:

“ …..for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man (Genesis 2:20-22). The Hebrew word translated as “helper” is עֵזֶר (‘êzer) which means to help, support or provide succor.

The passage has several significant details that I have been thinking about this week:

• Adam was alone in creation and God Himself intervened to create a “helper”, someone complementary and not a challenger or competitor.

• Eve was created physically out of Adam in the first surgical operation in history. What a remarkable idea, even if impossible for us to understand.

• You can’t get more intimate than a created helper formed from the rib of the first man. Adam’s response was: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).

• The commentary in the Bible (presumably from God) that follows is:
  “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This is not just a random comment as Jesus quotes this verse when asked by the Pharisees about divorce (Matthew 19:5) and St Paul also in Ephesians 5:31. The verse is noteworthy and contains vital information that I certainly failed to understand in the early stages of marriage. It is clear that a husband leaves his father and mother (physically and emotionally) rather than the wife leaving her father and mother. This is highly significant and often not understood. The husband now has a new allegiance, and becomes “one flesh” with his wife. As an only child, I did not understand this and continued to have an emotional pull towards my parents, who often interfered in my relationship with my wife. Had I better understood the Biblical proscription, I would have drawn more effective boundaries and saved a lot of heartache.

• There is a “mystery” at the heart of marriage that is profound. The “two becoming one” is akin to the “mystery….of Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). The church here is not any building but in Greek, the ekklesia , the called out ones. Marriage is not merely a legal or moral commitment but a remarkable spiritual mystery that was always designed to show us the intimacy that God Himself desires with His Son and His called out ones. This was a new idea to me until I read Derek Prince’s small book: “The Marriage Covenant”. It is never too late to read and apply the wisdom in this book.

I have written again about marriage and its mysterious elements because the foundation of God’s purposes has always been the family with the husband and wife providing complementary roles in raising children. There is no more challenging undertaking today and the latest US data indicates that about 50% marriages end in divorce. There is no evidence that we learn from our mistakes, as 60% of second marriages end in divorce and 73% of third marriages.

So – the secret to sustaining a long-term marriage must be in the selection process in the first place. The Book of Proverbs has much to say about the delights and dangers of marriage.

“An excellent wife is the crown of her husband,
But she who causes shame is like rottenness in his bones” Proverbs 12:4.

“He who finds a wife finds a good thing,
And obtains favour from the LORD” Proverbs 18:22

“Houses and riches are an inheritance from fathers,
But a prudent wife is from the LORD” Proverbs 19:14.

On the other hand – things can clearly go wrong as we are told:

“A foolish son is the ruin of his father,
And the contentions of a wife are a continual dripping” Proverbs 19:13.

Solomon with 700 wives and 300 concubines must have acquired first hand experience of marriage difficulties as borne out in this proverb:

“Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop,
Than in a house shared with a contentious wife” Proverbs 21:9.

Biblical Marriage Principles

You would think that over time, the secrets to successful marriages may become more evident but the divorce rate in the 1920s was only 1% compared to 50% today. I was surprised to find that you can improve your chance of marriage longevity by marrying an actuary, scientist, clergyman, software developer, optometrist, doctor or director of religious activities – all of whom have divorce rates less than 25% .

What a challenge marriage is and yet it is the fundamental foundation of a healthy society. No wonder we are experiencing all kinds of problems today in Western society. Yet it seems to me that we are now busy treating the symptoms of family breakdown rather than understanding and supporting the foundations of family life.

I can’t claim to be an expert because I have a track record of failure. It took me many years to grasp the heart of the Bible’s wisdom for marriage and I think that I have dimly seen and applied these principles to good effect. The Bible prescribes some principles that increase the chance of marriage success. Interestingly enough, the secret is not more equality but more inequality! :

1. The husband leaves (emotionally and physically) his father and mother and take responsibility for a new family life where his wife’s needs are pre-eminent, as I’ve written earlier – Genesis 2:24. The welfare of his wife is the husband’s greatest concern. This is not easy because we are naturally principally focused on our own needs.

2. Husbands need to be prepared to lay down their lives for their wives, as Jesus did for the church. St Paul tells husbands to: “..love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25). This of course links to point 1 but a husband’s love needs to be selfless.

3. Because the husband is head of the wife (as Christ is the head of the church), the wife should submit to the husband. St Paul says “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Saviour of the body” (Ephesians 5:22-23). This sounds crazy to modern ears but is an eternal principle of wisdom for marriage. The “secret sauce” here is that the wife is submitting to a husband who loves her as Christ loved the church and laid down His life. The radical idea at the heart of the Jesus’ teaching is that headship means being a servant (Matthew 23:11-12).  The Bible says that Jesus “…existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). Another key word used by St Paul in advice for wives is to “respect their husbands” (Ephesians 5:33). This seems to be challenging for wives and I heard an interesting podcast this week with the Delingpole brothers, James and Dick, who reckoned that “our wives think that we are idiots”.

Submission of wives to husbands and respect from wives is definitely counter cultural. Yet it is a timeless secret. Of course you can’t demand submission or respect as a husband but undoubtedly if your wife sees that you are laying your life down for her and giving her loving security, then submission and respect will likely follow.

Undoubtedly marriage, as the most critical unit for God’s plan, is under increasing Satanic attack. It’s hard for us to realize this in the day-to-day challenges of life. I read a great marriage book by John and Stasi Eldredge many years ago and a memorable line that stayed with me was “In marriage, you have an enemy, and it’s not your spouse”! No wonder marriages fail as it is the central ground for spiritual attack.

Some Conclusions

I believe that we need to be “alert but not alarmed” and to seek God’s wisdom and pray for our marriages. We husbands must focus on the welfare of our wives above all else and be prepared to lay down our lives. Wives (even if they suspect we are idiots) should respect their husbands and submit, even when it makes no sense.

It is unlikely that the implementation of these principles will give worse marriage results than we have in Western society at the moment!

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ARTICLES THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION THIS WEEK

Protests in China, Communism and the Surveillance State

Since David Rockefeller toured China in 1973 and wrote a glowing article in the New York Times -- many in the West have fawned over China as the new icon and model for a “new world order”. Recently, Klaus Schwab the Chairman of the World Economic Forum declared that China was a “role model” for other nations. China as a technocratic state with total control and surveillance, is the direction towards which the globalists are attempting to push us. As this article in ZeroHedge points out:

“China in fact is a giant prison, complete with slave labor, sweatshops, low wages, continuous lockdowns and actual laogai, or Gulags. Challenge the government in any way and you'll be packed off to one for years upon years in no time. In the case of the Uighurs, just being the wrong nationality is enough for such punishment”.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that old saying “never trust a communist”, as business and industry poured trillions into investment in China until the West has been held hostage because we can’t make anything. I remember saying to a group of business colleagues more than 20 years ago, this is not going to end well – as they moved their manufacturing plants to China. Now the West is caught in a trap and is dependent on China for almost everything, including all pharmaceutical products.

There was a widespread belief by Western politicians that if we made friends with China and gave them everything (or at least not complaining when they stole all the Western intellectual property) that they would become more like us. However, the reverse has happened and we became more like them with a standout being Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews, imposing draconian lockdowns for almost 1 year on Victorians  in Australia’s most southern mainland state – lockdowns that probably seemed extreme even to President Xi!

Now there is a small backlash by some brave Chinese citizens with protests which have been given prominence in the West (but not in China). The most significant were at the iPhone factory at Zhengzhou - and all the protests relate to the declaration of draconian lockdowns., said to be to curb COVID-19 infections. The strategy, as was demonstrated in the West, is ineffective and has myriad negative consequences. The final straw for the brave Chinese protestors seems to have been an apartment fire in Xinjiang where 10 people who were locked into an apartment building, perished when unable to escape. It must be clear to President Xi and his acolytes that COVID-19 can’t be controlled by lockdowns. Yet – Xi has committed himself and his authority to implementing lockdowns and so he will not fail, even if many have to die.

Interestingly, the Biden administration has not condemned the Chinese government’s authoritarian excesses. I imagine that the Chinese government probably has a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive which would be a great negotiating tool!

Many commentators are forecasting a new era of freedom, with the protests being a sign of an uprising amongst the people. This is a complete fantasy! President Xi not only has a huge army but a surveillance state second to none. The protestors won’t be protesting for long and already many have been rounded up – no doubt for intensive “counselling”. We in the West will continue to pay the price for throwing our lot in with an evil, communist dictatorship whose dream is world domination. China will not become more like us but we are definitely becoming more like them.

The United Kingdom Continues to Self-Destruct

The new UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has certainly had no “honeymoon” period and was thrown into a pool with sharks circling from his own Conservative Party as well as the Labour Party and Scottish Nationalists. This week, Sir Keir Starmer, the UK Labour Leader, pulled off the gloves in Parliamentary Question Time and pointed to Sunak’s education at Winchester College, a £45,000 per year elite private school. Sir Keir, using the politics of envy, pointed out that Winchester College has “a rowing club, a rifle club and an extensive art collection” - as though these were bad things. The school was founded in 1382 and it would be disappointing if it hadn’t acquired various resources to foster the educational experience. Given that the school is still thriving after 700 years, I’ll back Winchester College against Sir Keir’s desire to bring it down. Of course his real attack is on the Prime Minister as a “silver spoon” who has no understanding of the masses. Sunak is  not only extremely wealthy himself but his wife and her family are billionaires. One imagines that there must have been focus groups sought out by UK Labour and have indicated that this line of attack on the Prime Minister will be productive.

The UK now has the highest taxation rate in any period since WWII and I was staggered to read this week that there are 9 million Britons who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one. This is more than 20% of the adult working age population of the UK and in a welfare state, this is clearly unsustainable. It can’t be long before the government “runs out of other people’s money”.

Meanwhile, infighting continues amongst the Conservative government with the challenges being those who are Brexiteers (a majority of the party) and those who wanted to remain in the EU (an influential minority). There are moves to try to bring the UK into a position like Switzerland whose laws are in sync with EU laws. Of course this is strongly opposed by those in the Conservative party who point out that the UK voted to completely separate from the EU. Then there is the dreaded problem of wind farms. Wind farms have been placed off shore but now there is increasing pressure to overturn planning restrictions so that wind farms can be built in the UK countryside.  With the realization of the coming energy crisis, some Conservative MPs including former PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, have signed an amendment to current legislation which is opposed by the Prime Minister. The dysfunction and disunity in the Conservative Party is likely to continue with the result that an early UK election (the latest date being May 2024) seems likely. The Labour Party is currently 30 points ahead in the opinion polls and it is highly likely when an election comes, that full-blown socialism will arrive again the UK with a program of industry nationalization and resultant misery for millions. At least with UK Labour, it seems likely that everyone will be equally cold and miserable!

Israel, Iran, the JCPOA and Middle East Conflict

Since Israelis voted on 1st November, as usual without a majority for any one party, 3 times elected Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been busy negotiating with various parties to form government. Under the constitution, Netanyahu as the leader of the Likud Party has 28 days from his commission on 14th November by the Israeli President to complete negotiations that would provide him with a parliamentary majority in the Knesset. Given the complexity of the arrangements, an extension to the period may be necessary. Netanyahu has great experience in such negotiations, having first become Prime Minister in 1996. It seems to be a “dog eat dog” world of Machiavellian negotiations and the main Religious Zionist Party (RZP) has claimed that during the negotiations, Likud (Netanyahu’s Party) has leaked “dozens of falsities to the press; giving “briefings and spin intended to discredit and belittle” the party; sending "battalions of tweeters and 'analysts' to lie, abuse and curse us vulgarly"; attempting to "trample, humiliate and belittle the Religious Zionist Party"; "ridiculing the values" of religious-Zionism; and the list goes on”, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The leader of the RZP, Bezalel Smotrich, previously has called Netanyahu “the liar of all liars” – so the negotiating process must be very interesting. Everyone must be of a mindset like President Reagan who said “trust but verify”, in negotiations with the former Soviet Union. The Jerusalem Post summed the negotiations up as follows:

“While the issues in the negotiations will probably be worked out eventually, the mistrust between the two parties and their leaders may not. The agreements will probably be signed and a new government will form, but the intangibles – trust, good faith, partnership – will likely lead to rough sailing”.

I read a helpful article about the elections by Hillel Newman, the Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles. Newman wrote:

“The election process was first and foremost a demonstration of Israel’s vibrant democracy. The will of the people in the previous election was that Netanyahu should not have a majority, and in the most recent election resolved to return that majority to him; The will of the people is decisive. Very few states in the Middle East have such a political system, whereby a premier can be toppled and then reinstated according to the popular vote.”.

Israel is often criticized in the Western media but it should be remembered that it is the only democratic country in the Middle East. What unites Israeli politicians is the threat from various neighbours, which is constant and of course the biggest existential danger – Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Iran has repeatedly threatened to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. The US with support of permanent members of the UN Security Council negotiated a deal with Iran that was called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - a lopsided deal where in 2015 Iran, in effect, was given the go ahead to acquire nuclear weapons technology. President Trump pulled out of the deal, much to the delight of Israel, but the Biden administration has been trying to resurrect it since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. Since April 2021, talks have been held in Vienna and have broken down over a number of sticking points including the US designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. However the major problem in negotiations has always been Iran’s reluctance to provide access by independent inspectors to its nuclear sites. In the last weeks, the Iranian Foreign Minister has revealed that there has been exchanges of messages between the US and Iran in relation to revival of the nuclear deal. It is clear that the Biden administration is intent on reaching a deal with Iran, even if it is one that places Israel (and by association the US as the “Big Satan”) in jeopardy. It was interesting to see that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei said in an address in early November that “our people punched [America] in the face, in the full sense of the word.” “Our nation defeated them,” he added. He went on to say that the people’s “death to America” chant would be fulfilled and a “new order” would relegate the US to isolation. The students chanted in response “Death to America! Death to England! Death to the hypocrites and infidels! Death to Israel!”

Now – I may be old-fashioned, but it looks to me that with this fundamental commitment  - death to the West– any negotiations will not have a good outcome for Israel and the West. However, remarkably, the US presses on believing that somehow Iran will be nice to us, if we give them everything they want. Unfortunately, various pieces of the jigsaw are being moved into place for major Middle East conflict. Iran is at work fostering terrorism in Lebanon and Syria as well as Gaza. The US under Obama previously provided planeloads of cash which even John Kerry admitted would likely be used to support terrorism. A new JCPOA agreement will almost certainly provide further funds for Iran at a time when there is substantial internal opposition to the draconian regime, there being widespread protests over the last 2 months. This last week there were reports that more than 1 dozen people were killed in protests across Iran - and the deaths have included teenage children.

The incoming Israeli government will have to deal with many challenges, the major one being how to disable Iran’s nuclear plans. In addition, there are the ongoing threats from terrorism. Remarkably, the Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF has arrested more than 3,000 terrorist suspects and thwarted 500 terrorist attacks this year.

It is notable that despite these constant threats, Israel continues to prosper economically and is a beacon for hope in the Middle East. I will be interested to see how the new government deals with the challenges in this “fourth coming” of Netanyahu.