When I was a kid my dad would take me up in our airplane and let me take the controls. As I sat on my pillow straining to see out the windscreen, dad would point to the heading on the compass and instruct me to hold the course.

Sounds easy, but it wasn't. The problem was, at the same time I had to watch the artificial horizon indicator to keep the wings level and the vertical speed indicator to maintain the correct altitude. The result was, by the time I got the wings level and the nose pointed straight, the heading would be off. And, by the time I got our heading back on course, the wings and nose would need correcting again. This rocking back and forth motion would continue until my dad would finally take the controls back.

What does this have to do with Bible prophecy? Well, you may have noticed I posted a commentary yesterday only to take it down a short time later. The reason I removed it was because I felt like I was drifting a little off course from what God wanted me to do.

You see, my commentary was about a book and the man who wrote it, Jeremy Rifkin. The book is titled, The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. And, as the name suggests, Rifkin's book goes on and on, singing the praises of the European Union.

Rifkins book wouldn't mean much, if it weren't for the fact that Rifkin is an American intellectual who was getting such a favorable review in the influential Guardian Read it here. 

My problem was, there was more to this story. It turns out Rifkin is also a prominent New Ager who has known connections to certain elements within our American evangelical community. So, what started out to be a commentary about how a noted American intellectual was praising the European Union's model over that of his own American, became a commentary about how the New Age Movement may be infiltrating America's evangelicals. In other words, I was getting off course.

What is my heading? My only job is to point out how there is a God in heaven who rules over all earthly kings and kingdoms. He alone knows the future and He has revealed it to us in the Bible.

Rifkin's book is just more reason to believe that, in the European Union, we are now seeing the rise of the fourth and final kingdom foretold in the Old Testament book of Daniel. The prophecy states:

Then there will be a fourth kingdom as strong as iron; inasmuch as iron crushes and shatters all things, so, like iron that breaks in pieces, it will crush and break all these in pieces. In that you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it will be a divided kingdom; but it will have in it the toughness of iron, inasmuch as you saw the iron mixed with common clay. As the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of pottery, so some of the kingdom will be strong and part of it will be brittle. And in that you saw the iron mixed with common clay, they will combine with one another in the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, even as iron does not combine with pottery (Daniel 2:40-43 New American Standard Bible).

If this passage of Scripture doesn't describe the modern European Union, I don't know what would. The scary thing is, this kingdom will become the kingdom of the Antichrist. Fortunately, the prophecy isn't over yet. It also states:

In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever. Inasmuch as you saw that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands and that it crushed the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold, the great God has made known to the king what will take place in the future; so the dream is true and its interpretation is trustworthy (Daniel 2:44-45).

Friends, sometime we may drift around a bit.

But, this world is right on course.