The Middle East is a boiling caldron of Muslim division and contradiction, popping and spitting out molten hatred, burning, wounding and killing its own and anyone else with a different opinion. This is not a new, strangely perverted religious conflict. It's toxic roots reach all the way back to Ishmael, the illegitimate son of Abraham and his wife's maid servant, Hagar. God promised Abraham and Sarai a son who would pass the seed of Abraham through many generations and eventually bring forth the virgin-born Jesus. This son of Mary was the body in which the Jewish Messiah/Christian Christ would live in this world, deliver the truth of God and die for our sins. Satan knew that and violently opposed it. Abraham and Sarai were impatient with waiting upon the Lord for that son and they presumed to help God fulfill his promise. Sarai suggested and Abraham gladly accommodated and lay with Sarai's young hand maiden. Her resulting baby, Ishmael, became the first in what is now over a billion people composing 48 majority Muslim nations. There is just one predominately Jewish nation ... Israel.
When Sarai finally gave birth to her promised son, Isaac, the lineage of the Jewish nation began ... and nineteen hundred years later God's promised Messiah, Jesus Christ, was born in Bethlehem. The descendants of Isaac and those of Ishmael, though half brothers, both sons of Abraham, are total opposites. As the descendants of Ishmael are almost all Muslim, the descendants of Isaac are almost all Judaic. God promised to bless the world through Isaac with the Messiah/Christ and predicted conflict through Ishmael's descendants. The basis for this problem is recorded in Genesis 16 of which the central verses are Gen.16:11-12 "And the angel of the LORD said unto her (Hagar), Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."
This conflict will not end until the end of time.
