We are dealing with a situation in which radical Islam poses a clear and present danger to the security of Judeo-Christian civilization as we have known it.

That is not to say that all Muslims pose that threat. In this new book that I've written, Inside the Revolution, I really break down three major movements that are going on in the Middle East. I want to touch on them as we get into the word of God tonight. We're going to be studying from Ezekiel 38, so you may want to go to Ezekiel 38 as we begin.

But I want to give the big overview, the big picture at first. I wanna do the Google Earth, let's take us up to 30,000 feet or so and get a sense of where we are, because it was 1979, 30 years ago this year, that the Islamic revolution exploded onto the scene in Iran.

The shah of Iran had been pro-Western, pro-American, pro-Israel. He had a lot of his own issues and he was not a perfect leader, and there were a lot of serious and real grievances against the shah, chief among them human rights abuses that were very serious.

That being said, he was a friend of ours, he was a friend of Israel. Every single prime minister of Israel from David Ben Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, through Menachem Begin, the prime minister in 1979, every single Israeli prime minister had visited and met personally with the shah.

Iranian and Israeli air force pilots trained together on American equipment. There was a very close relationship between Israel and Iran. But in 1979 something, exploded in that country. The shah, quite ill, sensed that a revolution was building under him and he fled with his wife and family from the country.

On February 1st, 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini touched down at Tehran International Airport to throngs – I mean millions upon millions of people greeting this leader, this radical Islamic leader, who had come to lead the Islamic revolution, to topple a pro-Western leader and bring Iran into the vanguard of what he called the Islamic revolution.

As he landed, as he stepped out on the tarmac millions of people shouted, "The holy one has come, the holy one has come." Many people in Iran at that time believed that the Ayatollah Khomeini was the Madhi – the 12th imam, the Islamic messiah, and they revered him as such.

Now, he never accepted that. He didn't deny it but he didn't officially claim that role either. Nevertheless, something extraordinary was happening and of course that was February 1st, '79.

By April 1st, 1979, the country had had a referendum – you know about the referenda process – they had a referenda process and they had decided as a country to become the world's first Islamic republic. That is, the first country in 1,400 years of Islamic history governed by the Qur'an, governed by sharia law, and they became the first Islamic republic.

The ayatollah declared on April 1st, 1979, that this was the government of God, and that was not an April fool's joke; he really meant it.

As that year continued to unfold, of course, by November 4th, 1979, the students who were following Khomeini had led a revolution to take over the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Of course that set into motion the American people first really paying attention to this Islamic revolution.

The rest of this had been happening, if you'd been watching Walter Cronkite, you'd know it was happening throughout the year, but once the embassy was taken and a number of the hostages were released but eventually more than 50 Americans were held hostage for 444 humiliating days.

This was America's first taste with radical Islam. We had been dealing up till that point, in the previous decades, with Arab nationalism, but it was a secular Arab nationalist movement. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the head of Egypt and was the guy who used to say, "We're going to throw the Jews into the sea," he was a secular nationalist, meaning he hated the Jews, hated Israel – that's sort of standard operating procedure. You don't really get to be the head of one of those countries unless that's you're pedigree.

But he really hated them and mobilized the Arab world against Israel, but he was not doing it because of – although he was a Muslim, he did not do this because of Islam. This was pan-Arab nationalism, was the phrase that was used at the time.

Of course, that led to the 1967 war, and Israel won that war. Israel had won the 1948 war, the 1956 war, the 1967 war, later won the 1973 war. Something was happening in the Muslim world. Something was happening in the Middle East.

What was happening was Muslims were going through a period of soul searching. They were saying wait a minute, when Islam was founded 1,400 years ago, we rapidly dominated the planet. Militarily, economically, culturally, scientifically – in every conceivable way, the Muslim world was the center of the world, not just geographically.

The Europeans were so terrified of the Islamic military might that it had to figure out a new way to get to the spice routes, the trade routes, of Asia, because they couldn’t penetrate the Islamic Middle East. So they began to develop navigation techniques and build ships and figure out how to get around Africa to get around to India and the trade routes, bypassing the Islamic world because it was so dominant.

For years, Muslims believed that this was evidence, their dominance over the world was evidence that Allah, God, was with them. They believed that military victory was evidence that God loved them and was with them, and there was no evidence to the contrary in their view.

The Islamic empire had been glorious in its day, and yet by the 1900s Islam was imploding. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I. The Ottoman Empire, the Islamic empire based in Turkey – what we now know as Turkey.

The caliphate, the head of this Islamic empire, collapsed, and to whom? To the infidels of the West, to the British and the French and the Americans. Then as the years went by throughout the 1900s, what was happening? Well, what was happening was the Islamic forces that had allied themselves with Germany and with Japan, with the axis powers, were losing.

Then came 1948, and what happened? The Jews defeated the Arabs and created the state of Israel. The bible asks the question, can a nation be born in a day? The answer apparently is yes. May 14th, 1948 – that did not go over well in the Muslim world.

Then came 1956; again, the Israelis won. '67, everything seemed poised to wipe Israel off the planet, but Israel struck first in an act of preemptive self-defense and in six days they tripled their land, reunified Jerusalem, got back Judea and Sumeria, their ancient heartland of their homeland, and on the seventh day, they rested. [Laughter]

At this point, they were being treated in the world media as a superpower. How was it possible this ragtag band of Jews keep winning against these Arab Muslim forces? Then 1973, Israelis thought they were invincible, and what happened? On the holiest day of the year for Judaism, Yom Kippur, the combined enemies of Israel struck into Israel, moved very, very fast, and drove Israel to the point where they thought they may have to use nuclear weapons to repel their enemies.

So caught off-guard were they in '73, but fortunes began to reverse. The Israelis began to push back, and pretty soon they were on the outskirts of Cairo. They had reclaimed the Golan Heights and they were within striking distance of Damascus. This was 1973.

So by the mid-1970s the people of the Muslim world were asking themselves, what's happened to us? What's going on here? We were once dominant in every conceivable arena of human affairs, and now we are losing to the Christians, we are losing to the Jews, not once but again and again and again.

We have tens of millions of people in poverty. We have illiteracy, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide rates are soaring. What is happening to us?

Bernard Lewis, the famed professor of Middle East history at Princeton University wrote a book called What Went Wrong, where he traces this trajectory up and then down in the Islamic world, and the soul-searching that was going on in the mid-1970s and right up to this moment. What went wrong? Why is Allah not favoring us as he always had?

It's in that climate that the Islamic revolution exploded onto the scene in 1979. Why? Because Khomeini's theory was the reason we are losing is because we've abandoned God. Pan-Arab secular nationalism is a failure, he argued, because it's abandoned God. When we look at the ills of the world and we look at the ills of the Islamic world, his argument was Islam is the answer. Jihad is the way.

Islam, pure Islam, purified of all the corruption of the – of cozying up to the West, purified Islam, sharia law, fundamental extremist Islam is the answer, he argued, and jihad, holy war, violence, is the way. That meant you can force people to convert to radical Islam, or you kill them – Jews, Christians, atheists, even apostate Muslims who weren't as radical as Khomeini thought they should be.

He was continuing to preach this and build this up until the explosion of 1979. What's quite unnerving is that Washington didn't see it coming.

Now in a moment, we're gonna see how all this ties in to bible prophecy, but to continue our story for a moment, what's amazing is that Washington was completely clueless to this explosion that was coming. President Carter had just traveled to Tehran, the capital of Iran, and had toasted the shah, describing him as an "island of stability in the Middle East."

Within a few months of that visit nine million Iranians were on the streets. The streets of Iran were effectively on fire, protesting the shah, calling for his overthrown, death to America, death to Israel, bring in Khomeini, and that's exactly what happened.

Stansfield Turner, the CIA director under Carter, I quote him in Inside the Revolution. He says in his memoirs, "We were just plain asleep. We did not see the Islamic revolution coming." What's interesting is what got set into motion in 1979 was not just a capture of a country, it wasn't just a capture of an embassy.

Khomeini was committed to making disciples and exporting the revolution all throughout the Muslim world and eventually creating a global caliphate, an Islamic empire that would span the entire globe. This was his dream. This was his vision. These are the people he discipled and set into motion.

Now, Jesus told us in Matthew 24 that in the last days there would be wars and rumors of wars, nation would rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom. In Luke 21 we read specifically that there will be revolutions in the last days.

The 20th century was an entire century of revolutions, and the Islamic revolution was a central part. Jesus had said these things will happen as we get close to the end. There will be persecution of the believers – persecution of the believers in Iran and the Muslim world intensified as people outside Iran said wow, what Khomeini's done is extraordinary.

Apparently you can knock off, overthrow, a pro-Western dictator in this region and bring about pure Islam. That chant, that mantra, began to build – Islam is the answer, jihad is the way.

Now today we're 30 years into the Islamic revolution, and it's not entirely clear to me that Washington sees where we are. I believe we're at the most dangerous moment of the Islamic revolution. Why? Because the current leaders of Iran, the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they believe – they are disciples of Khomeini but they believe that they are supposed to bring about the final wave of the revolution.

What do they mean by that? They believe, and they are saying publicly, particularly Ahmadinejad, he is saying publicly, openly – and I quote him extensively in the book from direct sources in Iran, his speeches, his interviews, his websites – he is saying that he believes the end of the world is at hand. He believes that the coming of the Islamic messiah, the Madhi, the 12th imam, the hidden imam, he believes – they believe – that this Islamic messiah, his arrival on Earth is imminent.

That's the word they're using – imminent – and they believe that the way to hasten or speed up the coming of this Islamic messiah is to annihilate two countries: Israel, which they describe as "the little Satan," and the United States, which they describe as "the great Satan."

Now, that's not good. [Laughter] It's not good if you're Jewish, it's not good if you're an American. This is a problem. Now, you could say well, now, Joel, okay, so they're saying these things, but they're passionate people, they've got some rhetoric.

Now, you gotta understand this is not the Iranian people. The Iranian people, by and large, can't stand their leaders. But the elections, and there are elections coming up on June 12th in Iran, they're rigged. It doesn’t matter if people decide to pick their own person. The supreme leader has got the system rigged, so the big question we're watching for is will he favor Ahmadinejad and keep him around, or has Ahmadinejad lost favor and somebody else will be tapped to lead?