Current hostilities should not surprise Bible believers, for the attitudes and actions of Israel’s hostile neighbours were foretold many years ago. If you compare a map showing Israel’s enemies in Psalm 83 with a modern map of the same area, you will see a remarkable correspondence with the nations seeking Israel’s hurt and destruction.
Psalm 83 begins
Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
Note the similarity with the following documents. First, from Hezbollah Manifesto (1985 & 1988)
The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.
Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
Then from the Hamas Covenant (1988)
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.
The Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is an Individual Duty:
After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.
Now read to the end of Psalm 83 to see the ultimate outcome.
The situation will get much worse before it is resolved. The first two verses of Zechariah 14 shows the resolution of the problem after major setbacks.
Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee. For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
The attackers this time will not be one nation only, but all nations will be represented in the invading force, with considerable initial success. Israel’s very existence will seem threatened, as though the Hezbollah and Hamas manifestos are being fulfilled. But the massed forces will face unforeseen opposition, as verse 3 shows.
Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.
Such opposition is irresistible, and we can look back through Scripture to see other occasions when God has intervened on behalf of his people in times past - such as when five Canaanite kings opposed the conquest of the holy land by Joshua...
And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword. Joshua 10:11
In Revelation 16:21 we read of God's use of 25 kilogram hailstones as weapons.
Or we can look at the end of oppression of Israel by Jabin king of Canaan and his armies under his general, Sisera in the time of the Judges...
And I will draw unto thee to the river Kishon Sisera, the captain of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his multitude; and I will deliver him into thine hand.
Judges 4:7... ...The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength. Judges 5:21
No army, ancient or modern, can stand against raging torrents of floodwater.
Or again, we read of the end of Sennacherib's invasion of of Israel in the days of King Hezekiah...
And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. 2 Kings 19:35
Sudden mass death in the night is extremely unnerving for any few surviving to tell the tale, especially if they are the commanders with no remaining troops.
This is only a selection of the ways in which God has changed the outcomes of conflicts in favour of His chosen people. Open the Bible and see how many more you can find.
Zechariah 14 goes on in verse 4...
And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
The Lord Jesus Christ will return to the same mountain from which he left the earth to be with his Father in heaven, with great changes to the landscape accompanying his return. The consequence of this is shown.
And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one LORD, and his name one. Zechariah 14:9
Human government will be replaced by the Lord Jesus Christ ruling with his saints over the whole earth, with the religious and political capital being Jerusalem, as is shown further on in Zechariah 14.
Whether the present conflict will escalate into the situation described in Zechariah 14, or whether it is like the preliminary rumbles of a volcano, warning of the main event, we dare not predict, but the final outcome is certain.
You may have noticed yellow highlighting in the manifestos quoted above - their authors are aware of God’s promises to Abraham, indeed Islam claims that the promises belong to them, so they falsely accuse Israel of secret territorial ambitions. But the promises were made by God himself, this is God's plan, not Israel's...
In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: Genesis 15:18
Zechariah 14 describes the fulfilment of God's promises, the day when the Middle East will at last have enduring peace.