This Recent Articles page is proud to serve up links to the house specialties that have been on offer at Chez ALS during the current year of 2025.

Each entry below contains a "hook" that suggests what the article deals with (an hors-d'œuvre), the first several paragraphs (an appetizer), plus a link to the full article (the main course). If you just want to scan over a list of the titles of all the articles on this site, you can save time by grabbin' a burger at the Article Index page. Bon appétit!

If you want to look for a specific topic, use the search function in the sidebar. Use the menu below to go to similar pages for previous years.

The Burden of Damascus

Syria has been front and center in the news these days, as the government of Bashar al-Assad has fallen to Islamist rebels while the power brokers who propped up his government for their own purposes sat on the sidelines and watched. As for Assad, he escaped from the capital Damascus and fled to Moscow, where he was welcomed with open arms by President Putin.

Not being as much of a political wonk as some in the watch community, it's still a bit too soon for me to try and sort through the situation in Syria with a high degree of clarity and scope out just how all this might play out. I'm pretty much like a lot of ordinary people right now, saddled with a case of "wait and see." So, that's not the point of this article—we'll have to wait and see.

Now, I may not be much of a political wonk, but I admit that I am a bit of a Scripture wonk. So, rather than a little geopolitical prognostication, what I want to do here is consider a hot topic that's been making the rounds in prophetic circles these days: the question of Damascus and its relationship to an oft-quoted prophecy in the book of Isaiah.

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Shifting Sands

My, what a difference a year makes. Scarcely a year ago, Iran was the up-and-coming bully of the Middle East, flexing its military muscles and bellowing its belligerent death-to-Israel diatribe with abandon. Iran was recognized as the world's terrorist octopus, with its tentacles reaching down into Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and a number of other smaller terrorist groups scattered throughout the Middle East.

As that octopus slowly and inexorably squeezed its tentacles around the neck of Israel, the Iranian head of that octopus frantically pursued its dream of developing nuclear weapons, rapidly drawing ever closer to the glorious day when it would be able to wipe Israel off the face of the earth with a spine-chilling array of shiny new nukes.

Not only that, but both Iran and their Russian BFFs maintained a strong military presence in Syria that served to (a) project a direct threat to the hated Jewish state and (b) prop up a cooperative Assad regime that exercised a cruel level of suppression over a suffering Syrian population.

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The Beatitudes of Revelation

After He was baptized by John in the Jordan River and returned from 40 days of fasting and being tempted by Satan in the wilderness, Jesus began His public ministry a stone's throw from what is known today as the Golan Heights, in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee.

One of His teachings or discourses—the first of five that appear in the book of Matthew and easily one of His best known and most widely quoted—is known as the Sermon on the Mount. This discourse appears early in the book of Matthew (the full version is found in Matthew 5–7, but a few bits and pieces and several of the Beatitudes we will look at are repeated in Luke 6), and most people believe it is one of the Lord's first major public teachings.

This three-chapter sermon covers a broad range of topics, from adultery and divorce to entering through the narrow gate and from being salt and light to storing up treasure in heaven. As the sermon begins, however, Jesus lays upon His listeners a list of statements that were radically different from anything they had ever heard from the Jewish religious leaders of the day.

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Babylon the Great

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about the fact that many prophecy folks are looking forward to the complete destruction of Damascus in a presumed fulfillment of Isaiah 17:1. But not all students of prophecy see it that way: Some believe this prophecy was completely fulfilled in history and thus see no need for a future fulfillment.

There have been a couple of occasions over the years when an email question or comment from a reader has triggered me to write another article, and I suppose I can add this one to the list. And here's how I got here:

In that article, I look at both sides of the argument and in the end I concede that I am officially on the fence. Although I tend to lean toward the historical fulfillment interpretation, I freely admit that it could go either way.

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Sing a New Song

My wife and I live in Taiwan—and although they do actually have a few good churches here, the vast majority of Taiwanese churches invariably lean toward some species of salvation by works and other associated doctrinal errors. I can only speculate as to how this came about, but virtually every church in Taiwan—regardless of the name on the door—seems to be of the opinion that "good works" are required to keep a solid grip on one's salvation.

Along similar lines, many Taiwanese Christians also believe (because they have been taught it and accept it without question) that they will stand at the Great White Throne Judgment to learn whether or not they made the cut, so to speak, and will enter heaven. Many believe that if their works fall short and they don't make the cut, they will be sent off to something that has the distinct odor of purgatory, although that word is never used because the Roman Catholics have had dibs on it since the fifteenth century.

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The Welcoming Committee

That does it...I have to write this.

I've been tempted on occasion to write something about this topic for a number of years, but it just never quite came to the forefront and grabbed center stage. It's as if nothing ever pulled my trigger quite hard enough to make me to sit down and do it. But recently, that trigger got pulled.

And it got pulled hard enough to make me do just that.

(I occasionally use the expression "Somebody finally got their trigger pulled!" to mean that a certain person got saved, but not in this case.)

My Taiwanese wife Phoebe studies the Bible with a zeal that puts me to open shame, but one of the benefits of that is that she often asks me questions or wants my opinion on biblical teachings she's found on YouTube that often lead me to a deeper understanding of something I thought I knew pretty well.

Phoebe and I both hold to a pre-trib view of the Rapture, and recently she asked me about a YouTube video of a nice young Bible teacher who was holding forth in regard to the timing of the Rapture—only this guy was praising and promoting the post-trib view while doing a bang-up job of denigrating the foolish misconception of the pre-trib view. OK...heard all that before.

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