Britain founded its empire on its sea gates. This summer, it yielded one of its last and most important such gates without a shot being fired: the Rock of Gibraltar.
At midnight on July 14, border controls between Gibraltar and Spain ceased. Police and customs posts along the border were demolished. “The last wall in continental Europe has fallen,” gushed Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
The Strait of Gibraltar is the only western passage out of the Mediterranean Sea. The United States Navy regularly sends its nuclear submarines through the 8-mile-wide strait. One vessel passes through the strait every four minutes, five times the frequency at the Suez Canal and 10 times that at the Panama Canal. Without Gibraltar, access to the entire southern coast of Europe, northern Africa and, by extension, the western coasts of the Middle East is limited or, in the most drastic scenario, shut down.
The Royal Navy still maintains a naval base there, so the Spanish do not yet control Gibraltar militarily. On paper, it’s still British territory. But it is guarded by Spanish border guards. British citizens must show their passports to enter, while Spanish citizens are free to come and go. Britain is signaling that its resolve is gone and it is backing down.
Britain’s government thinks that such loss of control doesn’t matter. But dramatic recent events in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea should wake it up.
Nearly 4,000 years ago, God promised the patriarch Abraham spiritual salvation for the whole world through Jesus Christ, who would be born of his line. But what even many Christians do not understand is that He also promised Abraham’s descendants national greatness. This separate, physical promise included this specific detail: These descendants would “possess the gate of his enemies” and “the gate of those which hate them” (Genesis 22:16-18; 24:60).
“A gate is a narrow passage of entrance or exit,” Herbert W. Armstrong explained in his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “When speaking nationally, a ‘gate’ would be such a pass as the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Gibraltar. … We must look for a people forming more than one nation—yet all one people, children of Abraham—either now or in history who possess the sea gateways of the world, or we must deny the Word of God.”
Mr. Armstrong proved that God kept His promise and made Abraham’s descendants into a great nation and company of nations (Genesis 35:11). Further, he proved that the Bible shows the most powerful nations among those descendants are America and Britain. One of those proofs is that these two brother nations gained control of every major “gate” on Earth!
He also made a clear, bold prediction: Britain and America would lose control of those sea gates. “[W]e have lost most of them, most recently, the Panama Canal—and it appears that soon Gibraltar, too, will be lost,” he wrote (ibid).
On what evidence? In Deuteronomy 28:52, God warned these descendants of Israel that, rather than possess the gates of their enemies, their enemies “shall besiege thee in all thy gates.”
Britain is in the process of handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which has never owned them and has no history there. It has already surrendered control of Hong Kong, the Suez Canal, the Cape of Good Hope, Malta, Papua New Guinea, Timor, the West Indies, Cyprus, the Gulf of Guinea, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Singapore and the Gulf of Aden. These gates are politically, culturally, economically and militarily crucial, even in times of peace. In times of war, they make the difference between life and death.