Remember 1989: ‘No More Delay’
Writing in the Boston Herald this week, Lee Edwards referred to 1989 as the “miracle year.” It was in that year, he wrote, that “Communism, the dark tyranny that controlled more than 40 nations and claimed the lives of an estimated 100 million victims during the 20th century, suddenly collapsed in Eastern and Central Europe without a shot being fired.”
Edwards isn’t the first commentator to spotlight the significance of 1989. Last month, for example, columnist James Carroll made an interesting comparison between Kristallnacht, when Adolf Hitler incited riots that triggered Germany’s campaign to destroy European Jewry, and the same date in 1989. “If Nov. 9, 1938, can be taken as the beginning of Hitler’s war,” Carroll wrote, “the end of it can be taken as coming on that date in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was breached. The Cold War, beginning in a Soviet-American argument over Berlin, can be understood as the long denouement of World War ii” (emphasis mine).
Nov. 9, 1989, can certainly be pinpointed as the end of an era, but of much greater significance—from a prophetic standpoint—is the new era that date ushered in! As Trumpet columnist Ron Fraser has explained,
During the Cold War, history seemed stuck in a time warp as the U.S. and Soviet Russia glared at each other over a concrete barrier slicing through the German city of Berlin.
History revived on that fateful night, Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. …
In a sense, a history which had been held back, delayed for 40 years in the icy freeze of cold war, was suddenly freed to pursue its ongoing course. We had entered a time of “no more delay” in the course of world events (Revelation 10:6; Zephaniah 1:14). The history of mankind was about to reach its crashing, globe-shattering climax!
The fall of the Berlin Wall was to herald the dramatic acceleration of a European phenomenon which had been somewhat stultified during the Cold War—the revival of European imperialism. Simply put, the resurrection of that old imperial power which has dominated history since 31 b.c., the Roman Empire.
For more than five decades under Herbert W. Armstrong’s leadership, the Plain Truth magazine had powerfully and consistently proclaimed the future revival of that old European empire, to be headed by a newly unified Germany. For example, Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956, “Germany will lead and dominate the coming United States of Europe.” Similar statements had been made over the years on Mr. Armstrong’s television program, The World Tomorrow.
Mr. Armstrong barely missed living long enough to see the Berlin Wall fall in 1989. Yet many of the millions who studied his prophetic writings were well aware of the momentous significance of Nov. 9, 1989, as we all watched that wall come tumbling down.
Four weeks after the wall came down, Gerald Flurry and John Amos were fired from the Worldwide Church of God for continuing Mr. Armstrong’s legacy of watching world events and warning this world of the cataclysmic events prophesied to occur immediately before the Messiah’s return to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem!
For more on how the church that sponsors theTrumpet.com is carrying on Mr. Armstrong’s legacy, read “Sharing the Word of the Lord” and Raising the Ruins.