“only place that has an explicit role in the book of Revelation?’
Not so sure about that though it does all end at Megiddo. Given Israel’s rebirth and the US’s role in how God brought it about, the new world is definitely in the fight as well. The Son of Perdition may well have a ready made military industrial powerbase via the USA...like some Beast “that arises from the sea”...”or Earth” depending on one’s point of view or how prophecy is yet to unfold.
Sure we can be brought to ruin just the same and the action shifts “eastward”. What ever happens, it will fall in line with scripture...though perhaps not in the ways everything has always been expected to unfold. There will be surprises for pagan and Christian alike.
Christ first came at a time in history and in a manner not “expected”...yet he came in a way just as the scripture stated it would...not necessarily according to “popular” interpretations of the learned Jews of the era. It was Magi, pagans, who saw the star and had a better read of the times than the jews of that time. God as man had “slipped” into history almost unnoticed.
I think we need to take Christ seriously when he says “I come as a thief”. Yes there will be a rapture, everything the Bible says is going to happen but we may be better off tossing a lot of the old accepted notions out. The final “unfolding” is going to be a lot more dynamic and “on the spot” than we could ever imagine. I can’t neglect Matthew when it speaks of angels gathering up believers in a way that the nations notice; two women grinding at a stone mill and one is suddenly taken. The likening of the days of Noah being like the days of the coming of the Son of man and the reference of Noah’s ark shutting in those so redeemed as the floods arose; one can’t fail to notice it.
There are seeming incongruities about end times scriptures,which aren’t really, if you understand that like the utterances of the seven thunders which John wasn’t allowed to write down, there are things that will happen in ways we have never expected, at times that we could have never expected them,...like a thief who comes and robs then leaves when no one was aware until the theft is discovered and the money is gone.
It is a battle on a grand scale, universal in scope, and the mind can not begin fathom it!
Peace and good day to you!
On the edges, I have wondered if the entire Americas and other mostly modern discoveries are somehow covered in “the coastlands.” That phrase seems to suggest peripheral areas. But I’m not dogmatic about it. This would leave the drama centering around the Old World. Perhaps one purpose for the American faith torch, in the Lord’s hands, is to re-ignite faith in parts of the Old World. Then it could burn out, as far as its use is concerned.
Another question is microcosm vs. macrocosm. Many Christian principles can play out in both. We can go through miniature hells (and heavens) on earth as a result of our spiritual choices, as well as end up in one or the other final completed one in eternity. Could some Revelation phenomena be large scale and some small scale?
But yes, it did seem funny. If people think the Americas and other apparently unmentioned areas (Australia, Antarctica) are gone by Revelation, it would seem that it would be logical to abandon them before they meet whatever unspecified annihilation that they do. I haven’t ever heard about that, at the least.
God bless and keep you till we meet again.
But most of all, it seems to me that instability is the fate of the American model, because it was birthed in a stream of Christianity, but there is one hitch: nothing ever promised that this stream would keep running even as well as it was (and it had some blind spots, such as what gave rise to the well known curse of Negro chattel slavery). Yes, even more easily than Donald Trump has pushed back, the whole thing could slide down to an even worse hellishness in the future. Perhaps the seed is now in it with “gay marriage” and the most we can do is to put some temporary cap over that seed. But again we ought to have known this anyhow. And please pardon me if I ramble; I think these are potentially important things to consider. God has no grandchildren, as the old saw goes. What went up, can come down. Jesus posed a question about when He returns, will He find faith on the earth. We can’t coast and expect to inherit the greatest possible eternal blessing, to say the least.