The Abrahamic Initiative: Chronicling one of the greatest end time moves of God

By Alexis Wallace

Over seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, Prophet Isaiah stood on the banks of time and destiny prophesying to the offspring of the children of Abraham. His message still reverberates today. He prophesied that the "Eastern" trading tribes at the appointed time would come to the comprehensive reality of the glory and brilliance of the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781647733933

Book preview

Preface

Ten Powerful Chapter, Ten Powerful Introductions—One Book

Literary tradition seldom sees the author writing the foreword for their own book. I am not about to break that tradition. I am penning here an introduction to the multiple forewords for this book. These forewords are a prophetic tapestry of majestic writers that insightfully invite the reader into each chapter of this book.

Each Foreword writer has been carefully selected to address the topic of the chapter for which they are writing. I am humbled and pleased by every one of them, most of whom I have personally known and respected most of my life.

One thing that all our chapter introductory writers share in common is in being tell it like it is people. Their forthrightness, honesty, and life experiences make their perspectives even more relevant to each chapter.

Ten: God’s Number for Completion and Perfection

It was a challenge whittling down my manuscript to just ten chapters, and I thank God for friends that confirmed the necessity of my doing so.

There is an esoteric essence in numbers, wherein the numerical dimensions of the holy Temple in Jerusalem show us the very microcosm of creation. This reveals a better means for our understanding of the divine. I say all that high-minded stuff to stress what I believe to be the importance of my even choosing the right number for this great end-time work.

Just as God required ten righteous men in Sodom to stave off His divine punishment, ten also marks the number of the annual days of repentance beginning on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and ending on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur (the Day of Repentance).

The choices of life between good and evil and blessing and curse are clearly and universally understood in the battle between the Ten Commandments versus the Ten Curses as detailed in Exodus.

The bridge between cryptic numerology and gematria that unveils the redemptive plan for mankind was very carefully built through the numerical code sequence of the number ten. It is a cosmic number that will yield one of the greatest spiritual harvests in the soon coming fullness of time.

The Abrahamic Initiative book is ten chapters. It has ten unique focuses of our mission, thus requiring ten powerful forewords by ten specially chosen individuals.

Salute to My Heritage

One generation shall praise Your works to another, And shall declare Your mighty and remarkable acts. (Psalm 145:4 AMP)

I touched an iguana through Mom’s hand in Ecuador on a mission trip that I will never forget. I am no reptile lover, so to me, that was a big deal! Looking back, that symbiotic experience was so profound. It, to me, describes so well my relationship with my parents. I am what I am because they are what they are. And what they are has powerfully impacted my life. In Ecuador, I touched the iguana through Mom’s hand. I could not touch life but for Mom’s hand.

Introduction

Arabian Foundations

The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, proclaimed the good news [of the Savior] to Abraham in advance [with this promise], saying, In you shall all the nations be blessed. So then those who are people of faith [whether Jew or Gentile] are blessed and favored by God [and declared free of the guilt of sin and its penalty, and placed in right standing with Him] along with Abraham, the believer.

—Galatians 3:8–9 AMP

An Arabian noble gentleman heard the voice of God and moved from his Arabian homeland to become the patriarch of the three most powerful religions of the world today. Ibrahim as he is called in Arabic or Abraham to the Hebrew people and Christians is the common ancestral root of the Arabic, Hebrew, and Christian people.

Unfortunately, when we look at the state of the world today, we have only to watch the news to see that Muslims have been shot and killed, execution-style, in their living rooms and outside of their mosques. They have been kicked off airplanes and have had their clothes set on fire and their mosques firebombed. All of this happening in the good old USA by many people that would label themselves as Christians.

Overseas in the Middle East, as the media focuses on ISIS’s brutality of Christians in Syria and Iraq, what seems to be slipping through the cracks and escaping the public’s attention is the fact that Muslims are the ones over the last decade that have suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities. This is an official statistic reported by the US National Counterterrorism Center, which is the United States government organization responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts.

Research from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that more than six in ten Americans have seldom or never had a conversation with a Muslim. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they know little about Islam, while 26 percent say they know nothing at all about that religion. The average person that manages to find church on Sunday morning might not ever hear a message like this because we live in a time where most come for a pep talk to feel good about life and not to be challenged. This is contrary to the reality of the Bible and its relevance to us because the Bible is not an easy street book just as Yeshua tells us in Matthew 10:22, that we shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved (King James Version).

A March 22, 2012, Pew Research Center Survey of Religion in Prisons determined that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in US prisons (when conversions to Protestantism and Catholicism are not combined).

A recent report from the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, finds that Muslims make up about 9 percent of state prisoners, though they are only about 1 percent of the US population.

In an NPR (National Public Radio) article by Leila Fadel (July 25, 2019), the author for the Muslim Advocate’s report Yusuf Saei said that knowing how many Muslims are in state prisons helps prison officials understand the importance of respecting religious practice for a significant and growing portion of people in prison.

The report also compiled 163 lawsuits between October 2017 and January 2019 in which Muslims alleged their right to practice was being violated.

According to J. Michael Waller of the Institute of World Politics, Muslim inmates comprised between 17 and 20 percent of the US prison population in 2003, but most of them arrived in jail as non-Muslims. According to his research, 80 percent of prisoners who find faith while behind bars convert to Islam (April 1, 2015).

The fact of the matter is that right now, across the entire Western world, there is a modern phenomenon being experienced of a statistically high incidence of incarcerated non-Muslims converting to Islam while in the prison system.

When Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel together at Shechem to review their history all the way back to Terah, the father of Abraham, he reminded them of how the Lord had faithfully and miraculously delivered them from beyond the Euphrates River and led him through all the land of Canaan.

Joshua’s historical and encouraging dialogue at Shechem climaxed with him admonishing the Israelites to fear the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and in truth. Joshua 24 verse 14 continues, Remove the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the [Euphrates] River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.

Another poignant point made by Joshua in this Shechem dialogue is that we have freedom of choice:

If it is unacceptable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:15)

Scripture is clear with regard to our freedom of choice; of course, we must stand ready to accept the consequences of our actions. Freedom of choice in today’s world means that we have no right to burn Korans or sacred books from other religions. Mr. Saei’s point is well put with regard to our respecting the religious practice for a significant and growing portion of people in prison.

But there is also a danger in this growing demographic that we need to be very aware of, and it is that prison Islamic evangelistic outreach is one of the fertile grounds for the fanaticizing of Islamic converts.

Add to this toxic mix, racist politicians that pour gasoline on those incendiary embers, declaring that Islam is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out. This fear mongering by authorities leads to the blazing hatred acts.

My brothers and sisters, we must cross the line of ignorance and prejudice to initiate a new relationship with our fellow man. We cannot just plan another cold and calculating evangelistic strategy or launch another national crusade—God forbid!

We have had our share of crusades! From the days of Pope Urban the Second who initiated these religious wars all the way back at the turn of the first millennia (1095—the First Crusade), The Crusades were a romanticized event that was not so much the will of God as it was the will of man. Officially, it sounded like a noble cause to guarantee pilgrims access to the Eastern Mediterranean holy sites that were under Muslim control. But in actuality, there was a strong political motivation to woo and manipulate his Christian audience as the Pope sought to unite the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom, which had been divided since the East–West Schism of 1054, and to establish himself as head of the unified Church.

According to our mindsets of today, when most people justify the consideration of the military intervention or invasion of foreign lands, unless you are a tyrant or dictator, your usual thought process would lead you to consider the restoration and welfare of the land that you are militarily intervening in. But with Pope Urban II’s call for Crusade in 1095, it had very little to do with the welfare of the Jewish people because history shows us that the prevailing mindset saw Jews as much an enemy of Christianity as the Muslims.

From the offset of the very first Crusade, conquest, dominion, manipulation, and entitlement were powerful forces of influence. There were also powerful forces that ensured that we, the three main Abrahamic faiths, would never sail across the sea of distrust, prejudice, and misinformation to forge true relationships via an Abrahamic initiative that could bring glory to the God of Abraham.

From the days of Pope Urban’s Crusades, with their political agenda, to the Klu Klux Klan, America’s most infamous terrorist group, who from their inception have hated and committed terrorists acts against African Americans, Jews, immigrants, gays, and Catholics. Kingdom wisdom teaches us that when wrong is not corrected, it becomes the standard. The Klan has typically seen itself as a Christian organization, calling for the purification of American society to make America and the world great again.

There needs to be a genuine Abrahamic Initiative, not another political crusade where the motivation of the initiators is a duplicitous one. There needs to be a genuine movement where there will be no altered facts and no unchecked spirit of entitlement. Our forward-thinking aspirations, when we come together in unity for the work that lays ahead, will be to walk in the wisdom whereby we can overcome the challenges of the engrafting process for unity that presented and still presents itself for that process between the Hebrew and Gentile:

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you [Gentiles], being like a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among them to share with them the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast over the [broken] branches and exalt yourself at their expense. If you do boast and feel superior, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root that supports you. You will say then, Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in. (Romans 11:17–19 AMP)

There needs to be a genuine movement where there will be no altered facts and no unchecked spirit of entitlement that will lead to pride. With wisdom, we can look through the course of history to see where that spirit has caused us to sanctify that which is unsanctified. By our flawed actions, we have caused many of the foundation of such movements in the past to become shaky. They are now unable to sustain the weight of our present and future generations.

There are some people that are so blinded by the spirit of entitlement and whose minds are so fixed by generations of error and prejudice that they miss and probably will choose not to see the reality of Abraham’s genealogy.

Abraham was the patriarchal founding father of Judaism, as in Judaism, he is the founding father of the Covenant, which details that special relationship between the Hebrew people and Elohim (God). Abraham, the patriarchal founding father of Judaism, was not a Jew but an Arab.

Now [in Haran] the Lord had said to Abram, Go away from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you. (Genesis 12:1 AMP)

Haran is where God called Abram from and where he was living at the time of his call. Haran is a city whose ruins lie within present-day Turkey. Haran is also the father of Lot and brother of Abraham.

And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees. (Genesis 11:28)

While Haran was the place where God’s call came to Moses, Scripture makes clear that Abraham’s original place of descent was Ur of Chaldees.

Thou art the Lord the God, who didst choose Abram, and broughtest him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and gavest him the name of Abraham. (Nehemiah 9:7)

Ur is in modern-day southern Iraq. Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf. The coastline has shifted, and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates. Ur of the Chaldees was an ancient city that flourished until about 300 BC.

The Arabic peoples mainly inhabit the areas of Northern Africa and the Middle East. And much of that area is referred to as the Arab world. This was where Abraham descended from, so he would be Arabic.

You see, not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. There are an estimated 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. The Organization of Islamic Countries has fifty-five member states. The Arab World consists of twenty-two countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Genealogically, Abraham is the progenitor of the three main religions as the grandfather of Jacob who had his name and nature changed to Israel after wrestling with a very special angel at the Ford Jabbok (one of the streams on the east of Jordan). Jesus’ ancestry lines are traced through Israel to Abraham.

For the Arabic people, Abraham is the father of Ishmael and the grandfather of Esau, which makes him the main and common ancestor of most Arabic people.

If we are to do an Abrahamic initiative that takes a holistic approach to establishing bonds of international friendship between our three main Abrahamic faiths, then it is absolutely imperative that we shake hands in wisdom and with humility as we truthfully address the reality of our histories.

Peace accords and the peace process are nothing new to our modern history as we see the UN Resolutions, Madrid, Oslo, Hebron, and Camp David, etc. But we must realize that no matter how noble the effort may be, first of all, it is not just an Israeli-Palestinian issue but an Arab Israeli one to which we must go to the very root cause if we seek to truthfully address it. That’s where we must start and where healing must take place.

We must address some roots causes of outright emotional pain. We might have to re-break some emotional bones if we expect our ligaments to set properly and our limbs to be enabled to use again. Emotionally, our arms have been idled at our sides for way too long, and the weight of depression and oppression has been what has kept them inactive.

God is bringing a new season of healing and purpose to the body. Therefore, we must be willing for the light of truth to shine in some very dark and painful places if healing is to take place. When God fixes this age-old predicament, then we will be able to victoriously walk the same path that we once walked:

Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed. Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled. (Hebrews 12:12–15 KJV)

The Healing Genesis

Special Introduction from Rev. Dr. ADA Thompson

Dear Pastor Alexis,

I have read and reread your prodigious document, The Abrahamic Initiative. First, let me congratulate you on this most fabulous document. I have been blown away by its scope, its depth, and