Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

JERUSALEM – While Egypt has undergone some big leadership changes in recent years and some tumultuous social upheaval, a bigger story has been occupying the attention of the nation from the man in the street to top officials.

You probably haven’t heard much about this story – but it will have huge impact on the region and the world in the days to come.

Egypt is concerned about ISIS. It’s concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood as always. It’s concerned about the Palestinians in Gaza. It’s concerned about Iran.

But there’s something even more pressing on the minds of Egyptians – something they see as a matter of survival.

The lifeblood of Egypt has always been the Nile River.

Here’s a report from Foreign Policy Magazine from earlier this year: “Egypt’s musical-chairs government faces enough challenges. So why is a construction project almost 3,000 kilometers from Cairo provoking fears over Egypt’s national survival? Egypt and Ethiopia are butting heads over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4-billion hydroelectric project that Ethiopia is building on the headwaters of the Blue Nile, near the border between Ethiopia and Sudan. Cairo worries the mega-project, which began construction in 2011 and is scheduled to be finished by 2017, could choke the downstream flow of the Nile River right when it expects its needs for fresh water to increase.”

Note we are talking about a dam project that could “threaten Egypt’s national survival” as early as 2017.

How seriously is Egypt taking this threat?

A Wikileaks document released in the fall of 2012 revealed Egyptian plans to build an airstrip for bombing the dam. In June 2013, before he was deposed, President Mohamed Morsi said “all options” including military intervention were on the table if Ethiopia continued to build the dam on the Blue Nile.

Ahmed Abdel Halin, a strategic analyst, was quoted in the African newspaper Mshale earlier this year saying: “Egypt sees its Nile water share as a matter of national security.”

Ethiopia began diverting some water to the dam last year. That’s when things really started heating up in Egypt, with some Egyptian officials calling for sending commandos or arming local insurgents to sabotage the dam project unless Ethiopia halts construction.

Richard Tutwiler, a specialist in water resource management at the American University in Cairo, summed up Egypt’s problem: “Egypt is totally dependent on the Nile. Without it, there is no Egypt.”

A report in WaterWorld magazine, a trade publication of the international water industry, quoted a member of the Egyptian National Panel of Experts studying the effects of the Renaissance Dam as saying Ethiopia’s construction of a dam is a catastrophe for his country, which would end up losing 60 percent of its agricultural land. He also warned that a collapse of the Renaissance Dam could in turn lead to the collapse of the Aswan Dam, in effect devastating the whole of Egypt. Keep that in mind for later.

A report from National Geographic last fall showed Egyptians – from politicians to ordinary citizens – are furious and frightened by the implications of Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam.

“Ethiopia is killing us,” said taxi driver Ahmed Hossam. “If they build this dam, there will be no Nile. If there’s no Nile, then there’s no Egypt.”

“Building a dam is tantamount to a declaration of war,” a senior Nour Party official said. Meanwhile, Ethiopians living in Egypt have been beaten up and evicted from their homes due to the panic and helplessness of everyday Egyptians.

Here is another news report that will give you an idea of the magnitude of the crisis:

In 2012 Bradley Hope of Egypt’s the National reported that the dam “could destabilize Egypt in a way that would make the last year of political upheaval look minuscule.”

Mohamed Nasr El Din Allam, Egypt’s minister of water and irrigation, was quoted in that article as saying: “It would lead to political, economic and social instability. Millions of people would go hungry. There would be water shortages everywhere. It’s huge.”

Now think about this.

The Nile River’s length is 4,132 miles. It flows through Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, the Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and into Egypt. The Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt “the gift of the Nile,” because civilization there depended on the resources of the river. It’s true that without the Nile there would be no Egypt. To the east and west is desert.

The waters of the Nile have served as the means whereby civilizations have gathered along its banks – even to the days before the pharaohs of Egypt. The natural flow of the Nile is from south to north. Thus, the waters that eventually make their way to Egypt must first pass through the regions of southeastern Africa before emptying in the Mediterranean Sea.

Historically, in the spring, the snow on the mountains of East Africa melts, sending a torrent of water that overflows the banks of the Nile and floods the river valley. The rushing river picked up bits of soil and plant life called silt. As the annual flood receded, a strip of black soil emerged every year along the banks of the Nile. The silt was rich in nutrients, and it provided the people of Egypt with two or three crops every year. This made the Nile Valley ideal for farming since ancient times.

But that’s not as true today as it had been in the past. Egypt already had water problems before the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam came on the scene.

In 1970 the Egyptians constructed the Aswan Dam in southern Egypt to provide water for irrigation, to generate electricity and to control the flood waters of the Nile.

The original Aswan Dam was an embankment dam situated across the Nile River in Aswan, first built by the British in 1902. In the 1960s, President Nasser began building the high dam. It was a key objective of the socialist Egyptian government following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Nasser sought to control flooding, provide water for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity that would industrialize Egypt.

Nasser’s dream was to transform the old-fashioned agricultural economy of Egypt into a modern industrial society. It required electricity. Thus the power plant at the dam. It would also require moving people into cities and wiping out the old ways of raising crops that depended on the regular overflow of the banks of the Nile. In fact, 120,000 people, mostly Nubians, were forcibly relocated to build the dam and Lake Nasser, the reservoir into which the Nile flows.

No longer does the Nile overflow its banks the way it did annually before then. The Aswan Dam controls the flow of water, and no longer are the fertile areas along the Nile the source of natural nutrients flowing out of Africa. All that silt has been accumulating in the Aswan Dam since 1970. And it’s filling up with silt and already choking the flow of water into Egypt through the Nile. Some 40 million tons of silt was deposited annually on the banks of the Nile during flooding. That 40 million tons now accumulates every year in Lake Nasser and at the dam, diminishing both the capacity of the lake and the flow of water through the dam.

In other words, Egypt already has a big water problem. And the man most responsible for that water crisis was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the long-time president and Israel-hater – the predecessor to Anwar Sadat.

That water problem has already greatly diminished the fishing industry in Egypt because the water no longer carries those natural nutrients it picked up in Africa along the way.

But, as Egyptians have figured out, it could get a lot worse with the building of the dam in Ethiopia.

All of this may sound very familiar to Bible prophecy students.

The parallels between what’s happening in Egypt right now and what is predicted for Egypt in Isaiah 19 and Ezekiel 29 are stunning.

Isaiah 19 first predicts what seems to be a civil war in Egypt: “And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom. And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof; and I will destroy the counsel thereof: and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards. And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord; and a fierce king shall rule over them, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts.”

Following that, in Isaiah 19, comes the drying up of the Nile River: “And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up. And they shall turn the rivers far away; and the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall wither. The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks, and every thing sown by the brooks, shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. Moreover they that work in fine flax, and they that weave networks, shall be confounded. And they shall be broken in the purposes thereof, all that make sluices and ponds for fish.”

Isaiah 19 says that Egypt will become “desolate and waste” from “the tower of Syene unto the border of Ethiopia.”

What is Syene? It’s another name for Aswan – where the Nile enters Egypt through the Aswan Dam.

Keep your eyes on Egypt.

The confluence of prophecy and current events seems to be taking place before our eyes.

Is anyone paying attention?