The news that China is militarising its artificial islands in the South China Sea with missiles, reveals the aggressive ratcheting of its control over an international sea gate is not going away and increases its threat to all its neighbours.
One neighbour alone has the numbers to balance China’s weight – India. Will India stand with the West against Chinese expansionism or will it fall into line with the Biblically prophesied Eastern combine which will attack Europe with an army of 200 million? Revelation 9:16, ‘saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates. ….The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand; I heard their number.’
India is the world’s largest democracy, with a population of 1.3 billion. Only time will tell whether India’s highly – decentralised government system, with its divers ethnic, linguistic and religious groups in a noisy democracy will be content to ally itself with the autocratic Chinese communist system.
Current signs of strife over China’s ‘Belt and Roads’ initiative may indicate otherwise, reflecting India’s natural rivalry with its aggressive neighbour, and there are other reasons why such a union could be in doubt.
India has only recently been found to be made up of two ancient genetically divergent groups, half of which are similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations, amongst the speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi.
The racial divide between India and China is also influenced by India’s historical links with the ancient Parthian Empire, which included parts of Western India, where Kings with Parthian names (e.g. Gondophares) reigned in the Punjab region, and the great commercial town of Minnagar in the Indus Delta was under Parthian Kings.
The Parthians were actually Israelites and their Empire consisted of the 10 Northern tribes carried away from Israel in captivity by the ancient Assyrians. When Assyria was defeated by Babylon, the liberated Israelites moved North into Asia and built an empire which rivalled Rome at the time of Christ, but they have disappeared from acknowledged history.
Jesus Christ was not in Judaea from age 12-30 (Read our article Joseph of Arimathea). Just as he visited Israelites in England, He may well have visited Israelites then in Western India, for the same reason, Matthew 15:24, “He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
We see the same thing occurring with one of Christ’s Apostles, who were also sent by Christ to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, ‘go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ‘ Matthew 10:6. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states – “St Thomas (the Apostle of Christ) founded the Christian churches in Malabar [India], and then crossed to Mylapur, now a suburb of Madras, where the shrine of his martyrdom….. still stands on mount St Thomas, where a cross is seen with Pahlavi [Parthian} inscriptions.
Thus India with its Indo-European heritage, its Western democracy, genetic links, and British traditions is unlikely to sit comfortably within a Chinese dominated union, whose people do not enjoy India’s freedoms and heritage. Whether they will actually have the choice, is another matter altogether. Much will depend on their reaction to China’s aggressive expansionism.
India has joined the so-calle Australia Group, aimed at limiting the spread of chemical and biological weapons, and the Quadrilateral Dialogue, a regional cooperation forum that brings together the US, Japan, India and Australia. Whether these nations have the will to counterbalance the aggression of a determined China is yet to be seen, but we should understand that nations that stand for nothing risk losing all they have.