Europe and the Church, Part 13: And One Is Yet to Come
The book of Revelation shows there is to be one more revival of the Roman Empire immediately prior to Christ's return. Is the European Union the prophesied revival?
by Melvin Rhodes
My wife and I have often passed through Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport traveling to or from Ghana. Sometimes, we have broken up the return journey to Michigan with a short stop in England to visit family. There is a direct flight from Amsterdam to my hometown airport in the United Kingdom. When we have taken that option, we go through "Passport Control" in England. We are simply "In Transit" through the Netherlands.
So I was trying to understand why this time we had to go through immigration in Amsterdam when we were not actually visiting the Netherlands. We were, instead, heading to Cologne, Germany, for a three-day visit to the United Church of God office there. We were planning on touring Aachen and Trier for the purpose of further researching the history of Europe and the church.
I assumed that the "Passport Control" requirement had something to do with the Schengen Treaty, which was signed in 1985 by five member countries of what was then the 10-member European Community. I was not sure how many countries are now members, so I asked the official checking our passports.
"Twenty-six," was his answer.
"Twenty-six?" I asked with some incredulity. As there are 27 countries in the European Union, that meant only one was not a signatory. That one would be the United Kingdom, which I knew for a fact was not in the agreement. But I was also fairly sure that Ireland wasn't a member either.
His response to that was that only Iceland and the United Kingdom were not in the "Union." Clearly, the passport official himself was not clear on the difference between the European Union and the Schengen Treaty! The United Kingdom is in the Union but not in the Schengen Treaty; Iceland is not yet a member of the EU but is a Schengen signatory. There are actually 25 members of Schengen, not all of whom are members of the EU.
