If the prospect of Islamists taking over the Suez Canal made Europe nervous, chaos in Libya is giving it apoplexy.

Crazy, crazy times. Every week, another government falls: Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt. Bahrain and Yemen hang in the balance. Now Libya is about to go. Protesters are looting and burning. Tripoli is in flames. The government has mowed down over 200 people, which only angered the mob all the more. We’re about to see the longest-serving dictator in the world booted.

And it’s all happening in the neighborhood of the world’s richest oil chests. Libya happens to be the world’s 12th-biggest oil producer, and Africa’s third biggest. The country’s Sirte Basin holds the largest oil reserves on the continent.

Unsurprisingly, anxiety over Libya sent oil prices soaring 7 percent yesterday, putting oil at a 2½-year high. Brent crude jumped to over $105 a barrel, its peak since before the 2008 financial crisis.

Who is Libya’s biggest customer? Europe. Though the country produces only 2 percent of the world’s oil, it supplies an estimated 10 percent of Europe’s. Most of the 1.4 million barrels a day from the Sirte Basin go to Italy, Germany and Spain. Italy alone buys about one third of Libya’s oil and gas exports.

Clearly, Libya’s mad mob represents a massive escalation of the threat to European energy supplies. Reports emerged of a tribe in eastern Libya warning Muammar Qadhafi that if he kept oppressing protesters it would try to halt oil exports to the Continent. Worker strikes have already shut down one oilfield and one oil refinery. Skittish European energy companies have started evacuating some of their staff from the country. A German company announced it would cut its 100,000 bpd operations in Libya. The EU is getting ready to bring all its citizens in Libya home.

For Europe, the threat to one tenth of its oil supply is bad enough—yet at this point, nobody knows where the contagion of revolution in the Middle East will stop.

“This is potentially worse for oil than the Iran crisis in 1979,” said Paul Horsnell, the lead oil industry analyst at Barclays Capital. “That was a revolution in one country, here there are so many countries at once.”

Looked at prophetically, the two aspects of this story likely to prove most significant and worthy of attention are: 1) how Iran will seek to exploit the situation; and 2) how Europe will react.

Informed by specific biblical prophecies, the Trumpet’s editor in chief has for years been speaking about the dangers of Iran holding the world to ransom by gaining substantial control over world oil supplies. As far back as 1992, he focused first on its potential for seizing the oil fields of neighboring Iraq, at one time the world’s third-leading oil exporter. “Such a takeover by Iran would shock the world—especially Europe. It would be a strong impetus for Europe to unite quickly,” Gerald Flurry wrote in the December 1994 Trumpet. “Such a move would, in all likelihood, give Iran power to cause a sizable increase in the price of oil. This could help trigger a collapse of the Western world’s weak currencies. This in turn could cause Europe to quickly unite into the most powerful economic bloc in the world. That very event is prophesied to occur in your own Bible!”

Thus, when allied forces deposed Saddam Hussein in 2003, lopping the head off Iraq and leaving the country vulnerable to foreign infiltration, the Trumpet immediately spoke about how this opened the door for the fulfillment of the prophecies of Iran’s gaining influence there. (Mr. Flurry details these prophecies in his booklet The King of the South.) Though America’s presence in that country has prevented a complete Iranian takeover, the extent of the infiltration is already deep and will only grow as America continues to withdraw.

Another biblical prophecy directed Mr. Flurry to foretell of the downfall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the country’s subsequent shift toward radicalism and alignment with Iran. In July 1993 he wrote, “Islamic extremism is gaining power at a frightening pace in Egypt. … I believe this prophecy … indicates you are about to see a radical change in Egyptian politics!”

Last month, when unrest began in Tunisia and then started spreading to Egypt, Mr. Flurry took a deeper look at those prophecies. A crucial passage in Daniel 11, in addition to indicating that Egypt would unite with Iran, names two other countries that will join this Islamist alliance. Mr. Flurry taped a Key of David program on January 27, nearly a month ago, in which he pointed specifically to Ethiopia and Libya. These two nations, he said, “are going to also ally themselves closely with Iran, if not be controlled by [Iran]” as part of a “strategy by radical Islam to get control of that whole trade route going through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea,” through which a substantial portion of oil supplies to Europe and the West flow.

Libya wasn’t in the news. It was stable. Nobody had mentioned it. Nobody, that is, except the Prophet Daniel.

“[W]hy does the Bible mention Libya and Ethiopia, and Egypt, for that matter, and not many other nations in the Middle East?” Mr. Flurry asked in that Key of David program. “It’s because they are significant to Bible prophecy, and that they do relate to what’s happening in the Middle East right now!”

The Trumpet has focused on these signal prophecies about the Middle East for two decades—and right now, they are being fulfilled before our eyes so rapidly!

Watch what Iran does to seize the advantage in these destabilized nations that are almost wholly Muslim. Watch for evidence in these populations—particularly Egypt and Libya—of a turn toward radicalism, and for leaders to rise up to align their thinking with that of Iran. Watch for Iran to use oil politics to its powerful advantage!

And watch—carefully—for how Europe reacts to this massive, provocative threat to its energy supplies. As I wrote three weeks ago, “The European empire described in biblical prophecy—and presently coalescing, even amid financial troubles—is a voracious economic power, and unimaginably ferocious in securing the energy and other resources it needs to fuel itself.” Just look at how prophecy has already been dramatically vindicated by recent events—and know that we are certain to see that ferocity unleashed.