Stage lights shifted from blue to white as the backing band played a drifting melody. Two men hoisted curled rams’ horns and let out long blasts.

“Some of you have been saying you want to live in biblical times,” Cahn said, pacing behind a lectern. Then he spread his hands wide. “Well, you are.”

Sitting at the end of a sleepy drive an hour from New York City, Beth Israel may look like any common suburban church. But the center has a highly unusual draw. Every weekend, some 1,000 congregants gather for the idiosyncratic teachings of the church’s celebrity pastor, an entrepreneurial doomsday prophet who claims President Donald Trump’s rise to power was foretold in the Bible.

Cahn is tapping into a belief more popular than may appear.

A recent Fox News poll found 1 in 4 Americans believe “God wanted Donald Trump to become president.” Celebrities like televangelist Paula White and Franklin Graham have boosted the idea. The president’s own press secretary suggested as much in a January interview. And on the opening day of the Conservative Political Action Conference this month, millionaire businessman Michael Lindell took to the stage and declared Trump “chosen by God.”

Cahn was ahead of the curve.

He has dedicated an entire book to this very thesis, an insight he claims to have received from God. “The Paradigm: The Ancient Blueprint That Holds the Mystery of Our Times,” in fact, is only the most recent installment of a best-selling series dealing with the supposed mystical meaning behind all manner of current events. In it, Cahn likens Trump to the biblical king Jehu, who led the ancient nation of Israel away from idolatry.

With his growing stature, Cahn is also a rising figure in some quarters of conservative politics. In an email to congregants, Cahn shared his latest good news: This weekend, he is making his first trip to the president’s vacation retreat, Mar-a-Lago. He is set to address a small gathering of activists and advisers.

After worship on a recent Sunday, in a roped-off section flanked by security guards, Cahn signed piles of his books before a small crowd. At 59, Cahn cultivates a refined demeanor, rarely appearing without a signature all-black suit and tie. He laid his hands gently on one man’s shoulders and offered quiet counsel. “Be patient,” he said. “Keep praying for breakthrough.”

Gail Greenholtz, an elder member, stood near the end of the line. “Many of us consider him a prophet of our time,” she said. “A visionary.”

Michael Cooney, 58, had driven an hour to hear the pastor teach on politics and prophecy. “It’s all relevant for this moment,” he said. “He shows us that Trump was actually in the Bible.”

Central to Beth Israel’s story is the unlikely rise of its pastor, a liberal Jew transformed into an end-times evangelist. The tale is also a step into a controversial and burgeoning layer of American religion, where commerce, supernatural belief and patriotism blend freely. Daniel Silliman, a Valparaiso University professor of religion, called Beth Israel and its pastor part of a long tradition of Americans “looking to prophecy as a way to absorb the chaos” of current events. “It can make someone feel that God is working through human history,” he said, “transforming anxiety into a sense of fullness.”

The son of a Holocaust refugee, Cahn was raised in a nominally Jewish family in the New York suburbs. But from an early age, he was drawn to the more esoteric corners of belief.

He devoured the writings of Nostradamus, the Virginia psychic Edgar Cayce and far-out conspiracy theories about ancient astronauts. Cahn soon stumbled on “The Late Great Planet Earth,” the 1970s best-seller that argued doomsday prophecies of the Bible were playing out with events like the Cold War and Israel’s Six-Day War. Cahn bought the book thinking it was about UFOs; instead he was given a crash-course in Christian eschatology.

“I was just floored,” Cahn said. On his 20th birthday, to the dismay of his Jewish father, he became a Christian.

By the 1980s, Cahn was leading outreach for a hippy-style church in New Jersey. His hair and beard grown shaggy, he led services with a guitar slung around his neck. Cahn later broke off to lead an independent congregation, Beth Israel, and built his following through a slot on Christian radio, where his messages took on an end-times flavor.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks struck Manhattan, Cahn adopted a sharp, even more apocalyptic focus.

In sermons, he began comparing the attacks to the ancient warnings of the Bible, drawing largely from the book of Isaiah, where God vows to punish the disobedient nation of Israel.

Cahn said abortion, gay rights and the perceived retreat of religion in the public square were all troubling signs that America, like ancient Israel, had lost its way.

Once rolling with this comparison, Cahn began seeing patterns everywhere. As the Israelites turned away from their God, they were attacked by Assyrians; America, in modern times, was also attacked by a foreign army from the East, al-Qaida terrorists. After the ancient siege, the Israelites vowed to replant a destroyed sycamore grove with new trees; near ground zero, a huge sycamore tree was also destroyed, as the towers fell.

The supposed connections go on. Tenuous as they may seem, Cahn saw the links as compelling. His flock did, too. “God revealed patterns,” he said. “I called it the download process.”

Cahn eventually turned his thesis into a full-length book, “The Harbinger,” in 2012, put out by the publishing arm of the powerhouse Charisma Media, a Christian multimedia company that also runs a daily news site. The book climbed up best-seller lists and hovered there for months, alongside blockbusters like “Fifty Shades of Grey.” He followed his debut with a companion edition and three other titles, all embellishing on the same theme of prophecies replaying today.

“The Paradigm,” published in the months after Trump’s win, again likens the United States to the ancient nation of Israel — two peoples, Cahn says, who have a unique relationship with God. He then argues that all sorts of figures in contemporary politics have biblical counterparts. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, for example, are the modern-day analogues to wicked Ahab and Jezebel. Trump is the warrior-king Jehu, who took control of the nation and cast idols out of the capital. “Jehu also sought to drain the swamp,” Cahn said.

Trump, “like his ancient predecessor,” Cahn writes in his book, was a “flawed vessel” being used by God. “The unlikely and controversial warrior was destined to become the new ruler of the land,” Cahn goes on. “The template would ordain that Donald Trump would become the next president.”

Some observers object to Cahn's claims to divine insight. In particular, he has attracted the attention of a network of Christian critics who see him as part of a growing stream of over-the-top supernaturalism in the church.

Tensions came to a climax in 2015, when Cahn suggested in a book and during several TV appearances that an imminent cataclysm was on the horizon.

Leaning on arcane readings of the early books of the Bible, Cahn said that just as God visited judgments on the wayward Israelites according to a particular seven-year pattern — something called “the shemitah” — modern catastrophes might follow a similar pattern. In 2001 came terrorist attacks, in 2008 there was an economic crash. Cahn asked: could 2015 bring another disaster?

But months passed, and the doomsday date came and went. He was dismissed as a grifter.

Cahn actually grows embarrassed discussing the doomsday fiasco. He insists he has always included disclaimers on his work and never set exact dates. Rather, Cahn wanted to warn that a cataclysm could happen, not that it would. “I always say: You can’t put God in a box.”

And Cahn’s admirers remain true. On a Friday evening this winter, Beth Israel was packed, even though a snowstorm had been forecast.

After worship, congregants gathered near the canteen, where steam rose from platters of rice, beans and soup.

Several worshippers described how they once attended other, more mainline churches before discovering Beth Israel. Some still have a home church elsewhere, but come here for a supplemental dose of mysticism. Bob Keene, a 68-year-old school bus driver, described the appeal. “Learning about prophecy puts me at ease,” he said. “The problems I’m having, the things I’m going through, those are also part of God’s plan.”

Roxanne Mangal, a middle-aged woman in a flowery blouse, said Cahn had healed her of a terrible illness. Joining Beth Israel also brought wealth. “My income tripled,” she said. “It quadrupled.”

Now she wanted to show Keene a more recent miracle she’d seen, captured on a cellphone photo, no less. After Trump had moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem — the subject of great excitement at the church — she believed she saw the New York skyline light up in heavenly sparks. “God did that,” she said, thrusting the phone forward.

“Hmm,” Keene said, looking at the photo politely. “I thought it was a sunset at first.”