Tue, Oct 18th - 7:39PM
HE IS COMING
Last Friday, an earthquake measuring nearly 8.0 on the Richter scale flattened huge populated areas around Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad. Some estimates put the death toll from the quake as high as 50,000 people, with entire cities utterly destroyed by the temblor. The aftershocks were themselves major earthquakes.
The National Geological Survey reported 13 aftershocks measuring between 5.5 and 6.3 over the weekend. Aftershocks are a normal part of earthquakes. But the number and severity following Friday's quake are unusual.
Tom Ambrose did a little research on the subject on Monday. He found the three largest-magnitude earthquakes recorded in recent history took place in this generation.
The 1960 Chilean earthquake measured 9.5; the 1964 Alaskan quake and the Sumatra quake last Christmas both measured 9.0. The Sumatra temblor was so powerful it moved the island off its former GPS coordinates.
It shook the entire earth like a tuning fork, making the planet wobble on its axis and actually causing time to shift slightly.
Ambrose also noted, "The U.S. Geological Survey data indicate earthquake occurrences are increasing. In 2000, there were 22,256 recorded earthquakes worldwide. That number has steadily increased to 31,199 earthquakes in 2004."
According to the just-released Red Cross World Disasters Report, natural disasters are coming at a scale unprecedented in both frequency and intensity. Hama Arba Diallo, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, recently told reporters, "Natural disasters have reached enormous dimensions." Research says natural disasters affected, on average, 188 million people for each of the years from 1990 to 1999. Forty-three percent of the worst natural disasters struck Asia, which suffered 70 percent of the casualties.
The U.N.'s Inter-Agency Task Force on Disaster Reduction studied great natural disasters between 1950 and 2000. It found that there were 20 such calamities between 1950 and 1959 costing $38 million (in 1998 U.S. dollars). But between 1990 and 1999, the number of disasters had risen to 82 and the economic losses had risen to $535 billion.
The U.N.'s insurance group, Munich Re, compared the last 10 years with the 1960s. It found that the number of major catastrophes had increased from 27 in the decade of 1960s to 70 in the last 10 years. Many trends indicate that we now are experiencing the ultimate expression of the apostle Paul's observation: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." (Romans 8:22) But even greater "birth pains" and catastrophes are still ahead.
In addition to earthquakes, famines and wars, Jesus predicted an increase in the frequency and intensity of new outbreaks of pestilence, or deadly, infectious diseases. Over the course of this past generation, modern medicine cured scourges like tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, only to have new, drug-resistant superbugs arise to take their place.
Until this generation, there was no such thing as AIDS. Since AIDS was discovered in 1980, a whole host of new diseases with acronyms instead of names, like SARS, for example, keep baffling scientists. Right now, the U.S. is bracing for a predicted "pandemic" of avian flu that some warn may be worse than the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
That epidemic killed twice as many people in one season as the entire four years of World War I. According to worst-case scenarios, avian flu could kill a billion people worldwide and make ghost towns out of major cities. And we couldn't make enough vaccine to fight it in time, even if we had a workable vaccine to make.
Thanks to international air travel, experts believe avian flu could travel from China to Japan to New York to San Francisco within the first week. If the flu does strike, victims at first would not know if it is the kind of easily treated flu that comes every year or the killer flu, known as H5N1.
The draft report of the federal government's emergency plan predicts as many as 200,000 Americans will die within a few months. This is considered a conservative estimate. The draft report also says it will not be until six months after the first outbreak that any vaccine will be available, and then only in a limited supply.
Everybody is scratching his or her head in perplexity. What is wrong with the weather? But that isn't the only question puzzling modern science. What is up with all the killer earthquakes? Where are all the new diseases coming from? And why are all these catastrophic conditions coming at once? These are existential questions with answers completely outside mankind's power to answer or control. Statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe.
One can argue that people can manipulate events to make them appear to fit Bible prophecy. But no one can manipulate the weather, solar events, earthquakes, famines or pestilential diseases. But when taken in the context of the Big Picture, the answer to all these questions is the same.
If only a few of these things were occurring, it would not fit Jesus' predicted scenario of events that precede His coming. But the fact that all these predicted signs are like birth pains occurring in concert with each other and growing in frequency and magnitude must not be ignored.
They clearly tell us that the Lord Jesus is coming very soon.
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