HEADLINES: Forty Thousand Velvet Crabs Washed up on the Coast of Great Britain. Penguins Dying and Littering the Beaches of New Zealand. Crows Falling Out of the Sky in Sweden. Eight Thousand Turtle Doves Falling Dead to the Ground in Italy. Two Million Dead Fish Washed up along the Shores of the Chesapeake Bay. That is just a few places from a much larger number of headlines.
It appears to have started on New Year’s Eve and has been escalating daily for over two weeks. Brazil is dealing with hundreds of tons of dead fish. In state after state all across America, thousands of birds and millions of fish are mysteriously dying. There are numbers of reasons being given, but the answers sound emptier than not giving any answer. Is all of it more evidence that we are quickly approaching the Great Tribulation?
I believe 2011 will be a year of signs from heaven above and earth beneath. There is a Jewish proverb that states, “Accidents are not kosher.” The earth is the Lord’s and nature is God’s system — full of warnings and signs of the time. Absolutely nothing of human life is without cause or purpose. Nature does not exist out of God’s control but is a system of balance and design. Whatever is in our Creator’s plan is played out on a daily schedule. Jesus Christ warns us of man’s failure to discern the signs of the time. He stated, “And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” (Matthew 16:3).
Earthquakes have always been viewed by Godly people as a warning from the Creator. The Son of God stated, “And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven” (Luke 21:11). The growing frequency of earthquakes is ominous. We are witnessing an increase of earthquakes that is above normal and that perfectly fulfills the End Time prophetic events. A scale of earthquakes over a span of the last ten years is scary. There were twenty-one earthquakes that were over a magnitude of 6.0 in the year of 2002, but there were 168 earthquakes over a magnitude of 6.0 last year in 2010.
Before the OBD radio broadcast this past Saturday, I went online at USGS to research the frequency of earthquakes. From midnight on Friday until 11:30 AM on Saturday (11.5 hours), there were twenty earthquakes over 2.5 magnitudes, nine of them were over 4.5 magnitudes. I just read a headline from Arkansas, where many of the birds and fish are dying. The state had thirty-eight earthquakes in 2009 and over 600 in 2010. Nearly 500 of them were during the months of September – December. Today, earthquakes are as clearly the voice of the Lord as the one that shook Jerusalem and Calvary when the Son of God said, “It is finished.”
Peter declared the voice of God, “And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath” (Acts 2:19a). The media is awash with terrifying reports out of the heavens. One headline stated, “Terrifying Scientific Discovery: Strange Emissions by Sun Suddenly Mutates Matter . . .” (Project World Awareness). Another headline said, “Earth’s Magnetic Pole Shift Unleashing Poisonous Space Clouds, Linked to Mysterious Bird Deaths”(naturalview.com). This report warned that a cloud of this nature covering a major city would cause a multitude to die instantly. When you know that the infallible Scripture has warned us that this kind of End Time phenomena is going to occur, why do we fail to discern that the end is near? My friends, you must get ready to meet God!
The death of such an unprecedented number of birds and fish all over the world denies a simple problem. A just released news report gave details of the death of two hundred cows in a single pasture in Wisconsin. These all died over a span of a few days. It is impossible to call all of this anything but alarming. The Bible must always be the factor in understanding what we are facing in our world. By the Holy Ghost, an Old Testament prophet spoke and said, “I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven and the fishes of the sea” (Zephaniah 1:3a).
The kind of judgments that are right before us are clear prophecies, given by the Holy Ghost and they cannot be erased. Our world is in such a slumber that the only way a Holy Ghost revival can occur is for all of us to be awakened. There is a great majority that will only hate God more as His wrath is revealed. But, a remnant will wake up and repent. That’s all we can hope for in these last hours before the Rapture.
Joseph R. Chambers
jrc@pawcreek.org