www.olivetreeviews.org
                                   December 30, 2009

(Note from Jan: My assistant, Heidi Swander, is building on my e-newsletter of Monday found here.

It was Jesus Himself, who made it quite plain that we should "discern the signs of the times" (Matt. 16:1-3). 

And Jesus told His disciples regarding the run up to the end of the age, "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.  See that you are not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.  All these are the beginning of sorrows" (Matt. 24:6-8). The word translated "sorrows" in this context means "birth pangs."  And what do we know about birth pangs?

In his excellent book, The Last Generation: Ten Signs of the End of the Age, Jack Kinsella, editor of The Omega Letter, gives insight into this last sentence.  "Prospective parents in Jesus' day did exactly what I did with each of my kids -- timed the interval between the contractions.  'Labor pains' was a carefully chosen metaphor designed to resonate with all people, of all cultures, in all generations.  But, to the generation to whom those signs were addressed, the meaning would be unmistakable." 

So as we get closer and closer to the second coming of Jesus Christ, all of these signs will intensify, just as the labor pains of a mother-to-be.  And since the Tribulation -- that seven-year period immediately preceding the second coming -- is where all of these signs escalate to a crescendo, what we see now is just the prelude; early labor, if you will.  Let's tick these signs off and see where we're at today:

Wars and rumors of wars:  The site  GlobalSecurity.org provides a list of current conflicts on their military page and states, "The United Nations defines 'major wars' as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace."

Famines: In his book, Jack mentions an organization called, The Global Crop Diversity Trust.  Apparently fear of impending global famine is so great that this group has created what they call The Doomsday Vault.  According to Jack, this vault is "a cavernous concrete room carved from the side of a mountain on a frozen island located less than six hundred miles from the North Pole.  The room is designed to hold around two million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops."  The idea is that in a worst-case-scenario this trust would be able to reconstruct all agriculture on the planet. 

Pestilences (diseases):  The Web site of The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (there's a whole organization researching pestilences!) hosts fact sheets on a multitude of infectious maladies.  Today we have AIDS, E. coli, H1NI, cancer, SARS, a variety of STDs, and many, many more diseases that were unheard of even 100 years ago. And penicillin-resistant varieties of many diseases are emerging, which means we have nothing to fight them off.  And the bugs keep mutating to deadlier varieties. 

Earthquakes:  The most readily comparable information I found on the Web shows that, overall, there was a definite increase in earthquakes between 1990 and 2009.   "The December 26, 2004, earthquake that spawned the Great Asian Tsunami was one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history," Jack notes. "The earthquake that set it off was so powerful that it actually repositioned the island of Sumatra by some 100 feet to the southwest." 

Whoa.  I know that one gave me pause.  Made me think about the many Tribulation earthquakes the Apostle John noted for us in the book of Revelation (6:12; 8:5; 11:13; 11:19; 16:18 -- and this last "such a mighty and great earthquake as had not occurred since men were on the earth").   

Add to all of these facts the hysterical rush to form a one-world government, including a one-world economic structure (Rev. 13:16-18), and a one-world religion (Rev. 13:11-15) and evidence becomes pretty overwhelming.  I'd say the contractions are coming at regular intervals!

I highly recommend you read Jack's book.  He presents a lot more clear and undeniable evidence that points to our generation being the one Jesus spoke of when He said, "This generation shall not pass until all these things be fulfilled" (Matt. 24:34), including the restoration of Israel; the alignment of the nations for the Gog/Magog war; false christs; the rampage of deception in our world; terrors in the sun, moon, and stars; the revival of the Roman Empire; and the mark of the beast.

It sure does seem we are sitting on the precipice of the time foretold by Old Testaments prophets as well as Jesus and the apostles. Paul admonished the Christians in Thessalonica to be watchful and sober (I Thess. 5:6).   He tells them -- and us -- that we are "sons of light and sons of the day" and, as such, we shouldn't be blindsided by what is happening around us.  It has all been foretold and is playing out just as God said it would.