Is it possible that Jesus specifically warned us about the times that we are living in nearly 2,000 years ago?
You may have noticed that global events have started to spiral out of control lately. Normally, the summer is a period when things are relatively quiet. As far as the news industry is concerned, August is supposed to be the quietest month, but that definitely has not been the case in 2024. According to journalist Simon Tisdall, in recent weeks we have been experiencing a “peaking of volatility, instability and insecurity, unprecedented in recent times.”
August is the quietest month – to mangle TS Eliot’s verse – or so news editors used to think. Politicians go on holiday, governments shut down, people head for the hills or the beach. Not much happens. Not so this August. The world this month is experiencing an extraordinary peaking of volatility, instability and insecurity, unprecedented in recent times. It’s scary, it’s shocking, it’s a wild ride.
Sudden revolutions, wars current and imminent, terrible crimes, high-stakes feuding, famines, cost of living crunches, violent riots and unfathomable market panics come not as single spies but in battalions. In a world where mutual destruction, steeped in cruelty and despair, is a favoured human pastime, grim vistas of Eliot’s The Waste Land beckon anew.
He is right. But just because things have been crazy lately does not mean that we are living in the end times.
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If we really are living in the end times, there are certain very specific signs that we should be seeing.
In Matthew chapter 24, Jesus discussed some of those signs.
“And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.”
Of course there have been wars, famines, pestilences and natural disasters all throughout human history. If we really are living in the end times, all of these elements should be occurring simultaneously, and the intensity of each element should be at a very high level.
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Let’s talk about war first. According to the Institute for Economics & Peace, there were 56 active military conflicts in the world last year. That was the highest number that we have witnessed since World War II.
Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia… and so on. There are up to 56 active conflicts in the world, the highest number since World War II. Moreover, these carry an increasingly international component, with 92 countries involved in wars outside their borders. These are data from the latest Global Peace Index produced annually by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), a think tank that analyzes everything from military investment and the cost of violence to military laws and deaths in combat in 163 states and territories.
As I write this, there is a tremendous amount of speculation all over the globe about “World War III”. The conflict in the Middle East is on the verge of being transformed into an “all-out war”, it is probably only a matter of time before the U.S. is dragged into the war in Ukraine and we find ourselves directly fighting with Russia, and the moment that China invades Taiwan we will be at war with the Chinese.
We are most certainly living during a time of wars and rumors of wars, and the hot phase of “World War III” will truly be unlike anything we have ever seen before.
All throughout history, famine has accompanied war.
Right now, we are facing a global food crisis of unprecedented magnitude. In Sudan, endless war has created a famine that is truly horrifying. At this moment, it is being projected that millions of Sudanese citizens will die in the months ahead.
After 15 months of fighting in that country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), experts in food insecurity estimate that almost 26 million people (no, that is not a misprint!), or more than half of Sudan’s population, could suffer from malnutrition by September. Eight and a half million of those human beings could face acute malnutrition. Worse yet, if the war continues on its present path, millions will die of hunger and disease in just the coming months (and few people in our world may even notice).
How would you feel if you had to watch your family slowly die of starvation?
According to Timmo Gaasbeek of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, 2.5 million people in Sudan could perish “by the time crops are harvested in September.”
Gaasbeek warned, however, that soup kitchens can fill only so many gaping holes in a system shattered by wartime destruction, displacement, and crop failure. His institute estimates that at current rates of food sharing, 2.5 million people could die of hunger and disease by the time crops are harvested in September. In other words, a shocking 10–20 percent of the Sudanese in the hardest-hit areas could die—mortality rates similar to ones suffered during horrendous famines in parts of Nigeria in 1969, Ethiopia in 1984, and Somalia in 1992.
September is next month!
But most Americans don’t even realize that this is happening because our big news networks only want to talk about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Reuters has reported that hunger is so bad in some parts of Sudan that people are literally making meals out of balls of dirt just so that they will have something to fill their stomachs.
Garang Achien Akok is one of the thousands of new arrivals in the area. Akok, his wife and their five children abandoned their home in the southern region of Kordofan after Arab militiamen on camels stormed their village and torched their hut, he said.
Akok, 41, reached Al Lait in December, but has no work and can’t feed the family. At times, they go two or three days without eating. When that happens, Akok said, he watches helplessly as his wife and children dig holes in the ground with a stick, slide their hands in and grab some soil. Then they roll the soil into a ball, put it in their mouths and swallow it with water.
Meanwhile, supplies of food all over the world just keep getting tighter and tighter.
CNN has admitted that we are facing “the worst food crisis in modern history”, but the truth is that this is just the beginning.
Once nuclear weapons are used, everything will change.
One study that was conducted a few decades ago determined that three to four years after an all-out nuclear war global food production would have dropped by about 90%.
Using climate, crop and fishery models, researchers found that the climatic impacts of soot from nuclear war would peak in the first few years but last for about a decade.
In the worst-case scenario, when 150 teragrams of soot is unleashed, the global average calorie production from crops would decline by about 90% just three to four years after the nuclear war, the study found.
That same study concluded that approximately 360 million people would be directly killed during an all-out nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, and over five billion people would die from starvation in the aftermath.
The largest scenario examined, a week-long war involving 4,400 weapons and 150 teragrams, or 330.6 billion pounds, of soot – such as one that would occur between the U.S., its allies and Russia – would kill 360 million people directly – and more than five billion from starvation, the study said. The density of the soot would reduce global temperatures by more than 58ºF.
What would our world look like if five billion people were simultaneously dying from starvation?
That is something to think about.
If we really are living in the end times, we should also be experiencing major pestilences.
Needless to say, the COVID crisis killed millions of people and it is still with us.
Over the past few years, the bird flu has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of chickens and turkeys all over the globe, and now the bird flu has jumped into mammals.
Are we next?
We better hope not, because the World Health Organization says that over 50 percent of the humans that have caught H5N1 since 2003 have ended up dead.
In 2022, a Monkeypox plague rapidly spread all over the planet, and it created a lot of fear.
Now a far deadlier version that reportedly spreads more easily among humans is spreading in central Africa, and the World Health Organization is extremely concerned about this.
And I certainly don’t want to leave out dengue fever. So far this year, there have been more than 10 million cases in North America and South America combined.
In the Americas alone, almost 10.4 million suspected cases of dengue, a mosquito-borne viral disease, were reported to the World Health Organization in 2024 as of the first week of July, an increase of 232% compared with the same period the year before.
Peru is a case in point. When torrential rains started to fall there in 2023, a record-breaking dengue epidemic exploded shortly afterward. The case count is estimated at well over 100,000 so far this year.
If you have ever had a severe case of dengue fever, you will never forget it.
It is known as “breakbone fever”, because many of those that develop severe cases literally feel like their bones are breaking.
What about natural disasters?
Are we seeing a lot of those?
It is being reported that last year the number of “billion dollar disasters” established a brand new all-time record high.
The planet was besieged by a record 63 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 57 set in 2020, said insurance broker Gallagher Re in its annual report issued January 17. The total damage wrought by weather disasters in 2023 was $301 billion, with an unusually high 57% of that total being insured damages.
Meanwhile, the ground under our feet is shaking with alarming regularity.
Last week, I wrote an article about the strange seismic activity that we have been witnessing on the west coast, on the east coast, under the Great Lakes and down in Texas.
On the other side of the world, all of the recent shaking in Japan has created a tremendous amount of panic. People are feverishly hoarding food because they are so concerned about the possibility of a “megaquake.”
Authorities in Japan urged people to avoid hoarding as anxiety over a possible megaquake triggered a spike Saturday in demand for disaster kits and daily necessities.
In its first such advisory, the weather agency said a huge earthquake was more likely in the aftermath of a magnitude 7.1 jolt in the south on Aug. 8, which left 14 people injured.
At a Tokyo supermarket on Saturday, a sign was put up apologizing to customers for shortages of certain products it attributed to “quake-related media reports”.
I am entirely convinced that everything that we have been through so far is just the beginning.
We are still only in the very early chapters of this “perfect storm”, and if I am right there is a tremendous amount of death and destruction ahead of us.
Most people don’t want to hear that. Most people just want to hear that everything is going to be wonderful.
But if we really are living in the end times, global events will play out just as the Bible says that they will.
Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Abby Trivett 
James Lasher