Speaking of other signs around us, we can of course think of the weather, the heat. Have you followed the headlines these past two weeks? I felt I was in a science fiction movie where the earth was getting hotter and hotter by the day to the point that there remained only a few places to go and hide from the heat.
-Wildfires raged in Europe and North Africa as temperatures soared.
-Last week, they recorded 53 degrees in California’s Death Valley and over 52 degrees in China’s northwest. These are close to unbearable temperatures for man.
-A current map of Canada looks like a crown of fire, as wildfires extend throughout the country. So far, they have recorded over 4200 fires in this country, since the beginning of 2023.
-Just last week and because this July has brought the highest recorded temperatures, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that we have entered the era of “global boiling”.
We have gone through climate warming to global boiling. We have graduated! And he added that it is terrifying and it is just the beginning. You see, I don’t have to open up the Scriptures any more to heed the prophets’ warnings of the end times. I can simply follow the news. But this global boiling too is a harbinger of the end times. The Book of Revelation, which relates the events of the Great Tribulation, speaks of high temperature as a sign and judgment of the end. We read in Revelation 16, the chapter of Armageddon, that at one point: The fourth angel poured out his bowl upon the sun, and it was given to it to scorch men with fire. Men were scorched with fierce heat…
This will happen during the 4th bowl and it speaks of very high temperatures, intolerable to man. And Revelation 8 also speaks of many fires including forest fires where we read: And a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.
We are not there yet, however what we are witnessing today definitely reminds us of what is coming and these are no accidents of nature. They are the product of man’s negligence. That is what the UN also says, but they are also a call for a return from our compassionate and merciful Creator. And it is this very subject of the end times and especially the Great Tribulation that we will be looking in to in our study of Mark, where Yeshua Himself gives these prophecies to us.