Famines, epidemics and earthquakes are how Jesus foretold the beginning of sorrows in Matthew 24.
In the United States, there were more than 260 earthquakes in the last seven days. Those startling statistics include a 4.5-magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma and a 6.9-magnitude shaking in Alaska.
“There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring,” writes The New Yorker‘s Kathryn Schultz.
And perhaps that rebounding is exactly what Jesus meant.
One might be prone to brushing off the statistics as an improvement in the scientific recording of earthquakes, but that assumption would be a mistake.
Of the past, and future, earthquakes, Schultz writes: “In fact, the science is robust … we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next 50 years are roughly 1 in 3. The odds of the very big one are roughly 1 in 10. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.”
Those are in the United States, alone.
Expand the global observation and timeline of these earthquakes, and the picture is far from comforting. Take a look at Nepal earlier this year, or Japan in 2011.
Though scientists from across the world are attempting to predict the quakes, the words of Jesus appear to be manifesting before our eyes: “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines, epidemics, and earthquakes in various places” (Matt. 24:7).
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