Question: When does
an earthquake become a sign of the End Times?
(excerpted from End Time Events According to the Bible, taped
in 1991)
John Ankerberg: What specific signs did Jesus give to us that
would indicate we’re in the End Times and His return to earth was near?
He said this: Be on your guard. I have told you everything ahead of
time. When you see these things happening, you know that it—talking
about His Return—is near, right at the door. Be on guard, be alert, and
keep watch. What I say to you, I say to everyone, watch. Hal, I’m going
to come to you with the first question. Now you guys are going to talk
about the cataclysmic world events and the signs in prophecy that point
to this generation being the generation that Christ would return. How do
you know that you’re any different than any of those other preachers
down through the years that have already said that and they weren’t
correct?
Hal Lindsey: Well, when I first looked into this, I was a
hardheaded skeptic. And I looked back into how prophecy had been
fulfilled in history before and I found that God Himself threw the
gauntlet into the arena and challenged all those who would doubt
prophecy by saying, The prophet of God...his prophecies must come to
pass 100% accurately. And the Bible is the only book in history that has
ever made specific prophecies that have been 100% accurate. The
prophecies that are now happening, I realize that for some this sounds
like you’re putting your brain on the shelf to believe in such fantastic
things, and yet, the scenario the prophets predicted is coming together
exactly. Now, who would have thought that such unrelated general signs
as those birth pangs that Brother Dave was just talking about would all
come together at the same time within a generation? Like he said, those
birth pangs would increase in frequency and intensity. We’ve always had
earthquakes, but the sign would be when they would increase in
frequency and intensity. There were more earthquakes in 1980, the decade
of the 1980’s, than in the last 400 years...more killer quakes. There
has never been plagues on the scope and scale of what we see now. AIDS
is only the worst of them. There is an epidemic of cholera in Peru.
There also are prophecies in Luke Chapter 21 where He said there would
be global weather pattern changes. The book of Revelation speaks of skin
cancer breaking out in a terrible plague all across the earth. I talks
about heat waves that would make people drop dead like flies. Well, all
of that is technically possible now because of what we’ve done to our
atmosphere. The ozone level is now being peeled away to the point where
all of these things can happen. But it’s the magnitude of all of these
things fitting together at the same time that I believe makes this a
unique generation, fitted in with the fact of the miracle of the rebirth
of Israel.
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