Wars, Famines, Plagues — What’s The Significance?

Can “Water Wars” cause conflict? It is already happening as giant farms drain underground aquifers. California drought, here we come! But the situation could become global.

In North America, fresh water sources are dwindling. Only two regions have abundant water. One is upstate New York and the other is NW Arkansas.

Only 1 percent of the earth’s water is fresh. It takes two-thirds of this supply for agriculture and food. Global growth has lit the fuse for an explosive demand for food and that requires a lot of fresh water.

Wars, famines, and plagues. These things are associated with prophecies in the Bible. The prophet Daniel was given an explicit message about the last days: “Many will travel to and fro and knowledge will be increased.” Let’s look at those two things.

Every day 1.5 billion people travel by car, planes, trains, boats, even bicycles. Cities sprang up thanks to farming. Steam power enabled manufacturing. The assembly line was developed by Henry Ford who sold 15 million automobiles in the next fifteen years. Every single hour, half a million people are in airplanes in the sky! Travel has increased, hasn’t it?

Books and scriptures were hand-printed on paper for centuries. After Gutenburg, movable type speeded up printing and made it cheaper. More people learned to read and write, not just rich people.

Mass communication transformed society. Ideas spread widely. With electricity, the telegraph and the telephone came and information was transmitted in seconds. Copper wire cables were laid across the Atlantic. Europe and America connected. Now fiber optics connect continents, some stretch 24,000 miles from Belgium to Japan. Every second of every day 200 billion words go through this one line! Thirty-five million miles of fiber sprawl across America. Now the internet defines our networked lives. A single internet post can reach billions of people. Thousands of new websites appear every day. It has created a global exchange of ideas, even ways to instantaneously move money. More information is now generated each day than all of human history has created since the beginning. Knowledge has increased, hasn’t it?

China and India are booming. The world’s population is 7.3 billion, and it increases by 200,000 per day. Within 40 years, we’ll hit 9 billion — an increase of 2 billion in a single generation. We will soon have three gigantic needs: water, food, and energy.

Clouds of pollution already drift over swaths of Europe, Asia, and China. Transporting food causes huge releases of CO2. Can we grow food locally? Will we have the energy to run the farms, pump the water, and power our cities? Cities will double in 30 years. Cars will number 2 billion. Food for everyone will be a challenge.

Rapid population expansion is a challenge. Mix that growth with religious conflicts and mass migrations, and it causes more crime, less safety, the spread of plagues, shifting famines, and outbreaks of war.

Daniel was right, wasn’t he? But the clearest biblical sign of the climax of human history came from Christ. He foretold the rise of rampant lawlessness and cold love near the end. Then he said, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world; then the end shall come.” (Matt. 24:1214; stats from HUMANITY FROM SPACE, PBS.org)