Earthquakes, Tsunami’s and the Future

The world calls these events ‘acts of God’.
Christian speculations are aplenty as to God’s involvement
in the recent earthquakes and tsunami which claimed so many
precious lives. I guess we humans (Christian and non) find it
important to label, box and categorise life’s painful
events in order to appease our philosophical bent. We’re
probably right sometimes – and sometimes wrong. One
thing’s for certain: there is no injustice with God! Some
of our speculations would indicate otherwise.

Was this really God’s judgement on the Muslim world? If
so, many non-Muslims paid with their lives (including my work
colleague and brother in the Lord, Andrew Welch and his wife
Belinda).

Was this God sending a specific warning? Jesus warned us some
time ago about the ‘Beginning of sorrows’ⁱ This
period of mans history would be accompanied by earthquakes and
other signs which must come to pass. Jesus added "but the end is
not yet.ⁱⁱ" Wait there’s more, and it gets worse.

Does the world heed the warnings? No, in fact iniquity and sin
increase in spite of this apparent judgement – furthermore,
there is a huge increase in deception and false prophets running
around speaking god-less words. The net effect is: the love of
many shall wax cold, a falling away of believers. This
doesn’t sound like the corrective work of God’s
judgement to me.

So, was the recent tsunami Gods judgement? Biblically, it was
a sign. God has ordained a time for ‘the
judgement’.

While we have breath in our bodies, we have a window of
opportunity to make the most important of life’s choices
– how we will relate to God! The promise from Romans 8 is
that nothing (natural disasters included) can separate us from
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The future implications of the ‘beginning of
sorrows’ is mind boggling.

HUMANS ON PLANET EARTH

BY 2012 – an estimated 7 billion people will populate
earth (In 1800, 1 billion people lived on earth. By 1900, the
number grew to 2 billion. In 1950, to 3.5 billion).

At current growth rates – 8 million people per month are
added to the population of the world (mostly in India, China,
Indonesia, Pakistan & Nigeria).

In 1960, one third of the world’s population lived in
cities. By 2004, there were more of us living in cities than
rural areas.

17 of the world’s mega cities (+ 11 million people) are
in the developing world.

Soon 60% of the world’s population will live in
citiesⁱⁱⁱ – the implications of catastrophic events taking
place in these centres is an intensely sad picture of mega
proportion. These signs will come to pass – and in
‘strange places’.

We believers in Christ will soon be reminded of the potent cry
of the early church - "Maranatha" or "Come Lord".

ⁱMatthew 24:8.
ⁱⁱMatthew 24:6
ⁱⁱⁱMichael Richardson ìAround Asia’ Institute of
Southeast Asia Studies in Singapore