Jan. 6, 2005
Greg Lobdell
Koenig's International News
One day following the Christian’s Christmas in 2004, a “natural” disaster struck South East Asia. The fourth largest earthquake ever, propelled a wall of water so high, and so fast, into the surrounding seaside villages and towns, the loss of life and property has been described in “Biblical Proportions.” This phrase attempts to describe human pain and suffering in catastrophic language, as though the loss from uncontrollable forces is somehow more painful in numbers than the loss from wars, poverty and disease.
Truly, the agony of our fellow-man in this tragedy staggers the imagination of those of us who have never felt such pain or loss. I cannot feel any worthwhile satisfaction from those who compare the greater number of suffers as non-Christian. The greatest grief for me comes from surprise. If the world has truly entered an apocalyptic time of “Biblical Proportions,” then surely our ignorance of what to expect will make us vulnerable to the most grievous losses coming, for Christian and non-Christian.
My reading of the Scriptures puts a fair share of suffering on the faithful in the book of Revelation, supposedly covering the period of greatest calamities in the period described as the Tribulation. I am suggesting the message of this great disaster had little to do with punishment for biblical unbelief, despite its location in a largely un-Christian region of the world, South East Asia. A far more profound and irrefutable transfer of information came to us for confirmation of its source. What could be more reassuring than the matching of scientific and theological information on the same subject? I call this confirmation of “Biblical Proportions.” If we miss this, we miss the precious and clear signal from the sender that the world has indeed entered an advanced time of communication between our creator and His creation.
What am I talking about? In the last 100 years we have developed a science called earth sciences to study and understand the orbital behavior of our planet, among other behaviors. Motivated by these studies, instrumentation has been developed to perform precise measurements of planet dynamics, such as seismic modeling and measurement, including the detection of an “earth wobble on its axis,” according to the USGS Information Center in Golden Colorado, USA, the wobble occurred, when…”the two sides of the undersea fault slipped against each other” on December 26.
Earth sciences are a 20th century technological development. It did not exist 2,700 years ago when Isaiah, the prophet of the Old Testament predicted in Isaiah 24:20, The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again. Now, we can say we’re a ways from the implied reeling “to and fro like a drunkard,” but how many quakes of the size described in Matthew 24:7 earthquakes, in divers places will occur before Isaiah’s description becomes reality?
Yes, science and theology are collaborating on a scale of Biblical Proportions, and the people of the earth are receiving the message, that these are unmistakenably the beginning of sorrows says Matthew 24:8. For those who refuse to acknowledge this awesome connection, my heart bleeds.
© Greg E. Lobdell 2005 All rights reserved
http://www.watch.org/showart.php3?idx=63936&rtn=/index.html&showsubj=1&mcat=1