Dear friends:

Correspondent David Dolan's latest "Israel Update" from Jerusalem discusses the earthquake/tsunami event in the light of Scripture.  Below is an excerpt which I believe you will find interesting.  See my highlighted emphases.

Jim
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David Dolan:

The Bible contains many stern warnings that the end of this era will be filled with such sudden disasters, both “natural” and man-caused.  The earth will actually “reel to and fro like a drunkard” when the final judgment falls, according to the great prophet Isaiah (24:20).  That this can actually occur was illustrated by the 9.0 Asian tectonic plate shift, which NASA scientists said caused the entire planet to wobble for a millisecond and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

Was the “biblical” Asian disaster a Divine Signal that the prophesied End of Days is near, or has actually arrived?  No one on earth can say for sure.  Meanwhile it is obviously right to concentrate on helping the wounded to recover, the grieving to mourn, and the orphaned, widowed and destitute to rebuild their shattered lives.

While doing so, we should all be aware that the ancient Jewish seers, including Jesus, prophesied that the stability we so desperately seek in this life is fleeting at best, as the 9/11 attacks served to remind us as well.

Why should busy modern humans pay any attention to historic warning words from a bunch of long-dead Hebrew prophets?  The main reason in my estimation is because they also revealed that the Jewish people would be scattered to the four corners of the earth, and then regathered to their ancient homeland in the “last days” just before the foretold worldwide judgments would fall (Isaiah 11, Jeremiah 31-33, Ezekiel 36-37, etc.).

I am writing these words from my desk in the growing rebuilt city of Jerusalem.  Out my front window I see the nearby office towers and hotels that dot the skyline of Israel’s bustling capital city.  Jerusalem is not far from Ben Gurion airport, where the Jewish ingathering continues -­ despite enormous obstacles -­ almost every day.

Israel’s international airport has also been the setting for many emotional reunions as hundreds of local survivors of the Asian mega-disaster return to their precious homes in the very center of our shaking world. Those Jewish homes -­ largely built on thinly populated former wasteland -­ are the flashing sign of all signs that the ultimate earth-shattering judgments, and the subsequent reign from Jerusalem of God’s Anointed Messiah, are drawing very near!  As the prophets soberly advised us, it pays to take heed.