Can animals be signs of the times? One considers their role from Noah (Genesis 6) to Baalam’s donkey (Numbers 22:21). But let’s just stay on current observations: For quite a while now, many have cited demise of bees as a sign not only of too many pesticides and microwaves, but as marker of how spiritually out of balance we are with God and what He created.
Crows are considered a sign. Remember their decline due to West Nile virus? And how pigs in China harbored (and still can) virulent humanly-transmissible flu viruses?
There are many, many signs in the ocean, whether by way of plastic bottle caps in the stomachs of seabirds and plastic bags in the gullets of whales or temperatures in places like Alaska that are causing unusually massive kill-offs of salmon.
These are not just ecological barometers — and certainly have no business in politics — but spiritual ones.
Are animals that increasingly attack humans an omen? Some think so. Most don’t. There are many sharks near the coasts of America this year.
Is that prophetic or simply the result of humans stripping so many fish with shrimp boats and long-drift nets that there is no food for them in deeper waters?
We look to Hosea 4:1-3 …”Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
“By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood. Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.” Revelation 11:18 …”And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.”
Time to stop looking at this solely from a scientific or political perspective (politics is distorting everything) and to see it at times in a more biblical light. Let us note changes in nature as signs of the times.
Since 1970, the number of forest creatures in the U.S. has crashed by more than fifty percent. Half a billion bees died during first three months of 2019 in just four states in Brazil. In Montana, a hailstorm killed 11,000 birds. Five thousand tons of dead fish washed ashore in Dong Nai River in Viet Nam. That’s one of numerous fish kills there.
As animals go, so can go humans.
Hundreds of dead dolphins wash ashore on Florida’s gulf coast. Whales succumb. Tens of thousands of starfish in Flintshire, Wales. Here’s a good list.
Then there are the quakes.
This from an English tabloid: “Northeastern Israel has been the center of heightened seismic activity recently – and it all began when, in September 2013, locals felt their windows rattle as an earthquake rumbled beneath the Sea of Galilee. The freshwater lake is said to have been the location where Jesus walked on water – as told in the New Testament. It has developed into a new center for tremors – most notably in July 2018 when a dozen small earthquakes shook the same spot beneath the lake on a fault — the slip surface along which an earthquake ruptures.” Was it not Revelation that mentioned a third of the oceans turn to wormwood? (“Wormwood” translates in Ukrainian as “Chernobyl”; note the recent Russian accidents; note Fukushima. See next month’s “special report”).
This just in from the Vatican: “The ‘seriousness’ of the fires currently raging in Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, the Canary Islands, and ‘in particular, the Amazon’ is not only local, say the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is ‘of planetary proportions.’ The Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, has been burning for over two weeks.”
And so forth.
Many are the signs.
Few are those who consider them.
[resources: books on prophecy: Fear of Fire,Tower of Light, and Where the Cross Stands]
