End time and Revelation mania

In early October 2008 the economy crashed. The floor fell out from under and the globe went into a simultaneous spasm.

In just in the last 9 months the world has turned upside down. Not only the economy, but the prevailing attitude that accompanies this unusual turn of global events: doom. It seems that end time mania and revelation study is everywhere (a good thing). It also seems that television and movies are also getting on the bandwagon with documentaries outlining the Tribulation events on the History Channel and movies exploring the Mayan Prophecy supposedly to occur in "2012" How even the liberal, entrenched in secular culture New York Times is getting in on end times prophecy. Today they published a series of photos and captions about how the Euphrates River is shrinking. Of interest isn photo number 2.

1. Strangled by the water policies of its neighbors, Turkey and Syria, a two-year drought and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the Euphrates River is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago, and some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now.


2. The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, left fishermen impoverished and depleted riverside towns, forcing farmers to flee to the cities looking for work.


3. Canoes along the shallow Euphrates. The drought is widespread in Iraq. For two years, rainfall has been far below normal, leaving the reservoirs dry, and American officials predict that wheat and barley output will be a little over half of what it was two years ago.

The end times signs are signs the end is coming, the Tribulation in Revelation means the end has arrived. The ultimate message of Revelation is "woe to Babylon and glory to the Faithful." By the time the Euphrates is dried up it is far along in the three-set series of increasingly wrathful judgments. The first set of seven judgments are the Seals, the second set of seven judgments are the Trumpets and the last set of seven are the Bowls.

Revelation 16:12-- "The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river, the Euphrates; and its water was dried up, so that the way would be prepared for the kings from the east." Interestingly, the lack of wheat crop mentioned in caption 3 also is something that will happen, in Revelation 6. However I think it is quite startling that the New York times captioned their photo of the drying Euphrates with a biblical reference referring to the end of the world. I think it shows how deeply the human soul (believer and non-believer) intuits that this IS the time of the end.

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