December 6 2015
ARE WE READY FOR A PANDEMIC?
A super El Niño is on the way. El Niño is Spanish for the child. It is the name climate scientists have given the occasional periods of Pacific Ocean warming that play havoc with global weather patterns. There was also one in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu, which killed anywhere from 40-100 million people when the entire world population was less than 2 billion. A new study shows that the 1918/1919 El Niño was one of the strongest of the 20th century. The study also noted that the 1918/1919 El Niños central Pacific location linked it more closely to drought in India. The drought coincided with a flu pandemic that was sweeping the globe at that time – with tragic results. The influenza pandemic killed an estimated 18 million people in India. There was famine and a lack of potable water, thus a compromised population. It is clear that climate played a role in the mortality of people in India.
Were the two connected? Yes. People now think that the 1918 El Niño contributed to the onset of that pandemic as an El Niño affects weather patterns throughout the entire world, causing extreme droughts in some places and severe floods in others, and severely undermining public health. An El Niño occurs when warm water that has piled up around Australia and Indonesia spills out east across the Pacific Ocean towards the Americas, taking the rain with it.
Today we have a situation similar to 1918, except that we now have 7 billion plus people in the world. A pandemic today could well kill hundreds of millions.
What can we expect?
We already experience a very mild December and the long-range forecasts call for a very mild winter. Be assured that the coming of a very strong El Niño will disrupt global weather patterns and have broad consequences for agriculture, energy consumption, and public safety. It is also very likely that this El Niño and its consequences will be more intensive due to global warming.
So why do I offer the possibility that a Pandemic is on the way?
One reason is that, according to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease. Thus the general overall health is poor. Also there is not a person in the world free of chemical contaminants, due to the universal presence of airborne particles originating from automobile exhausts, electricity generating stations, pesticides and fertilizers. Yes, the tens of thousands of compounds originating mostly from our oil-based industrialization have invaded the very essence of humanity. Obesity too has become a world-wide curse, another symptom of poor health and the wrong food sources. Yet the main culprit to aggravate the situation, and make it ripe for a Pandemic, is the El Niño now gaining formidable strength. It will even further weaken human health and make it more susceptible for a contagious condition.
Is there a historic precedence?
I see a similarity with global conditions some 1500 years ago, when Roman domination came to an end, a time of great upheaval, not unlike we are witnessing today when the entire world is on the verge of tremendous change, and that not for the better.
I have a book with the telling title: Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser. That book leaves no doubt that pandemics are part of the human make-up. About the Sixth Century- coinciding with the Fall of Rome – Zinsser writes: “The sixth century was a period of calamity rarely equaled in history…..A succession of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – Vesuvius in 513 was one – and famines preceded and accompanied the series of pestilences which wrought terror and destruction throughout all of Europe, the Near East, and Asia for over sixty years. Of the natural convulsions, the most destructive was an earthquake, followed by conflagration, which destroyed Antioch in 526, killed between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, and frightened away most of the remainder…… A succession of floods and famines added to the general misery. ….All this was accompanied by the great plague of Justinian. After the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.”
In The End of the World, Otto Friedrich devotes a long chapter to The Black Death 1347-50, some 700 years later. In a population of less than 100 million, 30 million, at least 1 in 3, died. They too were confusing times, both religiously and nature-wise. Again there were droughts, famines, swarms of locusts, deluges of frogs, lizards and scorpions, forcing rats and other rodents in search of food. Heavy rains in 1314 severely limited the grain harvests, so that the general physical well-being was greatly impaired, not unlike today. The rain persisted into the next year as well, causing the price of food to skyrocket.
Laurie Garrett in her book The Coming Plague gives an exhaustive overview of the viruses that are out there today and the conditions now that have come into being due to the improper use of antibiotics. Combine that with the tens of millions of refugees often living in deplorable conditions and today too the stage is set for newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance.
Our faith in physical security is misplaced.
We now are also some 700 years after The Black Death. The life of Riley we live, totally dependent on fossil fuels, has done more harm than simply filling the air with CO2 and threatening our very physical existence. It also has given us a false sense of spiritual security, as if we no longer need God. It reminds me of Psalm 2, depicting the very situation we have today:
Why this tumult among nations,
Among peoples this useless murmurings?
They arise, the kings of the earth (Come to Paris!)
Princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
The Lord is laughing them to scorn.
Then he will speak in his anger,
His rage will strike them with terror.
Don’t for a minute believe that the Bible only applies to historical situations, relates what happened to the people of Israel and the early Christians. When we read Revelation, then we know what is in store for us, and it is not pretty.
Next year a new book by J.H. Bavinck will be published dealing with the near future as depicted in the last Bible Book, the Revelation of John the Apostle. Here is a lengthy quote from this book:
“The Great Catastrophe
“Something is going to happen. We sensed right from the start that somehow the portrayal John offered could not last for long. Everything is simply too artificial, too downright crazy, too terrifying for it to endure. Something is bound to happen, something that will cause this so elaborately structured set-up to collapse. The description of that regime makes that quite clear. The main plank of this governing body is its hate against God. Its confession of faith is based on unlimited trust in human power. Its only hope in life on earth is to fully immerge oneself in the pursuit of pleasure. The basis of its morality is that nobody can be a somebody, that nobody can believe in their own responsibility, and is ultimately answerable to God. The regime of the beast has as sole purpose the extinguishing of even the tiniest part of personal life, personal joy, and a personal connection to God. It all is built on one colossal lie, on the total denial of the most fundamental and decisive reality. The culture of the new regime constitutes a tremendous push to suppress, to close off peoples’ minds so that it deprives humanity of the very essence to be human. It is a culture that promotes escaping what is truly human. Its most primary goal is to live totally without God.
“And this can simply not continue. Eventually the powerful presence of God will penetrate all pores. It is simply impossible to suppress it forever. All this nonsense will have to be exposed someday when, finally, that what was so perseveringly is suppressed will break through after all. On every page of the book of Revelation of John it is clearly shown that someday this house of cards will collapse. The only question remains how and when this will happen.
“But, exactly at what point this will take place, John’s book is not quite clear. When we observe how that kingdom is experiencing its highest expression then a new series of visions appear, visions all directly related to the last things, but which also leave us with a barrage of other questions.
“It starts with a vision of the infinite majesty of the Lamb. After all these deplorable depictions of the kingdom of man we urgently need some more information of the world behind the world. “And I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion.” Just a short snapshot of indescribable grandeur: the Lamb amidst the thousands who belong to him. That short vision for a brief moment interrupts that insanely dark and somber picture of that human busyness.
“And right after this we see the first signs of the coming deterioration. The walls start to crumble, and the initial symptoms of decay and fall are visible. But it now looks as if John starts to hesitate. He already hears the rumbling of the approaching storm but it looks as if he isn’t yet ready for it. It all is so terribly unsettling, so intensely horrible that he can hardly absorb it. Here, finally, the age-long suppressed truth knocks at the portals of the human heart with loud and ineradicable force. Here, finally, the forever scorned, the nailed to the cross Christ, stands, in his full majesty, before the door of the kingdom of man. This time he cannot be refused entrance, he cannot again be dragged outside Jerusalem’s city limits, he cannot again be pushed away as an unwelcome stranger. His knocking at the door becomes louder and more insistent. And that human structure that was built with so much artifice and cunning, that entire building starts to shake.”
So far J. H. Bavinck.
Yes, the times they are a’changin. And not for the better.
All conditions are in place for all this to happen and a pandemic is part of that scene for which there is no hiding place: it will affect poor and rich, white and black, male and female, old and young. What form will it take? Probably some new form for which there is no antidote, and with the over-use of penicillin having deprived us of our best defense, the stage is set for a calamity of historic proportions.
No, the Bible is not a book that predicts that on such and such a date this or that will happen. What it does tell us is that before the return of the Lord, some disastrous events will take place.
Matthew 24 gives such an indication. Jesus tells us that there will be great distress, unequaled. Had these days not been shortened, no one would survive.
Therefore keep watch: when you see all these signs you know that The Time is near.
Are we ready for a Pandemic? No, because it will come suddenly and will bring on a lot of other disasters in its wake. Revelation speaks about an earthquake that will be the very beginning of all the havoc. That earthquake could also be in the form of financial collapse. So there is a warning, but, as we all well know, earthquakes come unannounced, come “like a thief in the night”. Even the best scientists have no clue when and where the Next Big One will hit.
No, I am not predicting that 2016 will see a world-wide devastating unstoppable disease affecting all. I think that it will come after the financial collapse when the entire world is already in disarray. Then the odds for some immense health disaster are extremely present.
Are we ready for such an event?
Hope in the Lord and pray for the coming of his Kingdom, the New Earth where ‘righteousness will dwell’.