The Bible

The Bible Says That There Will Be Famines In The Last Days

Could it be possible that the stage is being set for horrific famines that the Bible has been warning us about for nearly 2,000 years?  A few years ago, any talk of “coming famines” would have seemed absolutely ludicrous to most people in the western world, but the events of the last several months have changed everything.  Now, the UN is openly warning that famines of “biblical proportions” could be on the way, and the head of the UN World Food Program is telling us that we could soon see 300,000 people literally starve to death every single day.  Nightmarish droughts, African Swine Fever, COVID-19 and armies of locusts in Africa the size of major cities have combined to create a “perfect storm”, and global food supplies are becoming tighter with each passing month.

As conditions continue to deteriorate, many are starting to wonder if certain prophetic passages in the Bible are starting to come to fruition.  For example, in Matthew 24:7 Jesus specifically warned us that there would be “famines” in the days immediately preceding His return…

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

We can also find very similar warnings from Jesus in Mark chapter 13 and Luke chapter 21.

So if we actually are living during the time just before the return of Jesus, we should expect to see horrifying global famines start to emerge, and that is precisely what we are witnessing at this moment.

In Revelation 6:8, we are told that “hunger” will eventually be a major factor in the deaths of a large portion of the global population…

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Of course we aren’t at that point yet.

But are we starting to move in that direction?

David Beasley is the executive director of the UN World Food Program, and he recently stated that we are heading directly into “the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two”.  Hunger is rapidly rising all over the globe, and he believes that if dramatic intervention does not happen quickly we could see an astounding death toll.

According to Beasley, we could soon see 300,000 people around the world starve to death every single day, and that figure doesn’t even factor in the effect of this coronavirus pandemic…

“If we can’t reach these people with the life-saving assistance they need, our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period”, he upheld. “This does not include the increase of starvation due to COVID-19”.

As fear of COVID-19 pushes us into an unprecedented global economic downturn, how much worse will that make our rapidly growing global food crisis?

Of course in the western world we are much better off than most of the rest of the planet for now.  Famine is definitely not an immediate concern for us, but thanks to COVID-19 we are now wrestling with significant food shortages.  Because meat supplies are so tight, approximately one-fifth of all Wendy’s restaurants have taken burgers off their menus.  When I first read that, I was absolutely stunned.

Of course Wendy’s is not the only one dealing with strained supply chains.  Costco has started limiting the amount of meat that each customer can purchase, and Tyson Foods has announced that their capacity to slaughter hogs has fallen “by about 50 percent”.  Time Magazine is warning us that the meat shortages “could last for months”, and they could stretch even longer than that if this coronavirus pandemic doesn’t start to subside.

Meanwhile, farmers all over America are seeing their hard work go to waste because broken supply chains have made it impossible to sell what they have produced.  One industry expert is actually claiming that  “billions” of dollars worth of crops have gone to waste as a result of this crisis…

Crops planted months before based on pre-pandemic demand spoiled without buyers. Billions of dollars’ worth of produce went to waste, much of it tilled back into the soil, said Cathy Burns, CEO of the Produce Marketing Assn., which represents produce companies.

I have a feeling that eventually we will greatly regret allowing so much good food to go to waste.

Sadly, most of the rest of the world is actually in much worse shape than we are right now.

Long before COVID-19 came along, crazy weather patterns were playing havoc with harvests all over the world.  For instance, Australia is traditionally a major exporter of wheat to the rest of the world, but unprecedented droughts have forced Australia to actually start importing wheat…

Australia, which made a rare purchase of Canadian wheat in the current marketing year, is expected to continue buying more wheat in the 2019-20 marketing year (October-September), as weather conditions remain difficult in key states, market analysts say.

Australia’s wheat output dropped 45.6% to 17.3 million mt in the 2018-19 marketing year from a record high of 31.8 million mt in 2016-17, owing to prolonged drought conditions, data from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics shows. This forced the country to import wheat for the first time in 12 years.

In addition, another plague of “biblical proportions” has been killing off pigs in unprecedented numbers.

When I tell people that African Swine Fever has already killed off half the pigs in China and one-fourth of all the pigs in the entire world, a lot of people don’t believe me.

So let me give you a quote that comes directly from New Scientist…

A quarter of the world’s domestic pigs have died this year as a virus rampages across Eurasia, and that may be just the start. Half the pigs in China – which last year numbered 440 million, some 50 percent of the world’s pigs – have either died of African swine fever (ASF) or been killed to stamp out the virus.

ASF comes from East Africa. In 2007, it reached Georgia in the Caucasus in contaminated meat, and in infected wild boar. Now, it is all over Russia and eastern Europe and infected wild boar have turned up as far west as Belgium. It is also spreading in east Asia, killing many pigs in Vietnam and elsewhere.

And if you don’t believe them, just do a Google search and you will find countless mainstream news sources telling you the exact same facts.

This is actually happening, and the death toll is rising with each passing day.

Meanwhile, a new generation of locust armies that is being described as “20 times bigger” than the last generation is destroying countless farms all across Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.  The following comes from one of my previous articles…

Even before COVID-19 became the biggest public health crisis to hit the globe in decades, enormous swarms of locusts the size of major cities were devouring crops throughout eastern Africa, across the Middle East and even in some parts of Asia.  Now a new generation that officials are describing as “20 times bigger” has emerged, and the devastation that this new generation of locusts is causing is extremely alarming.  These colossal locust swarms can travel up to 90 miles a day, and as you will see below, when they descend upon a field they can literally eat everything there in as little as 30 seconds.  This new generation of locusts has been spotted as far south as Congo, as far north as Iran and as far east as India.  In other words, the food supplies of billions of people are at risk.

Never before have we seen so many catastrophic threats to the global food supply emerge at the same time.

It appears that “the perfect storm” is now upon us, and I anticipate that global events will continue to accelerate in the months ahead.

Of course we still have quite a way to go before we get to the type of famines described in the Scriptures, but it certainly looks like the stage is being set for severe hunger on a global scale.

But Jesus didn’t warn us about these things so that we would live in fear.  God knew about all of this in advance, He is in control, and He has a plan.

Unfortunately, most of the world doesn’t want anything to do with the God of the Bible or His plan, and so they will be facing what is to come all by themselves.

About the Author: I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep. My name is Michael Snyder and I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing those books you help to support my work. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but due to government regulations I need those that republish my articles to include this “About the Author” section with each article. In order to comply with those government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of the websites where my work is republished. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with all many people as we possibly can.

Just Like Our Founders 241 Years Ago, We Need To Unashamedly Declare That Our Rights Come To Us From God

Why do we celebrate the 4th of July?  If you were to ask average people on the street this question, many of them would mumble something about “independence”, but the truth is that most Americans would not be able to tell you clearly why it is a holiday.  According to Wikipedia, the 4th of July “is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence 241 years ago on July 4, 1776.”  Unfortunately, most Americans have never read the Declaration of Independence, and if a similar document was authored today it would be banned from our public schools because it mentions God four times.  We have allowed the liberal elite to gain such a stranglehold over our society that even our most cherished founding principles have become politically incorrect.

If you ask most Americans to quote from the Declaration of Independence, almost everyone will give you something from this sentence…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This is one of the most famous sentences in the English language, but do most of us still proudly believe this?

And if you happen to be someone that does not believe in God, then where do your rights come from?

If they come from men, then men can take them away.  But if they come from God, then nobody can take them away.  This is a point that President Trump brought up in a major speech that he just delivered to a group of veterans…

“Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence 241 years ago, America always affirmed that liberty comes from our creator. Our rights are given to us by God, and no earthly force can ever take those rights away. That is why my administration is transferring power out of Washington and returning that power back where it belongs to the people,” Trump said.

“Our religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. The American founders invoked our creator four times in the Declaration of Independence,” said Trump. “Benjamin Franklin reminded his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention to begin by bowing their heads in prayer. Inscribed on our currency are the words: ‘In God We Trust.’”

It is so refreshing to hear a president talk like this, because these days most of our politicians are so careful to be politically-correct.  And I am not just talking about Democrats.  Many politicians that are supposedly “conservative” seem quite uncomfortable when matters of faith come up, and if you can get them to talk about God they usually want to switch topics as quickly as possible.

But in the old days, Republicans and Democrats both acknowledged the importance of faith in our society.  The following comes from an excellent article by Dr. Gary Scott Smith…

Dwight Eisenhower insisted that the Founding Fathers “wrote their religious faith into our founding documents, stamped their trust in God upon our coins and currency, [and] put it squarely at the base of our institutions.” They strove to obey God’s commandments, live in freedom, and create a prosperous country. “The knowledge that God is the source of all power,” Eisenhower maintained, gave birth to and sustained America. Human dignity depended on the God-given rights that were “eloquently stated” in the Declaration of Independence.

Faith in Almighty God, John F. Kennedy contended, “was a dominant power in the lives of our Founding Fathers.” He urged Americans to “dwell upon the deep religious convictions of those who formed our nation.”

Ronald Reagan repeatedly stressed the religious commitments of the Founding Fathers, especially their contention that the United States would flourish only if its people acted morally. The founders, he declared, “believed faith in God was the key to our being a good people and America’s becoming a great nation.” Reagan regularly recounted how the founders, especially Washington, had relied on God in leading the nation. The Declaration of Independence, Reagan claimed, expressed America’s recognition of God’s power and authority. He noted that Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all accentuated God’s providential guidance and the importance of prayer. The Founding Fathers ensured that Congress began each day with prayer, Reagan proclaimed, because they valued prayer so highly.

Of course in our day and time teens are actually being threatened with arrest for praying in school.

If we truly want to restore our Republic, we can’t throw out the principles and values that the Republic was founded upon.  The First Amendment guarantees that there will never be an official state church and that we will always get to worship God the way that we want, but there is absolutely nothing in there that says we must have a godless government.  On the contrary, our founders were more influenced by the Bible than any other book, and they quoted from it more than any other book.  Dr. Daniel L. Dreisbach is the author of “Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers“, and I have used this quote from him previously, but I wanted to use it again here because it fits my point perfectly…

The founders, as I document in my new book “Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers,” lived in a biblically literate society. Their many quotations from and allusions to both familiar and obscure biblical texts confirm that they knew the Bible from cover to cover. Biblical language and themes liberally seasoned their rhetoric. The phrases and intonations of the King James Bible, especially, influenced their written and spoken words. Its ideas shaped their habits of mind.

The Bible left its mark on their political culture. Legislative debates, pamphlets and political sermons of the age are replete with quotations from and allusions to the Bible. Following an extensive survey of American political literature from 1760 to 1805, political scientist Donald S. Lutz reported that the Bible was cited more frequently than any European writer or even any European school of thought, such as Enlightenment liberalism. Approximately one-third of all citations in the literature he surveyed were to the Bible. The book of Deuteronomy alone was the most frequently cited work, followed by Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of the Laws.” In fact, Deuteronomy was referenced nearly twice as often as Locke’s writings, and the Apostle Paul was mentioned about as frequently as Montesquieu.

The biggest reason why our federal government is such a mess today is because it has pushed God completely out of the picture.

So instead of defending life, our nation has murdered nearly 60 million children since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

Instead of defending liberty, the control freaks at the federal level are suffocating us with hundreds of thousands of laws, rules and regulations, and if you throw in the state and local levels, the number of laws, rules and regulations governing us is in the millions.

And instead of promoting the pursuit of happiness, all of us have to work several months each year just to pay the dozens of different taxes and fees that various levels of government impose on all of us.  But we don’t actually have to have such a system.  If we got rid of our debt-based financial system and went to a much smaller federal government, we could abolish the income tax, the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

Government is not the solution to our problems.

As Ronald Reagan once famously said, government is the problem.

If we work together, we can dismantle the monstrous federal bureaucracy that the liberal elite have spent decades constructing, and we can restore the Republic that our founders risked everything to establish.

It won’t be easy, but we can get there, and the first step is getting back to the principles and values that made America great in the first place.

The Shemitah: The Biblical Pattern Which Indicates That A Financial Collapse May Be Coming In 2015

The Shemitah- Financial Collapse In 2015Does a mystery that is 3,500 years old hold the key to what is going to happen to global financial markets in 2015?  Could it be possible that the timing of major financial crashes is not just a matter of coincidence?  In previous articles on my website, I have discussed some of the major economic and financial cycle theories and their proponents.  For example, in an article entitled “If Economic Cycle Theorists Are Correct, 2015 To 2020 Will Be Pure Hell For The United States“, I examined a number of economic cycle theories that seem to indicate that the second half of this decade is going to be a nightmare economically.  But the cycle that I am going to discuss in this article is a lot more controversial than any of those.  In his most recent book, Jonathan Cahn has demonstrated that almost all of the major financial crashes in U.S. history are very closely tied to a seven year pattern that we find in the Bible known as “the Shemitah”.  Since that book was released, I have been asked about this repeatedly during radio appearances.  So in this article I am going to attempt to explain what the Shemitah is, and what this Biblical pattern seems to indicate may happen in 2015.  If you are an atheist, an agnostic, or are generally skeptical by nature, this article might prove quite challenging for you.  I would ask that you withhold judgment until you have examined the evidence.  When I first heard about these things, I had to go verify the facts for myself, because they are truly extraordinary.

So precisely what is “the Shemitah”?

In the Bible, the people of Israel were commanded to let the land lie fallow every seven years.  There would be no sowing and no reaping, and this is something that God took very seriously.  In fact, the failure to observe these Sabbath years was one of the main reasons cited in the Scriptures for why the Jewish people were exiled to Babylon in 586 BC.

But there was more to the Shemitah year than just letting the land lie fallow.

On the last day of the Shemitah year, the people of Israel were instructed to perform a releasing of debts.  We find the following in Deuteronomy chapter 15…

At the end of every seven years you shall grant a relinquishing of debts. This is the manner of the relinquishing: Every creditor that has loaned anything to his neighbor shall relinquish it. He shall not exact it of his neighbor, or of his brother, because it is called the Lord’s relinquishment.

This happened at the end of every seven years on Elul 29 – the day right before Rosh Hashanah on the Biblical calendar.

So what does this have to do with us today?

Well, if you go back to the last day of the Shemitah year in 2001, you will find that there was an absolutely horrifying stock market crash.

On September 17th, 2001 (which was Elul 29 on the Jewish calendar), we witnessed the greatest one day stock market crash in U.S. history up to that time.  The Dow fell an astounding 684 points, and it was a record that held for precisely seven years until the end of the next Shemitah year.

At the end of the next Shemitah year in 2008, another horrifying stock market crash took place.  On September 29th, 2008 the Dow plummeted 777 points, which still today remains the greatest one day stock market crash of all time.  It turns out that September 29th, 2008 corresponded with Elul 29 on the Jewish calendar – the precise day when the Bible calls for a releasing of debts.

So on the very last day of the last two Shemitah years, the stock market crashed so badly that it set a brand new all-time record.

And now we are in another Shemitah year.  It began last fall, and it will end next September.

Could it be possible that we will see another historic market crash?

Author Jonathan Cahn has correctly pointed out that we should never put God in a box.  Just because something has happened in the past does not mean that it will happen again.  But we should not rule anything out either.

Perhaps God is using His calendar to make a point.  Cahn believes that if we are going to see something happen, it will probably occur as the Shemitah year comes to an end…

Cahn has pointed that, according to his research, the worst of the worst usually happens at the end of the Shemitah year, not at the beginning. In fact, the last day of the year, Elul 29 on the Hebrew calendar, which will occur on Sept. 13, 2015, is the most dreaded day.

The pattern revealed in “The Mystery of the Shemitah” is that the beginning of the Shemitah’s impact is often subtle, but leads to a dramatic climax.

“The beginning may mark a change in direction, even a foreshadow of what will come to a crescendo at the Shemitah’s end,” he said.

And this time around, far more people are paying attention.  Back in 2001 and 2008, most Americans had absolutely no idea what a “Shemitah year” was.  But now it is being talked about on some of the most prominent alternative news websites on the Internet.  For example, the following is what Joseph Farah of WND has to say about the Shemitah year…

Farah believes the date Sept. 13, 2015 bears close watching – though he is quick to admit he has no idea what, if anything, will happen in America.

“A clear pattern has been established,” he says. “I don’t believe it’s a coincidence what happened in America on Elul 29 in 2001 and 2008. It would be foolish to ignore the possibility that a greater judgment might be in the works – especially if America continues to move away from God and His Word.”

The Shemitah year that we are in now does end on September 13th, 2015 – and that falls on a Sunday so the markets will be closed.

But what it comes to the Shemitah, we aren’t just looking at one particular day.

And it is very interesting to note that there will also be a solar eclipse on September 13th, 2015.  Over the past century, there have only been two other times when a solar eclipse has corresponded with the end of a Shemitah year.  Those two times were in 1931 and 1987, and as Jonathan Cahn has told WND, those solar eclipses foreshadowed major financial disasters…

In 1931, a solar eclipse took place on Sept. 12 – the end of a “Shemitah” year. Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also ushered in the greatest monthlong stock market percentage crash in Wall Street history.

In 1987, a solar eclipse took place Sept. 23 – again the end of a “Shemitah” year. Less than 30 days later came “Black Monday” the greatest percentage crash in Wall Street history.

Is Cahn predicting doom and gloom on Sept. 13, 2015? He’s careful to avoid a prediction, saying, “In the past, this ushered in the worst collapses in Wall Street history. What will it bring this time? Again, as before, the phenomenon does not have to manifest at the next convergence. But, at the same time, and again, it is wise to take note.”

So what is going to happen this time?

We will just have to wait and see.

But without a doubt so many of the same patterns that we witnessed just prior to the financial crash of 2008 are happening again right before our very eyes.

It has been said that those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Perhaps you believe that there is something to “the Shemitah”, or perhaps you think that it is all a bunch of nonsense.

But at least now you know what everyone is talking about.  What you choose to do with this information is up to you.