I was contemplating something while sitting in church today. I have hear people say that you can tell we are in the last days because God is send all the calamities. You know, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, drought, disease, and the like. One only need look at Wikipedia to see that people believe God sends/causes natural disasters.
What I was contemplating, however, was whether God specifically causes all the calamities prophesied of in the Bible.
On the one hand, one could say that the prophets foretold of the calamities and God is sending them forth now to fulfil the promises of the prophets.
On the other hand, perhaps our day is an unusual time in the history of humankind (call it global warming if you must), in which we see an abundance of calamities. In that case, maybe the prophets saw the frequency of calamities and prophesied regarding them. Maybe God isn’t sending any of them. Maybe the prophets saw when the second coming of Christ was and noticed it coincided with this unusual amount of calamities, and simply used this period as a benchmark.
And maybe then God isn’t behind any of these calamities. Maybe it’s just the earth responding to whatever environmental changes there are.
It seems odd to me anyhow that God would send calamities just so the prophets wouldn’t be wrong.
I always have to go look it up myself. Prophesy is the verb. Prophecy is the noun.
Whoops. Good catch. I didn’t choose it deliberately. I simply misspelled it. :) But reading through the article, you probably noticed that. I misspelled calamities as well.
All fixed now.
Or perhaps the exact same amount of calamities are happening, but since our ability to observe and record events has increased, our awareness of these events is also increasing.
So, the prophets were prophesying regarding our ability to record and report the calamities rather than the number of calamities?
Or this isn’t the time they were talking about.
“It seems odd to me anyhow that God would send calamities just so the prophets wouldn’t be wrong.”
Prophets are wrong all the time.
I’d say,”maybe then God isn’t behind any of these calamities” is much more likely to be true.
So, was that a yes or a no, JM? :)
Taken #5 into consideration, I rephrase my question:
So, the prophets were prophesying regarding the ability to record and report the calamities during the last days rather than the number of calamities during the last days?
No, I would tend to believe that they were speaking to an actual increase in the calamities.
I just don’t believe what we are currently seeing is an “Increase”.
Increase?… relative to what?
Then I guess I missed the point of #3.
Ya, I was responding more to the line that you hear people say “we are in the last days because God is send all the calamities.”
All I was saying is that I don’t believe there are any more or less calamities now than there historically have been in the past, therefore, we’re not really in the tail end of the “Last Days” like people think we are.
Nor do I see God being the one to specifically send what we are seeing now. If he were to “Send” something, he would probably do it through natural means.
In one of Elder Oaks’s General Conference talks, he quoted the statistics that there really are more calamities on an annual basis than before. I don’t know if he gave the source, but check his GC talks since Oct 2002. And it was probably no later than April 2006.
“In one of Elder Oaks’s General Conference talks, he quoted the statistics that there really are more calamities on an annual basis than before.”
Before what?