America By Design: Hurricanes, Earthquakes and Fires

North America is experiencing an unprecedented number of natural catastrophes, one after another. The response of many Christians is, “Jesus is coming soon!” They see these things as signs that Jesus foretold in Matthew 24. However, Jesus, knowing that whenever bad things happen on a wide scale people would respond this way, inserted the phrase, “But that is not yet the end.” A few verses later he said, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world for a witness to all nations, and then will the end come.” What interests me more concerning the timing of Christ’s return is how the gospel is progressing in reaching the whole world. That is why I have more interest in the developments between the United States and North Korea than in the natural disasters. There are two areas of the world particularly closed to the advance of the gospel: North Korea and the many Islamic states. I believe that these will somehow be opened to the gospel before Jesus comes. It is unpredictable how it will happen, but I believe it will happen. For many years, India was impenetrable to the gospel. It wasn’t the government in their case, but it was the culture. Some missionaries spent most of their carrier trying to get some converts with dismal results. Then, in the late 1980’s, something changed. Ministers from America could go over to India, hold a short evangelistic effort, and baptize people by the hundreds or thousands. It seemed that the Holy Spirit was being poured out in a way that had not been before. We could say, India became ripe for the harvest. In Acts 16, the Holy Spirit specifically told Paul not to preach the gospel in Asia or Bithynia. Then in a dream, Paul was invited to go to Macedonia and help the people there. He did so, and raised up a church in Philippi, the first foothold for Christianity in Europe. From this and the recent phenomena of India, we see that the harvest ripens in different places at different times. The gospel going to the whole world is the sign of Jesus return more than natural disasters. Watch the news more carefully with the two remaining regions of the world in mind. To get a more complete picture of why things happen the way they do, read the book, America By Design, by yours truly, Dennis Pumford. We need to shift our focus to a wide-scale lens and see the “Big Picture,” as explained in the book. Many things will begin to make sense then.