Black Horse Rider of Famine Gallops on Before the Pale Horse Rider
October 13, 2010
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Luke 21:11 – And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.
Revelation 6:5,6 – And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
[6] And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
The population explosion that has suddenly burst on the scene should come as no surprise to mankind.
The world’s population has roughly, in somewhat similar manner, followed the principle of daily doubling pennies. Suppose that someone proposed to give you five billion dollars if you would double a penny he gave you for forty days. Would you take the deal? A single penny on the first day would produce two cents on the second day, four cents on the third day, eight cents on the fourth day, sixteen cents on the fifth day, thirty-two cents on the sixth day, sixty-four cents on the seventh day, and only $1.28 on the eighth day. So, based on what you’ve read so far, it seems like a pretty good deal.
But on day forty you would have to fork over move than five billion dollars. This principle is now being added into the famine equation.
The world’s famine outbreaks in the developing countries have been occurring closer and closer together in time since World War II, and this trend, like a woman’s birth pangs, will definitely accelerate until Jesus comes.
Why? A few thousand years ago eight men and women descended in an ark “upon the mountains of Ararat,” and then began to multiply.
At first, like the penny, the increase was slow and insignificant numerically. When Jesus was born, the world population had only reached about 200 million. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, it had only reached 400 million. But, like the multiplying multiples of the penny, it began to accelerate about the time of the Civil War, and exploded after the Great Depression of the thirties.
In 1989 the world population reached five billion and, the same year, eleven million of the earth’s residents died of starvation. The world population passed six billion in October of 1999, and is predicted to reach ten
billion in 2030. There is no way under heaven that the developing countries across the Bible Lands of Asia and Africa, where most of this increase is forecast to occur, can fail to have an ever increasing, massive famine. Some say the population will only reach 8.5 billion in 2030. But even if this is true, how can the additional 3.5 billion be fed if 11 million died of starvation in 1989 with a population of only five billion.
In the late seventies, when I wrote my second book, The Tribulation Triad, I pointed out that the famines absolutely had to continue to increase in frequency and intensity. It is even more of a sure thing today! One might suppose that the prediction of thirty million Africans dying from AIDS during the next quarter century, would cause the predicted population growth to be canceled out.
Nothing could be farther from the truth!
In spite of this staggering AIDS toll, Africa’s population is expected to double during this time period.
Some say, don’t worry, agricultural technology will solve the famine problem. No way! The latest U.N. study found ten percent of the world’s soil profile badly damaged. The three-year study accessed soil conditions on a global scale, and involved more than 250 soil scientists. It marked the first time since World War II that soil profiles had been assessed on a global scale. As reported by Larry B.
Stammer in the Los Angeles Times, the study found that “about two-thirds of all seriously eroded land is in Asia and Africa, home to most of the world’s poor.” The article, using the report as its basis, stated: “ Despite the much acclaimed green revolution of the past several decades, which produced unprecedented gains in food production through the introduction of fertilizers and hybrid grains, the per-capita food production has declined in about eighty developing countries in the past decade.” The report, Vital Signs 1993: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future, as reported by David Brisco in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of July 18, 1993, stated: “This new report shows the first clear sign that population is outpacing the food available for humans. The trend is mostly because of record world population growth, but also reflects a slowdown in decades of increasing food supplies. The main sources of food – farms, ranches, and oceans – all appear to be approaching, or may have reached, their maximum per-capita output, according to Vital Signs 1993.” The simple truth is this, the world’s maximum food production, since the mid-nineties, has not been able to keep up with the stork, and the ever increasing population will cause it to fall farther and farther behind. Earthquakes, pestilence, and famine will continue to increase the pain of God’s creation while it awaits the manifestation of his sons at the appearance of his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.
Begin Excerpt from Middle East Online
‘Alarming’ numbers go hungry in 25 countries
Global Hunger Index: Yemen, Sudan, Djibouti among countries of increasing hunger severity.
WASHINGTON – Poverty, conflict and political instability mean some one billion people went hungry this year, many of them children in Africa and Asia, according to the Global Hunger Index report released Monday.
Out of 122 countries included in the annual report, 25 have “alarming” levels of hunger and four countries in Africa have “extremely alarming” hunger, says the report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Concern Worldwide, and Welthungerhilfe.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) fared the worst in the hunger index, which is based on data from 2003-2008.
Three-quarters of the population in the vast central African country were under-nourished, and DRC also has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world, the researchers who compiled the index found.
Three factors were used to calculate the Global Hunger Index (GHI): the proportion of undernourished people in a country, the prevalence of underweight children, and the child mortality rate.
“Protracted civil conflict since the late 1990s led to an economic collapse, massive displacements of people, and a chronic state of food insecurity,” in DRC, the report said.
“Food availability and access deteriorated as food production levels dropped, and remote areas became even more isolated as a consequence of very poor infrastructure,” it said.
The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with zero being the best score — no hunger — and 100 being the worst, although neither of these extremes is reached in practice.
A score higher than 20 indicates “alarming” levels of hunger and above 30, “extremely alarming” hunger.
DRC was one of four countries with “extremely alarming” hunger levels and the only country in this year’s index with a score above 40.
The other three countries with very high hunger levels were Burundi, Eritrea and Chad. All have been involved in simmering or open conflict for many years.
With the exception of Haiti and Yemen, all 25 countries with “alarming” levels of hunger were in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia.
They were, in order of increasing hunger severity: Nepal, Tanzania, Cambodia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Djibouti, Mozambique, India, Bangladesh, Liberia, Zambia, Timor-Leste, Niger, Angola, Yemen, the Central African Republic, Madagascar, the Comoros, Haiti, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.
Along with Burundi, DRC and Eritrea, the Comoros — a coup-prone archipelago off the east coast of Africa –and Haiti had high proportions of undernourished people — more than 50 percent of the population.
Bangladesh, India, Timor-Leste and Yemen had the highest prevalence of underweight children under five — more than 40 percent in all four countries.
Afghanistan, Angola, Chad and Somalia had the highest child mortality rate, with 20 percent or more of each country’s children dying before they reached the age of five.
North Korea was one of nine countries in which the hunger index went up — from 16.2 points in 1990 to 19.4 points in 2010.
The other eight were all in sub-Saharan Africa and include and in all but three — Gambia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe — conflict was the cause.
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