Sermon Tone Analysis

March 29, 2012

By: John Barnett

Read, print or listen to this resource on our website www.DiscoverTheBook.org

Adam’s sin allowed death to enter the world.

Our original parents were first to taste the warmth of life, and also first to feel the coldness of death.

Before the fall there was no disease, no coughing, fevers, convulsions, or death.

But death brought sickness when it arrived, and now sickness accounts for the most deaths each year around the world.

Every cough is a reminder of our fallen world, every sickness is a reminder of our inevitable death, and all who will every sin, get sick or die need a Savior.

So each new wave of diseases and death is actually an advertisement showing how desperately we all need a Savior.

*Reminders of our Greatest Need:A Savior*

Well the reminders are mushrooming.

If you have watched, read, or listened to the news reports in the past few weeks you know that the Swine Flu has been widely discussed.

But whether or not anything big comes of this new strain of Influenza, just the discussions have been very interesting to us who know and believe God's Word.

Whatever the next course global viruses take, all who know Jesus Christ should use disease and death to increase our longing for heaven.

Paul tells us in I Corinthians 15:53, “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality”.

Our next destination is final and it is a place where there is neither death nor disease.

All tears, all pain, and every pathogen will be defeated and Christ will make us eternally free to worship and serve Him.

To bring world news under the lens of the Scriptures, we have come today to the next sign Jesus gave when He described how to recognize the End of Days.

It is the:

*#7: The Sign of Global Pestilences*

As we open to Matthew 24:7, Jesus is describing another element of what the Earth would be like at His Coming.

Each of the other six elements given in God's Word (Global: Travel, Knowledge Explosion, Disaster Awareness, Communications, Commerce, and Apostasy) are actually trends that become full blown, global realities during what is known in God's Word the Bible as the End of Days.

After examining the first six of the ten biggest trends that are clearly described in the Scriptures, we have come to the seventh, which may be described as “Global Pestilences”.

Listen to Christ's ominous warning:

Matthew 24:7 /"For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

And there will be famines,* pestilences*, and earthquakes in *various places*."/

*Now turn to the inspired ending of human history*, when the Lord is reeling in the rebellious planet look at Revelation 6 with me.

The rider on the pale horse begins his deadly ride at some point during the Tribulation, and before his ride is over, a quarter of the population of mankind will be dead, from either war, famine or 'the beasts of the earth'.

*The word translated 'beasts' is 'therion' in Greek, and means a 'venomous beast'.*

We should seriously listen to Christ's chilling words that sound so much like the news reports of recent days.

Please stand as we read the future:

Revelation 6:7-8 /"When He opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come and see.” 8 So I looked, and behold, a pale horse.

And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him.

And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth."/

Could it be that we are seeing the days that lead up to the release of The Four Horsemen, the start of the coming Global Graveyards, the advent of deadly Flu, Pandemics, and the End of days?

Just to remember where we are, we are tracking the description Jesus gave for us of what the Earth looked like at the very end.

Jesus actually explained that the generation that sees “all these things” (Luke 21:28) begin to happen, is the final generation.

What things did He refer to?

*The Signs of the End of Days*

#1: *The Sign of Global Travel* (Daniel 12:4 many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”)

# 2:* The Sign of a Global Explosion of Information* (Daniel 12:4b many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”)

#3: *The Sign of Global Disaster Awareness* (Luke 21:25-26 “And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; 26 men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

#4: *The Sign of Global Communication* (Revelation 11:9-10 Then those from the peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations will see their dead bodies three-and-a-half days, and not allow their dead bodies to be put into graves.

10 And those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them, make merry, and send gifts to one another, because these two prophets tormented those who dwell on the earth.)

#5: *The Sign of Global Commerce*: Digitalized Money, Global Tracking and Positioning (Revelation 13:16-17 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.)

#6: *The Sign of Global Apostasy, Demonism, and Hatred of Christianity *(I Timothy 4:1-2 Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, 2 speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron)

#7:* The Sign of Global Pestilences* (Matthew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.)

Today we see on the horizon the world Jesus described in Matthew 24 and Revelation 6.

Today, all of the trends Jesus described are visible, they have begun, and as obedient believers we must look up.

To go through the lead up to the Final Holocaust heading this way means as we saw last time, that believers will experience greater and greater persecutions.

*The Pale Horseman Is Coming*

Jesus described a time coming when one out of every four people will die, some through the ravages of war, others by starvation, and amazingly many others by the ‘beasts of the earth’.

Revelation 6:7-8 /"When He opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come and see.”8

So I looked, and behold, a pale horse.

And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him.

And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth."/

With the breaking of this seal, one-fourth of the population of the world is going to die in the wake of a pale green (Greek chloros as in chlorine) horse.

Death may refer to pestilences.

Think for a moment of the vast legions of deadly agents surrounding us each day:

• *TB*: once thought conquered has reemerged in highly resistant strains that have even known to piggyback with HIV to be contagious in an airborne infection.

• *STAPH*: causing a fifth of the hospital systems two million infections a year has just shown up as staphylococcus aureus which is resistant to vancomycin, the final gun in the antibiotic arsenal.

At present 60 to 80,000 die of staph annually but if aureus comes out it is so deadly the numbers will skyrocket.

• *EBOLA*: with a mortality rate of 90% in less than a week, ebola is horrible.

The body bleeds as the infected individual convulses and splashes deadly contaminated blood in every direction.

There is no known cure, no treatment, infact no awareness of how it is transmitted.

Chilling to say the least if it started in a populated area.

• *BIOLOGICAL WARFARE*: anthrax is a cheaply produced poor man’s atom bomb.

Once infected the area is persistently a problem for decades.

If Berlin had been hit with anthrax in WWII it would still be uninhabitable today!

An interesting NY TIMES article reminds us about the testimony on record in Washington, DC from the most senior defector from the Soviet era germ-warfare program.

Soviet officials concluded that China had suffered a serious accident at one of its secret plants for developing biological weapons, causing two major epidemics.

Spy satellites peering down at China found what seemed to be a large biological-weapons laboratory and plant near a remote site for testing nuclear warheads, he wrote.

Intelligence agents then found evidence that two epidemics of hemorrhagic fever swept the region in the late 1980s.

The area had never previously known such diseases, which cause profuse bleeding and death.

• *YURSINIA PESTIS*: or to us non-doctor types bubonic plague is (rod-shaped, non-motile, non-sporulating, gram-negative, aerobic bacterium) in other words it killed tens of millions of Europeans in the Middle Ages and it is being cultivated in terrorist counties laboratories this morning!

Black Death as it was called in the 1400’s goes from rats to fleas to humans to hemorrhages, to suffocation and/or general toxemia.

• *BOTULINUM TOXIN*: this is one of the most powerful poison known to man.

Nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, repiratory paralysis and death . . .

all from a cultured bacteria called clostridium botulinum, that anyone can grow in a home lab with $10,000 worth of equipment in a room 15 feet square.

Just over 20 years ago (1986) Ma Anan Sheela confessed to growing and spreading trillions salmonella bacteria in four restaurant salad bars of Oregon as a biological terrorist.

750 people became seriously ill in that one town!

Up until 40 years ago there was no way anyone could kill one-fourth of the world.

Today “beasts of the earth” are multiplying by the trillions in laboratories boiling in the cauldron of hatred in the Middle East; and before long, they will spill out into the deadliest hour of the world.

So deadly are these beasts that Jesus said in Mark 13:20 “And unless the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake, whom He chose, He shortened the days.”

*When the Pale Horseman Rode through in 1918*

But rather than speculate on the future, just remember the past.

Just less than a century ago was the pandemic of 1918, which still remains a mystery to this day.

It began with a relatively mild initial assault on March 4, when the first reported case occurred at Camp Funston, Kansas.

Within four months, the virus had traversed the globe.

The flu sickened millions but killed relatively few, and in the tumult of World War I, the first wave seemed pretty mundane.

No one knew it at the time, of course, but flu viruses are notoriously unstable–“genetically volatile,” as one researcher puts it.

Set one flu virus beside another, and the two may trade genes, a process called re-assortment.

If this re-assortment produces a virus that closely resembles one of its parents, it is said to have undergone antigenic drift.

On rare occasions, this scrambling can be dramatic.

The virus becomes a kind of Frankenstein virus so different from existing strains that the human body has no immunity to it.

But, in August 1918, the mild virus apparently re-assorted into something positively deadly.

Outbreaks caused by the new variant exploded almost simultaneously in three far-flung locations: France, Sierra Leone and Boston.

The flu struck with a ferocity that shocked doctors, who feared this strange new pathogen might be an airborne version of the Black Death.

The virus rocketed to the farthest points of the globe.