“If the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for the battle?” (1 Cor 14:8).

I am grateful to the Editorial Board of Prophecy Today for allowing me to contribute the occasional article. I was the editor of Prophecy Today for 25 years, but I have no authority in the magazine today, so anything I contribute must be purely my own thoughts.

I want to say thank you to all those who have contributed to the comments on the recent articles¹ that I have contributed. I am strongly committed to freedom of speech, and I think it is great when difficult issues are teased out by many different minds in the search for the truth. I do wish, however, that people would stick to the point of the discussion and not wander away onto their own pet hobbyhorse.

Different viewpoints

I am also concerned that some people do not like us presenting different points of view on the same subject. But surely, this is the way that we reach shared conclusions on difficult and controversial subjects. We have to consider different sides of the same issue if we are going to reach the truth. In this magazine we have never had a policy of telling people what to think. Our desire is to present the facts as carefully as possible and allow our readers to make up their own minds by spreading the issues before the Lord. This is why we have never laid out a single eschatological view of the ‘Last Days’ – because we know that biblical texts can be interpreted in different ways, and we respect our readers as being sufficiently mature in handling the Bible that if they have different interpretations laid before them, they will be able to reach their own informed judgements.

In this magazine we have never had a policy of telling people what to think.

In regard to giving a clear trumpet call about the Covid pandemic and the vaccine, I want to say that while I personally have had my two doses and the booster, I also fully respect and uphold the right of those who for one reason or another refuse the vaccine. I believe that it is the responsibility of every Christian to be as well informed as possible, to spread the issues before the Lord in prayer, and then to do what they believe is right for them. I am not happy with the relentless pressure put upon the public by government policy, and I strongly resist any move to create a two-tier society of haves and have-nots.

Only a curtain raiser

By far the greatest need today is to make the public – and especially Christians and church leaders – aware that the pandemic is only the curtain raiser to a huge number of problems that will hit the nations in the near future. A multiplicity of organisations and interest groups are waiting in the wings to pounce when the moment is right to exercise control in order to achieve their objectives. It would be wrong to call them a ‘conspiracy’ because they have each got their own plan of ‘salvation’ for Planet Earth.

The pandemic is only the curtain raiser to a huge number of problems that will hit the nations in the near future.

The great danger is in the lies and deception that these different groups peddle to achieve their objectives. No doubt when the world financial system collapses under the weight of the eye-watering debts that most countries have accumulated by enforcing lockdowns on their economy, some groups will arise offering salvation to the masses. This is the kind of scenario we find in the Book of Revelation when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are released upon the world, which ties in with the warnings given by Jesus about the rise of ‘false messiahs’. These false messiahs will appear so attractive that people will willingly submit to them, resulting in a new form of slavery.

Excluding the Creator from Creation

The potency of the problems facing the world lies in the fact that we have airbrushed God out of our worldview, which is allowing the forces of darkness to drive humanity on the road to destruction. The danger is vividly illustrated in the climate circus currently being played out in Glasgow, where world leaders have poured pollution into the atmosphere by travelling thousands of miles to come together for this jamboree of handwringing activists peddling their fantasies and useless solutions, under the illusion that they can control Nature without consulting the God of Creation!

The danger is vividly illustrated in the climate circus currently being played out at Glasgow ... [a] jamboree of handwringing activists peddling their fantasies and useless solutions under the illusion that they can control Nature without consulting the God of Creation!

Lessons from the past

Why has there been no voice raised in the Assembly Hall to declare the unchanging word of the God who created the world to run in seasons, and the planet to have times of warming and times of cooling. These are all part of God’s plan from the beginning of creation that is set out in the Bible for the guidance of human beings. There was a period of warming in the third century AD, known as the Roman Warm Period, followed by a long period of cooling – which is thought to have influenced the migration of the Angles, Saxons and others to Britain in later centuries, with rising sea levels and subsequent loss of land a contributory factor.²

If climatologists would take the trouble to study the word of God, and the archaeology that supports it, they would see that there was a great period of planetary warming in the sixth century BC. The whole area around Babylon (now known as Iraq) was turning to desert and people were dying of starvation. This is why the Emperor Nebuchadnezzar took his army 1,000 miles across the Middle East to the land of Israel and Judah and brought back 10,000 captives to Babylon to dig canals from the River Euphrates across the land for a gigantic irrigation system (2 Kings 24:14).³ The Prophet Ezekiel lived beside one of these canals which he calls "the Kebar River” (Ezekiel 1:1).

But God uses even the wickedness and cruelty of human beings to serve his purposes. Psalm 137 shows us the despair of the people: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” But the prophet Jeremiah wrote to them saying that it was God who had taken them to Babylon, and they were to “Build houses and settle down, plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters… Increase in number there; do not decrease.” He also told them actually to pray for Babylon “Because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer 29:5-7). We know that they obeyed this instruction, accepting a deal offered by Nebuchadnezzar for land in exchange for skilled bowmen from the army of Judah to serve in his army. This has been established from recent excavations of 100 clay tablets that are now on display in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem.⁴

God used the exile to cleanse idolatry from the people of Israel, and to break their dependency upon the Temple and its animal sacrifices, paving the way for the sacrifice of Messiah Jesus. The family home became the centre of the religion of Israel and the synagogue was born in Babylon, and most of the books of the Hebrew Bible were collected while they were there. They did indeed prosper in their exile, and when they returned to rebuild Jerusalem, they gave a free-will offering to God of half a ton of gold and 2 ½ tons of silver! (Ezra 2:69).

We do not know how God will work out his purposes today through the pandemic; but we can be sure that the reason why God has allowed it to sweep across the world is because of two major sins of humanity, which are similar to the reasons why God allowed disaster to come upon Jerusalem and sent the Israelites to Babylon – IDOLATRY (turning our backs upon God and creating our own idols) and THE SHEDDING OF INNOCENT BLOOD – the millions slaughtered in the two world wars of the last century and the legitimising of the slaughter of babies in the womb through abortion.

Only repentance of these sins can save humanity from further disaster – but repentance has to start in the church, which is where judgement begins. People today do not know the gospel and they do not know the real danger – of judgement to come – and the God who opens his arms to save and transform each one of us who turns to him in repentance. The great question facing us today is – will the Bible-believing remnant of Christians arise and blow a clear trumpet of warning and calling to action to save – not only the planet, but humanity?

Notes

1 See The Third Trumpet, and Dispelling the Covid Deception, Prophecy Today
2 “Foundation: The History of England Volume 1”, by Peter Ackroyd, from chapter 3 –‘Climate Change’, published by Macmillan, London, 2011.
3 Bob Becker, “Global Warming and the Babylonian Exile" in "By the Irrigation Canals of Babylon: approaches to the study of the exile" edited by John J Ahn and Jill Middlemas, Bloomsbury, London, 2013.
4 From the Al Yehuda clay tablets. All the references are set out in my book on the exile: Clifford and Monica Hill, "Living in Babylon: a study of the sixth century BC Jewish exile", published by Hansel Press, Edinburgh, 2016, pages 27 – 28.

Dr Hill was the founding editor of the magazine Prophecy Today in 1985. He was a lecturer in the Sociology of Religion in London University.