What a time to be alive! Think of it: God chose for us to be here at the time that is almost certainly the wind-up of human history. But this is not something the Christian needs to fear; this all means that Jesus is about to return!
All of the major signals that Jesus and Daniel the prophet foretold for the very end of this present Earth Age are in our headlines today. The world’s religions coming together in the name of unity and peace are shaping up to be the apostate harlot church that rides the “beast” of Revelation 17. Huge banking and commercial institutions merging into one economic power are fulfilling the description of the one-world, economic Babylon of Revelation 18. Great increases in technology, knowledge, and speed of travel exactly match things prophesied in Daniel 12.
We are also seeing the rise of false prophets. False teachers pollute our broadcast airwaves with their false doctrines. Wars and rumors of wars are a part of everyday life. We continue to witness famines and pestilences in the form of new, incurable diseases. Earthquakes are occurring often and everywhere. There are wondrous signs in the heavens, from man walking on the moon to unexplained UFO sightings and unprecedented solar flares recorded by astronomers and other scientists. All of these things are eerily like Jesus said it will be just before His return to earth.
Mankind demonstrates all of the wicked ways the apostle Paul predicted in 2 Timothy 3. As if all this weren’t enough, Ezekiel’s prophecies (see Ezekiel 37, 38, and 39) loom heavily over the Middle East.
What is the one thing that turns all news-gathering cameras and microphones toward Israel and her hostile neighbors? Oil! Because oil deposits drench the Middle East, world economies are tied to that region as no other. Therefore, all the leaders of the great world powers concern themselves with every bit of news about Israel and its Palestinian adversaries.
“Now, most of the world is involved in the conflict in the Middle East, and the prosperity of the world depends on some mechanism to guarantee peace and a continued flow of oil from the region,” observes John Walvoord in his book,Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. “This is precisely what biblical prophecy predicts.”[i]
The Middle East indeed boils in oil anxieties while the world storms toward an uncertain future. But God is not worried; neither does He want us to worry: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). He knows the end from the beginning and has reported, in advance, the conclusion of these matters in his Holy Word. Study it and believe it to be absolutely true, and you will find your frown of worry fading into a smile of anticipation. You will know that His Beloved Son, Jesus, is about to return to take God’s children home with Him (read John 14:1–6).
God knew from before the Creation that oil would focus attention on the Middle East at the end of human history. He knew that the Garden of Eden’s lushness of life would bring about the end-time energy source the nations would covet.
Eden’s End-Time Energy
Let’s travel for a moment back to the time God created everything described in Genesis 1:20–24 with one majestic sweep of His almighty hand:
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth….
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
This wasn’t just a few scatterings of created beings and a mere smattering of vegetation. When the Creator of all things spoke, all of these things suddenly existed from what had been nothingness only a fraction of a second before. The vast ocean waters surged with life, from the smallest organism to the biggest whale. The brilliant, beautifully colored sky must have seemed suddenly cloudy while the flying, diving, soaring birds of every description tested their masterfully made wings. The dry land crawled, hopped, ran, leaped, and lumbered with marvelous reptiles and mammals of every sort. The sounds and sights must have been too incredible to take into the senses.
God’s creation power, not evolution, produced abundant life in that electrifying second of early earth time. Nothing crawled from primordial soup to change over the next zillion or so years. Everything popped into existence under the hand of the Living God. There were no accidents or errors in the Lord’s action. He knew exactly what He was doing. In the process, Eden’s potential end-time energy source—oil—was produced.
Lush Garden Slush
God is omnipotent (all powerful). He is omniscient (all knowing). He is omnipresent (everywhere, all the time). Through His omnipotence, He created the abundant and vast array of life in one split second. He knew all about, in His omniscient foreknowledge, the Fall of man through sin. The Lord was, in His omnipresence, already forward in time when oil was formed from the dead, decaying things He was creating. He is already in the future when the last great battle of history is being fought in the Middle East at Armageddon.
The rage in the Middle East today, the hateful conflict between Israel and its radical neighbors, points to the reality that things are aligned precisely as God foretold. Oil is certainly the ingredient that makes the great world powers look toward that region with concern.
So the present Mideast problems involving war and peace that tug the world toward Armageddon again go back to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Adam through willful disobedience. God didn’t cause this calamity. In His love and concern for us, He simply reported, through prophecy, the end of the matter. Is all of this about oil’s connection to the creation scientifically possible? I believe it is more than that.
Let’s look closer at what the scientific study of petroleum says. Then let’s look at what the Bible says about the catastrophic deluge God used to judge sin and cleanse the earth of sin’s corruption.
Today’s scientists believe that crude oil was formed over millions of years from the remains of small plant and animal life in the ancient seas. As this life—primarily plankton and algae and other organisms—died, it sank to the sea floor, where it was buried with sand and mud.
Heat, pressure, and bacteria compressed and “cooked” the material until it formed a thick liquid called oil. Over time, the oil traveled upward through the earth’s crust until its path was blocked by dense rocks. It’s under these rocks where we find most of our oil today.
The Bible says in Genesis 6 and 7 that God sent a great Flood because of sin upon the earth. The water covered everything, including the highest mountaintop, by at least fifteen cubits (a cubit is believed to be about eighteen inches).
So you can see that this catastrophe involved an incredible amount of water. This wasn’t just some local flood, as some would have us believe. The Bible says that all flesh and plant life on the earth’s ground portions died in the overwhelming surge. When the water receded, many of the various forms of life in the rivers and the seas were left to flounder and die on the drying ground. This included, of course, the plankton, algae, and other vegetation of the rivers and seas.
The fossil record shows this was true. Evidence of seashells and other residue of sea life has been found on some of the highest peaks in the world. When the waters swiftly withdrew, huge chunks of dirt, rock, and other material broke off and became massive mudslides. Many believe this is the reason the Grand Canyon was cut from the earth as it was.
The dead, decaying animal and sea life, as well as the birds that drowned, were covered by the mud. People, also, according to the Bible, died by the millions and their bodies became a part of the mixture that formed within the pockets where oil is now found.
Nowhere on the globe was there more lushness of plant and animal life than in the region where God had planted the Garden of Eden. It is sensible to think that the area would have the largest deposits of oil. At present, two Middle Eastern nations, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are ranked as among the world’s top five oil producers. With a daily production of 10.7 million barrels and a proved reserve of nearly 267 billion barrels, Saudi Arabia leads the list, and Iran—with daily production of 4.1 million barrels and a proved reserve of 132.5 billion—is ranked as the fourth-largest oil-producing nation in the world, with the third-largest proved reserve.[ii](Nations rounding out the top five include Russia, second; the United States, third; and China, fifth).
There are some today who say that the Middle East having the lion’s share of all known oil in the world has changed because of new drilling techniques such as fracking, which can force oil from previously unreachable rock layers into retrievable quantities at an economically feasible cost. The United States would, if this is true, have as much in potential oil reserves as the Middle East. Still the region surrounding Israel is the main attraction to those who lust after the black, liquid gold.
Oil Eases Toil
When Noah and his seven other family members stepped onto dry land from the ark (see Genesis 8), they faced the curse God had pronounced because of sin—the curse of having to work for their food. They had to raise the animals, cultivate and sow the ground with seed, and “toil” by the sweat of their brow to make a living.
Hard labor isn’t fun for most people. It certainly has never been fun to me! While there is usually a sense of accomplishment after a job well done that makes us say as God said when He looked upon all He had created, “It is good,” the actual work can be back breaking.
Throughout history, society has tried to come up with ways to create labor-saving devices. For example, the aqueducts of ancient civilizations saved people from the hard work of hauling water by bringing it directly into the cities. In more recent times, the hand pump to get water from deep wells became an important part of early American life, even in frontier towns. And automated looms saved time and energy in weaving cloth for clothing and other things.
Even these earliest labor-saving inventions required human power, except in the few instances in which the mechanisms could be driven by the wind or running water. But the fantastic energy stored underground around the world soon completely changed everything. The advancements that the discovery of the power of oil inspired are nothing short of phenomenal.
Think of the progress! Until the late nineteenth century, we could travel on flat land no faster than the fastest horse could run. With the coming of the steam engine and other inventions of locomotion, travel became much faster—and made it possible to move forward for a much longer time before having to stop. Petroleum and its byproducts were at the heart of producing advances that are truly astonishing. It all happened, basically, within only a century.
The twentieth century saw mankind go from the steam engine to the computer-directed, solid-rocket engines that let man exceed twenty thousand miles per hour. And man walked on the moon!
All of this happened in about the last 120 years. Before the discovery of the power potential in petroleum, we remained basically unchanged in our ability to progress, as far as labor-saving devices were concerned.
Not only did oil bring the electricity that powers the washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and all the rest, but it also created a tremendous economic base that in turn brought about a leisure class. Now, there are those who laugh when they read that they are part of a “leisure” class—we still work pretty hard! Compared to our ancestors, however, we Americans live like royalty. As a matter of fact, when you think about it, with our modern conveniences and our ability to travel to and from most anywhere in the world in only a few hours, we live far better than did Solomon.
Most stunning of all is the communication technology we enjoy. Like the prophet stated in Daniel 12:4, knowledge has increased beyond anything previously imagined. We have only begun to realize the things that harnessing oil has made possible.
Need Feeds Greed
The more work-saving devices, the better. This is the attitude of the people of the industrialized world. And, more and more nations are moving toward becoming industrialized.
People in general, especially spoiled people with all the modern conveniences, want more and more free time to play rather than work. Vacations, or even weekends on the lakes with powerboats, are much more fun than working 8 to 5 to buy those luxuries and pay the bills.
Despite the mega-trillion-dollar debt facing Americans nationally and personally, the unquenchable need to buy more and more is on the increase. The compulsion to buy things is one form of greed that seems to be like a virus in the American economic bloodstream. With national credit card debt at a staggering $849.8 billion and the average household owing $15,185 to credit card companies, that greedy addiction cannot be denied. [iii]
The apostle Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:1–4 that in the last days, people will be covetous and love pleasure more than they love God. Does that describe America today? Everyone wants “stuff”—homes, cars, boats, etc.—at least as good and, hopefully, even better, than what the Joneses have. When the warm days of springtime come, even the true Christian churches seem to empty into the lakes and other playgrounds on Sundays.
The plastic credit cards, themselves petroleum-based items, drive Americans deeper and deeper into debt. The greed factor gets much bigger, growing like a snowball rolling downhill. Companies rush to fill the consumers’ desires. Their own covetousness demands more and more production, with manufacturing processes depending upon more and more petroleum.
This is where Mideast war and peace come into the picture. As mentioned earlier, most of the world’s easily accessible (cheap-to-extract) petroleum is in the land God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—not the tiny strip of land occupied by Israel today, but the complete land of promise.
Today, Israel’s neighbors claim the majority of the world’s petroleum, and most of them are in an undeclared war against the tiny state. As a matter of fact, the enemies of Israel are blood vowed to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea.
The mostly Arab governments who, when combined, control the vast oil fields of the Middle East, are in a sense an economic superpower just as surely as America is a nuclear superpower. They can bend the will of the rest of the world by raising—or simply threatening to raise—the price of oil. The lust for oil is probably the major factor that will bring an invasion into the Middle East. But more about that a bit later.
The industrialized Western nations have been lucky so far. The Arab countries are too busy fussing and feuding with each other to get together and make demands so far as prices of petroleum are concerned. They more often than not undercut each other’s prices and keep the costs relatively low.
A time is coming, no doubt, when they will put aside their continual fighting and get together on a greatly increased price per barrel of oil. When the greed overcomes their feuding, something will have to give. Most likely, that something will be Middle East peace…maybe even worldwide peace.
Oil, then, is the factor at the very heart of concern for world leaders. This group, referred to by news media as “the international community,” will do all within its power to put a permanent peace into effect in that region where the greatest oil supplies have been stored since the Flood.
Pact with the Devil
One of the things we are to look for as a signal of the end times is the formation of a one-world government, what some call the “New World Order.” The Bible says that at the end of this present age, a powerful group of world leaders will imagine to take over the world in all of its aspects: economically, governmentally, technologically, religiously, etc. (Read Revelation 17:12–13.) That is what happened when Nimrod and his fellow one-worlder friends wanted to establish a single government, economic, and religious world order (see Genesis 11). Humanism, the religious philosophy that drove Nimrod and the builders of the tower of Babel, is still around, and growing as a philosophy through which to bring about total control over all peoples and all the world’s wealth. Oil has a very high place in their big plans.
God came down to earth and scattered the tower builders to all parts of the globe, confusing the language so they could no longer communicate well enough to continue their satanic building project. Today’s similar engineers are aided by the computer, which is helping them get around the language barriers. God will again have to intervene, this time at Armageddon.
Credit to Raidersnewsupdate.com
