THE BIRTH PAINS
Signs of the End Times, pt 2
THE BIRTH PAINS
BY GINA DETWILER
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of birth pains. Matt 24: 6-8
I remember when I was pregnant with my oldest child, Danielle. I asked everyone, how will you know when it’s really happening? When the baby is coming? Everyone said, “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll know!”
The truth is, I didn’t.
The day it happened, I woke up in the middle of the night with some discomfort, but I’d been having pains for weeks. Braxton Hicks, they called it. False labor. It was still ten days to my due date. Then my water broke, but not all at once. More of a leak. This was confusing as well. It can’t be time, I thought to myself. But then again, maybe it could be.
It was the day after Christmas, and my husband and I were at my in-laws’ house, almost two hours from home. I stayed up the rest of the night, wondering what I should do but not really alarmed. At 6 AM I woke my husband and said, “Maybe we should go to the hospital.” I wasn’t convinced anything was happening, but I wanted to be on the safe side.
So we drove home. Through the snow.
Once we got home, I picked up a suitcase of clothes “just in case” and then I printed out some work I was doing for a client. I was still thinking it was a false alarm. The pains were far apart and pretty mild. More like indigestion. It didn’t seem like I was really in labor. I’ve watched a million TV shows where women go into labor, and they seem to go from barely there to excruciating in the span of thirty seconds. That wasn’t happening for me.
We drove to the hospital about 9 AM. I remembering asking my husband, “Should I bring in my suitcase?” I was pretty convinced that this was a false alarm and I would feel silly walking into the hospital with a suitcase.
Six hours later, I held my baby girl in my arms.
So when Jesus uses this metaphor of birth pains, I get it. We think we know what it will look like, but then again, it might be something else. So how can we know for sure?
Wars
First, Jesus said, don’t be alarmed when you see wars. That’s not a sign. But right after that he describes the “birth pains” as nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom. Doesn’t that mean that war is a sign of the End? I’m confused.
Well, apparently Jesus was referring to a different kind of war in verse 7. Todd Hampson, in his book “The Non-Prophet’s Guide to the End Times” says the phrase Jesus used is a Jewish idiom of that time referring to world war.
Jesus was saying that regional wars would be common fare throughout church history, but when you see the whole world at war, that would be a key sign marking the beginning of the birth pains that would bring about the end.
Whoa. Didn’t the 20th century see TWO world wars? Over 100 million people were killed between these two wars alone, which involved 32 countries. And lately, with the Ukraine-Russia conflict, many people have claimed we will be dragged into World War III.
Hampson also points out that World War I led to the Zionist movement, when many Jewish people moved back to their homeland, and World War II led to the rebirth of Israel as a nation, as prophesied in Isaiah. That prophecy, interestingly, also uses a birthing mother as a metaphor, except in this case, the “child” comes before the birth pains.
“Before she goes into labor,
she gives birth;
before the pains come upon her,
she delivers a son.
Who has ever heard of such things?
Who has ever seen things like this?
Can a country be born in a day
or a nation be brought forth in a moment?
Yet no sooner is Zion in labor
than she gives birth to her children.
Isaiah 66: 7-8
Incidentally, the existence of a nation of Israel is also a prerequisite for the End Times events. So is it a coincidence that this happened because of the outcome of World War II? I think not.
EARTHQUAKES AND FAMINES
Jesus said another sign of birth pains would be “famines and earthquakes in various places.” Those things have been around for centuries. So how do we know when the famines and earthquakes are the ones to worry about? All we can do is track these events to see if they are getting worse.
Here’s this from NBC News:
The annual number of “great” earthquakes nearly tripled over the last decade… Between 2004 and 2014, 18 earthquakes with magnitudes of 8.0 or more rattled subduction zones around the globe. That's an increase of 265 percent over the average rate of the previous century, which saw 71 great quakes, according to a report to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America this week in Vancouver, British Columbia.
As usual, scientists attribute this rise of earthquake severity to “climate change” which seems to cause everything bad that’s happening in the world.
A chart from the website Mint shows the increase over years:
And what about famines? Surely, with advanced technology in food creation and distribution, famines are not nearly as severe as they used to be, right?
Wrong.
The worst famine in known history took place in China from 1959-1961 in which up to 50 million people died. A previous Chinese famine in 1907 took 20 million lives. The North Korean famine of 1994-98, the Bengal famine of 1945, and the Soviet famines of 1921 and 1935 took the lives of 20 million more people. According to the World Atlas, of the ten most severe famines in history, seven occurred in the 20th century.
The End Result of Birth Pains
All of this sounds bad, right? But Jesus chose his metaphors very carefully. Because while birth pains are definitely painful and may last a long time, and we might not even know when they actually begin or when they will end, they lead to something wonderful.
New life. A new creation.
Let’s rejoice in that promise. We won’t suffer these birth pains for nothing. God is bringing forth a new heaven and a new earth. He promised this in His Word, more than once.
“See, I will create
new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
nor will they come to mind. Isaiah 65:17
“As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,” declares the Lord, “so will your name and descendants endure.
Isaiah 66:22
But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. 2 Peter 3:13
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
Revelation 21:1
Thank you, Jesus
