A LOUD WORLD WARNNG

It is almost exactly ten years ago (Spring 2001) that I was speaking at a representative gathering of praying people on the subject of national judgement. I remember it vividly, not only because of the strong prophetic impulse that I felt undergirded the subject, but also because on the day of delivering the message our nation was gripped by widespread foot and mouth disease. As I spoke thousands of carcasses were being burned on huge bonfires all across the country. I may add that the subject was chosen and the date of the gathering was fixed well before the outbreak of the disease. The bonfires seemed a clear vindication of the message.

My horizon on that occasion was our own nation, and the certainty and devastating nature of the judgement that lay before it. In the years immediately following, when I began to put the prophetic burden into writing, and eventually into this website, the horizon did not move very much; it remained essentially national. Perhaps that was appropriate.

I have to acknowledge some movement beyond the purely national horizon after the 9/11 event of 2001, though in retrospect I can see that my horizon ought to have moved much more quickly and strongly than it did. The 9/11 event struck me immediately as a judgement and made me begin to widen the horizon to the U.S. and then to Western Europe, where one could very clearly see the same kind of degenerate things that were calling for judgement on Britain. It became plain that our whole western society was blatantly under the word of Amos, “I will spare them no longer”.

However, it was the world-wide events of 2010 and particularly the relentless kaleidoscope of shaking events in the first 3 months of this year that have given the most severe jolt to my horizon and turned it into a world horizon. The Lord has a quarrel with the whole world, and is speaking to the whole world. The selfish venal, violent, sexually obsessive, arrogant, God-denying sins that brought condemnation on Amos’ generation abound in all corners of the earth, whatever the political or economic shape of each nation may be. They are not just in the Western world.

This year’s staggering onslaught of natural events, culminating in the unparalleled disasters in Japan, is shouting much more loudly than 9/11. The Japanese disaster starting with earthquake and tsunami has finished with equally devastating human threats and fears in the form of fresh world economic collapse and nuclear meltdown. It is undoubtedly the loudest warning blast that we have had in ten years, and there have been more than a few such blasts. It is contrived to leave us speechless and unnerved. It will have lasting consequences, though we are adept at forgetting.

It is not just natural catastrophes that are shouting at us; it is also the man made “shakings” that are resounding in our ears. The Japan tsunami has pushed to one side events which at another time would be absolutely at the forefront. Gaddafi’s fight for power and western intervention, coming on the back of Egypt’s revolution, are accompanied by a rather more sinister use of force by the Saudi Arabian rulers to maintain their dominance. All this is a huge threat to what has become the crucial life source of the western economy, namely oil. The stakes could not be higher.

The divine pressure on the world is getting bigger and louder at an increasing rate and the world seemingly takes little heed or note. Judgement, like most other issues, is now a global issue.
Pray! – “Lord, in wrath remember mercy”.


Bob

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