The coronavirus crisis has exposed the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party as nothing ever has. It should be a sobering warning to the entire world!

Some of the most incriminating evidence appeared in a shocking 15-page report published in early May, compiled by an intelligence alliance comprised of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand—called the Five Eyes.

For years, China has worked ferociously to surpass the U.S. in economic power and scientific advancements. By now, it probably has overtaken America by some economic measures. The Chinese Communist Party (ccp) is also amassing staggering levels of military power. It is bent on asserting more and more control not just over the people of China, but over the territory and people in the nation’s periphery.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus that the ccp unleashed onto the world has cost the U.S. trillions of dollars. America’s national debt keeps climbing toward $30 trillion. This weakness will be a major factor that strips the U.S. of its superpower status and a lot more.

As China does all it can to hasten America’s decline, the China-U.S. relationship is becoming a tense clash of economic giants. This clash was prophesied in your Bible!

A Man-made Plague

On May 3, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence” that covid-19 “came from that laboratory in Wuhan.”

This is an alarming reality!

Though President Donald Trump’s administration has refrained from accusing China of intentionally bioengineering the coronavirus, it has questioned whether the virus may have accidentally escaped from a Chinese lab.

In a May 4 bombshell report about the Five Eyes’ coronavirus document, Australian Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson pointed out that in 2014, the U.S. withdrew funding to China due to fear over “controversial experiments that make pathogens more potent or likely to spread dangerous viruses.” The concern about Chinese laboratories has spanned U.S. presidential administrations!

Markson also discussed a “sensitive but unclassified” cable that U.S. Embassy scientists and diplomats in Beijing sent to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2018. The document warned of “inadequate safety practices and management weaknesses” as Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “conducted research on coronaviruses from bats.” The cable said the lab had “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

There were serious red flags all over this high-stakes facility! But no one did anything about the warnings!

The Five Eyes document makes another disturbing claim: Before the coronavirus spread around the world, Chinese scientists wondered whether it was wise to experiment with dangerous viruses to try to prevent a pandemic, when an accidental leak of such a virus could also cause a pandemic.

Clearly, the coronavirus is a man-made plague. What does that tell you about the country responsible for it?

An Act of War?

It is also now well established that in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese Communist Party deliberately suppressed reports about it and even destroyed evidence of the outbreak. The Five Eyes report called this behavior an “assault on international transparency.”

This was an assault on far more than “transparency”! And it was one that has cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives!

The Australian Daily Telegraph said the Five Eyes intelligence document’s major themes include: “the ‘deadly denial of human-to-human transmission,’ the silencing or ‘disappearing’ of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and ‘bleaching of wildlife market stalls,’ along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine. [A]nd data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret.”

The Five Eyes report says despite “evidence of human-human transmission from early December,” Chinese authorities denied such transmission “until January 20.”

The World Health Organization issued the same denial, shamefully doing the ccp’s bidding! And that was despite the fact that officials in Taiwan had sounded the alarm about people spreading the virus to each other as early as December 31, and experts in Hong Kong did the same on January 4.

It was only on January 23 that the ccp finally locked Wuhan down altogether. Many crucial days passed by while millions of people were leaving Wuhan for other parts of the world.

The report then notes that throughout February, Beijing pressured “the U.S., Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbors and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions.” This pressure came even as China was imposing heavy restrictions on its own people!

The timeline shows that after the outbreak, the ccp forbade people from Wuhan from traveling to other parts of China, while they encouraged other countries to let people from Wuhan travel all over the world.

It shows that there was pre-planning on China’s part, and that the nation willingly spread the plague.

This is cruelty beyond imagination!

Far too many people have died. The coronavirus outbreak could have been prevented. Eight Wuhan doctors tried to warn the world and were arrested and rebuked! One citizen journalist and local businessman disappeared! Foreign journalists were expelled. China’s government didn’t want the truth to leak out.

This is communism in action.

China has lied, buried the truth, and refused to let experts in to examine evidence, all the while hoarding medical supplies. Everyone knows China is covering something up! China caused the plague! This is brazen aggression. This is on the level of an act of war!

A Sea Gate Lost

In the July 2016 Philadelphia Trumpet, I wrote about another important development that put China’s brazen aggression and cruelty on full display! “Ever since Xi Jinping took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of China, his administration has been militarizing the South China Sea and working to push the United States out of East Asia,” I wrote in an article titled “China Is Steering the World Toward War.”

I emphasized that in two South China Sea island chains—the Paracels and the Spratlys—China is building a series of man-made islands. Some of these are as far as 800 miles from China’s shore! But that is not stopping China from asserting full control over this vital sea and even creating these new “sea gates” to help it allow or deny access to the region. China has been busy militarizing these islands, equipping them with anti-aircraft batteries, fighter jets and everything China needs to assert its power over this important sea!

In recent months, as the world has been distracted by the Made-in-China coronavirus, Beijing has been making many moves to assert its power over the South China Sea. In December, Chinese vessels trespassed into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone (eez) where they carried out a monthlong standoff against the Indonesians. In January, China began a series of tactical military exercises and other provocations dangerously close to Taiwan. In March, a Chinese ship rammed and sunk a Vietnamese fishing vessel near the Paracel Islands. In April, 10 Chinese ships entered Malaysia’s eez where they engaged in a face-off with Malaysian oil exploration vessels. The same month, China declared the Paracels and Spratlys subdivisions of the Chinese city of Sansha, and then renamed more than 80 South China Sea features—a clear assertion of dominance over the area. In May, China accelerated plans to develop infrastructure in Cambodia that will almost certainly give Beijing firmer military footing in that important edge of the South China Sea.

Since the end of World War ii, the U.S. had asserted naval dominance in the South China Sea and had kept it free and open for trade. That U.S. control was tremendously important because about a third of the world’s maritime commerce, $5.3 trillion annually, travels through the South China Sea. This is a major artery of commerce.

But now, China is taking over. It is bullying and domineering its neighbors into submission. It has the power, thanks largely to these militarized islands, to stop the trillions of dollars’ worth of trade being shipped through this area.

That would prove to be a colossal danger to the United States and several other nations—and it could lead to major conflict.

History shows how important the shift in power now happening in the South China Sea is. During World War ii, when Japan seized Singapore from Britain, it signaled the beginning of the end of the mighty British Empire. And it was a major boon to Japanese power! China is now exhibiting similar war-making aggression in the South China Sea that the U.S. long had control over. China is prying the region away from American power by literally building new sea gates—and militarizing them.

What is truly appalling is that during China’s first several years of building these artificial islands, it repeatedly denied they would ever be used for any military purpose. In September 2015, for example, Xi Jinping stood in the White House Rose Garden and made a promise to President Barack Obama: “Relevant construction activity that China is undertaking in the Nansha Islands does not target or impact any country, and there is no intention to militarize,” he said, using the Chinese name for the Spratly archipelago. In the following years, even as the ccp fortified and armed the islands, Xi and his underlings continued to deny their obvious true purpose.

How can the U.S. possibly trust China when it lies and cheats constantly?

China’s behavior with the coronavirus, in the South China Sea, in unlawful trade practices, and in so many other areas makes painfully clear that America cannot trust it!

That means the U.S. had better remain stronger than China, or it is inviting disaster. However, without strategic mastery of the crucial sea lanes, America won’t be superior for long.

A Sign From God

To understand what is now happening in the South China Sea, and in the overall U.S.-China dynamic, it is crucial to know why the U.S. first gained control over that oceanic region. And to understand this history, we have to go back long before America was even founded—back some 3,500 years ago, to the patriarch Abraham.

God called Abraham for a special purpose. Genesis 22 shows that as part of God’s work with Abraham, He asked him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. This was a heavy, heavy test! But Abraham deeply trusted God and showed himself willing to obey Him—even with this impossibly difficult directive.

At the last minute, once it was clear Abraham was willing to obey, God stopped Abraham from actually carrying out the sacrifice. However, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was a type of what God the Father would later truly do—sacrificing His Son to pay the price for the sins of all mankind!

What astounding obedience on Abraham’s part! As a result, God told Abraham: “[B]ecause thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies” (Genesis 22:16-17).

When Abraham passed this enormous test, God promised not only that his descendants would be numerous, but also that they would come to “possess the gate of his enemies.” This is about sea gates!

In his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, the late Herbert W. Armstrong proved that the peoples of the U.S. and the United Kingdom are the descendants of Abraham! Mr. Armstrong showed that America and Britain came from Abraham’s grandson Israel, and from Israel’s son Joseph, and that they received this promised possession of “gates.”

“[T]hese descendants of Joseph” became “numerous” and “encircled the globe” and came to “possess the ‘gates’ of enemy nations,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “Britain and America came into possession of every such major ‘gate’ in this world!”

It is irrefutable that until quite recently, America and Britain proudly controlled almost every important sea gate worldwide: the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Singapore and more than a dozen others!

Based on Genesis 22:17, Mr. Armstrong said the fact that the UK and U.S. acquired these strategic oceanic locations itself proves that these nations are the descendants of Abraham’s family. “[W]e must be modern Israel,” he wrote.

Notice: These gates would have otherwise belonged to Israel’s “enemies.” And who controls many of these gates today? Either directly or indirectly, it is China!

Israel’s enemies are trying to get control of these sea gates because they hate the nations of Israel!

Whether we realize it or not, China and many other nations are our enemies!

The Bible foretold the U.S. and UK’s incredible acquisition of these invaluable possessions. It also prophesied that America and Britain would later lose control of those gates.

Reaching the People

In Deuteronomy 28:52, God says that if the descendants of Abraham rejected Him, He would cause their enemies to take control of the gates. “And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy land, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.”

Our nations trust too much in their own military might, and not in the God who blessed them with sea gates! Because of this, America’s and Britain’s sea gates are disappearing.

The Prophet Daniel explained more about why this is happening: “As it is written in the law of Moses [such as that prophecy in Deuteronomy], all this evil is come upon us: yet made we not our prayer before the Lord our God, that we might turn from our iniquities, and understand thy truth. Therefore hath the Lord watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us: for the Lord our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth: for we obeyed not his voice” (Daniel 9:13-14).

God is not happy with the national descendants of Israel in this end time!

He prophesies that a devastating economic siege is coming against America! (Ezekiel 4:1-5).

China isn’t the only “enemy” making moves against America. The German-led European Union signed a trade deal with Mexico on April 20. We can see the beginnings of a trade war in which America will be besieged in all its sea gates—exactly as Deuteronomy 28:52 says will happen.

The fact that China—the same deceitful nation that unleashed the coronavirus on the world—is now controlling the South China Sea that the U.S. long controlled shows that these prophecies are being fulfilled!

And the Bible shows that much more bad news is to come for the U.S. and the UK. God says He is against Israel in this end time (Ezekiel 13:8). This is the most terrifying prophecy you could ever hear! But God always warns before punishing.

God doesn’t want Israel to suffer. However, as Creator of mankind He knows that, sadly, tough correction is the only thing that will cause the vast majority of people to turn to Him. Eight verses in Ezekiel label the suffering as a means of teaching the people about God. They will finally get to know God! That is the good news. And that’s the reason it is all happening.

Oh, what suffering will come if people don’t wake up! But God will protect a tiny few who do His work today before the return of Jesus Christ (Ezekiel 5:3—this is explained in my free book Ezekiel—The End-time Prophet). It is the job of the Philadelphia Church of God to warn of the coming crisis of crises!