Firestorm
The beloved country of my birth has been wracked by the trauma of devastating fires in the south and floods in the north. A massive fireball swept across Victoria and parts of South Australia in early February. These wildfires have caused unprecedented damage, taken some 200 lives, destroyed more than 1,800 homes, displaced about 7,500 people and burned almost a million acres. This is devastation of record proportions, even in a hot, dry country so used to summer bushfires.
This inferno in the state of Victoria completely eclipsed the news of devastating floods in the northeastern part of the country. Sixty percent of my old home state of Queensland was inundated as massive floods swept in. Ingham had 12 meters of water in its downtown center. Crocodiles entered normally populated areas via the floodwaters, and venomous snakes added to the challenges facing people displaced by the floods, which reached record levels. It’s suspected one wayward croc killed a child.
What a paradox. Massive floods to the north, death and destruction by fire in the south.
It is suspected that at least some of the fires were set by Islamist terrorists or their sympathizers. The cia warned Australia of this possibility after monitoring Islamist terrorist Web traffic, where a website called on Muslims in Australia, the U.S., Europe and Russia to “start forest fires,” saying it is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law.
Yet there’s one overarching reality playing out as floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, record freezes and similar phenomena increasingly plague the Anglo-Saxon nations.
Anne Graham Lotz, the daughter of Billy Graham, got close to that reality in an interview with Jane Clayson of the cbs Early Show after September 11: “I would say … for several years now Americans in a sense have shaken their fist at God and said, God, we want you out of our schools, our government, our business, we want you out of our marketplace. And God, who is a gentleman, has just quietly backed out of our national and political life, our public life. Removing His hand of blessing and protection.”
As Job 4:8 says, “[T]hey that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.”
An unfashionable view, but the truth nonetheless. Yet few in this now largely godless country—where more people worship the sun on its golden beaches than ever deign to think of worshiping the great God who gifted to “the lucky country” its magnificent blessings—would understand that they are witnessing the very prophecies of that God in action.
Our editor in chief has often pointed to the imminent reality of the prophecies of the book of Amos. Gerald Flurry declared, clear back in 1996, both the source of this devastation, and the reason for it: “The Prophet Amos prophesied about this problem in the end time …. ‘And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered’ (Amos 4:7). God says, ‘I caused it’! God is the cause. We are being cursed by God! Do we really understand what that means? When we continue to have serious floods and droughts at the same time, it is a warning sign from God. And this is only the beginning” (Trumpet, April 1996).
Our continuing prayer will be for Almighty God to have mercy on those who cry out for understanding as to the reasons for the devastation, in particular in the inferno engulfing southern Australia, as well as those suffering loss from the unprecedented floods in Australia’s north.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd referred to those fires as being akin to “Hell in all its fury [visiting] the good people of Victoria.” Yet this inferno in Australia’s south is but a portent of far worse to come.
Our prayers and our work are dedicated to delivering the answers as to why these catastrophes are being visited on our peoples at this time. To those precious few who will heed and understand, then turn to their God to genuinely seek to comprehend the reasons for their very existence on Earth, the Creator offers the magnificent truth about their incredible human potential!
Log on to theTrumpet.com to read our electronically published booklet Australia—Where to Now? and request your own copy, free of charge, of our booklet on Amos, The Lion Has Roared, for real insight into the prophecies for these times and the great future that awaits mankind beyond the hugely corrective curses that are increasingly devastating our nations today.
