Well, what a week that was!

Volatile was the term coming out of the mouths of most financial market pundits as we watched the stock markets rise one day, fall the next, then rise again, only to fall yet again. As investors bought, sold and transferred money and shares in frantic moves based on the latest news from Europe, many commentators were left wondering just what will happen when those stock markets that open earliest in the day—Tokyo, Seoul, Wellington and Sydney—do so on Monday. Trends there may well set the mood in London, Frankfurt, Paris and New York for the day.

This is truly a global crisis that is destined to affect us all. But the trends start in Europe, then ripple around the world the following 24 hours as the whole cycle repeats itself daily. Soon, we will reach the crunch point. The kickers finally will no longer be able to keep kicking the ever swelling can down the road. Then reality will set in. And what awaits the world at that point?

It’s effectively the reaction by two entities that the markets awaited after the final bell sounded at the New York Stock Exchange Friday afternoon. The first and most obvious entity was Europe’s most indebted nation, Greece. The second is the only institution positioned to render real help to bail Europe out of its current bind: the European Central Bank.

Whatever happens in Europe from now on, one thing is for certain. The whole fabric of the world financial and economic system, including its system of international trade, is about to change substantially. The real winners will be Europe and the East Asian economies plus Russia. The biggest losers will be the Anglo-Saxon nations—the United States, and Britain and its dominions. That much we know without doubt from inerrant Bible prophecy. It’s the details of how it is coming about that keep us riveted to news and intelligence emanating from the major players.

As this column goes up, Prime Minister George Papandreou is immersed in negotiations to try and form a unity government in Athens, while opposition leader Antonis Samaras is seeking presidential support for an early election in Greece.

Greece has everybody guessing as to the ultimate outcome of the approach its fractured leadership has taken to its national crisis. Yet the crux of the whole situation is that Greece is absolutely broke and unable to pay its debts. Further bailouts will only enhance its indebtedness and dig a bigger hole into which the nation must fall into abject, poverty-stricken, slavish submission to takeover by the new Germanic master of the European Union.

When that occurs, Germany will have achieved its intention—begun under the Kohl government’s regime—of completely taking over the strategic Balkan Peninsula. In absolute accordance with Bible prophecy for our time, the rising king of the north, in barely 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, will have colonized the entire region from Slovenia in the north to the Mediterranean island of Crete.

Take a quick look at a map of Europe. The Balkan Peninsula lies south and east of Berlin. That’s the exact direction in which the end-time king of the north was prophesied to move in its conquering of territory that eventually would end with it marching into Jerusalem! That prophecy was penned by the Prophet Daniel under divine inspiration well over 2,500 years ago! And it’s happening right before your eyes today!

Read it in your own Bible: “And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land” (Daniel 8:9).

Only Cyprus will then remain to complete the colonization of the Mediterranean by the king of the north. It seems highly doubtful that Turkey will ever give up northern Cyprus as its westernmost toehold on Europe’s periphery. But with southern Cyprus, an EU member, now holding out the begging bowl for financial bailout, its economic enslavement by Europe’s paymaster, Germany, is but a matter of time.

The best of pundits agree that the leadership of the new European Central Bank president, the dedicated Jesuit-trained Roman Catholic Mario Draghi, is now the most crucial part of the equation in handling the ongoing euro crisis.

All eyes center now on Draghi’s next move following his surprise reduction of interest rates last week. The financial world holds its breath. For, as billionaire market player George Soros said recently, the whole world risks financial meltdown, depending on moves involving the European Central Bank, as this crisis continues to unfold.

Yet once again we are moved to remind those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, it was the lone voice of Herbert Armstrong who, late last century, observed that the risk of collapse of the global financial system would accelerate the rise of the prophesied king of the north.

You are literally living through the day-by-day fulfillment of that prophecy. If ever there was a time to prepare for its cataclysmic outcome, it is now!

In this time of greatest global upheaval, you need hope. Real, tangible hope! Hope for a future free of the global turmoil that is now building so rapidly toward the prophesied climax at the close of this age. Hope of a new and a far, far better age to come—an age of stability and peace, free from the clamor of nations each seeking to get the better of the other with the risk of the annihilation of all flesh looming on the nuclear horizon (Matthew 24:21-22).

Read, study and absorb the wonderful message in our booklet The Epistles of Peter—A Living Hope. It reveals a vision that, if you truly embrace it, is guaranteed to take you safely through the tumultuous times we are living through, on to a most glorious outcome!