By Bob Barney, The Plain Truth
The Bible is very plain about death from diseases, and especially mass human deaths from epidemics. In human history, we have had worldwide flu outbreaks that destroyed millions of lives, we had the black death of Europe in the middle ages, when upwards to 25% of all people living in the area died from the bubonic plague. And let me make this clear right from the start, the Bible predicts hundreds of millions, if not a billion deaths from diseases during the coming tribulation that Jesus predicted would occur right before His return.
In Matthew 24:7, Jesus said, “There shall be famines, and pestilences [strange diseases], and earthquakes in diverse places.” Do we see famines today? 10,000 people a day, or more than 3.5 million people per year die of starvation. Starvation and other effects of poverty lead to disease. Strange diseases are running rampant? Some diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics. And new diseases appear for which science has no cure, AIDS, Mad Cow disease, the Ebola virus. Penicillin does work as well as it did at first in killing the bacteria normally associated with a variety of diseases which were devastating in the past. Diseases are now increasingly immune to the potency of the drugs used to combat them. They are actually growing and thriving in some bodies in a way that drugs cannot cope with. Medical authorities are seeing on the horizon a major catastrophe, or catastrophes plural, if new means cannot be found to cope with emerging mutant diseases.