Are we in the end times? It certainly seems like we are to many of us who pay attention to geopolitical events, but there’s something important we must all remember. Regardless of theology or philosophy, our personal relationship with God must not be shaken by fearmongers. Moreover, there’s a very big difference between the end times prophecy industry and the end times prophecy watchers. The former is selling something through fear. The latter wants everyone to be aware so they look up without fear.
For this reason, I want to highlight a trend I’ve been seeing with every report of an earthquake, include the major earthquake this week in the Philippines.
The United Nations would like you to know that the planet is coming apart. Disaster events, the organization announced a few years ago, have quadrupled since 1970, and its agencies have repeated some version of that figure often enough that it now functions as settled fact.
Turn on any newscast and the impression is confirmed before the first commercial break, with wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes streaming in from every corner of the globe in real time. The feeling is universal, and it crosses every ideological line. The climate activist sees a dying world. The prophecy enthusiast sees the trumpet about to sound. Both are convinced the ground is literally moving more than it used to.
It isn’t. And the most useful thing a discerning reader can do is understand why two camps that agree on almost nothing have ended up reading the same broken instrument.
Start with the question people ask most, because earthquakes carry a particular weight for anyone who reads their Bible. Are there more of them? The United States Geological Survey has answered this directly and without much patience for the panic.
Looking at the long-term record since roughly 1900, the world averages about 16 major earthquakes a year, around 15 in the magnitude 7 range and one at magnitude 8 or greater. The agency’s catalog does contain far more quakes in recent years, but not because the earth is shaking harder. It is because we have planted thousands more seismic instruments capable of detecting tremors that a century ago would have rattled an empty stretch of ocean floor entirely unrecorded.
Two numbers tell the whole story. The National Earthquake Information Center now pinpoints about 20,000 earthquakes a year, roughly 55 every day, and thanks to satellites, smartphones, and a media ecosystem that runs on alarm, the public hears about them faster than at any point in human history. A quake that would have been a local rumor in 1955 is now a push notification on five continents within ninety seconds. The signal hasn’t grown. The microphone has.
The Establishment’s Own Database Undercuts the Establishment
The broader disaster panic collapses under even gentler scrutiny, and the most damning testimony comes from the very source the alarmists cite. That “quadrupled since 1970” figure traces back to EM-DAT, the international disaster database maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. Pull up the chart and the line does climb steeply from the 1970s toward the millennium. But the people who build that database have spent years pleading with the public not to read it the way the UN reads it.
As Our World in Data documents, EM-DAT itself cautions that time biases from uneven reporting quality and coverage make it genuinely difficult to know what is actually driving the numbers, and the steep rise lines up almost perfectly with the period in the 1970s and 80s when the database was first being assembled.
A 2023 analysis published in the journal Environmental Hazards drove the point home. The researchers found that the count of reported disasters has actually been declining since about 2002, and that the dataset only became reasonably complete around the turn of the century.
The clincher is this. Geophysical disasters, volcanoes and earthquakes and the like, which no honest scientist claims are caused by carbon emissions, trace the same rise-and-fall curve as floods and storms. When the events climate is supposed to drive and the events climate cannot possibly drive move together on the same graph, the variable they share is not the weather. It is the camera.
This is the irony worth savoring. The climate movement and the prophecy hucksters, two industries that would never share a stage, are running on the identical statistical illusion. One sells you a dying planet to justify a political agenda. The other sells you the apocalypse to move books and broadcast minutes. Both depend on you mistaking better record-keeping for a convulsing creation.
What Scripture Actually Says About All This
Here is where the believer has to be more careful than the skeptic, not less. The temptation to greet every tremor as prophetic fulfillment is old, and the Lord Himself addressed it head-on. On the Mount of Olives, when His disciples asked for the sign of His coming, He gave them earthquakes and wars and famines, and then He added the warning that the sign-chasers almost always edit out.
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
Read it slowly. Before He listed a single calamity, He told them not to be troubled, and He told them the end was not yet. He called these things the beginning of sorrows, the birth pangs, a long process and not a countdown clock. And the dominant theme of the entire discourse is not “watch the seismographs” but “take heed that no man deceive you.”
The danger Christ flagged most insistently was not the earthquake. It was the credulity that the earthquake produces, the willingness to be led by every voice claiming to read the times.
So the prophecy industry that treats a slightly busier news cycle as the fulfillment of Matthew 24 is not being more faithful than the rest of us. It is committing the precise error the passage warns against, mistaking the noise of a saturated media for the voice of God. There is nothing new under the sun in this, and Scripture told us as much long ago. Every generation has watched its own disasters and concluded the curtain was falling, and the discipline of faith has always been to hold the watchfulness without surrendering to the fear.
That is the posture the data and the doctrine both recommend, and remarkably they recommend the same one. The earth is not shaking more than it did in our grandparents’ day. We are simply watching all of it, all at once, all the time, narrated by people whose livelihoods depend on our alarm. The Christian answer is neither the scoffer’s denial that anything matters nor the huckster’s insistence that everything is the end. It is the sound mind we were promised, the refusal to be stampeded.
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
Stay awake. Keep watch. And do not let anyone, in a lab coat or a prophecy conference lanyard, sell you a quaking world that the evidence simply does not support.
Be sure to check out my new Christian and conservative news aggregator, the only one I hand-curate exclusively.
And do not get caught up with the fear monger in a lab coat clad selling pandemic fear porn that latest pill or jab.
An underappreciated gift is the gift of discernment. Thanks, JD for sharing yours.