Man-made catastrophes are a little easier to explain because we can identify the cause. Wars are the classic example of man-made disasters. If we want to compare what we have done to ourselves with what nature has done to us in recent centuries, we are going to find that we have been much more destructive to ourselves. In the 20th century the conservative estimate is that, with the two world wars, the ethnic and political purges of Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, the Chinese revolution and other conflicts in nations too numerous to mention, people killed 130 million of their fellow human beings.

Consider, for instance, more recent civil strife that usually doesn't get much of the world's attention. One million were killed in the Congo, 1 million in Rwanda and 2 million in southern Sudan (not including the recent conflict in the Darfur region). Any one of these far outstrips the Indian Ocean tsunami that took some 280,000 lives.

Jesus Christ, being a prophet, spoke of the dangerous situations that would be the ongoing experience of man. Wars are in the forefront. "For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places," He said. "All these are the beginning of sorrows" (Matthew 24:7-8).

The Bible tells us that it will get worse before it gets better.

Revelation 6 indicates that a fourth of the population of the world will be killed as a result of the devastating trends and events symbolized by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (verse 8). In many ways these four horsemen represent the worsening conditions of human life due to what man has done to himself. (If you have Internet access, you can download our recent issues of The Good News magazine where we explain these four horsemen.) In one of the final onslaughts, a 200-million-man army will go out to kill a third of mankind (9:15-18). All of this began with a departure from God where man chose not to listen to Him. GN