WORLD WAR UPDATE

• 3/28/2022

IT’S 1942 ALL OVER AGAIN When I sensed the Lord showing me in early January that 2022 would look a lot like an earlier year in history that also ended in a “2”--1942–I knew immediately what that meant. Although I wasn’t born until ten years after WWII ended, my father and uncles and many others I knew fought in the global conflagration. My British-Israeli friend Lance Lambert was only eight when the Nazis began their deadly blitz of London and other UK targets in September 1940, where he lived with his frightened family. The terrifying bombings went on all winter and spring, only ending in May, 1941. He told me a house on his city block was destroyed by a Nazi bomb, which doesn’t exactly make for peaceful sleeps! Apart from knowing many people who fought in the war, I covered dozens of WWII memorial services as a reporter in Israel for 33 years, with most naturally centered on Hitler’s brutal and indiscriminate mass slaughter of the Jews, which he launched in 1942. So while expecting war sometime this year based on what I felt the Lord had shown me, and suspecting it would probably be Vladimir Putin’s threatened invasion of neighboring Ukraine, I couldn’t have imagined that much of Europe would resemble scenes straight out of a 1942 Newsreel by the end of February! As we all watch, millions of war refugees continue to pour into all parts of Europe, but especially throughout the east, as Ukrainian cities burn and millions of remaining civilians rush to bomb shelters, where many have died due to deliberate Russian military targeting. Destroyed tanks litter the streets. Putrid flesh rots in the streets of several decimated cities. Putin’s war against Ukraine, and indirectly (so far at least) also against the West, is already clearly every bit as savage as Hitler’s was, and it’s only been going on for five weeks! Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians perished in the first month of the war alone! LIVE AND IN COLOR These are astounding facts that indeed make 2022 sadly resemble 1942 in many sorrowful ways, and April has not even arrived yet! However, unlike during the second world war, we now have live footage every hour in our living rooms of the horrendous carnage that is modern warfare–especially when being waged by a brutal regime like Putin heads. Although people had radios in 1942 broadcasting regular reports about the war, they didn’t have live video feeds of the battles; only seeing them a week or two later during carefully-edited Newsreel reports shown at movie theaters around the world. Today, we not only have several fulltime news channels on TV in most countries around the world, plus many other international news broadcasts from the BBC (the bedrock of WWII journalism), France, Germany, Japan and even Russia (not worth watching of late). And of course, via the internet, we can view all sorts of news reports today, along with many personally posted accounts of the war from the people directly involved. Regular warnings of possible chemical or even nuclear attacks from both the Kremlin and Western leaders does not exactly help alter the comparisons with both previous world conflicts either, along with Putin’s open declarations in recent years that he intends to rebuild the old Soviet Union, which means incorporating Ukraine and the three Baltic NATO states at the very least. The demented dictator has openly lusted for Poland, Romania, and Slovakia as well, and hinted at wanting to take Finland into his bloody Kremlin bed. CUBA TAKES FLORIDA As noted before, I had been stating for some years that I thought the third world war actually began with the major Russian military move into Syria in 2015, along with Iranian and Hezbollah forces. Although all were invited in by the collapsing Assad regime (so they were technically not invaders), most Sunni Arabs and other anti-Assad fighters, along with Israeli leaders, viewed them as such. American, British and French warplanes fighting ISIS in Syria found themselves flying dangerously close to Putin’s aircraft–who were busy pummeling the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo into rubble and dust, and other targets as well. Both Assad and ISIS had recruited thousands of foreign fighters into the fray, as have Russia and Ukraine today. However, in light of this year’s war, I believe it’s more accurate to say that World War Three actually began with Putin’s seizure of the Ukrainian Crimea peninsula in 2014, along with two eastern provinces. I presume many Americans and Canadians would not appreciate what the Kremlin’s mostly bloodless Crimean seizure meant to the Ukrainian people. So I’ve developed a simple, but I believe accurate, way to explain how the average Ukrainian perceived Putin’s land grab. Although much smaller in size, the beautiful, lush Crimean peninsula is basically Ukraine’s Florida, or at least it was until 2014. People from all over Ukraine, and all over Europe, Russia, and other parts of the world, would come to vacation in the many beautiful hotels and beaches on the peninsula that juts out into the picturesque Black Sea. Israeli tourists flocked to the region from late spring until fall every year, and not just those with Ukrainian or Russian connections. But most of that tourism dried up after Putin stole the peninsula from Kyiv exactly eight years ago this month. So basically Ukrainians felt like Americans living in Florida would feel–along with snowbirds from all over North America–if Cuba, backed by Putin, took over everything from Orlando south (a very unlikely scenario, but who knows what might happen during a full world war?). And frankly, some friends say Crimea, with its lush farmlands, verdant green hills, ancient castles and churches, and many resorts and beaches, is quite a bit nicer than Florida, although the weather is much colder in the winter! FOUR HORSEMEN I’m sure many of you have noticed that world leaders are not only talking about the growing military crisis in Europe and Russia, but also about escalating food prices and pending global famine as a result of the intense conflict. This is the first time since WWII that a war involving great powers is likely to lead to severe food shortages, say the experts. Of course, that’s because war-torn Ukraine produces the planet’s fifth or sixth largest wheat crop each year. Russia is an even larger producer, and although the fighting is not (yet) taking place on its soil, the fact that a growing number of Russian men are heading off to battle can’t be good for crop production. So unlike earlier conflicts in Korea, Viet Nam, Bosnia, the Gulf and Afghanistan, this war will likely seriously disrupt food supplies in many places, especially in the Middle East and north Africa that normally buy most of their wheat supplies from Ukraine. We know that earlier food price rises in the region sparked off the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolts that led to Russia’s push into Syria, etc. We can expect something like that to take place again, especially given Iran’s nefarious regional actions backed by Russia. Let’s don’t even look at the growing prospects that warfare is also coming to east Asia, but that would complete the “1942” picture for sure. Famine, as pictured by a black horse, is the third seal of death and destruction that is broken in Revelation 6, verses 5-6. Before that, the second seal brings worldwide warfare, as pictured by a red horse riding forth. The fourth seal is death, pictured by an ashen horse. Of course, war and famine and death have always been with us, but not on the scale described here by the Apostle John. Rev 6:8 tells us that this widespread death will not just come from warfare or famine, but also by “pestilence” and wild animals killing human beings. The fifth seal, opened without a horse riding forth, is the martyrdom of the saints under Antichrist’s international rule. Apart from martyrdom, Western leaders at the recent NATO summit discussed all of the above

spreading war started by a major nuclear power, the likelihood of significant food shortages and rapidly rising prices (with inflation already roaring even before Putin sent his forces into Ukraine), and of course the high death toll among soldiers and civilians caused by Putin’s careless disregard of human life, including the lives of his own young men. So the evidence keeps growing that we are indeed entering a conflict that will reflect the terrors of 1942, signaling this time that the end of days are truly upon us. When will the “new world order” mentioned recently by Joe Biden emerge on the world stage, and who exactly will lead it? It increasingly looks like we’re about to find out. As I said when the pandemic began two years ago this month, fasten your seat belts—there are stronger speed bumps up ahead. Still, the Good News remains that our Messiah Yeshua is sitting on a solid throne that cannot be shaken!!