'There Will be Earthquakes in Diverse Places' --- Jesus Christ

LOS ANGELES

The death toll from China's May 12, 2008 earthquake last year in Sichuan Province remains at 68,712, according to authorities with the civil affairs department of the provincial government. Another 17,921 people in Sichuan were missing after the disaster, said Huang Mingquan, head of the civil affairs department.

As of June 2009, both numbers remain fixed from last year.

Huang noted that the disaster left 630 orphans, 635 bereaved elderly people and 184 bereaved handicapped people, of whom 1,182 were re-settled. About 4.45 million people in the province were injured in the quake, of whom 143,367 had been hospitalized, including 10,015 sent out of the province for medical treatment. More than 7,000 people in Sichuan were also disabled by the quake, the official said.

In Southern California, and nearby Mexico, a series of recent quakes served to remind us that the Earth is far from dead. Temblors in the 3.0 to 7.0 range --- nowhere near the magnitude of China's Sichuan shaker --- shook us from any comfort zone we might have been in, reminding us of a prophectic warning given more than 2,000 years ago. But more on that later.

Earthquake expert and geological sciences professor Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado at Boulder, predicted last year after China's devastating quake that unprecedented human fatalities from earthquakes will occur globally, unless significant quake-resistant building codes are implemented.

Bilham, who has worked extensively in the Himalaya, predicted that the death toll from the May 12, 2008 magnitude 8.0 Sichuan Province earthquake in China would exceed 50,000 based on previous similar earthquakes in urban settings. He was close, off by just 18,000 in a seismic event that damaged or destroyed 4 million apartments and homes and thousands of schools.

Bilham said there were 43 "supercities" on Earth with populations from 2 million to more than 15 million in 1950, but there are nearly 200 today. Roughly 8 million people have died globally as a result of building collapses during earthquakes in the past 1,000 years. A four-fold increase in the annual death toll from earthquakes between the 17th and 20th centuries is linked to increased urbanization, he said.

Half the world's supercities now are located near potential future magnitude 7.5 earthquakes, said Bilham, who is also a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. By the year 2025 more than 5.5 billion people will live in cities -- more than the entire 1990 combined rural and urban population. While large earthquakes over magnitude 7.5 have for the most part spared the world's major cities in the last century, this pattern will not persist indefinitely, he said.

While, what Bilham had to say is noteworthy, it is not entirely new. Jesus Christ made the prediction of widespread earth temblors more than 2,000 years ago.

Speaking to his disciples on the Mount of Olives, Jesus foretold of his death, burial and resurrection, and that He would return to Earth at a future time to juege the Earth. His disciples asked when that would occur, and Christ told them that no man could know the day or time, nor angels in heaven, but only His Father, the God of all creation, knew.

But Jesus did leave the disciples some clues as to His return. In the bible, Matthew 24: 6-8, Christ said that a clear sign of his imminent return would be an upsurge in wars and rumors or war on Earth, and the incidence of earthquakes throughout the Earth.

Note the scriptures from Matthew 24: 6-8: "And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of war, see that ye not be troubled, for all of 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 diverse places.

"All these are the beginning of sorrows."