Extreme weather is everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more dramatically than the scorching heat recently reported over Iran, where the heat index has been as high as 164℉ (73℃). Similar temperatures are being recorded in Iraq.
Where do we find this extreme weather in Biblical prophecy? In the tiny, three chapter long Book of Malachi, we find a clear reference “to a day that will burn like a furnace.” (Malachi 3:19)
In a recent blog post, Rabbi Lazer Brody, popular Israeli author and lecturer, reminded his readers of the prediction of Jewish sages that, as redemption gets closer, “God will remove the sun from its covering. The righteous shall heal in its heat but the wicked shall be doomed in it.”
Iran and Iraq are far from alone in experiencing tumultuous weather events in recent months.
A recent YouTube video compiling news sources of the sudden extreme weather around the world only highlights further the international apocalyptic-type weather currently taking place. News clips of deadly floods in the Midwestern US, wildfires in California and Saskatchewan, blazing temperatures in Tennessee and Indiana, clusters of earthquakes in Alaska, threatened eruptions of Mexico’s Volcano of Fire and much more illustrate the unprecedented meteorological occurrences.
On July 15, 2015, Fox News’s Shepard Smith reported on a new study that predicts that Oregon, Washington, and parts of Northern California are way overdue for an intense, margin rupture earthquake. The predicted 9.2 and subsequent tsunami could, according to the Federal government, cost as many as 13,000 lives in the Pacific Northwest.
On July 27, 2015, thunder and lightning over Moscow was so severe, at least one news report called it “apocalyptic”. On that one day, Moscow received over 40 percent of the rainfall it typically gets in an entire month.
The Science Alert website, which reports on science news, recently published a prediction that, based on the sun’s solar cycles, the entire earth could experience a second ice age within 15 years.
Have our prophets warned us about this pattern of extreme weather events? The End of Times blogger known as Tomer Devorah lists close to 20 Biblical sources of dramatic changes in the earth that have been prophesied since ancient times.
Rabbi Nir Ben Artzi, a mystical rabbi from southern Israel who publishes a weekly column about world events, connects all these news stories about extreme weather to the coming redemption. In nearly every weekly message, he warns that God is demonstrating His mastery over nature.
“The forces of nature: Every place with evil will go up in flames; there will be earthquakes, floods, winds, storms and volcanic eruptions,” Artzi explained. “God is thinning out the impurities in the world and burning them.”