Just recently, the world gasped once more when Israel and the surrounding countries were engulfed in yet another conflict. In other parts of the globe, earthquakes rocked countries that had never experienced quakes, and floods consumed entire towns in a single night. People say that these are “natural,” or “political,” or “just another turn of history.” I disagree. To me, they are not coincidences—but fulfillments, long predicted by ancient prophets who wrote of such events as the birth pains of the end-time.

When I watch people downplay such events as usual, we have gotten too used to being skeptics. The Bible prophesied centuries ago of wars and rumors of wars, kingdoms against kingdoms, and famine and pestilence in the world. They are not hyperbolic verses but prophetic facts now before our very eyes. Our television screens daily overflow with news which could have been borrowed directly from the pages of Matthew 24 and Revelation—foul wars, moral corruption, and the sickening indifference of man to God’s Word. It is as if the ancients’ words live again, but the crowd will not listen to the warning that the play has already commenced.

See the natural calamities befalling one after another—the floods engulfing whole provinces, the droughts splitting the ground of once green lands, and the storms worsening yearly. Climate researchers can refer to them as an effect of global warming, which is quite possibly part of it, but the Bible mentions the earth in travail, crying out for deliverance. I see nothing there that is inconsistent. Nature seems to be crying, not just for environmental balance, but for humanity’s long-ignored moral and spiritual purification. When the ground trembles and the oceans crash, maybe heaven’s just reminding us we never were in charge anyway.

More significant even than these worldly convulsions is the collapse of human decency—the chill of love, the smugness of deception, the banality of sin. They write of the latter days when men will be “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents.” How little do we have to scroll through social media or tread city sidewalks to see how astonishingly accurate the words are. We mock immorality, label sin “self-expression,” and turn fame into godhood. The prophets foretold this centuries ago, yet here we are, experiencing it, hashtag by hashtag, frogs in a pot of boiling water, unaware that we are being killed slowly.

And the false prophets and lying leaders—those who manipulate truth for gain, those who sermonize convenience over repentance, those who sell salvation like a product packaged with buzzwords. When truth is negotiable and righteousness is ridiculed as being quaint, the world’s moral compass goes haywire. Even the very institutions that stood on moral ground are assailed by scandal. It is not cynicism to note this; it is discernment. These too were prophesied: dishonesty would be rampant, and many people would be led astray by glittering lies presented as enlightenment.

What hurts me the most is not the chaos, but the blindness of those who cannot see. I do not say this in pride or self-righteousness; I am as imperfect as vulnerable to suspicion and distraction. But when I compare what I observe to what the prophets had written, the similarities are too emphatic to be ignored. To refuse them is to stand in the rain and sob that the sky is blue. Faith is not asking us to be unreasonable, only to look more deeply—to look for the divine autograph on the history wall.

I can see why many would rather believe these things are just part of life. To regard them as signs would be to face ugly realities—that time is running out, that repentance is imminent, that existence will not continue indefinitely as it has been in defiance. No one wants to give up normalcy because it seems safe. But safety is a mirage when the planet itself begins to crumble. The reality is that prophecy is not to scare us; prophecy is to prepare us, wake us up from religious slumber, and bring us closer to the author who penned the book before we started reading the story.

What do we do with all these signs and warnings, then? Not panic, hide, mock—but get ready, our hearts. The best approach perhaps is not to quarrel over dates or to perceive every thunderstorm as an act of God, but to live daily as though the end were near—not in fear, but in faithfulness. Love and forgive zealously, prefer truth to convenience, and be light in a darkening world. The prophecies are not intended to instill fear, but to make us vigilant. And if we’re going to really witness what’s happening, then the only sensible thing to do is be ready to live, come to Christ for your salvation, because what the prophets meant is no longer far away—it is occurring now.