Visions of Judgment: The Ride of the Third Horseman—Famine

With the potential for the food-producing countries to feed the entire globe, it's hard to imagine how famine could grip the earth in the crisis that ends the age. Yet, the third seal opens to a horrifying scene of food scarcity that leads to global famine. How could this happen? What will be the result?

by Darris McNeely

Right now people are suffering from famine in many parts of the world. Famine has returned to Ethiopia where nearly 6 million are in desperate need of emergency food supplies in order to avert starvation. Perhaps another million require immediate help in Eritrea. In southern Africa, 14 million people in six countries currently suffer from food shortages.

More than 2 million people have died in the past decade in North Korea due to food shortages caused by a combination of flood, drought and bad government policy created by Kim Jong Il, the nation's dictatorial ruler, who currently threatens the use and/or sale of nuclear weapons. Many feel this is a periodic ploy to gain concessions, including supplies of food, from the world community. (See "Kim Blamed for North Korean Drought," Washington Times, Jan. 6, 2003.)

Famine is a scourge that appears cyclically throughout history. Sometimes it is caused by drought, blight, floods and other natural means. At other times, it is caused by inefficient or outright malevolent government policy.

In today's global society, there should be no real obstacle to alleviating the effects of food shortages wherever they occur. Modern agricultural methods create bumper crops in the developed world resulting in massive amounts of food production, more than enough to feed the hungry of the world. There is no reason to expect people to starve when this is coupled with the means to transport food to any location in the world. Yet famine and suffering from food shortages continue—and grow.

The third horseman

We come now to the third horseman's ride. Notice what it says in Revelation 6. "When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, 'Come and see.' So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, 'A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the oil and the wine'" (Revelation 6:5-6).

Read the full article at www.wnponline.org/wnp/wnp0303/visionsfamine.htm

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