Beginning of Sorrows: Part 6 -- Pestilence

Behold a pale horse: and his name
that sat on him was Death.

In 2007, a native, Rwandan Christian minister began following this web ministry.  He had established a network of small churches in Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda; from his home in Kigali, Rwanda.  That whole area of Africa is still a challenge for anyone who wants to take the Gospel to the people of those nations.  There is a cry for knowledge and hope that only Jesus Christ can fulfill.

They have had tribulation.  In April of 1994 a tragic event initiated a 100 day period of genocide that murdered nearly 1 million people in that short period of time in the country of Rwanda.  The world stood back and watched.  Had Adolf Hitler killed with that kind of speed; the Holocaust would have claimed 25 to 30 million lives.

Rwanda 1994

The presidential guard quickly murdered the political opposition and enacted a pre-planned campaign of slaughter that spread across the country. Soldiers, government officials and business leaders organised the killings and were joined by a Hutu militia, the Interahamwe. BBC Tuesday, 6 April, 2004 Updated Timeline

It is incomprehensible to imagine such rapid genocide in such a short period of time.  The Rwandan people are still recovering

Revelation 6:7-8 KJV And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.  (8)  And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.  

Nazi Concentration camp 

This End Time event corresponds with the statement that Jesus made in Matthew 24:7 when He predicted there would be pestilences, and earthquakes, in different places; in the End Time.  The word pestilence means destruction; utter and complete annihilation on a scale of incomprehensible proportions.  We think of Hitler’s genocide of the Jewish people in World War II; yet he was just one of many in the twentieth century who committed genocide.  It was a century plagued with the utter destruction of peoples merely because they breathed air! 

These were madmen of tyrannical regimes; who used their power to annihilate; innocent people at their perverted whims.  The chart below comes from a website that lists those individuals who should have been tried for atrocities committed during their rule.   http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

The numbers add up to around 150,000,000 people who were murdered for their race, nationality or political view.  This is just for the 20^th Century!

Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)	49-78,000,000
Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39)	23,000,000 (the purges plus Ukraine's famine)
Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945)	12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians WWII)
Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908)	8,000,000
Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44)	5,000,000 (civilians in WWII)
Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-20)	1,200,000 Armenians (1915) + 350,000 Greek Pontians and 480,000 Anatolian Greeks (1916-22) + 500,000 Assyrians (1915-20)
Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79)	1,700,000
Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94)	1.6 million (purges and concentration camps)
Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78)	1,500,000
Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970)	1,000,000
Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982)	900,000
Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994)	800,000
Saddam Hussein (Iran 1980-1990 and Kurdistan 1987-88)	600,000
Tito (Yugoslavia, 1945-1987)	570,000
Sukarno (Communists 1965-66)	500,000
Fumimaro Konoe (Japan, 1937-39)	500,000? (Chinese civilians)
Jonas Savimbi (Angola, 1975-2002)	400,000
Mullah Omar - Taliban (Afghanistan, 1986-2001)	400,000
Idi Amin (Uganda, 1969-1979)	300,000
Yahya Khan (Pakistan, 1970-71)	300,000 (Bangladesh)
Benito Mussolini (Ethiopia, 1936; Libya, 1934-45; Yugoslavia, WWII)	300,000
Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire, 1965-97)	?
Charles Taylor (Liberia, 1989-1996)	220,000
Foday Sankoh (Sierra Leone, 1991-2000)	200,000
Suharto (Aceh, East Timor, New Guinea, 1975-98)	200,000
Ho Chi Min (Vietnam, 1953-56)	200,000
Michel Micombero (Burundi, 1972)	150,000
Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia, 1992-99)	100,000
Hassan Turabi (Sudan, 1989-1999)	100,000
Jean-Bedel Bokassa (Centrafrica, 1966-79)	?
Richard Nixon (Vietnam, 1969-1974)	70,000 (Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians)
Efrain Rios Montt (Guatemala, 1982-83)	70,000
Papa Doc Duvalier (Haiti, 1957-71)	60,000
Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1930-61)	50,000
Hissene Habre (Chad, 1982-1990)	40,000
Chiang Kai-shek (Taiwan, 1947)	30,000 (popular uprising)
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (USSR, 1917-20)	30,000 (dissidents executed)
Francisco Franco (Spain)	30,000 (dissidents executed after the civil war)
Fidel Castro (Cuba, 1959-1999)	30,000
Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam, 1963-1968)	30,000
Hafez Al-Assad (Syria, 1980-2000)	25,000
Khomeini (Iran, 1979-89)	20,000
Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe, 1982-87, Ndebele minority)	20,000
Rafael Videla (Argentina, 1976-83)	13,000
Guy Mollet (France, 1956-1957)	10,000 (war in Algeria)
Harold McMillans (Britain, 1952-56, Kenya's Mau-Mau rebellion)	10,000
Paul Koroma (Sierra Leone, 1997)	6,000
Osama Bin Laden (worldwide, 1993-2001)	3,500
Augusto Pinochet (Chile, 1973)	3,000
Al Zarqawi (Iraq, 2004-06)	2,000

For a list of casualties in wars, see this page.

Matthew 24:7 KJV  For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

The Twentieth Century was marked by the pestilence of genocide and war; together; we are talking about hundreds of millions of people.   The above chart is just the statistics of murders attributed to individuals.  Click on the link at the bottom of the chart for war casualties.

The Twenty-first Century is starting out as the Century that will be marked by the pestilence of earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters.  There is also the pestilence of disease; that follows such mass carnage of human flesh; and it adds to these staggering death tolls.  There is a rumbling that is shaking our world; it is the divine hand of God that is trying to awaken us out of our sinful rebellion against the Most High!  It will erupt into the destruction and annihilation of people, cities and nations that is unprecedented and beyond our comprehension.

We don’t know God’s timeframe!  We don’t know where we are at or how much time God will continue to allow mankind to wallow in the filth and squalor of sin.  Now is the time to get your spiritual life in order.  Now is the time to make sure you are developing your relationship with Jesus Christ.  Now is the time to make life style changes and to reprioritize your life.  Jesus needs to be the focus of your life!  If you have not been baptized in Jesus’ name and filled with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues; then you need to do so as soon as possible.  Now is the time!