Are We Living in the Last Days?

Beginning with this issue, The Watchtower is publishing an eight-part series about the last days

WHOSE life has not been touched by war? Who has not felt the aftermath of this century’s two world wars​—the era of violence, insecurity and fear imposed upon all mankind? Who has escaped the resultant economic hardships, the increasing financial burdens to cover the cost of military campaigns or war preparedness? Whose life is not now endangered by the ever greater threat of nuclear war?

Whether fought in aggression or for defense, for just or unjust causes, war has been the bane of civilization. The cost in human lives alone has been staggering. As calculated by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in 1969, the world has known only 292 years of peace since 3600 B.C.E., whereas 14,531 wars have been fought.

Our century, particularly since the first world war in 1914, has been called the “age of violence.” Concerning it, James Reston wrote in The New York Times of May 30, 1982: “This has been the bloodiest century in the history of the human race. It has suffered through 59 wars between nations with over 29 million combat dead, and 64 civil wars with almost six million casualties​—not mentioning the tens of millions of civilians slaughtered on the side. This is the meaning of war.”

So alarming are the possible consequences of another world war that repeated references have been made by the world’s leaders and scientists to Armageddon. (Revelation 16:14, 16) They simply view it as a man-made holocaust, whereas the Bible associates Armageddon with “the war of the great day of God the Almighty.” It is his war to rid the earth of wickedness and establish a righteous New Order for peace-loving mankind.

This God-given hope of a righteous New Order has sustained men of faith from ancient times. (Hebrews, chapter 11) These have looked forward eagerly to the time when God would remember them and raise them to everlasting life. (Job 14:13, 14; Psalm 37:29) Those righteous ones trusted in God’s power to resurrect them to a cleansed globe where he will be “making wars to cease to the extremity of the earth.”​—Psalm 46:9.

But they did not know when these things would take place. The time when God would take action was simply referred to as “the time of the end” or “the final part of the days.” (Daniel 11:40; Isaiah 2:2) It is no wonder, then, that Jesus’ disciples approached him privately to ask: “When will these things be, and what will be the sign of your presence and of the conclusion of the system of things?”​—Matthew 24:3.

The first thing Jesus mentioned that would be an indication of the approaching end was: “You are going to hear of wars and reports of wars.” (Matthew 24:6) Could the fact that we are living in “the bloodiest century in the history of the human race” be the fulfillment of this sign that Jesus gave? Are we truly living in the last days?

World War I and the Beginning of Sorrows

FROM earliest times, mankind’s history has been one of violence and wars. It was because “the earth became filled with violence” that God brought on the global Deluge in Noah’s day. (Genesis 6:11-13) Thereafter the Bible and secular history record hundreds of wars fought even prior to Jesus’ day. So “wars and reports of wars” would not be something new to the world of mankind.

For these “wars and reports of wars” to have meaning for Jesus’ disciples they would have to stand out as being different in some way. He went on to explain: “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in [various] places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.” (Matthew 24:7, 8, Authorized Version; compare Luke 21:10, 11.) So it would not be a case of just hearing of an isolated war here and there. This feature of the sign would take in many nations and kingdoms. It would be total war!

Have we seen such war? Yes, we have, and that starting with the generation of 1914. In fact, we have seen two such globe-encircling wars within this century. That this type of warfare was indeed something new in the annals of human history is attested to by the titles given them by historians. The first was called the Great War. Later this was changed to the first world war, and its successor was named the second world war. World war became a feature starting from the year 1914.

Unparalleled Sorrows

True to Jesus’ prediction, World War I marked a “beginning of sorrows.” As the publishers of the book The End of Order have stated on the book’s jacket: “The first world war and the Versailles Treaty that followed produced the most serious upheaval in the long and stormy course of modern world history. . . . Far from restoring the world to order, the diplomats who met in 1919 at Paris and at Versailles plunged the world again, this time irretrievably, into the chaos of the twentieth century. It was the end of order.”

Inside the book, author Charles L. Mee, Jr., goes on to explain: “At the end of the Great War, however, the diplomats confronted a world in fragments, a world that seemed to be in the midst of a massive psychic breakdown, of a breakdown of old combinations of states and of empires, of the disintegration of economic orders, of nineteenth-century capitalism, of the eruption of sudden disaster, of riots and assassinations, of tyranny and disorder, of frivolity and despair, exhilaration and dread on such an order of magnitude as to numb the mind. . .. Far from restoring order to the world, they took the chaos of the Great War, and . . . sealed it as the permanent condition of our century.”

Those sorrows​—the human death and suffering that began with the first world war—​are unparalleled in human history. Modern mechanized warfare​—tanks, machine guns, airplanes and submarines—​as well as the invention and use of poison gases in warfare​—wreaked havoc on the world. “A generation had been decimated on the battlefields of Europe,” says the book The End of Order. “No one had seen the likes of such slaughter before: the deaths of soldiers per day were 10 times greater than in the American Civil War, 24 times the deaths in the Napoleonic Wars, 550 times the deaths in the Boer War.”

Yet, said Jesus, this would be but a “beginning of sorrows,” or “of pangs of distress.” Other translations render Jesus’ words as “the beginning of the birthpangs.” (Jerusalem Bible; Phillips’ New Testament in Modern English) A woman about to give birth experiences pains that occur with increasing severity, frequency and duration. World War I and its accompanying sorrows were but a start of pangs of distress.

World Distress Increases

Other and more intense pangs were soon to follow with the coming of World War II. “The total deaths from military action and war-distributed disease attributable to World War I have been estimated as over forty million and those attributable to World War II as over sixty million,” writes Quincy Wright in the book A Study of War. “At least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to war.”

Civilian deaths were exceptionally high in the second world war. As Professor Wright explains: “Starvation, bombardment, confiscation of property, and terrorization involving the destruction of entire cities were applied in World War II against the entire enemy population and territory. . . . The entire life of the enemy state came to be an object of attack. The doctrine of conquest was even extended by some states to the elimination of a population and its property rights in order to open the space it occupied for settlement.”

The distress caused by the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in 1945, which resulted in 235,000 deaths, was eclipsed by the horrors unleashed a few months later by the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What used to take tens of thousands of bombs to accomplish, in terms of lives lost, could now be accomplished by only one bomb. But even more devastating were the deadly effects of the radiation poisoning, which continue until our day.

Writing about just the one atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, World Press Review of June 1982 states: “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been turned loose. The lucky ones were those who died in the first onslaught​—about 100,000 men, women, schoolchildren, round-faced toddlers, and newborn babies. Most of the additional 100,000 casualties would die in agony from ruptured organs, horrendous burns, or the slow hell of radiation sickness.” The pangs of distress were getting stronger.

Peace Taken From Earth

The reference to the “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is interesting in that it is based on the Bible account given in the 6th chapter of the book of Revelation. Here, Re 6 verse 4 reads: “And another came forth, a fiery-colored horse; and to the one seated upon it there was granted to take peace away from the earth so that they should slaughter one another; and a great sword was given him.” How well this matches that feature of the sign Jesus gave of nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom!

Peace has indeed been taken away from the earth. While historians have recorded years of peace prior to 1914, there have been none since. Men hoped in vain that the last world war would usher in an era of peace. Says the book The Violent Peace: “The peace that came in 1945 did not mean, as we had hoped, the end of war. Men have fought since then in almost every corner of the globe​—from Greece to South Vietnam, from Kashmir to the Congo—​and insurrections sprout like mushrooms in the poor nations of the world.”

The U.S. State Department reported recently that there have been at least 130 international and civil wars since the end of World War II. “About 701,600,000 of the world’s people are involved in wars of one kind or another,” reports the Toronto Star of June 13, 1982. “That’s about one person in six across the face of the globe and a figure that falls not far short of the numbers directly involved in World War II. About 250,000 combatants and up to 2,000,000 civilians are dying in these [wars] every year.”

“Wars and reports of wars” continue unabated. As the book The Violent Peace states: “Since [1945] men no longer declare war or make an end to war. They simply war. Ours is an era of mass violence that goes by the name of peace.”

Will there be another global pang of distress in the form of a third world war? “We are living in a pre-war and not a post-war world,” says Eugene Rostow, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the United States. Surely the nations are prepared for such a conflict! Currently they are spending about $1,000,000 each minute on armaments. Of the $550 billion spent on war preparations in 1981, about $110 billion was spent on nuclear weapons. Stockpiles of nuclear weapons are now equivalent in destructive power to one million of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. Peace has certainly been taken away from the earth.​—Revelation 6:4.

The evidence regarding war in our modern times points to this conclusion: We are indeed living in the “last days” of this present system of things.