Gathering storm clouds presage a fast-approaching struggle that will envelop the entire world in an orgy of destruction; nations to-day are rapidly completing preparations to make the next war the most devastating one in the history of mankind.
John L. Shuler
The huge factories of the world are ready to turn out the munitions of warfare in unprecedented volume when the tocsin sounds.
Among the many changes that the last few years have brought in the conditions of existence, there is one startling change that many have not realized. Destructive science has gone ahead out of all proportion to the power of construction. It is developing so fast that now it actually imperils civilization. Thinking men everywhere recognize that if destructive science remains dominant, it will certainly bring the world to ruin.
While this twentieth century has brought an amazing advance in transportation, communication, education, manufacture, and medicine, it has also brought even a more amazing advance in the production of weapons for wholesale destruction.
A STARTLING COMPARISON
One battleship to-day is more powerful than everything the naval world had produced up to a half century ago. A single modern gun can do far more execution than many whole batteries could do fifty years ago. The armies of one of the great nations of to-day, equipped with the latest improved weapons, could meet all the armies of the world prior to one hundred years ago, and mow them down before they could possibly get close enough to strike a telling blow.
The war appliances with which men fought twenty years ago are for the most part antique relics when compared with the weapons now ready for use. The war appliances of our day are more powerful than all the war appliances of all past ages put together down to the beginning of this twentieth century. Think what a commentary this is on our day, as the day of unprecedented war preparation, exactly as marked out in Joel 3:9, 10.
In this third chapter of Joel we are plainly told that just preceding the gathering of the nations into the valley of judgment, when God will arise to shake terribly the earth, war preparedness will dominate the nations. Mark how strikingly this is now fulfilled before your eyes!
Never since the world began has there been such a spectacle,—the whole world ready for war. Preparation for war is not confined to the great powers of Europe, but every nation in every continent is making enormous efforts to equip itself for the emergency of war.
SCIENTIFIC MEN STIRRED
War preparation constitutes what is actually the greatest industry in the world to-day. It is annually consuming billions of dollars and the service of millions of men. We see now what Joel predicted twenty-seven hundred years ago,—“Proclaim ye this among the nations; prepare war.” Joel 3:9, A. R. V.
In this preparation for war, the mighty men are to be stirred up. Mark now how the developments of the last few years have disclosed anew the significance of the words, “Stir up the mighty men.” The men of genius, science, and invention have been stirred in recent years as never before to discover and perfect new war appliances for destroying human life. There never was a time when science and invention were being drafted into the discovery of new and more destructive methods of waging war as in our day.
For ages men have fought on land and sea, but it remained for the twentieth century to lift war into the air and to carry it on under the sea. During the last three decades the war-preparedness movement has become so dominant in the world that war preparation has entered the domain of “the four dimensions” within man’s reach. The nations are now prepared to fight on the land, on the sea, in the air, and under the sea. Where else could they fight?
There never was anything like this before. We are witnessing a great race among the nations for supremacy in land armament, sea armament, aerial armament, and submersible armament.
And what does this mean to you and me? Look at the prophecy of Joel and see what it says of the time when this special war-preparedness condition obtains in the world. Hear the prophecy speak three times on this question.
It means that the great day of God is near. (Joel 3:14.) It means that Christ is about to take His seat on His judgment throne, and appear to the world to execute judgment on the nations. (Joel 3:12, 2.) It means that the time is at hand for Christ to appear as the great Reaper to reap the ripened harvest (Joel 3:13), and this is strictly a symbol of the end of the world (Revelation 14:14-20). Thus we are told three times over that this condition of war preparation is a harbinger of the glad day of the return of our Lord.
A WAR-PREPARATION PROPHECY
We should note particularly how these post-war years have brought the fulfillment of this war-preparation prophecy to a superlative degree. The progress of military science since the World War has been literally astounding. There have been amazing improvements in the range, hitting accuracy, and increased size of the projectiles of machine guns, trench mortars, field guns, and big cannon; in the increased bomb-carrying capacity; in speed, cruising radius, and armament of submarines, airplanes, and dirigibles; in the increased destructiveness and hitting accuracy of aerial bombs; in the increased speed, armament, cruising radius, mobility, and armaments of tanks; and in the increased destructiveness of chemical warfare.
The improvements in war appliances in recent years above those in use at the beginning12of the Great War have been as great as the invention of cannon was above the ancient artillery of the catapult and stone. It would be useless for us to attempt to give figures on the increased size, range, rapidity of fire, and hitting accuracy of guns, or the increased death-dealing power of battleships, cruisers, submarines, aircraft, or tanks, because before this would get into print it would be outdone by something still larger. Military science is advancing so quickly from one stage to another that the mind is dazed in keeping up with the swift advancement.
Some of the new and terrible weapons that will be ready in case of a new war are: aerial torpedoes; radio control of submarine torpedoes and bombing planes; armored superairplanes; soundless cannon; machine guns shooting 2,400 bullets a minute; flash lights of a million candle power; liquid poison, three drops of which will kill on contact; illuminating projectiles to light vast areas at night; electric apparatus to explode enemy ammunition stores far behind the lines; aerial bombs and submarine torpedoes of gigantic size; amphibious tanks, capable of crossing lakes, canals, and rivers, or lying submerged in flooded shell holes or ponds; armored supersubmarines; superguns and shells outranging by miles any heretofore in use; new deadly poison gases; a semiautomatic shoulder rifle that fires sixty shots a minute that will practically make every soldier a machine gunner.
These are only a few of the new war appliances of increased destructiveness that the nations now possess. We can easily believe they have more terrible inventions locked and guarded in their arsenals and secret places. No one knows what terrible inventions for destruction are now being secretly prepared in the laboratories and arsenals of the nations.
MERE CHILD’S PLAY
The British Society for Chemical Research in a recent report said: “Everything which happened in the World War in the way of the use of chemicals is mere child’s play compared with what will happen in a future war between industrially and scientifically advanced powers.
“Applied Science has brought aviation to a day when a lone aviator, riding a mother plane, may drive before him through the skylines a covey of death in the shape of pilotless planes. Under gas waves spread by them a great city or an army might be anaesthetized for a day or sent into that sleep that knows no waking. In this winged brood of destruction, radio guided, every plane will be able to drop bombs twenty times as destructive as the largest shell ever hurled from a gun muzzle.”
David Sarnoff, vice president and general manager of the Radio Corporation of America, and an outstanding authority on the possibilities of wireless, recently went so far as to say that, in view of the possible use of wireless in war, some future war would be more destructive and decisive in the first day of its duration than the whole four years of the World War.
He declares: “We know enough to-day about radio control of remote mechanisms (the field of radioteledynamics) to expect that, as development proceeds, unmanned airplanes, surface vessels, submarines, and land tanks, carrying dangerously destructive explosives, poisonous gases, or disease-breeding bacilli, could be aimed at the population centers of the enemy and sent to their destination in shoals.”
FRIGHTFUL FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
The mind is staggered by the frightfulness of these new war appliances. General Mason M. Patrick, chief of the United States Army Air Service, says: “We have developed automatic pilots so that airplanes can be sent off at a predetermined height and made to drop their bombs at a predetermined point. Or they can be maneuvered by radio with no pilot aboard. They may be carried across a continent by dirigibles and then sent forth on combat missions.”—Quoted in the Literary Digest for October 4, 1924.
The recent general assembly of the League of Nations in session. Many had hoped the League would be able to grapple with the war questions in a decisive way; but, as in the present case of the Italo-French deadlock over naval armaments, the League seems quite impotent to deal with Mars.
Just think of the horrors of one of these new wars, with the engines of death and destruction controlled by an invisible human agency, coming out of the clouds, hovering—it may be—over our city, and then letting loose its cyclone of death in destructive bombs or the breath of death in poison gas! Military men declare that no limit can be imposed upon new ideas of attack when war comes again, and they mention as a possibility the paralyzing of an entire nation by a combination of chemicals distributed by radio-controlled airplanes.
All of these things stand as striking evidence of the supreme fulfillment of this last-day prophecy of Joel, which sets forth the feverish activity of men in forging weapons for world conflict. In the manufacture of tanks for war, we have a striking example of the beating of plowshares into swords, for the tank is but a farm tractor dressed up and equipped for battle. Nahum 2:3, 4 declares that in the day of preparation “the chariots are with fire of steel [margin, A. R. V.]. . . . The appearance of them is like torches; they run like the lightnings.” Such language might well be used in reference to armored motor cars or armored tanks.
In view of the fact that scientists are inventing weapons of destruction beyond theThirteencomprehension of those who fought in the World War, men are now saying that the next war will be as much worse than this recent world conflict as that transcended every previous conflict of the nations.
“RESTFUL BY COMPARISON”
The editor of the Scientific American recently expressed his belief that “the future war will be so horrible as to make the late war restful by comparison. Short as it will inevitably be, it will last long enough to wipe out mankind at a rate which will turn many a flourishing capital into a deserted village, and many a fair campagna into a Sahara of lifeless desolation.”
General Bliss of the United States Army says, “The destructiveness of the next war would surpass human imagination.” David Lloyd George of England declares that another world war would wreck civilization, and this world would be driven, “not to the condition of the Middle or Dark Ages, but to something which the world has never conceived of in its most imaginative moment.”
Bible prophecy does not indicate that the next world war will result in the Armageddon of the Apocalypse. Prophecy does plainly show, however, that the worst war that has ever been in the history of nations—the war of the great day of God—is impending to-day. Is it not very significant that at such a time men of the world are saying that the next war will be as much worse than the World War as that was above any that preceded it?
These men made these statements without any knowledge of or any reference to the Scriptural forecast of Armageddon. They made them on the basis of developments in the war appliances of this day. Surely here is a striking indication that the stage is being set to-day for that final war of Scripture prophecy.
The prophetic outline of the proportions and resultant destruction of that coming, final, colossal struggle at Armageddon more than meets what men of the world are now saying relative to the extent and results of the next war. As we study further, we shall see a foregleam of that coming colossal struggle, not only in the forging of these new weapons of destruction, but prophecy will show how the nations are now lining up for the last conflict.
