Jesus tells us in Matthew 24 that in the end times we will see wars, famines, and earthquakes in various places. Optimists usually make the statement that all these events have been occurring since the beginning of time. Although this is true, a closer look into Matthew 24 reveals something overlooked by these idealists. After describing several of the above mentioned events Jesus made an interesting statement in verse 8, “All these are the beginnings of birth pains.” This sheds a whole new light on these end time events. When thinking about birth pains I am reminded of my wife when she was pregnant with our children. During pregnancy, women experience what is called Braxton Hicks contractions. These contractions begin as early as 6 weeks of pregnancy and continue on until labor. They are very irregular and in the early stages of pregnancy they are very weak. Many women confuse these early contractions with early labor, but actually the purpose for these contractions are literally to prepare the woman’s body for delivery. They tone the uterine muscle and promote the flow of blood to the placenta (Braxton, 2006).
Applying this knowledge to Matthew 24 we can see how it is true that there have been wars, famines, and earthquakes all throughout history, but these events were just Braxton Hicks and not the real thing. Several of the events that happened could be confused with true labor pains that Jesus mentioned, but they were just false labor. I have mentioned several times that if I was alive during WWII I would have sworn Hitler to be the anti-christ.
So how do we know true labor from Braxton Hicks contractions? I believe that we look at the occurrence of the events. When my wife went into labor with my children, we could time her contractions, and knew the closeness of delivery by the closeness of her contractions. For example already this year more than 223,000 people have died then all of last year (USGS, 2010) in earthquakes. As the time grows closer we will see all the events in Matthew 24 more frequently, until then we are commanded to watch.
