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Other external signs:
v. 6. And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that ye be not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
v. 7. For nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in divers places.
v. 8. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
Christ's recital is impressive, dramatic: It will so happen, there is no question about it. he multiplicity of wars, the restlessness preceding, following wars, leading to new wars, wars in which the nations to which the Christians belong are involved, and wars of which they only hear by way of report and rumor; all these things are bound to happen, they are the result of the rejection of the Messiah; and so the Christians should not give way to perturbation, to excessive terror. They need calmness and strength, for that is not yet the end of sorrows. It was not the end before the destruction of Jerusalem, and it will not be the last thing before the end of the world. The wars, on the contrary, will assume a definite form. There will be uprisings, rebellions, of nation against nation, of people against people, of kingdom against kingdom, the Jews against the Syrians, the Tyrians against the Jews, the Jews and Galileans against the Samaritans, the Jews against the Romans and Agrippa, and civil war in Rome itself. As it was in the days before the destruction of Jerusalem, so the instances could be cited and multiplied from contemporaneous history, presaging the dissolution of the world, according to Christ's word. Even so it is with famines and pestilences and earthquakes: A famine in the days of Claudius Caesar, Act_21:28, famines involving millions of people in our days; pestilences mentioned by the historians of those days, a most fearful, unexplainable pestilence sweeping over the earth in our times; earthquakes in Crete, in Asia Minor, on the islands of the Aegean, at Rome, in Judea, in those days, similar ones in our days devastating large cities and whole provinces. And these are only the beginning of the intolerable dolors.