#731

A Wild 2025

A Worse Year

A new year is upon us and some people who were asked what 2025 holds for us weren’t exactly hopeful about it. In an article from theeconomiccollapseblog.com the author, Michael Snyder seems to concur:

What kind of year is 2025 going to be? If you ask 1,000 different people that question, you will probably get 1,000 different answers. There are some that are very optimistic about the year ahead, but there are others that are very pessimistic about the year ahead. In fact, Gallup just conducted a survey that discovered that most Americans…think 2025 will be a year of political conflict, economic difficulty, international discord, increasing power for China and Russia, and a rising federal budget deficit.

The author agrees with that assessment. And then he adds more of his own feelings on other things:

The U.S. is facing both internal and external turmoil, and our economy is very rapidly moving in the wrong direction.

But another major global health crisis would make things so much worse.

Great, just great. I did a podcast on the dreaded bird flu and no matter how much we’re told it is highly treatable, there are some who just keep trying to make more than it is. Here is a litany of “facts” from the article:

In recent weeks, so many of the usual suspects have been doing interviews in which they warn that a bird flu pandemic among humans has become inevitable.

Do they know something that the rest of us do not?

Already, we are starting to see public officials freak out. The state of California recently declared a state of emergency, and now it is being reported that Arizona has detected bird flu in the wastewater in the cities of Phoenix, Tempe and Surprise…Bird flu has been detected in wastewater in multiple metro Phoenix cities, county health officials confirmed Monday.

Routine wastewater surveillance in Phoenix, Tempe and Surprise — the three cities in the county where monitoring occurs — confirmed the presence of avian influenza, according to a press release from the Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH). The influenza subtype, which includes bird flu as H5N1, has been detected in multiple locations in the Valley in the past couple of months. Meanwhile, the bird flu continues to spread like wildfire among animals all over the nation. 123 million birds, most of them chickens and turkeys, have already died in the United States alone. And now a farm in Ohio that has nearly a million chickens has been infected…Ohio agriculture officials are investigating after avian flu was detected in nearly one million chickens in Darke County. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory confirmed Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza was detected in Darke County on Dec. 27, involving 931,302 chickens. Since it’s an active case, the ODA did not identify the individual farms. Cats are dying from coast to coast too. In Oregon, it has been determined that a cat that recently died from the bird flu caught it by eating turkey-based cat food…If humans start getting infected and dying on a widespread basis, it really will be a nightmare scenario, and the level of panic that we will witness will be off the charts.

And Then The War Fears

We already know that wars and rumors of wars is one of the signs of the end times given by Jesus in Matther 24 and Snyder outlines how there are signs that wars could break out all over the globe:

The U.S. and Israel are openly talking about conducting a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program, North Korea is threatening to invade South Korea, and long-range NATO missiles continue to hit targets deep inside Russia. In response, the Russians just fired missiles at Kyiv…Russia launched an aerial attack on Ukraine on Tuesday, striking the capital and other regions with multiple missiles and drones…Ukraine’s air force reported a ballistic missile threat at 3:00 a.m. (0100 GMT), with at least two explosions heard in Kyiv minutes later. Another missile alert was issued at 8:00 a.m. followed by at least one explosion in the city. Missile debris fell in the Darnytskyi district of the capital with no reports of casualties or damage, the local administration said.

And there is China:

Elsewhere, Chinese President Xi Jinping is boldly declaring that “reunification” with Taiwan is inevitable and nobody will be able to stop it…No one can stop China’s “reunification” with Taiwan, Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his New Year’s speech on Dec 31, laying down a clear warning to what Beijing regards as pro-independence forces within and outside of the island of 23 million people.

Could 2025 be the year China tries to take back Taiwan? That could happen:

In the past year, Beijing has stepped up military pressure near Taiwan, sending warships and planes almost daily into the waters and air space around the island in what Taiwanese officials view as a creeping effort to “normalize” China’s military presence. Will 2025 be the year when China finally pulls the trigger? When it happens, we will instantly be at war with China.

The article notes that China has been building up its military at a pace not seen since Germany in the 1930s. And then there are other hot spots:

On top of everything else, it appears that Afghanistan and Pakistan are on the brink of “all-out war”… Fears of an all-out war erupting between Afghanistan and Pakistan are rising after the Taliban sent troops to the border as the two countries continue to trade deadly strikes. The Afghan Taliban has unleashed a series of devastating artillery strikes on Pakistani military checkpoints along the tense border, sparking fears of a full-blown conflict between the two neighbors. The hardline Islamist group boasted it had obliterated ‘several’ Pakistani positions and mobilized battalions of fighters to confront any retaliation from Islamabad, in a chilling show of force.

So this whole wars and rumors of wars might rear its ugly head in 2025.

Could 2025 See More Natural Disasters?

In 2024 Snyder says this

While all of this is going on, our entire planet continues to become even more unstable as well. On average, we experienced a “billion dollar disaster” in the United States about every two weeks in 2024. Just think about how crazy that is. And that doesn’t even count all of the “billion dollar disasters” that have been happening in other nations. Sadly, this is just the beginning.

Once again, we “treated” to more troubling information on this front:

Today, we are being warned that a massive underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon that is thousands of feet tall is likely to erupt in 2025… Scientists have warned that an underwater volcano off the coast of the northwestern US is likely to blow sometime in 2025. The volcano, called Axial Seamount, is more than 3,600-feet-tall and sits half a mile underwater just 300 miles off the coast of Oregon.

The Snyder then ends his article by taking a dig at those at the top of the food chain who he presumably thinks will be largely unaffected by all of this doomsday talk:

Our world is going completely nuts, but for the moment those at the very top of the economic pyramid continue to party like it is 1999. On Tuesday, it was being reported that the 500 wealthiest people in the world now have a combined net worth of 10 trillion dollars… The world’s 500 richest people got vastly richer in 2024, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang leading the group of billionaires to a new milestone: A combined $10 trillion net worth. An indomitable rally in US technology stocks played a key role in turbocharging the trio’s wealth, as well as the fortunes of Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. If you are one of the lucky few that is sitting on a giant mountain of money, life may still seem pretty good for the moment.

Of course he believes that they will have a day of reckoning as well. He then tells us this:

2024 was certainly a chaotic year, but I am entirely convinced that 2025 will be much more wild.

Snyder is a downer when it comes to world events. However I prefer to also add in some Biblical balance to the mix. In an article by Tim Moore we get that balance:

Storms, raging waves, and quaking mountains are inevitable in this life, but we are promised peace that passes understanding. How do those two contradictory realities coexist?

Just before His arrest and crucifixion, Jesus warned His disciples that "in the world you have tribulation" or trouble (John 16:33). That is not what they wanted to hear. It is not what any of us want to hear. And yet, I believe with all my heart that Jesus' words were not just for the disciples gathered with Him there in Jerusalem; they are for all who take up their cross to follow Him.

Moore makes a clear difference for us:

Here is the key distinction: our trouble will be external; our peace will be internal. But even then, Jesus did not say, "you will have peace." He said, "you may have peace." Why?

I believe it is because whether we keep our eyes on Him and rise above the troubles of this life—or allow ourselves to be distracted and dismayed by the devil's fiery darts—is up to us. Christ has given us the power to have His peace. He has given us His Holy Spirit, just as He gave Himself. But the choice to let or "let not your heart be troubled," remains with you (John 14:1, NKJV).

He ends with a challenge, one I also agree with: Some will choose wisely, and some will choose poorly.

Inherent in that statement is how we will choose to face the storms coming in 2025. May we all choose wisely.