Many people believe the plagues of Revelation 16 are yet future but most of them are already fulfilled. Brother Branham called them a "temporary judgment." They are the antitype of the Ordeal of Jealousy in Numbers 5 by means of which God separates the foolish virgin from the false church.
In his 1954 sermon, The Seven Church Ages (p. 4:28-30), Brother Branham said, "Now, a Trumpet represents war, a Seal, a mystery unfolding; and a Plague is what follows every war. And by God's help, and with the book of history, I can prove to you that we're living at the Seventh Trumpet, for the Seventh Plague, and the Seventh Seal to be opened, and the Seventh Vial to be poured out."
"When the Sixth one [Trumpet] sound . . . We'll get on that maybe the sealing away on Friday night. When the First World War [or Fifth Trumpet], why, that Sixth Trumpet sounded exactly according to the time God spoke of it, exactly, geographically, ["The very hour, by the Pan American chart, that Israel was declared a nation for the first time for two thousand years since they'd been scattered, not a people, it was that very same hour, exactly to the hour, that the Angel of the Lord met me up yonder and sent me with the Gospel . . . May the 7th, 1946" (Gabriel's Instructions to Daniel, p. 35:150; Revelation 9:15)], following the [Fourth] Seal before that. And when the mystery was revealed in there, for the baptism of the Holy Ghost, and the people then, how the Church did not move up; and those who were moving refused to walk in Light, and went back; and the plague [of the Fifth Vial] was opened at that time, and poured out upon the earth, which was influenza, that killed all the people as it did, the thousands times thousands".
An item published in the Sydney Morning Herald (August 17, 1985) stated, "In 1917-1918, 20 million worldwide were killed by the Spanish flu pandemic. In Australia in 1919, total deaths from Spanish flu were 11,552. This is a death rate of 2,172 per million. In Sydney there were 390,000 cases, or 370,000 cases per million. The coffins, for lack of burial manpower, were piled up on railway stations . . ."
Preaching on another occasion in 1954 he said, "In the Garden of Eden, there were two trees: One was knowledge and one was Life. And as long as man ate off the Tree of Life, he had Everlasting Life. The first bite he took from the tree of knowledge, he separated his fellowship from God, and every time he takes a bite yet, he destroys himself. He bit off gun powder; look what that does. He bit off automobile off the tree of knowledge; kills more of his comrades than all the wars do. He's got a hydrogen bomb bit off now. I wonder what he's going to with that? God don't destroy nothing; man destroys himself by knowledge" (Whatsoever He Saith unto You, Do It, #54-0722).
Speaking in 1961 of the Great Flood he said, "God never destroyed the world; man destroys the world. God don't destroy nothing; God tries to preserve everything. Man destroys himself by his knowledge, like he did in the Garden of Eden at the tree, so forth. And so some fanatic got ahold of some atomic power . . . They had it" (Revelation Chapter Four, Part II, p. 596:58-60).
God is the creator. He created by expressing His Word through faith. Man destroys God's creation when he contradicts God's Word by his wisdom and carnal knowledge without faith. The following letter published on educate-yourself.org provides us with the personal observation which explains how God permitted man's ungodly wisdom to cause the "deadly flu" of 1918.
The Flu: 1918 and Now
By Eleanor McBean
February 7, 2004 — You may have noticed that researchers are now saying they have analyzed the virus that caused the 1918 global pandemic of flu. They are linking it to a bird virus, which stirs the pot on the current flap about avian flu in Asia.
The PR goes this way: If this current bird virus mutates just a little bit in the wrong direction, we could see a replay of the 1918 disaster.
Here is another analysis, written about 25 years ago by Eleanor McBean. This excerpt, from chapter two of her book, "Vaccination Condemned," makes a quite different observation:
I WAS AN ON-THE-SPOT OBSERVER OF THE 1918 INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC.
All the doctors and people who were living at the time of the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic say it was the most terrible disease the world has ever had. Strong men, hale and hearty one day, would be dead the next. The disease had the characteristics of the black death added to typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia, smallpox, paralysis and all the diseases the people had been vaccinated with immediately following World War I. Practically the entire population had been injected "seeded" with a dozen or more diseases—or toxic serums. When all those doctor-made diseases started breaking out all at once it was tragic.
That pandemic dragged on for two years, kept alive with the addition of more poison drugs administered by the doctors who tried to suppress the symptoms. As far as I could find out, the flu hit only the vaccinated. Those who had refused the shots escaped the flu. My family had refused all the vaccinations so we remained well all the time. We knew from the health teachings of Graham, Trail, Tilden and others, that people cannot contaminate the body with poisons without causing disease.
When the flu was at its peak, all the stores were closed as well as the schools, businesses—even the hospital, as the doctors and nurses had been vaccinated too and were down with the flu. No one was on the streets. It was like a ghost town. We [who hadn't taken any vaccines] seemed to be the only family which didn't get the flu; so my parents went from house to house doing what they could to look after the sick as it was impossible to get a doctor then. If it were possible for germs, bacteria, virus, or bacilli to cause disease, they had plenty of opportunity to attack my parents when they were spending many hours a day in the sick rooms. But they didn't get the flu and they didn't bring any germs home to attack us children and cause anything. None of our family had the flu—not even a sniffle—and it was in the winter with deep snow on the ground.
It has been said that the 1918 flu epidemic killed 20,000,000 people throughout the world. But, actually, the doctors killed them with their crude and deadly treatments and drugs. This is a harsh accusation but it is nevertheless true, judging by the success of the drugless doctors in comparison with that of the medical doctors.
While the medical men and medical hospitals were losing 33% of their flu cases, the non-medical hospitals such as BATTLE CREEK, KELLOGG and MACFADDEN'S HEALTH-RESTORIUM were getting almost 100% healings with their water cure, baths, enemas, etc., fasting and certain other simple healing methods, followed by carefully worked out diets of natural foods. One health doctor didn't lose a patient in eight years. The very successful health treatment of one of those drugless doctors who didn't lose any patients will be given in the other part of this book, titled VACCINATION CONDEMNED, to be published a little later.
If the medical doctors had been as advanced as the drugless doctors, there would not have been those 20 million deaths from the medical flu treatment.
There was seven times more disease among the vaccinated soldiers than among the unvaccinated civilians, and the diseases were those they had been vaccinated against. One soldier who had returned from overseas in 1912 told me that the army hospitals were filled with cases of infantile paralysis and he wondered why grown men should have an infant disease. Now, we know that paralysis is a common after-effect of vaccine poisoning. Those at home didn't get the paralysis until after the world-wide vaccination campaign in 1918.
Protocol 10:19 states: "But you yourselves perfectly well know that to produce the possibility of the expression of such wishes by all the nations it is indispensable to trouble in all countries the people's relations with their governments so as to utterly exhaust humanity with dissension, hatred, struggle, envy and even by the use of torture, by starvation, by the inoculation of diseases, by want, so that the "Goyim" see no other issue than to take refuge in our complete sovereignty in money and in all else.
The Gulf War Syndrome and AIDS are two of many further such examples of disease and death created by man's unbelief in God's unchanging Word. bb040219.htm
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