The Great Cold Blast of 2021
There was a general belief on the part of most people that 2020 would stand as a year where a chain of disasters all occurred during the same year. The historical run of major disasters has now followed us into 2021, with a cold blast that set over 3,000 records.
I had a first-hand view of the disaster from my home here in Arkansas. When I moved down here from Nebraska, I quickly realized the deep south doesn’t handle cold weather very well. If you don’t cover up your crawl space vents, your water pipes can freeze and rupture. From the 11th of to the 21st of February, the thermometer was below 32 degrees.
We set so many records, I lost track of many of them. We had three days in a row with record lows, we had a record amount of snow on the ground from two back-to-back weather events, and we had record peak electricity demand for any winter season. The record I didn’t want to see is how cold the water was coming out of my faucet. When it dropped from the upper 40’s to the low 30’s, I knew my pipes might freeze. While I was monitoring the cold faucet, old man winter froze up my hot water pipe. After an hour of using a space heater in my utility closet, the hot water finally coughed back to life.
To top off my experience, the city told all residents to boil their water. A main pipe had ruptured, which allowed untreated groundwater to leak into the system.
Even the hardy United States Postal Service had to call it quits because of the cold and 20 inches of snow that clogged the streets. The Postal Service said, “…in an abundance of caution, and to ensure the safety of both postal customers and employees, the Arkansas District is temporarily suspending retail and delivery operations.”
I’m sure many of my readers in Texas would gladly switch locations with me. Rolling power outages and outages from ice affected a large section of the state. At the peak, there were nearly 4.2 million Texas customers without power.
The great need for electricity and natural gas generated a huge price spike for these commodities. Wholesale power for delivery was trading at anywhere from $3,000 to $9,000 a megawatt-hour in some places. A megawatt-hour is normally priced around the $25 range. Oklahoma natural gas prices have swung anywhere between $50 to the high of $600 per mmBtu. Gas normally sells for three dollars per mmBtu.
Many producers of natural gas made huge profits on the massive price rise. The owner of one producer estimated that his company brought in $600,000 to $700,000 a day — up from just a few thousand dollars a day. That’s enough to make conventional wells drilled years ago, and all but forgotten, profitable again. “We’ve got a roustabout crew hooking up wells that are so old they were disconnected,” he said.
The blackouts in Texas were the result of a cascade of events. Massive failures occurred at natural gas plants as the product froze up, along with failures at coal and oil sources. Wind turbines and solar panels also got knocked out, and a major nuclear plant lost half of its generating capacity.
I don’t normally open any of my gas or electric bills, but I will when I get the next month’s bill. Some people in Texas are getting billed as much as $17,000. This is an insane level of price gouging. It is just plain greed to sell something at a 200 times markup.
As warmer Pacific air invades the south, prices have come down about 90% according to ERCOT, Texas’ largest power company. The parent of a boy who died of hypothermia is suing the local utility for $100 million. As the south thawed out, many residents had their homes flooded with water from ruptured pipes.
I think the Great Cold Blast of 2021 will not stand long in people’s memory. In a few months, we will likely be on to our next disaster. Few people take the time to ask themselves, Why are all these disasters happening in such a short period of time? The only answer that I can find is Bible prophecy.
“Watch out,’ replied Jesus. ‘Don’t let anyone deceive you. You see, there will be several who will come along, using my name, telling you ‘I’m the Messiah!’ They will fool lots of people. You’re going to hear about wars, actual wars and rumoured ones; make sure you don’t get alarmed. This has got to happen, but it doesn’t mean the end is coming yet. Nations will rise against one another, and kingdoms against each other. There will be famines and earthquakes here and there. All this is just the start of the birthpangs” (Matthew 24:4-8).
— Todd
Harlot System in View
My much-missed friend, the late Dave Hunt, received considerable heat for pointing out the evils found within Catholicism. In his book, The Woman Rides the Beast, he pointed out, by name, some very famous Christian evangelists, ministers, and church leaders for their cozying up to Pope John Paul and the Catholic Church of that period. He gave all biblical reasons that the Catholic Church and true biblical Christianity were not compatible.
When Dave agreed to write a chapter for one of our books, controversy arose over his inclusion of his criticism of these Christian leaders in his chapter. Even a friend of Dave’s, one of my best friends and a Christian brothers, now also deceased, called me and asked: “Should Dave’s chapter be included, with his strong criticism of…and…for saying good things about the pope?”
My question to this friend–one of the most wonderful preachers and teachers of God’s Word and of Bible prophecy—was: “Well, is Dave telling the truth in his chapter about the Catholic Church and its false teaching?”
Our friend’s answer was, “Well…yes.” I then said, “So why shouldn’t we print Dave’s truthful telling about the mistakes of the Christian evangelist, minister, and church leaders cozying up to the pope and the Catholic Church?”
So, Dave Hunt’s chapter doing just that was published in our book, precisely as Dave wrote it.
I’m sure both of my great friends, now in Heaven, are closer friends than ever–along with the now-deceased men Dave was pointing out as in error by giving a degree of credence to the Catholic Church’s false teaching.
Dave Hunt’s book was harsh in its condemnation, to be sure. But God’s Word is even more condemning of that coming system of wickedness, which Dave and our friend who questioned the inclusion of Dave’s chapter agreed almost certainly will have Catholicism at its heart. As a matter of fact, even much of the Catholic clergy are beginning to conclude that this current pope manifests characteristics portrayed by the Bible’s depiction of the coming false prophet.
“Harlot” –rendered “whore” in the King James Version of the Bible–is a term that denotes a woman who prostitutes herself sexually. In Bible prophecy, the term is applied symbolically, to a system of religion that rejects true doctrine from God’s Word and gives itself totally to a false system of worship.
Just as the true Church (all born-again believers of the Church Age, the dispensation of grace) is known as the Bride of Christ, the harlot, as depicted in Revelation, chapter 17, can be likened to being the mistress of Antichrist. She is of her father, the Devil:
And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. (Revelation 17:1-6)
This harlot church system will, many prophecy students and teachers believe, be made up of an eclectic mix of religions in the time following the Rapture of the true Church. The religious system, called “Mystery Babylon,” will work in concert with the Antichrist regime to enslave the world in every realm of life.
According to Christian apologist Mike Gendron of Proclaiming the Gospel Ministries, the current pope presents a profoundly corrupted gospel, not the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Gendron, who was formerly a devout Catholic for thirty years, says that he, like many Catholics, never read the Bible for himself to any great extent, depending instead on Catholic teaching by those who inculcated him in the Catholic dogma. It was only when he started looking into Scripture for himself that he was freed from the grip within which the church held his eternal soul. He is now a man on Holy Spirit fire for getting out the true Gospel and particularly to those entrapped within false systems of religious worship.
The apostasy we see developing and burgeoning within society and culture today is a powerful signal of how quickly the Church Age must be nearing its end. When Christ calls the true Church to Himself, the false church–the harlot church—will come together, led by the false prophet who many believe could be a pope. Again, even many Catholic leaders believe this to be the case.
I’ve heard Mike Gendron speak on a number of occasions, and always have found his presentations inspiring and instructive about the evil of false worship systems. However, upon listening recently to Mike and Jan Markell on her remarkable radio program, aired over nine hundred stations each week, I was even more drawn to the truth of the evil the world faces with the ongoing developments.
With Pope Francis saying bluntly and on several occasions that even atheists will go to Heaven, we can be confident that apostasy is blatantly in our faces today. I strongly urge you to listen to Jan’s Discerning the Times radio program. I’ve provided a link below.
–Terry