Among any group of human beings there always arises a bully. We’ve all experienced it since our days in grade school, even in kindergarten.

My wife and I sometimes kept nursery and toddlers in church on Sunday mornings so that the younger parents could enjoy church service without the worry of riding herd on their little ones. I observed the same behavior among the very youngest. There was always one or two who bullied the others—took away toys or did other obnoxious things.

These, of course, didn’t really think or know that they were doing anything wrong. It was just a natural, human trait.

And that’s the problem. The natural thing amongst humans is the part of us that has brought forth the troubles throughout human history.

The natural in this matter stems from the sin nature intrinsic to the fallen, human creation.

“Progressing” up through junior high and beyond the bullying becomes more serious. It is done knowingly and with purpose. The purpose—to lord it over someone else for the bully’s own ego and sense of power and control.

It becomes even more evident in the business world, as people joust and elbow to climb the ladders of success within corporate structures.

Then we come to the arena of politics and government. We have witnessed this in a profound way within the last four years, in my opinion. We are seeing it even now, as far as I’m concerned, in the way the swamp-entrenched medical “experts” within Washington, DC, officialdom have caused the rest of us to completely give up our livelihoods and altered, perhaps permanently, the American way of life.

These have bullied even this president, in my view. They walked into the Oval Office and extorted him with the threat of 2.2 million deaths from the coronavirus, if he didn’t shut down the nation’s close interaction.

I admire Mr. Trump and believe him to be God’s man for the crucial hour so near the end of the age, as many who read our columns know. However, even such a self-confident, “Make America Great Again”president like Donald Trump is intimidated by the “experts” saying that 2.2 million Americans will likely die unless he follows their “expert” advice.

Now, I sense he is realizing the mistake of listening to the veiled intimidation and is trying to finesse America’s way out of this national economic nightmare. The doctors still hold the intimidating authority, though. To me, it is obvious in the way these “authorities,” through using barely comprehensible medical jargon, step to the microphones and coyly contradict the president’s words about starting the nation back up.

So the bullying continues even within this so-called pandemic.

Bullying has been, of course, powerfully manifested by nations throughout history.

The ancient rulers of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and all the rest literally beat their subjects and nations around them if those victims didn’t comply with the bully-rulers’ demands. This is seen in modern times by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and even lesser tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and many, many others.

To my way of observation, today’s most pronounced national bully is China. This monstrous dictatorship from the far reaches of the Orient has, through accident or deliberate perpetration, shown itself to be clearly the leading bully on the international block.

China is now seen as the prime culprit in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. They almost certainly, according to intelligence services from the UK and America, deliberately unleashed the disease after it, most likely, accidentally escaped biological laboratories near the Chinese city of Wuhan.

It is thought that the dictator-leadership of China determined that since it escaped, they would keep the fact from other nations—particularly from the Western nations, so their economy wouldn’t be the only one to catastrophically suffer if and when the pandemic developed—as it did.

Intelligence sources accuse Chinese President Xi Jinping of rounding up perhaps millions of coronavirus-infected Chinese people and having them murdered so that the disease wouldn’t appear to be so widespread in that country. This, of course, is the sort of thing that world-class dictators do.

We remember the more than 30 million murdered in the Stalin purges and more than 60 million killed in the genocide by Mao tse-Tung in the so-called Cultural Revolution.

So, the bullying by geopolitical tyrants continues—and in a big way. The following excerpt makes the case.

China is continuing to under-report the true levels of deaths from Covid-19, national security officials in London and Washington believe.

But European officials are wary about directly challenging China over the figures, sources told the BBC. That concern also extends to confronting Beijing over an information campaign to improve its standing and distract from blame in the crisis…

Governments in Europe have been wary of engaging in a diplomatic row with China at a sensitive time. One UK official, who like others declined to speak on the record, said there was a “nervousness” about confronting China and that relations were “delicate”. (Gordon Corera, “Coronavirus: Europe ‘wary of confronting China over deaths,’” BBC News, 23 April 2020)

Clearly, there are leaders in the European Union who are afraid to confront China. Governments and presidential administrations have shied away from confrontation from this behemoth state because of its feared military power and influence. Those same governments and administrations have given the Chinese dictators ever-increasing latitude to form and shape trade deals that have given the Chinese communists billions of dollars to build one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

Bullies must be confronted, and the United States now has a commander-in-chief who is doing exactly that. For the second time recently, American warships have sailed through the sensitive area known as the Taiwan Strait. This is an expanse of waters that separate the tiny island nation of Taiwan from mainland communist China.

The communist regimes in the mainland have always considered Taiwan to belong to China. It is an illegitimate government that rules in Taiwan, the Chinese government continues to declare, because rebels (in their view) broke away from China and fled to Formosa (the name of Taiwan at the time). The Chinese communists have been threatening since that break from mainland China to invade and take the people of free Taiwan back into their regime.

Bible prophecy, in my view of it, foretells—without mentioning the name of China—that this demon-possessed bully will be responsible for the deaths of fully one-third of human beings during the time of Tribulation. Almost without question, this evil state will be the king of “the kings of the east.”

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. (Revelation 9:13–16)

And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared. (Revelation 16:12)