What does this Scripture mean? There are preachers on radio and television who delight in conjuring with these words about wars and tumults, earthquakes, famines, and pestilences, terrors, and great signs in the heavens, and connecting them with current events in Afghanistan, India, the Middle East, Ethiopia, Central America, and Russia. (But one author has counted 300 wars in Europe in the last 300 years. How can anyone single out any single war as a sign that the end of the world is upon us?)

Some armchair psychologists analyze the audiences of preachers who make capital out of the Second Coming and dismiss them by saying, "They probably have a barren life. The electronic preachers are providing some excitement, an escape from their dull routine and perhaps even from their poverty or so…