Jesus said in Matthew 24:7 that earthquakes would be a sign of the approaching endtimes. In the last few months I have heard a few people say that they have been analysing earthquake records and they show that the earthquakes, or large earthquakes are on the rise. (One of the times I heard this they announced that there had just that day been a large earthquake in New Zealand – it turned out that it was in the ocean 3000km north of New Zealand! I was worried at first but when I couldn’t find anything on the NZ news websites about the earthquake I figured it must have either been very deep, remote, weak or a combination of all three.)

Anyway, I was already a bit skeptical about the claims of earthquakes increasing and had meant to do a bit of research to see if this was the case. Anyhow I found the US Geological Survey website and they have a FAQ devoted to the subject of whether earthquakes are increasing, as well as some graphs. Interestingly enough, since 1995, no year has exceeded that year’s total for earthquakes in any of the 6.0-6.9, 7.0-7.9 or 8.0+ ranges, so we can quite accurately say that earthquakes are definitely not on the increase right now. What’s more the USGS specifically state that the frequency of large earthquakes has been pretty constant over the last hundred years.

What was probably behind this perception that earthquakes have been rising (at least in HK) has been the Sichuan earthquake, which is the second most deadly earthquake in our generation (the most deadly being the Indian Ocean earthquake that caused the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. while both of these disasters are firmly implanted in people’s minds, most have probably forgotten about the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan which killed almost as many people as the Sichuan earthquake.

So, if we approach this question from another angle “Are earthquakes killing more people today?” what answer do we get? Well, 1920 and 1976 saw earthquakes in China that killed over 200,000 people. And there were about a dozen earthquakes i total in the last millennium that each killed over 100,000 people. And when we remember that Jesus in that verse spoke of “famines and earthquakes” and that the most deadly famine recorded in history occurred over 50 years ago then we have to conclude that earthquakes and famines are telling us nothing in particular about these times being the endtimes.

What is possible is that Jesus meaning was that wars, earthquakes and famines are always occurring and he explains that these are just birth pains – they are not the real trouble of the endtimes. In which case people who are seeking to calculate the endtimes by counting earthquakes are mistaken in their approach anyway.