Tipping Point Quick Hits (8.19.20)

Fire tornadoes, biohacking and UFOs: News stories capturing our attention this week

Fire tornado spins up in California

California wildfires aren’t exactly rare in the dry, hot summer months. But over the weekend, a wildfire burning north of Lake Tahoe was large enough to produce a pyrocumulonimbus cloud—a cloud that forms over a heat source—and that led to the formation of a rare fire tornado.

Also known as a fire whirl or “firenado,” these spiraling funnels of flames can occur when high winds interact with towering columns of smoke. It caused the National Weather Service in Reno to issue a tornado warning.

The storm came as California faces a heatwave of triple-digit temperatures, and after thousands of households across the state suffered brief power outages—the first rolling outages in nearly 20 years.

The fires were sparked by a rare thunderstorm near San Francisco, which one climate scientist described as “the most widespread and violent summer thunderstorm event in memory for [the] Bay Area.”

The combination of violent storms, power outages, a heat wave and wildfires in the middle of a global pandemic has felt rather apocalyptic for residents on the West Coast. Thankfully, fire tornadoes don’t happen often, but they remind me of language in Revelation describing the victory over Satan at the end of the millennium:

7 Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea. 9 They went up on the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. 10 The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are. And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”—Revelation 20:7-10

Devouring fire from heaven sounds much like a “firenado.” Could God use an extreme weather event like the one in California to crush Satan’s rebellion?

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New series puts “biohacking” back in the news

A new German sci-fi series called Biohackers releases this week on Netflix. It tells the story of a young medical student who gets drawn into the world of illegal genetic-engineering experiments. In the trailer, a professor lectures a class about the future:

“Synthetic biology has turned us from creatures to creators. It’s not only the future of medicine, but of humankind. It is our responsibility to create the world of the future. You are the creators of tomorrow.”

While the series has called new attention to the idea of synthetic human genetic modification, biohacking isn’t a new idea. In fact, a few rogue scientists and experimenters have been pushing the envelope for years in attempts to become “superhuman.”

This article shares a few examples. A filmmaker named Rob Spence became blind in one eye but replaced that eye with a working camera. The tech billionaire Peter Thiel has become fascinated with transfusions of “young blood” to keep his 53 year-old body youthful. In Sweden, thousands of people have voluntarily inserted microchips into their bodies as a potential replacement for cash and credit cards. (I wrote about this troubling phenomenon in Sweden already last year.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The mass chipping of people will allow the Antichrist to control the world’s commerce. I have no doubt our modern culture’s fascination with biohacking will propel us into that future.

In my book, Tipping Point, I wrote this about human genetic engineering:

We are made in the image of God, and we have no right to try to improve upon or manipulate what He has done. Yes, good people can access medical technology to help or cure others. However, arrogant humans should not try to take the place of God in an attempt to improve and immortalize themselves. There is only one God, and we are not Him.

We are racing toward the end of the age.

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UFO sightings prompt Pentagon task force

In 2017 and 2018, the media exposed the existence of three videos showing U.S. Navy pilots encountering “mysterious, fast-moving objects” captured by the cameras in their F/A-18 Super Hornet jets.

The public footage of unexplained objects documented by U.S. military aircraft renewed interest in UFOs. As a result, the Pentagon announced last week that it was forming a new task force to look into “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The task force was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we are conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours, so that’s a legitimate question to ask,” the chairman of that committee, Sen. Marco Rubio, told a local Miami news station, WFOR-TV in July.

“Frankly, if it’s something from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some sort of technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary,” he added.

My focus is Bible prophecy, not conspiracy theories or UFOs. However, I’ve shared before how my interest in the end times was originally sparked by Hal Lindsey and his book The Late, Great Planet Earth.

Lindsey believed that UFOs were real, but speculated that they were of supernatural origin rather than vehicles from another galaxy. He always pointed to passages like 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11, which says that the work of Satan in the last days will be marked by “all power, signs, and lying wonders.”

There will come a period when God will lessen His restraint on the forces of darkness. It will be a time of demonic signs and wonders meant to deceive humanity with the goal of bringing the world to the feet of the Antichrist.

The Bible tells of angels assuming visible, physical bodies and interacting with mankind. Could fallen angels do the same? And might that “great deception” potentially come in the form of UFOs? Scripture says “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work” in our world as we approach the fulfillment of prophecy.

I’ve written often here about the signs in the skies. In most cases, I’m referring to the movements of stars, planets and comets. But a moment may arrive when we place unidentified aerial phenomena into that category.