--- 1914, a marked year! ---
Quote from "The World" NY Newspaper
From August 30, 1914
In the August 30, 1914, edition of The World, a leading New York newspaper at that time, a feature article in the paper’s Sunday magazine section commented on 1914 as the year to establish Jesus as King and to end the time of the Gentile Nations as follows: “The terrific war outbreak in Europe has fulfilled an extraordinary prophecy. For a quarter of a century past, through preachers and through press, the ‘International Bible Students’ . . . have been proclaiming to the world that the Day of Wrath prophesied in the Bible would dawn in 1914.”
What the Bible students had been prophesying, what the Bible had been predicting, actually, was the establishment of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ as the reestablishment of God's Kingdom over the earth; thus bringing the end of the gentile times... (Luke 21:24 of 22-28) [This promised deliverance was/is not for ancient Jewish blood line descendants of Abraham and Jacob (unless they express faith in Christ); but is for the New Israel of God. (Gal 3:26-29; Gal 3:5-9; Rev 3:12-13)]
The world recognized 1914 as significant!
The War That Destroyed the 19th Century
1914
REFLECTING on the new millennium, Charley Reese, newspaper columnist for The Orlando Sentinel, wrote: “The 1914-18 war that destroyed the 19th century is not over.” What did he mean? He explained: “History doesn’t pay any attention to calendars. The 19th century—defined as a set of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes and morals—did not end on Jan. 1, 1901. It ended in 1914. That’s also when the 20th century, defined the same way, began. . . .
“Virtually all of the conflicts that we have been concerned with all of our lives stemmed from that war. Nearly all of the intellectual and cultural currents that we have lived with were born out of that war. . . .
“I think it did such damage because it shattered people’s belief that humans can control their destiny. . . . The war disabused people of that belief. No one on either side thought it would turn out the way it did. It destroyed the British and French empires. It killed off the best of a whole generation of British, French and German men. . . . In a short period of time, it killed 11 million people.”
*** 1914 a Marked Year—Why? ***
On August 30, 1914, the arresting headline “End of All Kingdoms in 1914” blazed across page 4 of the Sunday magazine section of The World, a leading New York newspaper. “The terrific war outbreak in Europe has fulfilled an extraordinary prophecy,” stated this feature article. “For a quarter of a century past, through preachers and through press, the ‘International Bible Students,’ best known as ‘Millennial Dawners,’ have been proclaiming to the world that the Day of Wrath prophesied in the Bible would dawn in 1914. ‘Look out for 1914!’ has been the cry of the hundreds of traveling evangelists who, representing this strange creed, have gone up and down the country enunciating the doctrine that ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand.’”
The Great War
Erupting in 1914, this war was called “the bloodiest and costliest conflict in the history of mankind” up until that time. The major participants in this monstrous act of lawlessness were “Christian” nations! Referring to the war’s atrocities, a letter in a 1914 newspaper ironically protested: “Nations should fight like Christians, or, at least, like gentlemen.”
Because of that war, force and violence came to be viewed as acceptable. “When the rules of civilized society are suspended, when killing becomes a business and a sign of valor and heroism,” wrote clergyman Charles Parsons in 1917, “then it seems almost useless to talk about crime in the ordinary sense.” No wonder that researchers D. Archer and R. Gartner found that most of the nations they analyzed that were involved in World War I had “substantial postwar increases” in the rate of murders—Italy had a 52-percent increase and Germany a 98-percent increase over that before the war! But war led to a different type of lawlessness.
When Dreams of Peace Were Shattered
VERY few people expected 1914 to be anything other than an ordinary year. The future, in fact, looked uncommonly bright to people in the preceding years. Science was on the advance against disease. And war? Well, as the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said in February 1991, before 1914 the public “believed that war had been relegated to the furthest recesses of historical memory” and that man was at last living in “an era in which war had been banned by enlightened peoples and governments.”
However, 1914 and the ensuing years had some cruel surprises in store for a complacent humanity. The first was the so-called Great War of 1914-18 that shattered the dreams of peace. In fact, L’Osservatore Romano called it “the first great carnage of modern history, marked, among other things, by technical discoveries that great scientists of former generations had believed to be devoted to peaceful aims.” The war made a mockery of science as a means to achieve peace; instead, science gave the war its unprecedented capacity for wholesale slaughter.
And when the carnage of war was over, another slaughter began. The Spanish influenza of 1918-19 killed over 20 million people—far more than the awesome death toll of the Great War itself. Desperate measures were taken; spreading the disease was declared a crime in some countries. Police even arrested people for sneezing in public! But to no avail. Like a hurricane, the disease swept along unhindered until it had spent itself. Entire towns were wiped out. Bodies were stacked up in city morgues.
The era of change ushered in by 1914 left man reeling. His delusions of victory over war and disease, his dreams of a world peace wrought by human wisdom, were left in pitiful tatters. And as things continued to worsen, as the Great War was demoted to World War I by its mammoth successor, World War II, as disease, poverty, famine, and lawlessness continued to erupt in epidemic proportions around the world, historians began to recognize 1914 as a great turning point in human history.
So 1914 is a marked year for bad to the wicked, and for the beginning of good to the righteous!
On Monday, June 29, 1914, the whole world opened their daily newspaper to read the headlines: ‘Austrian Heir to Throne Murdered in Sarajevo!’ Overnight, the political heavens had blackened. (2 Pet 3:11-13; Mal 3:16-4:3) Four weeks later World War I broke out. Now in the eyes of their opposers, sincere Bible students who had identified that year as the year of Christ's enthronement and the beginning of the Great Tribulation were suddenly the greatest of prophets.” The world has forgotten and gone back to sleep. Not you, though, right?
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