For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another

Matthew 24:6-13.

6. Why are the features of the “sign” not just a continuation of a previous pattern of things?

⁶ True, there had been wars, food shortages, earthquakes, and pestilences down through the centuries of our Common Era until 1914. (Luke 21:11) Nevertheless, there had been nothing to compare with what has taken place since the Gentile Times ended in that momentous year. The international strife that was surprisingly stirred up in the summer of 1914 grew into a military engagement in which 28 nations eventually took part. Along with that human upheaval came natural earthquakes. There were food shortages, or famines, and in the final year of that world war there came the thieflike pestilence called the Spanish influenza that took the lives of more than 20,000,000 humans. All of this was not just a continuation of the previously occurring pattern of things. It was the start of a series of events making up a “sign” that this system of things is in its foretold “time of the end.” (Daniel 12:4)