Barry Stagner: Final Labor Pains?

Is Our World Experiencing The Final Labor Pains?

Pastor Barry Stagner

I’ve been studying Bible prophecy for many years. I always look to the Olivet Discourse, places like Revelation, Ezekiel, the latter portions of Daniel, and Zechariah. You see this mention of birth pains that Jesus talked about being “the beginning of sorrows.” Paul used, translated, that same greek word as labor pains on a pregnant woman when he wrote to the church of Thessaloniki regarding Bible prophecy.

It’s interesting that if you really think about this in comparison to the duration of a pregnancy, labor pains are a very, very short period of time. Now that tells us things ought to escalate quickly and move directly into the heavy labor of the tribulation and then finally giving birth to the millennial reign of Christ on earth.

It is possible when we see one of these pushes forward prophetically, that we have jumped into or crossed the bridge of the final escalation the labor pains portion. Now, in Matthew 24:3-8, Jesus talked about a course of events:

Matthew 24:3-8 KJV – “And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.”

We see false claims of anointing all around us, we see the wars and rumors of wars, the ethnic tensions Jesus mentioned, we see the famines growing around the world, we also see the pestilence (I think we all have become more familiar than we ever wanted to be with pestilence/plague) and we see the cosmological and geological events that are escalating as well throughout the course of history.

But all of a sudden there seems to be a pretty significant bump in things, as far as their frequency and intensity. Could this be the final labor pains before the church is delivered and the Lord says to His Bride come up here? Well, we’ll see in the coming days.

No man knows the day or the hour, we’re not here to make foolish predictions. However, we are here to examine the facts. We don’t want to be caught like the Pharisees whom Jesus rebuked and said:

Matthew 16:2-3 KJV – “He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?“

We don’t want to be caught in that position.