The Americans had dropped 720,000 leaflets two days earlier warning the city of Hiroshima would be obliterated—but no one paid any heed. So the first atomic bomb was dropped and the dreadful prophecy that mankind would face extinction if not for the return of Jesus Christ became conceivable: “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened”(Matt 24:22).

Every individual who survived had his or her own account of the suffering they witnessed, and those accounts numbered in the tens of thousands. The magnitude of the destruction was beyond comprehension. A few days later a second atomic bomb was detonated above the city of Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands, as the first blast had done in Hiroshima, resulting in Japan surrendering to the allied powers.

Since then the world has lived in the shadow of the bomb. Over the next several decades following World War II, ever more powerful atomic weapons were developed across the globe in the period known as the Cold War.

Today, the nuclear arsenal of just the United States and Russia (to say nothing of India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, China and other countries known to possess nuclear weapons) is sufficient to destroy the inhabited portions of the earth multiple times over.

To get a picture of the events Jesus foretold would occur before His return, imagine the desolation in Hiroshima on that horrible day and multiply it the whole world over. In the prophesied time of worldwide turmoil and disaster to come, every citizen of every country of the world will be at risk.

Only one thing can give us hope in the face of such unspeakable destruction remaining a possibility for the world at large—God’s promise of intervention and salvation.