...death

The Black Death is a particularly nasty form of bubonic plague and killed tens of millions of people since it first appeared in the 14th century. It is caused by the bacterium carried by infected fleas and rats. In most cases, the infected victim suffers from fever, chills, fatigue, and painfully swollen lymph nodes. It carried away a greater proportion of the world’s people than any other disease or war in history. It literally transformed European society—reducing the population by one-third.

The Black Death was traced to the Gobi Desert in the 1320s. By 1400, it invaded China and reduced the population there from 125 million to 90 million. It then followed trade routes west to India, the Middle East, and finally into Europe. In Cairo, Egypt, a city of 500,000, at the height of the epidemic, 7,000 people died each day. By 1349, the plague had killed one-third of the population of the Muslim world. 

In 1347, Eurasian nomads deliberately infected a European community with the disease. While laying siege to a Genoese trading post in the Crimea, they lobbed plague-infected corpses into the town by catapult. From the Crimea, the Genoese inadvertently brought the disease to Sicily in a ship carrying infected rats. The disease then swept through Sicily in 1347; North Africa, Italy, France, and Spain in 1348; Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, England, Germany, and the Low Countries in 1349; and reached Scandinavia in 1350. Some 25 million Europeans were killed by the initial onslaught of the Black Death; whole villages were wiped out. 

King Hezekiah once faced death. The prophet Isaiah told him to set his house in order for he would die. “Then Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and prayed to the Lord” (Isaiah 38:2). Not only did the Lord miraculously intervene, but He gave an amazing sign: “Behold, I will bring the shadow on the sundial … ten degrees backward” (v. 8). 

When we are facing life-threatening illness, we would do well to cry out to God. The Lord hears our prayers. We might be miraculously healed. And if not now, we know someday there will be no more death. 

"And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death." Revelation 20:14

-doug batchelor