You will see in reading Revelation 6:3-8 that John foretold (1) warfare, (2) “food shortage” and (3) “deadly plague.” These are some of the very things Jesus had predicted in the “sign.” Thus we have added proof that there was to be a second or larger fulfillment of what Jesus had foretold. Professor A. T. Robertson says on this:

“It is sufficient for our purpose to think of Jesus as using the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem which did happen in that generation in A.D. 70, as also a symbol of his own second coming and of the end of the world or consummation of the age.”​—Word Pictures in the New Testament, Volume 1, page 188.

¹⁵ ‘But,’ some say, ‘there have always been wars, famines and pestilences. So how does one recognize the second fulfillment of the “sign”?’

¹⁶ Obviously, it would have to be something outstanding, different from a local war, an isolated pestilence or a single earthquake. Note that Revelation 6:4 says that the warfare would “take peace away [not from one nation or region, but] from the earth.” In addition, Jesus showed that it would be a composite sign. So, along with widespread war, there would be noteworthy famines, earthquakes and plagues, to name a few. These would all come upon one generation. (Matthew 24:32-34)

²⁰ Unprecedented disease is another evidence that the major fulfillment of the “sign” began with World War I. (Luke 21:11) After acknowledging that earlier plagues killed large numbers over a period of decades, the magazine Science Digest showed how vastly greater was the Spanish influenza of 1918:

“The war had killed over 21 million people in four years of dogged conflict; the influenza epidemic took approximately the same toll in about four months. In all history there had been no sterner, swifter visitation of death. . . . One doctor called it the medical catastrophe of all time.”

“The usual world figure is 21 million dead, but it is ‘probably a gross underestimation.’ That many may well have died on the Indian subcontinent alone; the mortality there in October of 1918 was ‘without parallel in the history of disease.’”​—Scientific American.

Nor have scientists halted the harvest of death by disease. When one disease seems “conquered,” another gains. Men send rockets to the moon, but they have not overcome malaria, cancer and heart disease.