When Uncle Jed Clampett, out shooting some “food,” pierced the ground with his musket ball, up come a bubbling crude. Black gold. Soon the oil men descended upon the Clampetts, and … well, who in America in his or her 40s, 50s and beyond doesn’t know the rest of the story…

It happened for real in the early 1900s in the United States. Texas, Oklahoma, and other points around the nation saw a rush to their oil field discoveries. It was like a magnet that drew the barons of industry to the fields. They went wild with the prospect of powering an economy that would bring riches like no other people of any other nation had ever experienced. The oil magnet was irresistible–and quickly turned to an absolute essential. The greed that followed the rush to achieve oil procurement created a monopoly that the federal government stepped in to break apart. John D. Rockefeller created a family dynasty from his oil dealings that continues to affect, literally, the world’s economy in ways that are difficult to fully comprehend.

“Big oil” today continues to be labeled as the chief culprit in, if not fomenting, certainly causing, the continuation of conflict–especially in the Middle East. I hate to agree with the liberal mantra against the major oil interests, but must be a realist, and admit that too often the love of money –which God’s Word terms “the root of all evil”–is at the heart of much mischief in the Middle East and other areas that contain beneath their surfaces the black gold industry seeks out so more wealth can be generated.

At the same time, each of us is the benefactor of such grasp for wealth and power. Every time we start our engines or flick the light switches, we are giving a tacit nod of approval to “big oil.”

I do not see this as an intrinsically bad thing. Like you, I enjoy being cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I love getting in my car and going comfortably and quickly to wheresoever I wish, as opposed to having to go out into the barn and hitch up the horses to a buckboard for an hour’s, rough, jostling ride into town.  The Creator of all things put the resources there to be used. He gave the brainpower to develop the petroleum sources of energy, and granted the acumen to develop all of the derivative spin-offs thereof.

Man, as he always does, has perverted things to make the blessing something that is quickly turning into a curse for us all. The lust for the black, liquid wealth in order to keep the engines of money-making powered, is, like the most powerful magnet one can imagine, drawing mankind toward the final war of the age.

With the political left in America and around the world getting their way about nixing development of nuclear energy and any alternative source they deem unhealthy to the environment –whether there is true altruism in their motivation or whether it is for political base-building—the fact is, availability of oil at a reasonably feasible cost is depleting by the hour. There lies ahead a point of critical mass for the explosion that is coming.

That critical mass will come; I’m convinced God’s prophetic Word says, when that petroleum magnet draws all nations who will meet in one spot on the planet where the rapidly dwindling, feasibly accessible, reserves will still be pooled beneath the surface. From this point in time, at least, it seems God will use man’s greed as a catalyst and instrument of judgment: “And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon” (Rev. 16:16).

Developments in the oil-rich Middle East, at whose heart, of course, sits Israel, the No. 1 signal of where we are on God’s prophetic timeline, are things to closely watch as future weeks and months unfold.