The Great Earthquake
The prophet Habakkuk (and others, Ezekiel 38:19-20, Revelations 6:12) predicts there will be a great earthquake at the end of the Great Tribulation. It will be triggered by the nuclear holocaust:
God is coming again from Edom; the holy God is coming from the hills of Paran. His splendor covers the heavens; and the earth is full of his praise. He comes with the brightness of lightning; light flashes from his hand, there where his power is hidden. He sends disease before him and commands death to follow him. When he stops, the earth shakes; at his glance the nations tremble. The eternal mountains are shattered; the everlasting hills sink down, the hills where he walked in ancient times. (Habakkuk 3:3-6 GNV)
The prophet Isaiah tells us that the Lord Jesus will come from Bozrah, a city in southern Jordan, after destroying the world’s armies in the Battle of Armageddon (Isa 63:1). Habakkuk, in these verses alludes to the nuclear holocaust; he warns that the world will witness the Lord’s awesome power in the Great Tribulation before that great and final battle is fought.
Habakkuk also alludes to the great earthquake that is prophesied to come when even the mountains that have stood since their creation will be leveled, and the everlasting hills where the Lord walked when they were formed will be flattened.
Then, after these displays of His might and power have ceased, the world will be at peace, a new place: ‘His splendor covers the heavens; and the earth is full of his praise.’ The “desert” will bloom again, as will its people.
7 I saw the people of Cushan afraid and the people of Midian tremble.
8Was it the rivers that made you angry, Lord? Was it the sea that made you furious? You rode upon the clouds; the storm cloud was your chariot, as you brought victory to your people.
During the Exodus from Egypt the Arab tribes trembled in fear as the Lord ‘brought victory to His people,’ the nation of Israel, when He led them through their territory in their mass migration to the Promised Land. In like manner people in the end-time will also experience fear until they repent and God saves them, giving them victory. God will save even those who miss the Rapture but who repent during the Great Tribulation.
The mushroom clouds will be His ‘chariot’ and the terror His enemies will experience then — the people who have rejected Him and who refuse to repent — their terror will be incomparably greater than the fear the Cushites and the Midianites experienced in that ancient time!
9You got ready to use your bow, ready to shoot your arrows. Your lightning split open the earth. 10When the mountains saw you they trembled; water poured down from the skies. The waters under the earth roared, and their waves rose high. 11At the flash of your speeding arrows and the gleam of your shining spear, the sun and the moon stood still. 12You marched across the earth in anger; in fury you trampled the nations.
Just as God performed miracles and directed nations and events in ancient times, so He will again perform miracles and direct events in the end-time. With great fury He will trample down the unrepentant nations throughout the world. The mountains will be shattered and violent storms will wreak havoc.
God will permit the use of nuclear weapons, weapons so powerful they may alter the earth’s rotation. Blasts, some detonated down on the seabed of the world’s deepest oceans, will ‘split open the earth’… disgorging magma, and causing tsunamis that will demolish every city and every town and hamlet along every seacoast. The awesome destruction will continue ‘across the earth,’ as God unleashes His fury upon every nation.
This will all be done through His “agent,” the Antichrist, Satan’s surrogate.
When, at the end of the Great Tribulation, the Antichrist learns that he cannot be God, he sets out to destroy the world. While it now seems like wild conjecture, given the circumstances, it is entirely within the realm of probability that he will detonate a nuclear weapon in the deepest ocean, as the prophet predicts in these verses. Indeed, there is nothing to prevent him from detonating a whole series of blasts in this manner. We can speculate what will happen: With the weight of six miles of water above and the weakest part of the earth’s crust below there is little doubt that the force exerted upward will produce monumental tsunamis; and the force directed downward will rupture the earth’s crust (v9), convulse its magma and create earthquakes that will level every mountain and destroy all structures on earth: the tallest buildings, roads, bridges, pipelines, etc. The heat from the escaping magma will melt the glaciers, raising the level of the oceans, thereby submerging islands as is predicted in Revelations 6:14. We can look to the erupting volcano in Iceland as and example -- and a warning!