Satan has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows.

Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of unprepared souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows. When he was suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks and herds, servants, houses, children, were swept away, one trouble succeeding another as in a moment. It is God that shields His creatures and hedges them in from the power of the destroyer. But the Christian world have shown contempt for the law of Jehovah; and the Lord will do just what He has declared that He would—He will withdraw His blessings from the earth and remove His protecting care from those who are rebelling against His law and teaching and forcing others to do the same. Satan has control of all whom God does not especially guard. He will favor and prosper some in order to further his own designs, and he will bring trouble upon others and lead men to believe that it is God who is afflicting them.  

While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he  will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast. “The earth mourneth and fadeth away,” “the haughty people ... do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.” Isaiah 24:4, 5               The Great Controversy pp. 589-590

All eyes might be on the Temple Mount after the UAE-Israel deal

JPost SEPTEMBER 26, 2020 

When he dedicated the Temple he built on Mount Moriah, King Solomon prayed that God’s house would be a center of prayer for all the peoples of the world.

Now, in the wake of the recent Abraham Accords – the normalization agreement entered into by Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain – the possibility exists that Solomon’s aspiration could be recreated.

Part of the avowed rationale for the accords was to create enhanced access for all Muslims to worship at al-Aqsa Mosque. This was lofty, with humanitarian intent, and a realpolitik gesture designed to discredit both the reflex accusation that Jews were somehow attacking al-Aqsa and were “Judaizing Jerusalem.”

How might this Solomonic vision occur? Quite simply by having various Emirs and Imams from the Gulf countries come to the Temple Mount to pray. Well, a bit more than that.

It would be one thing, not terribly noteworthy, for these leaders to make a ceremonial appearance at al-Aqsa. That, of course, would be a validation and proof of the benefits accruing to Muslims for entering into the accords.

However, imagine now if those same leaders were to stand on the open spaces of the Temple Mount, alongside Jewish leaders, religious and political, to pray together.