You can't understand what Christ said would happen without understanding what's already happening.
In Part 1, we established that you cannot understand the perplexities of nations without understanding money. The 1971 Nixon shock. The divergence of wages from productivity. The K-shaped economy. The second-order effects that show up in healthcare costs, family formation, birth rates, and the general sense that the floor is slowly giving way under ordinary people.
That's the economic backdrop. But there's a deeper layer worth examining, and it's one that Latter-day Saints in particular have been handed a remarkable set of tools to navigate. Because Christ didn't just describe the perplexities of the nations as an interesting prophecy. He gave us specific instructions about what to do with that knowledge.
Matthew 24: More Than a Checklist
Most people encounter Matthew 24 as a list of signs. Wars and rumors of wars. Nation rising against nation. Famines, pestilences, earthquakes. False prophets. The love of many waxing cold. And yes, all of that is there. But read the chapter again and notice what the Savior keeps returning to. The signs aren't the point. The point is what you do with them.
"Watch therefore."
"Be ye also ready."
"Who then is a faithful and wise servant?"
The chapter doesn't end with the signs. It ends with a parable about a servant left in charge of a household while the master is away. The faithful servant keeps doing his duty, feeding the household, managing wisely, staying alert. The unfaithful servant decides the master is delayed, starts abusing his position, eats and drinks with the wrong crowd, and gets caught completely off guard when the master returns. Same information and timeline. Radically different outcomes based on what they did with what they knew.
That's the actual lesson of Matthew 24. Not "here are the signs so you can be scared." It's "here are the signs so you can be prepared, because the unprepared will be caught out."
What the Signs Look Like Through a Monetary Lens
Let's run through some of what Christ described and look at it honestly through the lens of what we covered in Part 1.
Wars and rumors of wars. As Ron Paul has pointed out, it is not a coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking. Before fiat currency, governments had to fund wars through visible taxation or limited gold reserves. Citizens resisted high taxes, and gold ran out. Fiat money removed that constraint entirely. The war on terror alone has cost over eight trillion dollars, a figure that would have been literally impossible to sustain under a gold standard. The outcome was not even fully resolved. The wars aren't a mystery. They're a predictable output of a monetary system with no accountability mechanism.
Nation rising against nation. The weaponization of SWIFT, the dollar's role as global reserve currency, sanctions that cut entire populations off from the financial system… these aren't just political disputes. They're monetary disputes. When the United States excluded Russia from SWIFT in 2022, it demonstrated to every nation on earth that dollar-denominated financial infrastructure is a geopolitical weapon, not a neutral system. The accelerating de-dollarization, the race to develop alternative payment networks, the accumulation of gold reserves by countries that once trusted the dollar, these are nations hedging against a system they no longer trust. That's a perplexity of nations with a monetary explanation.
The love of many waxing cold. This one hits differently when you look at the social data. When young people cannot form families, cannot afford homes, feel no realistic path to stability, the social fabric frays. Birth rates collapse. Loneliness rises. Community institutions weaken. Marriages decline. President Oaks addressed this directly in October 2025 General Conference, noting that for nearly a hundred years the proportion of households headed by married couples has declined, and that families have shifted from units of economic production to units of economic consumption. That shift has a monetary cause. Inflation forced both parents into the workforce. Two incomes became the baseline instead of a bonus. Nobody's home. That's what the love of many waxing cold looks like at street level.
False prophets and deceptions. When people are financially desperate, they're vulnerable. Get-rich-quick schemes, financial gurus, political messiahs promising to fix everything, ideological movements that offer simple answers to genuinely complex problems. These proliferate in an environment of economic anxiety. A sound monetary system doesn't fix human nature, but it removes a significant source of the desperation that false prophets feed on.
The Thief in the Night
Christ uses a specific image in Matthew 24:43 that I keep coming back to. He says if the goodman of the house had known what watch the thief would come, he would have watched and not suffered his house to be broken up. The word broken up is interesting. Not just robbed. Broken up. Dismantled. The household itself disrupted and scattered.
Inflation is a thief in the night. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't come in through the front door. It slowly, quietly, in the watches of the night, reduces the purchasing power of everything you've saved. The family that put money in a savings account for twenty years and woke up to discover it buys half what it used to; that household has been broken up. The retirement fund that looks the same on paper but represents a fraction of the real security it once did, also broken up. The young couple who did everything right, saved diligently, lived within their means, and still can't afford a house in the city they grew up in, opportunity has been broken up.
The thief came in the night. They didn't watch. Not because they were lazy, but because nobody told them what to watch for.
That's why this matters. The command to watch is only meaningful if you know what to watch.
The Five Wise and Five Foolish Virgins
The parable immediately following in Matthew 25 extends the same theme. Ten virgins waiting for the bridegroom. Five prepared with extra oil. Five who assumed everything would work out. When the bridegroom was delayed, the five foolish ran out of oil at the critical moment and missed the wedding entirely.
The Savior's conclusion is not comforting: "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour."
The oil in that parable has traditionally been interpreted as personal righteousness, testimony, covenant keeping. All of that is true and primary. But preparation is not only spiritual. The Lord has always taught temporal and spiritual preparedness together. Food storage. Self-reliance. Avoidance of debt. These aren't optional add-ons to the gospel. They're part of it. A people who are temporally vulnerable cannot fully serve, cannot give freely, cannot act from faith rather than fear.
What's the modern equivalent of having extra oil? It's not just a year's supply of wheat, though that matters. It's understanding the system well enough to opt out of the parts that will fail. It's having savings that cannot be inflated away. It's not being dependent on an institution that may freeze your account, fail overnight, or debase its currency into irrelevance. It's being the wise servant who keeps managing the household faithfully, not the foolish one who assumed nothing would change.
The Faithful and Wise Servant
Verse 45 of Matthew 24 is the one I find most pointed: "Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season?"
Meat in due season. Provision at the right time. The steward who actually understands what the household needs and has prepared to meet it.
This is the image the Savior uses for what faithfulness looks like during the last days. Not someone hiding in a bunker. Not someone paralyzed by signs and wonders. Someone actively providing, preparing, managing wisely, serving the household with what it actually needs when it actually needs it.
That image carries weight. Understanding money, understanding what's coming, converting that understanding into preparation and provision for your family and community, this is what the faithful and wise servant looks like. The evil servant in verse 48 didn't lose his position because he misread the signs. He lost it because he decided the delay meant he could stop being responsible. He ate and drank with the drunken. He spent what wasn't his. He wasn’t watching.
What To Do With This
Part 1 ended with the observation that knowing there's an opt-out matters. Systems persist when participation is unquestioned. That's still true. But I'd add something to it from Matthew 24.
The Savior didn't say watch the signs and panic. He didn't say watch the signs and despair. He said watch and then he described what a faithful, prepared, actively serving steward looks like. The watching is in service of the doing.
If you've understood what happened in 1971 and why it matters, the next step isn't anxiety. It's preparation. Spiritual, temporal and financial preparation. The kind that means when the thief comes in the night, your house doesn't get broken up. The kind that means when the bridegroom is delayed, you still have oil. The kind that means when the master returns, he finds you doing your duty.
The perplexities of nations are real. The monetary system that underlies them is real. The signs Christ described are playing out in ways that are increasingly hard to explain away. But the response He called for was never fear. It was faithfulness. Wisdom. Stewardship. Provision.
Watch therefore. Be ready. Give them meat in due season.
That's the assignment.
It’s on you to see if Bitcoin will help with your preparation or not. This is not to be taken as financial advice, please do your own research. Knowing there is an opt out that can protect you from debasement, oppressive regimes, and preserve wealth across physical borders and boundaries is kind of a big deal these days though.