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"SURVIVAL! Part IV"

--by David Brandt Berg

PROPHECIES OVER DAVID AND HIS MINISTRY FROM LATE 1940'S-1968.

IN THE LATE 1940'S WE HAD THREE TIMES RECEIVED THE PROPHECY OF "THE KEY OF DAVID"--Revelation 3:7-13--which was to foreshadow our future ministry as a witness against the churches, their failures and hypocrisy. In 1952 I received the Call of Ezekiel 2 and 3, which definitely confirmed it! In 1962 we received the "Message of Jeremiah", God's final warning to a doomed Nation and His pattern of action for His Prophets during such a time as its fall!

IN 1965, WHILE VISITING OUR LITTLE FAMILY AT THE RANCH IN TEXAS, MY MOTHER RECEIVED THE NOW-FAMOUS "WARNING PROPHECY" concerning the coming "Great Confusion", which you'll find in our little "Warning Tract" with explanatory Scriptures, and which predicted it would originate "out of Memphis", Egypt. Nearly a year later, this was confirmed by Jeanne Dixon's book, "A Gift of Prophecy" in which she related a vision which showed a young man coming out of Egypt who was to rule the world! In her later book, "My Life and Prophecies", a revision of the older edition, she interprets this young man as being the coming world dictator known as the "Anti-Christ" in the Bible!

IN 1966, ON ANOTHER VISIT TO THE RANCH, MY MOTHER PROPHESIED THAT I HAD RECEIVED THE UNDERSTANDING OF DANIEL "to know the number of the years unto the End of Desolations", which was fulfilled in "The 70-Years Prophecy", which we received in 1970, describing the exact number of years with their dates and events between now and the Coming of Christ--which you are welcome to have if you will write us and send a small donation to cover the cost.

IN 1967, WE AGAIN RECEIVED A CONFIRMATION OF OUR CHARGE TO THE WORK OF DAVID IN EZEKIEL 34 through another precious prophetess, Sister Gunn, who drove 3000 miles 'round trip from Florida to Texas to deliver it to us in great faith, excitement and expectation! This was followed by our return that year to California on the strength of another prophecy: "Thou shalt return unto the land of the Setting Sun with all thy family, and there it shall be told thee what thou shalt do."

AND THERE IT WAS, IN 1968 WHILE VISITING MY MOTHER IN HER LITTLE COTTAGE IN HUNTINGTON BEACH, THAT WE RECEIVED THE PROPHECY OF PSALM 68, just before her Homegoing, in which God promised us an almost unbelievably fruitful ministry: "...Thou O God, hast prepared of Thy goodness for the poor! The Lord gave the Word: Great was the company of those that published it! Kings of armies did flee apace!", etc. Surely this is now being fulfilled in our thousands of disciples in hundreds of Colonies in many countries around the Globe, as well as the tremendous publicity we have received from many great publishing companies, such as newspapers, magazines, books, radio, TV, etc.!

STILL, IT WAS NOT UNTIL LATER THAT YEAR OF 1968 THAT WE DISCOVERED EXACTLY WHAT GOD WANTED US TO DO. It had taken me 49 years (God's number seven times seven!) to find my life's work!--And there we found it among the poorest of the poor--the poor hippies of Huntington Beach! My mother had begged us to come help them, saying the church people didn't know how to handle them even though some of them were trying at a small Teen Challenge coffeehouse in the heart of this surfing capital of the world. They were too churchy for the hippies who were fed up with the Church, and the feeling was mutual: The churches didn't like them, either! In fact, it seemed nobody loved hippies!--They were the most hated, maligned, discriminated against, abused, harassed, persecuted, and down-trodden element in all American society!--which seemed determined to try to stamp them out!

THE REVOLUTION FOR JESUS BEGINS AMONGST THE HIPPIES OF CALIFORNIA.

BUT GOD LOVED THEM!--AND YOU LOVED THEM, BECAUSE THEY WERE YOUR CHILDREN, THE FED-UP PRODUCT OF OUR "AFFLUENT SOCIETY"! They had everything, tried everything, and it hadn't satisfied; so they were earnestly searching for the answers--the truth, love and peace which they knew must exist somewhere! As though by some God-given instinct, they kept searching for it hungrily in the love of sex, drugs, mystical religions, and even death! But they rejected the answer of the churches, because the churches had rejected them, and in the churches and even in their own good, church-going parents they had found only what they considered hypocrisy and vain show, not reality!

SO THEY WANDERED ABOUT IN SEARCH OF GREENER PASTURES, AS SHEEP HAVING NO SHEPHERD!--And as I wandered about amongst them, wondering about them, God spoke to my heart that all they needed was His Love and a good shepherd to guide them, and God asked me if I'd be willing to be that shepherd! I was startled and mystified by this revelation, and wondered what it could mean, as I hadn't the faintest idea of how to go about it! I had never been a drunk, or a drug addict, nor a sex pervert or a tramp, so I could hardly deal with their problems from personal experience. But I had been a sinner of the worst kind, and the chief of all sinners, as the similar Apostle Paul had said to himself: a self-righteous, hypocritical, holier-than-thou, church-going Pharisee, a staunch, bigoted, ultraconservative fundamentalist, a Pharisee of the Pharisees!

SO I FELT THAT I AND MY GENERATION, THEIR FATHERS AND MOTHERS, WITH OUR CORRUPT, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL SYSTEM WERE TO BLAME FOR THEIR PLIGHT. The anti-God philosophy of evolution, or Devil-ution, had sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind in its children! A society with no God has no principles, no authority, no rules, and no laws that are valid, no right or wrong, and every man does that which is right in his own eyes, and only chaos and anarchy can result, with its pitiful products living like animals, dog-eat-dog, and to Hell with the hindmost!

SO, THESE HIPPIES ARE YOUR CHILDREN, Beloved, the product of your society, your educational system, your economic system, your religious system, and your political system! You have reaped what you have sowed! It is your generation who are the real rebels against God and His Word and His Plan, as we have already stated so eloquently in our little dissertation on "Who Are The Rebels"! Your poor children are only trying to find their way back to the Truth, Love, Peace, and God of their forefathers, the Patriarchs, who lived in a comparatively peaceful, Godly and unpolluted world of the past! Even your kids' hair, dress, customs, drugs, religions, and wanderings are a rejection of your present, and an attempted return to a happier past!

SO IT SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISING THAT THEY WERE NOT ONLY QUICK, BUT GLORIOUSLY ENTHUSIASTIC IN THEIR RECEPTION OF AND THEIR RETURN TO GOD'S LOVE IN JESUS and the answers of His Word, which after all, are the answer to all mankind's problems, not only the hippies'! So when my children came to them with the loving message of God in Jesus and His Words, and tuned to the language of their music, they were more than happy to receive them!--And with their instinctive premonitions of the impending doom of God's judgments on a wicked world, they were more than ready to eat up His predictions of the immediate future, as I taught them the prophecies of the Bible! They were ready for Revolution, and had found its greatest fulfillment in the "Revolution for Jesus!"-as we were the first to call it!

TEEN CHALLENGE ITSELF, WHO WERE NOT HAVING MUCH SUCCESS WITH THE HIPPIES, with only two church-like meetings a week, soon turned the Club over to us who were packing the hippies in to capacity the other five nights of the week, when they were getting saved, filled with His Spirit and set on fire by His Word to go out into the highways and hedges and compel others of their friends to enter into the Kingdom of God!--And the Jesus Revolution began to roll like a mighty wave from these humble beginnings! Hallelujah!

OTHERS IMITATE AND FOLLOW IN THE WAKE OF THE JESUS REVOLUTION.

THERE IN THE TINY LIGHT CLUB, HIPPIE HANGOUT OF HUNTINGTON BEACH, WE WERE THE FIRST TO PROCLAIM IT A "REVOLUTION", a term which the churches denounced as they denounced this revolt from their System, but later accepted when they found how popular it had become, and even imitated its message and methods in an attempt to jump on the bandwagon and capture its young people, following the old criterion: "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em!" They later not only copied our shouts, meetings, slogans, finger signs, marches, beach baptisms, and other demonstrations, but such churchy sponsors as Duane Pederson of Hollywood Presbyterian Church's so-called "Jesus People", with his "Hollywood Free Paper", even tried to claim credit for starting the Revolution, though he certainly did give it impetus in the churches amongst church young people; as did also Chuck Smith, Pastor of Calvary Church of Costa Mesa, a disciple of my Mother's, where we had first appeared to inspire him when he had a congregation of only a handful. Thank God, he too, climbed on the band-wagon of God's Youth Revolution and is now reaping the benefits of it by the thousands by compromising with Churchianity and not being as radical as we are!

BRECK STEVENS OF BETHEL TABERNACLE of Redondo Beach, California, was also converted to the Revolution by my son, Jonathan, at the Light Club and returned to his own church to make it famous as the first Hippie church of the Revolution, as noted on a National TV network. And we hear some others caught the fire of the Revolution about the same time in the San Francisco Bay area where they had already opened some Christian hippie houses and coffee communes and were trying to give a faithful witness to the hippie culture.

OUR DEAR OLD FRIEND, DAVE WILKERSON OF TEEN CHALLENGE, however, with whom my children had worked in his coffeehouses across the Country as the head of an apparently rival church-oriented, Youth-for-Christ-rally-type of youth drug rehabilitation operation, eventually turned out to be a bitterly jealous and vindictive Johnny-come-lately to the hippie movement of the Jesus Revolution! By this time he was working mostly with his churchy cousin, Ralph, at the Anaheim Christian Center in youth rallies with mostly church kids, having seemed to have forgotten the beatniks and teenage gangs he once loved in New York City!

DEAR DAVE WAS EVEN OVERHEARD TO SAY IN ONE OF HIS RALLIES, AS HE LATER CONFESSED IN HIS BOOK, THAT HE DIDN'T HAVE MUCH FAITH IN THE POSSIBILITY OF SALVATION FOR HIPPIES, and that he'd only known of one or two ever getting saved in his whole ministry. He and his speakers made fun of them, ridiculed them, and cracked the typical System dirty jokes about them, and even forbade them to come to his meetings, and even wrote a whole chapter against us in his book, "Purple Violet Squish", naming us by name and saying that our way was just not the way to reach young people. Since then I understand, however, that he has repented and admitted that he was wrong about the hippies, and now he loves them and their Revolution--but still hates and lies about us, the Children of God, originators of the movement--poor fellow!

OF COURSE, DAVE AND RALPH WERE NOT OUR ONLY ENEMIES, neither were Chuck, Breck, and Duane our only imitators, but we had plenty of both, although in the beginning the enemies seemed to outnumber the imitators! So we decided on a campaign of en masse goodwill visitations to local churches to help them get better acquainted with us, meet us, and know we were really human beings and really Christians, although somewhat unusual, unorthodox, and different in dress and manner from the average church-goer.

VISITING CHURCHES EN MASSE

EACH SUNDAY MORNING WE WOULD GO TOGETHER TO A DIFFERENT CHURCH and try to sit together in fellowship wherever we could find room, which was usually the front seats, which are normally vacant in most churches, although in some of the more crowded churches we were compelled to sit on the floor. In most cases, we would join enthusiastically in the singing, listen attentively to the sermon, and encourage the preacher with our Amens!--and then mix in friendly fashion getting acquainted with the church folks after the meeting.

MOST PASTORS LIKED IT, WELCOMED US PUBLICLY, AND RECEIVED US with open arms, commending us for coming, exhorting us to keep up our good work with young people, and even inviting us back to conduct services for them, giving them a sample of our music and our testimonies. Our welcome was usually particularly warm in the larger, more liberal churches, but a little fearful in the more conservative ones sometimes.

HOWEVER, AS USUAL, ONLY BAD NEWS MAKES NEWS and the two or three churches where we were not only not well received but actually asked to leave or even cast out with physical violence--these were the occasions which received the most newspaper publicity and which gave us an undeserved bad reputation with some people. In an Episcopalian church, one of our boys shouted out unwisely during the Communion, which of course, stunned the congregation; but the members kept their cool, considering the childish source, and were still friendly afterwards. But this mild incident got the lurid headlines, "Howling Hippies Disrupt Church!", which served to frighten some other churches about having us!

A FEW OTHER CHURCHES, HOWEVER, WERE NOT SO KIND! Garden Grove Community threw us out bodily because they said we were not dressed properly, which angered both some of our children and some of the members, who walked out with us before the service, and we sat down quietly on the lawn together for the remainder of the meeting. We had not disturbed the service, as they later charged, but their ushers had disturbed it by demanding and enforcing our exit brutally! Later, Pastor Schuyler tried to deny this saying we were only asked to leave because we were blocking a fire exit, which was not true. He also added the slanderous libel to his newspaper statement trying to explain away the incident by calling me personally a "publicity-mad false prophet!" We could have sued him, but merely counted him as a poor, misled brother, although he wouldn't talk to me when I tried to phone and explain.

RALPH WILKERSON ALSO CALLED US VIRTUALLY THE SAME THING publicly from his pulpit, but when we tried to talk to him on the phone about it, he refused to speak to us. We then went together to his church with the witnesses who had heard him say it and tried to discuss it with him, but he again refused to see us and ordered us roughly cast out of his building so violently as to tear my clothes and sprain my ankle! In the only other incident, the Pastor of First Assembly, Santa Ana, threatened to throw us out when our praises got a little too loud. Otherwise, we were usually treated with great kindness, favor and tolerance!

HOWEVER, THESE WERE NOT UNLIKE THE RECEPTIONS WHICH JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES and others of His followers like Paul, the martyrs, Martin Luther, John Fox, John Knox, John Wesley, etc., met in some churches. So we were not alone. When your very presence exposes their hypocrisy they even want to kill you, as some of these church people threatened to do to us! But these were the exceptions rather than the rule! Thank God for the many Christians who received us and were good to us!

MISINTERPRETATIONS OF SOME OF THESE OCCASIONS HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT US ACROSS THE COUNTRY, WHICH IS WHY I'M DIGRESSING HERE TO EXPLAIN the truth publicly to all of you for the first time, to try to stop some of the lies of the Devil. There may have been another incident or two along this line which occurred, I understand, in Northern California, with some young people who had formerly been associated with us, but for whom we were no longer personally responsible. But because of some of these misunderstandings, we have refrained from visiting churches since that time, unless specifically invited

.

SOME OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH US THEN GOT IN A LITTLE DIFFICULTY FOR INVADING SOME CAMPUSES where they were unwittingly trespassing, although we had strictly warned them against this, for which they were somewhat persecuted by the enemy and roundly reprimanded by me personally, but this also received some rather sensational news publicity, which was not altogether favorable and which some held against us and which we regret.

NEVERTHELESS, IF ANY OF THE ENEMIES NAMED ABOVE ARE EVER WILLING TO TELL US THEY'RE SORRY and apologize for their un-Christian actions toward us and stop lying about us, we would be most happy to forgive them, count them as brethren, and even work together with them for the Salvation of souls. Are you sorry, Fellas? Please let us know.

ALTHOUGH WE RAN A CLEAN CLUB WITH NO DRUGS AND LOTS OF SALVATION, DID THE KIDS A LOT OF GOOD, saving many of them from lives of debauchery and crime, many parents like some of you could not understand what we were doing and harassed the authorities into harassing us, while some of our churchy enemies literally persecuted us with a vengeance, finally getting our landlords to raise our rents on us, and thus drive us out of town.

Continued in part 5 ....
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family International


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James Arendt
James Arendt

My name is James Arendt. I was raised in the Hegewisch neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, served in the USAF from 1970 to 1974, and became a full-time missionary for Christ living 40 years in Japan, 3.5 years in Russia, and a few months in other countries such as Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China where I also served the King of Kings, Jesus, as an Ambassador for His Kingdom. My full bio.

On September 24, 2023, I had an accident and broke the bone of the tip of my left elbow. A boy ran in front of my motorbike less than 2 meters from me as I was leaving home. I stopped suddenly and my front tire slid on the sandy concrete road which caused me to fall. I did not hit the boy. On October 18th I had surgery done on my elbow. The doctor put in titanium rods to hold my bones together. The entire procedure including an entire week in the hospital was roughly $4000 USD. This was done in the Philippines where my wife and I have been living since June this year.


X-rays of bone before and after surgery that inserted titanium rods to reinforce my broken bone.

Before and after one week in the hospital.

Undergoing therapy to bend my arm again.
I'm now undergoing therapy to be able to bend my arm again.

It would be a super blessing to us if any of the visitors of this website can help us cover this expense!

You don't need a PayPay account to send me a donation! Just click on the donate button and you will see an option to send through your debit or credit card.


Or if you have a PayPal account, just log into it and send to my PayPal ID:
james.arendt@jamesjpn.net

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