James Arendt
Note from Webmaster: Due to tragic events in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I felt that this talk by David Berg is needed more than ever. It is specifically about New York city but I believe the principles can be applied to any metropolitan area. My purpose in posting this article is merely to show that large cities are dangerous places to live in. In the Great Kanto earthquake of Sept. 1, 1923, at 11:58 AM when many were using gas stoves to prepare their lunches, about 140,000 people died, many of them by fires caused by the earthquake. Amoung these, some 6,000 Koreans residents in Japan were murdered by the Japanese military and common citizens who falsely blamed them for causing the fires!
THE PROBLEM IN NEW YORK CITY HAS BEEN THAT NEW YORK HAS LET BOTH THE RICH AND THE POOR GO FREE: They haven't taxed the rich enough and they've spoiled the poor with too much welfare. Most of the big rich people and the big money boys and big banks and big corporations actually live over in Connecticut or somewhere else and are incorporated somewhere else and did it deliberately so they wouldn't have to pay those big high New York City taxes. So the people with all the money who have their big buildings and banks and everything in New York City have corporations that escape N.Y. City taxes. Leave it to the rich to figure it out so they don't have to get taxed! Well you can't run a city like that without taxes.
THEN THEY'VE BEEN FEEDING THE POOR IN NEW YORK TOO MUCH: Ridiculous things like if you're a poor peon in Puerto Rico--every Puerto Rican lives for the day when he's got eighty dollars and he can catch the Airbus to New York, because the moment he gets there they immediately house, clothe and feed him and put him up in a $200 a month apartment, pay $80 worth of utilities a month and give him a bunch of money to eat on besides, and he's just living in luxury, he doesn't even have to work! Anybody, any U.S. citizen, and it finally got to be where even any foreigner or anybody could land in New York City and apply for welfare and they immediately treat them like kings with a luxurious welfare system, the total welfare system, the total welfare state! I mean that's going to the opposite extreme on welfare. So between the two, treating the poor like that and letting the rich get by without paying taxes, N.Y. is going broke!
BUT IN NEW YORK THEY HAD IT ALL FIGURED OUT WHERE THE RICH COULD STAY RICH AND STILL FEED THE POOR ON BORROWED MONEY! New York kept borrowing money and selling bonds borrowing more money and all that kind of stuff. Well, people will trust you so long, and then they quit trusting your ability to ever pay it back. So if you keep living on borrowed money, there comes a day when you have to pay it back when those bonds begin to come due.
THESE DEBTS BEGAN TO COME DUE WITH ALL THEIR BIG HIGH INTEREST RATES AND NEW YORK DIDN'T HAVE THE MONEY TO PAY THEM BACK. She'd been living on borrowed money all the time and wasn't even raising enough money for her current expenses, much less to pay back her debts. Now anybody with a lick of sense knows if you're living far above your salary, your income, and you're living mostly on borrowed money you keep borrowing from your friends to live, and you're not even earning or working and making enough money to pay your current expenses, where you're living beyond your income and you are not even making enough money to pay your living expenses, much less repay all this money you borrowed, you're bound to go broke! Well that's what happened to New York: It's been going on for years until now New York's billions and billions of dollars in debt!
BUT YOU CAN'T RUN A CITY THAT SIZE WITHOUT MONEY. You've got to run the city's basic utilities, water system, power system, transportation system, sewage system, etc.--And when you get 14 million people in a city it's absolutely ridiculous! I mean its totally, utterly ridiculous! Nobody could possibly ever have that many people live in one city and survive!
THE LORD WILL HAVE MILLIONS IN HIS CITY, but of course His City's going have a lot of room--1500 miles (2400 kilometers) wide and 1500 miles high, and that's a whole lot bigger than New York!--That's half as big as the United States!--And a whole lot higher.
CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IN A CITY THE SIZE OF NEW YORK with millions of people in it if suddenly they couldn't pay the garbage men or the train drivers or the truck or the bus drivers, subway drivers electrical workers, water men, all the various utilities, school teachers--if suddenly the whole city went totally bankrupt and nobody could get paid and nobody got any more free housing, free rent, free food and everything, with all those loafing poor? It's unbelievable!
Well, you can imagine what would happen if suddenly nobody in a city that size got paid and they couldn't buy their food, or the water stopped running, the sewage stopped flowing and the lights went out? Now what do you think would happen?--Riots, brother?--No!--There'd be war! I mean there would be absolute chaos, total bedlam! People will be slaughtering each other for food!
AND WHEN THE TROUBLE COMES and the economic crash and the bankruptcy comes and nobody gets paid, they're going to go out with their guns and their knives and get it by force! And there's not going to be enough food in New York City, there's not going to be enough to eat there to get it in New York.
SO I SAW IN A VISION, I SAW THEM STREAMING OUT OF THE BIG CITIES LIKE BLACK ANTS UP THE HIGHWAYS from New York and out of all the major big cities in the United States, streaming out along the highways into the country and out in the Midwest and the West and all. Where are they going to head for? When there's no food in the cities, where are they going to go? When there's no food and no water in the cities, where are they going to go?
THEY'RE GOING TO HEAD FOR THE COUNTRY, OUT WHERE THE FOOD IS!--And they're going to rob the farmers by force and take it! Probably they'll run the farmers out of their houses and take over, slaughter their cattle and live off the land. That's probably very likely the way it's going to happen.
WHAT YOU SOW YOU REAP: What early America sowed in the way of slavery and all the rest of it, she's going to reap. It's going to be even more savage than the jungle because they're going to have guns and knives and bullets and bombs to do it with, bombs that they didn't have in the jungles!--I mean real savagery! That's what I call horrible!
IT'S THE INDUSTRIALISATION WHICH HAS MADE THESE RICH WESTERN COUNTRIES SO TOTALLY DEPENDENT ON OIL. They've abandoned the natural agricultural economy where the people lived off the land and at least have enough to eat. They live off industrialisation now. And what does that do, what does that make for them?--Nothing but weapons of war and all of their idols, automobiles, TV, and all the rest of their luxuries, non-necessities.
THE LUXURY OF WAR AND THE LUXURY OF IDOLATRY THAT'S WHAT INDUSTRIALISATION BRINGS! The whole industrialised civilisation is living on those things. It's all in "War-Boom-Bust," isn't it?
SO IT'S A WHOLE FALSE ECONOMY BUILT ON THINGS THAT ARE NOT PRODUCTIVE AND WHICH ARE TERRIBLY WASTEFUL. You can't bury automobiles and grow more automobiles. When an automobile comes to the junk pile it's done, finished, it's just pure waste! You can't burn oil and grow more oil, you know? You can't go out planting TV sets and have more TV sets spring up. When they get obsolete they're junked, total waste!
AND OF COURSE WAR IS THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE OF ALL: You bury the bombs but you don't get more bombs, you just get more death and destruction, more waste! So the whole economy is a false economy built on luxuries, non-necessities and waste, pure waste, the worst of which is war!
SO IT'S GOT TO COME TO AN END. YOU JUST CAN'T KEEP ON WASTING MORE THAN YOU'RE REALLY PRODUCING. All of this kind of production of industrial war and luxury products in the long run is actually waste, because it is not reproductive. Only life is reproductive. All this stuff that industry produces is dead, it is not self-reproducing.
THE CREATION THAT GOD MADE IS ALIVE AND SELF-REPRODUCTIVE "Whose seed is in itself bearing fruit," whose seed is in itself which can bring forth more of the same fruit and more life and multiply. God's production system is life and life-giving and multiplying and increasing and extremely efficient, the most efficient there is in the world!
THE HUMAN BODY IS THE MOST RESILIENT, TOUGHEST, STRONGEST AND THE MOST DEATH-RESISTANT MACHINE IN THE WORLD, CONSTANTLY RENEWING ITSELF! What other machine or motor will last a hundred years and constantly repair and rebuild itself as well as reproduce itself, reproducing other little machines that are just as tough and just as amazingly full of life!
ALL FORMS OF GOD'S CREATION ARE REPRODUCTIVE, REGENERATIVE. It's continually being reborn and repaired, repairing itself and its own wounds and its injuries.--Think of it!--Man has yet to create any kind of machine that repairs itself! God created a machine that repairs itself!--Even the plants and the animals and all forms of life! God's created life is creative, productive, reproductive, regenerative and multiplies.
BUT WHAT MAN MAKES IS TOTAL WASTE AND TOTAL DEATH! Cities are the glory of man--man's greatest achievement are his cities. That's what he brags about more than anything else, his big buildings and his big cities. "Oh, it was a great city!"
WHAT ARE THE CROWNING ACHIEVEMENTS OF MAN?--BUILDINGS!--Buildings built higher than God ever intended man to go in the first place, so why not shake them down?--They're dangerous!--Right? And what are they made of? Something that will reproduce itself? Is this hotel over here going to reproduce some little hotels one of these days in that nest on top of the hill? No! It's gonna sit there and decay and rot so that it'll fall apart one of these days if you don't keep repairing it and patching it up.
THIS IS WHAT THE MAN SAID ABOUT A HOTEL where we stayed once, the tallest hotel in town. He said, "It's not the operation of this place that costs us money (some phenomenal sum), it's the constant maintenance and repair of the wear and the tear and the breakdown of the materials, equipment and machinery and the painting of the building, the repair of the walls etc.--This is what costs us the money!" In other words, trying to keep this thing alive by patching it up, keep this dead body alive by patching more dead material onto it!
THE THINGS MAN'S BUILT ARE PURE DEATH! There's nothing alive about them. They are death and dead to begin with and can only continue to die unless man keeps patching them up and patching them up. Eventually they get past the point of repair to where he can't even patch it up anymore. It totally rots and wears away and collapses, as you can see by all the big buildings of the past glorious history of past civilisations. Where are they today?
WHERE'S THE PARTHENON AND THE ATHENIUM AND THE COLOSSEUM AND ALL THOSE GREAT AND GLORIOUS BUILDINGS? THEY'RE ALL GONE BACK TO RUINS because they got to where they couldn't patch them up any longer, they couldn't keep them alive any longer, for they never were really alive to begin with.
THE BEAUTIFUL RESIDENTIAL SUBURBS OF THE RICH OF YESTERDAY ARE TODAY'S SLUMS FULL OF RATS AND THE POOR WHO ARE MULTIPLYING LIKE RATS! Broken-down mansions, fallen-down buildings. When man doesn't follow God's plan and God's way of doing things, man's creations are nothing but death! They're dead to begin with and they're always dying.--They never were alive in fact. They're only death and waste and they never ever can repair themselves. They can't stay alive, they can't reproduce, so it's all dead and dying. It's all non-reproductive, therefore it's non-productive.
WHEN MAN STARTS BUILDING THESE THINGS WHICH WERE NOT OF GOD IN THE FIRST PLACE, he's headed on a crash course to destruction! All of the various means of rapid transportation that are faster than a horse are not of God! Anything that's faster than a horse is too rapid.--God hates cars! God made horses as the most rapid form of natural transportation that there is, and anything faster than that is too fast and is man's creation. In fact, manmade rapid transportation today kills more people than anything else! Rapid transportation kills more people than anything else besides old age! If old age doesn't get you, rapid transportation will!
SO MAN'S INVENTIONS ARE ACTUALLY NOTHING BUT DEATH-DEALING. They're not only death and dead to begin with, but they're also death dealing! That's all the devil's system, as his whole idea is destruction. So he has man continually busy building machines and engines and weapons of destruction.--Not only war, but rapid transportation! Rapid transportation kills more people than have ever been killed in all the wars put together!
WHEN MAN STARTS FOLLOWING THE DEVIL'S WAY OF BUILDING BUILDINGS THEY ARE GOING TO KILL HIM, means of rapid transportation that are slaughtering him by the millions already, buildings that all it'll take is a little shake and down they come and are going to kill him by the millions when it happens!
IN THE BIBLE GOD CALLS THEM TOWERS: A tower over there, a big tower here--and all He has to do is shake the earth just a little bit and down they come! It seems to me rather significant, isn't it, that the most destructive disaster that there is, is an earthquake. But what does it destroy? Why does man consider it the most destructive form of disaster or catastrophe? Because it destroys his buildings, his proud cities! It destroys man's pride, his vain creations!
BUT THE FARMERS OUT ON THE RANCHES, THEY DON'T WORRY ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. I never had any worries out in Texas at TSC about an earthquake. Good night, what few little tiny huts they had there, little tiny shanties and shacks, especially the ones made out of wood, they would survive anyway! They'd just swing and sway around. It's your ones made out of stone, that are supposed to be the best and the most beautiful and the most permanent, but they're actually the least permanent and the most dangerous in an earthquake! A wooden building's the safest kind of building to be in, in an earthquake.
MAN'S BUILDINGS ARE WHAT KILL HIM! It's not the earthquake that kills him. I talked to a guy after that big earthquake down somewhere near the Salton Sea in California. He was down there in a trailer park on the Salton Sea when that big earthquake happened, and he said he could see the ground waves coming right across the desert four feet high, the ground was just waving like that! He was making tea or something and it hit his little trailer and it knocked the trailer over on its side it was so violent, the waves like that! They rocked the trailer back and forth until finally it fell over. Even though that's the safest kind of building to be in, a vehicle, it threw it right over!
HE SAID THE ONLY SAFE PLACE WAS STANDING OUT ON THE GROUND and it made you sea sick, it was like standing on the waves of the sea just rolling like this. You saw them in this movie "Earthquake," you could see the waves of the earthquake coming down the street, the ground just goes in waves! Ordinarily if you're just out there on foot and you don't have much of a house or anything, it's not going to hurt very much. But it's totally and utterly destructive to man's greatest scientific achievements, his buildings! It just totally destroys his cities!--Which shows God must not like cities, huh?
WITHOUT FOOD AND WATER, NEW YORK WOULDN'T LAST A WEEK!--Right? How many people are going to stay in a city where they can't get food or water or get rid of their sewage or flush the toilets--can you imagine? Their cities are so vulnerable, so totally dependent on the artificial means of survival, electricity, gas, sewage, piped water and shipped-in food and all that, they are going to be the first to go!
IN ANY KIND OF TROUBLE, THE CITIES ARE ALWAYS THE FIRST TO GO! They're always the first to go in time of war, first to go in time of disaster, storm, earthquake or flood. Because God hates cities, that kind of cities, man's cities.
GOD'S HEAVENLY CITY WILL BE THE PEAK AND ULTIMATE OF HEAVEN ON EARTH and the right kind of society and the right kind of city, the ultimate achievement of the Children of God and God Himself, the Heavenly City, Space City!
BUT THE MODERN CITIES OF TODAY ARE THE ULTIMATE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE DEVIL AND MAN, inspired by Satan! They're doomed to destruction because God doesn't like them because they're always so wicked!
SO, WHAT DOES MAN PRODUCE THAT IS REGENERATIVE, REPRODUCTIVE, LIVING AND LIFE-GIVING? What does he really produce that is going to really live and last, that has life and really is going to last? Of course, the first thing that comes to mind, or should, is his children. They of course are the creations of God and man is His instrument, and they are forever, eternal, praise God!
NOTHING'S EVER WASTED IN GOD'S CREATION. Life is constantly regenerating, reproducing, things are constantly growing, and if it weren't for sin there wouldn't be dying at all, think of it! There would be absolutely no waste, no destruction, but all life, all reproduction and multiplication.
SCIENCE WILL OF COURSE TELL YOU, "WELL, IF THAT HAPPENED WE'D ALL SOON BE TEN MILES DEEP IN HUMAN BODIES AND MANKIND WOULD HAVE COOKED HIMSELF TO DEATH BY OVERPOPULATION!" WELL, THAT JUST ISN'T SO! Before sin got so bad even after the Garden of Eden before the Flood men were still living a thousand years and only having a few children. So when you multiply man's lifetime by ten times or more, then the world could carry on ten times as long without overproducing, right?
BECAUSE MEN WOULD LIVE LONGER AND HAVE FEWER CHILDREN. They hardly even thought about having kids until after they were two or three hundred years of age in the pre-Flood days! They were too young for such responsibility!--Ha! And it's going to be like that again in the days of the Millennium. Anybody that dies at 100 years of age would be considered a child. (Isa.65:20.)
SO GOD'S WAY IS A PRODUCTIVE, REPRODUCTIVE, LIVING, LIFE-GIVING, CREATIVE, MULTIPLYING, no waste, no death, can't lose system! They say, "Well, if we wouldn't be over-populated with human beings, then we would by insects or by fish.--They have all kinds of crazy theories! Well, don't you think God controls the insect population and the fish population and the animal population? He balances that out according to whatever the needs of man may be, or the needs of His judgments may be.
BUT MAN'S SYSTEM IS HELL-BENT FOR DESTRUCTION, CARVING HIS OWN TOMB WITH THE THINGS HE PRODUCES. His buildings are going to kill him, his fast transportation kills him everyday, nearly everything he's got is death-dealing and life-destructive. Now a minimum of housing, something enough to give you a little shelter, is all man really needs and is not all that dangerous. Especially if you live in tents and trailers or caravans and things like that like the Rechabites, Bedouins or Gypsies.
EVEN A HOUSE CAN BE DANGEROUS IN AN EARTHQUAKE if you don't get out from under it, if you can't get away from the building or out of the building or far enough away from it so it doesn't fall on you. The safest places to be are under a bed or a table or a car or something like that, a strong structure. Most buildings collapse into their basements and really bury you. Although they say that sometimes basements are safer because they're usually a little more strongly constructed than the upper floors, the girders and all are stronger.
BUT IN A DOORWAY, BELIEVE IT OR NOT, OR IN A WINDOW CASEMENT IS ONE OF THE SAFER PLACES TO BE because of the strength that is structured around it. Things are not as apt to fall on you there, too. Also under a bed or a desk or a table things are not as apt to fall on you in a way that kills you or that you get pinned down some way by falling debris.
OF COURSE THE SAFEST PLACE TO BE IN AN EARTHQUAKE IS OUT IN THE OPEN FIELD. Even in that big Managua earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua, guess who was there? Howard Hughes spent three days and nights in his limousine sitting out in the open field! He got a taste of what it's like. He thought he was all nice and safe and sound ensconced in the top of a big hotel in Managua until the earthquake came! But then he headed for the hills like all the rest! Disaster knows no rich or poor, they're all on the same level when the earthquake comes, all brought down to the same level.
THE POOR MAN WHO'S ALREADY LIVING IN THE HILLS IS A LOT SAFER THAN THE GUYS AT THE TOP OF THOSE SKYSCRAPERS! But even if you're outside a city in the streets, you can't get away from the buildings. It's impossible. If you go out into the street that's one of the most dangerous places there is, stuff falling clear off the tops of the buildings right onto you! You saw in "Earthquake" how it does.
ONE OF THE SAFER PLACES IS UNDER A TRUCK OR CAR but even that's not totally safe. If a whole wall collapses on the car it'll smash it right down flat to the ground anyway. But with most falling debris, if it's not too big, you're pretty safe under an automobile, as an automobile chassis is built strong, if there is enough clearance. Of course, many of these new fancy low-slung cars are so low you can't even crawl under one! A lot of them only have four or six inches clearance and you can't even get under those cars.
THE DEATH OF THE CITIES!--They're going to die one way or the other. They're either going to kill themselves or God's going to kill them, destroy them. If He didn't, they'd destroy themselves anyway, they cannot last.--And when they're destroyed, whether they go bankrupt or collapse, the people are going to head for the country and the hills, and that's when the horrible things are going to happen, as they slaughter the people in the country to get their food!
SO WHEN IT HAPPENS, THE ONLY SAFE PLACE TO BE IS IN THE LORD, amen? Because all of man's inventions and creations are going to be destroyed. The best place to be will be where God's creations are, the fields and the plants, the trees and the flowers, praise the Lord?
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.
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