K-512 Places of Refuge — Art Katz

Israel and the Message of Obligation

Under obligation, it seems to be the principal message of these days, and in fact it is so important that if the Lord would not give me any other message but this until the fulfillment of it, it would still be a privilege to hear myself atoning the same thing again and again.

It has to do with Israel, and I know that we're in different places of understanding with regard to that people. Even those of us who have an affinity for Israel usually have it from a basis of sentiment and kindly disposition for people who have suffered long and deserve some blessing in this last day, and a nation should be established at last, and they should be freed from the vexation of enemies and neighbors who seek their extinction.

But I have a totally different view, and it's a jarring view, especially hard to understand and to receive by those who do have this affinity, but I don't have all kinds of time, so in the one short time that we have, I just need to make a few blunt statements that the issue of Israel is not the issue of a people who deserve a break after the long history of suffering, it's the issue of a conclusion, a finale, a consummation of a remarkable purpose of God in having chosen that people from the first that will not be consummated without their restoration and return from their present apostasy and unbelief, of which their present political existence is not yet the fulfillment, but a preliminary, and that in fact this people's millennial destiny is so great that it cannot be fulfilled except on the basis of resurrection.

Israel's Future Restoration Through Judgment

There's no prospect of their improving or any amelioration from their present low condition, it'll become worse I believe, more degraded and more embarrassing for themselves until finally by force of the fury that shall be poured out against them, not only in the land politically but everywhere in the world, a global hatred described in Jeremiah chapter 30 as the time of Jacob's trouble, a final sifting of God of that nation in which the greater number will not survive, but the remnant that will survive will constitute a restored nation and be a resurrected and transfigured people, totally different from their present character, and by which means God's promise to Abraham that out of his seed shall come a blessing to all the nations of the earth will be fulfilled.

It's a whole tremendous overview for which there's not a word in English that I'm required to employ a German word, Germans being so theologically minded and I think their language lends itself to such an awesome and historic prospect that they use the word Heil's Geschichte, the saving history, the redemptive history of God, in which this nation is select, not because of its virtue but because God is God and he will choose whom he will choose, even the people who have forfeited their calling and have no regard for it even now and are concerned only for their political and national security and God will not allow them that luxury.

He will fulfill their destiny even despite themselves because his word and his honor and his name is at stake. So I'm expecting an anti-Semitism of such a kind as to eclipse what had taken place in the Nazi time, which for us would be a kind of a preview of yet more vile things to come, that a Jew will not be safe in any nation in the world and that even in our own nation they're going to be hunted and pursued and you need to understand the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.

Although it can be explained sociologically and politically and the long-standing enmity between Gentiles and Jews, the kind of economic position that Jews hold that excite the envy of non-Jews, that is always an inadequate understanding.

Those things can be played upon but the real nexus, the source of anti-Jewish hate is Satan himself. There's a demonic fury opposed to this people for reasons that we don't even suspect but just to give it to you very briefly, it's because of their election.

It's because their restoration is the key to the Lord's return and the establishment of this theocratic rule. And I'm throwing out one statement after another, each one of which deserves a whole exposition and because many of us, the lovely Christians that we are, have no theocratic anticipation.

We talk about the Lord's coming or his kingdom but these are fuzzy, vague words but for me they're very explicit. I'm expecting an actual political rule of God over the nations and the collapse of human government today is the prelude and the necessary preliminary to his coming and to his reign.

The Messianic Rule of God Over the Nations

Psalm 2 will help you to orient yourself where it says something like, why do the heathen rage and imagine a vain thing that the rulers, the kings and the rulers take thought against God and against his anointed and seek to break his bonds asunder but the Lord holds them in disdain, he's contemptuous of them for he has set his king on the holy hill of Zion.

And in this remarkable messianic psalm yet to be fulfilled, we can understand the rage of the kings and the rulers. The kings, by the way, are the immediate physical, visible level of government in the nations but the rulers are invisible.

They are the principalities and powers of the air who have had undiminished and uncontested sway throughout history to influence and jerk nations according to their will through visible and physical rulers.

But both together are opposed to God's design, namely that his king should be established on his holy hill of Zion. That's not poetry, that's absolutely God's literal intention and one of the reasons that we have missed it historically as the church is that we have spiritualized and made God's literal statements to be metaphors that have warm, evocative and suggestive spiritual meanings but have caused us to miss God's very literal intention.

So though you may not be so oriented, I'm asking you just for the sake of my giving you an overview before I get down to the brass tacks to understand the context for which reason Jews will be relentlessly pursued.

Every former persecution of Jews, nigh unto their extinction, like the Nazi time itself, the genocidal determination of the Nazis to exterminate is the most graphic and recent expression of this demonic drive to remove these people from the face of the earth.

Why? Because if they don't exist, there's no prospect of the fulfillment of what the prophets have spoken that there will be a last day's restoration and a return to the land and an establishment with them again of the kingdom of God.

And so if that cannot be practically performed because of their extinction from the earth, then the powers of darkness will go on in their undiminished sway. You see what a demand this makes upon us who have been knocking about spiritually or have satisfied ourselves charismatically and have not an apostolic view of the faith, which is something of a calling or a prophetic view, a foundational view of the faith, for which reason God has brought us to northern Minnesota and has given us the privilege of developing these views at length and in greater detail by those whom he brings to us in summer schools and other occasions.

I hope we'll have you visit at some future time. So this is not a view that's familiar to the church, and it shows the kingdom now, or that we are the kingdom, the presumption of the church even to displace Israel, that we are the Israel of God are all symptoms of a condition about which Paul warns in Romans 11 that he would not have us to be ignorant of this mystery lest we would become wise in our own conceit.

Something happens to the church that disfigures it and renders it non-church in any apostolic sense of the word to the degree that this mystery has not been understood or received. It's not just a conceit that displaces Israel, but a conceit that inflates the whole texture of the church and changes its very character and demeanor, and therefore cannot be employed by God in the fulfillment of these last days things.

And that brings me to really the heart of the matter. The great mystery that Paul speaks of is not just Israel's restoration, but the means by which Israel is restored after millennia-long apostasy and rejection of their own God.

The chronicle of their sin and their rejection is stupefying. Very few modern Jews have any awareness of it at all, don't even understand why it is that they were born in places like myself, Brooklyn, New York, or Moscow, or Argentina, or wherever there are Jewish communities in the world, Russia, Moscow.

These are all statements of exile, statements of judgment. And our rabbis have not instructed us, maybe they themselves don't know, or they have so construed it as to make us to come out smelling like a rose, that we have been propelled into the world to bring a certain measure of blessing, when the fact of the matter is, as our history shows, we're not going to bless people ourselves.

So as they themselves don't understand their own destiny, nor do they anticipate something as unthinkable as a yet future holocaust, now no longer confined to Europe, but something that is to be experienced globally.

Because Israel has been dispersed among the nations, and the greater number of us are in the nations, more so than in the land. So that calamity will come to both those that are in the land and those that are in the nations.

Ezekiel's Prophecy of Gathering and Covenant

In Ezekiel 20, there's a classic text that shows something of the design of God for the restoration of this people in the last days. Chapter 20, verse 33, as I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out, will I rule over you.

You have only to ask whether this speaks of the past or the future, knowing that he's not presently ruling over them, they have not even any awareness, and the last official statement by ourselves as a nation is, we will not have this man to rule over us.

And if the issue is theocratic, the issue of God's rule over his creation, it must first begin with his own people, his own nation, before it can commence with the nations. In fact, it is Israel as a restored nation that then undertakes God's program for the nations.

What we have been busy about as the church till now is not the redemption of nations, but a people for his name from among the nations, namely, to fill up the body of Christ and to complete the church.

But the actual task of the nations per se, as nations, is Israel's task after their own restoration, but their restoration begins with calamity. That's how my restoration began. I became a believer out of distress of a final kind, not physically violent distress, but one sufficient to bring me up out of my orbit in California as a teacher, university graduate Marxist-oriented, absolutely atheistic and church and Jesus-despising.

And I was rooted up by the depth of the calamity of my own life personally, and took a year's leave of absence and just began to knock around Europe and the world looking for philosophical answers. But in the course of traipsing through the nations, I began to receive a witness, people picking me up off the side of the road or native people or whatever, and speaking to me in such a way as to prick my heart and to make me aware that there's something with this people.

And I was prepared for revelation through them of the Lord himself in the first reading of the New Testament, which came to me aboard a deck of a ship en route to Greece. And then the final conclusion of the matter, the actual supernatural call of God in Jerusalem.

And there's a certain corollary to what I've experienced personally as to what my people will experience in a soon coming time. They will of necessity have to be propelled out of their places of security, affluence and comfort.

And it's only in that distress, you're not only uprooted physically, but all of your categories are uprooted. And the things in which you had placed your confidence, even if that's the United States or our culture or our pluralism and tolerance, the kind of thing that we Jews have enjoyed, that must go.

And we're going to find ourselves again, despised, rejected and pushed out into the earth and except that a certain grace come to us in that place of extremity, we would all perish. But as I'm going to show you from this text, I hope that the grace that does come and comes to a remnant will be through the church itself.

And that this is our appointment and our mandate. The thing that distinguishes us as the church, both our ability to extend rescue and aid to our people in such an hour of distress, and all the more at a cost that might imperil our own lives and our own families.

Because if they're driven and relentlessly pursued, then the whole of the nation, its political, its governmental, social disposition will be violently in hatred against them. And anyone who will lend them aid will put themselves in the place of suffering their fate.

And it may well be the discovery of Gentiles willing so to do that fulfills what Paul speaks of in Romans 11, that they might be moved to jealousy by some demonstration that has not yet historically come to them through the church.

That this willingness to be sacrificial in their stead while all the world hates them, though you're yet Gentile, has got to be for them a stunning revelation of a very living God. And the fact that you're not only willing, but that you anticipated this hour of distress and had made preparation for it, that they can come into a place of refuge, is itself a demonstration that you had some advance notice.

And how could that conceivably have been? Because when this comes, it says it comes with suddenness, with a fury poured out, and yet you had anticipated it, both biblically and spiritually. They will have to recognize that man could not have programmed this.

This is not something that could ever have been humanly organized, because they're going to go from a people to people who may not even have met each other face to face. Or it'll be evident to them that this is demonstrably the work of God by his Spirit.

The Church's Mandate to Provide Refuge

And this is a last days drama. When the Lord first inducted me into this, I wanted to run the other way. This runs so against the grain of my own makeup personally. It is so melodramatic. It sounds like some grade B black and white old movie that is so far-fetched and so inconceivable that it violates your taste.

And yet I want to say, for whatever it's worth, and for whatever authority I have, and whatever history I have, and thirty years of God, and traveling the world over and bearing his word, I trust faithfully that I would stake my life on the truth of everything that I'm saying to you now.

In fact, I could wish that I were a false prophet, and that this is some imagining that is really just my own vain subjectivity that will never come to pass. I would rather suffer that and the disgrace of it than to know that my people are going to pass for this.

And the issue of their survival, which is to say the issue of their restoration, which is to say the issue of the Lord's coming, because he says, I'm pent up in the heavens. He has voluntarily restricted himself, waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began.

I hope God will forgive me for every time I have misused that verse, and I've automatically reacted at the word restoration, thinking it meant the church, because at that time the Lord had not lifted the veil over my own understanding, though I'm a Jew, that restoration means the restoration of Israel in the last days, though albeit through an apocalyptic scenario of violence and extreme devastation, both within the land and outside of it.

Revelation 12 and Israel's Wilderness Refuge

So with fury poured out means the anti-Semitic deluge that I have described. You remember in Revelation 12 where it speaks about a woman and how Satan, the dragon, seeks to devour her and what is birthed by her, the man-child who is taken up to heaven.

I'm not sure exactly what that means, but what follows is that God's saving provision for that woman, who is evidently Israel, is that a place has been prepared for her in the wilderness where she's fed for three and a half years.

It's all provision for that eventuality, which I do not think is too distant, because even as we're speaking now, the pot is on the stove, boiling and ready to froth over. Anti-Semitic hatred, the changing climate of nations that have previously been sympathetic to Israel is growing more and more cold, if not hostile.

The scriptures tell us that the day will come when all nations will come against Jerusalem to destroy it. The untenable condition of Israel in the land now, the vexation that is going on in that country, their attempt to establish some kind of peace with their fiercest enemies cannot have any hope of success, and the disappointment in those who might have hoped for it might actually trigger a greater devastation than they sought to avert by the kind of peace treaty with Arafat and the PLO.

They are in a precarious position. Someone was just reading me today, was it Jim, where a woman from the Israeli government herself says, Lord, she doesn't even know him, but she's crying out, as my mother uses that word also, unless something happens, our position seems hopeless, we've had it.

And this is beginning to break upon the consciousness of the nation that has always been perennially optimistic, not in God, but in themselves, such a self-confident people, which is why God has got to break them through the drastic calamities that will come to them where they cannot save themselves, and where he says, I will remove the enemies that transgress against me, which unhappily I think will constitute the greater majority.

Ezekiel 20:34-37 and the Bond of the Covenant

So verse 34, I will bring you out from the people, that is the nations, and will gather you out of the countries wherein you are scattered, with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out.

If we're any kind of students of the word, just from its face value and apparent reading, we can see clearly, this cannot mean what has happened from 1948 to this day. The establishment of the political state of Israel is not this that is being described.

And if I had more time, I would give you my view of what I think present Israel represents, and that it is not yet the prophetic fulfillment, but is a preliminary to that fulfillment, and must itself be brought into death.

Israel must have one opportunity out of its own human strength to establish itself and fail colossally. And I wonder why we would stagger at such a scenario. Hasn't that been God's dealing with us? Have many of us come in just such a way where the Lord has allowed us enough rope, so to speak, to hang ourselves?

Enough demonstration to see the futility of even our best and well-meaning endeavor? And who comes to God except by such collapse, who comes in fact truly? And so what was true for us personally is the paradigm or the pattern of His own dealing with this nation, because they are the epitome of self-confidence.

Anyone who knows Jews knows that. There's something about us Jews that is so confident in ourselves, and how can we then bless all the families of the earth out of such a mentality and out of such a spirit?

There's got to come such a devastating brokenness, such a demonstration of the reality of God to us out of our deep-seated atheism, that can only come unhappily out of an extremity of the kind that I'm hoping to describe to you today.

And God is very terse with His words if you report out, my God, if we knew what that meant. And the hits of time should give us a little indication of what that meant, and will yet mean more fiercely in the coming hour.

It's brewing. The hatred is brewing, and it only waits for the Lord to release it, because something has got to evict Jews out of their present places, okay, and bring them through the nations. And if we had time and you could bear the word, not just mentally, but the emotional weight of this, I would show you from a text in Amos where God says, I will sift them among the nations as one sifts wheat in a sieve, and not one kernel shall fall to the ground.

The purpose of bringing them through the nations where the greater number of Jews yet reside is for the purpose of their sifting. That they might return as the redeemed of the Lord, though they were not cast out of Israel or out of Winnipeg or Chicago or wherever in that condition.

And mourning and sighing shall flee away, it says. What mourning and sighing of the calamities that I'm describing to you, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads, which means it's a final calamity, and that it is the contraction of death, the spasms and final travail of a nation before its resurrection and rebirth as a nation that can bless the families of the earth and be the locus, the location of God's theocratic rule and kingdom.

For it must be on the holy hill of Zion, in the city of Jerusalem, on the throne of David, to establish it henceforth and forever. That's God's economy. That's his promise to their fathers, it's his promise to David, and if he's not a God who will keep his promise in such specificity, he's not God.

The whole issue of God's success in this is the issue of God, not only demonstrably to the nation itself, but to all nations. It's God's final mercy to all nations. Now he's not going to do this in the corner, but it is going to be so open to the sight of all that anyone who yet then stubbornly resists God, both in the demonstration of his judgment and his mercy, invites his judgment upon themselves.

So I will bring you out from the people and will gather you out of the countries wherein you are scattered with a mighty hand, with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out. That's the second time in two verses that phrase is used.

Any elementary student of scripture knows that if God repeats himself twice, oy vey, there's going to be tsuras, or trouble, and I will bring you into the wilderness of the people. Here's where you guys come in, where we come in, where we all come in, who are God's remnant people and who recognize that the purpose of our salvation is to fulfill his grand and final consummating purposes in the earth.

I will bring you into the wilderness of the people, and there will I plead with you face to face, like as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt. So will I plead with you, saith the Lord God, and I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant, that is to say, you're going to get saved in the process, because a revelation will come to you in the height of your perplexity and distress.

You will see my face, and there will I plead with you face to face, like as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt. So will I plead with you, saith the Lord God, and I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant, that is to say, you're going to get saved in the process, because a revelation will come to you in the height of your perplexity and distress.

You will see my face, and here's the interpretation I give that, in which I'm absolutely confident, that it's not going to be some vision of God or some miraculous showing of his face, but the revealing of himself in his character, that's what his face means, what he is intimately in himself, in the faces and the demeanor, the self-sacrificial grace of Gentiles who will extend themselves to that people at that time, that by your mercy, they might obtain mercy.

Costly Mercy and the Testing of the Church

In other words, if we do this only out of a sense of religious obligation, gritting our teeth waiting for the unhappy moment to pass, and to get these nuisances out of our hair who are dirtying our rug and jamming our bathrooms and pressing us for space, we will have failed in the one historic moment that is ours.

They've got to see something more than Christian politeness, which is about as far as we've been able to stretch ourselves till now. We've got to come into a dimension of such grace that not only are we not inconvenienced by them, but count it all privilege to be stretched by them, not just to the issue of our convenience, but to the issue of our lives.

Can you imagine what that would require in terms of our authentic spirituality? Because historically, nothing has been more of a test for the church than the Jew, and the church has historically failed that test, because there's something exacerbating about Jews, even when they get saved.

How about in their unsaved condition? How about in their vexed condition, when they have been suddenly uprooted by a fury poured out? They're not going to come to you on their best behavior, and it's amazing how they might not even like your hospitality, or, what, you don't have bagels, and is this the best you can do?

And here you are extending yourself at risk, and you have to listen to those complaints. I know these people, and I often relate how one such Jew came to us when we were more of a Jewish community than we presently are, and a Jewish hobo picked up off the side of the road, and brought to us because we're Ben Israel.

And I wasn't there, I heard the story later that he was taken in by the co-author of my last book, which is on the table behind you, I'll talk about that later, Spirit of Truth, Paul Volk. And he received this man, Paul was a very quiet and laid-back believer, and he showed this man to a place to stay, and got him some food, and was about to leave him, and the guy started to complain.

A man in stinking rags complained, it wasn't good enough, he didn't like it, how about what? And Paul said that when I saw his patent ingratitude, something rose up out of my gut that shocked me, that I was capable of that reaction, that it was nigh unto murder.

There's something about hospitality spurned, or questioned, that brings up the deepest levels, I don't have a word for it, but I know it's there. And this is a Jew with a Jew, how much less likely will a Gentile, who has had a history of anti-Semitic overtone, or latent resentments, going back to your childhood when the Jewish kid in the class was getting his straight A's, and you were sweating just to pass.

Every Gentile has that latent disposition, and is not even aware of it. But the crisis of a Jewish presence thrust into you, in a moment with suddenness will reveal it, unless the sanctifying work of God, in power and in truth, has reached you in the depths of that place before their coming.

Now in saying that, you ought to understand why Paul concluded Romans 11, his remarkable statement of this mystery, with an ecstatic doxology that just beggars all language. Oh the depths of the riches, Paul cries out, Romans 11, 33 through 36, oh the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, who has been his counselor?

Who has given to him and shall be given again? For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. Paul's freaking out, he just can't contain himself, he's seen something so majestic, so stunning, so replete with the wisdom of God, much more than just the issue of Israel's restoration.

What he sees is the church's transfiguration in the very requirement of being the agent of God's saving grace to Israel. Just think of it, what other requirement is there in our Christian life now that would compel us to be so sifted and searched of God and yield ourselves to his refining fire?

What is there about our present church life that makes any demand, anything approaching that? Nothing. But the issue of not only the physical survival of a Jew, but the revelation of his God through you in mercy and unconditional love, no matter how vexed and provoked you are by them, is the issue of the church in the last days, in every place.

The Sheep and the Goats Among the Nations

That's why God's going to sift them through the nations, not just for their sake, but for our sake, that the church in the nations will receive this final test. And I believe that Matthew 25, that shows the very first act that the king performs in assuming his power and authority over the nations, is to separate the sheep from the goats from among the nations and condemn them either to an eternal hellfire with the devil and his angels or to eternal blessedness to a kingdom prepared for them on the basis of one thing only, what did you do with the least of these, my brethren?

So I'm just trusting the Lord, and in fact I know that except that his spirit is with us, we'll shock this off as some kind of harebrained, wild-eyed thing and go back to life and business as usual. But I believe that the whole drama is having its origin in settings just like this.

In fact, it's what we've been doing the whole weekend in Racine, Wisconsin, and Rockford, Illinois, and I can tell you such stories, I don't know how much patience you have, how utterly supernatural this is.

Testimonies of Providential Places of Refuge

Just cut me off, when you reach the breaking point, you can't take more. I'll tell you one incident in America on the West Coast, another one in Europe, but they're both of the same kind. I just happened to stumble on an announcement that there was a scholars conference on the Holocaust.

I didn't even know there was such a thing. It was the 22nd annual meeting of scholars on the Holocaust. I started to drool, my God, Lord, I want to go. I quickly sent off, I don't know what, a fax, a telephone call, I got an application, I was accepted.

It was being conducted at the University of Washington in Seattle. And it began, I forgot what, on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and knowing I was coming to that area, I said to brothers whom I've known up there, I said, why don't you guys make some arrangements for me on Sunday?

I'm sure there's some churches that would like to have me back or, you know, they were going to take care of that. I get a phone call the next day from Alaska, from Juneau, Art, when are you coming? I said, well, I said, as a matter of fact, I'll never be closer to you than I will be in March.

I'm going to Seattle, but I said, the only two free days I would have would be Thursday and Friday. She says, those are the days of our Bible school. So I went up to Juneau, God confirming, and I came back after the conference and for the services that I thought were being prepared, not a single door had opened.

It's uncanny. Not one church? You mean, Lord, am I going to spin my wheels on a Sunday? What is this? You're not redeeming the time? Meanwhile, I had written a letter to a woman who thanked me for giving her addresses in Germany.

She had made a trip there, and I noticed her postmark on the envelope, Washington, in some little town I'd never heard of, and so I just, I wrote her a quick note. I said, I'm going to be in Washington, Seattle, I don't know how close you are.

Here's the phone number of the brothers arranging my meetings, if you can come, come. She calls up and finds out there's no meetings arranged at all. She said, you think God will come to us? We're about three hours south of Seattle, and we're just in the boondocks, we're in nowheresville, we're just a most insignificant little band of souls, that's where I came.

Because no other door had opened. And as I'm being driven there, I learned that the pastor is a man who received this call at a message I gave in California years before. And now the man's beside himself, ah, it's coming.

And so I arrive, and the first thing they show me is an 80-acre property that they're just about to buy, which they think God wants to use to prepare a retreat for tired ministers, which I can appreciate.

And it's near the sea coast, the west coast, and I'm walking around this property, I don't say a word to them, everything in me is going off like gangbusters, bells are ringing, alarm system, I mean, I just know that that property is not a retreat center for ministers.

It may begin as that, it may give the appearance of that, even as our property is being used now for retreats and schools and things of that kind, in fact, almost invariably every property I know, intended by God to be a place of refuge, has now, as its present function, a retreat center or things where Christians will come in and out and the neighbors around them will be accustomed to seeing the flow of traffic, that when God changes the cast of characters, and it's no longer Christians coming in and out, but bedraggled Jews, it will hardly make a difference.

And so I didn't say anything to them. When we came back that night, in a living room like this, wall-to-wall people, and I shared with them what I'm sharing with you, only the unction, I mean, the place was electric, you didn't hear a proverbial pin drop, they had never heard anything, they had never thought about Jews in their lives, and I'm laying out to them their mandate.

And so we finished, we prayed in a very solemn way about what God is speaking and what he's wanting. And then people came up to me for prayer, and a whole family comes up, and, Art, will you pray for our fishing fleet, we're just about to sell our fishing fleet.

I said, oh really, where do you have it anchored, whatever you call it, moored, in Alaska, they said, opposite the Bering Straits. You know your geography? You can virtually row from Siberia to Alaska, but through the Bering Straits.

The moment they said that, of course, I exploded. And I said to them, with confidence, I said, you're not going to be moving fish, you're going to be moving men, and then we prayed over that fleet, and when we finished praying, it was such an anointed prayer, the man looked up at me and said, I don't think we'll sell, he said, I think we're going to improve our fleet.

You know what they didn't know that I knew? That one day's journey south of them is another community in Oregon, just equidistant from the coast as they. And I'm carrying in my address book, I have it with me now, if anybody wants to see it, a photograph of a painting, painted by a woman, by the Spirit, who has never been on the property, and I have been on that property, as I've been on many of these properties, and it shows a stream of beaten up, dejected, pitiful looking people, just bedraggled, coming not through the road, but somehow through the woods where the telephone lines have been cut through, and there's kind of a path that they can walk, right near the Salmon River there, and they're coming into two great barricade buildings, which are now built on that property.

That woman has never seen it, she saw it by the Spirit and painted it, I've been there, it's exactly what it looks like. If I told you the story of the man whom God had appointed for that work, it's another remarkable saga that had God brought him from the Bahamas, he was with the mafia, a backslidden Christian, and God stripped him and brought him, and he didn't even know why he was on that farm, raising cattle.