The Christian Digest [#8] Presents DAVID WILKERSON: A FINAL WARNING TO AMERICA
Excerpts from the book by Nicky Cruz / Conversations compiled and edited by Nicky Cruz
(Melbourne, Fla: Dove Christian Books, 1990.)
David Wilkerson is an American evangelist who achieved fame for his work with teen street gangs in the early 1960s. During his daily prayer time in 1958, this Pennsylvania country preacher glanced at a Life magazine article on teen gang killers and suddenly felt called to go tell them about Jesus. His experiences resulted in the book "The Cross and the Switchblade," later made into a popular movie. He pioneered the Teen Challenge ministry in the U.S. and presently pastors Times Square Church in the heart of New York City. Nicky Cruz is the former gang leader converted by David, who has written two books of his own.
NO matter what Dave or I have done in this last third of a century, we will always be remembered as the wide-eyed preacher and the sneering street-kid from the best-selling books The Cross and the Switchblade and Run, Baby, Run. Across the globe and in the video stores near your home, the movie still tells our story, convincing millions that Dave looks like Pat Boone and that I should resemble CHIPs' motorcycle cop Erik Estrada, who played me in the film.
Dave was the instrument God used to introduce me to Jesus. I would not be an evangelist today if it wasn't for Dave. So, rather than wait until Dave has gone to be with the Lord to write a tribute, I wanted to tell people what I know about this amazing man and his new, urgent call.
Now, after months of work and editing, I pray that the Lord will speak to you through the words of this unique man of God whom some call a prophet of doom ... but whom I know to be an honest seeker who has been given the role of watchman. Gently, lovingly, God has used Dave to warn us to turn from our fear of the days ahead and our laziness--and to fall to our knees.--Nicky Cruz.
(Editor: Following are excerpts of various conversations between Dave Wilkerson and Nicky Cruz, as well as their observations on modern society.)
New York, the city of my violent youth, is ten times worse than when Dave and I first clashed on the streets of Brooklyn--back when I was the infamous Nicky Cruz, teen warlord of the murderous Mau Maus street gang.
It's as if a new, terrible shadow of evil has overtaken the violent concrete canyons--far worse than even TV and movies portray it. The old drug parks are filled with ranting, seemingly demonized homeless. Empty shells of vandalized buildings overflow with throwaway girls and boys prostituting themselves on the brutal streets.
Live sex on stage is advertised on flashing marquees. A murder occurs every five hours and 258 violent crimes are reported every day. Cops huddle in their battered cars as pornography, drugs, AIDS, and sporadic, nerve-shattering violence rule the night.
Graffiti-defiled billboards whimper the "Just Say No" mockery of a drug war already lost.
"More babies die of AIDS in this city than any other city anywhere," says Dave. "They are not only born of AIDS, they are dying of AIDS, and no matter what the census says, this city is facing an army of homeless."
Everywhere you look now, if you come out of the Lincoln Tunnel or the Holland Tunnel, you see the same people in wheelchairs that you saw there a month ago. You see emaciated people with their little beggars' cans everywhere--dying in the most heartbreaking ways.
"The hospitals are full. It's a city with the highest rents in America and the highest taxes. New York has the most dangerous school system in the whole United States.
"Millions of discouraged, angry people live in neighborhoods that the police have written off as war zones--places the cops won't even go into, day or night."
But the horror we see on the streets is only a sample of what is to come, says Dave. This is what America is becoming--more quickly than anyone dares to admit. This is the result of a selfish, greed-driven society that has taught its children to defy authority and do whatever feels good.
This is what happens when a Godly nation turns away from the Lord.
"Nicky," Dave told me, "the Word of God makes it very clear that God will do nothing in the way of judgment, until He warns His servants."
He warned all the people of Noah's time. Most scoffed ... and drowned, except for the eight servants, Noah and his immediate family.
He warned the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. They scoffed and died, except for God's servants, Lot and his family.
The Lord warned Jerusalem over and over. They rebelled and scoffed and became slaves--taken from their Promised Land and into bondage in Babylon and the far corners of the Earth until the establishment of Israel in 1948.
And the Lord warned Nineveh. But they listened. An entire metropolis fell on its face in abject repentance. Even the cattle were draped in ashes and sackcloth as a sign of humility before the Lord.
The disaster was averted. God withheld His judgment. Can't that happen with New York--and America? Of course, Dave says.
"But I believe the day has passed that it will."
So, as the darkness descends across the Earth, what are we believers supposed to do? Be faithful. Obey.
Trust in a loving, protecting God Who has promised that we will pass through the fire, but that it will not touch us.
Remember Daniel. This faithful young believer was hauled off to Babylon's equivalent of the "re-education camps" in present-day Vietnam and China. He was a slave and a potential offering to a pagan god--if he did not cooperate. Instead, the Lord gave him boldness, power and brought him to the attention of the king himself, who raised him up in a place of honor.
God has done this so many times. Things may be going absolutely terribly, yet the faithful are protected--read your Bible about Joseph, who rose from slave to Egypt's prime minister. Or Esther, who went from captive harem girl to queen of all Persia.
What's going to happen to us?
It's already happening. Some economists are saying that America has been in a serious depression for some time, but that the government juggles the figures to hold down the panic.
Look around you. It is almost impossible for a family to live on one income. That has not happened before in our history. Wives are having to leave their children with strangers [in daycare centers, etc.] and enter the work force.
I knew what Dave was saying. New York's publicly owned buildings, structures and utilities are falling apart. On TV a few nights ago, they showed how the bridges across the Hudson and East Rivers are in dangerous disrepair. The concrete holding up the piers of one in particular is almost gone--all that remains in several places are the rusting, steel reinforcing rods.
But there's no money to fix the bridge. They can't repair the water system, either--once the best in the World. They can't maintain the city's heating steam tunnels--which keep blowing up and killing people and spewing deadly asbestos dust into the subways. They can't maintain the public buildings. Just look at the condition of the public schools--never mind the lack of education going on inside.
In some parts of New York now, beggars block the sidewalk, holding little signs, begging for small change. Many are becoming increasingly belligerent, menacing and violent.
"It's just the beginning, Nicky," Dave told me. "Thousands are teenagers--just kids, some of them younger than teenagers. They are sleeping in the abandoned cars and the trucks and dilapidated rat-infested warehouses on 10th and 11th Avenue here.
"They found 115 of them one night in one of those old shelters, an old warehouse where they keep their trucks, 115 of them, most of them teenagers. They sell their bodies for sex, and on 11th Avenue between 34th and 40th Streets, you can get sex for 25 cents from teenagers with AIDS. Twenty-five cents for perversion and death.
"Nicky, it was nothing like this even when you were wild and running with your bloodthirsty friends in the Mau Maus. It's so much worse. You look into these kids' eyes and their sunken faces and you see hell. Many are longing for death to escape the prison of drugs and perversion. Most of them are dying with AIDS, tuberculosis or pneumonia."
We have a man attending Times Square Church regularly, a real man of God, a former vice president in one of the Wall Street firms. He was fired recently. He told me, "Brother Dave, I wouldn't play their dirty games. I wouldn't work under the table." But he said more than that: "I wouldn't snort cocaine with them." He said only two men in his whole department are not on cocaine. Everybody, including the leaders, are all stoned, they're making their deals under the influence of coke. They don't care, it's other people's money. "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we are going to get canned," seems to be their attitude. "We are going to get fired anyhow."
Dave reminded me of how Babylon fell. "They were stoned out of their minds, Nicky. The enemy was at their gates and the Babylonians were inside drinking themselves into a stupor. They didn't even have watchmen at the gate.
"Nicky, it's the same here. Wall Street's dying. It's all going to the European Common Market. Brussels will be the center of the financial world, not New York.
"Wall Street is just going to fade away. We are going to become a third-class power in a very short time. We can't dictate a thing to Japan or Germany because we owe them so much money."
Dave began to tell me stories of how the Lord constantly protects His people in the war zones of New York. One lady from his church answered her door to find a man with a gun who tried to rob her. She started prophesying, and praying--and she chased him out!
"One of our workers told me yesterday how she went into her apartment and had a funny feeling when she entered the bedroom. She began to pray. Suddenly, her front door slammed. There had been somebody in there, but off they went--and nothing was missing.
"Nicky," said Dave, "God has every right to ask America a question today. What makes America different from wicked Sodom? Are we better than Noah's generation? Or Lot's generation? Are we better than the wicked people of the past? Considering all past evidence of God's fury, why should He spare us, since we are committing acts seven times worse than any of these wicked people?"
Nahum's warning to Nineveh, years after Jonah, is a warning to us also: "Thou also shalt be drunken: thou shalt be hid" (Nahum 3:11). America is drunken with lust, drugs, violence, evil sex--and intoxicated with success and prosperity. "Thou shalt be hid" means this country will become powerless, reduced to nothing, unable to act or to solve problems. Our mortal enemies will plunder us. Society will crumble under the weight of unsolvable problems.
I was stirred to angry tears as I roamed New York's streets and stared at the sheer insanity of this once-great city:
* I saw a man crazily banging his head on the wall of a tenement as pedestrians did not seem to notice. As I sought the Lord, He cautioned me to leave him alone. I did.
* Pimps, prostitutes, crack dealers all boldly sold their goods in broad daylight in front of the gutted buildings as cops drove slowly by, their doors locked, their windows rolled up.
* Ragged, angry kids were living atop steam vents shared with babbling bag ladies and lurching old men who trundle their possessions around in grocery carts.
* As I walked down the sidewalk, newsstand headlines proclaimed that an art group had received $10,000 in tax money for a New York City exhibition that included a transsexual Jesus with female breasts, a crown of thorns, eye makeup and women's clothing. In sneering quotes a spokesperson touted the right to practice homosexuality without using condoms.
* In other headlines, in Washington, D.C., former New York City Mayor Ed Koch was pleading with Congress to help stop the city's slide into a new Dark Age. The previous year, more than 1,850 New Yorkers were murdered--most of them in drug-related killings, he said. More than 56,000 were arrested for drug trafficking--3,500 of them in or around 343 city schools. Only three per cent of those were students.
"What this means is painfully clear," an emotional Koch told the House of Representatives Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. "Adult drug dealers are congregating near our schools, trying to hook our children into lives of drug dependency. This will lead to truancy, crime, and ultimately the destruction of many more young lives.
"We are now losing a war," Koch declared, "one that promises to exact a price far higher than Vietnam did. We are in danger of losing our greatest resource: our people."
Is Dave a prophet of doom? "I've been getting weary of warning about the judgment on America," Dave told me. "I went to the Lord this week again, like I have on a number of occasions, and said, `Lord, what's the use?'
"Nicky, so few listen anymore. Even the righteous seem to get depressed from hearing of the warnings. So why warn the people when they won't listen?"
"Also, Dave," I noted, "even those who do accept the message get tired of being reminded of it."
"Right," chuckled Dave. "So there is a tendency just to be quiet, and say `Lord, I've said enough.' Jeremiah was like that. He made up his mind one day that he was tired of the rejection and the mockery. He said, `No more will I speak of violence and spoil or war and judgment.'
"He said, `Lord, I go out and I warn the people about judgment, and all I get for it is reproach and mockery all the day long every day.'"
But even so, I mentioned, Jeremiah couldn't hold it in. Dave nodded his agreement. "Jeremiah said, `I said I'll not speak, but the Lord's word was in my heart as a burning fire, shut up in my bones, and I could not hold it in.' (Jer.20:9) I'll tell you, Nicky, I have a fire burning in my bones and that's why I've gotta preach this message. God said to Ezekiel, `Speak and tell them whether they are going to listen or not; tell them.' (Eze.3:4-11)
"There comes an end to God's endurance. People say, `Oh, I've heard this message time and time again, and year after year, but instead of getting worse, we get better. We're prospering more than ever before. Where is the sign of His judgment?' Well, Nicky, Jeremiah spent 23 years warning Judah and Jerusalem that destruction was coming, an enemy army was going to besiege Jerusalem, and there was going to be starvation. He warned up and down, and everybody mocked. They said, `We've heard that for 23 years.'"
Why did the Lord withhold judgment for 23 years and let Jeremiah look like a crazy old fool or maybe just an over-zealous mystic?
The answer is the same as today: God is always determined to warn His people, so much so that He sends His servants again and again, right up to the time of judgment.
In Jeremiah's day, when he wouldn't quit proclaiming doom and defeat, they threw him in a dungeon. They beat him. The religious leaders and the political leaders ordered him not to utter another word of judgment. They tried to shut him up.
The religious leaders didn't want to hear it. The politicians didn't want to hear it. The Bible says they even put him in a pit. (Jer.38:6)
There are a great many people today--particularly ministers who refuse to preach anything but prosperity--who hate the message of judgment.
Christians are increasingly the object of public ridicule. Just look at the TV news. Let's put a spokesman for lesbian rights in a debate with somebody like Jerry Falwell. Guess who is treated like a social leper? The person preaching sin or the person proclaiming God's Word?
No, the person standing up for good is treated like a stern schoolmarm wanting to rap America's knuckles with a ruler. And the person proclaiming evil is embraced as a spokesperson for human liberty and personal freedom. (See Isa. 5:20.)
Look what happened when Pat Robertson ran for president. His Christianity became a liability, a matter of sneering criticism. Did they call him "the genius behind the Family Channel," or "the founder of Regent University" or "the popular host of a daily news show with a Christian perspective?" Not on your life. They called him a televangelist--tarring his good name with the same dirty brush that they were using to blacken the names of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
The message of God's judgment is no more popular now than in ancient days. "Nicky, look how God dealt with other societies who turned their backs on Him. America has passed the hour of grace. America has been turned over to the hour of judgment. There is no question in my mind about that. I do believe there is hope for the church. I'm very hopeful for the church, but as far as our society, we are under divine judgment.
"Go to the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy and you'll see everything that is happening to our Western civilization right now."
He told me of standing on Wall Street the day that the stock market suffered its worst crash in recent history, in October 1987.
"That was only a taste of what is to come," he told me, describing the hysterical, devastated young brokers and traders whose dream collapsed that dreaded day. Their god of materialism had failed.
Their $2 million apartments and $60,000 BMWs and gold Rolex watches offered no hope now.
"Nicky, America is dying! The country's wound is incurable. It is now in the final throes of a terminal disease. The great empire is crumbling!
"This country is headed the way of all fallen empires. The time that God warned us about in His Word has come--the `dread release,' when even the prayers of Godly saints for a doomed land no longer avail."
"Moses listed in Deuteronomy 28 all the signs of the curse, Nicky. We need to be reminded of these dreadful signs which `shall come to pass, if thou will not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all His commandments' (28:15)."
1. A curse upon our cities: "Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field" (28:16). "America's cities are doomed," said Dave. "Our own magazines have declared them to be Western `Beiruts' or war zones. Crack is tearing them apart. New York City is becoming unlivable. A murder occurs every five hours, a crime every 20 seconds. Our cities are headed for anarchy, and there is no turning back. Now it's spreading even to our smallest towns."
2. A curse upon our economy: "Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store" (28:17). "Nicky," he told me, "this refers to our Gross National Product, banking and reserves. A curse will fall upon it all, bringing confusion, fear and uncertainty. `I (will break) the staff of your bread' (see Leviticus 26:26)--meaning widespread unemployment."
3. Plagues of incurable illnesses: "The Lord shall make the pestilence [sickness] cleave unto thee...with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation" (28:21,22). "The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt...and with the scab...whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment [panic] of heart" (28:27,28). "The Lord shall smite thee...with a sore botch [boil] that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head" (28:35). "The mark of AIDS is the purple blotch--the incurable boil!" said Dave.
4. Insignificant enemies will shame our armies: "The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them...And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air" (28:25,26). Think of the stalemate in Korea. Or our troops fleeing from Vietnam and being chased out of Lebanon. Or shadowy drug lords in Colombia and Burma holding a gun to our head.
5. An epidemic of divorce: An epidemic of broken homes has erupted. "Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof" (28:30).
6. A wave of bankruptcies: "Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes...thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them" (28:31). This describes the ancient Oriental custom of the creditor taking everything from the debtor for restitution. It warns of the wave of bankruptcies that will come upon this cursed nation.
7. The loss of a generation of youth: "Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them" (28:32). Today a nation of adults, supplied with all money and might, can merely stand by and watch in horror as drugs and violence swallow up an entire population of youth. This Scripture is a prophetic warning about the despair that falls upon parents in a nation under the curse. "Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity" (28:41).
8. You will become a debtor nation rather than a lender: "He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail" (28:44). "In the last five years we have become the World's biggest debtor nation," Dave noted. "At this moment we are now the tail--and Japan is the head. We can't even bail out our own bankrupt savings and loan institutions. Consider the $150 billion that's needed to save our banking system--and then tell me we are not under the curse! We are not experiencing the full fury of it yet. But now all our problems are going to accelerate."
Just look around and you'll see that Dave is on track:
The hospital system in our cities has become unmanageable: addicts are slipping out of their rooms, running out to get crack, and then climbing back into bed. Many are freebasing cocaine (smoking pure cocaine) in hospital rooms--even in emergency rooms. Doctors and nurses are being beaten and murdered. There is no cure, no solution possible!
Our jails are overflowing, resulting in the release of many criminals. We are now building prison barges in an attempt to cope with the overcrowding. Our penal institutions are horror houses of rape, violence, drugs and hopelessness. Here, too, there are no solutions, no cures in sight.
Our courts can't handle the caseloads anymore. Judge after judge has issued warnings: "We're on the brink of anarchy. We can't even process the multitudes of criminals."
Our schools are the shame of the whole World. Inner-city school buildings are decaying; teachers live in fear. The schools have become a miniature hell where kids are confronted with guns, knives, drugs, Satanism, violence and promiscuous sex. The schools are devoid of all morality.
Our welfare systems are in chaos. New York State has called this city (NYC) a "welfare basket case." Costs already have spun out of control.
Our economy is in its death throes. Nobody in the government, in Congress, on Wall Street or at the Federal Reserve can tell us what is happening. It is beyond us all. No one knows what is holding the system together.
Just look at America in recent years. As a nation, we no longer care about what is right. But it's worse than that. It's as if our nation is determined to flaunt what is wrong.
On TV, the criterion is "whatever sells." If it's a sneering, soft-porn package of greed and lust, then that's what is piped into millions of homes, twisting young minds and hardening adult hearts.
In the record industry, if it's Satanism and violent sex that our kids will pay for, then that's what is churned out by an industry with no conscience, consumed only with making a fast buck.
In the art world, we are deluged with an ugly new defiance--obscenities directed at all that is sacred: crucifixes bottled in urine, paintings of Jesus as a transsexual--federally funded homoerotic photo exhibits of children touted in the national press as "a wonderful expression of our First Amendment rights."
In our courts, judges are blotting out any remaining signs that we were once a Christian nation, ordering the removal of crosses, nativity scenes and Biblical mottos from public buildings and parks. As I write this, new legal battles are being mounted against the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which has refused to remove the tablets of the Ten Commandments from a World War II monument, and against the federal government to remove statues of Jesus from two parks.
The quiet battle against prayer has moved into the last bastions of local determination--the little, rural school districts now are being forced to give up Bible studies and are stopping local clergy from praying on loudspeakers before sports events. Our judiciary protects baby-killers and atheistic rights. Our judges shake their fist at God, daring Him to react to their flaunted rebellion. This small handful of wicked counselors has set their hearts against God. They have declared war, and God no longer can hold back His fury.
"All dying empires become soft and effeminate, unwilling in the end to take a stand for anything. From Sodom to Babylon, dying empires have gone out drunk, lazy, stoned and immune to all warnings. Like Belshazzar, the king of Babylon who saw the writing on the wall, they end up giving the prophets their day in court--telling them, yes, they are on target, that what they're saying is all true. But then they go right back to the party" (see Daniel 5).
"This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, `I am, and there is none beside me.' How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! Every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his head" (Zeph.2:15). Israel once became so wicked that even the heathen "daughters of the Philistines ... are ashamed of thy lewd way" (Eze. 16:27). Israel's corruption was worse than Sodom's. "Thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways" (Eze.16:47).
Moses warned Israel that sin would bring any nation "into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it" (Lev.26:32).
"I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazingstock" (Nahum 3:6). The prophet paints the picture of a God so furious, so full of vengeance, that He is throwing mud or dirt on this wicked nation. We are literally drowning in pornography: It is now a multimillion-dollar business. Ten years ago much of it was imported. But today the U.S. is the biggest exporter of filth in the World.
With its television shows and VCR movies, our nation has developed an appetite for perversion and sadomasochism. Even daytime soap operas are full of smut, fornication and homosexuality. TV has become the open floodgate of this barrage of filth.
Many don't like to hear about the coming economic collapse. The word "depression" scares Americans. But believe it or not, we are not just facing another recession that will last a short while before the economy bounces back. Rather, we are facing the last great depression!
It happened to every past society and empire in the throes of judgment. Don't believe it won't happen to us.
"Now I want to tell you something, the war on drugs by any government is doomed. It is absolutely doomed to disaster. What you're going to see will be a cosmetic war. You are going to see a lot of hype, a lot of public relations. You will hear of a few drug lords being extradited from Bolivia and Colombia and Panama and Thailand. They will be put on trial. They will be given showcase trials. They may even get some years in prison. But it won't even make a dent in the drugs flowing in.
"You are going to see pictures on television and newspapers of Brazilian or Laotian or Burmese or Peruvian or Bolivian troops going in, burning out some of the plantations of the drug lords. You will see pictures of great big heaps of heroin and cocaine being confiscated. It will look like there is some progress being made.
"But the war on drugs cannot be won by governments, because it is not a physical war. It is a spiritual war. It is a sin problem."
"It was impossible to get high anymore or even to stop trying," says the 31-year-old former New York City addict.
To look at him, you would scoff at the notion that the robust, well-dressed professional ever had a drug problem.
After all, Jim is a medical doctor, a graduate of a leading medical school and a former New York City resident doctor in anesthesiology--a specialty that he says he chose in medical school specifically because it would give him access to drugs.
But he is not alone. According to David Smith, an authority on drug abuse and the founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, "The toll among anesthesiologists is so high that addiction is now considered an occupational hazard."
In two recent studies of addiction among 173 anesthesiologists, 37 had died as the result of drug addiction. Abuse is so common that users have their own street-type lingo--such as a "party pack," enough morphine to anesthetize a patient for minor surgery ... which also happens to be enough for three friends on the golf course to get really plastered.
"In the last stages of my addiction, I needed eight or 10 shots a day," remembers Jim.
He started using morphine as a medical student when a patient at the teaching hospital had an incredibly ecstatic reaction to morphine administered before a painful procedure. He pocketed the leftover drug and injected it into his arm later. "From that point on," he remembers, "I never threw narcotics away."
Drugs became a big part of his life--helping him stay alert and energetic through graduation, then enabling him to withstand the rigors of hospital residency, where young doctors are often expected to put in 24- and 36-hour shifts.
"The addicted doctor doesn't just suddenly show up loaded one day at work," says Will Spiegelman, an anesthesiologist at Stanford University Hospital and an addiction specialist. "It's a progressive disease. By the time he starts functioning poorly at the hospital--at least two years and often more after he's become addicted--he's practically dead."
For Jim, feeding his enormous habit--and quelling his desperate fears that his supply of morphine would be interrupted--produced paranoia of the worst kind. Terrified that colleagues might detect something was wrong with him, Jim became exhausted, isolated and depressed. He lost touch with his family and withdrew from friends as his self-esteem vanished.
He had started with only two or three milligrams of morphine to get high. But now, all he wanted to do was function like a normal human being. His all-consuming goal was to walk the thin edge between the agonies of withdrawal and the death of overdose--for getting high was no longer that important. Staying alive was.
Incredibly, Jim was not caught by friends, family, police or fellow doctors. During an audit of the hospital's drug supplies, a computer brought Jim's name to the top of the list of doctors procuring drugs. Hospital officials were taken aback by Jim's enormous volume of written prescriptions--all supposedly for patients.
Jim was called in for questioning and only then did hospital officials spot telltale signs that he was using the drugs himself. Forced to submit to a urine test, he deftly substituted a drug-free patient's sample for his own.
Declared clean, he promised to quit overprescribing narcotics for his patients. And he turned to buying drugs on the street. He volunteered for high-paying overtime in the emergency room so he could afford the street drugs--increasing his intake and his physical exhaustion so that he was having to inject himself more and more often in the hospital restroom stalls, where he ran the serious threat of being caught.
Eventually, however, he ran out of money and returned to writing phony prescriptions. This time, the hospital computer was watching him. Alarms went off.
He was forced into a detoxification program--although he continued to deny any addiction.
Today Jim is drug-free. And a Christian. The battle was won not in the detox unit but when his heart was won. Only God's supernatural intervention was able to do it.
If you think crack has taken the nation by storm, just wait for designer drugs to spread--particularly if the Coast Guard, U.S. Customs, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the armed forces somehow succeed in blocking the flow of marijuana, cocaine and opiates into the United States.
A favorite already on the streets of New York is fentanyl--with a wallop 100 times as strong as morphine and 50 times as potent as heroin. It's a synthetic drug, altered by underground chemists just slightly to get by federal drug statutes.
The law carefully defines the chemistry of what is illegal. So, designer drugs are custom-built to get the user high, but skirt the law. When they first hit the street, they are completely legal.
It took officials long months to decide whether to ban the controversial designer drug "ecstacy" since it was not an illegal compound, did not seem to be addictive and apparently heightened a number of positive traits, such as affection. Some designer drugs are incredible. Sufentanyl and Iofentanyl are said to be as much as 6,000 times as strong as morphine.
But there are terrible risks. Since the drugs are altered forms of known narcotics, they have unknown new characteristics--sometimes have terrible side effects. For example, at least 107 people died from a batch of meperidine that was botched by the basement chemist and contained the compound MPTP--which contained a deadly neurotoxin. About 400 known survivors now have a syndrome like Parkinson's Disease.
According to Discovery magazine writer Winifred Gallagher, "The flood of designer drugs portends that in the not-so-distant future, there may no longer be any demand for botanical narcotics, nor any need for the elaborate criminal networks that supply them."
"If you're in the Mafia," says G. Douglass Talbott, head of the Impaired Physicians Program in Atlanta, "you may as well get out of the business."
And that makes the government's war on drugs seem a little silly.
All of the power of the United States government, says Dave, all the technology of the British military and all the determination of the Australian or Canadian or German police cannot take away the desire for drugs. "How can a program be successful when they can't change the heart of man?" Dave asks.
Where did this plague of drugs come from? Even 9- and 10-year-old kids in New York City are pushing drugs. Police picked up an 8-year-old boy, in fact, up in Harlem with a little paper sack with 400 vials of crack he was selling. Eight years old!
"Our kids laugh at `Just Say No,'" says Dave. "Right in my face, young teens scoff and tell me, `Just say no to all my gold chains and this $5,000 wristwatch? Say no to these designer clothes and go back to nothing? To food stamps and Salvation Army used clothes?'" Dave shakes his head and sighs.
"The problem is that we have pushed God out of our schools. We have pushed Him out of our courts. We have designed Him out of our laws.
"You see, when we denied God and rejected Him in our society we left ourselves morally and spiritually bankrupt. We have created a vacuum into which the Devil has moved with all of his henchmen.
"We are under the rod of God's chastening for our rejection of the Lord," Dave says. "God permits wicked enemies to serve as His rod of correction and chastisement. I'm telling you now that our nation is under the rod of God. He says, `I'll cause you to pass under the rod.' He said, `As I pleaded with your fathers, so I will plead with you, and I'll cause you to pass under the rod.' (Eze.20:36-38)
"Violence has risen up like a rod of wickedness. The Scriptures say that if we forsake His law and if we break His statutes and we keep not His commandments, then will I visit your transgressions with the rod and your iniquity with stripes. (Psa.89:30-32)
"Do you remember when God judged Israel by sending the Assyrian Army to be His rod, to do His correcting of Israel? The Assyrians were the rod of His anger, the staff in the hand of His indignation.
"God said, `I'm angry at you and I'm going to let these Assyrians come in and I'm going to let them invade your land. I'm going to let them move in among you and am going to use them as a rod.'
"And that's exactly what is happening to us with the drug lords, drug pushers, and the pimps and the prostitutes here. They have become the rod of God to chastise our wicked society."
"I've been preaching lately that I believe America has reached what I call the dread release," Dave told me. "It's past the point of no return, Nicky. Judgment is already on the land. There comes a time God says when even if these three men--Noah, Daniel and Job--were in it, `I would not hear their prayer' on behalf of America." (Jer.11:14) Why?
"Because there is a line that has been crossed. Some time ago, the Lord said `That's it!' There is a time when God has to move on.
"We don't have a chance now, Nicky. We have kicked the Lord out of everything in American society. We've become humanistic and materialistic.
"We are on the brink of the iron yoke right now. We're at the point now where people say that it can't happen again and we've come out of all our problems--just look at how good things are!
"But God's going to get the World's attention one way or another, and it's going to be pretty frightening. Time is running out!"
Are you ready? Probably not! But you can get ready now by reading, studying and learning His Word, and giving your full time to the Lord, your whole worship, and serving the Lord and loving Him with all your heart, all your strength, all your mind, everything you've got, starting right now!--Until the very End!