Attacked by a Perfect Storm
By Pastor Hal Mayer
Dear friends,
Welcome to Keep the Faith Ministry once again. The devastating effect of hurricane Helene on Ashville, NC has changed many people’s lives forever. But the hurricane left more than devastation. It left a warning to all of us, especially God’s true people, that a devastating destruction is coming that will attack the cities of the earth and ruin them. That’s in the near future. So, let us pray for God’s Holy Spirit today as we study.
Our loving Father in heaven, we realize that we are nearing the greatest crisis of all time. We see that Jesus is waiting for us to fully be His. The world is headed for devastating destruction of its major cities and they have not been warned. Also, many of God’s people still live in them. Please send your Holy Spirit to teach us today as we study. In Jesus name we pray, amen.
Let’s open our Bibles to Psalm 9:6.
“O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end: and thou hast destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them. But the LORD shall endure for ever: he hath prepared his throne for judgment.”
This verse is speaking of a time when disasters will no longer be. But it also speaks of a time of judgment before the end. The destruction in the wake of hurricane Helene was a fitting symbol of what will happen to large parts of the world when the judgments of God are poured out.
Ashville, NC, a city of over 95,000 people was known as the “climate haven.” Residents thought that they were inland enough to avoid the brunt of hurricanes and other storms, and that any storm would pass over them relatively quickly. Ashville was in the mountains, protected as it were. Flash floods had happened in the past, and the residents didn’t think of the devastation of the previous storm in 1916 that wiped out the city because buildings are made so much better now. Hurricane Helene’s impact was totally unexpected and the people of the city were unprepared for the sudden destruction that came upon them.
Hurricane Helene made landfall September 26, 2024, on Florida’s “Big Bend” as a Category 4 hurricane and created a 500-mile path of destruction with catastrophic flooding, damaging winds and power outages. But when it came to Asheville the storm stalled and dumped trillions of gallons of rain upon the area. The ground was already soggy with rain that had been delivered by another storm several days previous to Helene. When Helene hit, the water had no place to go but run off the surface. It ran down into the town of Asheville and flooded it with devastating effect. Flash floods pushed many homes off their foundation and demolished them, killing or drowning residents with them. It flooded businesses and destroyed inventory and supplies that would be needed to help the people recover. It overturned cars and swept people and animals downstream. Mud slides destroyed roads and buried more people. Rivers undermined roadbeds, tearing them away from their moorings and into the raging water.
“It’s been tough,” Mitch Collier said, a Christian volunteer. “Luckily, I have the strength of the Lord in me, because some people wouldn’t be able to handle the things we’ve seen, some of the things we went through, some of the devastation that we looked at while trying to help people.”
Collier said he has helped relief efforts in almost every major storm that has afflicted the United States since 2017 but noted Helene’s havoc stands out to him.
“These people need help up here,” he said. “This is the worst, most devastating storm I’ve ever been in. It’s bad… One day, the creek is 6 inches deep. Next hour, it’s 40 feet deep; an hour later, it was 200 feet wide, and just took everything in its path.”
Collier also said he didn’t know the death toll, but said he imagines “it’s gonna be pretty up there” based on what he has seen. Collier answered a question about FEMA.
“You really want me to talk about them?” he said regarding federal officials. “We didn’t see FEMA or nobody until eight days later, eight days after the fact. And then they’re trying to shut people down from helping.”
The lack of federal help for over a week made the misery even worse. A week after the storm, the smell of death overpowered the cool mountain air over the isolated, twisting roads of devastated rural western North Carolina. The region around Ashville includes 21 counties, which has reported at least 95 confirmed deaths from the storm, a figure later reduced to 42, the most in the state. But the official death toll due to the storm is preposterous and has to be way under the real count. The massive destruction suddenly wreaked on Asheville, in a town that wasn’t even expecting a flash flood, cannot have only 42 casualties. It’s just inconceivable.
Asheville sits at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which meant the city turned into a “catch basin” for rain gushing down 4,000 feet of elevation. The city of nearly 100,000 people lies at the intersection of two major rivers, the French Broad and the Swannanoa, which leave it vulnerable to flash flooding. Listen to this statement from Great Controversy, page 589.
“While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast.”
Large sections of western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the coast, have become unrecognizable. The emergency response was hampered by hundreds of decimated roads and downed bridges and complicated by lingering communication outages. Medical and other supplies had to be taken into the stranded residents by horseback, and pack mules.
In Chimney Rock, a village about 20 miles southeast of Asheville, no building or home was left unscathed by the raging floodwaters. With a population of fewer than 200 people, the once-idyllic mountain enclave is named for the towering granite outcropping that overlooks it. It has been wiped off the map.
“Everything you take for granted has been washed away, literally,” Mayor Peter O’Leary told CNN. “Every single business, every single building has been destroyed or severely damaged,” O’Leary said.
Locals were also using the pack mules to help rescue people as well as to deliver food, water and other essentials to residents in areas where roads remain unpassable. Think about how long it will take to rebuild even temporary roads. And the cell phone system was down so communication was impossible. Some of the stranded scrawled their names on tarps in hopes that images posted to social media would be seen by anxious relatives. A number of communities are only reachable by helicopter, which were few and far between for 8 days, because the average person doesn’t own one.
Think about what it will be like when cities are devastated and there is no communication available. Not only will relatives find it difficult to communicate with other relatives, but emergency crews will have difficulty finding people that can’t communicate where they are.
In nearby Black Mountain, North Carolina, where about 450 people have been rescued, authorities have moved from search and rescue operations to recovery efforts. Crews are conducting target searches in areas where homes were destroyed.
“We’re having to go through debris piles and utilizing specialty equipment,” said Ryan Cole at a news conference.
If you live on the side of a mountain you might only have one way in and one way out. And if a bunch of large trees blow over on your main street, you are trapped. In addition, the entire mountainsides are completely gone. It was difficult to account for how many people were missing because there’s little hollers (or valleys) all over western North Carolina, little pockets of communities, little trailer parks. You may have never heard of them but they’re there or were there.
In the resort town of Maggie Valley, about 35 miles west of Asheville, Joseph McElroy said his 6-year-old twins were coping with the disaster by treating it as a “grand adventure” but were still unaware their favorite teacher – “like a second mom” – had drowned during the storm.
“I mean, they really love this teacher,” he told CNN. “Now we face having to tell them that this grand adventure killed their beloved teacher.” McElroy lamented what he called the poor communication between local authorities and residents. It was difficult to get information about loved ones, and this caused a lot of psychological trauma.
Kim Ashby, who taught in North Carolina schools for 20 years, is described by her daughter Jessica Meidinger as “the glue that holds everyone together.” Kim and Rod Ashby have been building a house in Elk Park for about two years… The couple live in Sanford, about 45 miles southwest of Raleigh, but went to their second home just before the storm to check on it.
Lauren Meidinger said her in-laws were having breakfast on the morning of September 27 when Rod realized something was wrong. “He heard a crack. He went outside again and saw that the footer of the home was gone,” Lauren said.
He rushed back in. “Hey, we need to get dressed. We need to evacuate,” he told his wife.
Within seconds, the house was swept away into the river. Rod Ashby grabbed Kim Ashby and the dogs, and they clung desperately to a section of the wall until it broke apart. He went up and down the bank yelling for his wife before finally crawling to a neighbor’s house for help.
“He wants to get back up there and keep looking,” Lauren Meidinger said. “She’s a fighter. You know, Kim fought breast cancer and beat it, and she’s fought her entire life,” Meidinger said of her mother-in-law. “We know that if she got out of that water, that she’s alive.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard-of amount of water that has stunned experts. 40 trillion gallons of rain is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe, a very deep and very large lake, once.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
Putting that amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. By the time Helene reached Asheville the ground was already saturated with water, and the streams and rivers were already high from the runoff. The flood damage from that amount of rain was apocalyptic.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low-pressure system had stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. A storm that fell just short of named status also parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast and dumped as much as 20 inches of rain.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain that collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6,000 feet. The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of the runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air than it would on a gentle rolling plain.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall. Imagine that!
A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius).
Noah’s flood is explained by the Bible as the sun cooling down and lowering the temperature on the earth’s surface and of the atmosphere, which wrung huge amounts of water out of the atmosphere and also decreased the size of earth’s mantle, which contained the water, dramatically (which the Bible calls the firmament). Turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 30:26. Here is the explanation for what happened at the flood.
“Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound.”
So, what this is saying is that the sun will be 7 times brighter and hotter when the earth is recreated, and the moon is going to be a burning orb, when the Lord “healeth the stroke of her wound.” So, in other words, God is going to restore the earth and solar system like they were at creation.
When was the stroke of earth’s wound? It was in the flood. When God brought the flood on the earth all He had to do was lower the temperature by decreasing the sun’s strength and extinguishing the moon. And that brought the deluge down that flooded valleys, rivers, lakes and destroyed homes and buried everything. That wasn’t the only thing that happened at the flood, but that’s the explanation of the Bible for the enormous rainfall. By the way, the reason the moon needs to be a burning orb may be in order to keep the nighttime temperatures up enough so that water will not pour out of the atmosphere every night. Even after the flood God kept everything in nature in balance.
Today, we still see this same principle in action. When a storm hits a mountain, the air goes up around and over the mountain, and as it goes up it cools, and as it cools it releases more moisture, wringing it, so to speak, like wring a towel, such was the colossal storm in the mountainous region around Ashville.
Add to that, storms are warmer and wetter than in the past. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and even some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction.
This is the way God works. He works through nature to bring His judgments and His blessings. Listen to this statement in the Review and Herald, June 7, 1887.
“Four mighty angels are still holding the four winds of the earth. Terrible destruction is forbidden to come in full. The accidents by land and by sea; the loss of life, steadily increasing, by storm, by tempest, by railroad disaster, by conflagration; the terrible floods, the earthquakes, and the winds will be the stirring up of the nations to one deadly combat, while the angels hold the four winds, forbidding the terrible power of Satan to be exercised in its fury until the servants of God are sealed in their foreheads. Get ready, get ready, I beseech you, get ready before it shall be forever too late! The ministers of vengeance will pour all the terrible judgments upon a God-forsaken people. The way of obedience is the only path of life. May the Lord help you to see it in time to open your ears, that you may hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.”
People were moving to Ashville to escape extreme heat in the summer, sea level rise and hurricanes. They thought they were safe. No doubt many of them relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief when they moved to Asheville. Ah, “It’s so nice and cool,” they said, “no hurricanes, only tropical storms at worst,” “no earthquakes, no danger from the sea,” nothing to worry about, peace and safety.” That was until Helene wiped out the city, a few weeks ago.
What does the Bible say happens when they look for “peace and safety.” Let’s read it in 2 Thessalonians 5:3.
“For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”
The people of Asheville were looking for peace and safety. They were looking for a place that they could live out their lives of sin without fear that sudden destruction would come upon them. A number of God’s professed people lived in the city too. God counsels us to live in the country where we can grow our own food and have much peace from the enemies of God. But no doubt some of them were attracted to the city of Asheville, maybe like Lot. While we don’t know the fate of many of them, I’m sure God protected His own in miraculous ways. Here is a statement about Lot’s attitude. It is found in Patriarchs and Prophets, page 168.
“When Lot entered Sodom he fully intended to keep himself free from iniquity and to command his household after him. But he signally failed. The corrupting influences about him had an effect upon his own faith, and his children’s connection with the inhabitants of Sodom bound up his interest in a measure with theirs. The result is before us.
“Many are still making a similar mistake. In selecting a home they look more to the temporal advantages they may gain than to the moral and social influences that will surround themselves and their families. They choose a beautiful and fertile country, or remove to some flourishing city, in the hope of securing greater prosperity; but their children are surrounded by temptation, and too often they form associations that are unfavorable to the development of piety and the formation of a right character. The atmosphere of lax morality, of unbelief, of indifference to religious things, has a tendency to counteract the influence of the parents. Examples of rebellion against parental and divine authority are ever before the youth; many form attachments for infidels and unbelievers, and cast in their lot with the enemies of God.”
Here is a statement from Adventist Home, page 522.
“Many are eagerly participating in worldly, demoralizing amusements which God’s word forbids. Thus they sever their connection with God and rank themselves with the pleasure lovers of the world. The sins that destroyed the antediluvians and the cities of the plain exist today—not merely in heathen lands, not only among popular professors of Christianity, but with some who profess to be looking for the coming of the Son of man. If God should present these sins before you as they appear in His sight, you would be filled with shame and terror.”
And here is one more statement from Patriarchs and Prophets, page 170.
“Of the posterity of Abraham it is written, ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.’ Verse 13. We must dwell as pilgrims and strangers here if we would gain ‘a better country, that is, an heavenly.’ Verse 16. Those who are children of Abraham will be seeking the city which he looked for, ‘whose builder and maker is God.’”
Of course, now days you can bring the city with you into the country. But you must plan to leave the city as the starting point. Then plan carefully for other aspects of life that aren’t related to location. I don’t want to judge people who went through the terrible devastation of Helene. But it is a warning to those who think that they can live as they please, separate from God even though they are church members. You cannot think that the day of sudden destruction isn’t coming to all. All of us need to be intentional about our lives and our connection to God. God’s protection will only be given to those who are diligent students of the Bible and follow His counsel.
The mudslides and floods that have swept children and their grandparents and others away in the foothills and mountains of North Carolina were a risk that few saw as imminent.
Listen to this statement from Medical Ministry, page 7.
“The material world is under God’s control. The laws that govern all nature are obeyed by nature. Everything speaks and acts the will of the Creator. The clouds, the rain, the dew, the sunshine, the showers, the wind, the storm, all are under the supervision of God, and yield implicit obedience to Him who employs them… The Lord uses these, His obedient servants, to do His will.”
This explains to us how God uses nature’s laws to bring destruction upon wicked cities. Was Asheville a wicked city? You bet it was. It had, because of its natural beauty and its special characteristics, attracted many who were involved in evil. It was a center of witchcraft, new age, and every form of satanic necromancy you can think of. Listen to this statement from Evangelism, page 27.
“The Lord will not suddenly cast off all transgressors, or destroy entire nations; but He will punish cities and places where men have given themselves up to the possession of Satanic agencies. Strictly will the cities of the nations be dealt with, and yet they will not be visited in the extreme of God’s indignation, because some souls will yet break away from the delusions of the enemy, and will repent and be converted, while the mass will be treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath.”
Also in the surrounding area was plenty of meth labs, pornography studios that produced among other things, child porn, and other forms of wickedness. Do you think the hurricane was a judgment of God?
Of course there were many people in Asheville that were not involved in any of that, but all of them were affected by the storm and the flood. We should think about that when we are thinking about moving to the city. It does not pay to live in the cities where wickedness abounds. Asheville was in the crosshairs of the storm systems that were in the region. What began as weeks of continuous rain, turned into what has been called, “the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of western North Carolina.”
The catastrophic North Carolina flood of 1916, over 100 years ago, wreaked immeasurable havoc on the region, killing dozens and wiping out roads and railways. A storm system made landfall in Alabama on July 5, producing heavy, relentless rainfall over the North Carolina foothills and mountains. Although no flooding was caused by the initial storm, the ground became heavily saturated and bodies of water were running high.
Then the second storm hit. On July 14, 1916, a category 2 hurricane made landfall on the South Carolina coast, before reaching the North Carolina mountains on July 15. Record rainfall was widespread. Reports state that between July 15 and 16, 22.22 inches of rain fell over parts of western North Carolina.
The water that thundered in its wake wasn’t just “high;” it carved away the ground under mountain railroad passes, leaving railroad tracks looking like sky-high trapeze rigs hanging 20 to 60 feet in the air. Reports estimate that around 80 people were killed in the flood of 1916. However, the figure is estimated to be higher. Over 20 people died when a single bridge collapsed in Catawba, taking the lives of 14 railway employees, four Telegraph employees, and a half a dozen onlookers.
“It was more than a universal cloudburst in all this mountain country,” reported the Newton Enterprise back in July 1916. “It was a night of tempest and terror.”
According to 1916 reports, the flood caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage, with damage to crops alone being worth several hundred thousand dollars.
“It can be said with safety that no such damage has ever before been brought by flood in the western half of North Carolina,” wrote the Winston-Salem journal about the great flood of 1916. “Indeed, no one thought this section of the state could ever suffer such damage.”
Now over 100 years later, western North Carolina is left devastated once more from one of the deadliest storms in its history. Helene is now the deadliest hurricane to make landfall in the US mainland since Katrina hit in 2005. Maybe if the real death toll were known, it would go way back past Katrina much farther.
Water was a major issue for the people of Asheville that were survivors of Helene. It wiped out two of the three water treatment plants and the sewage treatment system.
Survivors, whose homes were not destroyed, resorted to 5-gallon buckets from rivers and streams of muddy water for flushing toilets. But where could they get drinking water? It had to be brought in by trucks where they could, and by pack mules and horses where they could not take the trucks. This will go on for weeks as crews work around the clock to restore basic necessities.
The city set up distribution centers for bottled water, but many of the people could not access it because the roads were blocked or their cars didn’t have gasoline.
In the city, you are dependent on the city’s system for water, sewer and other basic needs. And when cities are devastated by destruction those who live in them that survive will then be faced with severe challenges and life-threatening circumstances. Depending on a city’s infrastructure this can be deadly.
An estimated tens of thousands of people in and around Asheville, N.C., were without running water, and it was weeks before it was restored. People had to resort to creek water and rainwater just to survive.
“The [water] system was catastrophically damaged, and we do have a long road ahead,” said Ben Woody, assistant city manager in Asheville, at a press conference.
Asheville has three water treatment plants: one down by the airport, and two up in the mountains. The two mountainous water plants have been totally disconnected from the rest of the system. A bypass line, created as a backup, also got washed out.
“That’s how the flood and the deluge was,” says Mike Holcombe, Ashville’s former water director. “It washed away not only the mainline, but it washed away the line that they had put in to prevent this situation.”
The infrastructure problems go beyond the pipes. The topography is mountainous, and some parts of the system are hard to access even in sunny weather. Highways that go to those water treatment facilities were washed away. So, you can’t get heavy equipment in until the roads are reconstructed. Those two water treatment plants in the mountains are critical.
“It’s really a nightmare,” says Holcombe. “Those two main transmission lines serve about 70% of the actual water system.”
The uncertainty has been stressful for residents, including many who left the region temporarily. Since power and water were both out, people haven’t had a shower or been able to wash their hands or face with soap and water for weeks. Besides the city-imposed rations of 2 gallons per day for individuals of potable water. That’s not much. And it creates hardships that will last for a long time.
We have a mistaken impression that infrastructure should last forever. It pays to be self-sufficient. And many people don’t know how to do that because they live in the city and are dependent on the government system for their survival. What happens when you can’t rely on the very things that you once took for granted? People are going to panic. They are going to do what they have to do in order to survive. And when they don’t have any moral resources, which have been stripped away one by one by societies evil agendas, they will kill one another to get small scraps of food. And without a car or access to gasoline, they will be helpless and totally dependent on whatever little bit the government can do for them. The cities are actually death traps.
That’s the way it was during this siege of Jerusalem before it’s destruction. Listen to this from Great Controversy, pages 28-29 and 32.
“Men did not reason; they were beyond reason—controlled by impulse and blind rage. They became satanic in their cruelty. In the family and in the nation, among the highest and the lowest classes alike, there was suspicion, envy, hatred, strife, rebellion, murder. There was no safety anywhere. Friends and kindred betrayed one another. Parents slew their children, and children their parents. The rulers of the people had no power to rule themselves. Uncontrolled passions made them tyrants. The Jews had accepted false testimony to condemn the innocent Son of God. Now false accusations made their own lives uncertain. By their actions they had long been saying: “Cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us. Isaiah 30:11. Now their desire was granted. The fear of God no longer disturbed them. Satan was at the head of the nation, and the highest civil and religious authorities were under his sway.”
“Thousands perished from famine and pestilence. Natural affection seemed to have been destroyed. Husbands robbed their wives, and wives their husbands. Children would be seen snatching the food from the mouths of their aged parents. The question of the prophet, “Can a woman forget her sucking child?” received the answer within the walls of that doomed city: “The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.” Isaiah 49:15; Again was fulfilled the warning prophecy given fourteen centuries before: “The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter… and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.” Deuteronomy 28:56, 57.”
That will be the case of the whole world when God’s Spirit is finally withdrawn from the earth. It will become scenes of strife and bloodshed that no human eyes have beheld since the beginning of time. Here is a statement about the destruction of Jerusalem. It is found in The Bible Commentary, Vol 3, page 1133.
“The Jewish nation is before us as an example of the termination of God’s long forbearance. In the destruction of Jerusalem, the destruction of the world is typified.”
The following quote is from Evangelism, page 27. Notice what the author says about the cities.
“I am bidden to declare the message that cities full of transgression, and sinful in the extreme, will be destroyed by earthquakes, by fire, by flood. All the world will be warned that there is a God who will display His authority as God. His unseen agencies will cause destruction, devastation, and death. All the accumulated riches will be as nothingness…”
You don’t want to be living in the city when this destruction comes upon them. Yet many people are ignoring the signs of Jesus second coming. They continue their lives as though nothing is at stake. They think that they will see the Sunday law and persecution coming and can escape in the cities then. And if necessary, God will work a miracle to allow them to escape or send his angels to lead them out like they did a Lot. But this is not what God will do. He will not do a miracle for those who have neglected the council that He has given already a long time ago. Here is a statement from Country Living page 17.
“If we place ourselves under objectionable influences, can we expect God to work a miracle to undo the results of our wrong course? —No, indeed. Get out of the cities as soon as possible, and purchase a little piece of land, where you can have a garden, where your children can watch the flowers growing, and learn from them lessons of simplicity and purity.”
Asheville has been terribly shaken. It is but an example of what will come upon the cities, the mega-cities of the world. Listen to this statement from Testimonies to the Church, Vol. 7, pages 82 and 83.
“The time is near when the large cities will be visited by the judgments of God. In a little while, these cities will be terribly shaken. No matter how large or how strong their buildings, no matter how many safeguards against fire may have been provided, let God touch these buildings, and in a few minutes or a few hours they are in ruins.
“The ungodly cities of our world are to be swept away by the besom of destruction. In the calamities that are now befalling immense buildings and large portions of cities, God is showing us what will come upon the whole earth.”
Was Asheville and surrounding towns, villages and hamlets swept away by the besom of destruction? While Asheville will be rebuilt, the city was wiped out by the flood. Immense human suffering was imposed on the residents. For many who were packed in shelters there was nothing but what the government was pleased to give them for a while. This created greater suffering. The displacement and disorientation of large parts of Asheville created confusion and paralyzed people who otherwise knew how to navigate life pretty well. Think about what would happen if this occurred in New York or San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, or Los Angeles.
We can know what to expect and see how to prepare for it or avoid it by obeying the council of the Lord. Some of this council is found in the book Country Living. Here is a statement from page 7.
“Calamities will come calamities most awful, most unexpected; and these destructions will follow one after another. If there will be a heeding of the warnings that God has given, and if churches will repent, returning to their allegiance, then other cities may be spared for a time. But if men who have been deceived continue in the same way in which they have been walking, disregarding the law of God, and presenting falsehoods before the people, God allows them to suffer calamity, that their senses may be awakened.”
And then on page 29 of Evangelism we read.
“The time is near when large cities will be swept away, and all should be warned of these coming judgments.”
A second large hurricane named Milton attacked Central Florida shortly after Helene rampaged across the southeast of America. It destroyed much more property and took more lives. Then Nadine, attacked northern Mexico. And then hurricane Oscar attacked Cuba a couple weeks later. And we’re told that they will happen in quick succession. Listen to this from Selected Messages, Vol. 2, page 391.
“Troublous times are before us. The judgments of God are abroad in the land. Calamities follow one another in rapid succession. Soon God is to rise out of His place to shake terribly the earth, and to punish the inhabitants for their iniquity. Then He will stand up in behalf of His people, and will give them His protecting care. He will throw His everlasting arms around them to shield them from all harm.”
Shouldn’t we take a serious look at what we are doing by living in the cities and not pursuing an exit from them? It’s not just the coming destruction which can be delayed by God’s mercy that should motivate us. It’s also that many of God’s people are jeopardizing their own souls as well as the souls of their families.
We are living in a time when it is urgent that we consider eternal things. I have to do it. You have to do it. We all must be adjusting things to make our lives comply with heaven’s commands. Asheville is a prototype of what will happen to the major cities at the end of time all around the world.
Let us pray. Our Father in heaven, we see the devastation in Asheville, NC. and we realize that it symbolizes what will happen to other major cities at the end of time. Please, help us to be aware that we are living on borrowed time. Our lives need to reflect the image of Jesus. And we need to obey Him in every respect. Please help us as we seek to do this. We want to be victorious over the enemy who is seeking to devour everyone who is not allied very closely with Christ. And we’ll praise You throughout all eternity for Your great work of mercy to us. In Jesus name we thank you, amen.