By Claude Fonseka

"For the God who gave flesh and life to dry bones [Ezekiel 37:1-10], for the God who asked Abraham, ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’ (Genesis 18:14), no illness is beyond His power to heal. He can heal any and every disease". In the warm voice of Dr. Kelsey Glover, words to this effect came through on the nightly broadcast from Angelus Temple, to Isaac Shakarian and his son, Demos, two cattle farmers in Downey, Los Angeles, who were facing a desperate situation at that time around 1942.

Early the next morning, Demos telephoned Dr. G. ‘When you said ‘any disease,’ sir, did that include sickness in GOWS too?" There was along silence over the phone as the Berkeley-trained theologian no doubt consulted his Father in heaven. "Any disease," he replied finally. "In animals or men." "Then, sir, would you be willing to pray for one thousand Holsteins? Today?" Dr. G arrived at the dairy at 11.30 that same morning for that purpose.

If you were wondering about the title of this article, the two preceding paragraphs may have you a clue. A couple of months-ago, Mad Cow Disease was the talk of the town. as I complete this article, Foot and Mouth Disease is hitting the headlines. Quoting The Telegraph Group, London, The Island newspaper of April 4, 2001 gives a news item under the heading, "Culling cure is worse than the disease" and on the 16th of this month, the heading was "Animals awaiting disposal set to reach 1m." Today the newspaper quoting Reuters announces that the English village cricket championship among, 500 clubs is to be cancelled because some cricket grounds are in exclusion zones as a result of the epidemic. What a tragedy for mankind that scientists and world leaders go blundering on without looking to the one source, the living God, who can provide the solutions for all our problems.

The boy prophet

Before I continue the story, it is necessary to take you back to 1850 (approximately), to the little village of Kara Kala in Armenia, situated in the rocry foothills of Mount Arahat, the mountain where, the Bible says, Noah’s ark came to rest.

The most famous citizen of this village at that time was Efim Gerasemovitch Klubniken who was affectionately called "The Boy Prophet." When he was eleven years old, the Lord gave him a vision of charts and a message in a beautiful handwriting over a period of seven days. The boy could neither read nor write, but he asked for pen and paper and laboriously copied down the form and shape of the letters and diagrams that he saw. It turned out that this illiterate child (who had never seen a geography book!) had written out in Russian characters a series of diagrams and a prophecy, warring that at some unspecified time in the future there would be a brutal massacre of hundreds and thousands of Christians, men, women and children in the whole area. The time would come when everyone in the region must flee across a sea to a land, which the readers of Efim’s manuscript plainly identified as the Atlantic Ocean and the west coast of the United States of America, "where God would bless them and prosper them, and cause their seed to be a blessing to the nations."

A little after 1900 Efim announced that the time was near for the fulfilment of the words he had written nearly fifty years before. "We must flee to America. All who remain here will perish." What happened thereafter is history. A large number took the prophecy seriously and, selling their properties for a song, left for America to the jeers of the majority who stayed behind. "In 1914, a period of unimaginable horror arrived for Armenia. With remorseless efficiency the Turks began the bloody business of driving two-thirds of the population out into the Mesopotamian desert. Over a million men, women and children died in these death marches, including every inhabitant of Kara Kala" (who had stayed behind). "Another half a million were massacred in their villages. The few Armenians who managed to escape reported that the Turks sometimes gave Christians an opportunity to deny their faith in exchange for their lives. The favourite procedure was to lock a group of Christians in a barn and set it afire." If they were willing to deny Christ the doors would be opened for escape. "Time and again, the Christians chose to die, chanting hymns of praise as the flames engulfed them." It is stated that this massacre provided Adolf Hitler with the blueprint for his plan to exterminates the Jews.

Demos’s grandfather was among those who fled. In 1905 he sold the farm which had been in the family for generations, accepting what little money he could get for it. With his wife, six daughters and Isaac, his thirteen year old son, he set out for America. However, in California the effects of the great depression of the late 1800s were still being felt. Jobs being difficult to get, he had no choice but to accept work with the railroads, laying the rail track in the Nevada desert. Although he managed to send some money to the family for a few weeks, it was not long before the expected happened. "On a blast-furnace day Grandfather collapsed on the line." His body was shipped back by train. His son, Isaac, had to assume responsibility as the head of the large family at the age of fourteen.

Having worked as a newspaper boy in downtown Los Angeles for nearly $10 a month, and thereafter in a harness factory for $15 a month, Isaac was forced to quit his job when a doctor warned him that, if he continued to work in the fine leather dust at the factory, he would not live out his teens. What was he to do? As usual he turned to the church. Kneeling down at the table, with the church elders standing behind him, he stated his need. One of the elders ‘placed his finger on the Bible and read out strange and beautiful words":

Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, and the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your beasts, the increase of your cattle. The Lord will command the blessing upon your barns, and in all that you undertake; and He will bless you in the land which the Lord your God gives you (Deuteronomy 28:3-8 RSV).

"Your ground? Your cattle?" Would this ever be possible for a man supporting a large family on a little over $15 a month? But he knew that the one thing he wanted so much to do was to work with cows and fresh green things in the outdoors. So, acting on this prophecy he gave notice to the harness factory end within two weeks was without a job. Almost at once an idea formed in his head. He bought-a horse and a flatbed wagon,. drove three hours into the country to an area of small farms and picked up some of the choicest fruits and vegetables being raised. Back in the city he sold the produce going from house to house calling his wares: "Ripe strawberries! Sweet oranges! Fresh picked spinach". An year passed and Isaac was able to marry the girl of his dreams and buy three milk cows and ten acres of cornfields and pasture land. On July 21, 1913, their first child was born, a son, whom they named Demos after his grandfather.

By the time Demos was seventeen, the family business had grown. This was remarkable because those were the depression years of the early thirties, but everything that his father Isaac, the "son of promise", touched seemed destined to thrive. Politicians, businessmen, community leaders were now gravitating to their home and his mother, the shy little immigrant girl from Annenia, now a marvellous cook, found herself hosting weekly dinner parties for the prominent and the powerful.

By 1934, they were the largest dairy in California. Demos now took on as his special project the building of "Reliance Number Three", their third dairy on a forty acre property, a model operation, where milk flowed from cow to bottle without ever being touched by hand.

The largest in the world

December 1941, the United States was at war. Although dairies were classed as essential industry, many of the employees in the family business and many of their suppliers were soon in the service of the defence plants. Yet, short-handed and short of fuel, grain, tyres and truck parts to keep the business going, their toughest problem was the health of the animals. Demos and his father had always turned to prayer first when disease threatened their herds; now, with drugs and veterinarians in short supply, prayer was both first and last defence. Nevertheless, almost unnoticed in the pressures of wartime red tape and shortages, the original three cows had reached their target figure of three thousand, making them the largest private cattle farm in the world. But they also had the ‘largest private headache," hunting for milk bottles, cement and above all food for such a large number of animals.

With so many veterinarians away with the services, tuberculosis was on the rise in cattle. Every thirty days officials from the health departments arrived to test the herds. After three days, depending of the reaction to the test, the animals would be declared free of infection or classed as "reactors" or "suspects". When the incidence of reactors and suspects reached a certain level, all the animals in that herd, including even the healthy ones, had by law [at that time] to be destroyed.

Several herds in neighbouring counties had already been slaughtered when the problem arose in Reliance Number Three, their model dairy. Nearly one hundred animals had tested as reactors and two hundred as suspects. If, as seemed inevitable, there was any increase at all in these figures at the next visit of the inspectors, all one thousand cows in Reliance Number Three must be destroyed. Demos and his father, Isaac, of course prayed over the animals, but they knew that no dairy they had ever heard of had reached that level of incidence of the disease and saved their herd.

The day they received this distressing news Isaac and Demos were sitting disconsolately at their desks long after the evening milking. To cheer themselves up, Isaac switched onto the nightly radio broadcast from Angelus Temple. It was then that they heard the voice of Dr. Kelso Glover speaking on God’s power to heal.

A power packed prayer

Arriving at 11.30 the following morning Dr. G went round the corrals with Demos. Although the sun was directly overhead he took off his hat. Demos promptly followed suit. The man of God prayed:

"Lord Jesus! The cattle on a thousand hills are Yours! In Your Name, Lord, we take authority over every tuberculosis germ attacking Your creatures."

Although he was not a young man, Dr. G remained bare-headed throughout the three hours that he took to pray over everyone of the corrals. The atmosphere was strangely hushed and even the dairy hands sensed it.

A medical impossibility

At the next lesion test, the health officers looked grim and preoccupied. They knew only too well how the health of the nation, especially its children, depended on the dairy industry, and how devastating was the current epidemic. Three days later, they were back for the all-important reaction reading After the first two rows were examined, Demos heard the two officers comparing notes: ‘it’s a freak thing," said one. "There wasn’t one reactor in that whole row. No suspects either." "Not in the row I checked either," replied the other. In that entire barnful of 120 cows, not one showed a trace of the disease! By the time the second batch was completed and 240 cows had tested negative, the dairy hands began to gather at the barn. The third batch? Same result!

By the end of the morning over one thousand cows had been tested and not one case of tuberculosis or even the suspicion of it had been found, even among the animals which had previously tested active. There was no medical explanation or precedent for it, the medical men confirmed. The only answer was the one Demos shared with the now crowded team: Dr. Kelsey Glover had prayed and God had answered that faithful man of prayer. Nor was the answer limited to this wartime emergency alone. For over twenty years thereafter, as long as they had a dairy on that site, there was never a case of tuberculosis or suspected tuberculosis, at that model dairy’ Reliance Number Three!

‘The Happiest People On Earth’

All the information and the quotations in this article are taker) from that amazing book, "The Happiest People On Earth" by John and Elizabeth Sherrill, which relates the "Personal Story of Demos Shakarian", the founder and president of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, which has branches all over the world including a chapter in Sri Lanka. I strongly recommend that you buy or borrow a copy of this beautiful book [ISBN 0-8007-8362X) and read the numerous thrilling stories of unbelievable miracles related in it.

Says Demos: God has a specific purpose for every single human being. The ‘`Happiest People on Earth" are those who find through faith in the living God and obedience to His every word, what that plan is and fulfil it.