A prophetic word from New Wineskins regarding the Rust Belt and Detroit

Art is at his best with this:

Detroit. However one pronounces it, the city whose name means ’strait’ in French, (as in, the channel of a river) has become a city of death and decay.

The abandoned corpses, in white body bags with number tags tied to each toe, lie one above the other on steel racks inside a giant freezer in Detroit’s central mortuary, like discarded shoes in the back of a wardrobe.

Some have lain here for years, but in recent months the number of unclaimed bodies has reached a record high. For in this city that once symbolised the American Dream many cannot even afford to bury their dead.

Unburied bodies piling up in the city mortuary — it reached 70 earlier this year— is the latest and perhaps most appalling indignity to be heaped on the people of Detroit. The motor city that once boasted the highest median income and home ownership rate in the US is today in the midst of a long and agonising death spiral. [The number seventy symbolizes perfect spiritual order -- or in this case, the exact opposite: perfectly ghastly decay and disorder.]

The word ’strait’ carries very different connotations from its homologous cousin, ’straight’ (i.e., not crooked). In Hebrew scripture, it is translated from Strong’s H6887, צרר, and pronounced tsä·rar’, meaning:

to bind, be bound, or make narrow; to cause or suffer distress, to besiege; to tie up or shut up; to be scant or cramped; to show hostility toward, to treat with enmity; to vex, or harass

The word that first shows up in 1st Samuel 13:6 (key to establishing meaning):

When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait, (for the people were distressed,) then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits.

If we were to hop from Hebrew directly to an Engligh-French mash-up, the verse might read, “…they were in Detroit… distressed…” In the ESV, with the preceding and following verses (i.e., 1st Sam 13:5-7) it reads:

And the Philistines mustered to fight with Israel, thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen and troops like the sand on the seashore in multitude. They came up and encamped in Michmash, to the east of Beth-aven. When the men of Israel saw that they were in trouble (for the people were hard pressed), the people hid themselves in caves and in holes and in rocks and in tombs and in cisterns, and some Hebrews crossed the fords of the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. Saul was still at Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling.

There is much much more to all this, And I recommend you go to his website to read the whole thing. It's pretty earthshaking stuff and worthy of Judgement as you are always supposed to do with the Prophetic.