...organization, and I think the Lord Himself.
That's not to say that I've not been
reading extensively and familiarizing myself with what I
think the Lord wants us to consider.
I've just been kept from organizing, from having
something set, and just to find day by
day how the Lord Himself will unfold.
So I'm looking forward to these times myself,
for my own edification, aspects of things that
pertain to the prophetic calling that I myself
have never considered, but need to be considered,
and finding that there's a rich literature on
some of those things that I have not
before tapped.
So one of the blessings of our times
together is to bring to your attention writers,
theologians, scholars who have invested their life in
this whole area, and I hope that you're
not of a frame of mind that thinks
that if something is intellectual or involves the
mind that it's somehow unspiritual.
I'm greatly appreciative of the labor of these
scholars, and it opens up whole insight, as
I trust you'll find today and in these
days, that would have been lost to us
except for their labor.
One of the remarkable anomalies of the faith
is that the most intensive and insightful exploration
of the Old Testament comes from German scholars,
and it's a German scholar whose book I
have before me now, Old Testament Theology, by
Gerhard von Rath.
It would be great to begin to develop
a familiarity, and you might bump into one
or more of their books in a used
bookstore and be greatly benefited.
How do you spell that last name, please?
Von Rath, R-A-T-H, Gerhard von
Rath.
I think he's gone on, but he was
the, and probably still is recognized as the
outstanding Old Testament scholar.
When you begin to get into these men,
they refer to each other and quote from
each other's books, and so you find that
there's a fraternity of German scholarship, and they'll
sometimes invoke the names of others who are
American or English, whose writings were also directed
along the same lines of inquiry.
Just once in a while, I'll stop and
I'll just read you a footnote where they
begin to cite their sources, and you'll be
astonished how painstaking and exacting their work is.
Maybe that's the genius of German scholarship, is
a mental stamina, mental and spiritual, to explore
something thoroughly right through to the root.
And their Hebraists, their knowledge of Hebrew as
Germans exceeds that probably of most Jews.
And so their thorough in their background, their
knowledge of the original languages and so on,
is a great blessing for us.
So Lord, we just ask your blessing again,
right from the beginning as we get into
the insight and the study of this precious
scholar, and to stir us up, my God,
in areas that we would not otherwise have
considered.
Bless this and make it fruitful for us,
and we thank you for the work, the
life's labor, the labor of love of men
who poured themselves out in that kind of
labor, Lord, that is so exhaustive, that is
so innovating, more than anything that we could
know physically.
They have wrestled with the deep things of
God, and we're grateful, my God, for their
contribution.
Help us now to be the beneficiaries by
your Spirit as we look into this in
Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, when we first mentioned the Prophetical School
in the newsletter, we had no title.
And usually we don't ever give a title,
because we don't ourselves know what it is
that the Lord wants us to take up
when we begin.
But since the newsletter has gone out, in
the weeks that followed, the Lord began to
quicken Jeremiah.
We found ourselves increasingly aligned with Jeremiah, who
is the prophet of doom, but also the
prophet of restoration.
The two great prophets who announced judgment for
Israel, maybe three, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, are
also the prophets of restoration.
So it's a remarkable thing that the same
ones who did not shrink from the painful
requirement of having to announce impending doom, tragedy,
devastation, expulsion for Israel, much against the protest
and the opposition of the people of their
own generation, was an unwelcome message, were the
ones also to whom God gave the privilege
of speaking of an eventual and final hope
of restoration and return.
And this is also our own burden and
call.
I hope you don't think me dramatic in
any way, but personally, I'm persona non grata,
that means unwelcomed in Israel, by the Jewish
believers, by the Messianic fellowships, because of a
message that we bear, that is as unwelcome
now, in the ears of this generation, as
the message of Jeremiah and Ezekiel were to
their generation, which is to say, the necessity
for a soon coming devastation, probably eventuating in
an expulsion from the land, a serious final
chastisement or judgment of God for Israel, out
of which a remnant will be sifted, who
will be restored to the land and to
God as the redeemed of the Lord, and
open the establishment of the kingdom of God
and the law going forth out of Zion,
the word of the Lord, out of Jerusalem,
that will affect all nations.
This is the remarkable concluding drama of all
the ages, is Israel's final restoration after a
last day's time of the most serious tribulation
that Israel has ever experienced in its entire
history, which would include even the recent Nazi
Holocaust.
So we are speaking already, freely, as much
as opportunity is given and the Lord prompts
us, without stinting that there is a coming
devastation for Israel.
Can you imagine how that would fall on
the ears of those who have established their
life there since 1948, in the hope that
this is the completion and the fulfillment that
would have long been hoped for, a national
homeland, or the fulfillment of prophecy for the
establishment of a nation.
And I myself had once subscribed to that
view, that over the more recent years, the
Lord, by a process of things, not unlike
the process by which he brought Jeremiah and
other of his prophets into a growing awareness
of judgment, he's done the same for us,
until I see now and I believe without
any hesitation that there must come these final
judgments and chastisements, even to the possible destruction
of the present state of Israel.
It will no longer exist as a political
entity.
And one thing that I'm required to make
clear to those who will even allow us
to share this, is that we need to
distinguish between the state of Israel and Israel
as a nation, because the nation will never
be done in, will never lose its reality.
But the state may well be something that
will have to go in the course of
God's judgment.
So this is a painful message.
Any message on judgment is painful.
And you can imagine why people stop their
fingers in their ears and gnash their teeth
upon those who bear it.
Because invariably, the man is the message.
People cannot disassociate the message from the man.
And if they reject the message, they must
necessarily reject the man who brought it.
In fact, the way to reject the message
is to reject the man, is to find
some disqualification in the man that would discredit
the word, and therefore absolve those who hear
the word from any obligation to believe it
to be the word of the Lord.
So a prophet is subject to rejection, particularly
if he bears the word of judgment.
And so judgment is not only coming to
Israel, it comes to the house of God
first, it's coming to all nations.
So whoever are the prophetic bearers of the
word in those nations will necessarily experience a
degree of rejection from within their own nation,
and especially from the religious structure within that
nation who wants to preserve itself as a
self-perpetuating entity.
Nobody wants to consider a judgment that might
include themselves and bring an end to their
own involvement, their own work, their own purposes.
In fact, the cry that I've heard most
frequently from men in Israel when they hear
what I'm about is, well, what about our
ministry?
It's as if, well, too bad about the
nation, what about our ministry?
This can't be solved because God has brought
us and secretly, if not overtly, they believe
that their ministry is the key to Israel's
redemption.
So these, to bring a word of judgment,
how shall I say it, is an ultimate,
final, total kind of responsibility that will grind
most men to powder.
Most Christians have not the moral, spiritual stamina
to bear the responsibility of bringing such a
word.
But what we're talking about is not only
men who are called to bear it, but
a church that is called to bear it.
Because the church that is true church has
of necessity a prophetic constituency.
The church is intended by God itself to
be a prophetic entity and to be in
the nation the voice of God of things
that pertain to that nation's future and also
how the nation must understand its own history
as it affects its future.
For nations are also under the judgment of
God for the same reasons that Israel is
under the judgment of God.
So the church itself is called to a
certain kind of stature, certain kind of growth.
And so I'm really appreciating this scholar's attention
to the call of a prophet and some
of the things that pertain to the prophetic
call.
And he talks about this call, and we
can examine the call that came to Isaiah
in Isaiah 6, where he cried out, Woe
is me, I am undone.
He saw the Lord high and lifted up.
And who shall go for us?
Remember that?
Send me.
Jeremiah's call.
And often the reaction of the prophets is,
who am I that you should send me?
Or I'm a child, I cannot speak.
Moses made that same excuse.
So there's something about the call of the
prophet that needs to be examined and how
it comes, in God's own time, having nothing
to do, that we can observe, with the
man's necessary qualification.
In fact, his qualification might be his disqualification,
as Moses was 40 years in exile, having
murdered an Egyptian in some attempt, humanly or
religiously, to affect something for his own people.
So God never argued with Moses when he
said, who am I that I should be
sent?
But once the call comes, something is set
in motion of a radical kind that affects
everything for the man himself.
The scholar says, this created a totally new
situation for the man concerned.
It removed these men from all their previous
mode of life for at least a considerable
time.
It brings about a whole radical alteration in
the life of the man who's called.
Whether it's just for an immediate task, like
Amos had certain things to proclaim, and then
we don't hear more about him as prophet,
but in Jeremiah the call was not just
for a task, the call was for a
lifetime.
The call was for the man entire being
for all his life, beyond just the task
itself.
And it changes the whole mode of that
man's life.
From the very beginning, not only the prophet's
lips, but also their whole lives were conscripted
for special service.
Because it's not just a voice that God
is wanting to employ, but it's the whole
man, the whole life of the man.
Because the man is so identified with his
message, that God has got to invest himself
in preparing that vessel in every way.
So the called man is subject to a
kind of refining and chastisement himself.
How does he speak about the judgments of
God abstractly or academically if he has not
first himself in some measure experienced personally God's
judgment and chastisement for himself?
You see what I mean?
So to be called to bear the message
of judgment is to be made a candidate
for judgment for yourself.
And no wonder that men shrink from the
call.
And as we'll see with Jeremiah, what makes
Jeremiah extraordinary, he's the one prophet who gives
us biographical details about himself and his response
to his call and his complaint against God
for the call, like as if he were
seduced.
That's the actual word that he uses and
we'll look at it maybe today or tomorrow.
So it's a strenuous call, all demanding, and
in fact you can almost sense that the
prophet is free to reject it.
It can't be conscripted where a man would
come kicking and against his will.
But there's a surrender of will and life
to the totality of that call.
He goes on to say that the complete
absence of any transitional stage between the two
conditions is a special characteristic of the situation.
There's no transition.
There's no graduating.
There's no progressive thing.
It's a radical what the man was before
the call, what the man is since the
call, and as a rule, as I've said
before, what he was before is not a
qualification.
God did not choose him because he had
an academic background or a theological degree.
God chose him because God will choose whom
he will choose.
So neither previous faith nor any other personal
endowment has the slightest part to play in
preparing a man who was called to stand
before Jehovah, Yahweh, for his vocation.
I think this is important because there's a
lot of romanticization about prophetic calling.
This is one of the corruptive things taking
place now, I believe, in the charismatic realm,
is to romanticize the prophetic call as if
these men have some special attribute or some
mystique or something that would uniquely set them
off from other men of flesh and blood.
God is quite explicit in this scripture to
say that these men are flesh and blood
like as we.
That's very important because if these men are
extraordinary in some mystical way or have some
previous qualification that other men do not have,
then what shall we hope for in a
church that is made up of flesh and
blood men?
You see what I mean?
But there's something in man that likes to
romanticize, especially the prophetic call.
And men who have taken this identification for
themselves, who have not received the call that
Isaiah or Jeremiah or others have but think
they have in their romantic imagining, are the
men most likely to be bizarre in their
dress, in their personalities.
They run off to Israel, they carry placards,
they announce the day of doom, they wear
long beards.
There's something about the true prophet that is
remarkably un-extraordinary, quite ordinary.
They are flesh and blood men like as
we.
In fact, if there's something extraordinary, I would
be suspicious that this is not a man
authentically called, but one affecting a prophetic demeanor
that he thinks is appropriate and wants everyone
to know that he in fact has it.
Probably we would be more safe to say
that the man who is wearing a three
button, what do you call it?
Three piece suit is more likely to be
a candidate for the prophet than a man
who is wearing a camel's hair garment.
Unless the Lord has explicitly, as with John
the Baptist, called him to that.
As a rule, the prophetic man is a
man, is an ordinary man, and therefore he's
subject to all of the liability, failure, sin
of all men.
And that must necessarily be so, because he's
addressing all men and cannot speak to them
from the place of some assumed spiritual superiority,
but he's identified with them in their sin.
And probably one of the greatest statements of
that is Daniel in chapter nine of his
book, where he cries out to God and
says, we have sinned against you.
There's no way that Daniel disassociates himself from
Israel.
There's a complete identification with the sins of
his people.
And later on when the angel comes to
him as a messenger, your prayer was heard
from the very first.
I was delayed for three weeks because of
some commotion in the heavenlies from the prince
of Greece, the powers of the air, but
your prayer was heard from the first.
You're beloved of God.
And I would suggest that the reason is
that God loved when the prophet identified himself
with the sins of the people.
He may not be a conspicuous sinner, but
he knows himself to be a man and
capable of all of the shortcoming and the
failure of his own nation.
And that is a necessary qualification if he's
going to address the nation.
So these are ordinary men called to an
extraordinary call.
And the call itself, the nature of being
a prophet, changes a man from ordinary to
extraordinary.
And we're going to go into that this
morning.
And what a wonderful encouragement, therefore, for the
church.
The church is ordinary.
It's too ordinary.
It needs to be extraordinary.
And when it will perceive its own prophetic
call corporately as the church and embrace it
willingly and suffer the chastisements and the refinements
of God to attain to it, it will
become the extraordinary witness that God intended the
church to be.
The church that is not prophetic, in my
opinion, is ipso facto not a church.
It's an institution.
It's a cultural embellishment.
It's something that provides services and benefits.
But church, in the sense of God's intention,
must necessarily be a prophetic and apostolic entity.
And it may well be that if it's
not prophetic first, neither can it be apostolic,
because the church is built on the foundation
of the prophets and the apostles.
But when God says prophets and, he puts
prophetic before apostolic.
And I think that there's a logic to
that, that the prophetic thing must precede the
apostolic.
Maybe we'll talk about that later.
But if we're not prophetic, neither can we
be apostolic.
But the church that is the church is
both.
But it needs first to be prophetic before
it can be apostolic.
So what does that mean?
What does it mean to be prophetic?
If we have romanticized that word and embellished
it and given it meanings that God never
intended or see it in a way that
we expect extraordinary characters, then the church is
deceived about its own call and its own
identity.
The meaning of that word is critical.
What does it mean to be prophetic?
And the way we'll understand it is by
examining those men historically who were it, who
have received this call, and their call has
been legitimized or vindicated by history.
Their words have come true.
Their books have spoken.
They have shown the validity of their call.
And so in going back into their life
and their call, we can learn something about
what God intends biblically as the meaning of
prophetic.
And probably if we look into it, those
things that are being celebrated today as prophetic,
that are questionable, have very little biblical justification
or explanation because they have not gone into
the scripture.
They have not read and examined the work
of men who have given their lives to
this study.
And therefore they can go off on their
own tangents and their own fanciful imaginings of
what they think prophetic to be.
Usually if it's bizarre, if it's extraordinary, if
it's way out, if it's outlandish, people think
that to be prophetic.
Or if it has a degree of prediction
or can tell you something about your background.
We're not talking about those things.
We're talking about an office, not a gift,
not the gift of prophecy.
We're talking about prophetic calling as an office.
What that has meant historically, what God intends
it to mean presently.
People talk about Old Testament prophets and New
Testament prophets, and maybe there is a New
Testament prophet in some sense.
But I think ironically as we come to
the end of the age, if there's any
glaring need, it's for prophets of the older
kind, the prophets of the Old Testament kind
who brought the oracles of God.
What we need is not fortune tellers or
men who can tell us that we have
this name or that background or we have
this need, but what is the heart and
mind of God for this hour in the
last days.
That's the oracle of God.
The message that comes from the throne of
God as a sent word to a sent
man is what we need.
So I wouldn't want to dismiss it by
saying that was Old Testament.
That's classic, pervading through all generations, and we
have as much a need for oracular, true
prophetic statements that can only come through true
men at the end of the age as
we needed it at the commencement.
In fact, the whole disjuncture between Old Testament
and New Testament is itself false and has
given us an erroneous picture of the faith.
That could be a good subject for one
of our evening get-togethers about the unbroken
continuity of the one faith from the beginning
as against the idea that the church is
a new phenomenon that began on the day
of Pentecost and that the Old Testament is
relegated to the dustbin and that was the
God of judgment and wrath and now we
have the God of mercy and kindness and
like there's a rupture between old and new.
That's not the faith, that's not God.
And one of our prophetic tasks is to
restore to the church the sense of the
faith as an unbroken continuum from the beginning
to the end.
So neither previous faith nor any other personal
endowment had the slightest part to play in
preparing a man who was called to stand
before Yahweh for his vocation and we need
to make a real point out of that.
It's entirely the chosenness of God.
Amos was a vine dresser and a herdsman.
He had no qualification.
Isaiah and Jeremiah were priests but that was
not the qualification.
That just happened to be their ancestral and
hereditary calling.
It gave them access and privy to certain
things at the heart of their current Judaism
but it was not the basis for their
call.
The basis for the call is the sovereignty
of God.
Maybe we need to know who had that
call or have resisted that call or have
not recognized that call because we say to
ourselves who are we that we should be
called?
I don't have the qualification.
Well, there is no qualification other than the
sovereign call of God himself.
The real question is if it has pleased
God to choose you, are you pleased to
accept it, knowing that prophetic calling is a
synonym for suffering?
And Gerhard von Raad uses the phrase the
martyrdom of Jeremiah.
The fact of the matter is that we
don't know how Jeremiah died.
He's not talking about what was Jeremiah's final
demise in Egypt.
That's lost to history.
We don't know.
What he's saying is the whole life of
the man was a martyrdom because once you're
called and God has you in his grip
and you've got to speak to things that
are unpleasant for men to hear and that
they're quick to reject, it's equally unpleasant for
you.
Who likes rejection?
It's a martyrdom.
And so it may well be that historically
there have been men who have rejected the
call.
We don't hear about them because they're not
left behind a testimony.
But I think this scholar talks about the
freedom of the prophet.
Not only freedom in accepting the call, but
freedom in continuing in the call.
That every word that God subsequently gives, he's
free to hear or to reject or to
withhold from proclamation.
That is to say the prophet is always
in a continual state of tension, of decision,
freely chosen to act out what God has
given him to speak.
He can withhold it, he can swallow it
down, he can spit it out, he can
run from it, or he can express it.
And even how he expresses it, there's a
great element of freedom of choice in the
manner of the expression when he does express
it, which is to say that nothing gives
us a more profound understanding of the issue
of freedom in the life of a believer
than as we see it brought into a
particular focus in the call of a prophet.
And so if we apply that to the
Church, nothing more enhances the Church than its
freedom in accepting and rejecting its own call
and its own obediences to God over a
course of time.
And freedom is the name of the game.
Freedom is the making or the breaking.
Freedom to obey or to reject is the
foundation for personality, for humanity, for distinction as
a person.
If you have no choice in the matter
and you're just rubber stamping and you're being
processed out of an assembly line, there's nothing
there either for your own edification and ultimate
glory or for God's.
Freedom is a cardinal thing.
It's at the heart of propheticness and therefore
at the heart of prophetic Church itself.
So we'll have a better understanding of the
Church's own call and the thing that will
bring it to its own maturity as we
explore the men who are the forerunners and
are the thing in themselves.
So we have to disabuse ourselves of all
romantic notions of what we think propheticness is.
It may well be ironically that men who
are trying to affect the becoming prophets are
opposing authentic calls by trying themselves in some
glamorous, eye-appealing, attention-getting way, the thing
to which they're called, if they would only
shut up and let go and not bring
their own design to bear and let the
Lord bring forth the fulfillment of his own
call.
That's true apostolically as well.
Men opposing their own calling in their ignorance
because they've not given adequate study to the
way in which God calls and establishes his
true servants.
So neither previous faith nor any other personal
endowment had the slightest part to play in
preparing a man who was called to stand
before Jehovah for his vocation.
He might by nature be a lover of
peace, yet it might be laid upon him
to threaten and reprove.
Isn't that remarkable?
That the man by his natural temperament has
a disposition for those things that are peaceful.
He would have loved to have brought that
kind of message.
But no, God controversed his natural tendency and
calls that same man who has an affinity
for peace to bring the jarring, painful, and
discordant message of judgment.
And just the reverse might be true.
He'll take some guy who's hard-nosed and
would love to take out the sword and
give it free play and call that man
to be like a mouse and to speak
the kinds of things that don't thrill his
own soul at all.
I would expect that that, as a rule,
would be God's procedure.
He'll not be ruled by a man's natural
disposition, but he will controvert it, all the
more to show that he's the one who
both calls and shapes and forms the messenger.
He might employ a natural propensity, but he's
not going to be ruled by it.
And Jeremiah was just such a one.
I would suspect when you read about him
and his complaint against God that if he
had his choice in the matter, he would
never have been an instrument to proclaim a
message of doom, of impending judgment.
Nevertheless, God called him, and he was required
again and again in freedom to speak it.
Remember in Ezekiel 37, when God calls Ezekiel
to speak to these dry bones that they
might live, it's not only Ezekiel's faith in
question whether those bones can live.
In fact, he says, when the Lord said,
Son of man, can these bones live?
And Ezekiel said, Lord, thou knowest.
It's not only that he perhaps had not
the faith to believe for it, but there's
a good question whether he desired it.
Maybe he was of a heart that Israel
got what it deserved.
It deserved its death.
They should not be restored from it.
And he didn't want to have part in
seeing them restored.
Can you think of another prophet who exhibited
exactly that?
Jonah.
He didn't want Nineveh to come to repentance.
It bugged him.
He even had a controversy with God that
why should they?
I mean, they were horrific, and they had
been the enemies of Israel.
He didn't want to be employed for their
restoration.
So talk about an illustration of the freedom
of a prophet to balk from against the
very call of God, and God's employment of
a man contrary to his own natural aptitude
and disposition can be seen in instances like
that.
So, so deep is the gulf which separates
the prophets from their past that none of
their previous social relationships are carried over into
the new way of life.
And Amos says, I was a herdsman, a
dresser of sycamore trees, but Yahweh took me
from following the flock and said to me,
go prophesy against my people Israel.
Notice the word, go prophesy against my people
Israel.
What a word.
We wouldn't have mind going to prophesy for
Israel, bring them a word of encouragement that
the Lord has seen their suffering and seen
their distress, and now benefit is going to
come and prosper, and now they will, no,
prophesy against.
When Isaiah got his call, seeing the Lord
high and lifted up, he said, who shall
go for, the Lord said, who shall go
for us?
And Isaiah said, send me.
And what was the message that were to
be sent?
Speak, and so that their ears can be
stopped and their hearts hardened that they should
not believe.
Your word is not going to bring life
and restoration, your word is going to bring
judgment, but speak it.
No wonder God had to say, who shall
go for us?
Who wants that?
We want to go when it's gratifying, we
want to go when men will be pleased
and benefited and blessed and slap us on
the back and say, oh brother, I so
appreciated the word that you brought, it was
life for me.
But to have people shun you and turn
from you as you speak despicable things is
quite something else.
But I would say that God does not
have the prophet until he is willing to
speak whatever the Lord gives, whether it's a
word that will bring judgment or a word
that will bring blessing, because he's brought to
a place where he's indifferent to whether he's
going to experience rejection or approval.
Can you imagine what kind of a place
that is?
How many of us have come to that
place?
And by what process shall we be brought
to it?
Because we're talking about the very foundations, the
pit and the marrow of being a person.
It's human, it's natural, it's registered in our
corpuscles, in the very knit of our humanity
to desire the approval of men.
To live without that and to suffer rejection
has got to wither you and strike at
the very foundations of your own identity, your
own self-consciousness, your own confidence.
It can destroy you if you need to
be applauded and approved by men, as most
human beings do.
It's a rare person who can live without
that approval and live without coming apart at
the seams and all the while being haunted
by the thought that maybe I'm wrong, maybe
they're right, maybe this is not God's word,
maybe I'm being too harsh, maybe they're right,
that I am loveless and I am cruel
and vindictive and enjoined.
That kind of a doubt is always operative
and the prophet has got to eat that.
So he's a man and he'll suffer doubt
even about his own calling and his own
obedience.
And that's what Van Ryd means when he
said Jeremiah, the martyrdom of Jeremiah.
It's a continual dying.
So go prophesy against my people.
This was more than simply a new profession,
it was a totally new way of life
to the extent that a call meant relinquishing
normal social life and all the social and
economic securities which this offered and changing over
instead to a condition where a man had
nothing to depend on or as we may
put it, to a condition of dependence upon
Jehovah or Yahweh and upon that security alone.
So if there's anyone who is completely dependent
upon God, it's the prophetic man because he
cannot look to man, he cannot look to
his own nation, he can't even look to
his own family, he can't even look to
his own friends because as Jesus said, he's
not without honor except in his own home
and his own country.
The place where he needs it most is
the place where he'll get it least.
Someone said that I can take an insult
from someone on the street, but when my
own wife says the same thing, I'm shattered.
Or my own friend or my closest associate,
but that's exactly where the prophet is likely
to experience rejection and misunderstanding.
Jesus did not obtain that in Nazareth and
we're not likely to obtain it in the
places where we are.
So the prophet is cast upon God, not
just for the receiving of the word that
he's called to proclaim, but for the very
sustenance of his own life, that he'll not
sink in despondency and doubt, but that the
Lord is his sustainer.
Jeremiah said in chapter 15, verse 17 of
his book, because thy hand is upon me,
I sit alone.
Talk about freedom.
If you know that, are you still willing
to be called?
All of us who want to be prophets?
If you know that it's going to mean
exclusion, being solitary, alone, rejected.
Because your hand is upon me, I sit
alone.
Are we still willing for that call?
Because I do not sit blithely in the
company of the merrymakers.
Because your hand is upon me, I sit
alone.
It's even being alone when you're in company.
Everybody else is a merrymaker and they're having
a blast, and it's amen and hallelujah, and
they're enjoying the Lord, and you're sitting like
a lump.
You simply are not able to enter into
their merriment.
Either it's false, it's superficial, it's carnal.
Well, I'll give you a recent example from
this trip from which I've just returned, a
meeting in Pennsylvania, and I had to sit
through all the choruses, and what an anguish.
And every chorus was about Israel, and they
were banging their tambourines.
The pastor and his wife were in the
worship team, and every chorus was about Israel.
And away go Israel, and finally when I
got up I said, there's something foundationally wrong
here.
I've realized something tonight in hearing you that
I've never understood before, and this is it.
That there's something flagrantly wrong in singing these
choruses of Israel as if their restoration has
already been effected, and as if there's not
a trial and a time of unspeakable trouble
that is yet to be experienced.
How do we sing these merry choruses as
if it's already taken, done?
There's an unreality there to celebrate something before
the time.
It's a false celebration.
Well, they didn't know that there was a
chastisement that is yet future.
They thought it's all past.
I know it, and so I'm sitting there
and listening to the songs of merriment and
celebration that I know is premature to sound.
And then when I got up, I expressed
that there's something discordant here.
There's something not right about singing choruses of
celebration as if Israel is already through what
is yet future for it.
There's an unreality, and when there's an unreality
with regard to Israel, there's a pervasive unreality
with regard to everything.
Well, we were supposed to go out for
coffee with the pastor and his wife after
that service, and he came up to me
and he said, Otter, please forgive us, but
my wife is not feeling well and will
not be going out with you.
You better believe she was not feeling well.
That woman was undone.
And I called the next day for one
reason or another, and the man was so
cursed and short and, yeah, not even a
gracious word of thanks, Otter.
You can see already that something was setting
in, the recoil from the unwelcomed word that
came, because I went on from that beginning
to set forth the kinds of things that
Israel must necessarily experience as judgment that were
yet future.
And it was a painful contradiction of all
that they understood and had been led to
believe in one night, a complete, but my
point is this, that I was sitting in
the company of the merrymakers, but I was
all alone, in the agitation of my own
soul and the discomfort, to the point of
anguish, of a pain that you cannot describe,
because it's like a conflict between realities.
And either you are insane and they're right,
or they are all wrong and you're the
only one who knows it and the only
one in a position to correct it.
Got the picture?
And I would suspect that that was only
a faint first installment of what we can
expect more and more as we come into
these issues at the end of the age
more jarringly.
Before I had left for this trip, I
had made an arrangement to speak at a
Messianic congregation in Pittsburgh only a short distance
from this meeting that I'm describing in Pennsylvania,
but the brother canceled it even before I
left for the trip.
There was a conflict of schedules or the
summer and people would not be there.
He probably has heard that odd, disbearing kind
of word that might ruffle his congregation.
So I swallowed it down.
He was a dear man.
I knew him in Minneapolis and he loved
my word when others, other oxen were being
gored.
It's one thing to love the prophetic man
when he gores somebody else's ox, but when
he begins to gore your ox, that's another
story.
Somebody asked me about a brother whom we
both know.
He heard rumor that the relationship has been,
you know, I had myself to bring a
word in that brother's congregation of a kind
that after I finished, he came up and
said, this was the word of the Lord
for the hot church.
But when I got home, there was a
three page or five page letter of condemnation
from the same man over that same word.
And there was a rupture from that time
to this day.
There was a word that I had to
bring from a brother with whom I had
been in the closest relationship.
We had lived together as immigrants in Israel
and in New Jersey and so on.
And who loved, he was the first one
to identify for me my prophetic calling.
It was the same brother as we came
back from Israel and traveled in the States
and had meetings here and there.
Thanks, Dan.
That he said, aren't you realize that yours
is a prophetic calling?
Really?
Well, I'm just speaking what the Lord gives
me.
He was the first one to identify it.
But when it came to his fellowship years
later, and I had to act in that
calling in a word that was against him
and his interest, it was another story.
There are very few men who have the
magnanimity to receive the prophetic word for themselves
when it gores their own ox, when it
stabs their own interest.
That would be a man of God.
And if I could just follow this out
to the final logic, there have been other
relationships that have been frayed and broken for
this very self-same thing.
Simon was with me, Naomi's husband, when I
had to deliver a word like this with
my own publisher, who's a prophetic man, probably
the most celebrated prophetic man in the nation
today would not be an exaggeration.
But when I had to speak a word
that gored his ox, that was the beginning
of the end of our relationship.
Now, how is it that a man who
had celebrated me as being personally one of
the greatest, if not most significant influence in
his own life, and acknowledges me in that
office and call, should reject the word that
comes through me when it would touch his
interest?
But he did.
Why didn't he more rather say, well, art
has been consistently faithful in bringing the word
of the Lord without let or hindrance, no
matter which way the chips fell.
And I should have a first obligation to
consider that this is the Lord's word for
us.
How painful, though, it is.
And that's not the way that I see
us.
But I respect art.
I know its history.
I have at least an obligation to consider
that.
An instant rejection with great vehemence that persists
to this very day.
The mayor was even going to bring me
up on Matthew 18 charges for offending the
body of Christ.
And this is a prophetic man.
So this thing about sitting alone is no
small thing.
In fact, I said to this man, how
is it that I'm not personally invited to
these prophetic conferences when you prophetic men get
together?
Because I was operating in this call long
before you ever began.
And he turned with complete candor and said,
well, Artie said, the reason you're not invited
is that you're not an in-house prophet.
Can you get that?
Do you know what an in-house prophet
is?
You're not one of the boys.
You can't be counted to speak the kinds
of things that we want to hear.
You're liable to say something that ruffles people
or disturbs them.
And in fact, not long after I spoke
at another church in that area where we
had a friendship with this pastor and the
Lord just gave me a way of seeing
things that night and that service, the worship
of it.
And I spoke out of Job and about
Job's comforters.
And I said to these people, God condemned
Job's comforters to pray for them, for the
wrath of God was against them because they
had not spoken as Job had spoken.
But what they did speak is among the
most eloquent, deep spiritual insight that's to be
found in all the Holy Writ.
And you don't even begin to approach it.
And that was the end of my talk.
The man's wife came up to me that
night as we were putting away our books.
Reggie was with me.
And we felt like two turds.
There's not a word to describe how you
feel when you have upset the apple cart
and have had to speak a word that
for which you are instantly shunned, however long
your friendship had been.
That was it.
And there's a coolness.
People just turn their shoulders from you.
But the pastor's wife, whom I had observed
over the years as a basically unhappy woman,
Gray, came and said, thank you, Art.
That was reality.
When you spoke tonight, she said, what's reality?
She was the only one who came over
to acknowledge it, was the woman who had
been suffering a long distress for the want
of it in her own husband and in
his fellowship.
So don't pass this by quickly.
Jeremiah said, I'm a lonely man in the
crowd.
And it's not just a crowd.
It's a crowd making merry, having a blast,
enjoying the Lord, amens and hallelujahs.
And you're the only one who somehow cannot
rejoice with them.
And you have to bear that strangeness.
And if you have to speak out of
that strangeness, you're going to sound a discordant
note, where either they're going to break and
say, this was the word of truth and
we were in error, living in a fool's
paradise, sounding things, amens and hallelujahs, that were
unwarranted, or you're a freako and you need
to be rejected.
One of the two, most likely to be
the latter.
Only in one instance that I can remember
where I had to bring an abrupt and
discordant alternative to what was going on, is
that people hesitate for a moment and then
they broke before the Lord and said, that
was the word of truth, that what you
spoke was the description of the truth of
our situation.
Amen.
Who's, which one?
Frankie.
Frankie?
And you'll never know with confidence or with
any absoluteness, because you might very well miss
it.
And it's that tension that is martyrdom, that's
part of the suffering, that however much you
believe that it's the Lord, both the word
and the expression, you have always to allow
for the possibility that it might not be,
that you've missed it.
So for example, I just got in, I
wrote to the brother in Lithuania.
I was sensing as we went on that
he was increasingly unhappy with the presentations.
I spoke five times.
And so I asked him on the internet
recently, what was your evaluation now that those
days are past?
Well, frankly, we were disappointed.
They published the book Spirit of Truth in
Lithuanian and he thought I was going to
speak on the subject of the Spirit of
Truth.
It would have served the purposes of their
fellowship to have had a word of that
kind.
Instead, all five messages were about the issue
of Israel, her last days chastisement, her movement
through the nations, her movement through Lithuania, because
Lithuania and Poland, two countries where I were
on that trip, are the most historically anti
-Semitic nations of Europe.
So this is a word that had to
go into Lithuania and the church of Lithuania,
which is where I was, 1400 people every
night.
And that the pastor himself, who was my
interpreter, copped out by the third night.
He couldn't even bring himself to read the
interpreter because his heart was not in it.
It was not a kind of message that
he was expecting or wanted.
So I have to ask myself the question,
did I miss it?
I left men disappointed.
Or are they disappointed because they received something
that didn't serve their purposes, they would have
desired it, but nevertheless was a word that
God wanted, and there'll not be another occasion
when it will come.
And I can't tell you for sure, you
know, which of the two.
You can believe that I was praying through
those days and believing for the Lord and
praying with the brother who was traveling with
me, and spoke on each occasion what I
felt was quickened in my spirit.
But it was universally on one subject only,
Israel, her last day's chastisement, the role of
the church as Israel is again in flight
in the necessity for refuge and escape from
persecution and Israel's restoration and the millennial blessing
that will flow to all nations.
It was not the word that they wanted.
So in answer to your question, there's never
a final certitude, never a final confidence, always
the prospect of having missed the Lord and
being responsible.
Freedom is responsibility and to know you're not
going to get a second crack at this.
This is once and for all.
But I'll tell you what, I would be
much more fearful today if I had spoken
on the subject of the spirit of truth
and blessed them out of their socks.
And then later on had the haunting thought,
however blessed they were, they missed a one
occasion that will not come again to speak
a perception of the issue of Israel in
the last days that very few men are
bearing and that they're not likely to hear.
And that Lithuania, like all nations, is scheduled
for the movement of Jews through it with
a final historic opportunity to redeem all of
the past and the mistreatment of Jews in
Lithuania by the mercy that the nation would
extend in one final time in Israel's last
time of affliction.
I would much rather err on the side
of believing that was the word of the
Lord than to have spoken the spirit of
truth.
But there's always the tension.
And I don't know that it's a tension
that any other calling in God experiences.
I don't think that a teacher, pastor, or
evangelist has ever to groan and agonize through
that kind of weight of responsibility that a
prophetic man does, who's not just bringing a
cutesy word but the oracles of God.
It has on top of that the frustration
of bringing it through an interpreter in another
language where the interpreter is not one with
you in the spirit over that word.
That's another agony, another suffering.
So he says rightly, flesh and blood can
only be forced into such a service.
At all events the prophets themselves felt that
they had been compelled by stronger will than
theirs.
The early prophets only rarely mentioned these matters.
The first to break the silence is Jeremiah.
One thing that's distinctive about Jeremiah is he's
biographical.
He talks about his calling, he talks about
the call of God, and he talks about
his response to it as a complaint.
And that's in the chapter 20 in verse
7, if anybody wants to turn to that,
where he complains to God, Thou didst deceive
me and I let myself be deceived.
By the way, please read the book of
Jeremiah, particularly the first 25 chapters.
And also look again at the last chapters
of Deuteronomy, 28-32, because Jeremiah was Deuteronomic
in his whole understanding of the faith.
His whole understanding.
He called Israel to repentance on the basis
of Deuteronomy.
He saw Israel's coming judgment on the basis
of what was written in Deuteronomy.
So we need to know what is the
background of the prophet's understanding.
What enables him to interpret and understand the
crisis of his nation and to foresee that
there's going to be judgment?
It's not because the Lord has necessarily told
him in detail.
It's something that grows in the understanding of
the man himself theologically.
Which, by the way, is how I have
come to my own understanding of Israel's coming
judgments.
I have heard the voice of the Lord.
The Lord has given me expressed things in
times past.
But this most profound message that we're now
bearing, which is the greatest responsibility that we
have ever had, and there's not going to
be a message that will exceed it, did
not come through revelation.
In the sense that the Lord wakened me
at night, or there was a presence in
the room, or the room was filled with
light, or the Lord filled my soul with
the word.
It was a growing perception theologically of a
truth and a realization of what was ahead
for Israel in the light of scripture.
And that is foundationally true for the prophets
of God.
The Lord is not just stamping upon them
some message outside of their own comprehension, but
rather these are men who have a theological
grasp.
They grow into something and then when the
word of the Lord comes, it's in perfect
keeping with what they have already come to
understand.
It's not in opposition.
So that these prophets are theologically minded, they're
biblically based.
The thing that distinguishes them is that they
interpret the present crisis of the nation and
its future in the light of the past
according to the word.
It's not just some mystical process where they
are just neutral instruments waiting for a flash
of revelation and then they speak it.
Revelations come, thus sayeth the Lord comes, but
there's also the preparation of the man in
his own understanding.
He's not a mindless non-entity.
He's a man immersed in the word of
God, particularly when God has spoken of judgment
and Deuteronomy is foundational.
And then he sees the application for the
nation and warns them on the basis of
their own scripture.
Now on this trip I was in Warsaw,
Poland, where the Jewish community was, there was
a greater loss of Jewish life in Poland
than any other nation in Europe.
Of the six million Jews that were exterminated,
a half of them came from Poland alone.
And the one uprising against the Nazis in
which Jews were involved was the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising.
The church where I spoke was built on
the ruins, so to speak, of the Warsaw
Ghetto as well, geographically in that spot.
And the pastor took me at my request
to the Jewish cemetery and some of the
monuments, there were people who died at that
Warsaw Ghetto, but also all the history of
the Jewish community in Warsaw, remarkable tombs that
had not been destroyed, tombstones.
And when I came out, there was a
young man sitting on a bench by the
entrance with earrings.
I can't remember, he had a nose ring,
but certainly he had a share of earrings,
curly hair, you know, he had a hairdo.
He was from Minneapolis.
He just graduated college, got a degree in
psychology.
And I said, and he's an Orthodox Jew
and he's going from there to Israel with
a Jewish group.
I said, you know what the Bible says
about Jews perforating their skin?
It's an abomination to the God of Israel.
All he said, that was olden times.
This is now another time.
This is modern times.
He could not see the connection between what
God said in times past with this present
time.
And that is basically the mindset and the
condition of men in general.
So for a prophet to bring a word
of impending judgment for the future to a
people who have lost all connection with the
past is not the least of the weight
of his problems.
How do you take the past and the
words of the past and cogently bring them
into the consciousness of a people who are
mindless about the past and think that there's
no correspondence as we are now required to
do?
And in the Holocaust book, which we have
published, what we're saying is that there's a
coming judgment in the light of what God
says in the past and that you're under
a covenantal obligation of curse.
The fact that you have lost all consciousness
of covenant as modern Jews does not absolve
you from the curses proclaimed in that covenant
to which your fathers gave agreement.
Imagine telling that to modern Jews.
We just got a letter a couple of
weeks ago from a leading Jewish dignitary from
a Bible society in Jerusalem to whom I
had sent the book.
And it was a devastating lambasting.
Your intellectual presumption, you're this, you're that, you're
a traitor, you're a, you're a, one insult
after another.
And he's the head of a Bible society,
but he could not understand the correspondence with
what was being said about Israel's future in
the light of what is spoken in the
Bible in the past.
So the prophet has the uncanny responsibility to
bring to the present consciousness of those whom
he's addressing, the reality, the abiding reality and
unchanging truth of God's spoken word as it
applies now or will apply.
That is to say the whole force of
culture and the spirit and the mentality of
that society is opposed to his perspective.
No wonder he's a freak.
No wonder he's out of joint.
No wonder he's out of time.
He's a man living in the past and
for him that past is viable because God
is the same yesterday, today and forever.
That word is unchanging and he lives in
that reality and has to address the people
who do not.
So his word has got to bridge the
disjuncture between past and present.
And so as to prepare people for an
impending future.
What a responsibility, what a weight, what kind
of a word must that be?
And yet he's a man.
And can there be such a word independent
of what the man himself is?
Is he some disembodied spirit?
Is he some instrumentality that God can bring
that word through him no matter what his
own condition is?
No.
The man and the message, inseparable.
The character and the speaking, inseparable.
And that's why God has got to deal
ruthlessly in the shaping of the character and
life of the man or men who will
bear such words for their generation.
That's why we're seeing all of the sleazy,
cheeky, dramatic, melodramatic, romantic play on prophets now
because it has nothing of the weight that
we're discussing, nothing of the death, nothing of
the pain, nothing of the anguish of soul,
nothing of the rejection, loneliness, the separation, the
misunderstanding that is intrinsic to this call.
It's all made glib, cheap, quick, attractive.
Everybody is it.
They're all prophets.
Go to their schools and you can become
it.
So I'm grateful for the opportunity.
I need this myself to be reminded.
And I'm grateful for Gehard von Rath, a
German, and his scholarship and his probing raises
these great questions that needs again to be
considered.
And I'll repeat it.
I hope you'll bear with it.
Not just for the individuals who have the
calling, but for the church that, if it's
to be church, must have this come into
its own consciousness, for it is its call.
It has got to be, in society, able
to bear rejection, able to be abrasive, able
to be in disjuncture with the contemporary culture,
with its mores, with the things that the
society and the world values.
It's in opposition.
It's in greater reality in the past than
it is with contemporary things.
It's not at home in the world.
It's more at home in the biblical world.
It's more comfortable with the Israel of old
and the Bible and the God of Deuteronomy
than it is with present culture and the
dream world and the movies and all the
junk that's going on.
It's out of joint now.
And it's calling people out of that unreality
to the reality that is timeless and established
by God and his word.
That's the church's responsibility and call.
So it's a good question of where our
reality is.
Where's our reality grounded?
Reality is the name of the game.
And to have your reality established in scripture,
particularly Old Testament scripture, Deuteronomy, the Psalms and
the Prophets, is to condemn yourself to being
a weirdo and to being out of joint
with the time and with the age.
And yet to say that that is the
definitive reality and that what purports to be
reality is false is not only to be
an offense but an insult and a threat
to the present establishment whether it's religious or
secular.
And then the sparks will begin to fly.
Then you're no longer just a harmless curio.
You're a threat to men who want to
retain this unreality as reality.
So we've got to be grounded in something
that's timeless and eternal against every opposition to
it.
In the culture, the air we breathe, the
whole nature of things.
So Jeremiah complains, thou didst deceive me, I
let myself be deceived.
In other words, I allowed you to give
me the call when I didn't realize what
it was going to mean in full.
And now that I'm seeing it, I'm complaining,
you deceived me, you didn't tell me the
whole thing from the beginning or I may
not have accepted it.
But which of us have ever been told
the whole thing from the beginning?
We wouldn't know how to understand it and
we would run from it.
And Amos said, the lion has roared, who
is not afraid?
The Lord Yahweh has spoken, who does not
prophesy?
That was an answer to a critic who
was holding Amos to task.
After all, he was only a herdsman and
one who dealt with trees.
And Amos is saying, how can I help
myself?
God has roared.
Who shall not prophesy?
How can I withhold this word, seeing that
God has roared, the spirit of God has
amplified something and this word must necessarily come.
The prophet refuses to allow his prophecy to
be called in question in this way.
What he says is in no sense the
product of reflection or personal resolve.
It is something which bears witness to itself.
And so it's not unlike some conscious reflex
action, which even the person concerned cannot himself
explain.
Was he able to follow that?
The prophet does not allow his prophecy to
be called into question.
In other words, what Amos is saying is,
this is not my word, the Lord has
roared.
I'm just expressing what God is sounding and
that word will validate itself.
It's not something that's borne out of my
subjectivity or my desire and that the prophet
is aware that the Lord is the author
of that statement and that it's not just
a matter of his own reflection.
It seems like a contradiction.
Two minutes ago I'm talking about the prophet
reflecting on the scriptures and growing in his
own theological understanding.
But when the word comes, he knows it's
the word of the Lord.
It's in keeping with what he has been
brought to understand, but it's not coming out
of that understanding.
He's not saying it because I've come to
this conclusion and now that the Lord has
given me liberty and that that word is
the Lord's word.
It's something which bears witness to itself and
not just a reflex action, which the person
cannot himself explain.
So the fact that Jehovah claimed not only
the prophet's lips, but also his eyes for
the service of his new task was of
prime importance.
The purpose of the vision was to impart
knowledge, not knowledge of higher worlds.
It was intended to open the prophet's eyes
to coming events which were not only of
a spiritual sort, but were also to be
concrete realities in the objective world.
So here, Van Raad is going from the
prophet who can hear the word of God
and speak it to the prophet who is
being schooled to see as God would have
him to see.
Not mystical apparitions or revelatory things of a
mystical kind, but the same realities that others
are looking at, but seeing them not as
others sees them, but as God sees them.
And that is true seeing and that's the
seeing that the prophet has had to communicate.
So what dear heart Van Raad is saying,
God not only has the prophet's ear, he
has the prophet's eyes.
The whole man, lock, stock and barrel is
the possession of the Lord.
He's not even allowed to see by his
own seeing.
And you'll notice that sometimes.
I've been told that a brother humorously has
said, you have the discernment of a fence
post.
How come you don't see what everybody else
is seeing?
I don't see it.
I'll only see it when the Lord gives
it for me to see.
And for that same man, God has given
me to see about him and his situation
and fellowship in a way that it doesn't
even begin to occur to him to consider
painful insights into the unreality of his own
life and his own fellowship by the same
man who has rebuked me for having the
discernment of a fence post because I didn't
see what everybody else is seeing.
So the prophet is schooled.
He is a way of seeing in and
through things that others do not see.
I don't know whether I'm made that way,
but I'm very visual, very graphic.
I notice when I'm driving with my mother,
whether it's her age or she's just not
cut out of the same cloth, I have
to direct her attention.
Did you see this?
Look at those sheep.
I'm continually observing as I'm driving, and I'm
continually observing just about every time.
Or I'll see something.
My wife will show some video from her
visit to Israel, and she's panning the womb,
but my eye falls on a young man
and his posture in a slouch, and right
away it speaks to me volumes.
I have an understanding of the arrogance of
that man and a kind of conceit that
he's not saying or doing anything, but I
see.
So this is what this author is speaking
about, how God has the whole man, not
only his ear, but also his eyes, but
not in the mystical sense that he's seeing
apparitions, although that occasionally comes of special views
of distant and mystical things, but more properly,
he sees the things that are actual, that
are before everyone, but he sees them in
a way that others do not see.
Maybe he'll hear things in a way that
others do not hear.
I had a recent episode where a woman
was visiting here with her husband, who had
not been baptized in water, and I was
commending that she should be.
She had a baptism in the spirit, and
she thought that to be baptized in the
spirit subsumes all baptisms.
I said, no, this is foundational.
Israel passed through the cloud and through the
water.
There's a baptism in spirit and in the
water.
And so she turned to another person in
the room and said, did you know that,
that there's a difference between water baptism and
spirit baptism?
And that person said, I don't care.
And when I heard that, a chill went
into my soul.
That person was not only saying I don't
care about the issue of baptism, what they
were saying was, I don't care, period, about
the things of God, about the faith, about
this whole spiritual walk.
That's what I was hearing.
That's what my spirit was picking up in
that same phrase.
For the others, it was the person saying,
I don't care about the issues of baptism.
For me it was, I don't care about
the issues of faith.
I don't care about God himself.
So it's that kind of hearing and that
kind of seeing that is the distinctive of
the prophetic man.
And therefore, how much greater is his responsibility?
What will he do with that hearing and
with that seeing?
Is he going to make it the object
of gossip?
Is he going to come against that person?
How will he use it?
It's also the issue of his freedom.
Remember we talked about in the prayer time,
not only what we say but what we
withhold is the issue of our freedom and
our maturity.
So this prophetic man who is given this
particular seeing and particular hearing has got to
come under a very particular obedience to God.
He can't be moved by the disposition of
his own soul or any advantage that would
come to him by employing or using insights
that come.
He has the responsibility to hold it or
to speak it with discretion at an appropriate
time or just to make it the matter
of his own prayer and intercession.
But these are responsibilities of an acute kind
that most Christians do not know.
What I'm saying is all Christians are called
to know if the church is to be
prophetic.
So that to say that when the church
is prophetic, the church comes into the greater
freedom and the greater responsibility.
It becomes the church.
It becomes larger than life.
But we need to see this in individuals
to know what God is intending corporately.
And that's what Jesus did.
He exhibited in his own person, in his
earthly tenure, what is intended as a model
for the whole church corporately.
I wonder if that was Paul's prayer or
intention when he prayed in Ephesians about coming
into full stature in that prophetic manifestation of
Christ in his full exalted state of being
in reality.
Which Paul wasn't himself.
What he's really praying is that the church
would come into the same kind of reality
that he himself knows, that same fullness.
You guys need a break?
It's ten to ten.
Let's take a ten minute break and then
we'll come back for another hour before lunch.