I can tell you tonight, I have never
come to the pulpit more reluctantly and with
a greater sense of dread than now.
How do you figure that out?
Because I have a formidable task.
Formidable.
It means extremely difficult.
Complex.
Because I think the Lord wants me to
attempt, by His grace, some kind of statement
on eschatology, on the last days that's appropriate
for the church that is the church to
consider, to receive, to integrate into its understanding
that it might have a right expectation of
the things that pertain to the end.
Eschatology, the study of things that pertain to
the end.
And it has everything to do with the
cross.
The single great epochal, E-P-O-C
-H-A-L.
Somebody is not standing by the dictionary tonight.
So, you who have received mercy last night
or have been renewed in mercy, you have
a first opportunity to extend it to a
Jew.
Me.
I need mercy.
Think I'm kidding.
This is a disaster.
This is calculated for disaster, for failure.
There's no way that one can succeed in
a subject as complex, as difficult as what
I am burdened to share tonight.
Nevertheless, Lord, with you, nothing is impossible.
And for those aspiring young saints who think
that it's an easy thing to trip up
to the platform and be valuable with a
gift of gab, as if it's falling off
a stool and there's nothing to it, let
them know that the true preacher comes to
this holy desk with dread, with fear, with
reluctance.
He comes unwillingly like a snail.
He would rather be somewhere else and not
be charged with the responsibility of the word.
So, my God, only you can succeed.
And if you succeed, it will be joy
unspeakable and full of glory.
If you fail, not because of any inadequacy
in you, but the difficulty that I represent
for you to succeed through, then it will
be a dull thought.
It will fall to the ground with a
thought.
And we will leave joylessly and listlessly scratching
our heads and wondering, what was all that
about?
So, my God, come and unburden your own
soul.
We're so grateful that you are the high
priest and the apostle of our confession, as
well as prophet, priest, and king.
And so, I'm asking my God, if there's
a possibility of union with you, by which
we can say with Paul, for me to
live as Christ, then let that mystery be
explicated and demonstrated tonight through this unwilling piece
of dust that you will take to yourself
and charge with your own life and present
out of your own wisdom and ability the
word of the living God appointed for this
night that was determined by you before the
foundations of the earth were laid as a
work to walk in.
So come, my God, and delight your soul
and succeed out of your own great power.
It's more than the issue of reputation.
It's more than the issue of enjoyment.
It's the issue of a word that will
fit the church for its role, its participation
in the consummation of the things that conclude
the age through Israel's restoration by the cross.
In Jesus' name, Lord, we pray.
And God's people said, Amen.
I think the principal text tonight will be
Isaiah 53.
How many are unfamiliar with that text?
Raise your hand.
Oh, my.
Okay.
May tonight prompt you to immerse yourself in
the greatest single prophetic text that describes the
suffering of the servant of God at the
cross composed seven centuries before the event by
the inspiration of the spirit that foresaw the
execution of the servant of the Lord who
is himself the Lord in such detail of
agony and rejection that is an astonishment.
It is so Christological.
Excuse my language.
It's about time you caught up with me.
Christological.
It is so Christ-centered that the Jews,
my people and kinsmen, have wisely omitted it
from their synagogue use.
When I read to my Jewish mother, Isaiah
53, she said, Where in the New Testament
are you reading?
She understood this was about Christ.
I said, I'm not reading from the New
Testament at all.
I'm reading from the classic Hebrew prophet Isaiah.
Oh, she said, I never heard that.
I said, You never will in a synagogue.
Because the Haftorah selection, the reading from the
prophets that accompanies the reading from the Torah,
from the books of Moses, every Shabbat week
by week is already determined by rabbinical council
so that at a certain point in time
they read up to Isaiah 52 12 and
the next week they continue with Isaiah 54.
And the great text is omitted from Jewish
consideration, which leaves the task for you.
Well, let's turn to it.
And Isaiah 53 rightly begins in Isaiah 52
from verse 13.
Behold, my servant shall deal prudently.
He shall be exalted and extolled and be
very high.
This kind of language exceeds any appropriateness about
the servant being a man.
It's the kind of language that is appropriate
to a servant who is himself God, extolled
and very high.
And then the whole thing shifts abruptly.
And many were astonished at thee.
His visage, his face was so marred more
than any man and his form more than
the sons of man.
So already crucifixion is beginning to be described.
The most cruel and savage form of bringing
a man to death that human ingenuity aided
by satanic inspiration could ever produce.
So here is the form of death to
which Jesus was to be submitted, being described
in the spirit by the prophet seven centuries
before the advent of Rome, who employed crucifixion
as a principal execution for those who are
unworthy of being beheaded.
Paul was beheaded and not crucified.
Crucifixion was reserved for criminals, for rebels, for
traitors, for insurgents.
This servant who is yet to be extolled
very high evidently has first to be brought
very low.
And his visage, his face marred more than
any man, his form more than the sons
of men.
So in that condition, see what I'm inserting
here, shall he sprinkle many nations with what?
With his blood that is extruded by this
torture unto death.
Kings shall shut their mouths at him for
that which had not been told them shall
they see and that which they had not
heard shall they consider.
This, dear saints, is a key verse tonight.
This message, whatever the Lord will give it
grace to become, has got to make an
ultimate demand of you.
It will stretch you to breaking.
You'll want to cry out, enough cats, I
can't take more.
This is too great a demand for my
thought.
All of the complexity of this, the meaning
of these verses, the picture being described, that
one shall suffer so much that his form
and visage is marred, so wracked, so painfully
devastated that you could hardly recognize him as
a man.
And if you have ever seen the great
classic painting, the masterpiece at Colmar, France on
the crucified Christ, what is it called?
The Eisenheim Altar.
Wouldn't hurt you to look that up.
You'll see a holy ghost masterpiece of the
16th century which I had the privilege of
seeing as a Jewish atheist and was so
astonished and stunned I was transfixed by this
nine foot high painting of a man impaled
on a cross, so gnarled and twisted I
had to question was I looking at a
man or some kind of animal and whose
jaw was dropped, his lips were white and
his hair bedraggled and the look of excruciating
pain as the final fixation of his features
and in his body are pieces of wood
and bone and glass, whatever it was that
he put on that lash, the cat on
nine tails, each strand of that whip had
at its end a piece of bone, a
glass or stone that would cut through the
flesh into the bone.
Jesus was more dead than alive when they
nailed him, having been beaten to a pulp,
punched, had his beard pulled, spit at, he
was deformed, he was grossly maligned, so they
had no form, no visage or beauty that
we should desire him.
You turn your face away, you can't bear
to look at that ugly depiction and I'm
saying it's a holy ghost masterpiece and that
was the man naked.
I know when you see those pictures he's
got a nice loincloth but I can tell
you that part of the suffering of crucifixion
was the humiliation of having your hands nailed
so you couldn't even cover your private parts.
You're exposed, you're naked, you're a camp, not
even the dignity of within the city, you're
scum, you're a worm and your God suffered
that.
That has got to stop every man and
give him pause to thought.
So here's what I want to say, that
this last verse 15 has not yet been
fulfilled.
What do you mean, Art?
I don't think that kings have yet seen
or understood, their mouths have not yet been
shut, it's not yet been told them what
they shall see, what they had not heard
shall they consider and I'm saying all that
to say this, there's one crucifixion yet to
come by which king shall see that which
they had not heard and shall consider that
which had not been spoken of and so
shall he sprinkle many nations.
You say but Art, that took place 2
,000 years ago.
Yes, but what nation has acknowledged it?
Even Christian nations lack something in the depth
of their appreciation of this remarkable suffering and
death, let alone nations that subscribe to other
gods.
The kings have not yet seen, the nations
have not yet been sprinkled, it has not
yet been told them what they shall see
and hear and understand.
If that's true, Art, are you saying that
Jesus will then again be crucified a second
time?
No, what I'm saying is, and I'm the
only one saying it, because no one wants
to consider it, but I'm prophetically obliged to
express it, that the crucifixion of Jesus is
to be reiterated and expressed and demonstrated and
set forth before all nations by his own
people, Israel, the Jew, in their last days
suffering and their road to Calvary, called the
time of Jacob's trouble, when they shall be
marred more than any man, when they shall
be beaten so to a pulp, so driven
that they'll have no beauty that any should
desire them.
They will be repulsive in their flight and
yet because of it, the Lord through that
suffering is reiterating and setting before the consideration
of the nations what they had not understood
nor seen the first time.
They have opportunity now to see enacted and
depicted by the nation of what had been
suffered and experienced before by its Lord.
Can you follow that?
Can you see why I came reluctantly tonight?
Who wants to speak that?
Who can communicate that?
Art, you're talking about a grotesque suffering for
an entire people.
Yes, it's a judgment because Jesus bore it
in judgment.
Did you know that?
The wrath of God upon the sin of
mankind, his righteous wrath, his justifiable wrath and
anger fell upon his son.
It was undeserved by him but born, but
Israel will deserve its judgment.
It's everyday moving more sinfully toward a fulfillment
that must come to them as a nation
and I hope to show you the multiple
purposes that are served by God in the
visible suffering of that nation before all nations
in one night.
They keep us here till midnight but if
you don't hear it from me, you will
not hear it.
And if you don't hear it, don't understand,
don't consider it, how shall you be fitted
to extend mercy to that people when they
go through this time of national suffering and
shame and expulsion and marring and beating and
disfiguring where if no one extends to them
a hand of mercy, a towel to wipe
their face, a cup of water in their
nakedness as it says in Matthew 25, when
did we see you naked and thirsty and
hungry and in prison?
Jesus said if you did not do this,
if you did not succor, S-U-C
-C-O-U-R with the English spelling,
if you did not extend mercy to a
people in that condition, you did it not
unto me for these are the least of
my brethren.
I want to tell you dear saints, that
will indicate and show who in fact the
true church is in the last days.
Those who will have mercy when it will
not be convenient to extend it because if
they are pursued and beaten, left for dead,
that there's not a place of safety in
the nations because this shall be enacted globally.
If they're so hated and ferociously pursued, what
will be the fate of those who dare
to stand with them and identify with them
and extend mercy to them?
You're liable to catch it and why should
you?
Not only being Gentile but Chinese, what's in
it for you?
What do they ever do for you?
That you should extend yourself at risk to
be identified with the people when they shall
be marred more than any man.
There'll be only one explanation and it's beyond
nationality, it's beyond race, it's beyond culture.
It's that you are among the righteous and
could not do otherwise than extend mercy no
matter what the consequence for yourself.
That's why he says to those who extended
it, come and enter the kingdom prepared for
you, you righteous.
Oh, this is so remarkable.
For he shall grow up before him as
a tender plant and as a root out
of a dry ground.
He has no form, no comeliness, no attractiveness
and when we shall see him there's no
beauty that we should desire him.
There cannot be a description of Jesus before
his crucifixion because before his crucifixion he was
ruddy and handsome and a precious and supreme
piece of humanity like the David before him.
This is the description of a man who
has suffered abuse, punched, plucked, spit at, whipped.
There's no beauty we should desire him.
He's despised and rejected him and a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we
hid as it were our faces from him.
He was despised and we esteemed him not.
Who's speaking here?
Come on, you guys have got to become
Bible scholars.
You've got to become exegetes not dum-dums.
You've got to not just read passages, you've
got to interject yourself and wrestle and draw
out.
There are several voices in Isaiah 53.
We have to identify who's speaking at a
certain part.
This is no longer Isaiah himself speaking.
This is not the prophet narrating.
This is now the people themselves.
This is Israel.
This is the Jewish people who are looking
back 2,000 years to this suffering servant
and saying there was no beauty that we
desired him.
We rejected.
He was despised.
He was a man of sorrows acquainted with
grief.
We hid our faces from him.
We had nothing to do with this guy.
We didn't esteem him.
But now in verse 4, we are coming
to understand that in that condition as a
man of sorrows acquainted with grief and devastated
in his body and his face, he hath
borne our sorrows, our griefs and carried our
sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten
of God and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions and
he was bruised for our iniquities and the
penalty, the chastisement for our peace that should
have come upon us was upon him and
with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray.
We've turned everyone to his own way and
the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity
of us all.
Oh, you dear young saints, you naive, innocent,
shallow saints.
What a description is this?
That Israel who has for 2,000 years
rejected Jesus and put him aside as a
magician, a misfit, someone who irritated the Roman
authorities and earned for himself an execution and
he deserves no more consideration than that are
speaking another tune here.
This is a new acknowledgement.
He was wounded for our transgressions.
All we like sheep have gone astray.
Show me a Jew today who will acknowledge
that and say that.
What then does this prophetically mean, dear man?
It means that there is a short time
in which Jews will suffer in such a
way that it will open their understanding and
a consideration to consider him whom they have
now for two millennia rejected and set aside
and see him not only in a new
way but a true way for to see
him as the crucified Lamb of God who
bore our transgressions and our iniquities and suffered
in our behalf and by whose stripes we
are healed is to be saved.
So what's going to happen, Art, that this
Jewish worldwide Judaistic community that has rejected him
is going to see something new that they
have not seen till now?
What will enable and bring them to that
new seeing?
Suffering, rejection, persecution, being marred more than any
man because I have coined the phrase the
mutuality of suffering.
Nothing reveals like suffering.
That's why those aspiring actors who attended the
dramatic schools of Russia and New York used
to say I want to suffer.
Suffering reveals.
Suffering is deep.
The things that are shallow and flimsy fall
aside.
The things that are facetious, the things that
are imagined, the things that are deceptive, when
suffering comes you become strangely single-eyed and
have a view toward reality that is no
longer disguised by your amenities or your comfort.
This will bring you of age and it's
about time.
It's got to, you're on time, you guys.
So what are you saying, Art?
Summarize this for us.
We can hardly follow you.
I'm saying this.
This statement that is being made here in
this prophetic text is yet future.
It's a people who have long rejected the
Holy One of Israel as being of no
consequence and are now seeing him newly out
of the mutuality of their own suffering because
now they are being marred more than any
man.
They are being rejected and despised.
And somehow when you suffer what he suffered
you begin to perceive his sufferings in a
new way.
And in fact, if it were not for
that provision, Israel would never see the Lord,
never understand his sacrifice, never receive its benefit.
And if they do not avail themselves of
what he wrought on the cross unto salvation,
how shall they bless all the families of
the earth?
What do you mean, Art?
I mean Israel's destiny spoken by God to
Abraham that this people shall bless all the
families of the earth.
I've raised them up to be a nation
of priests and a light unto the world
which includes Asia, which desperately needs that light
which only this priestly people can bring when
they are in the priestly condition.
But to come into that condition will require
a suffering.
Lord, mercy.
Because a priest is not a technician.
He's not a religious functionary.
A priest is identified with those for whom
he intercedes as well as with God.
The priests were barefooted.
They were clothed from head to toe but
the feet themselves were never shod.
How come?
Because it had to be on the earth.
It had to be an identification with the
grip reality of those to whom they were
sent as the ministers of God in compassion
and identification in sympathy and in mercy or
else their intercessions would have been vain.
Today's Jew is in that description?
Far from it.
They don't give a rap for the nations.
And yet God has called them to be
a light to the nations and a nation
of priests.
So the question then comes, how can modern
Jewry fulfill their destiny which God spoke to
Abraham which if it is not fulfilled, how
is God God?
If it's not fulfilled, if the callings and
gifts of God are irrevocable and without repentance
and they're not fulfilled, how valid is the
God who made that gift and calling?
How valid are his covenants and his promises
that they would be restored and fulfill this
destiny millennially and eternally despite 2,000 years
of apostasy?
The issue of Israel's restoration is the issue
of God as God for the nations.
Everything, the Lord has put all his eggs
in one basket.
The whole issue of his truth and reality
is his ability to take this apostate people
who have been marked by their brilliance in
finance and in art and culture and psychiatry,
Freud and Marx and all of these great
geniuses, but they have not been a priestly
nation.
How do they go from this present preoccupation
with the world and finance and money and
wealth and fame and playing a violin to
becoming a priest?
Through suffering, through the road to Calvary, through
walking the same kind of path that the
Lord before them trod where they will be
despised and rejected of all men and have
no beauty that any should desire them, let
alone Singaporean Chinese.
Got the idea?
God has stacked everything against himself that if
he should succeed in forming such a people
out from such suffering for which most of
them shall not survive, we're talking about a
surviving remnant.
How do you know that art?
Because I put two and two together.
Because I combined Old Testament and New Testament
prophecy.
Because I take the Lord seriously when he
was asked by his disciples, Lord, what are
the signs of your coming and of the
end of the age?
Matthew 24 and Luke 21.
And he said among those signs there'll be
havoc in nature, great upsurge, calamitous geophysical eruptions
like the tsunami, earthquakes and social unrest and
wars and rumors of wars and persecutions.
And as far as the nation is concerned,
he said, there shall come upon them such
a time of trouble as will exceed any
trouble that that nation has ever previously known.
Do you know what troubles they have experienced?
Nobody knows the troubles I've seen.
Nobody knows my sorrow.
You guys need to do some homework and
get a volume of the history of Israel
and see what they suffered in the Middle
Ages.
In this very Passover Easter season, the cry
of Christ killer went up and the accusation
that some Gentile's blood was being used to
make the ceremonial matzah or the wells were
polluted and the great black plague that took
one third of Europe was a conspiracy by
Jews because they were not affected by the
plague.
So therefore they must be responsible and therefore
burned them at the stake, which they did.
How come they didn't suffer the plague?
Because unlike you, they kept kosher.
They didn't eat pork because in that generation
in time, pigs roamed the streets and lived
from the garbage that was thrown out of
windows.
They were saved by obedience to God in
the elementary rules of diet given in the
Torah.
But it earned for them persecution and it
will again.
Do you guys know what is happening in
the world?
Do you know that it's dangerous to be
a Jew in France today?
That the leaders of the French community have
told their people, don't go out into the
street with your yarmulke on.
Don't wear your little beanie that reveals you
as a Jew.
Put something else on your head, wear a
cap because you'll get beat up because you're
only 500,000 in a nation with almost
10 million Muslims and you're an open target.
There's a growing pall over the earth of
hatred against the Jew already.
If they're not safe in France, they're not
safe in Great Britain, they'll not be safe
in Germany, where will they be safe?
Will they be safe in the United States?
Oh is that so?
Then why has the Lord for 30 years
have us to establish a place of refuge
and haven for Jews and fight for persecution
in North America?
Oh you guys, better than my speaking to
you is that I should just be rung
out before you.
Because there's no way to summarize and communicate
the substance of all the things in which
I have been privileged by God to be
instructed and to instruct others in one speaking.
Which if you fail to understand it and
receive it, you're condemned to becoming only charismatic.
What a fate, too horrible to consider.
He wants you to be apostolic and prophetic.
How do you know that Art?
Because I'm here.
And here more than once.
He's persistent.
He has faith to believe beyond my ability.
He has an intention for you and he's
given you a precious pastor and leaders to
cultivate and nurture and bring you to a
place of maturity where you can receive a
hard word and gave you opportunity to obtain
mercy last night that you might extend it
to them.
But Art, there's hardly just a handful of
Jews here now.
But how many will come through all of
the shipping that takes place here in Singapore
that goes out to nations and from nations?
How many will come with those cargo ships
and containers and by one means or another
passing through?
How do you know that?
Because the scripture says, I will sift you
through all nations.
Why?
Not only to sift you, but to sift
the nation.
Not only to sift the nation, but to
sift the church in the nation.
So that when the Lord takes his throne
and pronounces his first judgment in separating sheep
from goats for their eternal destination, either in
the kingdom or in the lake of fire,
it's over one question.
Only one question.
What did you do with the least of
these, my brethren, when you saw them naked,
beat up, pulverized, chased, persecuted, marred?
Because your response to them is your response
to me.
And your failure to respond shows that your
so-called faith was facetious and shallow, inadequate
if not counterfeit.
Because if you were authentically in the faith
and were in the righteousness of God, you
could not do other than to succor them,
than to comfort them, than to take them
in, than to love them and bathe them
with your own tears and wipe their wounds
and heal them and feed them a good
Chinese meal and send them on their way
to their next destination, which you know by
the spirit.
So we're reading in this text, and I
can tell you, dear saints, this is new
to me.
I have loved and read Isaiah 53 for
many years until it pleased the Lord to
show me who in fact is now speaking.
It has shifted.
It's no longer the prophet narrating the text.
Now it's the voice of a people who
have come to a new recognition of a
critical kind that they must come to in
order to be saved and the only way
they came to it is because their seeing
has been affected by their own suffering.
While at the same time their suffering is
duplicating the sufferings of the Lord 2,000
years before them so that kings who had
not known and not understood shall see.
So the purpose in one sense is to
reveal the Lord to Israel and at the
same time to reveal the Lord to the
nations through Israel's suffering for they shall see
in the suffering of that nation that of
the Lord 2,000 years before which they
did not understand, did not receive, did not
consider and now as it's passing through all
nations they cannot hide their face from it.
They must see it and understand what that
Jewish suffering represents because it so reiterates and
captures again the suffering of the Lord 2
,000 years before.
It's a remarkable last day's stratagem from God.
It's an eschatological sweep of genius to redeem
a nation and the nations by the same
single stroke of a last day's suffering which
is the reiteration of the cross.
Praise God that this is being recorded.
So you'll have many opportunities to hear this
again until it comes into your spirit and
consciousness and understanding.
Surely verse 4, he hath borne our griefs.
The Allah is Israel, the Jews and carried
our sorrows and yet we didn't esteem him.
He was stricken, we considered him stricken, smitten
of God and afflicted but that affliction was
for our transgressions.
We didn't understand that, that there had to
be a blood sacrifice though it said in
Leviticus 17 without the shedding of blood there's
no remission for sin but since the destruction
of the temple in 70 AD and the
dispersal of all the priesthood of which I'm
descendant, one of the few, there's been no
blood sacrifice.
So what's the atonement for sin?
A day in the synagogue, day of fasting
and mitzvot, good deeds.
But art, that's a shabby substitute for blood.
Me you're telling?
Who invented that art?
The rabbis.
Rabbinical Judaism.
So that for 2000 years my people have
been living without the covering, the kapora of
their Messiah and his blood and therefore they
have been open to every assailment, every attack,
every vicious expression coming from the hateful gentile
world against them without the protection of the
blood of the Lamb.
How much do you esteem that blood?
How much do you invoke it daily upon
arising and in prayer?
Lord your blood upon my head afresh, upon
my door, upon my house, upon my children,
upon my family.
I don't dare leave this room, I don't
dare start to go to work without invoking
the blood.
And Lord going to bed that night, I'm
too tired to pray but this much I
want to say, your blood be upon my
head and upon my children, upon my house
afresh through the night hours so that the
evil one will not have opportunity to harass,
to molest, to give me dreams and fantasies
that I wake up with a bitter taste
in my mouth.
Are you invoking the blood?
The most precious provision of God for your
continuing salvation?
That if there be any iniquity, you can
appeal to the blood for forgiveness and for
washing, which I have done today.
Are you?
You're an impeccable saint.
You needed the blood?
We look to you as an example.
Well you dear man, why did Paul say
that he's the chief of sinners?
Was he talking about what he was before
his conversion?
Or what he was and is presently?
The deeper you come in God, the more
you know what a wicked sinner you are.
What's your sin, Lord?
My sin is the iniquity of priesthood.
My sin is the profusion of much speaking.
Because the scripture says in much speaking is
sin.
Well Lord, I can't help it.
As they say in American Midwest, Hepet.
I'm called to be a speaker.
Well that does not absolve you from the
sin that is inherent in your very calling.
And that's why even after speaking as solemnly
and as seriously as you know how, you
can almost count on it something inadvertent, something
out of your humanity, some illustration, some point,
some accent that was not from me got
into there and corrupted the text, corrupted the
speaking.
It was defiled.
You're always conscious of the iniquity of much
speaking, of the iniquity of priesthood, of the
iniquity of ministry.
We need the blood.
I dare not come to this platform tonight
if I had not prayed before coming for
the fresh application of the blood to purge
me and make me chaste so I could
be a vessel through whom the word of
the Lord can be expressed without being tainted.
Because there's much at stake tonight, not just
a man's reputation, whether you like him or
you don't like him.
What's at stake tonight is your call to
the eschatological conclusion of the age where the
church is the salvific agent of God for
a people who are so battered, so bruised,
so marred more than any man that none
will have any mercy for them.
There'll be no beauty that any should desire
them except for you.
You'll have a strange love for that people
in that marred condition, in their ugly spirit
being churned up.
Your heart palpitates for them because it's the
love of God for his own people and
not some little sentimental thing rising up in
your fancy.
If you're that united with him in Christ.
The Jew is the test of where we
in fact are in God.
When did we see you naked and thirsty?
Well, you didn't see me.
You know why?
Because you turned your face away.
You didn't want to see.
You wanted to be absolved of any obligation
that would threaten you, your security, your comfort,
your family, your future.
Like the German brother, the old man I
met years ago in Berlin, who was there,
he said, when the brown-shirted Nazis with
their swastika armbands were downstairs in the Jewish
neighborhood beating the Jewish kids to a pulp
and breaking the shop windows and making the
old men to wipe the sidewalk with their
beards.
I said, Brother, what did you do?
He said, What could I do, Hud?
I pulled the shade down and I walked
away.
You're going to have an opportunity either to
pull the shade down and walk away or
come down and expose yourself and be vulnerable
in their defense.
Even if you don't succeed, you still have
an obligation rather than to be passive and
unmoved.
Righteousness requires response and you better start cultivating
it now and not wait for that moment
in which you'll be embarrassed and found wanting.
Now you ought to be writing letters to
the editor of the newspapers.
Now you ought to be standing for issues
of righteousness in your society.
Now you ought to love righteousness and hate
iniquity and express yourself in that regard in
a way that you're heard and felt and
your presence counts so that it becomes a
mode of being that when the ultimate crisis
and test comes, you'll pass it.
All we like sheep have gone astray.
I can't wait to hear my Jewish people
acknowledge that.
We have turned everyone to his own way,
highly individualistic, full of our own opinions.
What do they say?
If you have two Jews, you have three
arguments.
Everyone turned to his own way and the
Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of
us all.
He was oppressed, he was afflicted, yet he
opened not his mouth.
He's brought as a lamb to the slaughter
and as a sheep before his shears is
done, so he openeth not his mouth.
If I think that I'm walking a tight
wire tonight prophetically, how about Isaiah in the
7th century describing a suffering servant who as
he's going to his death and being beaten
to a pulp and spat at and castigated
and saying come down and we will believe
you, bears all of that insult, all of
that injury without a single word of retaliation
or answer.
He bears it silently as a lamb to
the slaughter.
If Jesus had so much once opened his
mouth and spat out from the cross, you
dumb-dumbs don't you know what you're doing?
I came for you and I'm suffering this
for you and you're telling me come down
and you'll believe me?
What does it take?
He had every reason, every justification to let
them have it.
I would have, you know that, but he
went as a lamb to the slaughter.
That's an obedient son.
If he had missed only this one particular,
he would have invalidated his entire messianic credential.
How come that these Jews should be astonished
that he went as a lamb to the
slaughter because they're not going silently?
They're groaning, bitching, complaining.
How come us?
Why me?
Why did I ever do to suffer this?
And I was living so comfortably in Toronto.
I had a penthouse and a condominium.
And now I've got nothing.
I'm stripped.
I'm hated.
I'm despised.
I'm pursued.
How come me?
Where's God?
Full of complaints.
And the contrast will be staggering.
He who suffered more exceedingly anything that we
ever bore because not only was he a
man, he was equally God.
It's God crucified who is going to his
death silently as a lamb to the slaughter.
And my Jewish people will not honor him
and receive that work that he performed until
they begin to see it in the rejection
of two millennia by comparison to the suffering
through which they themselves are now passing.
Isn't there any other way that God could
have redeemed Israel and fitted them to be
a nation of priesthood?
No.
Priestliness requires identification and brokenness.
It requires humility.
It requires a death to your ego, your
vanity, your religious and ethnic and racial superiority
that only being banged out of you and
knocked and bruised and suffered in flight and
persecution can succeed in doing.
And all the more when you're saved out
of that because there's a people whom God
has prepared.
Though all the world will hate and despise
you, they will take you in.
They will wash your wounds.
They will speak to you words of comfort.
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people for they
have suffered double for their sins.
It's a drama of the coming together in
the last days in a moment of time,
the remnant of Israel and the remnant of
the church.
And the stage is set for Israel to
collapse, for destruction and devastation to come, for
anti-Semitism to reach its boiling point where
it's not safe to be a Jew in
France, England or any place where they're already
in flight.
The only reason that the Lord has his
hand of restraint on that situation is because
you are not ready to receive them.
He was taken from prison and from judgment.
Who shall declare his generation for he was
cut off out of the land of the
living for the transgression of my people was
he stricken.
So being the careful Bible students that we
are, we note that in that verse the
voice has shifted.
It's no longer the nation Israel speaking, it's
very God himself with the pronoun my for
the transgression of my people was he stricken.
And he made his grave with the wicked
and with the rich in death because he
had done no violence.
Neither was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.
He has put him to grief.
And when you shall make his soul an
offering for sin, he shall see his seed.
He shall prolong his days and the pleasure
of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
He shall see the travail of a soul
and shall be satisfied by his knowledge.
My righteous servant justify many for he shall
bear their iniquities.
Here is already a hint that this suffering
servant who's to die in his sufferings and
be buried in the grave with the wicked
is also to see of the travail of
his soul, indicating that there's a life beyond
that death through resurrection.
Though he has poured out his soul unto
death, he shall yet see the travail of
a soul and be satisfied.
What a text is this?
How wisely the leaders of the Jewish community
have kept this from Jewish consideration by not
allowing its promulgation in their Shabbat services.
How much then does this word need to
come to their attention and their consideration through
those who have understood this word and realize
how much it's a key to the salvation
of the Jew and you yourself need to
proclaim it.
I let Shelly Volk to the Lord who
was the Simon of his generation in charge
of the books in the office, a former
Jewish stockbroker, a Jewish whiz kid, new Buick
every year and a new wardrobe.
He only made one mistake.
He invited me to his home.
Why?
Because his wife had gone berserk.
She woke up in the morning having dreamed
and recited the entire Lord's Prayer by heart,
never before having read it nor seen it.
He thought his wife had gone off to
deep end and she found my first book
somewhere in a Christian bookstore and she gave
it to her husband and he didn't want
to hear about it but he was courteous
and so I'm speaking in Connecticut so they
invited me to be their house guest.
And he attended my first meeting.
I spoke on Act 16 on apostolic suffering
and consecration and he stood up to the
invitation before he was saved.
That's a Jew for you.
And then over his kitchen table on Isaiah
53, word for word, the Lord melted his
heart and opened his understanding and saved him.
This is what it means to extend mercy,
not just condolence or little syrupy affection but
to give them the word that opens their
hearts and understanding to call upon the name
of the Lord and to receive the blood
shed in this cruelty that he suffered and
described in this remarkable chapter.
Here's a remarkable book.
Talks about this eschatological climax of the age
where something will be demonstrated in the sight
of all nations revealing his glory and his
salvation in the deliverance of his people.
This Lord, the wisdom of God that at
the same moment by which his own nation
Israel is restored through suffering by that same
token and same action, the nations are being
informed and instructed of his salvific power and
they themselves will be saved because the issue
of Israel is the issue of the nations.
That's what Israel was born for, for the
nations.
So even in its helplessness and in its
last days suffering in this road to Calvary
when the nations observe because it's going to
take place throughout all nations that this knocked
out and battered people are being rescued and
saved and restored to Zion for the redeemed
of the Lord shall return to Zion with
everlasting joy on their heads and mourning and
sighing fleeing away and he'll bring them out
of dungeons and prisons and death and bring
them again into their land.
That will be the real return, not the
1948.
The nations will observe both the judgment of
God and his mercy and as many as
will will believe.
The salvation of Israel is God's last statement
and testimony to the nations and if they
refuse that demonstration of his cross and what
he suffered now being reiterated in the nation
there's nothing more that he can do to
save and the only thing that follows is
the day of the Lord's vengeance and wrath
and judgment.
So all the ends of the earth will
acknowledge him as God and turn to him
for salvation.
It is in his great act of eschatological
salvation, the new exodus that the one and
only God will demonstrate his unique deity universally
which is also the coming of his kingdom.
No wonder the powers of darkness will resist
this with everything in them by seeking to
obliterate the Jewish nation that they should not
return to Zion for once they return to
Zion their king will come and rule out
of Zion, the law shall go forth out
of Zion and the word of the Lord
out of Jerusalem according to Isaiah chapter 2.
The powers of darkness know this better than
you and want in every way not only
to obstruct this eschatological conclusion by which the
kingdom comes but remove that people who are
the key to the kingdom by obliterating them
through global racial annihilation through genocide of the
kind that Hitler almost succeeded in performing now
the same powers of darkness will go at
it globally and not just in Germany, Poland
and Europe.
It will even take place where you are.
This new exodus which demonstrates his deity to
the nations it was in this context between
the uniqueness of God and his eschatological acts
for the salvation of Israel and the world
that the early Christians saw Jesus as Lord
and God who both suffered humiliation and death
but is exalted and lifted up.
The nation will follow exactly the pattern of
the Lord.
They will be abased, they will be brought
down that they might be exalted and brought
up.
They will no longer be the tail but
the head.
All nations will come to Jerusalem to acknowledge
their Lord and the people whom he has
redeemed on the Feast of Tabernacles and if
you will not go, you will not have
rain.
You will suffer a curse because it's the
last act of Gentile rebellion that refuses to
acknowledge the people whom God has restored and
redeemed and given a place of celebration, exaltation
and honor as the head of all nations.
Not the UN, not New York, Zion.
Jerusalem is God's intended capital through a redeemed
and restored nation but odd if that happens,
won't they become egotistical?
Won't they become proud?
Won't we have the same problem, they'll look
down upon us as Gentiles?
Now you silly folk because in their route
to restoration they pass through suffering, brokenness, devastation
that when they are restored, the memory of
that through which they had passed as well
as the sin that had occasioned it throughout
their history will continue to haunt them and
always be a factor in their national memory
and consideration.
They will be another kind of people more
like me which leaves something to be desired
but it's better than what they were.
I'm kidding.
Gentiles will kiss their feet.
Those that oppress them will bring their children
on their shoulders and on their, what do
you call it, stretches.
The treasure of the Gentiles will be brought
to them.
They will be honored not because they deserved
it, not because they earned it but because
it pleased God who allowed them to be
abased and reduced also to be extolled and
exalted and made very high just like the
Lord before them.
This is the revelation of God as God.
This is why the nations will recognize that
there's only one God, it's the God of
Israel.
This Jesus, this suffering servant because his suffering,
his abasement and his exaltation is not just
the last moments adjustment by the Father, it's
an everlasting and eternal statement of what God
is in himself always and ever.
He's always a suffering servant.
If he's not a servant, he's not a
Lord.
He's always in humility.
He's always abased that he might be exalted.
This is very God and it takes the
cross to reveal him and if not his
cross then the cross which the Jew will
exhibit which is essentially what he himself bore
because the way of the servant is the
way in which God reveals his glory.
Remember what Jesus said?
I'm now going to glorify the Father and
the Father will be glorified in me.
He was talking about going to the cross
and to his death.
His suffering was to glorify the Father for
it will reveal him, reveal him in judgment,
reveal him in righteousness, reveal him in truth,
reveal him in mercy.
There's nothing that reveals God more succinctly, more
powerfully, more demonstrably than Jesus crucified.
It's not a momentary lapse.
It's not a little act of accommodation.
It is a statement of the intrinsic nature
of very God himself who knew the cross
before he even came down from heaven.
He was the Lamb of God slain before
the foundations of the world.
Nothing reveals him as his sufferings for another
which he did not have to do.
In fact, he didn't even have to create
the world.
He didn't need Chinese people, sorry to tell
you that, or us Jews.
How come then that he created us?
Because he loves, because he wants to share,
because he wants to exhibit and demonstrate and
share his glory, because he wants to bring
many sons to glory.
He wants eternal fellowship in righteousness and truth.
He didn't need it.
His love required it.
And it's the same love which sent his
son from heaven down to earth to suffer
what Isaiah described, silently as a lamb to
the slaughter.
They will see the exaltation of his servant
and turn to him for salvation.
Because those who did not see and did
not know and did not hear will consider.
Those who were ignorant will be sprinkled, kings
and nations, not having the opportunity of observing
Jesus 2,000 years ago, but seeing now
the suffering of his nation.
They will see the reiteration and the demonstration
of the setting forth of his sufferings before
and believe and be saved by it.
Israel is saved by it.
The nations will be saved by it.
And what is it?
Nothing less or other than the issue of
the cross as the final eschatological act of
God.
This is so rich, page after page of
remarkable insight, only that the writer does not
realize that he's describing Israel's sufferings in the
last days, who together with the Lord must
bear humiliation that they might experience exaltation, which
reveals the identity of the one true God.
This is the way in which the one
and only God reveals his identity to the
whole creation and is acknowledged as God by
the whole creation by the revelation of himself
at the cross.
To miss Jesus at the cross is to
miss God.
The issue of Jesus is the issue of
God.
And he's giving mankind one last opportunity to
observe what they had not been told, consider
what they had not heard, and to see
that which had not been told them in
the suffering of Israel for their sake.
Israel is unconscious that it's performing that function,
but nevertheless they will perform it to the
benefit of nations.
The cross reveals who God is, not as
we think him to be, but as he
in fact is.
He's a suffering servant or he's not a
Lord.
What then ought we to be?
Who's going to demonstrate Jesus to the Jews
before their suffering, by which they might be
saved and come into the ark of safety
before having themselves to be pummeled and beaten?
How shall they see the demonstration of the
reality of God except they see the reality
of the crucified one in a Christian people
who have known the cross and exhibit and
have borne sufferings?
Because tonight for me, dear saints, is a
suffering.
It's a moral suffering.
That's why I came like a snail, if
I could find an excuse to avoid it,
because I knew that to attempt a subject
of this kind is a suffering.
Faith requires it.
It's in keeping with his character, and to
the degree that we bear it, it reveals
him.
Especially if we bear it without complaint, silently,
and even counted privilege.
When my Jewish people will meet saints like
that, who are enchristened and show forth to
Christ in their Christ-likeness, they might not
have to wait to suffer in order to
understand and to be saved.
The revelation of who God is to the
world takes place in Jesus' death and takes
place in the death and suffering of the
nation.
His humiliation, which is the reality of God,
and his exaltation is something that they shall
pass through and know and exhibit.
It's the exaltation of God, who himself is
a sufferer and a servant, as well as
Lord.
God's identity is not simply revealed, but enacted,
E-N-A-C-T-E-D, in
the event of salvation for the world, which
the service and self-humiliation of Israel accomplishes.
Christ is demonstrated by being enacted, by re
-enacted, by a people who themselves are being
sent as lambs to the slaughter, albeit they'll
not be silent.
It will yet be a demonstration of an
enactment of the suffering of Jesus 2,000
years before them, and it will save the
nations.
The unique act of God's self-giving, in
which he demonstrates again his deity to the
world, by accomplishing salvation for the world, will
occur in full reality in this way.
To those who have not seen, will he
be revealed.
In this act, in this enactment of self
-giving, God is most truly himself and defines
himself for the world.
You ought to be reading stuff like this.
Theology is for the church.
The thinking of astute men like this, who
have wrestled and grown through Isaiah 53 in
these scriptures and texts, and come with these
insights, is a legacy and a privilege for
us as saints.
What are you reading?
Are you reading at all?
Or are you just glued to the TV
set, or videos, or some other cheap stuff
that makes no demand on your brain?
I'm jealous over you guys.
I want to shake you.
So, Lord, we thank you for the privilege
of Richard Bacham and other giants of the
faith who have wrestled with the scriptures to
get at the mystery of Christ, the mystery
of Israel, the mystery of the church, the
mystery of the last days, the eschatology of
God that he has designed in his own
great wisdom and set Jesus at the cross
as the hub and pivot of all reality
for all time and all ages, and especially
at the end in its conclusion.
It has called us to be participants in
that conclusion, not as dum-dums who wonder
what's happening and how come and where's God
that these Jews should be suffering again, but
who knew that there's a suffering that is
inescapable, that they must bear, not only for
their sake, but for the nation's and for
his glory and name and honor and that
they might be fitted by it for their
role as a priestly nation in the Zion
to which he might come as their king.
For when he comes as king to Israel,
it's his kingdom for all nations, for the
Lord shall go forth to all nations out
of Zion and the word of the Lord
from Jerusalem.
If you don't believe for this, if you
don't desire this, if you're not living for
this, you're not only a dum-dum.
I don't know what you are.
Can we distinguish you by the word Christian?
If you have not this anticipation, this desire,
this love, this hope, this is the hope
of the church.
This is the glory of God eternally as
king when he's restored through a restored nation,
through a church that extends mercy, when they
will be despised and rejected and have no
beauty that any should desire them.
So, Lord, what shall I say?
How shall I pray?
My God.
Mercy, Lord, I ask you for mercy.
I was stretched out in that apartment at
5 o'clock, on my face and crying
out, mercy to speak, mercy for these people
to hear, mercy to understand, mercy, Lord.
If it takes mercy just to comprehend the
last days purposes of God, what will it
take for us to fulfill them?
But mercy, mercy tonight, Lord, for these young,
delicate, precious little saints.
They should be spared from this kind of
assault and abuse from a man like me.
But you've brought them to here.
They have not the luxury to remain children.
They're being called to grow up and grow
up fast for the time is short and
the Lord is at the door and is
wanting mature saints who are capable of sacrifice
without complaint and count it all privilege to
be extended for the people of Israel even
in their unbelief and apostasy.
Thank you, Lord.
So I suspect, my God, to the degree
that you are successful in propagating your word
tonight that Jews who don't even know that
we're meeting here, who are not even presently
in Singapore, will one day receive the benefit
of your word and its reception by the
people to whom it was given for they
shall be the beneficiaries of their mercy to
save them from destruction and to bring them
to salvation.
Thank you, Lord.
Bless this church, my God.
Bless this church.
You've invested so much in them already.
You're giving them your best.
You're pouring out your soul and your heart.
You're giving them hard words and things to
contemplate and to think and to understand that
strain their minds because you love them, because
you're jealous over them, because they have a
destiny for which they're called and they must
fulfill to the eternal praise of your glory,
that there be a true worship that issues
out of adoration for the majesty of God
who has conceived of such a scheme as
this that through a suffering nation, the nation
shall see the revelation of Christ and believe.
You're majestic in all your ways.
Your wisdom and ways are past finding out
and it centers in the despicable cross by
which you were marred more than any man,
that you had no beauty, not even a
human form that was recognizable, that somehow that
was necessary.
How great then must the issue of evil
be that it required this from the Son
of God to bear.
We want to adore you, Lord.
And I confess, 76 years old and 41
years in the faith, I've not yet come
to that place.
Adoration is not a cheapie.
It's not something glib we can turn on
and off like a faucet.
Adoration is the deepest reverence and awe when
the majesty of God breaks upon our hearts
and our consciousness as it can only be
seen and conceived in the mystery of Israel
in the last days and not in any
other way.
If you miss that mystery, you miss God.
You miss God in His majesty, in His
wisdom, in His righteousness, in His glory.
So have true worshipers, Lord, who love you
for what you are, for your way and
your wisdom and the things by which you
shall be eternally glorified and not content except
that we would have part with you in
this so great drama.
Thank you, Lord.
And we were not even Jewish.
Thank you, my God.
All nations shall exalt you from one coast
to the other, from one end of the
earth to the other.
The praises shall rise up out of this
earth from people of every race and color
and nationality because they have bowed at the
feet of the Holy One of Israel who
is Savior and Redeemer and the now seated
King.
Thank you, Lord.
Seal these words.
Let not a syllable return to you void.
Let it be like a hammer upon the
rock on those whose hearts are hard or
whose minds are dense.
Let it be like a fire on those,
my God, who have prepared to be inflammable.
But let the word have its work because
you said that your word shall not return
to you void but accomplish every purpose whereunto
it is sent.
And it performs a work in them that
believe.
And, Lord, we have to confess, we need
that work.
Save us from being dumb-dumb.
Save us from being superficial charismatics.
Save us from just being successful.
We want your glory.
We want your honor.
And it's going to take more than what
we presently are, but we're willing.
So I bless this church, Lord.
Seal these words, even those who are not
able to take it in, only in part.
Nevertheless, it went forth by your spirit.
It will perform its work.
Let them hear the tape.
Let them consider it together.
Let someone transcribe it and publish it that
it can be read and marked and considered.
We thank you, Lord, for sending the word
in your great love and mercy.
It was a privilege that you considered us
to receive this burden of your deepest heart.
Receive our gratitude, our love, because you have
been so gracious to consider us in this
way as sons and daughters of the Most
High.
In Jesus' name we pray, and God's people
said, Amen.