I want to start this morning with reviewing
a paper that I've written on the subject
of exile entitled, Thinking the Unthinkable, because I'm
expecting horrendous things to break upon the earth
that will be unthinkable, both for those who
will be victim of it and for the
church itself.
And one of the privileges of the school
is to employ papers that have been written.
I'd like to encourage you to write papers.
It's a wonderful exercise and let the Lord
ignite a theme or a topic and put
it in print.
So I like this interaction over these papers
and maybe one day, if it should please
the Lord, they'll find themselves in a book.
In fact, I have a burden to put
out a book with a title of something
like, The Coming Catastrophe of Israel and send
it out as a word of warning to
an unsuspecting Jewish community and for the church
also.
And it should such a book come to
pass, it will employ articles of this kind.
That the writers on the subject of exile
are remarkably liberal theologians, Protestant theologians, Lutheran
theologians, men whose view about even scripture itself
would be at odds with us.
And yet their scholarly application, their examination of
those scriptures is rewarding and provocative.
So this paper was inspired by a book
called A Theology of Exile by Thomas Raitt
and published by Fortress Press, which is a
Lutheran publishing company.
In all of the books that I've read,
and there are not many, but they have
this strange thing in common.
As acute as these writers are in showing
the significance of exile and the experience of
exile in the history of Israel and showing
even unfulfilled prophecies that pertain to future exile,
they never make clear that there's a future
catastrophe coming for which the church and world
Jewry ought to be alerted.
I can't fathom that.
I'm waiting for the next page where the
man is just going to come right out
and say, well, look, if this is clearly
not yet fulfilled and it has such prospect
of sober things, ought not there be a
warning to be sounded?
But nothing like that.
Maybe that's when you're writing something academic, you
allow the implications to be drawn by the
reader himself and you don't state them.
Maybe that's the difference between a scholar and
a prophet.
My prophetic heart wants to cry out a
warning.
And that's really the object of our concern.
We're not just sifting through something academically, but
a word that needs to be sounded in
the hearing of the unwary and the unsuspecting.
And of course, at the same time, if
they can be convinced that there's a disaster
coming to encourage them to find a place
of safety, even now in the ark of
God, who is the Lord himself.
So we've used the word exile from the
beginning of this week, but does everybody have
a clear view of what that means?
Not just in your mind, but in your
heart and in your emotions, do you understand
the devastation of what unsuspecting calamity means when
it comes to a people and uproots them
from their city and from their land?
That the enormous suffering, what does it say
that the blood was up to the bridle
of the horses, that when Rome came to
put down the uprisings of the Jews in
70 AD, and then later on under Bar
Kochba about 135 AD, who was thought to
be a Messiah, that the bloodshed was horrific.
Everybody knows about Masada and the final suicide
of the last defenders of that great fortress
in the Judean wilderness, where men slit the
throats of their children and their wives, and
then took their own lives.
That when the Romans broke in on that
following morning, all they found were a sea
of corpses.
Only two or three survivors, an old woman
and two children, hid themselves.
Everyone else perished.
This is an unspeakable catastrophe.
Maybe we can understand when Jesus, on his
way to the cross, looked out on Jerusalem
and wept and said, O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem,
how oft would I have taken you under
my wings as a hen does her chicks,
but you would not.
And now you have missed the day of
your visitation.
Because the Lord saw not only the catastrophe
that would fall, which he predicted prophetically, not
one stone would be left standing on the
temple in which you boasted, but he saw
that would have set in motion a train
of tragedy, going to follow the Jews even
into the exilic places, into the lands where
they would be cast, where at night they
would wish it were day and at day
they would wish it were night.
The whole history of bloodshed and bloodlettings, virtually
in every hamlet and town and city in
Germany, particularly during the Passover season, Passover Easter,
forced conversions, mass suicides in synagogues.
The city that was my favorite in all
of Germany near Stuttgart, where I was stationed
as a GI, Esslingen, I found out after
my return from Germany, just in an accidental
coming upon an encyclopedia, that the entire Jewish
community was wiped out during the Crusades.
When the knights on the way to the
Holy Land would victimize and pillage Jewish communities
to obtain, loot them to finance their journey,
and that the Jewish community of Esslingen had
locked itself up in its own synagogue, and
that the synagogue was put to the torch
and the entire community went up in flames.
And in Esslingen today, there's not so much
as a plaque, a tablet, any kind of
public commemoration of that tragedy.
In fact, the historic cathedral of Esslingen, built
in the 1400s, is supposed to have been
erected over the site where the synagogue itself
had existed.
So, you need to read the book by
Michael Brown, Our Hands Are Filled With Blood,
which is the first popular treatment of the
history of persecution and suffering of Jews at
the hands of so-called Christians.
But it's a tragedy that was set in
motion by the rejection of Jesus and the
judgments of God that fell, that required their
exile and their expulsion, which is a fascinating
and rich study of how people react to
crises of this magnitude and God's place in
it and his purposes in it, the redemptive
purposes.
It would be a study in itself, but
when we know that there's a future such
devastation coming, yet another exilic being thrust out
again into the nations, then this study is
not really academic or abstract, it's pointed at
particular.
So, I just want to breathe a little
prayer.
I think this is the first time that
I've had opportunity to just share this in
a setting like this and to interact over
this paper.
So, Lord, we ask the blessing of your
spirit, that your heart, my God, that is
in this, that has witnessed these scenes, that
as it says in your word, that in
all of their afflictions, you were afflicted.
You were not some passive spectator.
You suffered the pangs and the horror of
the devastation of your own people brought on
by their own iniquity and sin.
And you warned them and you sent prophets
raising them up early and they refused to
hear them.
And finally, my God, when their cup of
iniquity was filled, these judgments fell.
And men who thought that such a thing
would be impossible, that to be cast out
of the land or to see Jerusalem destroyed
or the temple destroyed was unthinkable.
The unthinkable took place.
And Lord, we suspect that there are unthinkable
things that are future and that are now
brooding and being prepared.
And so we ask that you would help
us to think about the things that from
which the mind even recoils and to gain
an understanding and to be fitted and prepared,
my God, to sound the warning and to
instruct the church and as many of the
people of Israel, my God, whose deaf ears
you will open, that they might be saved
from the horror of what is yet future.
So, since that you put the subject of
exile on my heart, Lord, I ask now
a grace for us all as we probe
and feel our way through this paper.
Thank you.
Thank you for that privilege, Lord, in Jesus'
name.
Amen.
In the book that I had yesterday, Israel
in Exile by Ralph Klein, again, the same
publisher, Fortress Press.
It's interesting how this Lutheran publishing house puts
out all this good stuff.
None of the charismatic publishing houses ever touched
these things, which is a thought in passing.
Klein writes, exile meant death, deportation, destruction, and
devastation, not only of a physical kind, but
of a moral and a spiritual kind.
It's a good question to raise whether the
moral and spiritual death is yet even more
painful and has lasting implications beyond even the
physical suffering.
For example, the Jewish attitude toward Germany, the
vehemence and the bitterness toward Germany that yet
remains 50 years after the Holocaust is, in
my opinion, not only a statement about what
was suffered physically at the hands of the
Nazis, but the bitter disappointment in the failure
of German civilization, which had become such a
hope to enlightened Jews right up until the
time of Hitler, that somehow Germany has never
been forgiven for being a failed ideal.
If you would know it so well as
I know it, or even begin to know
it as God knows it, that secular German
Jews, which is, by the way, was the
epitome of celebrated Jewishness to be a German
Jew, was to be a privileged Jew.
The Polish Jew, the Jews that came out
of the ghettos, the shtetls, the little villages
like Fiddler on the Roof were looked upon
with a kind of disdain and contempt.
But the German Jew, the breadth of his
culture, his intelligence, his place in society, in
German society, was the epitome and the hype.
And this people looked upon German civilization as
even being the messianic hope for the world.
So taken up were they with that impressive
civilization.
And I can tell you that just to
move about in Germany today, which is a
shadow of its former greatness, is still to
be impressed.
There's something about Germany, the beauty of the
land, the country itself, its culture, the depth,
its history, its minds, even theology today.
The greatest theology is German theology.
There's something about the German mentality that is
able, that has the stamina to work its
way through complex questions.
They're footnotings.
I've always had great respect, how exhausting, and
they'll cite every source on that subject and
then there'll be an explanation in the footnote
of their particular difference with that writer.
The breadth of their scholarship, German scholarship, fastidious
attention to detail, German theology and theologians are
renowned the world over.
And this is what Jews celebrated, not so
much the theology as the breadth of culture,
the premium put upon ethics, morality, philosophy had
become for them a substitute for God himself.
So it's no accident that their devastation came
at German hands, that the thing in which
they trusted became the source of their death.
And not only a death, but a bestial
death, a devastating death, a cruel death, a
pitiless, merciless death that the German civilization reputed
for its culture and its ethics brought upon
Israel in the Holocaust, such conditions that you
would not even visit on animals.
And that somehow this is not accidental, but
an outworking of something which shows the wisdom
of God in judgment.
God judged and made a rod of judgment
the very thing that backslidden Israel had celebrated
above God.
So it makes you fear then what is
the future yet of this people if the
scripture says that that which is to come
eclipses any previous suffering that Jewry has ever
known, that this time of tribulation that is
coming is of such a kind that if
God did not cut it short, that no
flesh would survive, and that it's the worst
that has ever been known or ever will
be known in the history of this people,
and that's yet future.
So what ought the church to understand about
that if it is to sound a warning
and to be some kind of voice that
might save people out of that devastation?
The temple and the destruction of Jerusalem in
70 A.D. was a tangible symbol of
the people's election and the reminder of God's
unfailing actions in history on their behalf.
Now enemies had raced through the sanctuary in
which foreigners were not even to be present.
If you ever read the descriptions in Josephus
of the fall of Jerusalem, how the last
defense was on the very roof of the
temple and that the building was put to
the torch and men would just burn to
a crisp on a building that they thought
was unassailable and inviolable.
I'm going to use that word again, or
unviolable from the word violation.
In other words, cannot be violated.
One thing we could be assured that whatever
may happen, God is not going to allow
his own city to be destroyed or his
own temple.
That was their belief, that conviction, and yet
they died in the burning ruins of it.
And you don't recover from that.
The memory of that colossal devastation remains, and
in fact there's a sense in which it
ought to remain.
On this last overseas trip, I sat for
about two hours with the leader of the
Jewish community of Nuremberg, a very precious man.
I've been in correspondence with him, but this
is the first time that we met and
had an opportunity to sit down face-to
-face over the table in his office.
And he had done his homework, and I
had written some scriptures for him, and he
had searched them out and he had a
contrary explanation for every scripture.
But I had to say, you're among one
of the rare Jews that I've ever met,
who at least, even though your treatment of
the scripture is horrific, at least you base
your arguments on scripture.
However wrongly they're being interpreted, and that much
I appreciate it.
But we came to a point in our
conversation where it was clear that he had
no understanding of exile or exodus or the
diaspora.
Do you know that word?
D-I-A-S-P-O-R-A.
The expulsion into the nations as being the
statement of God's judgment.
So I had to say to him, how
is it that you were born in Nuremberg?
How is it I was born in Brooklyn?
How is it that the Jews who are
born in Moscow and in all places in
the world outside of the land?
It never occurred to him that there's a
conjunction between those places of birth and the
fact that it's a statement of God's judgment
through exile and expulsion.
So it's something that needs to be made
known.
And we can pray that something was brought
to his consciousness that day that he needs
to consider.
We've done so well in exile that we
don't even see it as the place of
our judgment.
Brooklyn is to us more natural than Judea.
In fact, thinking of Judea seems to us
alien and strange when you've been brought up
in asphalt and brick and played ball in
the streets and in the open lots.
It's your life.
And so what have we got to do
with that remote location and that remote people?
So we move from our experience and from
our understanding.
So much at home in Brooklyn and so
much making our success there.
Even the names that we've mentioned today in
prayer, Steven Spielberg, and I keep forgetting the
name of that film, Woody Allen, a New
Yorker, Bob Dylan, and all of the men
who have succeeded in exile.
So it has removed from us the consideration
that the place of our success is the
place of our judgment and our shame.
We should never have been there to begin
with.
And of course, God's redemptive history ends by
returning the remnant of his people to the
place that was intended for them from the
first when they shall be restored.
Lots of questions are set in motion by
the judgment that results in exile.
If the temple is destroyed and the priesthood
is dispersed, how do you perform sacrifice?
What do you do with your historical and
biblical faith?
How do you atone for sin?
And Judaism was faced with enormous questions and
the way in which those questions were answered
have everything to do with the present condition
of world Jewry.
Woody Allen and men like that who have
been alienated from Judaism, as I myself was,
though I was bar mitzvahed at the age
of 13, I did my thing.
I gratified my mother who felt she had
an obligation that her son should have a
Jewish quote education, which never had a cotton
picking thing to do with God.
The education was really a preparation for one
ceremony.
So I can understand how men like Woody
Allen would be repulsed by that exposure and
have no answer for the dilemma of their
life and have to seek it intellectually in
ideologies, philosophies, and occultic things and other alternatives.
Judaism has been largely a dead end for
modern Jews, although it is experiencing a bit
of revival now, but that what we call
Judaism was the response of the Pharisaic leaders
who were instrumental in the death of Jesus
and the persecution of the apostolic church to
find an answer of how to continue in
business in the absence of a temple and
a priesthood.
And so what they devised, this rabbinical Judaism,
is the alternative to the kind of practice
that God required biblically that had at its
heart both a temple and a priesthood, both
of which were lost in the judgments of
God that came in 70 AD, and for
which the Jewish community has suffered ever since.
Of course, if we had some orthodox Jews
here, they would wildly dispute everything that I'm
saying and commend rabbinical Judaism as a blessing
and what they call Torah and Talmudic study
and so on, but I'm giving you my
perspective, which I believe is true, of course.
So what hope for the future is there
when God has allowed your dearest and cherished
things to be destroyed?
What's your understanding of God?
And this writer says, what kind of future
was possible for people who had so alienated
their God that rejection was his necessary response?
Okay, now into my paper, and I wrote
this before, the thing that I've just read
you, and my paper begins with this statement,
what can reasonably be expected from a God
of providence and the view of his people
when they are shattered, when ultimate catastrophe breaks?
Exile is an unthinkable experience and has everything
to do with how God is to be
viewed in the future, what kind of a
faith can be had after that?
You need to understand the great loss of
faith after the Holocaust.
One of the great books that has come
out by a Jewish writer is called After
Auschwitz, where a previously orthodox Jew now contends
that there's no basis for belief in God
after the Holocaust, that there might be some
value in religious practices to bring some kind
of a moral value to Jewish life, but
belief in God is totally untenable after Auschwitz.
Where was God in the devastation?
How did he allow it?
And I don't believe that Jews have recovered
from that devastation.
They have no answer for it, though there
is answer, but it's an answer that they've
not been able to consider, namely that the
judgments are the consequence of our sins, and
historically that was always understood in everything that
Israel suffered, and it's in the prophets, and
God makes it clear that our judgments are
an exact proportion to our sins.
Why then wasn't that a sufficient answer for
the Holocaust?
Because the magnitude of the Holocaust, the systematic
annihilation of six million Jews was a horror
of such a kind that it eclipsed even
the ability to explain it on the basis
of Jewish sin.
There was no consciousness of sin on the
part of world Jewry, and so they could
not equate their suffering with their condition, but
what they did not understand, and even the
church doesn't understand, is that though God may
withhold judgment and suspend it for a long
period of time, there comes an hour when
it's released, but it's an answer and a
statement to sins of a cumulative kind that
may have gone back for many generations and
now have their final outworking as the catastrophe
of the Holocaust.
So this brings up all kinds of questions.
Are present-day Jews culpable and liable for
the sins of their fathers?
Can a righteous God bring a judgment upon
the sins of the fathers that are experienced
by the generation that came so much later?
What's the connection between the fathers and the
present generation?
How does God view that?
Is his view different than ours?
Is a nation responsible corporately for the sins
of its fathers?
What about individual responsibility?
How could God judge the innocent?
How about the million and a half children
who died in the Holocaust?
These are great questions, and they need to
be examined, and they need to be asked,
because I believe that in the asking of
them, God waits to be found.
It's something like the God of the burning
bush.
He's waiting to see who will turn aside,
as Moses did, to look into that bush,
which is one of the most painful things
to consider.
So the man that I'm reading, Thomas Raitt,
Theology of Exile, writes, one can hardly exaggerate
the challenge to Israel's faith posed by the
collapse of the national state and the removal
of its survivors through captivity in a land
hundreds of miles away.
When you hear this, think of this.
He's talking about the exile and expulsion that
came from the destruction of Jerusalem in 70
AD.
What would it mean if it would have
come now?
What if this present peace negotiation finally collapses
on its face, and the disappointed Palestinians, coupled
with surrounding Arab nations that have always desired
Israel's expulsion into the sea, finally, though they
have not succeeded in past efforts, succeed now?
What if there is a horrendous defeat of
Israel, and a failure of Israel as a
state, and an expulsion again into the nations?
So when you hear his statement about Israel's
past, think of it as the possibility of
Israel's future.
And that, as I say somewhere else in
this paper, there's something about modernity that makes
these things utterly unthinkable.
What made the Holocaust such a trauma is
not only the number of deaths, but that
it took place in the 20th century, in
the age of enlightenment and progress.
That's what was, you know, if it happened
in the Middle Ages, okay.
You know, the dark ages.
But when devastation comes in modern times, by
the most celebrated civilization of all, that heightens
the anguish of the moral pain of what
is experienced.
So having suffered the Holocaust, and the expression
that was born of it, never again, and
the rise of a state that has become
the third greatest military power on earth, with
nuclear capability, and high-tech civilization, for another
devastation to come, and the destruction of this
state, and this hope, and another expulsion again
into the nations, who, by the way, are
not going to be all that gung-ho
to receive them.
What will the effect of that be, should
it happen again?
The effect for the Jewish community, the effect
on the nations, the effect on the church,
this is calamity with a capital C, and
will set in motion such things as will
conclude the age, because that has been lost
now to present Jewish consciousness.
It's in the history book, but it doesn't
have an emotional meaning, all the more because
they're secular, and what does the temple mean
to them, or temple practices, or sacrifice?
Modern rabbis today are embarrassed that Judaism ever
performed sacrifice, and they'll tell you, quite frankly,
that that was primitive Judaism.
They're embarrassed by those references, so even the
destruction of the temple predicated on sacrificing by
priests is nothing that's dear to their hearts,
but present Israel as a state is dear
to their hearts, and it's not only a
hope for those living in the state, it's
a hope for Jews that are in the
nations, who maybe have no intention of going,
but somehow it brings them a sense of
security that the very existence of the state
is a backup in case anything goes wrong,
I've got a place to go, but what
happens if that place is removed, and you
have no place to go, at the same
time where anti-Semitism is being stepped up
in the nation where you are, and your
existence there has become questionable?
It's God moving world Jewry to a final
crisis, and I believe that we're going to
see those things.
It would offend modern Jews even to think
that there could be any connection between the
sins of the past and the present generation,
because they're groomed in a modern view of
responsibility, which is not biblical.
God's thoughts are not our thoughts, but God
judges on the basis not of modern man's
views, but his views.
So part of the prophetic task is to
bring modern men back or into God's view
of things, because it's on that basis that
eternal judgment is going to be rendered.
But you're going to be an anachronism.
You're going to be some freako who has
a view of things totally out of keeping
with the way in which they are seen
today by modern men.
That's why I raised the word about modernity,
and in fact let's go on on this.
This is going to be the foundational basis
of the attack against the church by the
liberal unbelieving community, the Clinton gang, the people
that share that modernist mentality, look with increasing
disfavor upon fundamentalists, the evangelical fundamentalists, and their
subscription to views that are out of keeping
with the temper of modern times.
And that's why they've gotten the Ten Commandments
out of the classroom, and prayer, and all
of these things which are virtually harmless in
themselves, but they can't even abide that much.
They despise the biblical view, and we're going
to be the square peg in a round
hole.
We are not going to fit.
We're going to become increasingly conspicuous and out
of tune with the age, until finally I
believe that our elimination will be called for.
We will be obstructions to ecumenical union and
progressive progress because we insist on biblical terms,
and we're not looking to men to find
an answer to their predicaments through a confederation
of nations and an antichrist system, but we're
looking for the coming of the Lord.
Oh, this is so deep.
You need to read back two newsletters of
ours where I make mention of the Waco
catastrophe, and I raise the question about the
vindictive devastation that came to that little sect.
Weirdo and true, but far out of proportion
to any threat that they could have constituted.
But you know what I believe was the
heart of the offense to governmental agencies was
their apocalyptic expectancy about the end of the
age of a kingdom that would come from
God and not from men, that they would
not subscribe to the kingdoms of this world
and to government.
It was an attack against the principalities and
powers of the air that is invested in
nations and in this nation, and in the
Waco disaster, we have a little preview of
things to come, and I raised the question
in my article in the newsletter, who's next
and how discriminating can government officials be to
distinguish between weirdo sects that are apocalyptic in
character and authentic expressions of the body of
Christ, which we believe ourselves to be, who
are also apocalyptic in our expectation and look
for another king and another kingdom to come.
Will we be equally as blotted out and
considered as much threat by secular government officials
who don't even know which end is up
and who are moved upon by the powers
of darkness whose instrumentalities they are?
Oh, I can go on in this.
Right here in Bemidji, a man was arrested
at gunpoint.
I understand I may not have the exact
figures, something like 30 FBI agents apprehended him
in the parking lot of Perkins Restaurant.
The man was absolutely harmless.
I didn't know him well, but I had
met him.
He attended a little seminar that we once
put on.
He was a learned man in scripture.
He had a view that the income tax
is unconstitutional.
For all I know, his view may well
be right, and that it was hoisted and
perpetrated on a nation at a certain crisis
time in and around World War I, but
that it is basically unconstitutional.
He was encouraging tax protesters, but what he's
really striking at is the efficacy and the
entity of the IRS as a government within
government and a power unto itself.
The reaction was so many times exaggerated as
against the threat that he represented.
That man is presently in a 65-year
sentence, whereas men who have committed murder, rape,
pillage, I mean the most horrendous crimes, get
off after three months, three years, they're on
probation.
Look at Jimmy Baker.
I mean, he's not my favorite, but they
threw the book at him.
Forty-five years, originally.
Yeah, which shows the vindictiveness and the hatred
of the liberal secular community against anything that
is in any way related to that which
is evangelical and fundamental.
So, you hold biblical views, you're going to
find yourself in opposition to another mindset, and
you're going to be looked upon as dangerous.
And I think the disparity between apostolic Christians
or an apostolic church and the world is
going to be more and more visible and
uncomfortable.
The verse that nails that down is the
one that says, and they will kill us
and claim that they are doing God a
service, that our removal is necessary for world
peace, unity, and progress.
That's how much we will be an impediment
in the works, if you take these kinds
of views.
So, here again I'm saying, it's the issue
of Israel, the issue of exile, the issue
of judgment that brings us into an examination
of the things of God and of God
himself, particularly in judgment, that nothing else will
afford us, and that opens up a view
of God that the church desperately needs, that
has everything to do in explaining the lightness
that is in the church, the frivolity, the
casual air, the absence of God's fear, which
disfigures the church and makes it something less
than other than God intended.
That's why I keep coming back again, the
issue of Israel in the last analysis, but
the issue of the church, what we have
paid by absenting or removing these things from
our consideration is visible before us today in
the unhappy condition of the church.
And therefore, what is the witness of that
church to its own community and to the
world, let alone to Jewry?
So, I'm writing that the one tradition which
could approach making sense of the catastrophe, namely
that the catastrophe is itself the consequence in
judgment for sin, is totally incompatible with present
Jewish self-assessment.
They cannot conceive that their sin is proportionate
to the judgment.
And that very inability to see is a
cause for catastrophe, so that we need to
be stretched out to consider a view like
that that has been lost to present consideration.
Now, it's really interesting that the great prophets
of exile who warned of exile to come,
of the judgment to come, namely Ezekiel and
Jeremiah, are also the prophets of restoration.
That the word of hope, that out of
the calamity of judgment God would bring restoration,
is sounded exclusively by the same prophets who
also sounded the word of warning of judgment.
What do you make of that?
That the privilege of speaking the word that
would be the basis for the hope of
Israel's restoration and return was given exclusively to
the men who were faithful to not withhold
the hard word of judgment and devastation.
That says to me that that will be
true in the future as well.
That the men who are today the false
prophets of false hope, saying that this shall
not come upon you, will not be able
to speak a prophetic word of hope when
Israel will desperately need to hear it.
And just to refresh your memory, the speaking
of that word of hope is not just
going to be a little pat on the
back to a people who are down and
out, but will be a very life-giving
provision from God to enable them to survive
until the condition of that hope comes.
You guys following me?
That the word of hope that precedes the
experience of it keeps you from the death
that you would have experienced in despair until
the hope comes.
Here we're supposed to be prophetic, but none
of us are yet in a place of
really esteeming the word for its creative life
-giving power when it's the word of truth
that comes out of prophetic men who are
true.
So true that they will not withhold hard
words of judgment when it's necessary to express
them.
But if we cop out there we're unavailable
for the other later.
Just to show you a favorite text of
mine that this is not speculation, but in
Isaiah 35 when the judgment will have taken
place and an expulsion and exile will come,
and Israel will be cast out again into
the nations and the wilderness of the nations
of the kind that I described to you
yesterday where I was brought in Mexico and
I despaired that I would get out of
it myself alive, though we had a four
-wheeled vehicle.
This is what weary bands of Jews will
be marching through.
And you guys either have to pray for
me of being off the deep end and
highly exaggerated in my views, or I need
to be strengthened in the lonely place I
occupy in believing and speaking these things.
I foresee Jews today now living in comfortable
circumstances of life, soon to experience being stripped
of everything, radically expelled from their places of
security and prosperity, without a cotton-picking thing
on their backs, but whatever they have on,
moving through places that are so bleak, so
forbearing, that if God did not break forth
pools of water in that wilderness, they would
perish.
If God did not keep them from the
heat and pass through the rivers, they would
expire.
They will be supernaturally kept.
But even with that, they're going to be
so stretched out as unto death, not only
because of the physical thing that they're experiencing
that has come upon them suddenly, but the
moral devastation of being stripped of everything, their
security.
I mean, look at German Jews that before
the time of Hitler, they had on their
fireplaces the picture of Uncle Otto with the
iron cross that he won in World War
I.
They were German citizens.
They were more German than they were Jews
and could not believe that this gutter snipe,
this clown in the bar, in the beer
halls, in the cellars of Germany, would one
day rise to become the chancellor of the
nation and set in motion the process of
their extermination.
They were Germans.
They had the breadth of culture.
They were the ones who were able to
quote Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel to the
Gentiles.
They made German writers their culture heroes.
When that all of a sudden comes down
and you find yourself behind barbed wire and
living like an animal from crust of bread,
if you can get it, and being whipped
and—I mean, men threw themselves on the electric
charged barbed wire to commit suicide.
They could not bear the anguish of the
contrast from the privileged life of affluence to
being now a number with lice covered and
without hope.
What would it be for Calvin Klein and—
Woody Allen.
Woody Allen and these guys who were living
sumptuous lifestyles with villas and homes in three
or four different places and celebrated fat bank
accounts and security, all of a sudden to
suffer being stripped and find themselves propelled into
the wilderness and in fear for their very
lives day by day.
And it's in this context that we need
to read Isaiah 35.
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be
glad for them.
The nations will not be glad for them.
They'll be expelled.
But the wilderness will.
The desert shall rejoice and blossom as rose,
shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy
and singing, and so on.
They shall see the glory of the Lord
and the excellency of our God.
Now we come to this part.
Strengthen ye the weak hands and confirm the
feeble knees.
Say to them that are of a fearful
heart, be strong.
Fear not.
Behold, your God will come with vengeance.
Even God with a recompense, he will come
and save you.
Then the eyes of the blind shall be
opened and the ears of the deaf shall
be unstopped.
Then shall the lame man leap as a
heart and the tongue of the dumb sing.
For in the wilderness shall waters break out
and streams in the desert, both spiritually as
well as physically, because someone is able to
say to them in the depth of their
depravity and disillusionment, be strong.
Fear not.
Behold, your God will come with vengeance.
Even God with a recompense, he will come
and save you.
You know, there's saying and saying.
Have you ever heard the nine men speak
from the same text and come out from
the service and yawn?
And the tenth man speaks in the same
text and you go down on your face
and you're devastated.
How come?
Same text, essentially the same word, the same
preaching.
What did a woman say to Elijah?
Now I know by this that the word
of the Lord in your mouth is truth.
It could be technically be the same word
in nine other mouths, but out of the
prophetic mouth, when she says it's truth, it's
more than just an acknowledgement that it's, you
know, it could be lined up with the
word.
It's a living word.
It's powerfully true.
That's the kind of word that Israel needs
to hear in the wilderness.
And I believe this, that the only men
that will be able to speak it are
the men who have first spoken uncompromisingly the
word of judgment that will bring them into
the wilderness.
For which reason already now I'm persona non
grata, unwelcomed in Israel.
And there's not a trip that I've taken
in the last three years to find out
that this meeting was canceled in Germany and
this meeting in Switzerland, because I'm promoting a
view that is found offensive, but of those
who do not believe that such calamity will
come.
That I'm accused of turning the churches against
Israel and even of being anti-Semitic.
And of what was Jeremiah accused?
My God, the man was lowered into a
pit.
Okay.
They could not abide his presence.
And so this observation that Thomas Raitt makes,
that the prophets of exile are also the
prophets of restoration is a profound point.
That privilege of speaking the word of restoration
and hope was not given to those who
had not the stomach to proclaim judgment, the
unwelcomed word.
And what we're saying about speaking to Israel
probably is equally true in speaking to the
church.
Who will really bring a word of hope
to the church?
Those who will not spare the church in
words that they need to hear, that are
of a kind that will be judgment.
Just to make this additional point about those
who will be able to speak the word
of hope that will save men before the
hope comes, is that they spoke the theme
of restoration in the face of the conditions
of judgment.
In other words, before there was any visible
prospect for hope of restoration, they spoke that
word into the midst of the devastating circumstance.
They saw it by the eye of the
spirit and they proclaimed it when there was
no visible evidence around them to support them
in having such a view.
What's the point of that?
What does that underline?
Something about the prophetic call, something about the
nature of prophets who can see something while
the disaster is the thing that is visibly
before you and speak it before there's any
evidence that it could be fulfilled.
It requires a consummate faith, an ultimate faith,
a prophetic faith, and something like what we
were talking last night.
We don't have to wait for the word
to come because when the word comes, of
course we'll not be obedient.
I'm telling so many people, when God tells
me, I said, of course, when he tells
you, there's no question, but you'll have to
do it.
What if he's waiting for you to take
the initiative?
What if he's waiting to see how far
you're willing to go?
You don't have to move to Minnesota if
you don't want to, but are you willing?
I think so many of the last day's
decisions will be of this kind.
It's really still infantile to think that the
uttermost expression of consecration to God is doing
what he says.
Kid stuff.
God forbid we should not do what he
says, but will we do what he desires
before he says it, where he will not
be required to say it, where we ourselves
will intuit his desire and be willing to
take the risk of it.
I mean, this school of the prophets, what
are we trying to do?
We're trying to underline what that word implies.
What does that mean?
What is that calling?
What must it be in the last days?
And you know what one of the accusations
that I've had to bear?
You think you're an Old Testament prophet and
you need to know that that's passe.
We have New Testament prophets that are different.
You think, as if I've chosen, but I
understand what they're getting at.
And here's what I believe.
That indeed, if Old Testament prophets are extinct,
I believe that the last days will call
for them again.
That something of the same Ezekiel and Jeremiah
ability to not withhold and to bring the
word of judgment.
That whatever the character is that is able
to bear that is the same faith and
character that can see the promise of God
before there's anything in evidence of it and
proclaim it with a faith that will give
hope to those who hear it.
That their word will be life-giving.
It's the word of truth in their mouth.
That kind of prophet, again, will conclude the
age.
To call that Old Testament prophet is misnomer.
These are prophets of an oracular kind whose
words are life-giving and they are words
addressed to a nation, to the church, to
God's people.
And I believe that this is part of
the restoration that is now taking place.
There are New Testament church prophets, but I'm
looking for and waiting for those that share
the character and the faith of an Ezekiel
and a Jeremiah.
Let me just read how Thomas Raitt, the
author that I'm citing from, sums up what
we are now discussing.
Their proclamation of that hope is entirely proportionate
to the unflinching proclamation of the disaster as
judgment.
It's one thing to talk about disaster, but
to explain disaster as judgment is quite another
thing.
That's where you prick the hearer.
Jeremiah and Ezekiel's oracles of judgment were more
painful to utter because they were delivered in
the actual existential situation of Judah's demise.
It's painful to bring a word to say,
your God will vindicate you.
He will restore you.
You will rebuild the cities that have been
made waste and have been left desolate, when
all they see is the desolate smoking ruins.
Imagine speaking to that.
Somebody would just want to turn around and
strip the flesh from your bones.
They don't want to hear that.
It's almost like a provocation to say that
there's hope when you're looking at the physical
evidences of disaster.
And that's exactly what they did.
And so the oracles of deliverance require deeper
faith and hope in the future because there
was as yet no historical hint that such
eternal events could become an actuality.
A prophet always sees the thing that is
future, but he speaks of it as if
it's present.
They're somehow in that place in God that
is beyond past, present, and future.
They see it as immediate.
It's so real and actual in their seeing,
and they convey it as actuality.
Both the judgment to come and the restoration
to come.
And to those who do not have a
prophetic ear, that word can be so offensive
and so grating that you just want to
extinguish.
In fact, what has been the fate of
men who have brought such messages, but stoning.
The condemnation of Jesus who gilded the sepulcher
of the prophets that were slain between the
porch and the altar.
The whole history of Israel's prophets is a
history of death violently by those who could
not bear their word.
So I'm suspecting that the last day's prophetic
ministry will be something very much like that.
In fact, I write very much in my
opinion of what shall be prophetically required from
us at the end, when the word is
required to sustain those who would likely otherwise
perish before the actual deliverance comes.
Let's take a little break at this point
and