So I'm reminding the reader that the issue
is not Israel and herself, but Israel as
a witness nation, a witness not of herself,
of her own virtue, but a witness to
God, not based on her own prowess and
impressive ability, but exclusively His.
And that finally, as this text indicates, only
His spoken word, when all human basis for
hope is gone.
Remember that in text, when they themselves said,
we are cut off, we are without hope,
then there's a therefore, now prophesy.
For not to know God is the God
who speaks, and by whose word the dead
are raised is not to know God, as
He essentially is and must be made known.
So such a fulfillment waits upon the painful
exhaustion, utterly and finally, of any human ability
to fulfill her calling.
Good thing that's only Israel and not us,
right?
If you haven't had a sense of this
and the experience of this, and how God
allows us to spend ourselves thinking to fulfill
our calling, and when we've been spent, and
it has not been fulfilled, and we're totally
emptied, then is the beginning of the fulfillment.
No previous experience, however deep in God, prepares
you for the next.
In a certain sense, you're from square one,
the very next time out, as if God
had never come to the rescue, as if
the whole issue of faith and confidence in
Him has to be established for a first
time.
There's a trembling, a dependency that your previous
experience and His faithfulness does not provide.
So there's always a tension, always a trembling,
always a being cast upon the Lord, in
that sense.
Okay.
Surely the prophetic national acknowledgement in Ezekiel 37
that we are without hope, our bones are
dried, our hope is lost, we are cut
off for our parts, is such a statement
of final and ultimate despair, contrary to the
historic well-known and inveterate optimism and indomitable
self-sufficiency which we as Jews have again
and again demonstrated to the world and ourselves
impressively.
It is on that basis, or is it
on that basis, that we are to fulfill
our Abrahamic calling, that in thee shall all
the families of the earth be blessed?
Israel's increasing failure, therefore, to establish herself as
a righteous state, as an example to the
Gentile nations, is a testimony to this fact.
How long then for us to condemn her
for the very things she's prophetically required to
demonstrate, and that even the Holocaust did not
suffice to elicit the cry that we are
cut off, we are without hope, and that
her own present proud condition testifies that Israel
has not yet come to the acknowledgement that
we are without hope, is expressed in her
present mentality and mode of conduct, predicated upon
a military self-confidence, never again the arm
of the flesh, which unhappily invites the severity
of gods, the severity of things that must
yet befall the long-suffering nation.
For us who had hoped for the progressive
improvement of present Zionist Israel and the end
of such suffering, there is a need to
reassess whether such hopes have been humanistic or
idealistic, and contrary to what we should perhaps
rightly have understood and expected in the light
of the whole tenor of the Scriptures that
is adverse to man in himself.
This has to be read, pondered, reflected upon.
But I'm goading the Church that their own
sanguine view, s-a-n-g-u-i
-n-e, their own optimistic hope that Israel,
though however unhappily is not what we had
hoped she would be, would improve and yet
become that, is really a projection of ourselves
and a lack of full appreciation of what
the whole weight of Scripture clearly establishes, that
there is nothing to be expected in man,
and that the whole statement of God with
regard to man is totally adverse.
Remember it says in the Gospel of John,
I think chapter, the end of chapter 2,
Jesus knew what was in man and would
not trust himself or reveal himself unto man.
They believed in him, for they saw the
miracles which he did, that he would not
commit himself unto man, for he knew what
was in man.
There's another A for the day.
If you could interpret and explain what that
means, that though they believed in him for
the miracles which he performed and which they
saw, he would not commit himself to them.
He would not make that the basis for
their knowledge of him nor of his salvation,
because it was totally predicated on human natural
assessment of visible demonstration of miracles, and it
was not the revelation that comes from the
Father.
Remember when Peter, when Jesus said, who do
men say that I am, who do you
say that I am?
And Peter said, thou art the Christ, blessed
art thou, for flesh and blood hath not
revealed this unto thee, not even your own
flesh and blood, but my Father which is
in heaven.
We need to be as jealous as God
in the sole and exclusive prerogative which is
God's.
He will entrust nothing to man on the
basis of man.
He has a total disregard for man in
himself.
Everything must come from above.
Every good and perfect thing comes down from
above.
It will never emanate up from below.
Even the best of our humanity must in
the end show its intrinsic defect, which is
exactly what is being demonstrated by Israel.
The nation that was persecuted is becoming a
persecuting nation.
The nation that was ravaged and had been
murdered brutally is now itself engaging in what
seems to be indiscriminate acts of violence.
It must be so, and that we have
not understood that and not seen that and
had some other expectation for Israel on the
basis of her own virtue is a statement
of where we ourselves are.
It's an embarrassing statement that we have not
understood that Israel cannot succeed on the basis
of its own merit, let alone on that
basis to bless all the families of the
earth.
Something grave and radical must happen.
Only that which issues out of resurrection can
bless and nothing else.
That we have not recognized that is a
statement very revealing, not only about our own
understanding, but our own walk, and therefore we
have projected on Israel what we want for
ourselves.
We also want to succeed without dying.
We also want to be approved on the
basis of what we do in our merit
rather than what issues from God.
We're more humanistic than we know.
Ironically, how much more is Israel his witness
people in their apostasy and undeservedness that he
might be sanctified through them before the face
of all nations when he restores her exclusively
on the basis of his own mercy, which
is to say what he is ultimately in
himself.
Remember, Moses said, show me your glory, and
God hid him in the cleft of a
rock and allowed his goodness to pass before
him, his hesed, C-H-E-S-E
-D, his loving kindness, his mercy.
God's mercy is God, and that will be
revealed in his restoration of that nation by
no virtue herself, but by all virtue in
himself.
It is as this God that redeemed Israel
must make him known, and this out of
their own experience of his power and his
faithfulness to his promises by his word and
no other, and that word spoken not directly
by himself, but by the very church which
the Jew has been so long in enmity.
Here is the Lord giving an extra twist.
Not only the word that saves them, but
a word that does not come from him
directly, but the very church which Israel or
the Jewry has historically despised and has been
so long in enmity is God's very saving
provision.
The issue then is not the glorification of
Israel, but of God.
His own goodness prompts him to act as
he does.
It is as recipients of his undeserved grace
and mercy that Israel becomes most powerfully ultimate
witness unto him and is brought to such
depths of broken repentance and corresponding character change
as the world has never seen, and Jerusalem
is made appraised in the earth.
Can we therefore realize that a then inert
Israel can only be called to prophetically out
of our own experience of death and resurrection?
Is not this death made necessary by the
stubborn depth of intractable human pride convinced of
its own intrinsic righteousness?
The issue of Israel's resurrection from the dead
becomes our own.
It compels us to that transcendent ground by
which we are ourselves transformed and to which
we would not otherwise have been brought were
it not for her.
Israel compels us to be what we all
along should have, but never would have, except
by the requirement of her death.
This perception of Israel's future is painful, but
how much greater, though, would the pained disappointment
be for many of an Israel that fails
our every expectancy and brings into question even
the truth of Scripture as we had naively
understood it?
I am of the God who appears now
unable to secure Israel from unexpected calamity.
When I went to Israel three years ago
with this message, having been there the year
before my first return to Israel after five
years of absence and I have no word,
I spoke nowhere.
I came the next year and I spoke
seven times this one message, three times in
Jerusalem, some here may have been there, and
Haifa, Tel Aviv, Tiberias, principal places, this one
message.
And the thing that I left with in
my heart when I went is this, that
the Lord wanted to save from crushing disappointment
and the possible loss of faith those who
naively believe that present Israel is already that
prophetic fulfillment and would not be able to
handle a devastation of this present nation, and
that they begin to sound a note that
would come into their consideration that maybe what
they have celebrated is not the final and
the ultimate thing, but it's necessary preliminary, and
that God must take away the first to
bring the second.
Paul says that the end will not come
until the first, a great falling away, and
not the least of the reasons for it
might well be a disappointment in the part
of many charismatics and evangelicals of Israel being
what they had hoped for.
I mean, therefore, didn't the words say that
they would no longer be pushed out of
their borders and that they would remain safe
and no more would they fear and God
would be this?
How then can this happen?
That's the danger when you have misread the
Scripture.
How shall I say it?
Resting the Scripture, not to your own destruction,
but to fit your own expectation and desire,
because you want so much to see the
present nation succeed that you're prevented from understanding
the Scripture as God intended that it should,
because that understanding is too painful to consider,
if not unthinkable.
What it means is we're standing above the
Word of God and imposing our own subjective
meaning that would make it compatible with our
own established view, rather letting the Scripture stand
by itself and speak for itself without our
pre-subjecting it to our own view.
That's costly.
So this perception of Israel's future is painful,
but if it saves people from that kind
of loss of faith it would be worth
it.
Could this be at least in part a
factor in that last day's great falling away
which Paul warned?
Better to allow ourselves to be carried out
in the spirit of the Lord from evangelical
naivety and presumption and be put down in
the midst of the valley, the place of
depressing truth, and to find ourselves in opposition
to or exempted from His purposes with Israel,
however well-meaning our intentions.
How much in fact must we inquire of
our own present Christianity as a desperate keeping
alive of what God would make desolate and
present Israel for the projection of our own
vain hopes?
Nothing more calculated to make the Church wake
from its own sleep than the deepening, intractable,
and insoluble crisis of Israel.
There's a purpose served in God, even for
the Church, as to how far God will
go with that nation.
And if He'll not hold back calamity, how
then will He spare us?
And if judgment begins what then for the
world?
It's a whole awakening to the apocalyptic conclusion
of the age of which Israel is the
ringing of that bell.
It awakens the Church from its sleep, or
it should.
To pray for the elimination of what now
vexes and threatens Israel, however much humanly it
is to be desired, is to find us
perhaps praying ironically against the very design of
God to obtain the death of false hope
by which alone the prophetic and enduring glory
is birthed.
We might find ourselves opposing God, even in
our best well- meaning intention, praying for
the elimination of things that God Himself has
established or has brought to bring Israel to
that death.
And we talked about this the other day.
How then should we pray?
There's a radical requirement now of another kind
of prayer.
We cannot just pray intelligent prayers or kindly
prayers.
We can only pray God's prayers that are
in keeping with His purposes, that bewilder us,
and are contrary to the kind of strategy
we would employ.
But how can know that?
And how do you obtain God's prayers?
And how do you align yourself with His
mind and find yourself in agreement with Him?
Because if there's no agreement with earth, there's
no release from heaven.
This issue of prayer is more than just
religious politeness.
It's critical.
So what it shows is there requires from
us a radical shifting of gears.
What has sufficed in times past no longer
is sufficient.
We have got to come to a place
of identification with God in prayer, and that
corporately, that we would never have sought except
for this requirement.
And that coming is painful.
To go from easy prayer and prayers that
just rise up to our mind, to actually
find the mind of the Lord corporately and
to pray those prayers is a requirement radically
of another kind.
And for those who didn't hear me the
other day, my favorite little maxim that I've
made up, the quality of our prayer cannot
exceed the quality of our relationship.
True corporate prayer rests on true corporate relationship,
and that requires the cross.
Truth in any form requires dying.
And so it's easier just to pray religiously,
pray nicely, pray appropriately out of your intelligence,
but that very prayer can be opposed to
God's attention.
So the whole issue of Israel brings a
requirement of a radical kind to the church
that changes it.
How much is the prayer the statement of
where we in fact are with God?
You ever think of it that way?
Spurgeon says, you can tell where a man
is in God simply by hearing him pray
publicly.
Not the length of his prayer, but the
weight and the heft of it, the substance,
the feel, the quality of it, this speaks
something about that man's relationship with God.
So prayer is a remarkably significant thing and
is pegged so much to relationship with the
Lord and with each other, and yet God
has bound himself and can only be released
in proportion to the agreement on earth with
himself in heaven.
This could be frightening for people who have
not moved in that dimension and don't want
the cost of it.
So this much at least is sure, the
issues are too great to be prompted by
sentiment rather than the Spirit, and that travail
is effectual that has not its own agenda,
but is in agreement with heaven, however much
its own assumptions are crucified.
That's a great statement.
Oh, I like that.
That must be the Lord.
This much at least is sure, the issues
are too great to be prompted by sentiment
rather than the Spirit, and that travail is
effectual, or that prayer is effectual, that has
not its own agenda, but is in agreement
with heaven, however much its own assumptions are
crucified.
There's death.
Death first for the church before Israel, or
there be no Israel.
That's restored.
Such was the obedience of the Lord himself
when despite his own human desire, after hearing
of the sickness of his friend Lazarus, abode
two days still in the same place where
he was.
Had he acted prematurely out of his own
human compassion to hasten to the bedside of
his beloved friend so as to alleviate his
suffering, he would have nullified the purposes of
God, of the Father.
This sickness, he said, is not unto death,
but for the glory of God, that the
Son of God might be glorified thereby.
How assuredly is a prophetic mouth disqualified when
it speaks a false word of comfort, however
well-meaning, or even a true word prematurely.
This line between true and false prophet is
very thin, and you can lapse from the
one over into the other, not just by
speaking error, but speaking truth before the time.
Jesus waited two days longer where he was.
That for him, given his love for Lazarus,
was a dying.
To his own humane desire to alleviate the
suffering of his friend.
May we keep ourselves in prophetic obedience as
sons despite the censure, c-e-n-s
-u-r-e, the criticism, misunderstanding of others
for our, quote, lovelessness.
What will you be accused of if you
wait two days longer?
Hey, your friend is sick.
Don't you have an obligation?
You've healed others.
Why shouldn't you be there?
You're loveless.
You're concerned only for your own skin.
You don't want to be that close to
Jerusalem where your life will be threatened.
Many are going to think the worst of
your pure obedience to God.
Count on that.
It's calculated to be that.
Obedience will always be misunderstood and cannot be
explained.
Often you'll not understand it yourself.
God will not explain it to you.
How then shall you explain it to others?
You have only to do it.
Later the explanation might come, or in some
cases, not in this lifetime at all.
And you'll suffer the reproach of it through
your entire believing life, as I have to
do with certain obediences that I have performed
over the course of the years.
To this very day, men still think me
a maverick, a man doing his own thing,
independent, not submitted because he did this, this,
and this, when he clearly got a note
to take only 45 minutes to finish that
message.
Only they don't know that when I read
it, my vision was blurred, and I'm sure
it said 45 minutes.
And I believe that to this day.
But how will I explain that to them?
I can't.
I have only to suffer the reproach of
being seen as a maverick doing his own
thing.
Though later on, deeply spiritual people who were
there and heard that word said, this was
the message of the conference, and I wasn't
even a scheduled speaker.
So these are the kinds of prophetic obediences
to which we'll be called.
And if you have no stomach to bear
reproach, and need to be approved of men,
you'll not wait two days longer where you
are.
You'll be quick to do the thing that
men expect of you.
Or your own humanity desires.
Can you live with the tension of unreconciled
suffering, knowing that God has a greater purpose
than its alleviation?
Namely, this is for the glory of God,
and of the Son of God.
That has got to be our abiding motive.
It was His.
And that's what it means to be a
son.
See, every voice is shouting at you.
Every logical and humane thing says, go.
Why not heal?
When you heal Gentiles, how about your friend
Lazarus, whom you profess to love?
Those choruses will be deafening.
You'll even get the dirty look of your
own disciples.
And against all of that tumult is the
still, small voice of God that says, stay.
Now, what will we hear, and to what
will we accede, if we are not habituated
to an obedience to that still, small voice?
That kind of facility is not obtained in
a day.
It takes a lifetime to train up a
prophetic man, a generation, many experiences that God
will bring you through to test you on
this very thing.
What will you hear, and what will you
speak?
When every other voice is clamoring for another
expression, and you'll be goaded and prompted by
the full gospel businessmen to take your cue.
Don't you guys know that?
There's a certain way that men can kind
of prompt you along to be one of
the boys.
But somehow, while you fasted and prayed for
two days for this full gospel conference in
Washington, D.C., before 5,000 people, you
seemed to sense the Lord was asking you
to speak on a eunuch for Christ's sake.
And they wanted your testimony, because it's so
exciting, a Jew that was an atheist and
a Marxist saved.
But somehow, this thing about eunuch, for Christ's
sake, and you looked and fasted, and finally
the night came, Saturday night, 5,000 people,
Catherine Kuhlman in the wings, all the big
shots in circadian, and you've been not eating,
and there's a meal, and it's lamb, your
favorite dish, and you turn away, and it's
a suffering, and seek the Lord yet one
more time, and still that inner voice seems
to say, eunuch for Christ's sake.
And then it's time to speak, and you're
obedient to that voice, and you speak, eunuch
for Christ's sake.
There are eunuchs that are made, that are
born eunuchs, biological freaks.
There are eunuchs that are made eunuchs by
men, but there are those who have made
themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God's sake,
and let them who have ears hear.
And to go on and to develop that,
only to find out later, my God, what
did you say?
You have offended 5,000 people.
They're going haywire, and men are waiting to
stone you the moment you step down off
the platform, and a Jewish man claiming to
be a prophet has come up to you
and said, God has sent them to tell
you, you've misdemeanored the Lord, you've done incalculable
damage against the body of Christ, and you
need immediately to go to the microphone and
retract your statement.
What an onslaught in what you thought was
a simple obedience.
Okay, can one Frenchman be right, and a
million is wrong, and you alone have the
mind of the Lord, and there's Shekerion, and
Oral Roberts, and Catherine Coleman, you know, and
what are you, some Jewish pipsqueak who saved
about five years, something like that?
I'll tell you, it was horrendous.
And then that night, I don't think Inga
has ever recovered, you're invited as a speaker
with the others, of course, how can they
then block you out, to the penthouse apartment
of Dima Shekerion, and you walk into that
room with all these personalities, and you feel
like a turd.
Everyone is turning their shoulder, and oh, here
comes that loathsome guy who spoke about eunuch,
and how impolite, and you learn how to
bear reproach, but your wife hasn't learned it,
and she's got to bear that with you,
and she's calculated and made by God to
be a mercy person that doesn't want to
offend anyone, wants to make nice, and she's
married to a man who's upsetting the apple
cart, and is antagonized to the point of
breaking.
In fact, Inga wept through that whole message.
So, the School of the Prophets ain't a
little two-and-a-half-week picnic.
It's a real place of preparation and testing,
and there's not a God there at your
elbow to say, don't listen to him, my
faithful servant.
God is silent, and allows you to get
roasted, and skewered, and turned over in your
kishkas, and you're exiled virtually out of the
country, as I was, and went to Denmark,
and lived there for several months, and never
took a meeting, but was licking my wounds
for many months, while this same so-called
Jewish prophet was sending me telegrams, and long
-distance phone calls on Jewish holidays, calling for
my repentance, and my recanting of that message
that should now be published in the full
gospel business lens, Voice Magazine, and for all
I knew, he might be right, and where
was God?
Here's the tension.
The tension of having to speak.
The hour has struck.
The moment has come.
You speak what you believe is in your
heart by the Spirit, though still and small,
and contrary to what is expected, but never
a final assurance that you were right, and
that you may have missed it, even for
all your fasting.
That is the prophetic tension, and you'll never
get over it.
You'll carry that till your final day.
You'll never speak with a total certitude that
there's not some possibility that however much you
desire a pure obedience, that you may miss
it.
What do you think last night?
Would you believe my mind battle while I'm
speaking to you, and there was some kind
of brokenness, and an effect of that word?
You know what was going through my mind?
You've laid a trip on this people, cats.
That's not God's Word, or even God's requirement,
but there's an anointing on you in general,
and anything you would say would have an
effect, but that doesn't make it God's Word.
This is your thing.
You like this little thing about commanding God,
and we've worked it up, but it's not
His, and it's affecting this people, but it's
not God.
You've laid a trip on them out of
the general power of your own personality, and
your anointing, and I have to walk home
after that and say, Lord, was that you?
Was that me?
Was that you?
Was that me?
Did I miss it there?
Prophetic obedience is dying, and yet when the
enemy whispers, that wasn't God, that was you,
you're laying a trip on this people, and
you're allowing the force of your personality to
impress them with something that is credible enough
to be worth hearing, and I don't know
about you, but are we susceptible to taking
the devil's thoughts into our consideration?
Boy, we have conversations with him right and
left.
Yeah, boy, you're making a point to ask.
That's true.
And we ask God to say, don't listen.
You know that God doesn't.
He allows you to suffer the It's a
baptism by fire each time, and unless it's
a suffering, is it a real word of
God?
Because that suffering is a death, and it's
the death that brings the life.
It's death that works in me, Paul said,
and life in you.
Whenever you're performing something from God that does
not require a death, it's not going to
be a life.
It'll be pleasant.
There will be an enjoyment, but it's not
going to be a life-giving, life-changing
thing if it does not come out of
a death again and again and again and
again.
Imagine a whole church that is prophetic in
this sense, and indeed, until there will be,
Israel will remain in her grave.
That's why the death of the church must
precede the death and resurrection of Israel.
A woman pastor stopped me in a message
in California.
I was only about 15 minutes into it,
and she's just having to step down, and
I just moved away, and I stepped down.
There were shrieks and howls, let him continue,
let him finish.
The Lord had given me that message on
my knees that morning, in revelation, in prayer
with a brother from Ben Israel, and to
this day, this stink and reproach has never
been resolved.
They even accused me of planting Ben Israel
people in the audience to cry out, let
him continue, let him continue, and then she
said, if you knew that, and the board
of people with her, if you knew that
you were going to be speaking a radical
message, why didn't you submit that message in
advance for our approval before you spoke it?
I said, but my dear lady, I've never
submitted a message in advance.
I mean, if you don't have sufficient confidence
that I'm with the Lord and sent of
Him, don't invite me, but if you invite
me, trust that what is going to come
is the Lord.
Well, you should have prepared it.
I said, it's not the message that needs
to be approved, it's the man, and if
the man has been submitted and his life
has been tested and overseen, then we can
trust more readily for the message.
So it was a real eye-opener to
me, because who can advance?
I don't know what I'm going to say
in advance.
That word was fresh, right off the anvil
of God given that morning, and I did
not know it was radical until I spoke
it.
I didn't know that Munich for Christ's sake
was going to cause enormous uproar, and people
came to me and said, I hated your
word, and I want to be a grandparent.
They thought that I was literally telling their
children to forsake having children and living celibate
lives.
It was a spiritual message, but they interpreted
it carnally, and it became for them a
root of offense, and the Lord allowed me
to languish in the whole heat of that
opposition and the thought that I might be
wrong, that I might have missed the Lord.
After all, I was still relatively young, and
there I was in Denmark in a little
place upstairs, licking my wounds like a dog,
saying, Lord, never again.
I'm not a preacher.
I never asked for it.
I don't want it.
And finally, I agreed to take a series
of meetings in Denmark, and I was reading
Watchman Nee's trilogy on the spiritual man, somehow
in preparation, and I came to a place
where he's speaking about Munich for Christ's sake,
and he's quoting out of Matthew, and he's
quoting out of 1 Corinthians 7, and the
very same scriptures that I used, and then
he says, this is so sensitive, he said,
that if you miss this by the Spirit,
it's the very heart of offense, and boom,
the burden lifted, as if I had not
breathed for three months.
It was a mechaya, you know?
But why did the Lord allow the burden
to remain for three months, that I might
have missed the Lord and done incalculable damage
to the body of Christ?
Because if you're going to bear the Word
of God, the real Word, you've got to
know that it's a great responsibility, and you've
got to go through a baptism of fire.
You're not playing games, and you're not in
the entertainment business, and God will not entrust
His Holy Word to casual speakers or to
men who will make profit of it.
There's got to be a baptism in fire,
there's got to be multiple deaths, there's got
to be testings, and they're not cheap, they're
not easy, and they're not quick, and then
can God entrust His sacred words.
How would you stand up under the accusation
of lovelessness that was unloving, or your message
is hard?
I'm hearing that now so frequently, and really,
I wasn't aware of that.
Can you take the accusation that you're loveless?
That was the very cry that I heard
in the congregation in Jerusalem when I spoke
the Ezekiel 37 message.
You know, you've got to have such foundations
in God that no matter what men say
of you, that somehow you're not wither under
the blast of it and come unglued and
undone, that you somehow need their approval or
need to be seen and recognized as being
loving.
If that's the way you're going to see
me as being loveless, so let it be.
Let God vindicate me, but if that's what
I've got to suffer for speaking that word,
so be it.
Have you come to that place?
And what does it take to come to
it?
The whole substance of all that we're speaking
in these days is simply to come to
the place where we allow God the free
right to prepare us in such ways, because
it's not for everyone.
Others can, you cannot.
This is only for those who are called
to the ultimate things that pertain to his
glory, to the things that are prophetic and
apostolically true, and that preparation is the greater,
the more demanding, and the more painful.
But he will not inflict it, except that
we voluntarily welcome it.
So if you want to live a Christian
life in a lesser or other place, charismatic
and evangelical, for which he'll never fault you,
you're quite free to live it at that
level, he'll allow you.
This is only for those who say, Lord,
whatever it takes.
And it takes.
Okay.
It's just like we're already on the subject
of prophets, and I didn't intend that until
tomorrow.
So however much our non-intervening silence will
be construed as lovelessness, ironically, it's only a
faith that works by love that will suffice
in that once and for all critical moment.
Not the present love, which may be no
more than sentiment or symbiotic identification or appeasement
for guilt, or fascination for the mystique of
Israel, but the unconditional love of very God
himself.
I think nothing provoked a greater howl than
my suggestion in Jerusalem that a lot of
you Christians have an identification with Israel that
is symbiotic and subtly self-serving.
You know what symbiotic means?
You're in a relationship by which you expend
yourself for another, but only because something is
returned to you of a kind that is
personally gratifying.
That one thing, as I said last night,
disqualifies ministry as being priestly.
And if it's not priestly, then neither can
it be prophetic.
How far must God's death go?
How far must the application of the cross
reach to touch the most subtle ligaments and
sources of subtle satisfaction that come to us
through serving, or through identifying with the purposes
of God or with the people of God?
And until we've come to that, we have
not his unconditional love, but something lesser and
other.
But that faith will not work except it
works by love.
So we are called to a prophetic faith
beyond ourselves, a love beyond ourselves, an obedience
beyond ourselves, an agreement in unity beyond ourselves,
and being required to speak as of one
voice.
For us to live, then, must be Christ.
Will we wonder that the Lord enjoins Israel?
Then you shall know that either would have
spoken it and performed it, says the Lord.
Indeed, for who is to say where such
a son of man ends and the Lord
begins?
So complete that fits the bride for the
bridegroom, when you can't tell where the one
ends and where the other begins.
So here's the final summary and conclusion.
For if he himself, as an utterly devastated
son, cut off and out of the land
of the living, and could then, as the
resurrected and glorified son, enlist the power to
birth the church, how shall we expect less
or other for Israel, whose glorious restoration is
the key to the nations?
If Jesus himself was required as a son
to taste death in order to come into
a resurrection and ascendant place to birth the
church and to forward the redemptive purposes of
God, how shall we expect less of the
son that Israel was called to be, and
that it should find a means other than
what was his?
It too, as the church, must come through
the way of death and resurrection.
But how is this affected?
The prophet is no more a spectator but
agent.
His fidelity, his faithfulness alone, releases the powers
which brings new life.
His vision is critical to the fulfillment, all
the more because he sees the situation at
its worst.
Therefore, if he dealt with as severely as
Israel itself, for if he is to be
as God's mouth, he must first become one
with God's heart, for out of the abundance
of the heart alone does the mouth speak,
and that by a willing obedience consistent with
all past obedience and not just a final
moment's obligation.
That obedience is itself a death to those
final inveterate prejudices and envies, insecurities that would,
for many, just as soon leave Israel in
its grave than bring the prodigal back from
the dead, to bask in the father's favor.
For only such a death will free the
son of man company from those final succulties
of pride and prejudice that qualify it at
last as God's prophetic people.
Now the sticks can be joined together so
that one king shall be king over them
all and David their prince forever.
It is the issue of Israel alone, though
she be oblivious to this function, that compels
the church to that ultimate faith, obedience, and
stature by which it is itself fitted for
eternity.
Is not this the heart of that mystery
that alone saves us from the deadly conceit
of our own misconception as the church, apart
from Israel or substituting for Israel?
Where shall be found more to be down
to the eternal honor of God than this
triumph over sin and death in both Israel
and the church?
The same powers of hell and darkness that
rushed in their characteristic fury to bring to
death the Son of God will now again
at the end of the age repeat their
ineluctable logic against the whole house of Israel,
seeking an extermination of that nation whose restoration
is cojoined with the coming of its king
and the triumphant establishment over the nations through
his theocratic rule.
The threat of that lost sway of the
principalities and powers over the nations so enjoyed
till now accelerates and intensifies the rabid hatred
of the deceived of the nations, both Islamic
and Western, against Israel, fulfilling the purposes of
him who is sovereign over all, and whose
certain triumph over death by the spoken word
will be played out before the face of
all nations and that of the chosen nation
itself.
Thus Israel will fulfill the role which it
had spurned or so sorely misunderstood, fulfilled ironically
now more by its vices than its virtues
and in its failings than its successes.
O'er the depths of the riches, both
of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how
unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past
finding out.
That's the article.
Let's pray a blessing on it and that
the Lord will imbue it with the spirit
of truth and give an ability of people
who have not had our privilege, our preparation,
somehow to understand by it the same things
that require for us a background, and that
it will be a turning point that will
be pivotal in opening up whole new perspectives
of the faith.
What the call of God is, what the
creative word is, what the prophetic word is,
what kind of obedience as sons it requires
and how that is to be obtained, why
the church must first know death and be
itself a resurrection phenomenon where Israel cannot be
raised from the dead.
Only a resurrection word will succeed and it
must come out from a resurrected people who
themselves have submitted to the necessary death of
their own first things.
So Lord we just hold this up to
you, precious God.
You've given this, my God, if I know
anything, it's a critical key of understanding not
only for Israel and her future, but the
church, the meaning of the faith, all the
issues of the faith, my God, in a
way that we have not been required to
see it, even what prayer means, what unity
means, what the body of Christ means, what
prophetic means.
It's revolutionary, it's radical, it's demanding.
It raises the cross and makes it again
central to the faith in a way that
we have not been invited to see it
in all of our charismatic years.
And Lord we're asking an appropriate blessing.
These children now can have part in the
reward of this by their investment, by their
participation in faith, in prayer, in intercession for
this article in this journal that has been
willing to publish it.
Lord may it open doors elsewhere as Lilia
has hoped that now she will submit it
in French to a French Christian publication and
hopefully German and that it will make its
rounds and do its work for your church
in the earth among the nations everywhere.
And let that work be done with us.
Lord you've spoken to us in ways I
didn't intend today of what it means to
be prophetic and obedient, what kind of a
preparation to be bearers of your Word, let
alone that last and ultimate Word that saves
the nation out of death.
And we just ask you to look upon
us, my God, who have called us to
hear such things that you might have from
the deepest place of the truth of our
being, a yea and amen.
Lord if we didn't tell you exclusively we'd
tell you now whatever it takes.
Whatever took for aught and is taking for
aught must necessarily be required also of us.
There's no shortcut and we're willing.
God forbid that we should enter eternity having
missed the grandest opportunity to have been significantly
employed for you in your work with the
nations and this nation that we would have
opted for something less and less costly but
we're telling you now that whatever it takes.
Fit us by trial, by testing, by the
things that you'll demand, by the things that
cannot be explained, by the dust that we
must taste to be eminently that people of
the resurrection who can bear your Word for
your Word alone is life.
Thank you precious God for every amen to
that prayer you're hearing out of these children,
out of their hearts.
That even today this has been for us
an event, something turned, something established in your
hearing, in your recognition that would even make
the powers of the air to tremble.
Lord I ask a release of prophetic men
and women from this congregation and from the
hearing of this tape to come into a
world desperately needing to hear the Word of
truth uncompromisingly spoken even when it will be
misunderstood which by its very nature must be
so and yet bear it without hesitation.
Oh Lord come and have such sons and
daughters for your use in these last days.
We bless you for the privilege of being
such and welcome from your hand every preparation
required that only you can give and you'll
not hear us whimper once.
Thank you Lord for the high calling in
Christ Jesus which we affirm again today and
say yes Lord with gratitude it's ours in
Jesus name.