This morning I think we're going to have
it, because it is given.
So, I'm jealous for your sake.
My reputation has been so long on the
dung heap that I don't even bother to
consider it.
But I want you to receive the full
and ample blessing.
And I know that you're going to be
extremely stretched this morning, spiritually, intellectually, and in
every way.
And I'm very fond of speaking about life
and death issues.
Every man likes to heighten the value of
his own message by commending to the people
who are hearing them that it's not just
a message.
Life and death hangs in the balance.
And that, in fact, is true.
In a tangible, very real way, the issue
of life and death of many will be
affected by you and your ability to hear
and to receive this word this morning that
will affect, if it's understood and received, all
of your subsequent future and walk.
It's the kind of word that brings you
of age in the very hearing, because it
has got to do with the ponderous, last
days work of God through the Church, that
we can almost say that everything till now
has been preparation.
So, the fact that it has to do
with Jews and with Israel should not prejudice
you.
And you should not think that it's a
subject that I'm fond of because I myself
am Jewish.
Just a coincidence.
The fact is that it's what God has
chosen, and if we are his people and
share his heart, we will choose what he
chooses and love what he loves.
And something has got to be done with
that little boy.
God bless him.
Whether it's execution or at the stake or
exile, I don't know, but the world is
not big enough for the two of us.
He'll understand at a later time.
That's how important I think that what the
Lord is about this morning, that we can't
even brook that kind of distraction.
So, Lord, having said all these things, puts
the premium on you to deliver.
And if I'm not exaggerating, and I have
not overstated the importance of this word and
this perception of ourselves as the Church in
your last day's call, then I'm asking my
God for that revelatory power that breaks into
the consciousness of your people and gives an
understanding by impartation and not by celebration, not
by the analytical work of our mind, which
may come later.
But, Lord, I'm asking that divine work, that
thing that is sent and finds entry in
your people, because this mystery is of you
and it must be through you in order
that it might be to you as glory
forever.
And I know enough to know that you'll
not allow any man to touch it, that
it'll not be communicated or fulfilled either by
human eloquence and ability or religious desire.
It's altogether a supernatural thing because, as Paul
says, it's unto you as glory forever.
There will not be another issue.
At the end of the age, given by
you, by which your glory will be obtained
in this earth and will reverberate eternally.
So we just thank you, Lord, and ask
your blessing now, the blessing of your Spirit
and your anointing for speaking and hearing.
May we just sense, my God, the historic
occasion, the weight of it, and be open
to receive it.
We thank you and give you the praise
in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, there's any number of texts that can
be chosen from the prophets.
In fact, the prophets are loaded with references
to the last days' dealings of God with
the nation Israel.
But this morning, the Lord has just kind
of stirred me in the book of Amos,
in the very last chapter, one of the
minor prophets, not because his message is insignificant,
but because it's not as voluminous, it's not
as large as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, but
altogether related to everything that the major prophets
understood about the issue of Israel in the
last days.
And this is an extremely compact statement, which
means that we have to unpack it.
It says so much in a few words,
and that is the genius of Scripture itself.
And that's why if you've been groomed on
Gone with the Wind or Tarzan of the
Apes or something like that, and then you
come to the Bible, you're altogether on another
ground.
Have you learned to realize the genius of
the Word of God, the Scripture, and the
way that God has to compact and to
intensify meaning in just a few words?
And not the least of his purposes is
that he's calling us to draw out his
heart, and that it's a holy and spiritual
phenomenon to read and understand and probe and
extract the meaning of God's Word.
The theologians call it exegesis, the Greek word
meaning to draw out.
The Latin word education is from the root
educare, which also means to draw out.
So to draw out the Lord's meaning and
to have it in ourselves is his intention.
And when you have it in that way,
it's transforming.
And God wants us transformed.
He wants the young people to come of
age, to come into a maturity and a
grasp and a high seriousness about the things
of God that could not be expected, naturally
speaking, with regards chronologically to their years.
And those of us who have been shallow,
silly, and casual and just knockabouts and filling
space and getting by, he wants us to
come awake and come alive in God.
There's an enormous, ponderous responsibility that can only
be performed by the Church, the whole Church,
in all of its corporateness.
That means every cell, every member is going
to be required to be participant.
You know, this is more than religion.
And I praise God for that, that he
has called us to more than services.
And I cherish services and an opportunity in
services to worship the Lord as we have
this morning.
My spirit is just refreshed.
And I know it's going to affect the
transmission of the Word.
Already it is.
And then the proclamation of the Word itself,
coming into the house of God.
What a privilege.
And we delight in it and we enjoy
it and it benefits us and blesses us.
But he has a purpose for himself in
it.
Everything pertains to the ends of God and
his ultimate and eternal purposes.
The issue of his glory forever, that's our
calling.
So if we have jobs and careers, don't
get too occupied with that.
Praise God that it's his mercy that clothes
our kids and puts food on our table
and a roof over our heads.
But that's not the purpose for our being.
The issue of God's glory is our purpose.
And it cannot be obtained by single virtuosos.
There are not enough outcasts around to do
it.
It requires the entire church.
The gray heads, the younger, the older, the
kids.
Everything has to do with the atmosphere and
the thing in which is the outworking of
God's purpose.
You notice, by the way, that the world
is coming apart at the seams.
It's in the process of collapse and final
disintegration.
There's only one institution in the earth, excuse
the language, institution, that bodes any hope.
It's the church of Jesus Christ in the
earth.
And we are called to it and we
constitute it.
Wow, what privilege.
Well, there's a people who are central to
God's last day's purpose who don't know beans.
They don't have the faintest notion of anything
that I've already said.
They don't even know their own prophets.
My mother, who has just visited us, stumbled
on Isaiah 53 and some references in a
book that I've given her of the testimony
of rabbis who were converted.
She said, where's this Isaiah 53?
Is it in the New Testament?
This is not an unintelligent woman, but a
typically Jewish woman who is a biblical illiterate.
And that's the condition of my people.
Now, that was my condition before the grace
of God came.
So you really are the lightbearers to a
people in darkness and it's going to be
the issue of their life and death.
I'm going to describe to you a scenario
out of these scriptures and repeat it in
many other places that pictures world Jewry coming
to a condition of final extremity that will
eclipse the holocaust of the Hitler time.
And it's not going to be confined to
Germany or to the European nations.
It's going to be experienced in every nation,
including this nation.
No nation will be exempt in witnessing the
drama of the last day's extremity of the
Jewish people.
God is going to allow these terrible things
to come upon them.
It is a very severe judgment.
And I think I can say with some
confidence that the majority of Jews now alive
in the world will not survive it.
Only a remnant will.
But it's interesting that when the smoke clears,
it's only a remnant with which God is
concerned in any matter.
It's only the true remnant of the church
that will stand in that last day because
we know there's going to be a great
falling away and a great apostasy.
So God is not interested in numbers.
He shocks off the sinners and the indifferent,
the rejecters.
And when the final light breaks at the
end of the age and the introduction to
the millennial glory, there are two remnants that
stand for God, a redeemed Israel and the
true remnant people of God who were the
instruments of Israel's redemption.
Let's look at that in this great text
in chapter 9 of Amos, beginning with verse
8.
Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are
upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy
it from off the face of the earth,
except that I will not utterly destroy the
house of Jacob, saith the Lord.
Shall we just, a verse at a time
and speak a little bit on each verse?
Like, for example, the sinful kingdom.
You know what I love about the Word
of God?
It doesn't mince words.
It doesn't disguise things.
It doesn't put its best foot forward.
I mean, when Jesus said to Peter, Get
thee behind me, Satan.
And the rebuke that the Lord had for
his own disciples, let alone Pharisees, O ye
of little faith, and why are you afraid?
And how long must I bear you?
And Peter's painful betrayal before the cock crowed.
And, you know, the Lord tells it like
it is.
When he says sinful nation, he means sinful
nation.
And that's the remarkable glory of it, that
God is going to redeem the remnants of
a sinful nation.
That is to say, it's not because they
have any qualification in themselves, or any deserving
that commends them to God's mercy.
Because mercy, by its very definition, in its
very nature, is something that issues out of
God toward an object totally undeserving or would
not be merciful.
Like, for example, the mercy that has come
to us who believe.
What virtue did we have to commend God's
mercy to us?
Zero.
Zilch.
Nothing.
It's just, it's what he is in himself.
And the greatest demonstration of what he is
will be directed to a people totally undeserving
of it, the sinful nation.
And I don't know, are you guys reading
the newspapers beside the sports section?
Have you noticed what's happening in Israel?
Talk about a deterioration in the world.
Look at the deterioration of that nation.
Just take one episode that a Jewish doctor
by the name of Baruch Goldstein, nice Jewish
boy like me from New York, and the
nicest of the nice, because he's a doctor.
My son, the doctor, is the proudest thing
which a Jewish mother can boast.
And on top of that, he's an Orthodox
Jew, not an atheist of the kind that
I was.
And having all of these virtues, he went
into a Muslim mosque in Hebron on one
of their high Islamic holy days and shot
up the works and killed at a minimum
of 39 people and wounded many others before
he himself was stomped to death.
It has never been heard in modern Jewish
history that a Jew should be violent.
We have been the objects of violence.
It has been visited upon us.
But it's something, what shall I say, contrary
to our nature as a people.
We're usually quiet, unobtrusive, although I have to
say there were Jewish boxers out of the
Depression years when men had to make a
living somehow.
Benny Leonard and Slapsy Maxy Rosenblum and guys
like that.
And he was Slapsy Maxy.
But as a rule, Jews are not famous
for violence until the State of Israel.
In fact, it's violence that preserves the State.
It's the nation's ability to be violent and
to threaten violence that has kept it from
the onslaught of its enemies.
Necessity has forced violence upon us as a
way of life.
But you remember what God said, cursed is
that man who trusts in the arm of
his own flesh and blessed is that man
whose hope is the Lord.
Israel is not blessed.
It does not know the Lord, does not
trust in the Lord.
It hopes in itself in its own strength
and is a painful daily revelation of something
that Jews have needed to see for millennia.
That we have no special thing going for
us.
We may have thought that we had some
distinctives and we wanted to prove it by
having our own nation and show the world
what a Jewish nation is like.
You goyim, you gentiles, of course you're going
to be corrupt.
Of course you're going to employ violence.
Of course you're going to have scandals.
But if we Jews ever had a nation,
we'd show you what it's like.
It would be moral, ethical, everything that we
have been unable to demonstrate in 45 years
and especially now and it will get worse.
And the finest of us is now killing
people in innocent blood in some self-appointed
mission to blot out the Arabs and to
ensure Israel's safety.
And you know what the heck of it
is?
People are going to his tomb as almost
a worship.
He's become a national religious hero and even
his mother and his wife tout him as
some kind of great hero of the nation
who shot that number of people in cold
blood, put on his ear sound protectors and
just blasted away at people who were in
a posture of prayer.
I'm not a defender of Islam, but I
think that that is a symbolic episode that
we Jews will pay for it.
It's a sinful nation.
It's a sinful kingdom.
But it one day will be, listen to
this, the residence and the locus of the
kingdom of God in the earth.
It's not unlike God taking the murder of
Paul, whose name was then Saul, and making
him the chief apostle of the church.
God just is God like that.
He takes the worst and he makes of
it the best.
And he's going to do the same thing
with this entire nation.
This nation will be the Paul of the
millennial age.
They will have an apostolate to the nation.
And right now what we're suffering from in
pornography, filth, and corruption and defilement will be
no more when Jews who are bearing the
light of God and the way of God
and will be the mouthpieces of God will
bring to the nation their priestly ministry that
was their calling from the first.
Believe us on this?
Not only must you believe it, but if
you're going to be the church that will
be used to obtain this, you've got to
believe it with joy.
You've got to identify with this drama and
understand the mystery of it.
Paul calls it a mystery.
And that somehow this glorifies God.
He would not have had as much glory,
as much honor, as much credit if he
had taken the people who show themselves to
have attributes and distinctions of a spiritual kind
that he could employ.
He is much more glorified when he takes
beggars off the dung keep and he makes
them to sit with princes.
See?
The issue is God's glory forever and he's
going to take the least likely candidate, a
sinful nation, and I will destroy it from
off the face of the earth.
How do you like that phrase?
I don't know if we'll get beyond this
one verse, but you've got to get beyond
it.
That is to say, how are you equipped
to understand a God who will destroy?
We had a little breakfast conversation about the
severity of God and how the church is
lacking in the understanding of a God who
can be severe.
That's crippling for the church.
If you don't know God as judge, as
Paul knew him as judge, you're going to
live a slipshod life.
You're going to live a lackluster, slack life
because what's lacking in you, that is God's
intention, is his fear.
And the greatest thing that God has given
to inculcate the knowledge of his fear has
been the testimony of his judgment for Israel.
Some people, I can tell you right now,
are going to lose their faith.
They're going to become apostates because they're going
to become offended when they see God destroy
this sinful nation.
They are not prepared for that in modern
times.
It sounds inimical, opposed to what we understand
God's nature to be.
But who's in error here?
It's we who have projected upon him, capital
H, a soft, sappy, sentimental view that is
not God at all and we call it
Jesus.
That's called deception.
The way in which God guards us and
keeps us from deception is showing us the
fulfillment of his word even when he chooses
to be a judge who will destroy.
But the precious thing about God is that
he not only kills but he makes alive.
He slays but he resurrects.
Are you ready for this?
There's going to be a resurrection of an
entire nation.
Will somebody please choke and splutter and fall
out of their seat and cry out in
opposition that this can't be, this is too
much, I can't believe this, this has got
to be metaphor, this is some spiritualizing, you
surely do not mean literal resurrection from the
dead.
Why?
Why should you stagger over that?
Is it so great a thing for God
to raise the dead?
Aren't we exactly here as believers because he
has?
And aren't we encouraged to believe that because
he has raised Jesus he will raise us
also?
The greatest event that concludes the age is
the resurrection of an entire nation out of
the death of God's last day's judgment upon
them.
Now here's the catch.
How is that performed?
Not by God in some mystical way speaking
to that nation, but by employing a son
of man who is a prophet and commanding
him to prophesy to the dry bones of
that nation who are destitute and without hope
and cut off and see themselves as being
very dry.
And unless there's a prophet who can speak
to those bones they remain dry.
Are you guys following me?
Tell me when I reach the end of
your, what do they call it, your capacity,
your...
Yeah.
It's supposed to be like 20, 30 minutes,
something like that.
I'm asking a miracle this morning.
If I'm right in what I'm suggesting, now
you're ready for me to pull the string.
Do you know who the son of man
is whom God will command to speak to
those dry bones in a historic moment of
time calculated that is the future and toward
which we are sending?
Who is that prophetic son of man who
has the authority, the creative power, the union
and identification with God himself that he can
speak for him as him so as to
raise an entire nation by the word, come
forth.
Who is he?
Is he anywhere in the audience this morning
who doesn't even know that he has this
calling and will be shocked to learn it
because he's just an average Joe.
You know, he's just a nice guy who's
a believer and keeps his nose clean and
I'm no prophet.
Everybody who's in the audience this morning is
that son of man.
Put that in your spiritual pipe and smoke
it.
Everybody.
It's either going to come out of a
corporate son of man, a church that has
come to its full prophetic constituency and stature,
the word that was used about me this
morning in introduction, because only that word corporately
spoken as one voice in perfect and total
agreement as the church of older of one
heart and one mind and one soul.
And Paul says, say the same things, speak
the same things, not because you're automatons or
punched off the assembly line.
You're distinct individuals, but in the individual dealing
of God with your life and in the
process and the formation of your own growth
and maturity, you're in agreement with God and
so is everyone else with you in the
moment that has come that you can speak
the word of God as one voice that
raises the dead.
Now, if you've got anything up here in
any kind of sense, you know what your
next question has got to be?
You tell me what the next question is.
If this is the destiny of the church,
to be the prophetic voice of God to
a dead nation who will be eternally indebted
to the church, made up essentially of Gentiles,
that that church whom they have disdained and
have been contemptuous of all their history long
was their saving grace and they'll just bow
at your feet and hug you and embrace
you eternally, that you were the instrument of
their deliverance and salvation.
You Gentiles, you guys who barely have made
it through high school and have nothing that
Jews would ever look upon with, in any
way to be impressed, were the instrument of
God's use for their eternal deliverance.
I'll stake my life on what I'm saying
this morning, guys.
I'll stake everything that what I'm speaking to
you is the eternal truth of God and
I'm one of the few men who know
it and proclaim it freely.
And even those who are sympathetic to Israel
are opposed to my view because they do
not want to consider the necessary death that
precedes the resurrection.
I'm the only one who's got the gut
and understands the way of God because of
his own dealings with my own life and
even with then Israel that I recognize and
know that I know that death must precede
resurrection.
Whether it's individual or a community or a
ministry or a marriage or a nation, anything
that pertains to God's glory can only issue
out of resurrection.
But there must be a first death and
Israel is tending toward that death.
But are you tending toward the prophetic place
to save them from the death?
That's the question.
That's why we're here in Williams Bay.
What do you think?
I need speaking engagements?
That's why I just came back from Russia
and Ukraine and Warsaw and Romania and little
dinky nothing places.
Why?
Because until we all come, until we all
come.
I wish the Lord had said until most
of us or some of us come or
just a few out who can speak for
God prophetically.
No?
Until we all come into the fullness and
stature of Jesus Christ unto the perfect man.
If this does not come to Williams Bay,
I despair for my entire nation.
If every cell and every member of the
body constitutes the corporateness and the fullness of
Christ, then any segment of the body, whether
it's Warsaw, Poland or dinkyville, Romania or some
place in the Ukraine or Williams Bay, cannot
be exempted.
We're in this together.
And it's this very recognition of our call
to be the agent of Israel's deliverance that
is God's unifying theme, principle and revelation.
Any other basis for unity is political, false,
ecumenical and a hoax.
And the only reason why men are working
to obtain it through denominational and religious structures
rather than the organism which is the body
is because they have not this revelation and
don't want to have it.
Because it centers in a people's heart.
whom they despise and do not want to
see resurrected unto glory.
Oh, I'm giving you something to think about
and chew on.
And in fact, if the principle of resurrection
from the dead is not working today, I
would despair of the entire process.
Today, now, this morning, in this message, this
word has got to be something that raises
you up out of the grave of indifference,
of ignorance, of distraction, of all the kinds
of things that keep you from your own
prophetic fulfillment.
And if this will not work by the
word, it will not work.
Even right here, it will shut down.
So, can you believe for a God who
will destroy, who is yet the God of
love?
Some of us are going to be offended
by such a God because we've never allowed
his judgments into our life.
Or when they have come, we have not
rightly understood them and have attributed them to
men or factors or the economy or some
other thing or to a lousy marriage or
this wife or that and have not understood
and made the principle of God's judgment a
first basis for explaining adversity, crisis and death.
Except I will not utterly destroy the house
of Jacob, saith the Lord, for I will
command and I will sift the house of
Israel among all nations, just as corn is
sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the
least grain fall upon the earth.
Put a box right around that verse, a
neon box.
Let the light blink on and off.
God's last days dealing with world jewelry is
a sifting through the nations.
So does that include the USA?
All the nations.
There will not be a nation exempt on
the face of the earth through which Jews
will pass in their last days extremity in
the process of God's sifting.
See, we have to even catch the language
that's being used.
What do we sift today?
When have you sifted last?
We're a modern technological civilization.
It's all done for us by Pillsbury and
General Mills.
It comes to us sifted.
But I have enough recollection to remember my
Jewish mother sifting flour to get the lumps
out that she was making something.
And it's like a fine strainer that you
just shake back and forth and the coarse
lumps cannot come through but only the fine
grains can.
God is going to do that with entire
nations.
And he's going to do it through the
nations and in the nations.
And not one kernel will fall to the
ground.
He'll know every speck that comes through because
he says the sinners of my people will
not be sifted out.
They're going to perish in the process.
They shall die by the sword in verse
10 who say this evil shall not overtake
us nor confront us.
I'm afraid that that describes the majority of
Jewish people in the last days.
Because my time is limited I just am
required to make one or two statements and
pass on.
They're going to be sifted through the nations
and God is going to bring them into
contact with his people because it's only his
people who will reach out to them and
extend mercy in their time of Jacob's trouble
and national affliction in the world.
Basements, their barns, their properties to take in
Jews because if they're not taken in and
they're detected and apprehended right here in River
City.
Can you believe that?
That that could happen in America as it
happened in Nazi Germany?
And the fact that we have Michael Jordan
and Apple Pie and the World Series does
not absolve us from the demonic outpouring of
the last days that will bring a global
hatred against that people by every government and
every people?
That the only semblance of mankind that will
have any compassion for this utterly degraded and
despicable nothing people.
Jesus calls them the least of these my
brethren will be his church and as a
matter of fact that will identify who the
true church is because listen, why should you
have any concern for Jews?
Come on, any one of you.
Why?
You have nothing in your experience except maybe
distasteful things or negative things.
Why should you extend yourself for a people
whom the world will then come to despise
and blame for everything, for collapsed economies, for
war, for the last days collapse of the
world, their comfort, their security?
Jews have always been the scapegoat for the
failures in nations.
Why should you have an attitude other than
what the world has?
And why should you have a concern?
And why should you have a compassion?
And why should you be willing to extend
yourself when it means that you're putting your
neck on the line?
It's going to be a risk to identify
with that people at that time, a risk
of your own life.
So it will take a few miracles.
One is your deep identification with God and
his love for that despised people.
Because no matter how much their conduct stinks,
his love is not measured by our goodness
against.
It's something that just flows out of him
in an unconditional way.
It cannot be offended against.
And so the issue of the people of
the last days who will rescue them are
those who are so in union with that
God that his love is their love.
His seeing is their seeing.
His compassion is their compassion.
What basic question am I prompting here?
I have yet to get the answer from
you when I said that there's going to
be a prophetic people whose word will be
the issue of life or death for Israel.
Now I'm saying in the very same way
there's going to be a compassionate people who
will extend themselves even at the risk of
their own life or that of their own
children to take in a despised people because
if they don't take them in they'll perish
in their wilderness.
And the wilderness does not mean a jungle.
It just means any location outside of principle
urban centers where they can be sifted and
brought and moved from place to place without
being recognized and detected which is the very
reason we've been 20 years in Minnesota.
That's why God takes a Brooklyn boy, a
big city boy and brings him up to
the boondocks in nowheresville because it's there that
God has intended, a place of refuge and
flight.
You know what the great question is that
all of this raises?
If this is true art and we are
presently nowhere near the condition that this kind
of scenario requires, we don't have that kind
of compassion even for each other let alone
for Jews.
We don't have prophetic authority.
We can't speak a word that raises the
dead.
We have trouble even mustering the faith to
pray for someone's cold and sniffle.
So the question is, the great question, how
do we get from where we presently are
to the ultimate condition in which we need
to be if this is going to be
fulfilled?
And there's a one-word answer and I'll
give an A for the day to anyone
who can suggest it.
It begins with an S, suffering.
Church is a place of suffering before it's
a place of glory.
Church is a place of glory.
We're going to have to be a community
that can bear the weight of the assault
that will come to us physically and morally
and spiritually by Jews that are completely deranged
and uprooted and in a condition of panic.
And their mouths will be full of blabber
and they'll be full of hatred against what
has happened to them by Gentiles and what
are you?
And you're going to have to take their
onslaught and it has to be like water
off the duck's back.
You can't be offended.
And right now if I said one word
more you would raise up like huh.
That means there's got to be a deep
sanctifying work in the people of God and
that means it needs to begin now.
It's not going to be obtained in that
moment.
This is the time of preparation and that's
why I have the liberty to speak this
word to put you on alert.
The only one thing that is lacking and
will probably come by the end of the
message is an invitation to say yes to
God for whatever in his sight would be
required to establish you as that people.
And supposing what I'm saying doesn't take place
what have you lost in allowing him that
preparation with you?
And I want to tell you it's not
compulsory.
You don't have to.
You can be an average saint and you
can be an average saint and get by.
You'll be eternally embarrassed if that's what you
do.
But this is an opportunity for your eternal
joy and not your eternal embarrassment.
By saying yes to the Lord in whatever
it takes to prepare us as a people
and to be prepared together.
You watch things change when you say yes
to the Lord for that.
In that day here's what's at stake folks.
In that day will I raise up the
tabernacle of David that is fallen and close
up the breaches thereof and I will raise
up its ruins and I will build it
as in the days of old.
All of this just to restore Davidic worship
and tambourine banging and Israeli melodies and boy
it's very expensive if it's just that.
Are you guys following me?
The tabernacle of David has come to mean
in the charismatic movement Davidic worship.
Talk about a faulty exegesis.
God is not going to go through all
of this elaborate life and death agony of
an entire nation being bled and his greatest
numbers dying by the sword being hunted and
pursued in a Nazi terror that will come
to it in demonic onslaught just so that
there could be the restoration of Davidic worship.
I mean we've got that now.
The tabernacle of David has not a cotton
picking thing to do with worship.
The very fact that we think it does
is a statement of our inanity and immaturity
and triumphalist attitude of elevating the church over
Israel and not understanding God's literal intent for
that nation.
The tabernacle of David is the theocratic government
of God.
His rule and reign over his creation.
But why is it called the tabernacle of
David?
Because that's where his rule must center.
I didn't make this up, folks.
There's got to be someone descended from David
to sit on the throne of David or
there will be no Davidic theocratic kingdom.
I don't know how anxious you are for
that government.
I can't wait myself.
For a new heaven and a new earth
wherein dwelleth righteousness.
I'm sick to the teeth with Clintons and
human government and administrations and Jezebel influences and
monolithic government with programs that are going to
not only end poverty but change the moral
condition of the nation.
What a bunch of hokum and farce and
defeat.
There's a certain corollary between Clinton and Baruch
Goldstein.
They are the best of their kind and
the best ain't good enough.
And God's showing us that.
If we had any hope in man, we're
watching now a man so frustrated, so tied
and not so stupefied by the issues of
power and not knowing how to employ it
and just a contradiction in himself morally and
ethically and intellectually.
He can't govern himself.
How is he going to govern a nation
and a nation that should be an influence
in the world?
There's only one answer.
There ever was only one answer.
It's the theocratic rule of God.
Theo meaning what?
God.
Theology is the study of God.
Theophilus was the lover of God for whom
Luke wrote the book of Acts.
Theo, theology, is God.
And so what is a theocracy?
It's the government of God.
Perfect, righteous, holy, and true.
Now here's the catch.
It will not come except this nation is
restored.
It's got to be the tabernacle of David
that has fallen down.
God will restore it as he restores them
because the law of the Lord will go
forth out of Zion and the word of
the Lord out of Jerusalem to all nations.
Isaiah chapter two.
Don't get poetic and don't spiritualize that.
It's a literal statement.
How literal?
Nations when they hear it beat their swords
into plowshares and study war no more.
That means the unspeakable billions of dollars expended
in armaments.
One of the principal industries of the United
States, one of our principal exports, I think
it's $91 billion a year and many other
nations are in the rat race with us
in the production of armaments.
What will it mean to mankind if that
expenditure is no longer required and that the
fruit of the earth and of men's labors
can be directed to the benefit of mankind
and not to its destruction?
Nations will study war no more when the
law of the Lord goes forth out of
Zion but there's got to be a Zion
out of which it goes forth.
And that's what happens when these people are
sifted through the nations so that the redeemed
of the Lord shall return unto Zion.
And mourning and sighing flee away.
What's the mourning and sighing?
The painful process of this sifting and everlasting
joy shall be upon their heads.
What does that mean?
That's the end of their tribulation forever.
It's their final suffering, their final sifting, their
final refining.
Their government comes, their kingdom comes, and the
king comes who alone is a descendant of
the son of David.
I can occupy that throne.
In that day I'll raise up the tabernacle
that they may possess the remnant of Edom
and all the heathens which are called by
my name, saith the Lord that doeth this.
I don't have the time to develop this.
That does not just mean Edom or Arabic
nations.
It means all Gentile nations will be affected
and come under the government of God when
that tabernacle is restored with the restoration of
that nation.
And then how does the chapter end?
Total millennial statement.
The days come, saith the Lord, the plowman
shall overtake the reaper, the trader of grapes,
him that sows seed.
The mountains shall drop sweet wine and all
the hills will melt.
And I will bring again the captivity of
my people, Israel, and they shall build the
waste cities and inhabit them.
What made them waste?
The same destruction and satanic fury poured out
upon them in their physical place as will
pursue them throughout all nations in the last
days.
Cities today, Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, will be made
waste.
And the first act in their return is
the rebuilding of it.
Because it says, they will never again be
forced out in the last verse.
I will plant them upon their land, they
shall no more be pulled up out of
the land which I have given them, saith
the Lord.
Note the tragic thing is, many are citing
this verse now about present Israel who have
neglected what precedes it.
First the suffering, then the glory.
First the dispersion, then the return.
It has not yet happened.
What we call present Israel is only the
set up for the devastation that must come
and is about to break at any moment.
So, I need to pray.
We're just at the limit.
One more word and the fuse will go.
I want to plead with you to bring
some new things into your consciousness, as for
example, the millennium.
The rule and reign of Christ over the
nations through a restored nation from a particular
specific locus called Jerusalem.
Out of Zion, the law will go forth.
And read Psalm 2 and see how the
heathen rage and the rulers and the kings
take thought against God and against his anointed
and want to break to his yoke asunder,
for they will not have him to sit
on the holy hill of Zion.
But God holds them in disdain and he
said, I have set my king on the
holy hill of Zion.
Eat your heart out.
You wanted to have it in New York
City or Geneva?
No.
I choose the hill, that little pimple in
Jerusalem called Zion.
That shall be the place of my government.
And God means it saints, literally.
It's a controversy.
It's a scandal that God should be that
specific, either about a nation or about a
physical location.
And some of the dumb-dumbs are saying,
he's not interested in geography.
He's interested in that geography because his name
and his word and his promise and his
covenants are not fixed with that geography and
with that people and with their fathers.
He's got to honor what he has said
to them or he's not God.
And what kind of church are we that
is indifferent, that doesn't give a rap, that
his name shall be honored and his word
fulfilled by bringing his people back and restoring
them and establishing that tabernacle of David that
his word can go forth over the nations.
In fact, the nation that will not come
up to that place to celebrate and worship
him on the Feast of Tabernacles will suffer
a curse.
That's how specific he is.
And our unwillingness to surrender to the specificity
of God and our offense at the scandal
of what he has chosen shows where we
are.
We have not surrendered to his sovereignty and
to his choice.
We have thoughts of our own.
We would not have chosen Israel.
We would not have chosen Jerusalem.
But the people of the last days who
are his remnant will choose what he chooses
and rejoice in it.
If you want to understand God, you would
know why he chooses a stinking hill.
For the same reason he has chosen the
basement of this church.
For the same reason he has got us
up in the boondocks of Minnesota.
For the same reason he had David in
a cave.
For the same reason he was born in
a stable.
For the same reason he died outside the
camp in the dunk heap.
Because he chooses what the world despises, what
the world exalts and honors, he condemns.
He will always choose the foolish thing.
That is why he has chosen us.
And through the foolish thing that we are,
he is going to fulfill his millennial destiny.
Both for the church and for Israel.
And when you graduate from this school, not
only have you obtained for yourself eternal honor,
but also the very qualification by which you
shall rule and reign with him from heavenly
places.
Israel is our finishing school.
It completes us to be what we have
always ought to have been and have never
had the stimulus or provocation in our conventional
church life to be.
The crisis of Israel compels us to be
larger than life, to be prophetic, to be
fulfilling.
That's why Paul said, oh, the depth of
the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge
of God, who has been his counselor?
Paul was staggered when he saw this.
And until you see it and cry out,
oh, the depth of the riches both of
the wisdom and knowledge of God, you've not
yet seen it.
It's got to come by revelation.
And all I can do is pray now
that in this scant opportunity, having to give
such a concentrated statement that introduces whole new
categories of understanding, that the word itself will
be triumphant in its revelatory power, issuing from
the office that is mine and the moment
that God has appointed by which to express
this power.
This historic moment that I don't know will
come again.
So, Lord, if I'm not just speaking out
of my hat, if I'm not some kind
of raving lunatic, if I'm not off on
some tangent peculiar to me, if I have
been faithful, as my brothers have said in
the 20 years that they have known me
and have never heard a message like this
from me before, I was not never into
it for the revelation had not come.
But now it has come for the time
is short and the fulfillment of these things
is nigh.
And I'm asking my God a miracle of
resurrection power to take this word and to
implant it in the corporate body to whom
it was addressed.
I'm praying especially for Larry and for Ed
and other people who are here in places
of responsibility in the church that they would
be especially targeted by you.
That the word will be like a shaft
to sink deep into their spirits.
They'll not be able to shake it.
It will challenge them.
It will search them.
It will sift them before Israel itself has
sifted.
Lord, let your word not come back to
your void, but accomplish something significant that will
mean life or death for Jews from Chicago
and nearby communities.
When they will be fleeing for their lives
and just happen to bump into Williams Bay
en route to Minnesota and find that somehow
there were people here who anticipated their coming.
Who were prepared to receive them.
Who have the grace of character and union
with God that their faces are radiant in
his life.
And who do not think it a big
thing that they might suffer loss even of
their lives if they should be apprehended in
the process of befriending and extending mercy to
these people and would count it even a
privilege knowing that it would earn them a
modest crown.
And that the Jews would be staggered.
That Gentiles whom they wouldn't have given the
time of day have anticipated all this, knew
it, prepared for it, and are willing to
take the risks of it.
And would be moved to jealousy like nothing
has ever moved them in anything that has
ever come from the church even at its
charismatic best.
Lord, either on I'm a false prophet or
I'm a true.
And if I'm false, I want to be
blotted out today.
Not to raise issues for the church that
are non-issues.
But if I'm true, and this is a
true word, I'm pleading with you, you'll not
allow it to fall to the floor.
You'll stretch this people, the young ones as
well as the old.
You'll enlarge their hearts and their understanding.
They'll seek you for this.
They'll burrow into the scriptures.
They'll search them.
They'll examine what the prophets have said, knowing
that Jesus is contained and held up in
the heavens, waiting for the restoration of all
things spoken by the prophets since the world
began.
Lord, I'm asking you to implant something this
morning, a jealousy for the glory of God
and those who have not had it.
I'm asking you to implant a love for
the people of Israel and for those who
have not had it.
Not this shabby sentimental sham because they're cute
or we like them or we're impressed with
their entebbe exploits, but your love for a
people who will be increasingly despised.
No matter what they do, even if they
offend us, a love that cannot be offended
against.
And let the first expression of it be
to each other before it is to them.
Thank you, my God.
Lord, bless us.
Enlarge us.
Grow us up unto this.
That you might have your glory forever.
We thank you and give you the praise
for the privilege of this high calling in
Christ Jesus.
That you have elected us as you have
elected them.
But unlike them, may we choose to be
chosen.
We thank you and give you the praise
for our privilege.
In Jesus' name, I want to give this
invitation, and it's holy, and it's not compulsory.
God will not compel anyone to participate in
this.
This has got to be a sacrificial first
fruits offering unto the Lord of anyone who
will stand or kneel, make some physical gesture
that says to the Lord, I want part
in this.
I want to be part of that prophetic
company, that last day's entity of the church.
that can be to Israel everything that has
been described this morning.
I know I'm nowhere near approaching that.
I'm selfish.
I'm vain.
I'm fearful.
I want my comfort.
I don't want my privacy disrupted.
I don't want to take any risks for
anyone, let alone for a Jew.
I'm nowhere near being able to show love
of that kind, even for my own fellow
believers, even my own family.
But I'm asking you Lord, whatever it takes
to change me and to make me from
what I am now to what I must
be for the fulfillment of this great scheme,
to your eternal praise and glory, I'm willing
whatever it takes.
I know it's going to there'll be a
suffering.
You're going to knock me from pillar to
post.
You're going to finger my soft spots.
You have my lusts that are hidden under
the sanctity of marriage.
Every kind of defense that I have raised
up to just get by, you're going to
bring down.
You're going to require.
You're going to compel me to be a
student of the word and a serious believer.
A man of prayer that can agonize and
travail for the fulfillment of these things.
And to be in the church what I
ought and not just a pew sitter.
This is sacrifice and that's what my what
his house is built of.
Don't miss a moment.
There's precious potential in this room.
There's something that hasn't even been scratched yet.
This brother in particular.
So Lord I'm praying a blessing on every
daughter and son of God who are standing,
kneeling, and indicating to you whatever it takes.
I'm going to take down my Jordan posters.
I'm going to strip that idolatry off my
walls.
Even I've got to look at bare walls
down with this distraction that is the seduction
of the age.
I'm going to strip.
Whatever it takes Lord.
I'm willing to be stripped and be formed
at your hand to be a formidable son
and daughter of the living God for the
fulfillment of this holy last days task reserved
only for the church.
But a church of an ultimate kind.
I want to be in that number.
Lord I'm blessing these children and asking your
holy seal upon their heads.
Give them every requisite thing my God that
will shape them for this.
May they be to each other what they
ought for.
We're not going to make it without each
other.
We'll need the encouragement, the strength, the reproach,
the corrections.
We thank you Lord that that's what church
is.
Finally.
I bless this congregation.
I bless this fellowship.
I bless this expression of your life.
Seal this word my God to them.
May it sink into their very foundations that
affects all of their perception of the faith.
The role of the Holy Spirit.
The issue of the church government.
The purposes of the church.
Relationship.
Family.
Faith.
The scriptures.
Everything seen in a new hue and a
new view because you have reinserted what has
been historically lost to us.
The centrality of Israel.
In the mystery of God.
Thank you Jesus.
For this morning.
This grace.
This sense of your presence.
This unction to proclaim and set forth before
your people.
What is totally opposed to our flesh.
Our minds are understanding.
Be glorified my God.
May we have occasion in eternity.
Remember this morning.
The day of your visitation.
For which they will be eternally rejoicing by
us and those who have been saved by
it.
For we thank you and give you the
praise for it.
Saying amen to the holy call of God
in Christ Jesus.
In his precious name.
And God's people said amen.
Amen.