Maybe true propheticness can be measured by the
kind of adverse reaction that it invokes.
If we find ourselves well accepted and popular,
and one of the boys were likely in
the false place, because the history of prophets
is the history of persecution.
Jesus spoke about all of the prophets that
were stoned, that were sent unto you, and
that can it be that a prophet should
die in any place other than Jerusalem, that
Jerusalem has been the place where the prophets
have met their end.
So there's something intrinsic to the prophetic calling
that invokes or has to do with persecution,
and my concern this morning is a kind
of anatomy of persecution, an understanding of it,
and what occasions, what form does it take,
what is the prophet's response to it when
it comes, as being somehow something suggestive and
instructive for us.
So I want to pray for that, and
this morning's devotional material speaks of persecution of
another kind that may be more formidable as
a problem for saints than that which comes
from without, is the persecution that comes from
within, which is to say our own opposition
to ourselves, being our own worst enemies, and
kicking ourselves, and opposing ourselves, in a kind
of freedom that we think we can enjoy,
where we would never dream to call a
brother a jerk, we will call ourselves a
jerk, as I've done recently when I hung
up the hangers for the rods over my
mother's door, upside down, and had to extract
the nails and do it over again, and
the very next one that I did, I
did it again the same way, and so
I thought I was fully justified in kicking
myself and calling myself a jerk, but that's
no more pleasing in God's sight than if
we were called someone else.
We are not at liberty to abuse ourselves
however much we think it coming, and yet
that might be the greatest indoor sport, and
the greatest practice of saints, is that they're
facing what is formidable, not from outside themselves,
but from within themselves.
So before we get to Jeremiah, and the
persecution that came to him externally, I want
to read a little bit from Oswald Chambers
and another devotional source, that just happens on
this day to come up, that might be
helpful for some of us.
So Lord, blessing again we pray.
Your blessing is everything.
We can't imagine how anyone can proceed without
the blessing of the Lord that maketh rich.
So the operation of your spirit Lord, and
the bringing of these things to light and
to life, may it bring release, may it
bring deliverance, may it set free those who
have hindered themselves from the fulfillment of their
own calling, and give us rich insight Lord,
into the experience of Jeremiah in that way
Lord, that will likely be our own.
Show us the corollary between his time and
ours, the forces that opposed him, and how
they sought to dispose of him, and how
you affected his deliverance.
And we want to learn Lord, an anatomy
of persecution, the principles, underlying things Lord, that
are universal at all times, and will be
likely to be experienced greatly of those of
the last days.
Thank you my Lord, bless us together now,
and be blessed with us, and we thank
you and give you praise for yet another
privilege in Yeshua's name.
Amen.
Well I read every day both my Atmos
for his highest, the selection for that day,
and another one that I didn't know about
until about a year ago called God Calling.
And I've mentioned it before, but I'll say
it again.
God Calling is the daily word that two
women received in England.
I don't know when, the 1930s, something like
that.
They were spinsters, or widows, I'm not sure
of their condition.
They lived together, and they sought the Lord,
and they received from the Lord a daily
word in the morning.
And it was such a kind that began
to be circulated.
People were blessed by it.
And then someone came and edited their notes
that they took, and compiled this devotional from
those daily things received from the Lord.
So, here's today's, it's called Shame and Remorse.
And it's God speaking, that's how it came
to them.
God is talking to these women.
My children, yes, shield from the scorn and
cover from the chiding.
It's in quotation marks, so it must be
either from a church hymn, or something that
was familiar to them in their English experience.
And then the Lord went on to say
to them, according to their report, often I
have to shield my disciples from their own
scorn and chiding.
You know what it means to chide?
To berate yourself.
My poor Peter could never have done my
work, never have had the courage to live
on, or the daring to live for me,
but for the tender love with which I
enwrapped him.
Not from the anger of my father, who
was all loved that I need to protect
him, not from the scorn of his enemies,
nor from the resentment of his friends, no,
but from the self-hatred of Peter for
himself.
That God's greatest act toward Peter was not
to defend him from things that were external,
though being an apostle he was going to
experience that.
His greatest threat was that which came to
him from himself.
His own self-loathing, his own self-contempt,
his own berating of himself and chiding of
himself.
And of course there was cause.
He betrayed the Lord.
After his loud protestation, though all the world
deny you, yet will I deny you ever.
Before that, the echo of that even dissipated.
He was denying the Lord before the cock
crowed three times.
I don't know the man.
And with oaths and with cursings.
So if any man would be haunted by
failure, grievous failure, shameful failure, it would be
Peter.
And what the Lord is saying here, I'd
like to believe that that is the Lord,
that that would have disfigured his whole apostolic
life.
His own self-hatred for his failure would
have kept him from a fulfillment of his
own calling.
Because it is so cloying, you can't shake
it.
It gnaws at you.
The thought continually comes to you.
The remembrance of your failure.
And so the greatest act of love was
to keep him from his own destructive tendency,
just to muse and to kick himself for
that grievous failure.
And to one degree or another, that's the
problem of many of us, if not all
of us.
Someone once wrote that though the cock would
crow 10,000 times, we will not forgive
ourselves.
We will forgive others, but we will not
forgive ourselves.
We are our own worst taskmasters.
And we sometimes have a standard for ourselves
beyond anything that the Lord himself would impose.
And so it's a frustration that is calculated
to weaken the saint, to rob him, and
at its worst form to destroy him and
destroy him in his calling.
So before we talk about external persecution, let's
look at the one that's right before us,
of which we ourselves are the promoters and
the worst inflictors.
So Peter was his own worst enemy.
These are my own thoughts.
And self-condemnation was the thing that was
eating at him.
And that's not a privilege to which we
are entitled.
I'm not entitled to call myself a jerk
because I hung up the hangers for the
curtain rods the wrong way.
No more than I would call someone else
who had done it that name.
Because it's me does not give me the
right to berate myself.
I'm still a son of the most high
God.
And that when you impugn a son of
his, you're impugning him.
But we think we have that liberty because
we could do anything to ourselves.
And somehow we have a greater delight in
kicking ourselves than in kicking others.
That's why this writer said that though the
cock crow 10,000 times, though we may
have forgiven others, we'll not forgive ourselves.
There's something perverse about this self-inflicted, morose
kind of behavior.
It's a form of soul sickness, but it's
like a plague and affects more saints than
we can know.
And so to my followers today, as then,
there come the shame and remorse and contempt
for themselves, for their weak selves.
They meant to be so strong and brave
for me.
And then I have to protect them with
a shield of love, or they would never
have the courage to fight and conquer.
But this facing of the real self has
to be shame and remorse that must come
because there's grounds for it.
The only question is how long do you
continue to rue your failure?
How long do you continue to steepen it?
Maybe it has something to do with self
-pity, or there's a certain kind of perverse
delight in ruminating over past failures.
It's healthy to acknowledge them, to seek forgiveness
for them, to put it under the blood.
But it's abnormal and unhealthy to continue to
languish in them.
So it talks here about if a butterfly
remained earthbound and weighed down with the thought
of its contemptible past, how would it be
a butterfly?
It couldn't take off.
So now today I say to you both,
to these two women, that you are not
to dwell for one moment on your sins
and mistakes and faults and bad habits of
the past.
What does that mean?
That we would be oblivious as if it
never happened?
And to disregard it, be light about the
question of sin?
Not at all, no.
You could be grave and solemn and stricken
for that moment and then give it to
the Lord or confess it to a brother.
But after that, not to enjoy the luxury
of languishing in it.
It will weigh you down.
You'll not be a butterfly that can take
off.
You're not to dwell for one moment on
your sins, your mistakes, your faults, your bad
habits of the past.
You must be as one who runs a
race, stumbles and falls, but rises up again
and presses on to the goal.
What does it avail if we stay to
examine the spot where we fell or weep
over the delay or over the short-sightedness
that prevented our anticipating and avoiding the obstacles?
What value is it to continue to rue
something?
You know that word?
R-U-E.
So with you, here's the Lord exhorting these
women, I laid on you as a command,
do not look back.
I'm not allowing you the luxury of festering
over the failures of the past.
I'm commanding you, do not look back.
Give yourself and all you have to a
fresh start from today.
Remember no more your sins and failures, for
the remembrance is a fierce current of disappointment
that hinders the swimmer.
I wrote here that swamps the swimmer.
It's a tide that we ourselves are invoking
against ourselves, and we don't need it.
There are enough tides of opposition coming externally
without our adding to it by continuing to
dwell over what should be put under the
blood and given to the Lord.
For what he forgives, he forgets and casts
away from him as far as the east
is from the west.
Why aren't we then able?
If he's willing to do that, why aren't
we?
What is it about us that's so perverse
that we will not forgive what the Lord
has forgiven?
Isn't that remarkable?
Because what he forgives, he forgets, and we
continue to hold it about our own failures
and maybe the failures of others.
And I'll tell you what, if you're holding
the failure of another, you're preventing him from
swimming.
Something is injected.
Something comes into the atmosphere.
There's a valence.
Something is operating in the realm of spirit
by your holding something against him for which
the Lord has forgiven him.
And that's why it is that we're fighting
against currents and we never break through to
reach the goals.
So when I sent my disciples out two
by two, no script, no coats, no money,
it was an injunction to be carried out
literally, not only literally, but figuratively too.
On life's journey, throw away all that is
not important.
Cast aside all the hindrances, the past imperfections
of your own and of others.
The sense of failure, the haunting, persistent, gnawing,
G-N-A-W-I-N-G, sense
of failure, which will keep you from present
success in the Lord.
Travel unladen with a light heart, freed from
that kind of a weight.
And then it ends, my children, I love
you.
Good?
Huh?
That's good.
Worth recording?
Yes.
I hope it'll encourage many.
Any thought that that has provoked?
Yeah.
Simply that kind of indulging in self-pity
and constant haranguing of oneself is ultimately yet
another form of self-glorification.
Because there's a standard that we ourselves have
established, not the Lord, that we want to
meet, because by that our self-esteem is
established.
We have met our own standard.
Well, the standard of the Lord is beyond
any standard of ours, and it can't be
met by any accomplishment of ours.
The only way to obtain it is to
be in him who has attained it.
The fact that we're still kicking ourselves shows
that we're operating on a very different plane,
namely, still wanting to be established on the
basis of our own standard and our own
self-esteem.
That's doomed for failure.
And we'll always kick ourselves for those failures,
and our whole life will be a life
of fretful kicking because we've missed the point.
There's no way that we're going to satisfy
ourselves by any standard that we can establish
or succeed in, but that the Lord himself
has given us his accomplished life to live
in and to express.
And so not the least of it is
your thoughts above my thoughts.
Filthy rags.
Huh?
You know, the kicking against filthy rags of
your own.
Yeah.
If Peter had something for his betrayal that
would have crippled his whole apostolic life, what
should we say about Paul?
He was a murderer, a persecutor of the
Church.
That should have weighed on him in such
a way that he could never lift his
head and never serve God completely.
He makes, I think, one reference to it
about how undeserving he was of the grace
of God that it should come to him
having been a persecutor of the Church.
But that's all.
Then he goes on.
That's his past.
It was instructive.
It was needful.
It was a sobering thing, but it's not
a crippling thing.
And in today's Oswald Chambers for the 20th,
the scriptures out of Matthew 11, verse 28,
and I will give you rest.
Beware of allowing self-consciousness to continue because
by slow degrees it will awaken self-pity
and self-pity is satanic.
The complete life, I'm skipping here, in contrast
is a life of a child.
When I am consciously conscious, there is something
wrong.
The child of God is not conscious of
the will of God because he is the
will of God.
Wow, wow.
You know, for us to use language like,
if God will help me, which I hear
saints saying all the time, implies that there
are two entities at stake.
One is God and the other is ourselves.
If God will do for me, then I
will be able.
What Oswald Chambers is saying is that's missing
the glory of the faith.
That's operating religiously as if God is only
giving us an assistance to our own human
endeavor.
What he has given us is much more
than that.
Namely, he's given us himself.
And to live and to be in him
is not to say, Lord, what is the
will of God for me?
But it's to be in that will.
And to live with a complete freedom and
abandon to that knowledge that unless there's a
check, you're continuing to be in that will.
We don't continually have to put the question
to God.
Am I in your will?
Am I not?
That's to tie yourself into knots and to
make your life nothing but a frustration.
That except there be a check, just to
have the sublime confidence, you're in the will
of God.
And Chambers is even more bold than I.
He says, you are the will of God.
I mean, how do we know about these
days?
What we're even speaking this morning.
How is that determined?
Did I make a calculated survey of different
possibilities?
It came in this out of this morning's
devotion and our prayer time and conversation the
same way.
So what he's saying is the rest of
God is the sublime confidence that you're in
the will of God.
It's a childlike confidence and trust that is
not continually taking a pulse, measuring, wondering, am
I, am I not?
It's simply being.
To live as Christ.
And Paul's great accomplishment as an apostle was
not in the least because he was freed
from the kinds of considerations that choke and
stultify us as self-conscious saints.
If we're self-conscious, the problem is that
there's still a self that has not been
crucified and loves to be the object of
your consideration.
Wants you to dwell on it because it
doesn't want to give up the ghost.
It wants to continue to be the foremost
object of your concern.
And it's more deadly in the spiritual realm
than ever it was in the secular.
Faith is a trust predicated on a knowledge
of God, his character, and what he has
performed.
If we don't know that, then how shall
we believe that?
So do we really know what was wrought
at the cross?
And where Jesus says, it is finished.
What is the it?
And when he says finished, how thorough is
that?
Is there anything left over after that that
God has not attended?
Who has given us all the things that
pertain to godliness and to life.
So if we're falling short of that, and
still living fretful, self-conscious lives, it's either
we don't know the provision that has been
made, or we have not the faith to
believe for it, or perversely, we actually enjoy
this self-consciousness and kicking of ourselves and
self-pitying.
There's a perverse kind of enjoyment.
If you want to see this, talk to
my mother.
Her whole life is predicated on self-pity.
This one failed her, that one failed her,
this is wrong, that's wrong.
She enjoys.
These Jewish women, these widows, what else do
they occupy themselves with?
Failed possibilities.
My brother Lenny was such a one.
If only he had done this rather than
that.
If only he had this happen rather than
that happen his whole life.
He was continually living in the past of
unfulfilled or failed occasions.
So to be saved is to be delivered.
And Chambers knows this reality and expresses it
like no one else that I know.
The complete life is the life of a
child.
That doesn't mean goo-goo.
That means childlike trust and confidence that it
is finished.
And that we are in the will of
God.
And that if we're not His will able
to give us a check and in the
absence of that check go on with complete
abandon and confidence that that is His will.
For He is in us to will and
to do of His good pleasure.
And the God who created the heavens and
the earth and all that in them is
has not the power to check us if
we begin to wander out of them.
Is He that weak that He cannot communicate
to us that uh-uh, you know, and
you'll feel an inward check or a dis
-ease your rest begins to dissipate away, your
peace.
You know something needs to get back in
line.
So when there has been the slightest deviation
from the will of God we begin to
ask what is thy will?
A child of God never prays to be
conscious that God answers prayer.
He is so restfully certain that God always
does answer prayer.
If we try to overcome self-consciousness by
any common sense method, we will develop it
tremendously.
Isn't that a remarkable paradox?
That in trying to get out of this
terrible trap of self-consciousness that the more
we labor to get out of it, the
more deeply we establish it.
Because we're still contemplating self.
Jesus says, come unto me and I will
give you rest.
Christ consciousness will take the place of self
-consciousness.
And wherever Jesus comes He establishes rest.
The rest of the perfection of activity that
is never conscious of itself.
You know that line is so superb that
as gifted as Oswald Chambers was, he could
not have composed it.
That this is not only a statement about
something, it is the statement of something.
The statement itself is the proof of what
he's saying.
This kind of sublime insight and the way
it has been so phrased and expressed is
itself Christ.
This isn't the self-conscious man garnering his
gifts and thinking how to say something cleverly.
This is a man beyond.
Anything of that self-conscious kind.
This was just quickened and took up his
pen and he wrote it.
But listen to this last line and say,
could any man have composed that?
Wherever Jesus comes He establishes rest.
The rest of the perfection of activity that
is never conscious of itself.
It's not that rest comes from the absence
of activity.
That's not rest.
That's kind of a death.
We're not called to be inactive.
We're called not only to activity but to
supreme activity because He says, your work shall
be greater than mine.
So in the last days we'll see an
intensification of responsibility and works.
But in that should be the rest of
God.
It does not come out of our fretful
self-conscious concern but out of our childlike
trust with the works of God issue.
And that's why Jesus could say in his
own time when he was being accused of
violating the Sabbath because he did some conspicuous
things on the Sabbath and I think he
did them on the Sabbath only to make
this point because the men who accused him
were men living on the other plane and
they thought that what issued from Jesus were
the acts of Jesus.
But he said, no, he said the Sabbath
has not been violated.
I didn't do anything.
It's the Father who doeth the works.
Go take your complaint to him.
See what I mean?
He was in the rest of God and
why is it that Jesus rose early in
the morning while it was yet dark and
found the place apart to pray?
Was it the prayer to load up petitions
before the Father?
I'm sure there must have been some, but
I think more likely and more profoundly a
time of communion with the Father, a reunion
and the necessity again to have his spiritual
batteries charged by being in the presence of
God in prayer.
Prayer is more than petition.
And in that he would receive the thoughts
of the Lord and then when the daylight
began to break, the people would submerge on
litters and the insane and the demon possessed
and the sick and he was swamped and
carried on all through the day and he
healed them all out of a remarkable energy
that was imparted in his union with the
Father in prayer.
And he would say, the words that I
speak are not my words, but the words
that my Father has given me.
I had the feeling this morning and on
some other occasions when we begin 7 a
.m. a little bit hung over I want
to ask the brethren I said, didn't you
have a good night's rest?
I'm sure you had more hours of sleep
than I did.
Or is it that your sleep is not
as restful as it ought because you're a
troubled soul and a lot of your energy
is being eaten up in self-concern even
in the night hours.
You're not enjoying the rest and the fatigue
that you experience is not from the want
of chronological time in bed or in sleep
it's for the want of a getting rid
of the conflict that is robbing you of
your energy and of your life that you
carry with you even through the night hours.
See what I mean?
And I think that and this is my
own experience fewer and fewer hours of rest
more and more intensive activity and yet we
will not come unglued we don't need the
eight hours and I think we'll find we
don't even need the six hours because we
are more properly established in the rest of
God.
So Christ's consciousness will take the place of
self-consciousness wherever Jesus comes or maybe we
come to him he establishes rest the rest
of the perfection of activity that is never
conscious of itself and even that we are
at rest in our activity that's the remarkable
thing about it when it's the father who
doeth the works there's even an energy that
comes from God that is not of ourselves
so we haven't shifted gears we're still clunking
along at the world's level though we're believers
and have not appropriated the full provision of
God that would distinguish our life as being
different than other than the mode by which
men live who are outside the faith I
think we should have longer lives chronologically and
more fruitful lives and activity rightfully and just
like with Moses his eye was not dimmed
right till the moment that our death is
not because our body has fallen apart more
from fatigue and inward conflict and unresolved tensions
and all these things that take their toll
on the body but because the purpose for
our length of years has been fulfilled we
have performed, we have run the course that
was set before us and now we go
to our reward it's not that we end
because the machinery has broken down because of
the undue stress I think there are more
people dying today from stress and that opens
the door to other diseases than probably any
other factor the modern life is full of
stress anxiety, fear, doubt all those things for
which the saints of God should be free
and our life is not terminated because our
bodies have suffered the consequence of that stress
but because as I've said we have finished
the course that we have the days that
the Lord has numbered for us we've learned
to number our days and we're not even
conscious of its activity so let there be
an encouragement come to me and I will
give you rest so come out of your
self consciousness where the enemy would like to
keep you because there you're only treading water
and come unto me shift that gears, make
that transition and that will be your rest,
trust the Lord you're in his will he's
in you to will and to do of
his good pleasure, you're here because he's brought
you and if there's any change that needs
to be wrought the Lord knows how to
effect it maybe in the light of our
conversation now neither condemn yourself no man now
is there to condemn you but don't remain
under the condemnation by your own self condemnation
for neither do I condemn you and if
I don't condemn you don't you condemn yourself
and so I think that that woman was
totally deliberate by that word she's the same
one who poured the anointing oil upon Jesus
in gratitude for the great deliverance that was
effected so self condemnation is a curse and
an unnecessary curse and Jesus did it all
and he doesn't condemn us and neither would
he though we have reason who is not
marked with failure and defect and he doesn't
want us to be blithely pass it over
pause, be sober bring it before him repent,
receive forgiveness but don't remain ruling over that
thing and let it become a canker if
not a cancer okay or we will never
serve in a Jeremiah fashion, can you imagine
if Jeremiah was saddled with all of this
terrible self consciousness because the guy was daily
barraged as a traitor his word from the
lord was contrary to the whole conventional wisdom
of the ruling class of his generation who
were going to oppose Babylon and fight it
out and that was the and God would
be with us and he's not going to
allow his own city to be taken and
destroyed but his counsel was surrender it sounds
like cop out and in fact it was
considered traitorous and if you did your homework
and read up you read where they condemned
him for robbing the nation of its ability
to fight he was demoralizing those that would
resist Babylon by telling them that there's no
point in resisting it's not a people that
you're laboring against, you're fighting against God it's
God who has determined that Babylon will be
your judgment and it's in vain for you
to fight against it and if you fight
against it it will result in your extinction
but if you surrender to it he will
preserve your life but it sounds like a
subversive message and he's the only one speaking
it so if a man had doubt and
was anxious and fretful and fearful what a
way in which the enemy could have sifted
him and left him just as a hulk,
incapable of anything should I, shouldn't I is
this me, is this God this can't be
right and all those guys be wrong this
doesn't sound wise this sounds suicidal you don't
yield to the enemy remember better red than
dead at a time when the Soviet Union
was a great threat to peace and the
issue was to what degree would nations condescend
or infuriate this powerful bear to the point
where it would drop its atomic load on
us and we'd be finished and what the
phrase came out in those days better red
than dead better to surrender to their imperialist
and communist design than to oppose them and
to be obliterated in a sense that's the
kind of prophetic counsel that Jeremiah was giving
in his time to his nation it has
every ear mark of being traitorous so if
I'm just repeating myself but it's worth it
if ever the man was not in the
peace of God was not confident that when
he said thus saith the Lord it was
a thus saith the Lord that his counsel
was not coined out of his own mind
but that it came from God it was
understood and tempered in the context of his
whole theological understanding of the covenant, failure, curse
and judgment then he would have been so
rattled as to have been of no earthly
good but we don't see any evidence of
that in terms of his own self-doubt,
we do hear complaints against God that he's
suffering rejection and heartache but because he takes
all these things to heart he sees the
impending death of his own nation and in
great detail does he describe what they're going
to pass through to the point where in
the siege of Jerusalem they will be eating
their own young, they will resort to cannibalism
and that came true and the great people
Israel reduced to the most animalistic level out
of a survival in a siege that they
need not have experienced if they had only
heeded the voice of the prophet and surrendered
and he has to eat that and it's
not unusual that we see in the prophets
where they have to eat the scroll, eat
the word where God touches their lips as
he did with Isaiah and I think with
Jeremiah also and gives them his word but
the consequence of it the pain of it,
the anguish of it they have healed the
sickness of my daughter lightly, they say peace,
peace, imagine how that felt to that man,
the false prophets are saying peace, peace, but
he knows that he knows that there's nothing
but destruction, devastation ahead and they will not
hear him that he alone has the word
and it's being rejected and that his very
life is threatened because of his insistence on
that word that rightly does talk about the
martyrdom of Jeremiah and we don't even know
how Jeremiah's natural life ended it took place
in Egypt he was likely stoned to death
because even in Egypt those that were cast
out of Israel in exile in Egypt took
up again with the gods of Baal and
all of the deities of the pagan world
and he was again reproving them in Egypt
for the very thing for which they were
cast out of Israel and the legend that
we don't know for a fact but the
surmise is that he did not die in
bed, that these exasperated people had enough of
him finally stoned him to death in Egypt,
church legend says that Isaiah was sawn in
half the prophets so rile up and anger
against themselves like no other, so even in
revelation where we read about the two witnesses
in Jerusalem the prophets who can bring fire
out of their mouths to destroy those who
oppose them and are finally slain that when
they are slain and the people would not
allow them to be buried they wanted to
luxuriate in seeing them streets of
Jerusalem dead for three days, they so despised
these men, they so hated their guts that
they loved their death that had come to
them and wanted to see their bodies actually
fester and decay and would not even give
them the privilege and the basic amenity of
a burial and God resurrected them right up
out of that death but it says that
the people began gave gifts to one another
because those who had tormented those who dwell
on the earth were now dead these prophets
tormented those who dwell on the earth to
the point where they not only desired but
they luxuriated in the death that came to
those men and every once in a while,
and especially now in more recent years and
months I have to stop myself when I'm
speaking somewhere before a congregation I say, you
know I feel like I'm, am I tormenting
you?
I have to stop and ask them your
faces seem to indicate that I'm tormenting you
am I saying something that is making you
patently unhappy?
were you expecting another kind of word but
you're receiving something that is really chafing you
and it's a form of torment so there's
something about the prophetic word that is so
incongruent, so out of sorts with the temper
and mindset and wisdom of their generation that
their speaking is the most um give me
a word it exacerbates their heroes, they cannot
bear to hear them and just like Stephen
when he gave in Acts 7 of the
history of Israel and then he concluded by
saying as your fathers have done always done,
you do also you do always grieve the
Holy Spirit and they rushed upon them and
gnashed upon them with their teeth they put
their fingers in their ears they could not
bear to hear the word of God through
the man and they had to extinguish him
there's the first martyr who died because of
his speaking now if he only played his
cards right and was more politic and abbreviated
his statement and was not so abrasive he
could have survived but he spoke the word
of God as it was given and it
precipitated his own death so also Jeremiah and
all the prophets before us and so also
the prophets of our own and final generation,
your word will kill you because the world
doesn't want to hear it and likely not
the church either, the people of God so
it says that they will kill us and
claim they're doing God a service there's a
little indication of what we can expect in
the last days interrupt me at any time
some thought, for those of you who weren't
here in our prayer time I was encouraging
our class to engage in corporate exegesis that
I don't have any particular insight into the
chapter where Jeremiah is cast into the cistern
but I'm inviting everyone to wrestle with that
text put questions to it examine it, bring
forth out of it a corporate exegesis, a
corporate understanding that the best theology of the
last days will not be through individual geniuses
like Carl Bott or Gerhard von Rahn but
the exercise of God's people dealing with the
text together that's what I'd like to see
us do now okay let's look at Jeremiah
38 you mentioned prophetic freedom and Jeremiah's lack
of self confidence I was just thinking Stephen
speaking the words of the Lord without any
politeness we're so far from that, we're very
self conscious and we don't want to go
outside boundaries of what we think is appropriate
and we might even compare, we'll go into
detail that the Lord gives us that reading
with Acts 7 compared to Jeremiah 38 a
classic Old Testament martyrdom and the first of
the New Testament martyrdoms and just check for
the resemblances in any kind of of the
New Testament martyrdoms and just check for the
resemblances in any kind of principle that would
affect both and I think that we would
find them but when he spit out that
last word, he was giving me a whole
history of Israel and how you have always
missed it and all of a sudden something
breaks in through that statement as your fathers
grieved the Holy Spirit, so do you also
you have always grieved the Holy Spirit, the
law came to you and you did not
obey it and that triggered the rush upon
him and his death it was not his
own remark it was God himself breaking through
a general history of Israel to really spike
the point that needed to be made and
what was served by that were those men
going to be converted by Stephen's tirade and
by his statement of the truth of Israel's
failure instead it just provoked them to kill
him, but there was one man standing there
who heard that whole thing and it did
not receive the point in the moment but
when he saw the consequence of this man's
fidelity, what does that mean?
Faithfulness in unswervingly giving the word of God
no matter what the consequence to himself and
this man was only a busboy who waited
on tables and swept the crumbs and fed
the noisy widows and this was the supreme
candidate for rabbinical honor, the most prized student
of the Rabbi Gamaliel what a contrast in
the men and their dignity and stature and
prominence, but he saw exhibited by this waiter
on tables a quality of something beyond any
category that he knew religiously so that later
on the Lord could say to him, why
do you kick against the pricks?
Since the day that you saw my martyr
die for the word of God and die
graciously whereas the stones thudded into his flesh,
you don't hear a word of complaint, you
don't hear anything about his own suffering, as
if the man is not even feeling them
his only thought was, Lord lay not this
sin to their charge, there's not even a
concern for himself, but those who are afflicting
his death this is so transcendent this is
how we came in our morning discussion that
the word martyr is the same word for
witness something was being witnessed to Saul that
he could never swallow down and later on
was the principal factor for his conversion and
that's what a witness is he exhibits something
transcendent but where do you exhibit it?
Under normal circumstances of life?
Or do you exhibit it under the most
abnormal conditions of duress trial, threat to your
own existence, crisis what you exhibit in crisis
is what you are crisis reveals people have
heard me say it many times crisis reveals
an absolute crisis reveals absolutely and when a
man is at the point of the extinction
of his own life that's absolute crisis now
it would be one thing if if Stephen
was an old croc like me, 70 years
old and he has served his time and
has served the Lord and he can go
to his reward it's not so tragic but
he was a young man and his face
shone like an angel and he had enormous
potential because already miracles were being worked by
his hand that made him the object of
concern what would his life have been had
it continued would he have been another Paul
he would have been in the front first
most rank of the servants of God in
that apostolic generation and the Lord allowed his
life to be snuffed out in its youth,
he was only about 7 years old in
the faith according to the estimates that men
have made, but what was effected by his
death was probably more profound than anything that
would have been obtained by the continuation of
his life, which is to say that the
length of our years and service is not
with us but with God because how many
times was Jeremiah saved out of impending death,
he was put in the stocks there were
earlier chapters where his life was threatened and
where they said this man must die for
these words and he got out of it
how many times were men ready to kill
Jesus in Nazareth where he said this day
these words are fulfilled in your hearing, that
was blasphemy and they took him to throw
him over the brow of the hill but
the scripture says he passed through them, I
don't know how he did it, it was
not the time we need to have the
sublime confidence that until the time comes no
man can do us in and if we
are done in it's because it is serving
a purpose in God for which maybe our
whole life was preparation for that one time
so that the issue of martyrdom is not
how you die but how you live it's
a mode of living that is confident that
when the physical extinction comes God has fought
it or else it could not have been
performed so that when Pontius Pilate provoked Jesus
and said don't you know I've got the
power to release you, to deliver you or
to execute you he says you could do
nothing against me except it were given you
from above every good and perfect thing comes
from above and that's true that's why Jesus
said no man take my life I lay
it down and this is the ultimate witness
because you're not terrified with your extinction because
your end is not an end it's a
beginning right and that's why Paul could say
death where is your sting and grave where
is your terror of what shall I fear,
I've been through death I've been baptized that
was my death and the life that I
now live is not my life but his
life and it's his to possess to yield
to do and to perform as he will
or to end it when he will Paul
died as a martyr he lost his head
beheaded in Rome and what would his prolonged
life have meant if the Lord had allowed
him to live it but he knew even
before that that his end was near that's
why he called for the elders of the
church at Ephesus to say you will see
my face no more I've finished the course
he knew it and I'll tell you to
know that is joy unspeakable so when the
end comes big deal to know that you've
finished your course and that you're going to
hear the great commendation well done good and
faithful servant what difference does it matter how
your earthly ten years should be ended there's
no reason for its continuation you have fulfilled
it and that's not only true for Paul
Stephen and Jeremiah it's true also for us
and we've got to know it so that
we can walk through this life with complete
confidence and without fear without trembling and speak
the word of God though it is a
minority voice that has all the earmarks of
being a traitorous statement and yet speak it
even if it will not be acted on
which it was not for Jeremiah the nation
did not heed his voice and they suffered
exactly the penalties that he described including the
eating of their own children so he had
no gratification that his word was heard or
received or enacted it was refused and rejected
as he himself was but he obeyed the
Lord it was a prophetic faithfulness to what
his calling was and that's the name of
the game it's not whether we succeed in
it, these men were called to failure, they
were not called to succeed in the sense
that we understand that it's a whole other
mode, this prophetic life and it's this mode
that infuriates men unbelievably they cannot bear your
presence they said the land cannot contain their
words, but more over the land could not
contain their example, because what Jeremiah was in
himself was the example of the kind of
fidelity that God desired and should have obtained
from the entire nation, there was only one
faithful Israelite in his generation it was Jeremiah
he was the covenant keeping obedient son and
so his very life was itself an accusation
against an apostate nation and some of you
may have heard me quote this when I
was a very young believer returned to the
Oakland Public Schools history teacher and just months
old in the Lord naive as all get
out and witnessing to my colleagues, particularly the
Jewish ones, that one day at the dining
room table with this Jewish woman who had
an adulterous affair with another teacher against her
own Jewish husband and I don't even know
that I even knew that at the time
and I was just eating away, not even
saying anything and I could just sense that
she was increasingly chafed and irritated and finally
she couldn't contain herself, this was a woman
living on pills to quiet her guilt she'd
turn around, she'd blurt out she said, even
when you're silent, she said you're a living
accusation because I was unselfconsciously unselfconscious, I don't
know and maybe that was the very thing
that was a accusation contrary to the self
-conscious sinful life that she was living and
having to dope herself up with pills in
order to live it here's a guy just
eating and that's representative of the church that
has always occasioned the fury of those around
it particularly those who are religious and that's
why the Anabaptists, the Hutterites, the Canaanites, and
all of the apostolic expressions through history before
the Reformation and after suffered at the hands,
not of the world, but of religious bodies.
In David Hunt's book about the woman rides
the beast, the beast is the state system
but the woman rides it and one of
the reasons that I mentioned yesterday, Israel is
suggested by Arthur Pink as being the whore,
is because she rode the beast to execute
Jesus.
She employed the Roman system to bring about
an execution that she herself was unable to
perform, but she saw to it through the
system and that's how they will kill us
in the last days.
They are the religious factor who have no
heart nor desire to live this kind of
exemplary prophetic life and are infuriated by those
who do.
They cannot abide their presence because their presence
is a living accusation.
Jeremiah died, not only for what he said,
but for what he was.
Now you say, Art what do you mean
Jeremiah died?
The book of Jeremiah doesn't talk of his
death and he was delivered out of that
pit, yes, but when he was thrown into
the pit, he was thrown into the pit
unto death.
For all effects and purposes, he did not
know that a deliverance would come although God
had earlier said, I will deliver you and
I will be with you as a fortified
city.
That they will be against you but I
will keep you.
Maybe he forgot that he was told that
but so far as he knew in that
moment, when he was thrown into that pit
that was the end.
And what an end it was.
Picture that.
If there's anything for which my flesh shrinks,
it's claustrophobia.
You can behead me, you can burn me
at the stake, but don't shut me up
into a compressed place, particularly one that's dark
and without light.
I despise going to a restaurant even a
gourmet restaurant where you have to read the
menu with a miner's helmet and a lantern.
I'm crying out Give us a table with
the most light.
But the pit into which Jeremiah was cast
had no illumination at all.
I've had the privilege of seeing the cell
that Paul languished in before he was beheaded
in Rome.
You can still visit it.
It's called the Maritime Prison.
I don't know how it got that name
but he was lowered into it in the
same way that Jeremiah was taken up out.
There's no doorway.
You can only go into it by being
lowered down and once you're lowered down and
they remove those ropes, there you are.
Sunk in the mire in dark without water,
without food to suffer a slow and excruciating
death in that horrible darkness stink and congestion
that is apparently hopeless.
So whether he actually physically died or not,
there was a very real death.
The truth of death is not the issue
of physical extinction.
That's kid stuff.
Death is when you taste it.
Death is when you have to eat it.
Death is experiencing the realities of isolation, loneliness,
rejection cast into a pit.
That was the death.
And he bore that.
In fact he made it inevitable by his
own faithfulness to God.
He would not recant.
He would not compromise his message.
The king gave him every opportunity.
Called him again and again for his counsel
has God given you another word?
Can you soften it even just a little
bit?
Can you be just a wee bit more
accommodating so that we can preserve your life?
He never moved an inch away from the
word that the Lord gave from the first.
This judgment is inevitable.
It must come.
God has decreed it.
Deuteronomy spoke of it.
There's no alternative out of it.
Except the only thing that will save you
from complete extinction is to surrender to the
rod of God's chastisement.
It's not Babylon that is opposing you.
It's God himself who has made himself an
enemy.
Your sins have brought this on you.
He never changed.
That word was relentless to the end.
Unto his death.
So let's take a little break.
If you've not read chapter 38, read it
in a few minutes and then we'll come
back and try to take it apart verse
by verse.
Imaginary thing or some piece of fiction, something
that actually took place and point of time
and here are the names of the men
that were involved in that.
And that much is given for Jesus also
so that we know at whose administration Pontius
Pilate, at what time in the history of
Rome that execution took place.
We know we're talking about something historical and
not fictional.
But beyond that, there's not great detail given.
They heard the words that Jeremiah was saying
to all the people.
Thus says the Lord, those who stay in
the city shall die by the sword, by
famine and by pestilence.
But those who go out to the Chaldeans
shall live.
That is those who surrender to them.
They shall have their lives as a prize
of war and live.
Thus says the Lord, the city shall surely
be handed over to the army of the
king of Babylon and be taken.
Then the official said to the king, this
man ought to be put to death because
he is discouraging the soldiers who are left
in the city and all the people by
speaking such words to them.
For this man is not seeking the welfare
of this people but their harm.
Now this is a classic response to prophetic
words.
The irony and the paradox is that what
is most intended for the good of the
people is construed by men in their fleshly
minds as being intended for their harm.
So you're not going to be patted on
the back, you're not going to be chaired
to the marketplace, you're going to be looked
upon as an enemy and as a traitor.
What God intends for good is construed as
harm and what would have been spoken as
harm they construe as good.
It's a complete inversion of value that makes
the prophetic man a real anomaly, a round
peg in a square hole.
That's a very uncomfortable feeling.
In fact, that feeling is itself martyrdom because
it's not a momentary feeling, it's a continual
feeling.
You're always an oddball, you're always strange even
when you're silent.
You're never one of the boys, you're never
fitted in.
So as I may have mentioned when I
asked one of the prominent prophets of today
how come I'm not invited to your prophetic
get-togethers because my history in this calling
goes back far before you ever began.
Oh, we know that, Art.
The reason you're not invited is you're not
an in-house prophet.
What he was saying is you're not one
of the boys and your words may not
be fit in comfortably with the consensus of
the kinds of things that we speak where
we reinforce and confirm one another.
So this is the isolation, the rejection, the
sense of strangeness that is characteristic of true
prophets that have to bear as a mild
form of suffering.
Their martyrdom begins long before their final martyrdom.
That's why the German scholar can say the
martyrdom of Jeremiah.
He's not speaking about his end, he's speaking
about all his days.
Anything that you would think about the official
said to the king, and King Zedekiah said,
here he is, he's in your hands for
the king is powerless against you.
What does that say or imply?
What pattern?
Where have you previously stumbled on something like
that elsewhere in the scripture?
This is not a once and for all.
It's almost a design where a king, the
one of ultimate authority, absolves it and defers
to the press of men and condescends to
them.
Though he might himself be personally reluctant.
He still allows the popular opinion to have
its way.
Can you think of where?
John the Baptist lost his head though Herod
was fond of him and impressed by him.
He did not insist on his royal prerogative
to save him.
Where else?
Paul with Agrippa.
Again, these officials who had an opportunity to
exert their authority to preserve the man of
God defer to the press of opinion.
Pontius Pilate is the most glaring example where
he washed his hands before Israel like this
is your baby.
You're the one who's doing it.
He could have exerted himself in his authority
and said no, I'll not condescend to this.
It's interesting and raises the question whether this
is more than just an accidental thing or
rather a pattern of something we can anticipate
in the last days, which is to say
we'll have no assurance of protection from the
authorities that are there, but that the evil
of men will win out through the weakness
of authority, unwilling to take the responsibility of
either affirming or preserving the man of God.
He's in your hands for the king is
powerless against you.
So they took Jeremiah and threw him into
the system of Malachi, the king's son, which
was in the court of the god letting
Jeremiah down by ropes, the exact same way
that Paul was let down into his cell.
Now there was no water in the system,
but only mud and Jeremiah sank in the
mud.
We ought to just try this one day
just for the feel of it, to feel
yourself sinking like into quicksand.
It's a wonder he didn't go down all
the way and be asphyxiated in that moment.
So it probably was not enough to extinguish
him, but to root him in helplessness where
he could not extricate himself and sank into
it.
What do you think that God would allow
this?
How would that be experienced?
The man of God in the place of
helplessness that if something does not come to
him externally from outside himself, he's finished.
And he's finished by degrees.
By slow and excruciating thirst and hunger in
darkness, isolation and cold.
Of all the forms in which men of
God have had their lives taken, this is
probably one of the most excruciating.
It's like the missionaries that were buried in
anthills and allowed to have the flesh eaten
off their bones and I anything about mud?
Mud is after all not only uncomfortable oozy
and trapping it's also filthy.
It's also degrading.
It's also humiliating.
So he's tasting death in manifold ways and
maybe that's the name of the game.
And there's no place for self-esteem or
even ending your life in dignity.
You end it shamefully as in fact Jesus
himself ended his.
The cross was not the most cruel but
the most shameful form of execution that in
the literature of Rome they said that this
is unbefitting to a Roman to die on
the cross.
This is for criminals or for slaves.
Roman transgressors who broke the law and deserved
death drank a cup of poison like Socrates.
They died with dignity.
But the cross was reserved as a shameful
death for non-Romans whose crime was of
an ultimate kind.
That not only to experience the excruciating physical
aspect but the humiliating aspect because these men
died nakedly their clothes were taken from them
and so Jesus had to bear the gaze
of men seeing him in his nakedness not
that long cloth that is always depicted on
Jesus but in his nakedness with his arms
nailed unable even to cover himself is part
of the suffering and the anguish and the
humiliation of death.
And so to a degree the mud gives
a certain parallel that the prophet is not
unlike his master and that this is even
a little foreshadowing of what is to come
for very God himself and beside that the
scripture says in all our afflictions he was
afflicted.
That is to say I will be with
you even in your disgraceful end.
God is in the mud so to speak.
It may be that Jeremiah was not conscious
of it did not experience the comfort of
it but neither did Jesus experience the comfort
of the presence of the father but rather
the contrary my God my God why hast
thou forsaken me but the scripture says God
is with us in our afflictions that means
God himself is submitted to the same humiliation
because Jesus the spirit of Jesus is the
prophecy the testimony of Jesus is the spirit
of prophecy so the Lord himself is in
the humiliating mud and in the rejection and
he sank in it and how does his
rescue come verse 7 Abed Melech the Ethiopian
a eunuch in the king's house heard that
they had put Jeremiah into the cistern the
king happened to be sitting at the Benjamin
gates so Abed Melech left the king's house
and spoke to the king my lord king
these men have acted wickedly on all that
they did to the prophet Jeremiah by throwing
him into the cistern to die there of
hunger where there is no bread left in
the city then the king commanded Abed Melech
the Ethiopian take three men with you from
here and pull the prophet Jeremiah up from
the cistern before he dies so Abed Melech
took the men with him and went to
the house of the king to a wardrobe
of the storehouse and took from there old
rags and worn out clothes which he let
down to Jeremiah in the cistern by ropes
then Abed Melech the Ethiopian said to Jeremiah
just put the rags and clothes between your
armpits and the ropes Jeremiah did so then
they drew Jeremiah up by the ropes and
pulled him out of the cistern and Jeremiah
remained in the court of the god well
what about that what does Abed Melech mean
who is an Ethiopian and a eunuch you
know what a eunuch is a eunuch is
one who has had his sexual organs so
violated surgically that he is incapable of sexual
acts why because he is a servant in
the king's house and he is entrusted with
the king's concubines and kinds of things of
that kind and to assure and guarantee that
he is not going to violate that trust
the axe is laid to the root so
who is Jeremiah's deliverer a black man an
Ethiopian and a eunuch and his name is
not even his name Abed Melech means the
servant of the king it's only his title
he doesn't even have the dignity of being
allowed his own name but only his function
so what about that what's the point of
that why is that his salvation and how
will that be our salvation you scholars exegetes
the oneness the oneness of the king the
servant of the king was able to influence
the king and obtain permission to effect Jeremiah's
release could god have employed anything lowlier than
what he did in a black man who
is a servant and a eunuch as being
the instrument of Jeremiah's deliverance that there's something
in that that god would employ that lowly
thing of a man not even entitled to
his own name to be that instrument and
yet he had a greater consciousness of who
Jeremiah is than his own than the Israelite
nation and its own king and nobles and
officials so that the lowest of the low
from every human reckoning had a greater regard
for the prophet than the nation itself than
the king himself and set in motion by
his own initiative Jeremiah's deliverance because god had
said I will be with you to deliver
you and of all the ways in which
that deliverance could be effected god employed the
lowest of the low and the least of
the least what kind of prophetic suggestion might
that imply for last days you know that
we were going to have a seminar for
black believers here it didn't come come off
because of conflict of dates but it was
in my heart to gather up our contacts
with black believers and have them here at
one time without any conscious agenda I had
none but something under the general title the
implications or the challenge of the last days
for black believers and I have a sneaky
intuition that there's a place of ultimate use
for black believers in the last days as
it pertains to god's prophetic people and perhaps
to Israel itself when it will be in
the mud up to its neck that it
will expire except that it will receive a
ministry that comes to it from the lowest
of the low those whom the world despises
and dismisses with contempt as being no name
will be the very instrumentality of god's deliverance
in fact there's a black pastor whom I
know who had this impression long before me
and he showed me in Isaiah it says
I have I have used the
life I have given men for you I
think that's the way it goes I have
given the lives of men for you and
then it mentions Ethiopia what's the biblical name
for Kush everything that's described in that Isaiah
passage refers to black men I have given
their life for you and this brother believes
that we black believers have as the last
days commission a deliverance toward Jews at the
cost of our own life and it's not
an accident that the Jewish community with which
I have the most significant relationship in Brooklyn
New York the Hasidim the ultra orthodox Lubavitcher
Hasidim are in the midst of a black
ghetto and that there has been friction historically
between these Jews and the black people around
about them because a race riot was set
off when one of the young rabbinical Hasidim
killed a black kid through reckless driving and
there were three days of riots that were
only quelled by the black mayor coming and
pleading with the people to desist but not
before there were shootings and other retaliations and
I've been to that neighborhood now several times
and there's a continual tension waiting for the
next spark that will break out into violence
again what are Jews doing in the midst
of a black ghetto they have moved there
because they wanted a place where they could
buy houses cheaply or these brownstone apartments in
walking distance to their synagogue 777 Eastern Parkway
not far from the Brooklyn Museum so on
the Shabbat you don't drive to your services
in orthodox you walk so that at dusk
on a Friday you'll watch people coming out
of their brownstone houses basement apartments in their
black clothing, black hats and beards with their
wives with their wigs and their children on
their way to the mikvah the ceremonial bath
or to the synagogue walking if you want
a picture of community unlike anything that Christians
presently know, go to Brooklyn Eastern Parkway and
watch them on a Shabbat night coming out
from their dwellings they have left better living
accommodations in Long Island and homes and affluence
to enjoy the relationship with each other and
the proximity to their synagogue which is the
heart of their life it puts us to
shame and I can't describe to you what
an experience it was for me to come
into that synagogue on the Friday night and
walk in and come in standing there are
a thousand men bowing and dovening the Hebrew
word before their God with their talasim their
prayer scrolls over their heads facing toward Jerusalem
I'll tell you what you've never seen anything
like that charismatically speaking but the whole thing
is set in a black ghetto because only
there were the properties cheap enough for them
to buy and they were willing to take
the risk of friction with blacks that was
inevitable because of the uniqueness of their differences
that would necessarily antagonize and irritate and indeed
there have been eruptions over the course of
years and even now they live in that
threat and how about a guy like Farrakhan
do you know about him?
this demagogue what is demagogue?
demo from people he's a misleader of the
people playing upon racial prejudice because Jews have
historically owned slum residences in Harlem and in
other places they're cheap and they don't have
to be maintained you don't have to keep
them current and you've got whole families living
in one room paying through the nose it's
a very profitable thing to own slum property
and Jews are prominent in that ownership so
they already got their worst foot forward and
if they are employers so who has not
been skimmed by them or suffered some imagined
or real injustice I'm saying all that briefly
to say that the situation is loaded that
there are resentments that are historic, there are
prejudices that have existed for generations and Jews
have put themselves in a place of threat
to put, to enjoy the proximity to synagogue
in one with another so how long will
it be before these demagogues in the heightened
issues of the last days, stir the black
community against it will it be before these
demagogues in the heightened issues of the last
days stir the black community against the Jews
and I foresee a time I've said this
to black believers you will stand between the
Jew and your own kinsmen as they seek
to do them harm and you will be
called whitey and you'll be called a traitor
because you're identifying with Jews who are their
supposed or real exploiters and you're standing with
Jews rather than with your own people who
suffered the injustice and it will cost you
are you guys following me?
and that's why I felt that there needs
to be some kind of a colloquium a
seminar, a coming together just to be before
God to say Lord, if this is the
scenario of the last days, you're going to
use the least in society, the black people
and the American Indian to be a kind
of a buffer between Jews and their oppressors
out of the same race and what kind
of preparation do these people need to fit
them to suffer that monogamy for another so
this black man who has not his own
name and not even his own sexual possibility
becomes the deliverer of God's prophet it's not
just a happenstance it's the profoundest pattern of
the last days, in my opinion I think
I sent a copy of a message to
our sister here on the gospel of Ephesians
for the Indian that part of the reason
for the degradation of the American Indian today
not only their living on welfare and stamps
and food stamps but their lack of heroic
possibility, the lack of significant life that they've
lost the conditions by which they hunted and
sustained their life through their own energy and
now to be dependent on a check that
comes in the box or other kinds of
milk sop subsistence robs men of dignity that
to be a man you need to have
the prospect of distinguished and significant use of
your life and that the lord of belief
has reserved this not only for the black
people but for the American Indian as God
will move Jews through the wilderness of the
nations so that the aborigines of Australia and
the Maori of New Zealand who are the
victims of white domination historically will be called
to a last days heroism that will be
the difference between Jews sinking in the mire
of their time of last days persecution or
being pulled out of it that's what I
think so I appreciate Abed Melech because he's
a servant of the king not Zedekiah but
the one who is most high and so
where is the sovereign God in all this
and I would say sovereignly in everything he
has seen to it and prepared even a
last day provision from where the Jews who
have been riding high and are foremost in
society and education and prestige and self esteem
will find that in their time of ultimate
crisis that their savior is from the lowest
of the low and that which the world
despises and looks upon with contempt and disgust
is God's provision and in that what a
revelation of the Lord himself who is willing
himself to sink in the mud in order
to affect the salvation of mankind haven't both
Indian Native American and black believers suffered already
from the accusation that they've adopted white man's
religion and that the black man will suffer
the slur of being an Uncle Tom that
he's condescending to the whites or to the
Jews so he's going to need to have
a quality of faith and relationship with God
like unto Jeremiah himself he's got to be
able to stand against this withering indictment that
you're a traitor to your own people Jeremiah
was put to death for that very reason
and his deliverers or the deliverers of Jews
will suffer the same kind of accusation and
maybe the fiercest thing that will come against
them is not so much the physical threat
as the moral threat because to be called
or identified as a traitor to your own
people as I have to live with and
every Jewish believer almost continually is a severe
test that you, whether you know that you
know that you are accepted in the beloved,
that no matter what men say and whatever
appearance you give to the contrary, speaking at
NYC or City College of New York or
university campuses and having Jews come against you
and call you traitor because you've given the
appearance of being it why else would you
be a Christian?
Why else are you there?
You're getting paid for this you're a lackey,
you're a flunky, you're a a mushumad, you're
a traitor and you can't answer them.
There's no way it's not a time to
give answer and even if there were, they
could not hear it or receive it.
You simply have to accept that indictment you
have to bear the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune.
A quotation from Shakespeare Got the idea?
So the ebid meleks of the last days
are going to have a faith which is
to say a relationship with God of the
same kind that Jeremiah himself had because they're
going to suffer the same kind of accusation
as traitor and have to bear up under
it and be faithful to the Lord unto
death because that accusation of indictment is a
death for men who need to have approval
and acceptance especially from their own kind You
understand why we need a seminar with black
believers?
Just for these very things to be communicated
and to pray for them and be established.
Yeah, praise the Lord You guys may not
be impressed but someone else will be the
beneficiary who needs it desperately especially those who
have not the slightest anticipation of the profundity
of their last days call who are now
relegated to inferior places as having no significance
in society of God's choice of the most
crucial kind to deliver his people from their
last days plight What a scenario only God
and it's hinted at in the very life
and experience of the prophet because the prophet
is the message and even in Jeremiah's death
God is speaking something for the last days
that he could not give us abstractly it
could not be given us as a principle
well in the last days those who are
despised in society will be my instrumentality to
say no He gives it to us as
a parable as a living thing that took
place in antiquity as a picture of the
last days that no man could ever have
conceived and for which proud arrogant and self
-sufficient Jews will be eternally indebted How about
the Jews of Johannesburg and Pretoria who are
living comfortably will one day be saved by
their own black servants and I have had
to say to the black people with whom
we are in connection in Kansas City mostly
women Pentecostal black women who are domestics in
the houses of wealthy Jews that the day
will come when you will be putting them
on barges and boats and whatever to float
them down the Kansas River up to a
place where I have already been that was
used in the pre-Civil War days to
bring slaves to freedom through the stepping stones
the underground railway still exists, I've been on
it in properties in Kansas but you can
only get to it through water and I
said you'll be putting your Jewish employers on
boats and barges, you will be the key
to their salvation they will have learned to
trust you they will see something in you
as you clean their houses unto the Lord
and the love that you have for them
that cannot be explained even if they have
exploited you all the more that will be
their salvation and this is so in keeping
with the wisdom of God who has been
his counselor, who has given to him and
it shall be given again who has known
his mind that in this very thing is
revealed the character of God himself who abhors
that which men esteem and uses that which
is weak and foolish to confound that which
purports to be wise and mighty and this
is Israel's last days deliverance for which they
will be eternally indebted even as they are
instructed about God by the very provision that
has saved them out of death and all
of that is prefigured in this text how
do you know these things are, how do
you sense these things how do you tie
this together well out of my prophetic life
out of my being in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
with the Hasidic Jews in a relationship that
God gave 25 30 years ago and still
has kept alive from my relationship with the
Kansas City black community where I'm their darling
and they looked upon me as a father
of faith and I've been there many times
by my fresh and new association with the
saints in Mobile, Alabama with Pearl, with just
eight miles away from the Cast Lake, Leech
Lake Chippewa Nation, of all the places for
God to bring us so that the life
of the prophetic man is steeped in the
realities from which the elements are brought together
as a hermeneutical key of understanding of the
scripture which is exactly how Jeremiah understood what
he understood contrary to all the false prophets
that opposed him the prophetic man is instructed
by the very elements of his own life,
his own marriage his own situation and that
opens a key to the perceiving of scripture
in a way that is not given to
others teachers are not required to live their
message, the prophet is not required to live
it, but he is given it through his
life his life is a factor as well
as the word of God and the coming
together of these realities gives him a perception
of things that is not afforded to other
men and yet he is required to speak
from it in a way that would confound
them but only in the authority that he
has in God and though it would be
rejected as it was for Jeremiah still must
it be spoken so who is sufficient for
these things?
little did Jeremiah know that his own life
and the way in which it was except
for God's last provision brought to its end
was to be a pattern and a picture
of those things that pertain to the end
and little did I know that when we
took out the newspaper ad for these days
and we were a footnote on the bottom
because the major space was given to the
brother who would be the speaker from January
29th we mentioned the prophetical school and labeled
it Jeremiah, prophet for the end of times
thank you Lord for confirming and vindicating what
we could not have known naturally then you're
now confirming all the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and the knowledge of
God how unsearchable are his judgments and his
ways past finding God for who has known
the mind of the Lord who has been
his counselor who has first given to him
and it shall be recompensed to him again
for of him and through him and to
him be all things to whom be glory
forever thank you Lord this may be our
last session on Jeremiah we may turn to
something else next week but if this is
the end of our examination we appreciate the
way that you have concluded it looking back
my God not knowing how we began you
were the Alpha now you're the Omega and
we have to say you've done a pretty
good job of it laying it out day
by day in a kind of divine logic
that brings us to this conclusion and we
thank you for that and that it's going
to go out my God beyond the little
circle that we are that has drawn the
word out of your heart your ways indeed
are past finding out who has known your
mind so bless my God tapes and give
them the circulation that you desire bring it
to the attention of your Native American believers
and your black people who are feeling like
they're on the shelf and whose church is
in a decrepit condition has become a kind
of a culture and that you have reserved
for them a significance beyond anything that could
have been imagined that will make their eternal
future glorious and have everything to do with
the restoration of your people Israel in their
own last days plight when they will sink
into the mud unto death we bless you
Lord seal this we're privileged the way you
have brought us through this morning and for
the guests who are with us now and
receive our gratitude in Yeshua's holy name for
this little circle this table and what is
germinated incubated in it and from it to
the blessing of many even the Israel who
is unconscious of our existence or knows of
it and opposes it as a threat to
their interest just exactly the way that Jeremiah
was himself misunderstood and misconstrued and we count
it all privilege in Jesus name amen