Son of heaven, your anointing, my God, is
everything.
It can compel us, it can bring us
to such an attentiveness that we not only
hear your word, my God, we hear in
between the lines.
We intuit your spirit, we sense the disposition
of your heart.
Even the kids are arrested by it, though
they're not of an age even to understand
all that's said.
Let them understand that you're present, that you're
speaking, that something goes into their spirit.
Whether or not they can understand the totality
of the words, that may be true for
the adults as well.
So, Lord, precious God, pour out from the
thorn of heaven the precious, holy, anointing oil.
Precious unction, commensurate, my God, with the task,
commensurate with the topic, commensurate with your great
purpose.
We bless you for such provision, Lord, or
else everything is vain.
To be correct is not correct enough.
We need the enablement of the Most High.
Come, my God, and register that upon our
souls, we pray.
Thank you that you anoint what you appoint.
And may you govern, my God, every word
that proceeds out of my mouth, every illustration,
even the tone of the speaking, the mood
of it, Lord, be yours.
We bless you.
Grant us your living word, my God.
And we give you the praise for the
privilege of it.
The responsibility of it.
Thank you, Lord.
Speak, Lord, your servants are hearing.
In Jesus' holy name, amen.
Well, I'm going to take you into different
places in Scripture.
I like to start in Romans 11.
Everything is familiar.
We need to come to it afresh, virginally.
Just leaping into that great chapter, Romans 11,
and just noting that every triumphalist voice for
the church that presumes to think that the
church has usurped the role of Israel always
universally omits reference to Romans 11.
They cannot reconcile this text with those presumptions.
This demolishes all presumptions that is not in
keeping with the divine stratagem of God in
the restoration of Israel at the conclusion of
the age.
I always have to say to people, hey,
I'm not saying this because I'm Jewish.
I don't have a vested interest in Israel's
destiny because I'm Jewish.
I have a vested interest because it has
to do with the glory of God.
Had he chosen pygmies, I would be celebrating
pygmies.
And in fact, let's face it, that's why
he's chosen Israel, spiritually speaking, historically speaking.
We've been a non-people.
We've been a terrible cop-out.
Our track record is atrocious.
He didn't choose us for our distinctiveness.
He chose us because we were the least
of peoples, that he might have the greater
opportunity to be glorified.
So Paul, oh God bless him, what makes
an apostle an apostle?
It's the apprehension of the mysteries of God.
He has a stewardship over the mysteries of
God.
What's a mystery?
A mystery is something concealed, withheld by God,
until an appointed time has come, and then
it's revealed by his spirit.
Not to give us dilettantes a little something
to talk about over the coffee table, but
to find a fulfillment and an enactment.
So of all of the mysteries of which
Paul speaks, there's only one that he refers
to a penalty if we fail to understand
it.
And that's the one that I'm going to
quote now in chapter 11, verse 25.
So that you may not claim to be
wiser than you are, brothers and sisters, I
want you to understand this mystery.
A hardening has come upon Israel, upon part
of Israel, until the full number of the
Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel
will be saved as it is written, out
of Zion will come the deliverer.
He will banish ungodliness from Jacob, for this
is my covenant with them when I take
away their sins.
My Lord, what a blockbuster of a statement.
What a mystery, it's a perplexity.
That Israel that has been blinded, judgment has
brought that blindness, that there's going to come
a historical moment when the Lord is going
to lift it, that he's not finished with
his people, that there's yet a destiny to
be fulfilled by which you will be glorified.
But what does it wait upon?
Nothing from them.
They will be brought to such a place
of inertness, incapability, and there's a necessity for
that because Jews are notorious for the ability
to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
When it comes to self-sufficiency, we're a
marvel.
Well, look what we've done with Israel.
Fifty years?
My God, other nations require centuries to even
begin to approach nationhood, statehood, a distinctive language
or culture.
Fifty years?
Look, my no hands.
When it comes to self-sufficiency, we Jews
are par excellence, and that's the very reason
why we have to be reduced to a
virtual nothingness, that he might be all in
all.
The purpose of Israel is not to celebrate
Israel, it's to celebrate God.
So even in this, what is this mystery?
They're hardened, they cannot see, they reject, until
the full number of the Gentiles has come
in.
Something has got to happen with Gentiles that
affects Israel.
And I don't know that that requires even
a direct expression from Gentiles to Jews, but
something has to happen here that releases something
there, for the deliverer will come out of
Zion.
He's waiting for something, and he waits for
it not from Israel, he waits for it
from the Gentiles.
You are the principal actors.
Israel is acted upon, it is inert.
It will be reduced by judgment that will
be capable of nothing.
They will be a dry bones.
They have to be acted upon by very
God himself, but he waits for something that
must take place outside from them, and it
has to do with the Gentiles, and this
is the mystery.
Only God could have conceived it, that he
took a people whom we Jews would have
long disregarded or looked upon with disdain or
contempt, looked upon them from our spiritual or
religious superiority, and they become the key to
our final restoration and redemption that is carried
on, not only into the millennium, but throughout
all eternity.
And unless it comes from you, it will
not come.
So what is he waiting for?
The fullness of the Gentiles.
Here it says the number.
Well, I'm sure that it includes a number,
but there's something beyond something numeric, something quantitative.
There's also something qualitative for which God waits
from the Gentiles, and it's that that I
want to explicate or develop out of another
text in the Old Testament, in Psalm 102.
It's a remarkable psalm, and would take hours
to do it any kind of justice.
I won't even read the first part, but
just to say that in all of Old
Testament scripture, perhaps with the exception of a
portion from Deuteronomy 32, there's nothing that more
describes the Nazi Holocaust than Psalm 102.
It talks about skin clinging to the bones.
It talks about eating your ashes.
My bones burn like a furnace in verse
3.
My days pass away like smoke.
This is not some language that has been
plucked out of the air.
It's profoundly descriptive of the worst judgment that
has ever come upon Israel in modern times,
and will come again in exactly this same
character.
I was with a brother at Auschwitz in
Poland, and next to Auschwitz is the original
concentration camp.
That's the German pronunciation of its Polish name,
but it was originally a barrack for Polish
soldiers.
And the Germans, when they conquered Poland, turned
it into a concentration camp, and then became
a death camp.
But it was inadequate.
The facility was too old.
It was too limited.
So three kilometers away, they developed the most
modern process of elimination of a genocidal kind
in the history of mankind called Birkenau.
I can't describe it to you.
All that remains today are the ruins of
it, the gas ovens, the place where the
people undressed, where they came right off the
train tracks, right into the gas rooms, into
the chambers, and into the smoke being turned
into ashes.
That has been destroyed.
The Germans destroyed it themselves.
They wanted to destroy the evidence of the
calamity of their own inhumanity.
But there's enough there to shock you.
I was shocked in 1952, just putting my
hand on the smokestack at Dachau, outside of
Munich, where there were still bones and ashes
in the oven.
And I needed to make contact in a
tangible way with the evidence of this horror,
because it saved me from my narrow presumption
of good guys and bad guys.
There's something about the magnitude of what man
has done to man in his depravity and
the revelation of what his essential nature is,
despite his impressive culture, that is shattering.
All of a sudden you realize it's not
the Germans versus the Jews.
We're all guilty.
We're all implicated.
This horror, the magnitude of it, eclipses any
kind of concept of where we can yet
claim ourselves to be righteous.
In fact, before I got back to where
I was stationed on the train, in a
compartment with a German multiple amputee with hooks
and artificial limbs with blonde hair and blue
eyes, a veteran of the recent war, locked
into that compartment, he and I alone, in
my US uniform, in my Jewish self-righteousness,
in this pitiful remnant of a man, I
recognized as I looked at him, that there
but for the grace of God go I.
It's only a fluke I'm born in Brooklyn,
that I'm wearing an American uniform, that I'm
Jewish.
Black bodies, the dint of circumstance, I would
have been putting bodies into the ovens.
And I would say that my conversion began
on that day.
It took the Lord ten years more to
bring me all the way through.
But he broke in to my humanistic assumptions
of good guys and bad guys and made
me aware there's only one category.
We're all bad guys.
And the Holocaust is that demonstration.
And it's coming again.
You can read it.
This is very descriptive.
Because of my loud groaning, in verse 5,
my bones cling to my skin.
I'm like an owl of the wilderness, like
a little owl of the waste places.
I've been in a concentration camp where the
one symbol over the crematoria is an owl.
I love birds, I love nature, but there's
one species that makes me a little icky.
It's the owl.
There's something sinister about this large-eyed thing
that roosts and waits to...
that the Germans themselves employed as a symbol
over their crematoria.
Here the owl is described like the prisoners
themselves, a lonely bird on the housetop.
All day long, my enemies taunt me.
Those who deride me use my name for
a curse.
Hey, that might well be descriptive of something
future.
Can you imagine if the Palestinians and the
Arabs ever get the upper hand over Jews,
over Israelis, and want to ventilate what has
been percolating for the last 50 years of
grievance, of mistreatment, of injustice, and now in
their Islamic mentality, that Arab mentality that loves
vendetta and vengeance, can ventilate that without limit
upon Jews?
This is what you're reading.
And I want to say with all confidence
that's exactly what's going to happen historically.
We're going to be so oppressed, so defeated,
so humiliated, and so taunted.
You hotshots with your Israeli economy, reduced now
to rubble, and we've got you.
You're our victim, and we can torment you.
It's not just that we will be satisfied
with defeating you.
We want to rub your defeat into your
face.
We want to ventilate and enjoy the last
iota of our vicious fight, and now we
have you, and we will do it.
If that doesn't take place, call me a
false prophet.
I will be.
And I've said many times, with the God
I were, that these predictions of utter severity
and judgment for Israel is just my own
imagination.
I would rather be the false prophet and
save Israel from having to go through that
than to be the true one and to
predict what must necessarily come to pass.
That's the way this psalm begins.
It's an eschatological psalm.
It's both historic, but it's also speaking of
something yet future, a calamity of unbelievable proportions,
where the victims eat ashes like bread in
verse 9 and mingle tears with their drink.
But they also understand, in verse 10, because
of your indignation and anger, for you have
lifted me up and thrown me aside.
This hasn't come because of a Hitler or
some erratic and inexplicable thing in history, some
aberration that can't be explained, that you just
have to suffer.
This terrible calamity is a judgment, and it
has come from your hand.
We're suffering this because you have inflicted this
upon us, but you have inflicted it lightly.
We deserve it.
It's in exact proportion to our sins.
How do you know that this is an
eschatological psalm, Art?
Because it's future.
Because nothing in the history of Israel's past
calamities has ever brought the nation to recognize
its calamity as coming from the hand of
God, as will be true in the last
days.
And that's the least reason for their understanding
that, is that we will tell them.
You didn't know.
So a woman said to me, Israel has
always suffered judgment.
The judgment has always been an expulsion from
the land, always been an exile, and then
a subsequent return.
Well, what makes you think that this one
that you're speaking of, that is yet future,
will result in anything other than another repeat
performance, another return, another falling into sin, another
expulsion?
Why will this be different from all previous
judgments, exiles, and expulsions?
I said, well, that's a great question.
Then the thought came to me, one difference
that's profound is that they will now be
brought not only into communities of a mercy
kind of a refuge, but prophetic communities who
will not only address their physical and moral
need, but their spiritual need, and explain to
them why they are in that circumstance.
The community will prophetically explain to Israel the
cause and reason for its distress.
Imagine the kind of anointing that we will
need, the kind of unction to speak to
people who are in the midst of that
judgment to reason for it in a way
that they can understand it and receive it
and repent for it, who have no consciousness
that God is an actor in history, that
God intervenes, that things are not merely circumstantial,
that what is happening again in modern times
is directly from his hands and is in
proportion to your sins.
But we have no consciousness of our sin.
We thought we were exemplary.
Well, the judgment itself is the statement of
your sin.
It's not the issue of whether you subjectively
understand it or agree with it.
The judgment itself is the testimony of your
sin.
The fact that you don't know that God
is the principal agent in history and that
he's sovereign is itself the statement of your
sin.
You have no knowledge of God because you
have rejected the knowledge of God and now
you're suffering the consequences of that rejection.
We have something more to do than just
provide refuge in a physical way.
We have to give explanation in a compelling
way that everything in them will resist.
But here, the acknowledgement, because of your indignation,
God, and anger, you have lifted me up
and thrown me aside.
My days are like a shadow.
I wither away like grass.
Then we come to the heart of the
matter.
But you, O Lord, are in thorn forever.
Oh?
To be in thorn forever means that not
just the present moment and the future moment,
but all of the past moments, you were
in thorn also.
You're not only in thorn in our times
of blessing, you were in thorn in our
times of prevail, suffering, and judgment.
Because you're God.
Because you're sovereign.
Because all that takes place issues from your
hand.
To say forever is to include all time
and all the circumstances that have been experienced
in time.
Not only the things that bless, but the
things that bring painful judgment.
What an acknowledgement.
You are in thorn forever.
And you know what I want to say?
That that kind of acknowledgement and that kind
of awareness is itself salvation.
And I want to say, only a distress
of this proportion will bring the rebellious Israel
to these acknowledgements.
Judgment will have served its purpose.
There's the redemptive heart of judgment.
It's not just a punitive thing, God inflicting
His wrath.
It's an instructive thing.
It's a mind-opening thing.
It breaks you into categories of consideration that
you could not before have entertained.
Nothing less will do it, or God would
have been satisfied with something less.
The judgment serves multi-purposes.
They are redemptive.
You, O Lord, are in thorn forever, including
all the present calamities and past ones.
Your name endures to all generations.
Then we come to this remarkable statement.
You will rise up, what a confidence, and
have compassion on Zion.
For it is time to favor her.
The appointed time has come.
It has nothing to do with Israel coming
of age, Israel graduating, Israel acknowledging.
A set time has come in the economy
of God.
The psalmist anticipates and knows it.
Because God is God.
His judgments will not endure forever.
It's not his last word.
It's a preliminary word.
What's the word for this?
Something that comes before the end.
No?
Reggie was sure he would know it.
Penultimate.
It's a penultimate thing.
Judgment is not the last thing.
It's a penultimate thing.
That means it's the last thing before the
last thing.
The last thing is redemption.
The last thing is restoration.
The last thing is glory.
Somehow the psalmist knows this.
He knows that it has nothing to do
with something that Israel can perform.
For they are wiped out.
They are incapable of performance.
God himself has so reduced them.
They need to be so reduced.
Because God has got to break the power
of human pride and arrogance that somehow it
can of itself affect its own circumstances, its
own deliverance, its own salvation, its own redemption.
God is only an accessory, a Sunday supplement,
or a Friday night service.
Unless he's a deliverer, without whose intervention we
would have perished.
We don't know God.
So, you will rise up.
Anything that is suggestive of resurrection and ascension
is hidden in those words.
You will rise up.
Because except that you act out of your
ascension authority and glory, there'll be no deliverance.
It's not just the God swearing himself.
It's God exercising himself in the thing that
was given him a name above every name,
an exaltation of ascension to the most high,
to the throne, because of his willingness to
suffer the abasement of humiliation and death at
the cross.
You will arise.
You're qualified to arise.
And if it were not for your death
and resurrection, there would be no deliverance.
For the set time has come to have
compassion on Zion.
It is time to favor it.
Well, what determines that?
How does the psalmist indicate when the set
time comes?
And here's the mystery.
For your servants hold its stones dear and
have pity on its dust.
Don't you just want to keel over?
You're looking for the key statement that releases
God to come out of Zion as a
deliverer.
And there's this ambiguous, poetic statement that needs
to be interpreted.
Your servants have pity on her dust, compassion
on her stones.
Well, who are her servants?
Who are your servants?
Not Israel itself.
If Israel had been a servant, they would
not be suffering this judgment.
It's the forfeiture of Israel's servant role to
be priest to the nations that accounts for
its judgment.
So who then is being referred to here?
Why does the psalmist say the church of
the last days?
Because that language was not employed when the
psalms were written.
It would have confused generations.
But I'm saying that that's what the servant
is.
The servant is the church of the last
days.
But what kind of a church?
A church that comes of age, that the
set time has come, not because something has
happened in Israel, something has happened to the
church.
What has happened?
It has come to a place of compassion.
It has pity on the stones.
It has compassion for the dust.
What does that mean?
They've taken an interest in the antiquity of
Israel?
They're archaeologically minded?
What dust?
The Amplified says, in the dust of her
ruins, I just want to say, beyond record,
every present-day city of Israel is going
to be reduced to rubble.
Present-day Jerusalem?
You see, there's those who say, it can't
happen, Art, because Jerusalem is inviolable.
This is the inviolability of Zion.
God is not going to destroy what is
so intrinsic to his own name.
Oh yeah?
What happened in 70 AD?
What happened in 586 BC?
This is not unprecedented.
When his glory has departed, he'll destroy the
very thing that was united to his name.
And it's going to happen again.
Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv.
I mean, if God will not spare Jerusalem,
what city in Israel will be saved?
It'll be a land that will be uninhabited.
Empty cities, forlorn, broken.
Jackals will be dwelling in the ruins.
It'll be the most morose, prophetic picture of
a vibrant nation reduced virtually overnight to rubble
and to dust.
You know what the world is going to
say?
They deserve it.
They really deserve it.
They were a threat to world peace.
They were arrogant.
They refused to concede to conditions that might
have brought about a resolution of the crisis
in the Middle East.
They deserve it.
What is the true Church going to say?
God waits for something.
Unless he gets it, the set time has
not come.
The issue is not Israel.
The issue is the Church.
But the Church of an ultimate kind.
Not a sentimental kind.
Because I'll tell you what will happen to
the sentimental.
They will go down, they will reject the
Israel that has been humiliated and reduced to
dust.
Because every hope for her will have been
destroyed and lost.
The Yentebi hit squad Israel that is so
marvelous in its exploits will now be reduced
to the most servile, abject condition.
And those who were enamored of the mystique
of Israel and the heroic exploits will cast
her away like a dead dog.
The sentimental, those charismatic saints who love the
allure of Israel when she had a bit
of something going for her will be the
first to reject her.
Mark my words.
The ones that I fear are those who
love whales and want to preserve the extinct
species.
Those are the ones that will kill us
without batting an eyelash who tremble with such
palpitation over the loss of a cockatoo or
a remote species.
Sentimentality is deadly.
So in all of that rejection of Israel
and people clucking their tongues and rubbing their
hands in delight something like the two prophets
that were in the streets of Jerusalem and
were killed and people exchanged presents one with
another.
They were rejoicing.
They had a celebration because they are those
who torment those who dwell on the earth.
It will be something like that.
A celebration in Israel's terrible deceit and destruction.
People will actually enjoy it.
They will take a malicious delight in saying
they got what they deserved.
In fact, their sins will grow worse and
there will be every justification.
Pick up the Jerusalem Post or the Jerusalem
Report.
Just a recent issue talks about the 300
,000 or so foreign laborers in Israel who
are living in prisons who are being exported
out who never got their salaries whose families
were separated.
It's virtually slavery because when they had to
shut the doors to the Palestinians as a
labor source because they were coming in with
their bombs they had to open the doors
to men from Kenya, from Romania from Eastern
Europe who wanted a better wage and they
made contracts with employers who took their passports
and held them in their control.
They received no social benefits no medical benefits.
They were cheated of their wages.
They were exploited.
Jews doing that to Gentiles.
They're digging a hole for themselves so that
when their end comes people are going to
say they deserved it.
And by every reckoning that's true.
But who is going to take pity on
them?
Who is going to have compassion on them
in their judgment?
And I want to say that this is
not some superficial thing where we just oh,
isn't that too bad?
To have pity on Israel and compassion on
HaGash is to make that one themselves susceptible
to the same destructive things that have brought
Israel into the dust.
Because if all the world hates Israel and
is gloating and delighting in their destruction what
will they do to you when you show
the evidence of an affinity and identification for
that very people?
You might find yourself coming under judgment.
You might find yourself receiving the short end
of the stick.
So that this kind of identification is not
a cheapie.
It's not a shallow thing that we can
put on or take off.
It is so authentically the heart of God
that those who are in that place have
no choice in the matter.
Their heart is God's heart.
Their identification is his identification.
Because though he was the judge and though
he brought the terrible devastation he's not some
unthinking, mindless and mechanical deity who can bring
this without a twinge of being personally hurt.
In all our affliction he's afflicted.
He hates to bring judgment.
It's a last alternative.
It devastates his soul.
This is the people who are the apple
of his eye.
These are his elect.
This is that nation.
And look at their condition.
Twice in modern times reduced to absolute rubble.
Their skin clinging to their bones desolate, imprisoned.
But he has compassion on them.
But he waits for your compassion.
Because the issue of your compassion as I've
said is not some superficial and external thing
that you can put on and take off
in some kind of tongue-clucking way and
you're too bad about them.
Your compassion is the issue of not just
your identification with Israel but your identification with
the God of Israel.
By identification I mean your union with the
God of Israel.
In a word, what God is waiting for
is the people for a people a servant
people who come into such relationship with him
that his heart is their heart.
His attitude is their attitude.
His compassion is their compassion.
This must be so awesome a phenomenon that
the nations who observe it will be astonished.
And evidently it's so visible that they can
see it because it says in the very
next verse the nations will hear the name
of the Lord and all the kings of
the earth hear glory.
What a demonstration that they see a people
in the earth who are Gentile, non-Jews
so identified with a people under judgment so
much as to share in that judgment share
in the shame of it share in the
scandal of it and the unspeakable indignity and
the humiliation of it.
This is such an astonishment at a time
when all the world is opposed to that
nation that they have to recognize that what
they're seeing and what is being demonstrated is
nothing less nor other than very God himself.
What the church, the servant people of God
will exhibit in that day is beyond all
categories of religion.
It is such an awesome demonstration of God
writ large in an entire people that the
nations themselves must acknowledge it and hear the
name of the Lord and the kings of
the earth hear glory for the Lord will
build up Zion he will appear in his
glory.
That is the appearance of God.
That is the revelation of God in his
servant people.
He will regard the prayer of the destitute
and will not despise their prayer.
Well I wondered about that, the destitute.
Is that talking still about Israel's suffering in
judgment?
But it says the prayer of the destitute.
Israel is not going to be capable of
prayer.
It doesn't know God to pray.
It may cry out something.
But could this destitute be the servant people
themselves?
That somehow they also are made destitute?
In identification with Israel do they come under
that same judgment and suffer some of the
same consequences?
Or are the haters of Israel of such
a kind so fiendish in their diabolical hatred
of Israel so delighting in Israel's judgment that
they inflict upon those who love her so
something of the same and render us destitute?
If that's true, to be identified with Israel
in a way that will bring us to
destitution is no small, light thing.
It's an ultimate thing.
And God waits for the ultimate thing for
when it comes.
The set time to favor Zion.
That's the mystery.
They're blind.
They're out of it.
Until the fullness of the Gentiles be come
in, then the deliverer shall come out of
Zion.
What a remarkable corollary between them.
Maybe that's where Paul got it.
Out of the psalm.
The mystery of God that he saw in
a future way.
That the issue is not Israel.
It's the issue of the servant people and
their identification with the nation, not at its
best, but at its worst.
It's an easy thing to identify with her
at her best.
She's glamorous.
She's heroic.
She's exciting.
She's a new thing.
But in her judgment, where the enemies are
ventilating their spite and rubbing it in with
taunts and mocks and they're cast out of
the land and their cities have been reduced
to rubble.
To identify with her then is nothing less
nor other than identifying with Jesus not in
his exaltation, but in his suffering.
If the invitation to be one with the
bridegroom is not when he's spanking clean and
has on his best tuxedo, but on the
cross.
Can you identify with him there in a
way that you have a union with him
there in the blood, the gore, the beatings,
the suffering, that you're willing to be joined
with that despicable one in whom there's no
beauty that we should desire him?
It was one thing when he had his
beauty, but can you identify with him in
his devastation?
He suffered judgment and that judgment left him
as a wreck.
And even his disciples fled from the ungainly
sight.
Only the women remained at the cross.
Who will embrace that cadaver?
Who will let his blood come on them?
And the gore of his wounds and the
ugliness of that, that's union.
That's love.
That's beyond human sentimentality.
That's beyond our human capability.
That's an ultimate union and that's the one
that will take us into the bridal condition
eternally.
Not Jesus at his best, Jesus in his
suffering and at his worst, where he's most
despicable, most offensive, most rejected.
Who will identify with him then?
Isn't it a remarkable parallel?
Israel in the last days will go through
its own Lord to Calvary.
It will be despised more than any people.
It will have no beauty that any should
desire it.
It will be fanged up.
It will be wrecked.
It will be mangled.
Who's going to identify with it then?
I don't know if I will.
You think because I'm a Jew naturally that
that's going to guarantee that I'm going to
be identified with my own people in that
condition?
Won't they be revolting?
Won't there be something in my own humanity
that's deeper than my Jewishness that will say
they deserved it?
How many times have I been there trying
to appeal myself to deaf ears?
Everything in me will want to agree with
the world, except that there's something deeper than
my Jewishness.
Something deeper than my superficial spirituality.
Something so deep that I'm so much in
union with the God of Israel that his
heart is my heart.
I can't help myself in loving identification with
their people in their pathetic condition.
That's the set time to face Israel.
The mystery that Paul is celebrating is not
the issue of Israel alone.
The mystery is Israel and the Church.
The reciprocal relationship between these two entities by
which the one without the other can never
come in to its eternal destiny.
The issue is not Israel.
The issue is the Church.
Israel will be inoperative.
It will be reduced.
It will be the skin clinging to their
bones.
They'll be hapless victims.
God waits for something for the set time.
To have compassion on her stones and pity
for her dust is not only to identify
with Israel in God's judgment but to invite
our own decimation by those who will despise
it.
We make ourselves candidates to have come upon
our heads what has come upon their heads
simply by that identification.
I told you where was it yesterday?
The one dream that I've had.
I've had only a few here.
Being yanked out of my bed three or
four o'clock in the morning as the
sun was knocking on the door and men
in their storm trooper outfits with a uniform
of some kind bundling us up, me and
another person, throwing us in the backseat of
the car and running off into the night
and turning around and probably in answer to
my question why are you doing this?
You are among those who love the Jews.
If there's anything more offensive to the unregenerate
Gentile anti-Semitic vicious spiteful spirit that will
sweep the world, more hateful than the Jew
himself will be those who isn't that a
remarkable thing?
And a certain sense of breath worth it
will separate the true from the false, the
feigned, the artificial, the synthetic from the actual.
Those who have only an outward sentimental affinity
from those who are in a profound union
with God.
Because nothing will measure your relationship with God
more in the last days than your attitude
towards his people in their judgment.
Don't measure it by any other thing.
How you're titillated by how you're moved by
worship, how you can cry a crocodile tear
for this or for that.
What are you going to do in the
great dawn of their judgment?
How will you relate to them in their
despicable and reduced condition when they're hated worldwide
and they're fleeing for their life those that
have even that capacity will be the issue
of the truth.
Nothing less, nothing other.
And I'll tell you what, we're not going
to find it in a day.
It's not going to come to us magically
because the set time has come.
The set time has come because we have
found it.
Not in a day but over a course
of time.
In eschatological communities of the kind that was
described yesterday.
Where we recognize that we have not given
the compassion for each other.
We have not the mercy for each other,
let alone the Jews.
And we repent at the revelation of that
condition and allow God to do his work
on us.
Let him bring his judgments upon us and
his fire so that when the other fire
comes, it's not needed.
We've already passed through.
This is not some magical condition.
This is an ultimate condition and God waits
for it.
Because unless it comes, the age is not
ended.
We're still then stuck because the age will
only conclude when God has a nation redeemed
and a church transfigured.
And Israel is the key for our transfiguration.
I thought to rewrite the theme of this
morning but I forgot.
I'll strain my eyes and read my scroll.
This identification is false if we still retain
an iota of self-righteousness that believes ourselves
morally superior to fallen Israel.
Because that turns identification into condescension.
Am I getting too fancy?
Do you know what it means to condescend
to someone?
Oh, you're so cute.
I've always loved black people.
Jews have always been my best friends.
That's condescension.
If there's anything that makes a Jew's skin
crawl and a stomach knot is when someone
says my best friends are Jewish.
It's condescension.
If we really identify, we don't have to
make unctuous statements like that.
We don't have to wear our hearts and
our sleeves and show people that we're identified
with the black, we're identified with the American,
Indian, we're identified with the Jewish.
That's just the kind of false thing that
God must bring down.
Those are the idols of which Jim was
speaking, the false categories that keep us from
bridal reality.
God can have a bride like unto himself
adorned for the bridegroom, the real thing.
And he despises this mock sentimentality and affectation.
I've always said Jews are my best friends.
What will they be when the rubber hits
the road and the ultimate conditions where they're
your best friend then your neck is in
the news.
So any iota of self-righteousness negates everything.
It is an ultimate inner condition for which
God waits.
The redemptive saga will not be over until
it be obtained, for we will not have
been fitted for our own servant destiny to
the nations if we have avoided first the
cross by keeping our lives rather than losing
them.
Maybe of all the language that needs to
hit the dust are the references to the
cross.
Talk about the final insult to God is
the sentimentalization of the cross or the employment
of it as a kind of religious or
various other kinds of phrases that we pick
up at our current in our time, but
we're never sincere.
God's dust are the references to the cross.
Talk about the final insult to God is
the sentimentalization of the cross or the employment
of it as a kind of religious or
various other kinds of phrases that we pick
up at our current in our time, but
we're never sincerely.
God's on a vendetta against insincerity, and if
there's going to be a bride going for
the bridegroom that's like him, we've got to
be of the same stuff, true and true,
utterly sincere, and so if we have avoided
the cross even as we celebrate it, we'll
not come to the condition for the celebration.
This is the work of that cross, and
I don't know of any place where its
working is more effectual.
Israel's pitiful state tests ours.
We cannot claim compassion and love.
We can only reveal what is the truth
of our condition, the statement of what and
Israel will find us out as they come
into our communities whether ours is a superficial
or God's love is unconditional.
It can't be authentic anymore.
There's nothing they can say or do, and
don't you doubt that they're going to say
and do everything calculated to find us out.
We have an instinctive cunning as Jewish people
to find that secret thing, to press that
button that will find us out.
It's only external.
That resentment will rise up, the root of
which was never dealt with, because we concealed
ourselves and kept ourselves from any dealing with
God that would have attended it.
That moment will be a crisis moment that
will reveal the truth of our condition, and
God has established that in his great wisdom.
That's why Paul ends the whole statement of
Romans on all the depths of the riches
of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.
Who is that it comes to?
What is Paul seeing?
He's seeing something so much more than Israel's
own redemption, as great as that is and
as great as his heart cried out for
that redemption.
What he's seeing is something more.
In its pitiful condition and all of its
slipshod revival consciousness and all of its subjective
pleasure seeking and phony baloney transfigured into a
bride.
The crisis of Israel compels it to a
true ground.
So Israel's final judgment judges us, and only
so could the truth of our condition ever
be known.
Hey, this isn't bad.
Only so could the truth of our condition
awaken in the day of eternity with a
shock and a cry and an anguish of
heart that we had deluded ourselves about our
own condition.
And nothing had ever tested it.
Our sanctimonious fellowships and Sunday services could never
be the test of the truth of our
ultimate condition.
Only Israel in its ultimate condition can test
us in ours.
But we need to be conscious of this
mystery or else we'll become wise and self
-assured, arrogant that somehow we don't need this
and we can attain sanctification without it.
Every present ill that is disfiguring the Church
today is in my estimation the consequence of
the absence of this mystery.
This mystery was given by God to temper
the Church.
It's His very provision to keep us in
a place of humility, to show us what's
at stake in the enormous saga of the
redemption of Israel and through Israel all nations.
Look at what is at stake here.
Why the Church cannot phony it up.
Why it must be in a place of
authenticity where Israel is not delivered.
The deliverer will not come out of Zion.
He's contained in the heavens waiting for the
restoration of all things spoken by the prophets
since the world began.
And he knows when he'll get it.
And he's got to get it in his
entire Church.
There's got to be a company, a bridal
company, a corporate expression of just what he
is in himself.
That's no picnic.
That's no cup of tea.
That's not attending a prophetical school or a
three-month discipleship course.
There's a suffering in that to go from
where we presently are to come to a
reality of that ultimate kind.
The world is capable of sentimentality.
Jesus wept at that kind of weeping.
Remember that?
Outside the tomb of Lazarus and they wept.
They were all wringing their handkerchiefs and their
fingers and plucking their tongues.
Wasn't it a pity this young man had
to die so early?
The shortest verse in all Scripture is in
that text.
Jesus wept.
He wept at their weeping because it was
shallow, because it was sloppy, because it was
sentimental, because it completely misunderstood the whole situation
with Lazarus.
There's nothing tragic about a young man dying
to be with the Lord.
If God is sovereign and has always been
enthroned, then there's some purpose being served in
the wisdom of God by the removal of
even a young man with such potential to
be taken into the heavenly precincts with God.
That's not something to cry about.
That's not some occasion in which we're going
to enjoy some kind of self-pitying picnic.
He wept at their weeping because it was
the statement of how far removed they themselves
were from an understanding of God and his
purposes.
How little they understood his glory.
How little they anticipated what it means to
be with him throughout eternity.
How little they understood the purpose for this
life as being only preparatory and not the
thing in itself.
He wept at the revelation of Israel's abject
condition revealed in the slipshod, sloppy sentimentality that
eventuated in crying around the tomb of Lazarus.
He wept over their weeping and he'll weep
over ours if our tears are shabby.
If our affiliation is sentimental, if it's shallow,
if it's carnal, there's only one thing that
he'll recognize and that he waits for is
a compassion on her dust and a pity
for her stones.
That's poetic language to say an identification with
Israel when she is reduced to the lowest
denomination to which God could bring a nation.
Pitiful.
Heart-rending.
Then the deliverer will come out of Zion.
The set time to favor Zion has come
and the nations will observe it.
Fear the name of the Lord.
The kings of the earth is glory.
He'll build up Zion.
He will appear in his glory.
There'll be a revelation of himself.
He will regard the prayer of the destitute
and will not despise their prayer.
He'll answer it.
Someone has said...
Well, I'll tell you who this someone is.
Charles Spurgeon.
Have you read his commentary on the Psalms?
Wouldn't you love to see what he has
to say about Psalm 102?
How does he understand why God will hear
the prayer of the destitute?
The way he says it is there's no
other prayer that God hears more aptly and
is more quick to answer.
There's something about destitution that appeals to God's
heart.
He doesn't hear the prayer of the comfortable.
He doesn't hear their prayers of convenience.
He hears the hot cry of those who
are reduced to destitution.
Well, I looked it up in the dictionary.
What does it mean to be destitute?
Wiped out.
Empty.
You have no resource.
You've been stripped.
And that may not only be a statement
of what may physically come upon us because
of our identification with Israel when it's most
universally hated, but also because their condition is
of such a kind.
The judgment is so severe.
They have been cast out to all nations.
Their condition is by every reckoning utterly hopeless
that we will feel ourselves destitute.
Have you ever felt destitute spiritually speaking?
No.
Like, woosh, my God.
When I begin to understand what you're after,
when I understand what you're wanting, what kind
of a church that is formative of this
bride that will adorn the bridegroom eternally, I
throw my hands up in despair.
We're not even at square one.
We put up a sign that says lights
out at 11 o'clock and people go
on till 12.
We ask for this, we get that.
Shallow, undisciplined, self-serving, that's our condition.
Will there be ministers to that?
I love what Jim said.
This is where the judgment begins first with
the bridal company, the most intensive dealings of
God.
Well, when you recognize the magnitude of the
task, you're reduced to the awareness of your
destiny.
Who's sufficient for this?
That was Paul's continual cry, and when God
hears that cry, he becomes all in all.
The church is not the church until we're
brought to a place beyond any capacity of
our own to fulfill the purpose of the
church.
This kind of a Christianity that is something
of the kind that we can perform is
apostate.
Only a requirement, only a faith that brings
us beyond any capacity of ourselves to fulfill
is the faith.
And God waits to hear the anguished cry
of the destitute.
When he hears that cry, the set time
to favor Zion has come.
Let me read you some of this good
stuff.
If you don't have the three volumes of
the Treasury of David, you'll never have a
better investment.
25 bucks, 29 bucks?
Ridiculous for the treasure.
Really a treasure.
Not only Spurgeon's insightful comments had spoken and
written with a quality of English that stabbed
you through.
It makes you all aware in one swift
stroke that the kind of English that we
employ today is hardly more than a grunt.
Where's the men's room?
Is it time to eat?
This is language.
This is language superbly employed to express the
deepest insights of the nature of God, of
his call.
It's what language was given for.
And not to be able to speak like
that and think like that and communicate like
that is to reduce us to something less
than for which God suffered and died.
It's a treasure to pick this up and
to luxuriate in it.
And on top of his own comments, you
know what he said?
He was fastidious in collecting scraps of what
other of the great divines of England had
said about these songs.
And you cannot find these sources anymore.
They're extinct.
They're out of print.
You'll never find them.
He quotes men from the 1600s.
1500s!
At his time, there were still archives, still
places.
Maybe before the bombing of London by the
Nazis in World War II that devastated whole
libraries, he had access.
He called it out and it's there.
Precious comments.
Wow!
Why didn't I think of that?
What a way to see this.
The restoration of Jerusalem was a marvel among
the princes who heard of it.
And its ultimate resurrection in days yet to
come will be one of the prodigies of
history.
We don't even talk like that.
What's a prodigy of history?
An ultimate phenomenon, an event of such a
kind will be considered the high water markable
history.
Nations will observe it.
That's what the song says.
Kings and nations will be startled, they'll be
astonished at this remarkable demonstration toward Jews coming
from Gentiles who have no reason to have
this kind of compassion for that people.
They have been the victims of that people
who has tortured the church more and crucified
its lord and victimized and persecuted its apostles
than this people.
And don't think that they're finished.
If I appreciated anything from Jim in these
days, and I appreciate it much, it's his
uncanny fingering of what they're going to be
with us in these last days.
They're not going to give us a pat
on the back and thank you for preparing.
What, you live here 25 years in sub
-zero arctic wasteland for us?
There will be a flicker of that kind
of recognition but a hostility and an anger
and a bitterness because we're quote-unquote Christian
and they're suffering because again, Christians twice in
modern times have brought a holocaust upon us.
Oh, it's going to be fierce and yet
it will result in the prodigy of all
history that the nations themselves will have to
acknowledge when God comes out of Zion to
bring deliverance because the set time for favor
has come.
People have had compassion in their stomachs, visible
and willing to suffer for that identification.
I don't think it's an identification unless there's
a suffering.
If it's a convenient one for us and
a shallow one and one that we could
easily put on as an external thing, the
nations will not notice it.
They're not noticing it now by those who
go to plant trees in Israel and go
to Feast of Tabernacle Conferences.
But when Israel is reduced and becomes anathema
to the nations and is a despicable people
and we'll say again what the Nazis said
when they had their great Nazi rallies.
The Jews are our misfortune.
The world will be saying that.
Yes, Hitler was right.
They're a curse.
Look what they've done to the economy.
The Zionist conspiracy.
I don't know how it's going to be
spelled out.
And you in that kind of environment, in
that milieu that global hatred of an anti
-Christ spirit seeking their devastation and their annihilation.
Well, I like them.
Yes, they're being judged for their sin, but
God has a hope for them.
The final word is not in yet and
I'm standing with them and I believe them.
Oh yeah?
Come over here, buddy.
You're more despicable than they are.
What do they call an Uncle Tom?
The black people that some black person who
is an authentic Christian is an Uncle Tom.
He's deserted and forsaken his identity with his
people to identify with a white man's faith?
And the Indian believers suffer the same thing?
What will we suffer in our identification with
Jews?
It will be a suffering sense, but when
God sees it, when the world sees it,
it sets in motion remarkable consequences that will
be a prodigy of history, the rebuilding, the
restoration of that nation.
This he does by providential rescues, by restoring
health to the dying, by finding food for
the famishing.
And spiritually, his need of grace is accompanied
by sovereign grace which delivers us by pardon
from the sentence of sin.
That's what it says here, that he will
have compassion in Romans 11.
He will rise out of Zion, he'll deliver
them and take their transgressions from them because
of the covenant that I have made with
them as it is written.
I can't think of one statement that touches
the issue of God in his sovereignty, in
his character, in his responsibility, in what he
is in God in that one statement.
Of what he has written, what he has
made as covenant, what he is able to
do as a deliverer, what he is able
to do in the forgiveness of sins wholesale
overnight in one stroke.
Not just their presence in, the history of
their sin.
Volumes cannot contain it.
The sexual rites, what went on under oak
trees on hills, the most pagan, putting our
children through the fire.
Molech and every pagan kind of thing that
even the practitioners of Judaism performed.
Men in the temple, that is a horror,
that God had to say to the prophet,
look at this, in my temple.
The history of our transgressions.
Unbelievable.
And he's going to remove it like that.
Because he's God.
It's the issue of God as God.
It's the issue of God who has made
a covenant that I will take their sins
from them.
I will give them a new covenant.
I'll give them a new heart and a
new spirit.
There'll no more be covenant failing because it's
no longer going to be the issue of
their ability.
I, I will, I will, I will.
The issue of Israel is the issue of
God.
But it's the issue of the people of
God with God as God.
It's the issue.
And the church that doesn't have this issue
is ipso facto not the church.
It's a deformed, stunted facsimile thereof.
It's a grotesque.
It has services.
It has programs.
But it lacks apostolic content, apostolic reality, apostolic
vitality.
It lacks prophetic presence.
It lacks authentic worship.
For the ultimate issue of all this is
worship.
And even the anticipation of this great restoration
already evokes a depth of worship that nothing
else can compel because this is the ultimate
glory of God.
That's how Paul says it at the end
of Romans 11.
For ultimate through him and to him are
all things to whom be glory forever.
I've been up doing a little homework while
you guys were turning over on the other
side.
The salvation of Jews and Gentiles is penultimate.
What does that mean?
Not the last thing, but the next to
the last thing.
What then is the last thing?
It is the ultimate glory of God.
Worship is the concluding word.
God has arranged redemptive history to bring the
maximum glory to himself.
He has arranged it so that it is
clear that all things are from him, through
him, and to him be glory forever.
Where am I quoting?
Paul's preoccupation with Israel was not because he
was a Jew, but because he was an
apostle.
Our preoccupation with Israel is not because of
our sentimentality, but because of the same apostolic
timber and resonance and actuality of our lives.
Because the apostolic burden is God's burden.
It's true for Paul and it's true for
anything that is authentically apostolic.
In fact, the absence of it betrays that
it's false.
There are a lot of presumers.
False apostles in the last days?
False prophets?
A dime a dozen.
Impressive.
Able to solve problems and quote Paul and
do this and do that and managerial and
organized and governmental.
But where's the mystery?
Where's their apprehension of the mystery?
And where is the temperedness that comes in
both to the apostle and the apostolic church
of a quality that brings a humility and
a meekness to its very character that comes
when it recognizes this mystery.
The absence of that guarantees egotism, vanity, self
-seeking.
We have it together.
We're the conquering church.
We're going to bring the kingdom of God
independent of the Israel whose kingdom that is.
Paul was right.
I would not have you to be deceiving
to this mystery.
You will become wise in your own conceit.
You will become inflated.
You will become puffed up.
And the church that becomes that is the
church.
It has lost its essential character which is
the meekness and the humility of the Lamb
of God himself.
Only the proper appropriation and understanding of the
mystery assures us of this tempering faculty.
The mystery serves us, keeps us from grandiose
ambitions about ministry and ambitions of any kind
and brings us into a lonely place in
the purpose.
We're only an interim provision.
We are not the thing in itself.
We've only been established to bring Israel back.
And if we faithfully serve that, we'll have
an eternal reward and glorified bodies to perform.
But we are second fiddle to the people
with whom God has made his covenant and
the fulfillment of which is the issue of
God himself.
Can he keep a covenant that he's made?
Can he honor his own word?
Can he fulfill it?
Even against the reluctance and the unwillingness of
the people to be faithful to that covenant?
He's stacked every card against himself that if
it succeeds through a Gentile church he will
be glorified forever.
And when this happens, it's the end of
history.
History ends with the conclusion of this great
redemptive drama.
This, what do the Germans call it?
Heilgeschichte.
Salvation history.
We don't have a word for it in
English.
That shows you how impoverished our understanding is
as American Western Christians.
The Germans praise God for the great Old
Testament scholars understood the symbolic, the remarkable significance.
This is a Heilgeschichte.
This is a salvation history.
It's a saga that had its commencement with
the beginning of time and ends with the
final restoration of Israel unto him be glory
forever.
It takes place in time.
It concludes history.
But the glory of it goes on forever.
And that church that has not taken the
issue of God's glory seriously as the first
purpose for its being, as the central purpose
for its being, is ipso facto not the
church.
The glory of God should be our consuming
passion.
Whatever it takes to attain that which pertains
to God's glory, we are the fools for
it.
We are sacrificed for it.
We'll let the world despise us.
We'll be misunderstood.
We'll be dewlovers.
Let them call us what they will, and
let them reduce us as they will till
we shall be, what's that word?
The destitute.
But how can we be other?
Because we know that this will eventually, whatever
it takes, God's glory first and foremost.
It's got to be the central thing.
That's the apostolic heart of Paul.
And to celebrate God and his glory makes
worship the concluding word.
To say amen, to glorify God as worship.
And what has suffered more in our charismatic
age than worship?
It's ghastly.
It even opposes the word of God.
There are times when they have finished with
their worship things, I can't even get out
of my seat to speak.
Whatever the burden that the Lord had given
that I was so inflamed and waiting to
get up to speak it, by the time
they finish with their worship, I'm depleted.
I'm finished.
I can hardly say boo, beef.
What kind of worship is that that so
reduces the capacity of a servant to bring
the word rather than enhancing the word?
Well, it's because it's technical, because it has
to do with loudspeakers and overhead projectors and
men who are pumped up in their own
presumption that they are really the key.
There really is where the rubber hits the
road.
They're the ones who are determining the character
of this meeting and whether it's going to
be blessed or not.
And their worship becomes an instrument to an
end.
It's no longer worship.
Once it becomes a servile thing to obtain
an end of improving the atmosphere, it becomes
a technical thing that even contradicts what worship
means.
Worship is ultimate.
God is waiting for ultimate worship that doesn't
have to be prompted, doesn't have to be
manipulated or managed, that rises up out of
the spontaneity of our hearts, that recognizes the
grandeur of God as only his redemptive dealings
with Israel will reveal, his willingness to judge
and to restore.
It's not withholding of severity in order to
bring goodness.
There's nothing that reveals God as God than
his relationship with Israel and his dealings with
that people.
To be ignorant of that, indifferent to that,
disfigures us, reduces us as church, makes it
a succession of meetings, and the hope is
of so-called worships.
Well, I'd love to read you more from
Spurgeon, from
some of the sources that he quotes, referring
to preferring Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Let my right hand forget her cunning, if
I forget thee, O Jerusalem, is more than
the attachment to a city.
It's the issue of Zion, it's not the
issue of architecture, archaeology.
It's the issue of God who has chosen
the city and the hill upon which he
shall set his son as king.
If I forget that, let my right hand
forget its cunning, let my tongue cleave the
roof of my mouth, because if I forget
that, I forget everything.
I've lost the center.
You know what the ironic thing is?
It's the very reason for which I'm being
condemned, by so-called prophetic men of our
generation, that I have lost the center.
I'm off on a tangent on Israel, and
I have forgotten Christ.
This is Christ as king, seated in Zion
on the holy hill, when his nation will
have been restored through the agency of a
church that loves her stones and has compassion
on their dust.
It's his glory that will be revealed, that
breaks forth in that salvation.
But what shame must cover thy face, O
Christian, if you should not sincerely aim at
God's glory?
He has chosen Zion.
He loves the gates of it.
It is because all the glory that he
looks for to eternity must arise out of
this one work of building Zion.
This one work shall be the only monument
of his glory to eternity.
Does Zion mean to you what it means
to him?
Of all of the places?
Have you ever been there?
The city of David?
You can walk by and get a speck
in your eye and miss it.
There's nothing about it that's grand in the
natural sense.
It's a hill, not a glorious mountain, but
it's a hill that he's chosen.
Because what makes it glorious is that he
has chosen it.
That he has put his name there.
That he will make it his sanctuary and
his dwelling.
It will be the locus of his theocratic
rule of all creation.
That's why it's to be in Zion.
That's why it's to be honored.
That's why Israel must be restored.
For Zion's sake.
He's Zion conscious, and we are not.
We're denomination conscious.
My ministry conscious.
I love these older saints.
Oh, no wonder that England has become the
punk rock culture of the world and giving
us the Beatles and Scum and the filthiest
aspects of contemporary culture.
I've had their argument in Great Britain.
Because where are its urchins?
Where are its whitfields?
Where are its great men of God and
missionaries who have gone to China and places
like that?
England, there was a nation once alive in
God.
That men waited for the publication of Spurgeon's
notes on the Psalms.
Jim mentioned the prolific production of this man
in volumes.
But a lot of it was just the
transcription and publishing of his messages.
What he spoke.
What he wrote.
His comments on the Psalms.
What a heart.
A church that waited and hung on to
every syllable.
English society was transfigured by having a Spurgeon
in its midst.
And the absence of it is the melancholy
statement of what prevails today.
Young girls chasing these jerks down the street.
These punk rock specialists who charge $140 to
get in and will watch my mouth here
take advantage of these young girls.
Dine a dozen.
Lay with them.
Rape them.
Sleep with them.
Use them.
Because in their adoration and fascination for the
psychic hypnotic power that they have through Satan
in a nation that has forgotten.
Pray for the restoration of Spurgeon and men
who understood the mystery.
Who anticipated.
Loved God.
Knew that his glory was at stake.
That the one monument to that glory will
be the restoration of Zion through the restoration
of Israel.
And that this is not a narrow ethnic
concern.
So, oh there's so much.
Let us know ourselves as destitute that we
may know how to pray.
Destitute of strength.
Destitute of wisdom.
Destitute of influence.
Of faith.
Of consecration.
Of the knowledge of Scripture.
Righteousness.
We don't know as we ought to know.
But we think we know.
And so long as we think we know
we're not destitute.
When we know that we are destitute then
there's an authentic cry that goes How do
these saints see that and write that?
Precious.
Let us therefore under God set the crown
upon the head of prayer.
Prayer has always been, has had the preeminence
in the building of Zion.
Prayer has been the chiefest instrument in the
building up of Zion.
But prayer of what kind?
Prayer that issues from the destitute.
How about our prayer sessions before every day
of our convocation?
What was it?
The cry of the destitute or the well
fed and the comfortable and the expectant?
Jim is going to pull it off.
Or Art's going to pull it off.
It's a casual air.
Our prayers are kind of a formality.
Our gut is not in it.
I had one of these mornings to begin
with an exhortation.
Let's not presume upon God.
Let's not be guilty of presumptuous sin but
think that He has any obligation to bless
us.
Because yesterday was a blessing, doesn't mean that
we can mechanically expect that today.
There's nothing more unbecoming of saints toward God
than this thing that we can lean upon
His grace and cheapen it.
Where we have no necessity to ask to
plead to pray, Lord blessing, open the heavens.
Lord, we're destitute.
There's no way to communicate a word like
this.
To give a sense of the great genius
of God in the mystery of the faith
that makes the church the church and Israel
Israel and gives Him a bride forever.
Who can speak that in an hour, two
hours, whatever?
Destitute in the face of the magnitude of
the requirement.
Then God answers.
Well, let's go back to Romans 11.
A few things that the Lord quickened for
me this morning.
Going into chapter 12.
As I said in our prayer time, these
labels are only they were not there in
the original letter.
One thought followed another.
Precious flow of God through the apostle.
So how does Paul continue having described this
mystery that eventuates in God's glory forever?
I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercies of God, present your bodies
as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to
God, which is your spiritual worship.
I don't understand why he employs the word
bodies.
I don't know of any other context where
he again cites that make your bodies a
living sacrifice.
What is this identification of Israel that require
bodily sacrifice?
That this word destitution is not a euphemism
or an analogy or a rhetorical device, but
an actual statement of what we can expect
bodily.
There'll be a bodily destitution.
There'll be a sacrifice that will be called
for, or Israel is not going to be
redeemed, except there's a people willing to go
that far.
Not for Israel's sake, per se, but for
the glory of God's sake.
That our bodies must be a living sacrifice?
This guy's serious.
Holy and acceptable to God, which is your
spiritual worship.
Do not be conformed to this world, but
be transformed by the renewing of your minds,
so that you may discern what is the
will of God, what is good and acceptable
and perfect.
Well, I mentioned it at prayer time, I'll
say it now for those who are not
here.
My experience is this.
Nothing has more served to keep me from
deception than all of the present currents that
are out there than my understanding of the
mystery of Israel and the issue of God's
necessary judgment for that people.
When you bite the bullet on judgment, when
you have made peace with a God who
judges, something comes into the inner man that
was not there before that insulates you from
a susceptibility for deception that would otherwise make
you victim.
And the way that the Lord made this
clear to me, as I described this morning,
was a conference on the American Indians up
in Ottawa, Canada.
And one of the services toward the end
was a staged device to bring people to
a place of seeming repentance for the injustices
perpetrated on the Indians by white men.
Who should have been more sympathetic?
And I was like the proverbial round peg
in a square hole.
I was completely untouched.
In fact, I was irritated.
I was chafed.
It was painful for me to sit there
and watch people come up to my phone
and cry their crocodile tears.
Yes, I'm so sorry.
I ask your forgiveness.
And relieve themselves.
Almost like a form of spiritual masturbation to
relieve the weight of their guilt when you
knew in your heart that nothing authentic was
really being transacted.
It was a human and religious device to
serve the needs of men and to play
at something that will assure that the problem
will continue.
And the people who had brought me there,
who were with me, whom I've known, who
had been here to these conferences, spiritual, crying,
going up to the microphone, enjoying the bash.
And I'm sitting there like a lump.
And so we're driving home that night and
another question would come.
Art, how did you like tonight?
And so what mattered, you would ask.
It was, for me, an anguish.
It was a grim experience.
I could barely contain myself.
How come you were not affected?
How come everybody else was crying?
I said, I can't tell you.
I just, it did not touch me in
my spirit.
It was a soulish thing and I've learned
where the center of my life is.
It's not in my soul and my response
to things external seemed or felt or played
upon.
But if it's real from God, it's going
to reach my spirit and I'm not going
to cooperate with anything less than cry a
crocodile tear to be one of the boys.
I'm going to keep my heart with all
diligence because I'm going to wait for the
real thing when it comes.
Not when men will seek to produce it,
but when God by his spirit will call
for it.
Then there'll be a transaction both in heaven
and in earth.
I said, you guys not only had a
little play at it and bashed at it,
but you even preempted God from the real
thing because you staged it yourself.
And then I thought to myself, I may
have been the only man in the room
that saw that.
The only man in the room that was
impervious to sentimentality and to the play on
emotion and outward affection.
I thought to myself, I know how come.
It's because I have imbibed and taken into
my spirit the mystery.
Because I understand the necessary judgments of God.
It's at the heart of what God is
distinctively as God and I have not shrunk
from it or balked at it.
God is a whole thing.
His garment cannot be parted.
And those who have acceded to his judgments,
not reluctantly like I guess I have to
because it says it, but with joy in
the spirit and sense that has been communicated
to us in these days.
That judgment is redemptive.
It's the glory of God.
It's not a punitive thing in itself that
we have to fear and dread.
It's the most welcome thing.
It's the revelation of God in his intense
love that will not shrink from chastising.
We're raising up a whole generation of kids.
My God, they're monsters before they're ten.
They're capable of unbelievable cruelty of blowing the
heads of their parents off in bed.
There's such an anger, resentment, a bitterness, a
hatred against the adult world, their parents, their
teachers.
What is it?
They've never been chastised.
There's no one who has ever chastised them
because it says if you do not chastise
your own children, you hate them.
You love yourself more than them because you
cannot bear the pain of having to inflict
pain.
You're soft.
You're mushy.
You're sentimental.
You're sloppy.
You want to get by.
You want what's nice, what's soft, what's pleasant.
You have no capacity for hardship, for pain.
Chastisement is a suffering, not only for those
upon whom it's inflicted, but he who inflicts
it.
In all of your inflictions, I was afflicted
because I had to bring it.
Not that God just observes it, he brings
it.
But what love.
And in the Holocaust book, if you leave
without a copy of it today, there's a
section where I quote a precious brother from
another generation, Kellogg, who writes something like this.
He said, God does not withhold chastisement from
Israel, but severe chastisement.
And in the receiving of it, Israel something
breaks upon the consciousness of the nation of
the love of God that will not spare
it, as no other conduct from God would
have obtained it.
And it comes broken, shattered, and weeping, and
lays its head, so to speak, on the
shoulder of God who has inflicted it, with
deep sobs, convulsive sobs, of pain, but gratitude
for a love that has not spared it.
And the father is weeping, even as the
son is weeping, on his shoulder.
And something happens in that moment of bonding
between God and his nation that will endure
eternally, and was never there before that time.
I don't know of an age more dangerous
than our own, in temptations and seductions and
subtleties of things that are being promoted as
being prophetic, being apostolic.
They seem to have all the marvels.
They say it right.
They're impressive.
They quote Scripture rightly.
Their experiences are supreme.
They write beautifully.
How do we work our way through this?
Because the issue of the true apostle and
the true father is the issue of the
church.
If we fail to be able to discern
those who serve him and those who serve
him not, we've lost the game before it
begins.
How do we come to an acuteness of
discernment of things both good and bad?
It comes right out of the mystery of
Israel.
That's why it follows, the very next statement,
that having discerned and seen and understood and
received God in his dealings with Israel severely,
reducing it to the place of rubble and
ruin, not sparing, that he might restore it.
That he might restore it, not Jews and
their Zionist aspirations.
And his restoration will be glorious.
When Jerusalem is rebuilt, it will bear no
correspondence to the present slipshod, jerry-built cracker
box that I despise going to today.
I can't bear to walk in the streets.
It's not fit for the king.
But the new Jerusalem will be built on
the foundations of the old.
It will be built on its rubble as
unto the wood.