Shalom, Mishpochah.
Shalom, family.
Mishpochah is a Hebrew word, it means family.
And we're in the Mishpochah, the family with
the Jewish heart.
Made up of Jewish and non-Jewish people
that are brand new creations in the Messiah.
Getting ready, Mishpochah, to blow the grandest show
far.
Oh, the grandest trumpet in Zion.
We want everyone, everywhere, to hear the good
news.
We want everyone, everywhere, to be red-hot
for Jesus.
And I have on the telephone a man
that has never been accused of not being
red-hot for Jesus.
He's prophetic teacher Art Katz.
I'm speaking to him at his commune, so
to speak, at the Ben Israel Fellowship in
northern Minnesota.
They've been there, what, 25 years, Art?
That's right, Sid.
That's a long time.
In fact, I've not lived any place longer.
Even Brooklyn, New York, my origin.
Well, for those that aren't familiar with you,
I go back with you, because when I
was a brand new believer, if anyone heard
of someone Jewish believing in Jesus, the one
they heard of was Arthur Katz.
Art, I remember you were a history teacher
in New York, a high school history teacher,
and you were a real left-wing radical.
Tell me a bit about your life and
how you became a believer in the Messiah.
Well, I'm a summation of so much that
is characteristically Jewish in the diaspora, brought up
in Brooklyn, and a high school dropout, all
the more because I was a visionary and
an idealist and I couldn't find any fulfillment
for that in school.
I was not interested in career or success.
And drafted.
I fell into left-wing causes and Marxist
institutes in my search for truth.
I was quite taken up with Marxism and
then a process of disillusionment, being drafted into
the army during the Korean War, sent to
Germany, where I found myself a German wife
and was fascinated and loved the whole German
culture and civilization, which has always been a
strong propensity for us Jews.
And then coming out of the service and
being trained to be a teacher at UCLA
and Berkeley and being married to a German
woman who was crushed by her own upbringing
in the Hitler years and was schizophrenic.
All of these elements conspired together to bring
me to an end of my humanistic assumptions
in my 34th year and to require me
to leave the teaching profession and put a
pack on my back as my marriage failed
and to seek philosophical answers.
And in the course of that 14 months
of travel in that fashion, which became my
first book, Ben Israel, Odyssey of a Modern
Jew, the Lord apprehended me and called me
by name in Jerusalem and brought me to
himself.
I returned to California.
Excuse me, that's too powerful to leave alone.
He called you by name in Jerusalem.
That's right.
Was this a pretty startling thing for a
Jewish atheist?
A preliminary supernatural experience in the first reading
of the New Testament aboard the deck of
a trap steamer on my way from Italy
to Greece.
You have to understand that as a modern
man I was more Greek than Hebrew.
In fact, in my classroom I had a
sign up at the top of the board
that said, Go Greek.
Philosophical and humanistic.
So it was significant that en route to
Greece and the reading of a Hebrew book
called the New Testament, in fact I had
never read either Old or New Testaments up
till that moment, I received in the very
first reading a revelation out of the mouth
of Jesus that was indisputable and terrifying that
cut me in two and left me trembling
aboard the deck of that ship.
I knew in a single moment of time,
having been an atheist all my adult life
long, that there is indeed a living God.
I'm reading his book and the Jesus of
that book is who he claims to be.
So you can imagine the depth of my
astonishment at that revelation that came in a
first reading.
So when the Lord finished me off some
months later in Jerusalem calling me by name,
I was in a certain sense prepared for
this consummation by the whole process of revelation
that came through being picked up off the
side of the road by born-again believers
and being given hospitality and witness to and
in every way being prepared for the greatest
revelation of my life coming in my 34,
35th year.
And you say the Lord called you by
name?
Yes.
What did he call you?
I had been staying at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem and was being guided by a
young man training to be a rabbi and
not to forsake my ancestral faith and the
last aspect was to visit an ultra-Orthodox
community.
He put me on a bus but he
put me on the wrong bus.
I found myself lost and going in circles
in Jerusalem and got out of the bus
and walked into the first store that I
could find which was a bookstore and asked
the woman for directions.
She was very gracious, gave me a little
sketch, a map and I was about to
leave and I observed I was in a
bookstore and I looked a little more closely
and I saw Bibles, commentaries, New Testaments I
looked again at this woman's Jewish face clearly
Jewish, I said what is this place?
She said this is our bookstore adjoining our
chapel we are a congregation of Jewish believers
and the Messiah Jesus and at that point
something clicked in my heart and then an
inward voice called me and said you're not
to leave I was commanded not to leave
and so I stayed four days and nights
with this Pentecostal congregation and saw a demonstration
of the reality of God that I had
never glimpsed in any synagogue or church in
America and people praying for me and trying
to answer my questions and I in the
most bewildered state imaginable trying to put all
this together going to sleep the last night
in a state of bewilderment confusion, unable by
the power of my intellect to understand how
God could ask me, a Jew, to become,
quote, a Christian and in my sleep that
night the Lord just gave me an understanding,
transcending my mind, and I woke up believing
on May 26, 1964 came to the breakfast
table and said to this woman, Rina with
whom I'm still in correspondence 35 years later,
Rina I believe I understand and the poor
dear fell out of her seat weeping because
her final prayer that night was, Lord we've
done everything for this stubborn man, you make
him to understand, and on that basis she
encouraged me to pray my first prayer in
35 years to call upon the name of
the Lord to take the word Jesus, the
name to my lips which was excruciatingly difficult
and put me in a press of thousands
of years of history, of abominations that we
have suffered in that name, and despicable violences
and how could I call upon that name
and join myself with the enemies of the
Jewish people but within all of that tumult
there was an inward sense that I will
in no wise cast out any man who
comes unto me, and the Lord actually gave
me the grace to speak his name, it
was not a vocalization it was a grace
that allowed me to stutter and finally get
that word out of my mouth and the
moment I did I was born again by
the Spirit of God Art, the two hardest
questions in the traditional Jewish community, one you've
dealt with, how you as a Jew became
a fervent red-hot believer in Yeshua Jesus
the Messiah but the second question is just
as penetrating and just as heavy in the
Jewish psyche, and that is the Holocaust why
didn't God stop it why did God allow
it and many traditional Jews are closer to
atheists even going to traditional synagogues because of
the Holocaust I want to take you back
to the early 1950s and this was before
you had a revelation of Jesus and you
were visiting one of the worst of Hitler's
concentration camps Dachau, tell me about it well
as a GI in Germany and my first
young kipper instead of going to a synagogue
being an atheist I chose to visit Dachau
a notorious concentration camp and I had all
my categories fully in hand the good guys
and the bad guys and I was going
to have my hatred for the Germans confirmed
but as I walked through that camp which
by the way Sid, is different now than
it was then now it has been nicely
cleaned up and landscaped, at that time it
was the crude, ugly place of death that
still lingered from the late 1940s and the
stink of death and the whipping posts and
the gas chambers and bones and ashes were
still in place and so the totality of
that horror so affected my soul that I
realized that this is beyond good guys and
bad guys that somehow we are all implicated
I had always wrestled over the issue of
the Holocaust because like most modern and American
Jews there was something about German civilization that
we found very compelling and endearing and how
could this people the land of Goethe, Schiller,
Fichte, Hegel Wagner, Schopenhauer and so on be
the land of our destruction this was the
culture and civilization that we most touted and
wanted so much to emulate even as a
messianic alternative and so the conundrum of how
Germany could have been the agency of our
undoing not just our death but a bestial
death was a paralyzing question that had always
occupied me even as an atheist and so
the going to Dachau that day was a
tremendously traumatic experience After the Holocaust the Jewish
community really tried to evaluate it or interpret
it but you point out in your book
that it took 20 years before they even
put in writing what they thought were the
reasons for the Holocaust I think that that's
understandable because the trauma of the Holocaust the
systematic annihilation of 6 million Jews the elimination
virtually of continental European Jewry was so staggering
that it was beyond even the categories of
thought so after the Holocaust there was virtually
no significant literature of interpretation and it took
about two decades before we began to get
some kinds of comment and analysis and attempt
to understand that remarkable phenomenon All this week
we will be discussing your book titled The
Holocaust subtitled Where Was God Why did you
write this book?
Well I would say it was the culmination
of many years of agonizing reflection and I
had been speaking on this subject One of
my major addresses came in 1974 at a
Kansas City conference before 2000 people that brought
the most profound response to the word of
God I had ever heard or seen since
and I knew that I had stumbled on
something or been prepared for something and that
God wanted a book from that initial statement
and it took virtually a quarter of a
century from that time of public speaking before
we found it in print but I believe
that it's on time not only because it
attempts to understand the Holocaust past but speaks
also of a Holocaust yet to come Now
Art this is maybe I better repeat that
line in case people missed it a Holocaust
yet to come Shalom Mishpochah Shalom family Mishpochah
is a Hebrew word Mishpochah means family and
we're the Mishpochah the family with the Jewish
heart made up of Jewish and non-Jewish
people that are brand new creations in the
Messiah Get it ready Mishpochah to blow the
grandest shofar blow the grandest trumpet in Zion
we want everyone everywhere to hear the good
news we want everyone everywhere to be red
hot for Jesus and just listen to my
guest long enough and you'll realize he is
red hot for Jesus his name is Art
Katz he's a prophetic teacher I'm speaking to
him at his community called the Ben Israel
Fellowship in northern Minnesota in particular we're talking
about his book The Holocaust, Where Was God?
and on yesterday's broadcast Art you mentioned some
pretty unpopular views that you espouse in this
book one in particular is the next Holocaust
that's coming and of course a lot of
people say oh I'll pray and feel sorry
for the Jewish people not realizing that the
whole fate of the world and individual countries
and cities are dependent on what happens to
the Jew but let's go back to you
told me you were visiting for 20 years
you've been going back and forth in Jerusalem
but some of these views were so unpopular
you could not find anyone that would offer
you a pulpit for them back then and
you actually spoke about it in the lobby
of a hotel what happened?
well in the lobby we were given meeting
rooms that had to be expanded every night
for the increase of the crowd but not
one of those whom I had known over
the years came I was totally boycotted and
the only one who came was the wife
of a brother to harass me publicly but
when I came back from that series of
meetings there was a letter signed by 13
of the most eminent and known of the
messianic and other leaders of the ministries in
Israel condemning me as a false prophet that's
harassing the church and giving aid to the
enemy and so that opened up an opportunity
for me to respond by a letter that
we took weeks to compose which gave the
most comprehensive and biblical exegetic overview of our
consideration of Israel's future and destiny and that
letter is to be found on our website
www.benisrael.org called the burning bush and
it's called letters to a friend and in
that you can have a view of how
we perceive the whole situation of Israel and
her future and that the time of Jacob's
trouble is not past it was not the
Nazi Holocaust.
It's not possible to assert that in light
of Scripture, and that it's yet a future
event, and that there's calamity for the Jewish
people not only in Israel, but worldwide, seeing
that it's the time of Jacob's trouble, and
Jacob is dispersed in many nations, and that
we ourselves are here in northern Minnesota, not
the least for the reason of preparing a
place of refuge in North America for that
soon-coming time.
So both my own experience, the call of
God, and my understanding of Scripture from a
prophetic side constitutes our understanding, and we're putting
our life on the line.
We so much believe in what we're saying,
and the Lord is now giving me quite
a liberty to speak this publicly and freely
everywhere I go, and I find that where
I go often proves to be the actual
white line of flight and refuge that the
Lord is establishing, and people invariably come up
to me and say, I've been waiting years
to hear this word.
I felt that I was a freak, that
God had called me to prepare something like
this, but it seemed outlandish and unthinkable, and
now that I've heard you with it, I
feel that it's credible and that it was
the leading of God.
And so everywhere I travel, Sid, both in
this nation and in the world, I'm seeing
God preparing places of refuge with Jews in
flight in that soon-coming time.
Let's go back just a little bit to
the premise of the book, The Holocaust.
Where was God?
Many Jewish people ask, where was God?
Why was he so silent?
Maybe there isn't a God.
Respond.
Well, I think that not the least of
the reasons for the Holocaust is that God
is not happy with our inadequate view of
him, that there's something about ultimate tragedy and
calamity that necessarily is going to bring an
end to inadequate views of God.
We're compelled either to see him afresh more
deeply than we knew him, or to altogether
cast away our notions of God and God
himself as somehow being a fiction.
And there have been books of this kind.
Richard Rubinstein, who's a professor, former rabbi from
University of Florida, wrote a book called After
Auschwitz, in which he forsook the traditional views
of God and became essentially an atheist.
He did not call for an end to
Judaism nor Christianity, but that it should go
on without any sense that there is a
God, and serve social and moral purposes.
So there has been a great disillusionment with
God as people thought him to be.
But the issue is, is that the God
who is?
Because the aspect of God that was omitted,
the one that even Christians are least likely
to consider, is the issue of God in
judgment.
And my contention is that nothing more reveals
God in his depth than his severity and
his judgments.
And that without that consideration, we don't understand
either his mercy or his love.
And so if any serious consideration of the
Holocaust will require a radical re-examination of
our understanding of God, and are bringing us
back to the biblical sources for that knowledge,
the most profound of which is God's historic
dealings with Israel, which have always been judgment
for our sins.
My question is, why should the Holocaust be
exempt from that principle of interpretation that even
rabbis have employed historically to understand the Jewish
disasters of the past?
It has always been examined from the perspective
of Deuteronomy, of blessings and of curses, and
that what we experience comes from the hand
of God, though he will use nations and
men as the rod of his chastisement, but
that he himself is its author.
And that's the theme of my book, and
I try to sustain it biblically, and I
can't understand why any serious person who has
a biblical framework of understanding would not consider
first that we need to look at our
calamities in the light of our sins.
And then if that does not serve, then
we can consider other possibilities.
But the thing is that there has been
no answer for the Holocaust, and even Jewish
sources say that this is beyond consideration.
It's not for us to understand nor to
probe.
You talked about a chance meeting that you
had with the Jewish winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize that many are familiar with, Eli
Wiesel.
Tell me about that.
Well, this was some years ago, he spoke
publicly, and a fascinating speaker, and an eloquent
and impressive man, and in the course of
it, he said that he's now studying the
Hebrew Scriptures with a rabbi twice a week.
The Lord didn't allow me to ask the
question publicly, but afterwards I went up to
him, and I said, insomuch that you're studying
the Scriptures twice a week, to what degree
would you acknowledge that our history of disaster,
calamity, and including the recent Holocaust, is itself
the fulfillment of promises made in Scripture of
what would befall us in the latter days
for our sin.
And he, it was as if he had
been dashed with a bucket of cold water.
He froze, and he looked at me, and
he finally said, I refuse to consider that.
And I quote that episode in my book,
and go on to interpret what it means
when a foremost authority on the Holocaust refuses
to consider that.
What he, in fact, is saying is, I
exalt my human judgment over and against the
Word of God.
It's not a question of whether God has
said that in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, or in
the Prophets or the Psalms.
I refuse to consider that.
It's outside of my category.
I will not factor it in.
And so it's a statement, in my opinion,
of supreme human exaltation over God.
And I write in my book, if this
is a foremost authority who lost all of
the members of his family in the Holocaust,
was himself a survivor, what then is the
condition of the Jewish community itself, if he
is the voice of it, and that we
are still guilty of this kind of presumption
and self-assertion over and against the Word
of God, which is to say, over and
against God himself.
Art, one of my concerns is, as you
know, there's an anti-Semitic lie that unfortunately
has floated around that the Jews killed Jesus.
We know by the Word of God that
Jesus laid down his own life for the
sins of the whole world.
But it's been used for anti-Semitic purposes.
Your theory, your teaching on the Holocaust of
where was God, in effect will cause some
of these anti-Semitic, quote, Christians that, you
know, the two words should never be put
together, but they're religious people, they're not really
one of the Messiah, let's call them religious
Christians, to point at a Jew and say,
well, you didn't believe in Jesus, that's why
you had the I can't think of anything
harder to say to a Jewish person.
It's, what shall I say, it's a situation
and a question of an extreme kind, but
I don't think that we can evade the
truth.
Peter, in his first message after Pentecost, clearly
confronts his hearers with their culpability and guilt
in the death of the Messiah, who was
slain with wicked hands, though was predetermined by
God.
They were still culpable in their involvement, and
so the pity is that the enemies of
God's people have played upon that, seized upon
that with the cry of deicide, but we
need to recognize that the truth of it
is undeniable, but we need not bring it
to them as accusation in that sense, but
with a broken heart and say that our
implication in the death of the Messiah is
the ultimate statement of what had been a
long-standing sin, and it reached its apogee,
it reached its final expression in our inability
to recognize him when he came, in our
opposition to him, to his word, and to
the testimony of his miracles, and finally our
agreement to his death is the summation of
all of the sin that characterized us as
a nation to that point.
The fact that successive generations have not opposed
that decision for his death makes them culpable
in it, and until we repent of the
error of our fathers or the sin of
our fathers in their willing consent to his
death, we ourselves are implicated in that decision.
But I must balance it by saying, so
is every non-Jew on the face of
this earth, because he died for our sins.
Right.
I mean, his death was a necessity, but
the fact that we were involved in that
death willingly implicates us all the more as
Jews.
He came to his own, his own received
him not.
So we need to own up to our
part in that, though it served the redemptive
purposes of God for all mankind, and all
mankind's sins were placed upon him as the
sin-bearer, nevertheless we need to recognize what
our sin was, and as willing participants in
his death, and in our continuing attitude that
endorses the decision of our fathers, implicates us
in that choice.
Art, you're stirring up a lot, as you
always do.
Shalom Mishpochah.
Shalom, family.
Mishpochah is a Hebrew word, and that's what
it means, family.
We're the Mishpochah, the family with the Jewish
heart, made up of Jewish and non-Jewish
people that are brand new creations in the
Messiah.
Getting ready, Mishpochah, to blow the grandest show
far, all the grandest trumpet in Zion.
We want everyone, everywhere, to hear the good
news.
We want everyone, everywhere, to be red-hot
for Jesus.
And a lot of teaching today, throughout the
body, is, for lack of better words, bless
me club.
But you know something?
To whom much is given, much is required,
and we are living in, as the Orthodox
Jewish community says, the footsteps of the Messiah.
And I believe that my guest, Art Katz,
who's a prophetic teacher, I'm speaking to him
at his place where he's lived for over
25 years, the Ben Israel Fellowship, his commune
in northern Minnesota, and God has recently given
him a release on a lifetime study that
he's done.
We're talking to him about his book, The
Holocaust, Where Was God?
Art, I'd like you to get a little
more specific, rather than we've been talking in
generalities up till now.
What is, biblically, the root cause of the
Holocaust?
And perhaps read a scripture on that.
Yeah, I speak about a Deuteronomic view, that
is to say that Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the
Mosaic Covenant, speak of blessings and curse, that
there's a covenantal obligation to walk in the
way with God, and a very serious consequence
for the rejection of that way.
And there's an actual, actually a vivid description
of something of which we are warned in
Deuteronomy chapter 32, which is called the Song
of Moses.
It's not a song in the sense of
something of elation or victory, but rather something
to be memorized and passed on from father
to son and through the generations, of what
we are warned would befall us in the
latter days.
And in chapter 32 are descriptions that are
so vivid and reminiscent of the Holocaust that
it gives you a chill to read them.
So for example, I'm looking at the Amplified
and also the New Revised Standard Version in
that chapter.
Verse 24 says, "...they shall be wasted with
hunger and devoured with burning heat, and poisonous
pestilence in the teeth of beasts will I
send against them, with the poison of calling
things of the dust."
And then the next verse, verse 25, "...from
without or outside the sword shall bereave, and
in the chambers shall be terror, destroying both
young man and virgin, the suckling child with
the man of gray hairs."
And it's interesting that in the examination of
the process of extermination through the use of
gas chambers, which is a place of terror
and asphyxiation, that when the doors were opened
after the work of gas, the composition of
the bodies always remained the same.
At the bottom were the oldest and the
weakest, namely the gray hairs and the sucklings,
and at the top were the young men
and women who had the strength to climb
to the top for the last vestiges of
air that remained.
So in a remarkable way, God foreshadows and
speaks prophetically in Deuteronomy of what would befall
us in the last days as a warning
to be faithful to covenant.
In that same chapter, other questions that have
confused and stirred us are touched.
For example, how could that have taken place,
that we could have been herded like sheep
to our death, and that we could not
have overcome in many instances the few German
gods, and that nations were closed to us
for escape?
And in that chapter, it says, how could
one have chased a thousand, and two put
ten thousand to flight, except their rock had
sold them, and the Lord had delivered them
up?
So here's a biblical explanation for a phenomenon
that takes place in modern times.
Art, what about the innocent children?
What about the very religious Jews that were
sincerely wrong, but sincere in their faith, and
definitely loved God to the best of their
ability?
How could God allow this to happen to
those two people groups?
Well, that's the argument that's put forward by
a Jewish philosopher, now living in Israel from
Canada, and I answer that question at the
end of my book, or I attempt to
answer it, and I say this, that does
God approve of that kind of orthodoxy?
Is he as impressed with it as we
are?
Why do we assume that they would not
be subject to the same judgment, merely because
they practice a form of Judaism that is
pious, because the derivative of that piety goes
back to the pharisaical, its pharisaical origin, that
had much to do with the rejection and
the death of Messiah himself?
And so, whatever their practices carried on at
the modern times, it has not been divorced
from its root, and God may have all
the more the greater contention for a people
who purport to be religious, and yet have
been Scripture-rejecting as well as Christ-rejecting,
and have not had even opportunity, given through
the calamities that have pursued us in Europe
and in exile through these last 2,000
years, to ask if, indeed, our fathers had
not made a mistake?
And do we need to reconsider, and in
the light of Scripture, is there a basis
that can be examined about this rejected Messiah?
But having had 2,000 years, not only
to consider the question, but to ask why
do we continue to suffer pogroms, persecutions, exiles,
and death?
Is this a continuing statement from God, seeking
to arrest our opinion?
And have we come finally to a time
in history when God just chose to allow
our sin to have its consequence?
In fact, in Deuteronomy 32 verse 34, he
asks, is not this laid up in store
with me, sealed up in my treasuries?
That is to say, I can bring this
judgment whensoever I choose.
I am not under obligation for there to
be a direct cause and effect action in
you through them, to give you cause to
repent and to consider your ways.
But the fact that we have passed through
that Holocaust without a remorse and without a
repentance, without a broken consideration of our past
and its failures and our judgments, and come
out with a statement, never again implies that
what we suffered has nothing to do with
God, but our own weakness as a people
and the viciousness of those who are our
enemies.
In a letter of condemnation that I got
from the head of a Bible Society in
Israel who read my Holocaust book or at
least portions of it, he says, I'm not
interested in this God-judgment stuff.
The issue is man's inhumanity to man.
Well, is he speaking from the vantage point
of Scripture or from the vantage point of
humanism?
I think that the issue is not man's
inhumanity to man, but the God who allows
his judgments to be wrought through man's inhumanity,
but that he himself is the author who
he cuts and slays, he heals and he
makes alive.
And that statement is in Deuteronomy 32 as
well.
I lift up my hand to heaven and
I live forever.
I wet my lightning sword.
My hand takes hold on judgment.
I will wreak vengeance on my foes and
recompense to those who hate me.
I will make my arrows drunk with blood
and my sword shall devour flesh with the
blood of the slain.
And so...
Art, I must ask the question.
I posed of the pious Jews, you gave
me your answer.
What about the innocent children?
Well, I try to address that too.
You know, what makes judgment judgment is that
others suffer for our sins and especially our
children.
And for that reason, judgment all the more
needs to be feared, and it's an incentive
to keep in covenant fidelity, knowing that failure
would bring upon our heads not only the
judgment of God, but the heads of our
children as well.
How shall they be exempt?
That they have to...
the sins of the fathers fall upon their
children, and that would be an incentive to
keep us in the way.
And that's what makes judgment judgment, and judgment
to be feared.
And what would you say to someone that
says, if God is that way, I am
not going to serve a God like that?
Well, I would say that that's the kind
of arrogance and self-exaltation that makes sin
sin and invites that kind of very judgment
upon us.
God is righteous.
That's a given.
We know that.
He does all things well.
He's perfect in all his ways.
He's holy.
And though we may not understand or let
alone approve of the of the painful things
that come to us in our experience in
history, we have to fall before the fact
that God is God as the indisputable factum.
That's the given truth, and hope to understand
our calamity in the light of it, and
go back to Scripture and search it.
And in fact, God says to this man,
I will look.
He who is of a contrite and broken
spirit and trembles at my word.
And so these judgments ought to occasion a
trembling by which that word will be opened
and revealed to us.
But if we harden ourselves, which is the
option of how we can respond to judgment,
and choose to reject the God who inflicts
it, then we invite upon our own heads
and that of our children the consequence.
I've heard many say, well, the Holocaust certainly
could not have been as bad as it
was if true Christians had taken their stand.
How would you respond?
Certainly, the church is indicted in its failure,
but that doesn't obviate or lessen the issue
of the Holocaust for ourselves as Jews.
It does bring the church under an indictment
as well, and there are reasons and things
that need to be understood in that way.
But I don't think that anything could have
happened to have dissuaded God from bringing to
pass that which he speaks in his word
will necessarily come to pass, and that there's
been no repentance on our part as Jews.
We have not acknowledged the sins of our
fathers, which makes us one and culpable with
them in it.
And in my answer to this doctor in
Jerusalem who condemns me and my book, I
just wrote this last night, I said, how
is it that you could be a leader
in a Bible association and not understand yourself
the Deuteronomic principle by which rabbis have always
understood the calamities that have befallen Israel?
What has changed?
Why should we not continue to understand and
seek an explanation on the basis of the
Word of God and the judgments that God
said would befall us in the latter days?
What has happened, what has changed in us
or in God that removes that as a
fulcrum, as a principle of seeking explanation?
Art, we're out of time.
Shalom Mishpochah.
Shalom family.
Mishpochah is a Hebrew word.
It means family, and we're the Mishpochah, the
family with the Jewish heart, made up of
Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand
new creations in the Messiah.
Getting ready, Mishpochah, to blow the grandest shofar,
blow the grandest trumpet in Zion.
We want everyone, everywhere, to hear the good
news.
We want everyone, everywhere, to be red-hot
for Jesus.
I have on the telephone, a friend of
mine, I've known him, gee, I don't know,
hardcats, I don't know how long I've known
you.
Probably as long as I've been a believer
in the Messiah, which is well over 25
years.
He's a prophetic teacher.
He is a founder of the Ben Israel
Fellowship.
It's a community in northern Minnesota.
And, Art, we're talking about your book, The
Holocaust, Where Was God?
I must say, you use Scripture to support
your case, but it is not what most
people think of when we think about the
Holocaust.
Historically, besides the Holocaust, why do you feel
that Jewish people, the traditional Jewish people, were
not obedient to God as a people group
throughout history?
Well, we have been the authors of counter
-Messianic alternatives, but probably the most prominent and
devastating example would be communism itself and Marxism.
Marx himself being an apostate Jew, and according
to Richard Wurmbrandt and others, one who has
dabbled in Satanism and offers mankind an alternative
to God's plan for the redemption of mankind
and the nations, and the reconciliation of men
through a social system, the end of which
has been rivers of blood, tyranny, and devastation
in nations of the world, and one of
the greatest threats even to our present civilization.
Paul in Romans says that we are the
enemies of the gospel.
Yes, but I have to balance with what
you're saying by the fact that some of
the greatest finds in science that has blessed
humanity has also come from Jewish people that
did not know their Messiah.
That's true, and of course I'm grateful, and
mankind is grateful for that genius and that
contribution, but we're asking what is it in
our life that would be a cause for
God's anger, wrath, condemnation, and judgment, and I
would say that we have been in the
forefront of many causes that oppose God and
present an alternative to his own redemptive purposes
for mankind.
And what would you say to the anti
-Semite who takes that type of information and
uses it and says, see, Jews are eternally
cursed by God, and we should rid the
world of the Jew.
That's the Hitler theology.
Well, they will stand before God in judgment
for their misuse, but you know, if they
want, they have plenty of ammunition right within
the Scriptures themselves, and even quoting Paul, even
quoting Isaiah.
I mean, there's an indictment against us and
all the prophets that they can employ.
The issue is their heart and their intention
toward us is evil, and they'll be judged
for that.
So how does God look at a so
-called Christian that hates the Jew and wants
to persecute the Jew in the name of
God?
Yeah, well, they'll still suffer for that, because
we are still his chosen people and the
apple of his eye, and he's jealous over
us, and they will bring upon their own
heads and eternally the consequence of that hatred.
But I think one thing that we need
to consider is that anti-Semitism itself is
part of the judgment that has haunted us
and followed us throughout the ages and in
every nation where we have been cast, and
that when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, maybe not
the least of that weeping was when we
missed the day of our visitation, is that
he foresaw prophetically what would befall us as
being a people cast out in the nations
and conspicuous for our differences, and that there
would be necessarily and inevitably friction, resentment, irritation,
hatred, all the kinds of things that would
be generated by the way that we would
stand out as the square peg in the
round hole.
We could not fit in to Gentile society
or Christian society, and the suspicion about us,
the wells being poisoned in the Middle Ages,
our own attitude toward the goyim would make
us candidates for the kind of irritation, resentment
that could find its expression in anti-Semitism,
but this is also judgment.
But if it's part of the judgment of
God, why should a Christian even share the
gospel with the Jew?
I'm sorry?
If it's part of the judgment of God,
why should a Christian even share the gospel
with the Jew?
Well, God would have as many as will
to be saved.
There's still a remnant that needs to be
sought, and it's the first obligation and mandate
of the church to promulgate the gospel to
the Jewish people.
So both things are active congruently, you know,
at the same time.
There's the hatred against us, there's the church
that seeks our salvation, and that even that
activity will be misconstrued and looked upon as
being anti-Semitic, as the recent determination of
the Southern Baptists to witness the Jews has
been understood.
So, but we need to...
I found it pretty interesting, I heard the
head of the Southern Baptist Organization on a
secular talk show on that subject, with a
debate with the rabbi, and I heard him
say, the rabbi said, oh, you feel our
religion, this traditional Judaism, you feel our religion
is defective.
And so the head of the Southern Baptist
said, oh, absolutely not, it's wonderful, we just
want you to add Jesus to it.
What would you say to the head of
the Southern Baptist?
It's a cheapy answer.
I would have agreed with the rabbi, yes,
your religion is defective.
It's intrinsically defective.
You've rejected your very God.
In the name of the defense of Judaism,
you have formulated a rabbinical alternative to a
biblical faith, and rejected the Messiah promised in
that, by those scriptures.
Yes, and if that were not so, Paul
would not have wished himself a curse for
his brethren's sake.
If all you need is a little bookkeeping,
a little...
Well, listen, the Southern Baptist will not be
endeared with the traditional Jewish community by anything
short of an answer like that.
Well, I don't know if being endeared is
the issue.
The issue is that time is running out,
eternity is at stake.
Men need to be confronted with truth that
will affect their eternal destiny.
It's not going to be pleasant to hear.
It has to reverse the prejudice and the
misjudgment of the ages, and only one who
loves a Jew would be willing to be
misunderstood, and suffer even the indignation and the
anger of a Jew to whom this kind
of testimony is given.
But isn't it easier to reach a Jewish
person with the gospel by not saying, as
a result of sins, these judgments are coming?
Say that again?
Isn't it easier to reach a Jewish person
with the gospel without confronting them about the
Holocaust as God's judgment?
I mean, that is going to make a
Jewish person so upset they're not going to
hear the good news.
They might become upset unto salvation, because it's
repent and believe the gospel.
The tenor of our modern gospel has been
an appeal to man's self-consideration.
Accept Jesus and that these are the benefits
that you will receive is not a basis
of repentance and believing.
See, the gospel is patently antithetical to man.
It is hostile to his understanding and to
his intelligence.
It is a calamity.
It is a scandal.
And the only way it could be understood
and received unto salvation is through revelation.
And revelation comes through repentance.
And God tells us, don't hesitate, don't hold
back.
Tell Jacob their sins and Israel their transgressions.
I just gave a message like that in
Germany.
I had to sit for four days for
a painful conference on prayer for Israel that
was the most wishy-washy and sentimental and
pointless, self-serving thing that I'd ever heard,
that was concluded with a final night of
repentance that was absolutely cathartic, that these Germans
wanted to be rid of the sense of
guilt.
But it had no blessing for them.
It'll have to be repeated and certainly will
not affect the Jewish community.
And I went on from there to Nuremberg,
having written something that night when I came
home, so chafed over that, on what would
constitute a true repentance of the German nation,
the German Christians toward the Jew.
And the Lord had me to speak on
the final night and brought the house down,
that the evidence of a real repentance on
Germany's part would be such a change as
the willingness to confront Israel with their transgressions
and Jacob with their sins, knowing that that
message is calculated to rub Jews the wrong
way, and that they would not be appreciated
for that, and they would be willing and
love to be misunderstood in order to speak
a truth that will occasion a repentance unto
believing and faith unto salvation.
You speak of the Jewish community and the
hope of being endeared to them is a
dead end.
You speak in your book about what will
happen in the future to the Jew, Israel,
and the nations, and Christians.
And this also is a teaching that very
few people have ever heard, and is also,
I might add, very unpopular.
For those who are familiar with it, in
just a minute would you basically tell me
what the premise is?
The premise is the time of Jacob's trouble.
And the issue is, is that time past?
Has that already been fulfilled?
Was that the Holocaust?
And that the Jewish community can now rest
safely, that they need not fear any future
devastation?
My conviction, based on examination of Scripture, is
that the Holocaust was not that fulfillment, that
the time of Jacob's trouble is future, that
it will be worldwide, and that Jesus himself
warned of it, and that it would exceed
any trouble that we had previously known in
our history, and that if that time were
cut short, no Jewish flesh would survive.
Do you see an invasion of Israel of
the magnitude described in this description by Jeremiah
of Jacob's trouble?
An invasion?
Yes.
Well, I see a devastation of Israel and
its cities.
Ezekiel is full of it, Isaiah is full
of it, Jeremiah is full of it.
It talks about the destruction of Jerusalem that
would subsequently be rebuilt upon its own heaps
as unto the Lord.
I think that that's future.
In Ezekiel 36 it talks of Israel being
returned from being cast out in exile again,
and that its first function is to rebuild
by the grace of God the cities that
had been left waste and made desolate.
That there's a plethora, an abundance of Scripture
that speaks of a devastation so severe that
I believe is future for the present nation
of Israel, and that will leave its modern
cities in ruins and require an expulsion of
flight or captivity from which God himself will
return them in the last days and in
the millennial time himself, that the Jewish community
that survives it will experience both the severity
of God and the goodness of God, the
severity in their expulsion and then the devastation
of their hope for the state of Israel,
and the mercy in the return that he
himself will affect by his own power.
Art, the thing I want you to deal
with on tomorrow's broadcast is the effect that
this is going to have on the world.
When God deals with Israel he's not just
dealing with Israel.
He's dealing with the entire earth, and I
believe that this is important for our Mishpochah
to understand.
Shalom, Mishpochah.
Shalom, family.
Mishpochah is a Hebrew word.
It means family, and we're the Mishpochah, the
family with a Jewish heart, made up of
Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand
new creations in the Messiah, getting ready Mishpochah
to blow the grandest shofar, all that grandest
trumpet in Zion.
We want everyone everywhere to hear the good
news.
We want everyone everywhere to be red hot
for Jesus.
I'm talking to a friend of mine, a
Messianic Jew by the name of Art Katz.
We in northern Minnesota called Ben Israel Fellowship.
I'm speaking to him by telephone there.
We're talking about his very controversial book, The
Holocaust, Where Was God?
And Art, I promised our Mishpochah that we
would deal with the fate of the nations
based on what the judgment of God on
the Jew in Israel, but I have to
ask you this question.
It's kind of personal.
Another good friend of mine by the name
of David Stern in Jerusalem, Israel, stated that
a Jewish believer in Jesus today does not
need a call from God to make Aliyah,
to return to Israel.
You need a call from God not to
return to Israel.
How would you respond?
I would disagree completely.
The steps of the righteous are ordered by
the Lord, and I believe that this is
the kind of presumption that we will later
rue with great misgiving that we have invited
Jews from the frying pan to the fire.
If my anticipations are correct, and Israel is
going to be at the vortex of devastating
violence, to invite Jews to come to it
now is to invite them to their death.
But on the other side of the coin,
if a Jewish believer in Jesus is called
by God to go there right now, there's
no better place on the face of this
earth for them.
No better place if it's going to be
the vortex of violence.
If God calls them there.
If God calls them.
But they need to know that they're going
into that vortex, and they're being called to
be a salvific agent in the deliverance of
Jews who would otherwise perish except for their
help.
That they're not going to the safest place
in the world, but the most dangerous.
Okay, you're posing so many questions.
The take of the well-meaning Zionists is
to invite Jews to a return that is
premature, that there's a judgment and a dispersion
that must first take place.
And I agree with my brother Arnold Fuchtenbaum
that present Israel is established as a crucible
for judgment, and is not the final restoration
yet, but a preliminary toward that end.
Art, I must ask you another question.
You talked about six million Jews died because
of judgment, for violating the laws of God,
and accumulated judgment, and you stated scriptural references
for that.
But what about the five million Christians that
lost their life during the Holocaust?
Well, I don't have enough to occupy myself
with it.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, why would Christians be judged?
Well, maybe because they're not Christian enough.
Maybe they were Christian only in name.
In fact, the message that I gave in
Germany that brought the house down was that
the sin of Germany is comparable and exactly
the same as the sin of the Jew,
and that in fact it's not an accident
that Reformed Judaism had its advent in Germany,
reflecting the rationalistic temper of German civilization that
was embarrassed by the supernatural references in Scripture,
and that the God-is-dead theology issued
out of Germany, that there's a band of
connection between German liberalism in Christianity and Jewish
flight from scriptural orthodoxy that indicts both before
God, and they're both subject to judgment, and
will yet experience it.
And what brought the Germans down on their
face in repentance, in the acknowledgment of their
sins as being exactly comparable and the same
as of a God-rejecting Israel that established
its own religious alternatives in a flight from
Scripture and the requirement of God's lordship, because
they wanted a religion that would be comfortable
and compatible with German culture, German civilization, on
the Jewish part, a Saturday exercise, and the
liberal German, and even German orthodoxy, wanted a
bourgeois, middle-class kind of Christianity that was
not in any way apostolic or threatening to
their own middle-class aspiration.
All right, I'm sorry, because of time, I've
got to ask you this question.
What about the church in America?
And when I'm talking about the church, I'm
talking about the lukewarm church in America.
What effect will this devastation on little Israel
have on us here in America?
I think it ought to be profound and
cause us to re-examine our whole understanding,
and to see the shallowness of our faith,
to recognize that we have dismissed from our
deepest consideration the issue of Israel as central
to the church's own understanding of itself and
of its mandate and role.
I think at what a occasion the deepest
repentance on a church that has itself been
in flight from reality, because the issue of
Israel is central to the church's own perception
of itself, and it's not only by the
way of rejecting Israel from consideration, but even
sentimentally to consider Israel is still a rejection.
That is to say, Paul's statement in Romans
9 through 11 is central to his whole
apostolic understanding of the faith and the role
of the church.
It's not an appendix, it's not a side
note, and to the degree that the church
in America or in the world has not
taken up Paul's apostolic view of the centrality
of Israel and their restoration in the last
days as being the establishment of God's theocratic
kingdom, that kind of Christianity that has taken
place with that absence is substandard and defunct,
and has become only a kind of Sunday
culture that gives rise to the Littleton Colorado
shootings and a whole generation of youth going
progressively berserk, because they have been robbed of
the vitality and the reality of God that
would have been theirs had they been in
the environment of a church that is apostolic,
that understands that these are the last days,
that God has called us to more than
a Sunday religious or Saturday religious culture, and
that the issue of Israel would have opened
all of these perspectives had it been rightly
understood and received.
What is your prognosis for that, what you've
just described to me, if a church does
not understand the obligation to the Jew, the
destiny of Israel, the obligation to reach the
Jew first, what is your prognosis for the
country that is loaded with churches like this?
It's in root to apostasy and to judgment,
and indeed there'll be a great falling away
as Paul said, and two of the reasons
I think will be most prominent, one will
be the failure of Israel to be established
as the state that we have shallowly desired
and expected, without any real depth of understanding
of the chastisement that was first come for
Israel before it ascends to its millennial glory,
and the second will be the failure to
experience a rapture out from a time of
tribulation in which I believe the church will
yet be in the earth.
And these two failures and disappointments of a
shallow faith will mean the end of that
faith for many who will fall into apostasy
and God rejection.
Others through repentance will be required and led
to re-examine their inadequate faith and come
to the apostolic and prophetic quality of believing
that I think God waits.
Now, 25 years ago you started the Ben
Israel Fellowship in northern Minnesota.
Tell me why.
Why has God told you to start this?
I was living in a 17-room house
in New Jersey, 20 miles from New York
City, and half a million Jews in my
birthplace.
I was invited to this area in Minnesota
as a speaker, and while I was here
I was told that there was a property
for sale but I care to see it.
I said, well why not, let's go for
a ride.
They drove me to this bankrupt boys camp
bordering on a lake, and there was a
chain across the road, no trespassing.
When I stepped over that chain and my
foot came down on the property itself, the
Lord who spoke to me explicitly and called
me by name of Jerusalem in 1964, spoke
to me and gave me the name Dominion,
and these exact words, End Time Teaching Center,
Community Refuge.
And we are here by the mandate of
God and his word to establish a refuge
for Jews in flight in North America in
the soon coming time of Jacob's trouble.
I know you can't answer it, but I've
got to ask you, how far off is
this Holocaust in Israel?
How far off is this persecution of Jews
even in the United States of America?
You can see what's happening, that the noose
is tightening and that the anti-semitic episodes
are increasing in number and in the fearfulness,
the shootings in Los Angeles at that Jewish
day school and the man boasting in it.
I think and on university campuses an increase
of anti-semitism.
The Jewish community is rightly alarmed at this
increase, and so we're moving toward these fulfillments.
How long it will take, I don't know.
It's the hand of God's restraint that keeps
it from breaking out right now, and I
think that the thing that restrains us the
most is that the church is not yet
ready either to understand or to participate as
being a saving agent from God for Jews
in their time of ultimate distress.
The woman is going to be fleeing into
the wilderness, and there needs to be a
place prepared for her there, and few churches
and few Christians have any cognizance of this
at all.
They're unwilling to be inconvenienced, let alone to
extend themselves for Jews at a time when
Jews will be globally hated, and that in
extending yourself you put your own self and
family in peril.
And so my labor is to bring the
church to this kind of consciousness prophetically, and
Matthew 25, the first judgment that Jesus renders
as the now-seated king, is what the
Gentiles have done with the least of these
his brethren, and whom do they recognize as
being his brethren, and naked, thirsty, and sick,
and in prison.
And the response of Gentiles to Jews in
that plight determines their eternal destiny, and I
think we're moving toward that consummation, that the
issue of Israel in the last days is
the issue of the nations themselves.
And therefore the Trump has got to be
sounded to wake the church from its sleep
and its programs, its attempts at revival, and
every other kind of thing to offset its
gray and dispirited condition, not realizing that it's
in that condition, because it has forfeited an
apostolic and prophetic recognition of the centrality of
Israel.
I'm sorry, we're out of time.
Say that again, please.
Well, Sid, I was just sharing with you
that the key interpretive principle for me, that
is at the depth of my whole being
and understanding of God and his way, is
the cross and resurrection.
And I believe that every issue that faces
the church, the world, and Jewry, is cross
avoidance.
And it's this understanding of a certain necessity
that is implicit in God's wisdom, that was
demonstrated by his own son, of a necessity
for the suffering and the death that precedes
the glory, is the key to understanding the
prophetic scriptures as it pertains to Israel.
And so this has been the key of
interpretation for me, and in my conversation with
those who have opposed my views, I sense
in them either a shallow understanding of the
cross, or really a flight from it.
To embrace the cross and to understand its
unavoidable necessity as being that which precedes, that
anything that pertains to God's glory will open
up the scriptures, and particularly the issues of
Israel, in a remarkable new way and depth.