I call for a commitment that night that
I and a few others there made, and
I've always been touched by Art's preaching.
Art was a young Jewish man, very much
caught up in intellectual and even communistic pursuits.
He's one of the Jews that the Holy
Spirit, I believe, has picked out and specially
saved in the last days to minister to
the body of Christ and to prick our
consciences about our Jewish brethren and our Jewish
brethren-to-be.
Art wrote a book years ago, Ben Israel,
which swept through to the then young charismatic
church.
He was very much in demand and speaking
all over the place in Europe, and still
is.
Then he and Inger, his wife, retreated to
Minnesota for a while where they've been.
Now, I believe, in the past five or
six years, the Lord's really begun to open
doors again in a special way for Art.
It's always a pleasure to have him here.
I've never heard him speak.
I didn't get something tremendous out of it.
I'm sure that the Lord's going to do
that tonight.
So, Art, why don't you come on up
and take your liberty.
I always receive Art as a prophet.
I don't know how they receive him other
places, but I believe that we get a
prophet's reward if we receive him that way.
Well, you dear saints, you're going to be
sorry that you've ever seen my face, or
you'll eternally rejoice.
Nothing in between.
I sense that you need something desperately urgent,
and I'm fool enough to be an instrument
available to God for that kind of surgery.
I have a sense of like a veil.
What do they call that fleshly membrane over
the congregation that needs incision, a scalpel, a
cutting, a laying back, an opening up, a
bringing forth.
And I really have a peculiar burden tonight.
Like, can we afford a throwaway night that
doesn't really count, where we can just pull
out the stops and go for broke and
don't even try and preach a commendable, intelligent
message?
Something really off the wall, irrational, that if
the Spirit of God is not in it,
well, I'll take it back, if the Spirit
of God is even in it, you'll come
away perplexed.
I think we need perplexity.
I have the kind of sense that we
don't know as we ought to know, and
that there's a God whose love is so
great, and whose knowledge is so perfect of
what is real, that I wouldn't put it
past him, really, to do something devastating, to
bring us from where we are to where
we need to be.
And the sense is that nothing less than
that which is devastating will succeed in it.
That's why God brings devastations.
Because his thoughts are not our thoughts, and
his ways are not our ways.
As great as is the distance from heaven
to earth, so great is the distance between
his thoughts and our thoughts, even when our
thoughts are correct.
You've got correct thoughts, but you're as removed
from God and from heaven as great as
is the distance between heaven and earth.
And you know what God periodically does in
order to shorten the gap and to startle
and make us aware of the disparity and
the discrepancy between ourselves and him?
He brings devastation.
What would you say is the greatest historical
devastation of modern times?
Question and answer time.
What's the single greatest devastation in the 20th
century?
Of course, there's been a lot of devastation.
Maybe it's not a fair question.
World War II?
Definitely.
The Holocaust is really what I have in
mind.
Part of it, it has a very special
character, certainly a devastation of ultimate proportions for
the Jewish people, and one that occupies me
sorely, and one that I feel that has
not occupied us enough.
I just have come from a recent conference
on the Holocaust at a university on the
West Coast, a scholar's conference.
I joke about how did I get in.
In fact, the wonder is how did I
remain in once I got in, having been
shut up on my third public statement, trying
somehow inoffensively to introduce the subject of God,
and being told that this was a scholar's
conference and not an evangelistic occasion.
And hearing those words, I realized why it
is that God has to send his fricos
into such conferences.
Because the reason that we have holocausts is
that we have separated scholarly functions from God,
which he never intended.
Secular and sacred is only the world's convenience.
These are not God's categories.
Everything is sacred.
And unless there's a little shockwave and a
little untoward activity by God where men don't
expect it, we'll shut God out, and the
secular will surely become profane.
So, you think you can understand me?
I'd rather be misunderstood or not understood at
all, and take a shot at allowing the
Lord through my mouth to jab you a
bit, and to leave you perplexed, then you
should go home thinking it was a good
message and what a nice speaker.
I'm willing to risk rupturing my relationship with
your pastor.
So great do I sense that the need
is.
And not you only.
You're expressive of a greater need, just like
it all over Christendom.
You know what the remarkable thing is?
It's Christendom at its best, and still so
wanting in divine reality that you ache.
And if I ache, how much does God
ache?
So, Lord, we give you this night in
a kind of a throwaway sense.
Do with it what you will.
Continue to let me ramble.
Let your buckshot find lodging here and there
in certain hearts.
Ruffle a few feathers.
Step on a few toes.
Knock a few heads.
Challenge us.
Raise a standard, a plumb line from heaven.
My God, that will shame us.
Make us to understand, Lord, that we're living
under a kind of fleshly tissue, a membrane.
Everything is transmuted through it.
We don't get the full impact of anything.
Joy, reality, truth, God, each other.
Everything is blunted, dulled.
And we ask, Lord, that you would insert
your scalpel and open a hole, make a
slit, and let divine reality in of a
kind that will make us out of place.
Bring us into collision with things with which
we ought to collide and have not.
Unfit us for the world, and fit us
for yourself as a people really persuaded that
these are the last days, that the time
is short, that the tasks are urgent, and
that we are ill-prepared to serve them.
Unless you help us in your great mercy.
So have the whole possession, my God, and
just let it rip.
Do what you will, say what you will,
and at least once a year we ought
to have something like this, just for the
heck of it.
And we give you the praise, and we
invite your reckless abandon with us.
Don't spare, and don't be restrained.
And give this people hearing ears.
Let them hear a spirit word that does
not appease and gratify their minds, but mystifies
and perplexes it, but lodges something in their
spirits that will not let them go.
Let there be a shriek somewhere along the
way, here tonight or somewhere in the night
hours.
Thank you for calling the church to be
the ground and the pillar of truth.
Give us such a love for that truth
that will make us maniacal, put us at
odds with those who are satisfied only with
the technical data of it, and are not
too concerned for the spirit of truth.
Come, Lord, waken us.
We thank you and give you the praise.
In Jesus' name, God's people said, Amen.
Well, I just happened to have one of
my papers on the Holocaust.
Don't fear, I'm not going to read it.
It would not even be intelligible to you.
The subtitle is, Thinking the Unthinkable.
This much you need to know, that the
magnitude of the devastation that came with the
systematic, genocidal annihilation of six million Jews a
half century ago has got to be one
of the great, brute, rude events of all
times.
What makes it particularly probing is that it
did not take place in some primitive, uncivilized
area of the earth where we would expect
some kind of bestial conduct on the part
of men.
It was perpetrated in the land of Mozart,
Beethoven, Wagner, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Schiller.
I know you probably don't know one out
of those names, but I can extend it
so much as to say this.
Germany was the epitome of civilization.
It's a conundrum, saints, a hard-to-be
-understood paradox in history that something as vile
and as devastating as that could be perpetrated
by a people of such an eminent kind.
And even when I was an atheist, I
knew that the key to the meaning of
human existence was to be found in the
graves of the victims, that somehow we have
buried them too quickly.
They need to be unearthed.
What's the word?
Exhumed.
And we need to leap in and wrestle
with the bones.
There's a mystery there, and it would be
tragic if we were content to pass on
and let it go.
Don't think that you have any apostolic calling
at all until you will back up and
examine the devastating things of history and of
your own life and probe and ask the
why of it and be willing for ruthless
things to be exposed that challenges you at
every level.
That's what Moses experienced on the backside of
the desert in the wilderness, tending the sheep
for 40 years until everything in him that
was Egyptian and brilliant and Jewish and distinguished
was extinguished.
There was nothing left that could be considered
credible.
He was a man shot through with contradiction,
with a sense of defeat and failure, having
failed to be to his own people what
he thought that he ought.
All that he could boast of was one
dead Egyptian, and
God allowed him to stew in that condition.
And in that condition on the backside of
the wilderness on the Mount of God, tending
the flock of God, he passed a phenomenon
of a bush burning that was not consumed.
And he stopped and he turned aside to
see and to ask why.
And when God saw that he turned aside
to see, he called his name twice and
brought him into his apostolic last day's purposes
to send him to the Pharaoh, not some
peripheral Egyptian, but smack dab where the action
really is.
To a man who was tongue tied and
stuttering and felt himself completely inept and incapable.
Therefore, he was qualified.
And God said, I will be with you
because he turned aside to see.
I can't help but sense that somehow we're
the victims tonight of the failure to turn
aside to see.
We're the victims of a kind of shallow
and callow day by day existence that gets
by.
We're satisfied with things that do not satisfy
God.
And we refuse to blow the whistle so
long as we can perform the perfunctory necessities
of life and of religion and go home
in time for the late news or whatever
it is that awaits us after the service.
We are living beneath the glory of God.
We're not sufficiently alive to God.
And I think a rabbi rightly said that
why God called Moses is that when he
saw that he turned aside to see.
This is the apostolic distinctive, because once you
turn aside, there's no assurance of ever turning
back to where you were or what you
saw before.
You may be permanently dislodged out of your
whole sense of things, the rightness of things,
your view of things, and brought into another
dimension of seeing that threatens, eclipses, and changes
everything.
God has put before us great events, a
great devastation, and we've not turned aside to
see because it's a devastation of inexplicable suffering,
of men treated bestially, of conditions so horrible
they cannot even be civilly re-described.
And even on this trip, when my diesel
would not start on a cold upstate New
York morning, we had a call at AAA,
and the man who came was a Ukrainian
refugee or immigrant, and one word led to
another, and he recalled for me how when
the Nazis had occupied the Ukraine that they
took the intelligentsia out of the locality where
he was.
I think anyone who wore glasses or had
a college background or was a shopkeeper or
a professional or gave any suggestion of an
intelligence beyond that merely sufficient to feed one's
face, they took 18,000 of these people,
the same kind I think that were destroyed
in Cambodia or Vietnam or wherever it is
these devastations take place, and they brought them
out of the locality, and they had them
to lie prostrate in the road.
And they ran over them with tanks, while
a bulldozer dug great ditches to heap the
bodies into the ditches, whether they or not
they were alive or dead.
That's only a little microcosmic detail of a
whole decade of unspeakable horror and atrocity.
Have you ever asked the question why?
And I don't mean why sociologically or politically
or even historically.
The why that I think we need to
ask is where was God?
Jewish faith in the God of their tradition
has suffered a terrible eclipse since Auschwitz because
they cannot reconcile the systematic murder of six
million of God's covenant people, a million and
a half of whom were children, and they
cannot find an answer to the question, where
was God?
Do you know?
You'll never be an ultimate people for God
unless you ask ultimate questions.
And guess where God turned me this morning,
probably for you.
In one book that describes the Holocaust of
a single man in such devastation that was
totally inexplicable because he himself was undeserving of
that kind of calamity.
What book would that be?
Let's turn toward the end of it, where
we come to the last of the explanations
for this Holocaust on the part of Job's
comforters.
You know, the remarkable thing is you go
through 36, 37, 38, that
the statements that are made to Job to
explain his devastation are not cheapies.
They are about the most astute, intelligent, spiritually
and biblically sound explanations for suffering of the
righteous that can be given anywhere in scripture.
And yet, you know what the remarkable thing
is?
At the end of the book of Job,
God says to these men who gave that
counsel that he was angry with them because
he did not speak of God as Job
was to speak.
This raises remarkable questions.
How was it that they could be so
correct and yet be so wrong?
That God would censure them and if Job
did not himself pray for them after they
had made a sacrifice of seven bullocks.
Let's turn to that in 42, chapter 42,
verse 8.
Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and
seven rams.
What's the significance of seven?
Perfect, complete sacrifice.
Not a one or a two.
It needed to be an ultimate sacrifice for
ultimate offense, though correct.
And these men were astute, discerning, understanding.
They would eclipse the understanding of any one
of us in this room tonight and all
of us put together.
And yet they required such a sacrifice before
God would bless them.
Take unto you now seven bullocks and seven
rams and go to my servant Job and
offer up yourselves, for yourselves, a burnt offering.
And my servant Job shall pray for you.
For him will I accept, lest I deal
with you after your folly, in that you
have not spoken of me, the thing which
is right, like my servant Job.
That's remarkable.
However correct they were, their correct statements were
unacceptable to God.
And they didn't do Job any good either.
By them he did not come to a
place of repentance or an acknowledgment of God
or a new perception of the faith.
It left him completely cold.
It was lifeless, though correct.
And if you read some of it, I
mean, it's marvelous.
Let me see.
Verse 17 of chapter 34.
Shall even he that hateth right govern?
And wilt thou condemn him that is most
just?
Verse 23.
For he will not lay upon man more
than right, yet that he should enter into
judgment with God.
Verse 26.
He striketh them as wicked men in the
open sight of others, because they turn back
from him and would not consider any of
his ways.
Verse 29.
When he gives quietness, who then can make
trouble?
And when he hides his face, who then
can behold him, whether it be done against
a nation or against a man only?
Verse 31.
Surely it is meet to be said unto
God, I have borne chastisement.
I will not offend any more.
That which I see not, teach thou me.
If I have done iniquity, I will do
it no more.
Not only is this correct, but it's sublime.
It's poetic.
It's superbly expressed.
And yet the men who expressed this counsel
to Job required a sacrifice of an ultimate
kind.
And the prayer of Job, in order to
be released unto God, lest his anger abide
upon them.
Because they did not speak as his servant
Job spoke.
And Job speaking came after God turns to
Job and takes a shot at explaining to
him something about ultimate reality, that eclipses all
of our categories, all of our understanding.
Presents a sense of God who does not
need to explain anything.
It's a God who is God.
And he'll afflict whom he will afflict.
Even the righteous.
His ways are not our ways.
Although we know that we know that he's
just and righteous altogether.
But it may not always appear so.
In chapter 38 it begins, then the Lord
answered Job, Job out of the whirlwind.
And maybe you can tell me later, if
you're still talking to me when all this
is over, why he addresses Job out of
a whirlwind.
I'm not sure that I know what a
whirlwind is.
But it sounds like something of a stormy
kind, whirling, and I don't know what, God
in some kind of ultimate condition of the
kind by which he spoke to the prophet
Elijah in the cave.
Maybe it's a God who's distressed or I
don't know what.
But there's a speaking out of a whirlwind
that we probably need ourselves.
And all I'm doing is creating a little
breeze, let alone a whirlwind.
We need God out of the vortex.
We need God devastatingly.
We need a God who shatters our categories,
even our correct ones.
To communicate something that is more dear and
more precious than correct statements about God, but
the knowledge of God as he in fact
is.
Awesome, holy, fearful, to be dread.
I would give almost anything if I could
see restored to myself and to the church
the fear of God.
You know what I suspect would happen if
we had it?
We would not have begun the service tonight
the way we did.
Automatically, boom, boom, boom.
Musicians, drums, guitars, and all the other kinds
of things that we did and go right
into our program.
We might even have waited on the Lord.
We might even have entered this room with
trembling.
We might even have thought that this is
more than just a midweek service or a
speaker passing through.
Why, it might even be divine encounter, visitation,
event.
Some untoward and unpredictable thing, for God knows
we need such.
But we have a blasé, stinking attitude that
has no real expectancy in God.
We're mechanical and habitual, and this is the
thing that we do on Wednesday nights.
Would to God he would speak to us
out of the whirlwind.
We need it.
The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind
and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel
by words without knowledge?
Do we have any of those?
Words without knowledge.
They're correct, but they're not knowledgeable.
What a paradox.
Better to have fewer words that are knowledgeable.
Because that's God's first accusation or charge against
the man who was described in the beginning
of this book as upright.
Have you found such a one as Job
who eschews evil and who is upright on
the face of the earth?
He was an exemplary man.
In fact, there's a place where he describes
his credentials and what he did for the
poor and how people fastened on his words
and the kind of respect that he enjoyed
in his community.
Men stopped speaking when Job opened his mouth.
For every time, wisdom, gracious utterance, ponderable statements,
full of charity, justice, righteousness.
Can you find such a one upon the
face of the earth?
God asked Satan.
And yet however exemplary his condition was, he
had to be devastated by God.
And however eloquent his words were, and however
knowledgeable, they were words without knowledge.
Just like those that were spoken to him
by his, quote, comforters, for whom God required
ultimate sacrifice, they were so much out of
his pleasure, though they were correct.
Gird up now thy loins like a man,
for I will demand of thee, and answer
thou me.
I love a God like that.
You like a God who demands of you?
You want to know something, saints?
We have not been demanded of enough.
If you had been, you wouldn't need a
freako like me.
We're getting by with murder.
We're getting by with casual airs.
We're getting by with cheap amens and hallelujahs
and the singing of a few choruses in
a buck in the collection plate and looking
beatific and religious on Sunday.
Only God knows what is the true condition
of this congregation tonight as he sees it.
The truth of your life, your marriage, your
morality, your thought, your secret thoughts.
He knows the condition of the man who
is leading the worship here tonight perfectly.
We have a lot of words without knowledge,
and I suppose I could feel free to
say a lot of worship without worship.
I like a God who will demand of
us and require an answer, because if he
doesn't get it in this life, he'll surely
get it in the day of eternity.
Will there be a howl and a shriek
and a gnashing of teeth When we learn
in one fell swoop we have lived consistently
beneath the glory of God and hardly took
note of the matter, content to coast.
Not only will that strike you in the
moment of eternity when you'll see as he
sees, but another thing will strike you with
equal power.
It's too late to remedy it at all.
You're fixed eternally in that makeshift slapdash condition
to be out in the periphery somewhere and
not around the throne of the Lamb charged
with and honored by eternal service in ruling
and reigning with him from heavenly places.
You blew it and were content to get
by, and nobody seemed to notice or require
of you, because we made each other the
standard of our spirituality, and by that standard
it did not seem too conspicuous.
Well, you can read how God speaks to
Job and speaks to us, Where were you
when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if you have understanding.
Who hath laid the measure thereof, if thou
knowest?
Who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened?
Who's laid the cornerstone thereof?
When the morning stars sang together and all
the sons of God shouted for joy, Well,
who shut up the sea with doors when
it break forth, as if it had issued
out of the womb?
When I made the cloud, the garment thereof,
and thick darkness and a swaddling band for
it, and break up for it my decreed
place and set bars and doors.
It goes on like that.
It's a remarkable poetry.
It's a sense of God as creator out
of nothing.
Ex nihilo.
It's a sense of God who is awesome
and so beyond ourselves, so beyond Job, so
beyond his virtue, so beyond his personal excellence,
that the sum effect of God requiring of
him and giving him an answer was Job
crying out in chapter 42, verse 2, I
know that thou canst do everything, and that
no thought can be withheld from thee.
Do you know that?
Let every man be a liar, but let
God be true.
What's the subtitle of my holocaust paper?
Thinking the unthinkable.
Do you know why?
Because Jewish and Christian theologians are having to
reappraise their traditional theologies in the light of
the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people and
wonder if their doctrine of God is correct.
Because how could he be God and be
omniscient and know what was taking place and
not intervene to stop it?
Either he knew it but was powerless to
do it, which means to say that he's
not omnipotent but impotent, or he could stop
it but chose not to, which means that
he was unjust and unrighteous and didn't give
a rap.
Whichever way you look, God strikes out.
There's more subversive things going on in seminaries
today than you will know, and it's only
a matter of time before it percolates out
to the grassroots and infects all the church.
The only other explanation is that God was
there, that he knew, that he's all-powerful.
He's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
But for reasons of his own, he remained
silent, chose not to intervene, allowed the systematic
annihilation of a people whom he says are
the apple of his eye, and that in
all their afflictions, he was afflicted.
He was not some passive observer who hummed,
who yawned while they were being shredded and
put in gas ovens and sent up through
smokestacks and babies ripped out of their arms
and thrown into flaming troughs by the railroad
tracks when they came in in their cattle
cars more dead than alive.
Why was he silent?
Why did he allow it?
What is he wanting us to understand from
it?
And if we don't understand from devastating and
ultimate suffering, will we be required to experience
yet something worse?
Every instance of inexplicable suffering raises the issue
of God.
And you know what I suspect?
Because the issue of God was not raised.
Because there were Jewish congregations comparable to your
own who were doing their dutiful religious thing,
only they did it on Friday night and
Saturday morning rather than on Wednesday and Sunday,
and went on like that for decades and
for generations, speaking about God with words without
knowledge, until finally it caught up with them
in a devastation calculated to shake them to
an awareness that would save them from an
eternal holocaust of a fire whose burnings do
not cease.
I know that thou canst do everything and
that no thought can be withheld from thee.
The margin says about that last thing that
no thought of thine can be hindered.
We're suffering saints from an inadequate knowledge of
God.
And we are the house of God, charged
with the responsibility to make him known.
And these are the last days.
And people are perishing everywhere.
The bottom is soon to fall out.
In fact, the last time I spoke here,
I gave a sense of the prophetic foreshadowing
of the decade of the 90s in which
I talked about the moral, economic, and political
collapse of nations, including our own, the devastating
things that would rise out of the debris
and the clutter of it, the whole last
day's apocalyptic collision between powers of darkness and
light, the last shakings and convulsions of an
age that is on its way out and
under judgment.
I hope you're the same congregation.
But we don't have a sense of urgency.
We are not able to persuade men, knowing
the terror of God, as Paul was.
We don't want to think of apocalyptic conclusions
to the age that end in fire and
elements melting with a fervent heat.
Deep in our secret hearts we're humanists that
hope for some kind of progressive improvement that
would not require devastating judgments of God.
We're charismatic, but we're not apostolic, which wouldn't
be bad if we didn't use that apostolic
language.
We need to know that there's a God
who can do everything, that no thought of
his can be hindered.
We need to know God.
And God's condemnation of Job's friends were that
you have not spoken of me, the thing
which is right.
You spoke about me many right things, but
you did not speak of me, for you
had words without knowledge.
You did not really know him of whom
you were speaking correctly and poetically, and therefore
your words were unable to touch my suffering
servant and to give him an illumination that
would explain the anguish to which he was
being passed till I myself required of him
and explained to him.
And here's the result of when God speaks.
This Job says, I abhor myself and repent
in dust and ashes, in verse 6.
How do you equate that for a man
whom God described at the beginning of the
book as a just and upright man?
Is there one like him upon the earth
who eschews evil and sins not?
And this same man, at the end of
his devastation, cries out, I abhor myself and
repent in dust and ashes, because in verse
5 I have heard of thee by the
hearing of the ear, but now mine eye
seeth thee.
Okay, you guys.
Supposing you had this option tonight, to see
God as he in fact is, knowing that
there'd be such a shriek out of the
deeps of your heart, who are now relatively
satisfied with yourself, far less impressive than Job
was before God began to work on him.
You don't begin to touch the righteousness of
Job.
What would your shriek be if God revealed
himself as he is?
I abhor myself and I repent in dust
and ashes.
That's not a little catchy phrase.
You know what that means?
When you put dust on your head, that's
dirt.
That means the only place that's fit for
you is six feet under.
Let every man be a liar, but let
God be true.
The same thing happened to the prophet Isaiah,
who was called the prince of the prophets,
when in chapter 6 he saw the Lord
high and lifted up and cried out, Woe
is me, for I am undone.
I'm a man of unclean lips, and I
live in the midst of a people of
unclean lips.
When he saw the Lord as he is,
he saw himself as he is.
When Job said, I've heard of you by
the hearing of my ear, but now my
eye seeth and I abhor.
That means hate, detest myself.
I'm a loathsome thing next to the grandeur
and awe and unspeakable holiness of a God
who can do anything.
Who is always right, even in a holocaust,
when you can't explain him.
And unless you start with that premise, you'll
never come to the knowledge of the truth
that God intended to be found in the
ultimate places of suffering and devastation.
Don't reason God away.
And it was so that after the Lord
had spoken these words unto Job, the Lord
said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is
kindled against thee.
God's not playing here.
My divine anger has been ignited against you.
Though you were eloquent, though you were poetic,
and though you were correct.
To speak about me, you did not speak
of me, because your words were without knowledge.
And you're trying to console Job and explain
to him why it is that as a
just man, he's allowed to suffer a holocaust?
For you have not spoken of me, the
thing that is right, as my servant Job
hath.
What did servant Job speak that God said
was right?
I abhor myself and I repent in dust
and ashes.
This is the only right thing that God
could hear from righteous men.
And so the Lord turned in verse 10
to captivity of Job when he prayed for
his friends.
And also the Lord gave Job twice as
much as he had before.
The Lord blessed the latter end of Job
in verse 12, more than his beginning.
For he had 14,000 sheep and 6
,000 camels and 1,000 yoke of oxen
and 1,000 she-asses.
He had also seven sons and three daughters.
And he called the name of the first
Geminon, the name of the second Ketsion, the
name of the third Keren-hapuch.
And in all the land were no women
found so fair as the daughters of Job.
And their father gave them inheritance among their
brethren.
And after this, after this, Job, lived Job
140 years and saw his sons and his
sons' sons even four generations.
So Job died being old and full of
days.
His latter end was more glorious than the
beginning.
He began as a just man and he
ended as a holy.
He had to suffer devastation.
His children died inexplicably.
Great winds came and tore the house down
and the roof collapsed upon them and upon
servants and bands of marauders and murderers came
and slew this and that and a whole
devastation and a holocaust came upon his children,
his property, his own life, his own body
that he had to scratch himself with broken
pieces of pottery with scabs and itching sores
and devastating things from the top of his
head to the soles of his feet without
explanation.
That's what was necessary to bring a righteous
man to an awareness of God, of a
kind that would otherwise have evaded him except
it came through suffering from the hand of
God.
Do you think it was worth it?
And his latter end was more fruitful, more
prolific.
God added years to him, more than several
lifetimes because something happens when we submit to
the hand of God for things that are
calculated to bring down what is cheap, superficial,
false, play-acting, even sincere.
Even our sincerity is not enough.
There's a remarkable necessity to lay hold of
God in the time that remains in a
way that we ourselves would have been too
slothful ever to have sought him.
And our worship tonight reveals it.
We would have been content to coast but
God is bringing you a verbal holocaust as
a preliminary and an invitation for a fuller
one for those who want to be increased
and multiplied and have a length of years
for which you can rejoice eternally.
Strange, am I speaking mysteries?
The Lord wants to turn our captivity, saints,
and enable us to pray for others that
their captivity might be turned who are correct.
Even the Jewish people that remain.
Our mandate to extend mercy that they might
receive mercy, to move them to jealousy, to
be to them what only the church is
calculated to be at the end of the
age, but not a church of false comforters,
not a church that is just verbally correct
whose words will bounce off of afflicted Jews
who cannot understand why they have boils and
sores and corruptions and why they've been uprooted
and pushed and pursued and in flight.
They need a people who know God and
can make him known.
And that knowledge of God is not about
God and it ain't cheap.
It comes out of affliction, it comes out
of devastation, it comes out of dealings and
trials that God is not required to explain
because he does all things well.
Because let every man be a liar and
let God be true.
Because God is God.
Because he created the heavens and the earth
and the mysteries of all things and ourselves
also.
So, what's the use?
Shall we pray?
Hallelujah.
How could a God who is by definition
just and righteous all seeing and all powerful
countenance a horror of such magnitude whether it's
Job's or Israel's or the church's except that
there's an eternity at stake for which we
are ill prepared for the world is too
much with us and our thoughts are not
his thoughts nor are our ways his ways.
We need to be devastated, saints.
And I'll tell you what, that that devastation
is the very mercy of God.
It's the very love of God.
It's the very jealousy of God that will
not let us go.
Who's not content with our sham and with
our flim flam because he's the living God.
He's the creator of the heavens and the
earth.
He's the Holy One of Israel and we
have not spoken of him as his servant
Job has spoken.
We've only spoken words without knowledge.
So, precious God, in Jesus' name I give
to you, Lord, this pathetic, strange, deviant night.
This little throwaway, hard to be reconciled with
the way in which we perceived ourselves and
applauded ourselves for our charismatic success enjoying the
worship so called.
And I ask my God that this strange
word tonight, what shall I say let it
be a hand grenade with the pin pulled
and roll it right down the central aisle
of this church and let it go off
BOOM!
And let there not be one soul in
this room who has an inkling of anything
disposed toward God who is not fragmented and
impacted by some aspect of what has been
spoken.
Who has settled on his lease.
Whose life is predictable.
Whose marriage is humdrum.
Whose worship is banal.
Who is not alive to God or to
great questions and ultimate questions.
Who is not jealous to know Him and
to serve Him.
Who is not aware of the things that
are eternal.
Lord, come, pull the pin and let it
go.
BOOM!
And so, to conclude our little foolish time
together, I would just invite anyone who has
caught even a piece of the fragment of
that grenade to sort of go down before
God.
I don't know what you should do.
Bow before Him or cry out or get
restless or seeking or prostrate and ask God
for light more light.
My true books are out on the foyer
there.
Much more intelligent and understandable than anything I've
spoken tonight.
And quite anointed and blessed.
Thanks for your patience.
In Jesus' name.