Precious God, man of sorrows, Lord be the
Lord of my mood as well as my
speaking.
And bring forth, Lord, something precious, something abiding,
something foundational for these whom you've gathered before
yourself tonight, Lord.
Make this a once and for all occasion.
Make it compact.
Make it full.
Let it touch, Lord, all of the categories
of our faith.
May we be willing to submit to reconsideration
things that we've held, my God, unwisely or
not well or romantically or sentimentally that needs
to be adjusted, Lord, to things as you
see them.
But take possession, Lord, of this vessel.
Let me not err against you.
And bless this people tonight in a signal
way, an appointed way, my God.
We thank and give you praise.
In Jesus name, amen.
Well, I'm covering myself right from the beginning
because I am in a strange mood.
I trust it's the Lord.
I had to ask my personal physician who
gave me antibiotics today for a bunged up
foot, whether that had affected my mood or
robbed me of some rest I wanted to
have before coming.
But he says no.
So it's either the enemy or I do
have a very sober subject.
It's Israel's imminent catastrophe, the apocalyptic end of
the present state of Israel.
How would you speak that?
How would you speak it to people who
have a sympathetic disposition and want by every
means to see present Israel success succeed?
And along comes a Jewish speaker and says,
no, you're barking up the wrong tree.
This nation is not scheduled to succeed, but
to die.
So I don't know how to speak these
things.
It's not that I've not spoken them before
and even written of them, but it's not
a pleasant subject, but it ends in glory.
So I must feel like praying and Lord
guide me directly.
You know, I looked over some of the
ponderous scriptures that seem to clearly testify that
I'm not walking out on some limb and
need to scratch for a scripture or two
to support an unusual thesis.
The remarkable thing is that there's a surfeit.
There's an overwhelming abundance of scripture that speak
of this cataclysmic and imminent disaster.
And the remarkable thing is that nobody seems
to have seen it.
Even the believers living in Israel seem not
to have seen it, or they have prematurely
taken scriptures that speak of the millennial blessedness
and invoke them prematurely.
Either way, either I'm strangely out of it
and have missed it and deserve to be
put on the shelf or worse, or I'm
a lone voice speaking a necessary word to
save even God's people from outside of Israel,
from a fatal, perhaps fatal disillusionment and even
a forfeiture of faith.
If the hope for expectancy does not materialize
and it would seem as if every expectation
has been contradicted and God is not the
God we thought and his word is not
reliable.
Do you know what I mean?
Paul speaks of a great falling away in
the last days, and I'm already assured that
not the least reason for it will be
a naive and mistaken expectation of Israel's immediate
future.
Because if I have a proper understanding of
what is the immediate future of Israel, there
will be another such catastrophe, another Holocaust.
It will not be confined to Europe.
It will be global.
You'll not be exempt.
The consequences will resonate through every nation, including
South Africa.
After all, you have 80,000 Jews here.
And God says, it's the time of Jacob's
trouble.
Jesus said, unless that time were cut short,
no flesh would survive.
But for the elect's sake, that small surviving
remnant, that time will be cut short.
And I believe that he's speaking about an
event that is yet future.
Part of my controversy with other men of
a prophetic kind who totally disagree with me
say that the time of Jacob's trouble is
past.
It was the Nazi Holocaust.
Oh, is that right?
Well, how then does it have its inception
in Jerusalem?
How then does Jesus warn that they should,
that those that are there should flee to
the mountains of Judea and pray that it
not come on the Sabbath.
All of these admonitions only make sense in
the context of a people upon whom a
fury of devastation falls within the land and
not in Germany, not in Europe.
I mean, it's so elementary.
How is it that these, these men could
miss a logic of that kind?
But you know what I'm sensing?
Leadership, maybe especially messianic.
Well, let me put it in another way.
If you have an agenda, you have a
view that is dear to you and you
want by all means to see fulfilled and
succeed.
Like for example, the establishment of the present
state, you will read scripture in such a
way as to strengthen, fortify, validate that view.
But you know that such a practice is
ipso facto non-prophetic.
It flies in the face of what is
prophetic for prophetic.
If it means anything is allowing the scriptures
to speak to us.
We don't come with an agenda.
We don't come with an already determined perspective.
We simply come, we submit, we bow before
the word of God and we don't impose
our will or intention upon it.
So I'm learning some remarkable things just being
at the center of a bit of controversy
that was especially raised by the conference we
conducted in Israel.
I was saved in Jerusalem 35 years ago
and we had been going back virtually every
year to minister to the body of Christ.
They used to say that when art comes,
the word of the Lord comes with them.
They don't say it anymore because this word
that I now bring is frightening, apocalyptic, full
of impending terror, judgment, devastation, ruin, desolation.
And of course, if you're living in the
land, that's the last thing you want to
hear.
And as so many of my brothers said,
but art, how can it be true?
What about our ministries?
It's not so much that the land is
going to be devastated, but then how can
our ministries continue?
Can you understand why men like me border
on insanity?
And so we had to conduct the conference
in our own hotel.
And the title of the conference was the
coming calamity of Israel.
Not one single soul came whom I had
known over the past quarter of a century,
but one woman who came to heckle, what
do you call it?
Interfere, to sound off and mock me and
so on.
And then when we got home, there was
a letter waiting for us signed by 13
of the most eminent leaders in the body
of Christ in Jerusalem or Israel.
Many messianic ministries, men whom I've known for
years, condemning me as a false prophet and
harassing the church and giving aid to the
enemy.
And so we took exceeding great pain to
answer them in a sound exegetical way, which
is not my prophetic suit.
The prophetic proclamation is a gush, but what
these men needed was a reason answer to
their judgment.
And we took four to six weeks to
draft it.
And if you're on internet, you can read
it.
It's on our website and our websites.
The address is printed on our newsletter.
Our newsletter is on the table.
If, if we run out, it's www.benisrael
.org organization and up will come the burning
bush.
Why the burning bush?
It's for as many as we'll turn aside
to see.
Isn't that remarkable that the critical issue of
God's employment of Moses as the deliverer of
Israel was waiting to see if he would
turn aside to see this strange site of
a bush that burned, but was not consumed
fire.
Fire is always the emblem and the symbol
of judgment.
And there are not many who want to
look into it.
We would rather circumvent it and pass it
by.
It's not pleasant.
It jostles us.
It affects our categories, but Moses not only
turned to see, but to understand why that's
apostolic, that's pleasing in God's sight.
And with the God that we had a
church that would turn aside to see the
Lord, uh, quicken those verses for me.
Some years ago, I was on a plane.
I'm always on planes and sure enough, I'm
always sitting next to a Jewish passenger.
And sure enough, they don't have to wear
a Star of David for me to know
that all my vibes go loose and the
plane was crowded.
And, uh, I turned to this precious young
lady in the middle, in the three seats.
So I was on the aisle seat.
I had my Bible on my lap.
I was reading Exodus chapter three, Moses in
the burning bush.
Usually I read sport illustrated or other magazines
that I'm too stingy to buy.
And the plane, the plane is not a
place for serious Bible reading.
But there at that time, I was reading
that text.
And this woman, of course, was looking at
me.
Here's a modern man with a Bible on
his lap.
And I turned to her and I said,
when do you think you'll see again, another
Jew on a plane reading his Bible instead
of saying, Oh, she turned the other way.
And so I didn't say anything.
And we were coming in for landing.
I said one more time, when do you
think, again, you'll have another occasion to meet
a Jewish man who has met God and
has been transformed by him in the name
and the discovery of the Messiah, the Holy
one of Israel, something like that.
She turned the other way and the plane
landed.
We plotted never to see each other again.
She missed a once in for all occasion.
If she had, but ask one question, what
you believe in that insane, grayish Gentile Greek
myth or any way that she would have
in any way turned to inquire, to ask,
it would have been setting in motion, the
kinds of things that would have devastated every
security, every expectation for the future.
And she knew it.
She had a nice, sound Jewish instinct not
to expose herself by turning because as the
rabbis say in one of the rare commentaries
that I so appreciate the reason that God
said, called Moses twice when he saw him
turn and to look was that anyone who
turns aside to see need not have any
assurance.
He can never turn back.
Once you turn aside, you're putting in jeopardy,
all that you understand, all that constitutes the
security of your religious and spiritual life, all
of your neat categories that you've taken so
long to frame.
Once you turn to look at a strange
apparition, fire judgment, there's no assurance you'll ever
come back to where you were before.
And in fact, it's my hope that that
will be true for you tonight.
Not that where you are is in any
way to be what's the word, uh, unappreciated,
but there's a deeper apprehension of truth and
reality that waits for the knowledge of God
that is given exclusively in judgment.
You know what I've noticed in 35 years
as a believer, that there's a strange aversion
on the part of God's people to consider
God as judge.
There's something about judgment that somehow does not
appeal to us because after all, how do
you reconcile a God who judges a God
of wrath?
Wasn't that the old Testament God?
Praise God that he's retired.
And the new Testament God who has replaced
him is full of mercy and love.
And I am, I am the Lord.
I change not.
And we say the same yesterday, today, and
forever.
The God of wrath is the God of
mercy.
Wrath is his mercy.
If you could, but understand and to shun
his, his wrath is to shun God, to,
to read out any attribute of God, which
is indivisible.
You can't separate his attributes is to lose
God.
And judgment is at the heart of God.
When, when the world will, when, when God
will bring judgments in the earth, the world
will learn righteousness.
What's the scripture that gave you today in
chapter nine of the book of Psalms, something
on judgment, major on judgment saints.
It will not be depressing.
Psalm nine, verse 16.
The Lord is known by the judgment, which
he executed.
Did you hear that?
The Lord is known by the judgments, which
he executes.
So the Nazi Holocaust, what was it?
A peculiarity of history, a little aberration, a,
an unfortunate dint of circumstance because of the
madman called Hitler.
Or is God sovereign?
And if that was his judgment, is it
to be known by it in a way
that he would not otherwise be known and
known in full.
God has appointed Israel to be a witness
to the nations.
And it's remarkable and ironic that Israel succeeds
more profoundly in being that witness in her
apostasy and in her failure and in her
separation from God than ever in her success.
But she's a witness still.
That's why Paul says in Romans 11, behold
the severity and goodness of God.
When have you beheld it less?
Come on, get honest.
We don't want to behold the severity of
God.
We have a natural propensity to behold his
goodness.
But I'll tell you, dear Saints, if you
take the one at the expense of the
other, you have an inadequate God.
I don't care that you put the label
on and call him Jesus.
We do not know him as we ought.
If we are in flight from his judgment
and from his wrath, which is the heart
of his righteousness.
And in fact, the one Holocaust that revealed
God as no other that preceded the Nazi
Holocaust was the one that came upon Jesus
himself.
The crucifixion of Jesus was a Holocaust.
It was a devastation.
He was marred more than any man.
He had no beauty that we should desire
him.
He was a wreck.
All the powers of hell, the fury of
everything inimical opposed to God came upon him
in such severity that left him a shambles.
Have you ever seen that Holy Ghost masterpiece,
the crucified Christ that hangs in Colmar, France?
Somebody help me.
Who's the artist?
The Sisters of Mary celebrate that painting.
Who's the Sisters of Mary?
That's Aaliyah Schlenk.
Anybody?
Does that ring a bell anywhere?
That movement in Darmstadt, Germany celebrates that painting.
I went out of my way as an
atheist 36 years ago, hitchhiking through Europe, looking
for philosophical answers to a distraught ex-Marxist
left-wing radical life to see that painting
because someone had picked me up off the
side of the road who was an art
teacher and said, Art, you mustn't miss seeing
this one painting.
Oh, I'd seen, I was in the Prado.
Is that the museum in Madrid?
One of the great art museums of the
world.
And I couldn't get over it.
Every floor was loaded with paintings on Jesus,
whether the Lord was just conditioning my Jewish
atheistic heart to see that this was the
preeminent theme of past times up until modernity.
And then we got sloppy.
Then men flung paint at canvas and every
kind of abstract nonsense.
But in those previous generations, when art was
a significant activity, Jesus was a preeminent theme.
Crucified on the cross, being taken down into
one form or another.
Jesus with his disciples.
I was just overwhelmed, but I'd seen too
many depictions of Jesus as a Jew on
velvet with sequins and pillows or Jesus on
a cross looking more like a ballet dancer
than a suffering servant.
I had to stand before this painting at
Coma and I was transfixed.
I was stupefied.
I gasped.
It is a holy ghost masterpiece of a
man who's a piece of wreckage, so devastated
that you wonder if you're looking at a
man or some kind of gnarled animal whose
jaw is a gape in death and the
lips are white and the flesh has pieces
of wood and other kinds of things that
were imparted with the flagellation gangrenous, the color
of the skin and hung over in total
death and devastation and defeat.
It's a, it's a hypnotizing picture.
You can't stand before them and not come
undone.
And he was an atheist looking at this.
That was a holocaust.
But when you walk around the back of
the same painting is the resurrection side.
And every place where the first side showed
the perforations and the wounds, the resurrection side
shows the beams of glory coming through the
same perforations and wounds.
I commend it to you.
Make a trip to Coma, France.
And if not inquire where you can get
copies of that print and hang it in
a conspicuous place, it will temper your whole
Christian life.
Because think of this saints, what would happen?
What would be the character of our faith?
What would be our witness in a troubled
world and in a crisis ridden South Africa?
If the crucifixion of Jesus becomes shabby, sentimentalized,
glossed over, familiar, what if it loses its
sharp edge and it's breaking in?
What if it doesn't stupefy us in the
way that it ought to confront us?
What does this mean?
I want to tell you what it means
or enough to tease you to look, to
seek out what it means.
It means the most profound statement of God
ever presented to men in point of time.
The crucified Christ is the statement of God
in judgment.
Jesus suffered the sin of mankind.
He was judged.
He bore that judgment in all of its
terrible cruelty and devastation.
So it was a statement of God's righteousness
that God alone can pay.
But it was a statement of God's mercy.
It was a statement of God's trinitarian composite
Godhead, because the son who is bearing this
cries out by the spirit and yields up
his spirit to the father, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?
In one historic moment is the most profound
statement of God as God, as has ever
been put before men.
Have you taken the content out of that?
Have you sucked the marrow out of that
bone?
I would say probably the single reason for
the prevalent shallowness of God's people, particularly in
the charismatic realm is the absence of this
consideration.
We don't want to look into that burning
bush.
And the Holocaust of the Jew is related
to the Holocaust of Jesus.
I can almost say, in fact, my book
does say that the lack of the consideration
of the first by my people made their
own crucifixion ultimate and unavoidable because we pride
ourselves in our monotheistic view of God.
And we think we're doing God's service by
defending monotheism and that the Christians somehow have
three gods.
Well, the monotheistic view of God is not
God.
It's a construct of a humankind that has
all kinds of implications.
There are reasons why men prefer this kind
of simplification of God, but God in his
triunity, God in his fullness has other implications
for our own present walk and relationship.
So our theology and our doctrine is altogether
related to our comfort zone.
And that's more than I can say tonight,
but so we Jews have paid for a,
what do they call the, the dismissal of
the Holocaust?
Because this is now a Jewish complaint in
the world.
There's a word for that where people deny
that the Holocaust ever took place, or they
say that was greatly exaggerated or that revisionism.
Oh, praise the Lord.
Doug, that God sent you.
Here's a brother joining us on the trip
home.
I had never seen till we met at
the airport.
First time I've ever done that.
Revisionism is the dismissal of the Holocaust in
its historicity and Jews, the Jewish community and
its agencies just foam at the mouth in
anger at the dismissal of one of the
most brute facts of modern times and rightly
so.
But to what degree are we reaping what
we have sown?
We have been revisionistic in dismissing the crucifixion
of Jesus as the mere unhappy and melancholy
end of a political misfit who got the
authorities all riled up because people might have
followed him as King.
That's all that it means.
It means much more.
It means ultimately more.
And Jesus wept because he knew that there
would be a tragic consequence for people that
dismissed the most profound revelation of God as
God that has got to have consequence in
time and it has and it will yet
again.
I'll praise the Lord for a comprehending brother.
If I had time and the Lord so
led and you had the interest and I
just commend this to you because I don't
think I'm going to take that time.
Try reading Isaiah 53, not only as the
suffering of Jesus, but the suffering of a
nation that is yet to follow him in
a road to Calvary.
Because I believe and we are preparing practically
for a mass movement of Jews throughout the
world being uprooted in every country and forced
march in flight from persecution to all nations.
That sifting is yet future.
And I would say the majority of Jews
alive in the world today will not survive
it.
In fact, it says in that same text,
those that transgress the rebels that transgress against
me, I will bring them out of the
nations where in they have sojourned, but I
will not bring them into the land.
The same thing is repeated in Ezekiel 20,
that this final uprooting in time of Jacob's
trouble in the sifting of Jews through the
nations and nations where they are not necessarily
presently resident, but are brought by the providence
of God in remote wilderness places is the
last opportunity to, to bring through ultimate trial
a people for his name.
You know, the chorus that we sing, and
so the redeemed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with singing and everlasting
joy shall be upon their heads.
They shall, they shall obtain gladness and joy
and mourning and sighing shall flee away.
You want to know how pathetic is the
condition of the church, how usurping we are
in our mindlessness and taking to ourselves that
which does not belong to us, but is
descriptive and intended for Israel is the way
that we sing that chorus, thinking that we're
singing about ourselves.
When have we had mourning and sighing and
when shall we have what they will have?
What will it mean for the Jewish people
to see their present state extinguished and their
hope of a national homeland?
You know, even if we American Jews don't
have a disposition to go there and it's
not a place that I would want to
live, having lived there and having been kicked
out of there as a believer, it's a
tough place and it's going to become horrendous
in the violence that will issue there.
And I'm of course at odds with those
who want to send Jews to Israel.
I said, well, go ahead, but you're sending
them from the frying pan to the fire.
Israel will be the vortex of unbelievable violence.
They are safer in the nations than they
will be in the land.
But whether we go to Israel or not,
there's a certain sense of security that Jews
would have anywhere in the world, that there
is a place that they could have gone
should they desire to be safe within a
Jewish nation.
And if that nation is removed, it will
bring a sorrowing and a sighing that cannot
be explained by any other event.
So I have to groan and gasp my
way through a subject like this.
There are so many scriptures.
I was looking today at Ezekiel 36.
Make a note of these references that upon
their return, when I will return them to
the places where they have been scattered, which
is not a statement of present Israel's constituency
today.
They will rebuild the cities that have been
laid waste and made desolate and left in
ruins.
That's not a reference to the cities of
antiquity.
That's a reference to present day Haifa, Jerusalem,
Tiberias, and all of the other cities of
Israel.
There'll be a, there's a cry in Isaiah.
The land has become our destruction.
That's future.
But imminent.
And so we can see all of the
forces that are at play, bringing this fulfillment
in Israel's untenable condition, both with ringed about
by nations intent upon her destruction.
And now within her own borders, a Palestinian
presence on to the teeth with the very
same intention.
And no amount of negotiation will save her.
The very negotiation shows a mentality that is
so human, so rationalistic that assumes that if
you present to your enemies a scheme by
which they will share in the prosperity that
will come to the region, if they will
lay down their and their desire for vengeance
and their arms, that they will subscribe to
that.
And if you meet them and accommodate them,
then we'll all share in the prosperity of
the Middle East and luxuriate in the Israel
that becomes the Hong Kong of the Middle
East.
And that man's self-interest that he will
enjoy a prosperity and abetment will, will be
the factor that even takes recalcitrant Arabs.
And those of that Islamic demoniacal hatred, and
then allow them to be pacified and to
accommodate and make peace with Israel.
That's what I'm saying.
It's based on a premise that man will
act in his own best interest.
That's a piece of humanistic presumption that is
going to come apart in the face of
Israel because their enemies are not concerned with
self-interest.
They're concerned with vengeance and devastation and retribution.
So Israel is going to suffer for faulty
premises because they have an incorrect view of
man predicated on their own assumptions about themselves
because we Jews act in self-interest.
So surely all enlightened men must, had they
not been, what's the word about putting away
the Holocaust?
Had they not been revisionist and looked at
the crucifixion of Jesus, they would have had
a statement about man's nature and condition that
would have saved them from this presumption now
that will mean their death.
Am I getting too complicated?
Can you follow some of the things that
I'm trying to suggest?
You know, what's wrong with us among other
things and why it is we have shallow,
saccharine, sentimental expectations that are not biblically grounded?
It's because we want a happy ending.
We want to see that work out nicely.
And don't they deserve it after all, having
been knocked about and suffered through the ages.
Don't you think that even though they're having
present problems, that they can work it out?
Can't they progressively come to a place of
improvement and finally be a blessing to all
the families of the earth?
This is a deep theological question, whether there
is such a thing as progressive improvement, that
a nation can be ameliorated and improved and
come to that condition that will fulfill God's
statement about Abraham and his descendants to bless
all the families of the earth.
The reason that we have erred in a
shallow expectation for present Israel is that we
have had no understanding of Israel's ultimate destiny
and glory and calling.
It's because Israel has the call to bless
all the families of the earth.
It's because God has chosen her as the
locus of his theocratic rule over all nations.
It's because Jerusalem is God's intention for his
sanctuary and dwelling.
It's because the holy hill of Zion will
be the seat of his divine government, that
the law shall go forth out of Zion
and the word of God out of Jerusalem,
that Israel must be so dealt with.
And we have erred in hopeful expectation because
we project upon that nation something of the
same kind of shallow considerations we have for
ourselves.
We have not understood the issue of God's
glory as being greater than the issue of
mere national survival or success.
The fact that we have a success mentality
rather than a glory mentality is enough to
assure that we're going to miss the significance
of Israel in the last days.
And if we miss it and we're not
psychologically, spiritually and practically prepared for the uprooting
of this people and the tremendous sifting of
this time of Jacob's trouble, there'll not be
any survivors at all.
The church has the mandate to extend mercy
that they may obtain mercy.
And if we don't anticipate that their devastation
and be prepared for it realistically there's not
a soul in the world that will extend
themselves to take them in in the time
of their final devastation.
The first judgment of Jesus as King after
the smoke clears from these final apocalyptic events
and the remnant of Israel is restored is
a judgment on the Gentiles in the world
over one question, what did you do with
the least of these my brethren?
And those who say, Lord, Lord, when did
we see you hungry, thirsty, naked and in
prison?
His answer is, as you did not see
them and do for them as you did
not do it for me.
And your failure to be to them what
you ought brings a judgment of a radical
ultimate kind that those who did not extend
themselves are cast into the lake of fire
reserved for the devil and for his angels
though they said, Lord, Lord, it may well
be that the issue of the Jew and
Israel in the last days is the very
sifting that will not only sift Israel, but
will sift the nations will sift the churches
and identify who in fact God's people really
are.
God's people who have his heart and his
identification for that people, even in their apostasy,
even in their sin, even in their judgment
will be revealed by their ability to extend
mercy, that they might obtain mercy at a
time when extending it will be like the
world war two time for Corrie ten Boom
and other of the Dutch people who risked
their lives to extend help to the Jews
in their midst.
That was a dress rehearsal.
That was a minuscule faint intimation of the
magnitude of what will face us in a
soon coming time.
I'm speaking not only from a prophetic understanding
of prophecy, but also from the practicalities and
the realities of my own life.
We left Minnesota to come here to South
Africa at a community where that has been
established for 25 years in one of the
most remote wilderness locations in North America.
I'm a New Yorker by birth.
I'm a city slicker.
I'm an urbane man.
And the Lord 25 years ago, by a
word of God directed to me unmistakably when
my foot came over a chain across the
entrance to a bankrupt boys camp for sale,
where I was taken by some believers just
to the curiosity of seeing the property in
a place in the country.
Minnesota, where is that?
I came, my foot came down on the
property and the Lord said, Dominion, the name
that the property now has borne for 25
years, end time teaching center, community refuge.
That's all he said, but that was enough
to give up a 17 room house in
New Jersey, nine bedrooms and five baths and
two Volvo's and a whole charismatic lifestyle to
come out to that remote place and to
begin without any knowledge of even what community
is.
And we've been there for 25 years with
the exception of three years when God required
the entire enterprise to be brought into death
and the property abandoned and not one soul
allowed to remain.
And the one elder who would not take
my view that God was wanting the whole
thing brought into death, not because of some
internal implosion of things going wrong in community.
Ironically, they were beginning to go right.
It didn't end because of some failure.
It ended as a requirement of God to
bring something into death without explanation, because if
something is explained, where was the death?
It's death because you don't know and yet
are required, but it was so implicit and
so clear to me.
But one elder said, no, I don't see
that.
I like living in the country.
In fact, he was already in my house.
I had already moved and we had one
last showdown.
And again, I pleaded with him.
God is wanting a complete abandonment of this
property.
55 souls were living there.
It was a 10, a flourishing community for
10 years.
And he wanted everything brought into death, not
only the property, but the ministry that was
recognized by the federal government.
My marriage was brought into death.
You know, when you're a man approaching 60
and you're no longer in community, no longer
in ministry, and God puts you on a
sabbatical silence, I was forbidden even to speak
publicly.
And the Lord did not say how long
this would go on, but there was a
death of not being able to minister.
There was a death of the abandonment of
the property.
There was a death of a wife, threatening
divorce and suicide and children leaving and everything
just coming apart without explanation.
This brother refused to leave.
We had one final showdown.
He still refused.
I said, okay, well, I'd see your baby.
He came to the breakfast table the next
morning before we departed.
And the moment I laid eyes on him,
I said, what happened to you?
He was as white as a sheet.
He said, well, he said, I prayed last
night before I went to bed.
I said, Lord, if I'm in error, you
know, correct me.
He's not the kind of man that he
would think he could be an error because
everything was according to principles.
And the Lord said to him, and I
remember every syllable, even with my dull capacity
for memory, the Lord said to him, if
you will not leave, I will kill you.
There was a necessity for death saints.
I'm not trying to intrigue you, give you
a little anecdotal information.
I'm trying to underline the enormous significance of
the subject that God is wanting to bring
to you in one night that required a
death of a very palpable kind that in
the three years in which we were in
death and away from that property on the
one or two occasion, I had to come
back for something, especially in the winter when
the roads were not plowed out and the
snow was up and the doors were creaking
in the wind.
And there was not a soul, a voice,
a laugh or a shout of a thing
that had been alive to 55 people.
I can't tell you how eerie that is,
that I drove my car up as far
as I could open the door and my
dog went out of the car, took 10
steps and came back with his tail between
his legs.
The death was experienced.
It was tasted.
We had to realize and experience the death.
And what did God do with me in
that period of time?
He sends me to a Lutheran seminary of
all things, a liberal Lutheran seminary.
65% of the students were women and
they were feminist witches and they were out
for my blood.
And every day when I went into these
classes, there was such friction, such anger, such
bitterness, such threats, because I did call God
he, I did use the male pronoun for
God.
And these women called that sexist language.
I can't begin to tell you, I came
home where I was living battered and bloody
daily from the the remarkable encounter with these,
these women who were not just out to
modify Christianity, but to radically transform it in
a feminist way.
That was part of the three years.
But in the course of those seminary days,
not because of any course that I took
or instructor, the Lord was beginning to open
a revelation of the mystery of Israel that
I had never seen before.
For me, Israel was a country like any
other.
I went there to minister to the body
of Christ, but I did not know, nor
did I want to consider that the nation
itself has a destiny because I was so
jealous for the glory of the church.
I didn't want this to see that glory
shared with some nation in a dubious condition,
but the Lord made quite clear that the
mystery of Israel is the issue of his
glory.
You can read that in Romans as Paul
comes to the end of his brilliant statement
in Romans chapters nine through 11.
He concludes with a, an outburst of remarkable
praise or the depth of the riches, both
of the wisdom and knowledge of God.
Who's been his counselor.
Where did this come from?
This scheme of God, of this mystery of
Israel and the church, this reciprocal relationship between
two bodies that are so antithetical, so opposed
by nature, Jews and Gentiles.
And yet the one without the other cannot
come in to the ultimate destiny of God.
There's a reciprocity and one has bettered and
affected the other.
Salvation has even come to the one through
the failure of the other.
And through that salvation now, they, through whom
salvation was forfeited should be moved to jealousy.
It's a remarkable complex scheme.
And Paul says, I would not have you
to be ignorant of this mystery lest you
become wise in your own conceit, that if
you miss this, you miss the heart of
God.
You miss an understanding of what the whole
spectral cosmic redemptive faith is about.
And you're condemned to a kind of Christianity
that is a succession of Sundays, even with
charismatic improvement.
You miss the whole glory of the faith,
the whole heroic call of the faith, the
whole significant conclusion of the age is the
relationship of the church to this body.
And that every meeting, every coming together is
in one, if it's led by the spirit
and with the seriousness that it deserves is
a preparation for this conservation.
Take a text like Ezekiel 37, the Valley
of Dry Bones, which I just preached in
Lady Smith.
Get the tape.
It is gorgeous.
What a state and what the God that
were the Lord's designed for tonight, because in
that remarkable text of Israel, acknowledging we are
cut off.
We are without hope.
We are as dry bones.
Have you ever heard or known historically for
that nation to make that acknowledgement?
Quite the contrary.
We're the kind of people that we can
come out of the concentration camps with a
tattooed number on our wrist.
And we're saying never again, we're not saying
we are without hope.
Our hope is in ourselves.
The whole national anthem of Israel is the
hope, but it's not the hope in God.
It's the hope in the state.
It's the hope of human endeavor.
It's the hope of human self-sufficiency, which
is what we are as Jews.
Can you understand that?
What's at stake here is God's statement about
the human condition, about the whole issue of
what, of meaning of life from the nations,
as it is explicated and demonstrated in allowing
Israel to take a shot at it herself.
Zionistically, through her own effort, through her own
ability, and coming really close in the most
remarkable event in modern times, in a half
century, a nation establishes itself.
God is there in a kind of, what's
the word, providential way to protect and to
give assist, but it's essentially the endeavor of
men.
And God is there in a kind of,
what's the word, and what's the result of
it?
Exacerbating differences with their neighbors, cruel violence, injustice.
Do you know that one of the great
issues of Israel today is the justification of
the use of torture?
Did you ever think that there would come
a time when Jews would condone the use
of torture?
But what are you going to do when
the extremity of your own life and the
necessity for survival requires you to extract information
from suspected terrorists, that if you could obtain
that information and save Israel from a bomb,
bus bombing, or something in the streets of
Jerusalem, it's saving 50, 60, 70 Jewish lives.
And so if you have to use a
little pressure, a little force, if you have
to torture, what are you going to do?
It's expedient.
It's an exigency.
It's not something that you can consider in
a moral and ethical way because the issue
of survival, but it's the issue of survival
without God by men in their own merit,
their own ability.
You understand?
God has boxed Israel into a predicament, which
even Jews cannot solve.
And the object of it is to show
them their human inadequacy, to show them that
without God, there has got to be these
kinds of consequences.
Only God can plant them in the land.
And when we read that in the prophets,
and I will return you and I will
plant you and I will establish you and
you will know fear no more.
And there will not be terror at night.
And there's no way to understand those promises
as already being fulfilled because Israel is in
terror.
Israel is in fear.
So there's a future time of another return
after an expulsion through violence and judgment that
God himself will affect by his own power,
bringing them back from the most remote places
where they will be driven or will have
gone in flight.
And they will know in that day that
I am the Lord who has spoken and
performed this.
I'll tell you what, if you remain indifferent
to this subject after tonight, I would not
be optimistic for your corporate future.
Because to remain indifferent to the issue that
is being put before you tonight is to
be indifferent to that which God has calculated
for his own glory.
Because Israel's return has nothing to do with
Israel's merit or has to do with this
in himself.
And an opportunity to demonstrate that once and
for all before the age ends with a
people so patently undeserving that their return from
expulsion and being settled again in the land
and being planted and being blessed in a
millennial blessedness is the statement of God as
God who will have mercy upon whom he
will have mercy.
The question is, will you have it?
Now, I don't know about you people of
Dutch descent.
What you're feeling is about Jews.
First countries till now have been Anglican.
New Zealand, Australia, England itself.
I have suffered so patent disrespect where I
spoke on Romans 11 at a fellowship in
England.
And the elders never concluded the meeting.
They never said thank you, but no thank
you.
They left the room and never closed the
meeting with prayer and just left us with
our faces sticking up because they were so
turned off on a message on the subject
of Israel's restoration, which the Lord gave me
to speak because it contradicts their whole view
of the faith.
When they speak of restoration, they're speaking about
the restoration of the church in an apostolic
New Testament way, the revival of the fivefold
ministry, divine government, all the kinds of things
in which I once used to luxuriate, but
they never think of restoration in terms of
a nation and being English.
I don't know what that is.
I think that there's a depth of anti
-Semitism.
That's not the blatant crude kind, but the
kind that does not want to consider that
God has a destiny for people that we
would not have chosen.
It's a stumbling stone in Zion for Gentiles,
for Anglo-Saxons, and maybe German, people of
German and Dutch extraction.
I don't know, but search your hearts.
I'll tell you this, dear saints, don't measure
your love of God and the depth of
your relationship with him in the euphoria of
your choruses.
Measure it in the cold gray dawn and
the consideration of a people who by every
reckoning have nothing going for them that should
evoke our admiration, our respect, or our sympathy,
rather our resentment or our irritation.
The issue of the Jew for the church
is the issue of God.
It's not an issue of sentiment or of
dislike.
It's the issue of our union with his
heart for a people whom he loves unconditionally,
even in their worst condition.
What is our response?
That's why I say, will the true church
please stand up?
I don't know if I myself have that
capacity.
The fact that I'm a Jew by birth
doesn't automatically confer a natural disposition for my
own people.
I've met Jewish anti-Semites who despise their
own people.
The love of the Jew, particularly when they
shall be in their last day's extremity and
the willingness to extend mercy to them at
risk to yourself is the ultimate statement of
one's own relationship with God.
You better know it now and start searching
your heart now and preparing your heart now.
Now, I didn't tell you that the Lord
brought us back.
It proved to be three years.
I came back by myself first to a
lonely and deserted property.
I painted the house yellow, a garish yellow,
because everything was so dismal and steeped in
death.
It was so melancholy and pathetic.
And when the Lord released me from my
sabbatical silence, he said, you don't know me,
but you've been praying and we believe that
God wants you to speak to us a
seminar on Israel and the church in the
last days, that exact thing.
And so I went trembling, not having spoken
in 14 months.
And when it was over, the pastor said,
this was historic on the very first message.
I know what it means to be prophetic
and not be, has outlines and graphs and
charts and just gush out the revelation, the
things that God has been seeping in your
spirit, not knowing how it's going to come
out.
You don't know what the next day's message
is.
But I began with that first message.
What kind of a church is it that
can move Israel to jealousy?
Has it ever been demonstrated yet in the
earth?
We've moved them to anger, to irritation, to
vexation.
My mother can't even take the name of
Jesus into her mouth simply.
Jews will cross the street rather than have
the cross of the spine of a church
fall upon them as a shadow.
So have they come to detest the one
name alone that can save them through a
church that has been brutal, has compelled their
conversions.
I mean, they're steeped in blood.
You know, the history of Jews in Germany
and locked in synagogues and set afire by
the crusaders, forced conversions, mass suicide called Kiddush
Hashem, sanctifying the name of God by killing
your wife and your children, slitting you and
you're slitting your own throat that when the
pagan horde was, they found every Jew dead
and that was sanctifying the name of God.
That's in our history.
So how are you going to move that
people to jealousy?
What should you perform?
What kind of service?
What kind of song service?
What is God after?
Paul doesn't give us any footnote, but yet
there's an ultimate requirement made of us that
if we will aspire toward it and seek
the Lord for it, it will not only
affect Jews, it will transform us and affect
our communities and the world.
Having not taken that mandate seriously has made
us to come up short, not only for
the Jew, but for the Greek.
They serve a purpose for us that we
have not recognized, but need to understand in
these last days.
And after our return from that three year
death, you know how I left for that
message to go to California.
I had a suitcase in one hand and
my attaché in my other hand with my
papers and thoughts.
And I came out of my yellow painted
house and I stood by the barn.
It was five or 6 p.m. And
the sun was going down on this yellow
house.
It was the most pathetic, melancholy, heart-wrenching
picture you could imagine.
You didn't hear another voice.
It was silent.
And I just looked at that and I
started to bawl.
I broke and I wept.
And the Lord said, they that go forth
bearing precious seed weeping shall doubtless return, bringing
their sheaves with them.
I hope that you'll be included in those
sheaves.
There was a suffering and a death merely
for the revelation of the mystery of Israel.
What then will it cost to fulfill the
mystery on the part of the church?
If this is the price we have to
pay for the revelation of it, and are
we willing for that price?
And is there a glory without a suffering?
And when we came back, the Lord began
to take that last word off the shelf
that I didn't understand, refuge, and made it
clear that we were in remote northern Minnesota,
its strategic location for Jews in flight out
of Canada, even from Siberia through the Bering
Straits and who knows what and what peoples
will pass through.
And now we are linked with numbers of
other communities.
You've got to be a community to provide
refuge.
Isolated individuals, however virtuoso, cannot pull it off.
It needs the corporate strength of a tested
body who will not be easily offended because
they've paid their own dues in their own
relationships together and have graduated from being hypersensitive
and easily bruised.
There's a spiritual preparation as well as a
physical.
So I want to tell you, saints, my
convictions are not only out of my understanding
of scripture that is replete in Isaiah, Jeremiah,
read chapters 30, 31, the time of Jacob's
trouble, Ezekiel chapter 20, I will meet with
you in the wilderness of the nations, Hosea
chapter 2, I will plead with you in
the wilderness, Amos chapter 9, I will sift
you through all nations.
There's a pattern.
Once you get into this, you'll wonder where
it was all your life.
It's inescapable.
But that my understanding is confirmed by the
realities of our life.
25 years in northern Minnesota in the coldest
spot in the North American continent, colder, our
temperatures are colder than Alaska traditionally.
It's not a place a man would elect
to go.
But why there?
Because it's out of the way.
Because it's away from urban centers where any
Jew will be instantly identified and will be
his death.
God is going to take these Steven Spielbergs
and Jerry Levin, the head of Time Warner
Corporation and all the big shots and they're
going to find themselves stripped and out in
places of desolation that they would never have
chosen and all of the amenities of life
removed where you're compelled to face the ultimate
issues of human existence itself.
That's how I got saved.
35 years ago, I was brought up and
out from my whole context, California teaching profession
and thrust out into the nations with only
what I could carry on my back, living
off the side of the road as a
hitchhiker, being picked up off the side of
the road by believers, being taken in, being
comforted, being spoken to, being addressed, being turned
to the painting at Colmar, France, being given
a revelation in the first reading of a
New Testament that I got from a fellow
passenger, being spoken to by God in Jerusalem
and being called by name.
My own testimony of being sifted through the
nations to come to an ultimate salvation in
Jerusalem itself is a paradigm and a picture
of what I think is in store for
my people in a larger way.
Am I going to pick them up off
the side of the road?
Have you got a place to hide them?
When we came back and my wife said,
she'll never come back to that property again.
Finally, she came back and she'll never live
in that house again, but she'll live in
it if I'd extend the living room.
So I extended the living room and therefore
I have for the first time in 25
years, a study of my own.
I don't have to do my ponderous writing
on my lap.
And the young man who did the work,
a young Christian carpenter, that was his first
business for his new business.
He left a gaping hole in the wall
going under the attic.
And I said, aren't you going to close
that up?
He said, no.
And he said, it's your Corrie ten Boom
hole.
And when he said that, the Holy Ghost
came down over me as it's doing right
now.
And that hole remains to this day.
There's a desk right up against it.
Unless you knew it, you wouldn't know that
that desk can just be moved away and
six, seven, eight or more adults can go
right under the, the roof line and be
hidden.
Dear Saints, believe me, I despise sensationalism.
I can't, God has had to rub my
face in the grit of this, but I
would be doing you disservice if I gave
you a nice sermon tonight and don't think
I'm not capable to bless you out of
your socks with such brilliant biblical exposition, but
not when I have one occasion only to
send a word into your midst of the
things that shall shortly come to pass, for
which you need the most profound preparation, both
spiritually and physically and practically, because you are
out of the way, because you are not
in a great urban center, because you are
off to the side and somewhere the 80
,000 Jews in South Africa are going to
have to routes of flight and escape and
safety.
This is not a message tonight.
This is nuts and bolts alert of the
future.
And where do you think we're going from
here?
Zimbabwe and Zambia, which I think will be
the continuing flight out for the surviving remnant.
We'll find out when we get there.
But you know what I know by now?
Every place that I am is a place
intended by God for refuge and flight.
Why not be there?
So I commend this book to you.
I thought even to read a portion and
the scriptures that I've cited, the Lord will
give you others.
And I want to pray for the body
of Christ at this locality, for their preparation,
for their understanding that tonight was a life
and death situation.
That's why I was in that strange mood.
It was not my antibiotics crunched.
I don't know what I was groaning through
something because something had to come forth tonight.
That's not a message.
And I looked at the scriptures, they're overwhelming,
but where do you begin?
It's not the occasion to give a dissertation
and a list of scriptures.
Somehow the urgency and the burden needed to
come forth through a groaning because life and
death is at stake.
And not only the issue of Jewish survival,
but the issue of Jewish restoration is the
issue of the Lord's coming.
How do you see that, Art?
Because Acts 3.21 says that the Lord
is contained in the heavens under self-imposed
confinement, waiting for the restoration, the fulfillment of
the restoration spoken by the prophets since the
world began.
And that's not of the church, that's of
Israel.
He comes when they shall say, blessed is
he who comes in the name of the
Lord, when they shall say it.
He comes when they shall be redeemed and
returned that he might be the greater David
who rules over them forever, according to Ezekiel
37, 2 Chronicles 7 and many other places.
The Lord's coming is the issue of Israel's
restoration.
And the issue of the Lord's coming is
the issue of his kingdom.
You do believe that?
You do believe the kingdom?
Or are you content with human government?
Black or white?
Corrupt?
It must by necessity be.
Come Lord Jesus is a cry for righteousness
and justice and equity in the earth when
the law shall go forth out of Zion
and the word of the Lord out to
all nations, out of that pivotal nation, which
God has elected as central to all nations,
not because they're mighty, but because they're weak,
not because they're great, but because they're few,
not because they're impressive, but because they stink.
Their track record stinks.
They have blasphemed his name in every nation,
but I will have mercy upon him.
I'll have mercy and I will bless him.
I will bless for I am that I
am and my, and the issue of Israel
will demonstrate it forever to every nation.
Got the picture?
Lord, my God, if your spirit Lord is
not with this speaking, I don't know what
to say.
What should I say?
Lord, if this is your heart tonight in
one night to stun Pierce into a Christian
community, and I'm looking at quality saints here,
Lord, I know that this is an appointment,
a one night appointment coming at distance because
they are on a route of flight and
safety and refuge because they have a mandate
and a call because they need to be
alerted to it because they need to consider
themselves privileged in it.
And even if it should cost them something
of sacrifice or suffering, or even the loss
of life, they will not complain, but count
themselves privileged because when you finally brought that
seventh message in Sacramento, California, what kind of
a church is it that will move Jews
to jealousy?
Your answer was a modern church.
And a modern church is definitive church in
every generation.
And especially the last, it's not a grim
thing from which we should shrink.
How come us as a privileged call, whether
it is required or not, we should live
as if modern is alcohol.
It's another mode of being, not just of
dying.
Lord, I bless this people, bless this people,
what I pray and open their understanding.
And if there's something in their Dutch hearts
of the kind that I have seen in
Anglican hearts, that they need to consider that
this stumbling stone of Zion is designed and
calculated a flush out that Aryan racial, ethnic,
national sense of superiority and pride as nothing
else will let them face it.
And if they have resisted your servant tonight
and have looked cynically and who's this guy
and who's he to say, and they sense
an irritation, let them recognize what the root
of that irritation is.
It's not this guy.
And let them face it.
We need community in truth and the grace
of it and the sanctifying, redemptive work of
it in order to prepare, to be prepared,
to be a people of the last days
for such task as this.
It's not an option.
Sunday services will never do it.
We need the intensity of the sanctifying work
of God that only comes in the frequency
of people who are together.
So my God, may you demolish religious categories
that have to do with safety, respectability, politeness,
comfort, and show us what alcohol was from
our salvation.
Ever.
We're a chosen people for the last days
and what has comforting convenience to do with
it?
Come my God and shake us and remove
those religious notions that the world loves because
it saves the world from the kind of
challenge that a radical apostolic church is designed
to be.
They love it if we will be satisfied
with Sunday services, only the midweek Bible study.
But when they see a people earnest, taking
the mandate of God seriously, the powers of
darkness that have prevailed uncontested over every locality
will be threatened for the first time.
Jesus they knew and Paul they knew, but
who knew?
Until they see an earnestness and a seriousness
to do your will.
So Lord, I bless this people.
Help them as they search out the scriptures,
as they look into the prophets, as they
look into the Psalms.
Let them understand what it means to pray
for the peace of Jerusalem is more than
just a little unctuous quip at the end
of a prayer time.
To pray for the peace of Jerusalem is
to say whatever it takes in me for
that peace and for Israel to pass through
judgment before peace, I'm willing.
So we bless them Lord.
Bless them and let them take this fragmentary
and convoluted speaking and sort it out and
sift it out and discuss it among themselves
and get your heart.
I bless them Lord with this word.
Let not a syllable of it return through
void.
Thank you for historic occasion, an appointed night
that you have given so much is at
stake.
May we rejoice in the privilege of it,
the high calling of God in Christ Jesus
and the precious grace of God sufficient for
that call that you might be glorified for
as Paul said, for of him and through
him and to him are all things to
whom be glory forever.
If this is of you Lord, it has
got to be through you.
We can't do it religiously.
We can't do it professionally.
Our distinguished human abilities will not do it.
It's got to be through you and the
resurrection power of God by those who live
and move and have their being in it
that you might be glorified forever.
Bless this people and let them rise my
God to that call and to that reality
is my prayer in Jesus name and God's
people said amen.