When God sifts the nations, what will be
the criteria?
Good afternoon, and welcome to Focal Point.
I'm Peggy Gasterson, your hostess.
And with me in the studio is Art
Katz.
Art, welcome to Focal Point.
Thank you so much, Peggy.
I've waited a long time to have you
on.
It's been a couple of years.
I know you were a world traveler, and
so it hasn't been possible always to get
you on.
But finally, God had you come into this
studio even today, so praise his name.
Amen.
I'm going to ask you to just introduce
yourself, Art, and tell us what's on your
heart today.
Okay.
I'm a Jewish believer for 37 years now,
saved in Jerusalem at the end of a
14-month spiritual odyssey with a pack on
my back as a disillusioned ex-Marxist atheist
looking for philosophical answers as my ideological and
philosophical world came apart, not looking for God,
but there was a God looking for me
because some Gentile woman, the mother of one
of my students, was praying for this radical
atheist, and the Lord pursued me in response
to her prayer as the hound of heaven.
So I've had a 37-year history in
the Lord that has taken me to many
parts of the world and revelation and understanding
and experience that has found its way into
several books.
And the last 27 years, the Lord has
led us to participate in a community in
northern Minnesota.
So we're about 30 believers living on a
160-acre farm with daily access to one
another, going from house to house daily, as
it were, breaking bread, seeking to establish a
biblical lifestyle, having moved from evangelical to charismatic
to Pentecostal to full gospel, every form and
variety of the faith available.
I came finally to the sense that something
is omitted from them all that needs to
be found and to be restored, and it's
a lifestyle.
It's a mode of being, a life together,
those that believed were together.
And until we come to that, we will
never have the quality and depth of witness
that the world desperately needs.
So we have been giving ourselves to that,
and the Lord has blessed and taught us
many things.
It's been a hard school, but a gratifying
one.
Well, driving here last night from Winnipeg, having
attended a conference on North American native theology
and driving on the Trans-Canadian Highway 1
and seeing the beautiful scenery and seeing Rainy
River and the porous border between our two
countries stimulated me again to be reminded that
I bear a very special burden, which is
very much in keeping with the reason for
which the Lord has established us in northern
Minnesota, and that is to prepare a place
of refuge for Jews in flight from persecution
in the last days.
And this is something of which the church
has hardly any awareness nor expectation, but there's
a time of Jacob's trouble, spoken in Jeremiah
30 and 31 and in other of the
prophets and in Amos chapter 9 of a
sifting of the lost sheep of the house
of Israel through all nations.
So we are actually anticipating Jews coming down
to us through Canada that may have their
origin from as distant places as Europe, Russia,
or Siberia, crossing the Bering Straits into the
Yukon, the British Columbia, into Canada and down
to us and from us into yet other
places.
And we live 10 miles from the Chippewa
Nation in Cass Lake, and we're not far
from Red Lake, and the Lord has impressed
my heart to believe that the North American
Indian Christian is going to play a significant
part in the shielding and providing of refuge
and direction for Jews in those last days.
It may call for a revival of Native
American understanding of nature and of wilderness because
God says in Ezekiel 20 to the Jewish
people, I will meet with you in the
wilderness of the nations.
It's in the remote, out-of-the-way
places that these sophisticated, urbane Jews who have
lived in condominiums and places of that kind
will find themselves remarkably thrust, and that quite
suddenly.
So, of course, I'm interested, therefore, in anything
that pertains to Indian spirituality and to a
deep appropriation of the faith.
And we live close enough to know the
high rate of suicide.
It's almost a genocidal thing that is taking
place among North American Indians, and the tragedy
is that the gospel has had so limited
an effect for them.
I'm very much inspired in remembering a remark
made by Craig Smith, a North American Native
brother who's the head of the Indian work
of the Christian Missionary Alliance Church, sharing with
us one day some years ago that in
his long preoccupation with the issue of the
gospel and his own people, he felt that
the high rate of falling away from the
faith and the lack of the power to
attract the Native American to what is purportedly
white man's religion has been the omission of
the things pertaining to Israel and the Jew
in the communication of the gospel.
And I agree with that completely.
The fault of the matter is that those
who brought the gospel to the Native Americans
themselves lacked such a perspective, and so the
whole church needs it.
But I believe that the depth of Native
spirituality would respond to the understanding that there's
a special destiny for themselves in relationship to
the tribes of Israel that are yet dispersed
over the face of the earth that will
give them an ultimate and final purpose for
meaning and significance, which, of course, is lacking
in modern times and explains, I think, so
much of the disillusionment and depression and lack
of sense of significant purpose for being that
is like a cancer with the North American
Native people.
So there's a purpose for God that will
bless Israel and bless them, and I hope
to find opportunity to communicate that to my
Native American brethren.
That's the key.
How are you going to do that?
How is that going to be done?
Do you have an open forum for them?
Not much opening.
The Lord has somehow kept me on the
shelf or the issue on the shelf, though
I traveled the world.
And here in my own backyard, I have
very little opportunity for expression.
It may well be that this broadcast today
is the beginning of something opening.
And, of course, I just come from the
conference in Winnipeg on North American Native theology
with Richard Twiss and other significant leaders who
seem to have known me from past times,
and I left with them copies of my
different books with Richard.
I left a book on the Holocaust, Where
Was God?, which is a biblical attempt to
explain the tragedy of Jewish calamity and suffering
historically and especially at the hands of the
Nazis in recent times as being not somehow
an accident in history of which we were
the victim, but the fulfillment of Scripture, speaking
of the judgment that would befall us in
the last days, and that that principle is
applicable not only to Jews, but to people
who have been victim of oppression, the black
people, the North Native American slavery or white
oppression, to be understood as a rod of
God's chastisement, and that the enemy is not
the white man who has inflicted these things.
The enemy is our own unrepentant sin and
our continuation in forms of religious culture that
are in opposition to the biblical faith and
in the rejection, the continuing rejection of the
faith of the one God who is the
creator of the heavens and the earth and
all that in them is.
We still stand under the threat of those
judgments, and that the first step in return
to God is a repentant acknowledgement and a
willingness to understand and to see that what
we have experienced as oppression or persecution is
not the thing in itself, but a rod
of God's chastisement for sins for which we
have failed to acknowledge and to express repentance.
Therefore, we are not victims.
So long as we have a victim mentality,
we see the white man as enemy.
But if we have a repentant mentality that
sees that God may have used them as
the chastisement, the necessary chastisement, then we are
no longer their victims, but that they have
functioned in a purpose in God to bring
us to a necessary repentance, and we are
released from the necessity to bear a resentment
that puts us at odds with them and
with their culture.
There can be no healing until that bitterness
and resentment is forgiven.
Right.
And until you stop blaming somebody.
We need to see ourselves in response to
the same question that was put to Saul
on the road to Damascus.
Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
We are the ones who have persecuted God
in our failure to respond to his Christ
and our continuing rejection of his salvation and
redemption and even sometimes even actively opposing those
who bear that message to us.
And we need to be brought down to
the earth as Saul was and perhaps to
be blinded as he was until someone will
be sent to lay hands upon us that
we might receive our sight and our understanding
and serve the God whom till now we
have been historically opposing.
We have had Richard Twist.
I have had Richard on this program, and
I love him dearly.
I understand his heart to win his people.
And his idea is that they would redeem
the Indian culture.
Some Indian people have asked me, do I
have to give up my culture to be
a Christian?
Well, you don't have to give up being
Scandinavian to be a Christian, and so explain
that for them, will you?
I think that there's an ultimate requirement of
sacrifice that indicates our level of response and
loyalty to God above every other attachment.
Abraham, when he was called, had to come
out of nation, kindred, and father's house and
follow the Lord whithersoever he would lead him
in the land of promise.
There's a radical separation that the faith calls
for as the first principle of the faith.
It was required of Abraham and required of
the patriarchs.
It's required of Jewish believers today who, in
receiving Christ, face the very real prospect of
the loss of their own families, their own
communities.
They have got to put the interest and
call of God above every consideration.
I think that the question is of the
same kind about Indian culture.
But about culture in general, whether it's Indian
or Western, I would say that we need
realistically to appreciate that all cultures are human,
and therefore they have a demonic quotient and
prospect and possibility, and that we're told to
touch not the world, love not the world,
nor the things that are in the world,
for all that is in the world is
the love of the pride of life, the
lust of the eyes, and so on.
So we need to touch everything with a
restraint, especially those things that have been historically
employed by demonic powers to turn men from
God and to the fascination or the idolatry
of nature itself or nature gods of their
own making and imagining who do not require
the moral requirement that their true God calls
for.
All right, let's use the issue of, for
instance, their music.
And we don't necessarily filter through music that
comes from Ireland or Great Britain, let's say.
It has kind of a Celtic ring to
it, and yet we don't say that it's,
well, maybe intrinsically evil.
One of the things that I have known
about the Indian people is that everything they
do is spiritual.
Is that true?
It's kind of like the Jew is that
way.
Yeah, that's a powerful component.
And so this is why maybe for me,
looking on, I would have to say that
maybe like the powwow or the music that
they would play maybe has a spiritual meaning
to it.
And if they're not in Christ, then it
would not be of the Lord.
Can you redeem that?
The only safe redemption that I could consider
is if that were given over unto death
with a full destruction in the real sense
that you don't expect it back again and
that if it comes back again, it comes
back as a gift from the Lord from
the resurrection side.
In that sense, it might be sanctified.
But merely to employ the language of sanctification
without submitting it to a very real death
leaves it with all of its worldly power
and spirit power intact.
So unless we have a heart that is
willing for something to be brought to death,
as Abraham brought his Isaac, how then can
we receive it back as safe?
And this was the ultimate requirement for Abraham's
faith.
It's the ultimate requirement for us with our
Jewish culture, with our Indian culture, and any
and all cultures.
I'm not celebrating Western culture over the Indian.
H has its demonic content and possibility.
And I would say that the only culture
that is safe and that ought to be
sought is the culture from heaven, the culture
of the kingdom.
And even in our own community life when
we fought to introduce some Jewish cultural things
like the candles on a Friday night of
Shabbat, the Lord was quick to wrap our
knuckles and not to allow it, as if
to say, there's something higher that I want
to communicate and see established in your community
that has no origin in that which is
earthly, however, sacrosanct, however, honored over time, and
I will give it to you from heaven.
As I'm giving you your economy, which is
below the poverty level established by the United
States government, I'll give you your culture also.
But don't you seek to introduce earthly, human
elements, for it is all charged with corruption
and given to suspicion.
And we have to have a faith that
will believe that if we forsake the one,
God will give us that which is heavenly.
Set your affection on the things that were
above.
Don't strenuously defend your own vested self-interest
and be open for the things that God
is wanting to communicate.
If he then gives it back, it is
sanctified.
And if he doesn't, you treat it with
historical respect, but you don't employ it or
think that you can sanctify it and that
it will serve the purposes of God when
there are yet things resident in it that
are contrary to God.
Could we back up a bit?
You said that your place just outside of
Bemidji there, you felt that Jews were going
to come out of Canada into the wilderness,
various places of the wilderness in northern Minnesota.
In the wilderness of all nations.
I will meet with you in the wilderness
of the nations.
So I'm expecting a worldwide phenomenon that will
employ even the indigenous people of Australia and
New Zealand, the black believers of North America
who are living in the urban centers where
Jews are, may have to stand in defense
of unbelieving Jews as against the rage and
opposition of their own black kinsmen but that
there's a particular call of God for the
use of peoples that have been despised in
the world as being inferior or secondary in
which Jews themselves have had a superior perspective
that God will use the foolish and the
weak thing to convey to the unbelieving Jew
the love of God at the price of
sacrifice that why should a North American Indian
or a black person who has perhaps been
gouged in his rent by a Jewish landlord
be willing to even risk his own life
in defense of unbelieving Jews?
There's no way to explain this except that
this is the very sacrificial nature of God
being expressed to believers who are in that
kind of union with him.
But if our culture keeps us from that
union, we'll not be able to fulfill that
kind of destiny.
So there's something very much at stake here
over the issue of our relationship with the
Lord which ironically may be hindered by our
insistence on employing cultural things that makes our
religion as significant and as formidable as our
white western brothers in their forms.
Both forms are suspect and we need to
seek to heaven for the kingdom of heaven,
the culture of heaven and the relationship with
the Lord of heaven.
Paul was such a man.
And look at the remarkable penetration Paul had
into pagan civilizations as well as with Jews.
Was it because of his natural qualification that
he came from a Roman community or that
he was a citizen of Rome or that
he spoke Greek or had a rabbinical training
or was it that the key to his
penetration was that his citizenship was in heaven?
So I want to make a case that
this is not some airy metaphor that is
not attainable.
It is attainable and God has separated us
in northern Minnesota.
I'm a New Yorker by birth.
I graduated from the University of California in
Berkeley and God is separating me from my
own cultural origins to bring me into a
dimension that is above all transcendent and will
speak to all as God himself is in
it in his power so to do.
Why would they come out of these countries
now?
Maybe you said even from Russia through Canada,
the Bering Straits down to Canada and into
the United States or people in Canada, will
they be taking care of the Jews?
Canadian Jews will also be subject to the
same persecution.
We just read that there was almost a
close attempt at bombing in Montreal in the
Jewish neighborhood by Islamic radicals and Islam is
spread all over the world and particularly now
in the West.
So the life of Jews will be at
stake.
God will use this again as a rod
of chastisement uprooting them from their places of
security and culture and to thrust them out
in a wilderness stripping where they have to
face the ultimate question of the meaning of
life and God and in that place God
says, I will meet with you.
So we foresee this time of Jacob's trouble
as being near and it will affect Jews.
Jacob is everywhere and in that time God
will use true believers to bring a place
of refuge and understanding to those Jews upon
whom this will come suddenly.
What did you mean Jacob is everywhere?
Wherever Jews are, Jacob is.
In other words, we are not yet Israel.
We have called the political state Israel but
we can see from its conduct that it's
not acting as an Israel.
Jacob did not become Israel until he met
with the man and wrestled with him through
the night of his adversity and then after
that he was made lame and halt.
The blessing was a crippling of his native
power and humbling and then he built his
own altar and called it El Elohe Israel,
God the God of Israel.
My God has become for me personal and
has changed everything even the way in which
I view Esau.
I see in his face now the face
of God.
So of my Jacob people, I was a
Jacob myself until I was confronted by that
man and now this is going to be
a global confrontation wherever Jacob is and the
church needs to know it, anticipate it for
it is God's salvific agent in that very
time in revealing the Lord in his love
and in his mercy when all the world
will be despising them.
When you include Indians or the Native American
people as not knowing about Israel, I also
feel there is a terrific ignorance in the
Gentile church regarding Israel and our roots.
Where do you see this church that say
are believers today but still don't understand the
significance?
This is my primary function and that's why
I'm going to nations all over the world
with this kind of message to set forth
the centrality of Israel and the Jew in
the last days for the issue is not
just the survival of an ethnic minority.
The issue is the survival of a remnant
of a chosen people in whose Zion shall
go forth the law to all nations that
there is a theocratic rule that has to
issue out of redeemed Israel and that the
powers of darkness know this better than the
church and the answer to avoid the loss
of the false power that these powers of
darkness are employing is to annihilate Jews.
They have succeeded almost in times past and
they will once again be given opportunity in
the last days.
We're recording this on Monday of this week
and Prime Minister Sharon has been with President
Bush and of course they were attacked over
in Israel so he quickly went back to
Israel and now has declared war on terror
as President Bush has declared war on terror.
How do you see that tying in with
what we've been talking about?
Well, I think until they recognize that the
terror is the expression of a heretical religious
system called Islam they will never successfully cope
with it.
It's not terror as a phenomenon as an
isolate in itself but as the expression of
a false religious system conceived by a demonic
personality, Mohammed and whose intent is world domination.
I think we need to face that reality
but of course it puts us in the
unhappy position of having to say that there's
a true faith that there is a true
Bible that there's one true God and it's
the God of Jacob and the God of
Israel which even modern Jews are reluctant to
express that sounds so dogmatic and narrow but
we live in a pluralistic society that wants
to make a space for all religious persuasions
but I think at the end of the
age we need to know that what we
call religious persuasions are deception and that we
need to stand for the truth and there's
only one God and one truth in Jesus
and we have to have the boldness to
declare it that we will be called narrow,
dogmatic and all of the rest and finally
even be killed by those who will claim
they're doing a God a service in removing
us from what would have been a happy
ecumenical world faith and world religion, world political
system that we will of course oppose because
we're waiting for that which comes from God
which is the kingdom of God that waits
on the restoration of Israel for which the
church that is sacrificial will be the Lord's
instrument Copies of this afternoon's interview are available
if you would like them be sure to
call us at KBHW it's been a privilege
to be with you Art Katz thanks so
much My joy Peggy, thank you for having
me If you would like to get in
touch with Art Katz and his ministry you
can go on the website at Ben Israel
I-S-R-A-E-L one word,
benisrael.org and there you can order books
and tapes also if you'd like to correspond
with one of our pundits, Art Katz route
to Laporte, Minnesota 56461 God bless and Shalom