minor affliction, but all the more, Lord, whatever
weakness that has brought, that that would give
greater opportunity for the expression of your strength.
So we are made strong, my God, in
you, and we're so jealous over this word.
And I trust that it's your jealousy, and
that nothing shall be lost to your people
whom you've assembled, and beyond and through them
to the larger congregation, the church, that a
statement will come forth, Lord, of a continuing
kind for what you gave us yesterday.
That was precious.
I've been around for almost 40 years.
I would say yesterday was remarkably precious.
And we just invite you to continue and
bring that perspective, my God, to such a
peak, and to dot the I's, cross the
T's, show us its application, its implications, and
whatsoever you will.
We're so privileged, Lord.
What shall we say to you?
So privileged.
So come and have your full sway.
Thank you, my God, for your thoughts that
are so unspeakably precious, full of wisdom and
understanding and on time.
So be with this piece of dust, Lord,
and let your children not only hear your
words, but your voice.
We thank and give you praise in Jesus'
name.
Amen.
Well, among my many books, if I indulge
anything, it's the purchase of books.
And Inge says, are you going to read
them all?
When will you ever read them?
Well, I said, they're there positionally, so at
any moment the Lord can finger what he
will, what he wills, and I'll have it,
the accessibility.
I can't tell you what a privilege to
have the complete work of Karl Barth, 14
volumes of church dogmatics that no man in
a single lifetime could ever read.
But when someone alludes to a particular volume
and you want to follow up that reference,
there it is at your fingertips on the
shelf.
So I'm appreciating that.
So somehow my eye was directed to a
little booklet by Arthur Pink.
How many people know that name?
Oh, you need to read Arthur Pink's work
on David.
That's a milestone work.
He's a British preacher, teacher, Bible commentator.
And here's his little book on the Ten
Commandments.
And so I thought, what has he to
say on the commandment, thou shalt honor thy
mother and thy father?
Beside the thought that God would include that
as a statement in itself of all the
things for which we could be commanded, that
had sufficient priority in the wisdom and understanding
of the Most High that it was included.
I believe it's the fifth and right after
the fourth, keeping the Shabbat.
So here are the foundational thunderclap statements of
God, not only for the believing community, but
for all mankind.
One day when every knee shall bend and
every mouth confess that Jesus is Lord, the
whole world will subscribe to the law and
the commandments of righteousness of God, of which
this will be a center.
That somehow, because it's included, is the testimony
in itself that it bears with him an
uncommon weight that we would never give it
as earthlings.
And the test and the proof of that
is the way in which parental authority is
not only ignored, but despised in our time.
And as you'll see, as I just share
with you some of his comments, particularly when
it pertained to youth, when he says, let
us consider the duties of children to their
parents.
They are to love and reverence them, being
fearful of offending due to respect they bear
them.
A genuine filial veneration is to actuate children
so that they abstain from whatever would grieve
or offend their parents.
In that one statement, we have the whole
divine alternative to adolescent promiscuity and to children
having children.
And the whole spate of illegitimacy that is
one of the foundational data of our time
is the promiscuity, the sexual ease with which
the children of our generation fornicate.
Why?
Because they have no fear, because they're not
concerned about whether or not they offend their
parents.
So when I read that, I thought, wow,
here was God's provision and so great wisdom
to put a restraint on the youthful passions
that claw and clamor for indulgence and that
God's provision is you shall honor your father
and your mother.
And if something would offend them, you deny
yourself that gratification.
That the issue of not offending the parents
from your call to honor is a sufficient
deterrent to any invitation or disposition to indulge
your flesh.
So in the absence of that, it is
so clearly and conspicuously absent in our time.
Children are enemies to their parents under their
own rules.
They mock them.
If you read some of the confessions, that
shooting in Colorado at that high school, and
one of the young ladies who was not
a victim, but she was turned back to
the Lord by the demonstration of the faith
of one who did suffer death.
And she writes her biography and it's loaded
with rebellion against parents, witchcraft and curses and
voodoo.
It's unbelievable the vehemence and the vitriolic hatred
of this middle class Protestant girl against loving
Christian parents who gave no rise, no occasion.
This isn't an instance of child neglect or
child abuse.
These are loving parents and yet she with
another friend were meeting privately and nursing and
cultivating and brooding in this demonic way against
their parents.
It's the spirit of the age and it's
contrary, of course, to the wisdom and the
counsel of God.
So we need to know when we read
the statistics of illegitimate children, of children having
children.
The root cause of it is the failure
to honor thy father and thy mother.
And he says that this commandment is not
only to the literal father and mother, but
it is to be applied to all our
superiors.
The end of the precept is that since
the Lord God desires the preservation of the
order he has appointed, the degree of preeminence
fixed by him ought to be inviolably preserved.
I don't know if you can catch this
as it's read, can you?
But it'll be on the tape and every
good writer writes so compactly that it's hard
to follow and hear it.
Because another consequence of our generation is that
we've lost an appreciation for words, words that
bear weight and concept.
There's so much blab that when someone says
something in a pointed way, we're unable to
appropriate it.
I'll read it again.
He's saying that this commandment is rooted in
the necessity to preserve order.
And if the respect for the structure that
is inherent in creation out of the wisdom
of God is neglected, you'll have chaos, you'll
have anarchy, you'll have devastation.
And that's what we're having from every level,
from the home to society, where the respect
for order, the respect for authority has declined.
There you see the onrush of every kind
of collapse of order.
So the end of the precept is that
since the Lord desires the preservation of the
order he has appointed, this is the divine
order.
This isn't some human construct of something that
we think will have a certain efficacy and
keep things going.
This is the divine order out of the
divine wisdom.
And the commandment given to see to its
preservation is thou shalt honor.
And the father and the mother is a
statement not only for your actual parents, but
any expression of those in the place of
a superior authority.
From a policeman to an elder, to the
judge, to the president.
I don't know if you've observed the cartoons
and the way in which President Bush is
depicted in cartoons.
I think basically he's not a bad looking
guy, but those cartoons are such a disfigurement.
And by the way, the process by which
Jews ended up in the ovens began earlier
with disparaging comments in German newspapers about Jewishness
and of a tinctured anti-Semitic kind that
became increasingly bold until it became flagrant.
And then cartoons of Jews virtually with horns,
beards, hook-nosed, avaricious, greedy, lustful, protect your
blonde daughters from these monsters.
So that the disparagement of the Jew that
made him a candidate for the oven, because
he no longer was human but subhuman, began
through a process of demeaning that began in
the press through editorials, through comments, and through
cartoons.
We're seeing that now with Bush, and occasionally
we see it with a reference to evangelical
Christianity.
That the fundamentalists are becoming the ogres and
the resistors of progress, and we will be
depicted in a kind of a caricatured kind
until we will be candidates for concentration camps
or ovens.
So all of that is a statement of
disorder and disrespect and a lack of honoring.
I remember saying to my youngest son one
day in his adolescent displeasure, he came down,
he didn't say a word, and I took
a look at him and I said, fix
your face.
I'm not going to allow you to wear
that expression.
Merely because you have not verbalized it is
not a reason that I can ignore what
your face is saying.
And for me to ignore that comment and
that statement is to encourage you to allow
yourself to fester and to brood on that
resentment.
Fix your face.
And you know what the remarkable thing was?
He instantly fixed his face.
He put away that spiteful, angry, resentment, sneering
kind of thing and took upon himself a
pleasant massage.
But most parents would not ever make an
issue of it.
So long as it hasn't erupted to the
verbal level of outright resistance or, what's the
word, rebellion, they kind of look the other
way.
There's a fear.
What a remarkable reversal.
Instead of children fearing their parents with filial
respect, parents are fearing their children.
And so they don't want to, what's the
word, they don't want to push the issue.
And so they ignore to look the other
way.
But it's an issue that cannot be denied.
And our unwillingness to exert our authority invites
a greater resentment.
Because it may well be that if we
knew the cause of youthful and adolescent rebellion,
it's an instinctive and intuitive complaint and cry
against the failure for us to express the
authority that they crave and need to have
and that we're unwilling to express.
So the moment I said, fix your face
in the authority which is mine as father,
which is an authority reflective of what is
given me in the divine order, he instantly
obeyed.
So I hadn't thought to say all these
things, but the best things that issue for
me are the things that I hadn't thought
to say.
So I hope that there's some practical value
for parents in this room and others who
will be hearing these statements.
So he says we should render honor, obedience
and gratitude to anyone who is a father
or holds a position of superiority or authority
in the order of God.
But this precept is exceedingly repugnant to the
depravity of human nature, whose ardent desire of
exaltation or self-exaltation will scarcely admit of
subjection.
Praise God for British writers.
If they convey no other virtue than to
show us how to use the English language,
that's reason enough.
That's English, folks.
I want you to know that you're sitting
on a great repository and a great treasure
that is suffering neglect and erosion and corrosion
because you're not employing words with significant meaning.
So let's have less babble, less blah, blah,
blah, and fewer words, but with more precise
speaking and meaning and content.
Listen to this.
This precept, honor thy father and thy mother,
is exceedingly repugnant to the depravity of human
nature.
Don't think because your kids have tagged along
to church and are joining the youth section
that that's the statement that they are born
again by the Spirit of God.
There's a lot of pseudo conversion and feigned
Christianity, even feigned spirituality, which means that the
Adamic nature is still regnant, is still on
the throne, still in charge.
And it will be that this commandment to
that nature will be exceedingly repugnant because it's
the ardent desire of the Adamic nature for
self-exaltation, which will scarcely admit of subjection.
To bend and to bow and to submit
is that the real nexus of whatever remains
in us that is Adamic.
And when I gave that first statement last
year on the Tent of Shem and that
it was God's provision for Japheth, for Japheth
left to himself unattended because of the enlargement,
which his name means, would be a vehicle
for destruction, which World War II and World
War I have clearly revealed.
But in order for Japheth to enjoy the
benefit of Shem and whatever attends Shem and
the environment in which Shem dwells because he's
ever living and having his being in and
before God, the whole issue of being a
Shem is what Paul says at the conclusion
of Romans 11, You want to know what
a definition of a son of Shem is?
One who lives for that alone.
A son of Shem is his every thought,
conduct, action, breath, and being is of him,
through him, and for him, to whom belongs
glory forever.
Well, I'll tell you what, just to be
close to anyone who lives like that has
got to be a blessing.
Anything that would exude from such a one,
whether he speaks or is silent, has got
to confer some kind of valence of heavenly
things.
And that's the blessing God intends for Shem,
that will change him, it will mediate, take
the rough edges, more than take the rough
edges off, make him the full human being
that in his enlargement can be a blessing
and not a threat.
And even a blessing to Shem himself.
So, what's the catch?
You have to bow to enter the tent.
There's the tent, but you have to break
your stiff posture and bend and bow in
order to enter.
And when I gave that invitation, all hell
broke loose, because whatever was Adamic, whatever yet
remained in man, balked and expressed what he
writes here.
It was exceedingly repugnant, because this exaltation of
man will scarcely admit of subjection, of bowing.
So may we be, what's the word, not
just flexible, pliant.
You guys are getting some good English words
here.
Pliant, that means ever disposed to bow.
When there's a choice in the matter of
whether you should stiffen and resist or bow
and submit, choose to take the likely error
of bowing rather than the error of resisting.
Always to be pliant, always disposed before God
to yield.
Even when we're right, we're wrong.
There's a precious word that came up a
year or two ago, out of Colbert, that
catches the spirit of when you're right, you're
wrong.
It'll come to me later.
But I thought if the church could be
characterized by that word and that disposition, that
spirit, what a witness.
And you know where the word was born?
It's in the English language, but it came
to me in a message in New Zealand
over the issue of who really owns New
Zealand.
The Maoris, the indigenous people who were there
some perhaps thousands of years before the advent
of white settlers, and though they were primitive
in their civilization and in their culture, and
the white men came, just like the story
of the American Indian here, within a couple
of generations, they had built their cities and
affected the economy and done more with that
native soil than ever the Maoris had done,
who were a hunting and fishing primitive community.
So now the issue in the 20th century
is whose land is it really?
The white settlers who have developed it and
obtained a commercial and economic progress or those
who were there before you?
Only the wisdom of Solomon could give an
answer to a question of that kind, but
it's a question that haunts the earth.
This is not just New Zealand.
It's also Australia.
It's also the United States of America, wherever
racial consciousness is being increased.
The issue is the conflict between the colonizer
and those who were there before.
And so the Lord said something like, don't
be insistent upon your claim, whether you are
a Maori or a New Zealander.
But even if you're right in your claim,
you're wrong.
Defer to the other and accommodate and condescend
and bow before the other one, because I
think it would do more to erase Maori
rage, their indignation at white exclusion and white
superiority by white men bowing, not necessarily concede
the nation to the Maoris, but to give
to this people a measure of respect and
honoring.
To the point where they might be so
affected as to say, you know, it's really
not all that matter, much of a question
anyway, of who really, in fact, owns it.
We, in fact, have really prospered by what
you have done in your enlargement, in your
Jafeth use of the land.
So let's even forget whose it is and
let's enjoy what God has given together.
Your attitude toward me has broken my resistance
toward you.
There's something about submission that is so precious.
But as Peter says to women in First
Peter three, submit yourselves to your husbands with
a chaste, how do you say, with a
quiet spirit, with a meek and a quiet
spirit.
Which means that it's not a submission by
which you clench your teeth and stop your
indignation against this guy because you're so much
superior to him.
You're so much more spiritual than he is.
He's a clod and he'll spend all day
in front of the TV set watching a
football game and you would much rather ruminate
over the scriptures and you ought to submit
to him.
So you have everything that contends against what
God requires, but he requires it.
Okay, I'll do it, but I'll do it
with clenched teeth.
But God says, accept that it's with a
quiet and meek spirit, which in his sight
is of great price.
It's not submission at all.
In order for a woman to really be
submitted to a clod like that, which by
the way would be the very release of
the man to move him from the foot
from the TV set to the Bible is
the demonstration that issues from his wife when
it's authentic.
But for it to be authentic is the
issue of the cross.
Bowing and going down before another is death.
It's the cross.
And the evidence of whether or not that
has been truly affected is whether what issues
from you is a quiet and meek spirit
or just the quietness that comes because you
have clamped your mouth shut.
So he reminded me of a text.
Maybe you want to turn to Luke chapter
two of an example of the Lord himself
in what honoring father and mother means, which
was interestingly, the first message that I gave
at a prophetical school of some four or
five years ago, which I thought was a
complete flop.
I thought, Lord, what a minor note to
sound.
Is that the way you're going to ring
in an historic prophetical school?
Every school has got to be historic.
And the message was from Luke 2, 51,
when Jesus had gone up with his family
to Jerusalem for the Passover and then disappeared.
They didn't recognize his absence until they were
on their return.
And of course, they were panic stricken.
Where is our son?
And went back and inquired here and there.
And finally, they found him.
And when they saw him at verse 48,
they were amazed.
And his mother said unto him, son, why
hast thou thus dealt with us?
Behold, thy father and I have sought thee
sorrowing.
And he said unto them, how is it
that you sought me?
Didn't you know that I must be about
my father's business?
Here's a son of Shem speaking.
There's only one purpose for my life.
It's to honor and glorify the father.
Didn't you know?
And they understood not the saying which he
spoke unto them.
How dense can you be after the visitation
of angels and yet to miss the clear
meaning that issued from this boy's mouth.
But here's the punchline.
Verse 51, he went down with them.
He went down with them because Jerusalem, of
course, is probably one of the greatest heights
in Israel.
Elevated.
So they go up to Jerusalem for the
three occasions in which the men of Israel
are to attend to the Lord on the
three feast occasions, Passover being one.
And then when you return to your place,
you go down.
But you know the way we prophetically read
that statement?
He went down with them.
He submitted himself to them.
All the more galling when they couldn't even
understand the simplicity of his statement.
Didn't you know that I have to be
about my father's business?
Why were you concerned and apprehensive and anxious?
Is this what I'm going to have to
live with?
That I have to give you an explanation
every time I'm called to some obedience?
If this is the way it's going to
be, I can't cut that.
That's not an atmosphere in which I can
thrive and come into my full messianic being.
That's what we would have said.
But that's not what he said.
He went down with them.
It's more than just descending to the altitude
of Nazareth.
It's going down in humiliation to live with
parents who will not understand you.
How would you like to live with a
husband who cannot understand you?
How would you like to live with a
wife who cannot understand you and wish that
you were some other kind of preacher and
funny like so-and-so?
And why do you get people aggravated?
But he went down.
And I would submit that his going down
was the key, as the scripture will show
us, to the whole sending forth of the
fully mature Son of God at this critical
juncture.
He went down with them and came to
Nazareth.
Of course, what's Nazareth?
Nazareth is scumsville.
Nazareth is the bottom of the barrel.
Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?
Not only does he return with them, but
to where does he return?
To a city whose reputation is a stink
and was subject unto them.
Isn't that precious?
Whether he's understood or not understood, he was
subject unto them because his subjection unto them
was not predicated upon their understanding of him
or his call.
They had not to display any virtue, any
particular quality.
They were simply parents.
And God said, honor thy father and thy
mother.
And he was subject unto them.
All the more significant when the parents don't
understand.
That kind of submission will yield a greater
spiritual reward than submission that is easier to
give because the parents are in tune with
you and do understand.
So if you're facing a circumstance like that,
whether it's on the job, under your roof,
in your marriage, with children, relationship, there's a
greater spiritual value to be subject to that
one and to that condition, that circumstance, because
it's difficult than it would be if it
were accommodating.
Verse 52, and Jesus increased in wisdom.
Wow.
Is that just a little, this verse follows
that verse?
Or is it that this verse follows the
spiritual logic of that verse?
He was subject unto them and Jesus increased.
You want to increase?
Increase by subjection.
Increase by bowing.
Don't increase by self-assertion and by striving.
That's the spirit of the world.
It's not the spirit of Shem.
Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in
favor with God and with man.
So there we have the example of a
young Jesus honoring his father by honoring his
father.
By being subject, by going down.
Here he says that King David, after he
was anointed for the throne by Samuel, fulfilled
his father's appointment by tending his sheep.
You can come and say, look dad, up
till now I didn't mind this.
It's stinky and it's swarmed with flies and
bugs and insects.
I know that because I tried to go
up to a spiritually elevated place when we
were immigrants in Israel years ago.
I rose early with the rising of the
sun and I climbed up this thorny side
in Galilee to find a place to sit
on the rock and look out over the
Galilean landscape and muse upon God.
And there was the droppings of the sheep.
Evidently the Palestinian shepherds had taken their flocks
up over those hills and wherever the droppings
were, flies were.
And when that sun came up and got
warm, those flies were all around me.
And I started to get bitten.
And I had welts on my legs the
size of a silver dollar.
And I lost all my spiritual inspiration.
So I can see that Samuel having come
and anointed and said, you're God's choice.
You're the chosen one.
You're the king of Israel.
He would come the next day and say
to his dad, I have to submit my
resignation.
For me to continue to tend sheep after
this would be uncomplimentary to the magnitude of
the call that has come to me.
Sure, son.
Not a word, not a whimper, not a
complaint.
He went back to the sheep.
Isn't that precious?
You have to pray for me.
I guess I'm getting mellow in my older
years.
That kind of stuff touches me.
I love that.
And it's exactly that quotient, that dimension of
things that I feel is so absent from
our abrasive Christianity.
Because even when we're right, we're right.
And we want the other guy to know
it, no matter what kind of faction and
friction it will cause.
This is the spirit of the son of
Shem.
He went back to his sheep.
He went down to Nazareth and he was
subject unto them.
Pray for the restoration of the Ten Commandments
and the fifth in a special way.
So children ought to hearken to their instructions
and to imitate the godly practices of their
parents.
Their language must ever be respectful and their
gestures be token submission.
Where are you coming from, brother?
Are you on the face of the earth
that you would request and expect that this
is a realistic expectation for children of our
generation, even in Christian homes, that their language
should be respectful?
I know of instances where Christian parents are
cursed by their children and called every filthy
name in the book, and somehow the parents
take it and bear it.
I don't call that love.
So he says that if you're going to
honor this commandment, your language must be respectful.
And not only your language, but your gestures
must be token submission.
It mustn't stiffen your back and you'll take
out the garbage, but you'll let it be
known that though you're taking it out, you're
taking it out under, what's the word, under
complaint, under duress, because you've got to.
No, let your demeanor and your posture indicate
that this is an act of submission that's
genuine and heartfelt.
So bring your body into compliance as well
as your mouth, and then you'll be honoring
the commandment.
And he speaks of Joseph that when he
was long separated from his father, Jacob, and
Jacob came to Egypt, where Joseph had now
risen to such a state of excellency over
the entire land, that not seeing his father
all those years, he says, he bowed himself
with his face to the ground before his
father.
I think the text may say three times.
This is, again, not a little gesture of
culture.
This is heartfelt, deep recognition of the respect
to his father.
And that had not had opportunity to be
expressed over a long separation.
He bowed with his face to the ground.
Can you imagine any kid in our generation
doing that to a father or mother in
our time, or the equivalent?
And then he reminds us that of the
wicked it is written, they are not afraid
to speak evil of dignitaries.
Why are they wicked?
Because they're turning their back on the very
clear commandment of God to honor authority by
speaking evil of dignitaries, people in authority, and
they're not afraid.
The issue of not being afraid is not
the issue of being afraid of the dignitaries.
It's not being afraid of God.
There's the want of godly reverence and fear
of the God who has spoken and the
God who has given commandments, established his priorities,
and has communicated to mankind what are the
essential recognitions that must be maintained if order
is to be maintained, and that there would
be an habitation that is appropriate to men
that I've created in my image.
This goes all the way back to God.
Respectful authority is the respect for God.
Disrespect for man and the expression of that
has at its root an indignation and a
disrespect for God who established this order.
So strictly has God enjoined them to quiet
submission to their masters.
He's speaking now about slaves, that even when
a servant has given no just cause for
rebuke, yet he is to silently suffer the
groundless anger of his master.
Talk about equal rights and what do they
call it to give Negro students a place
of preference in the university systems?
Affirmative action.
Affirmative action is completely contrary to what Paul
has written of how a servant in a
submitted and inferior relationship is to relate to
his master.
Not ever is there a whisper or an
intimation by Paul or by Jesus that a
man who is subject to slavery should rise
against it, but to submit to that condition.
And the scripture says in whatsoever condition you're
called therein remain, even if it's the condition
of slavery, because in that relationship you have
perhaps more opportunity to glorify God the Father
than if you were in a free condition.
How you relate to your master in subjection
will give more occasion to display the grace
of God in you, which is to say
God as God, than if you were free
just to be your own master and call
your own shots.
Therefore remain in that condition.
But in that condition don't murmur, don't complain,
don't retaliate, certainly don't use violence to extricate
yourself, nor employ it in speech, nor even
exhibit an attitude of contempt to the master
because he's misusing his privileged superiority over you
in a way to be abusive.
Bear it.
Well, I have to say at this point,
there's a black brother and I came to
his home on one of my trips.
He was the head of a fellowship and
I don't know how it came up in
conversation, but I think the Lord was already
turning these thoughts over in my own spirit.
I said, the greatest thing you can do
for the black church.
He was complaining about the congregation, the larger
congregation where he was a member, how hokey
it was and that the minister was a
kind of a prima donna who was a
flashy dresser and had an expensive wardrobe and
demanded and required all kinds of attention and
repetitious in his messages.
I don't know what his complaints were.
And he wondered whether he should even submit
to such a one or go off in
some independent direction.
You know what I said, the best thing
you can do for the black church and
the black church is desperately in need is
be an Uncle Tom.
You need to show the black church and
the black church needs to show the white
church in America what true submission is, that
the greatest figure in American history, in American
literature, the most Christlike figure in American literature
is Uncle Tom, who patiently bore suffering at
the hands of those to whom he had
fallen in slavery and bore it in so
Christlike a demeanor that he exuded the very
radiance of God.
He condemned an entire generation and likely won
others to the knowledge of God, whom he
exemplified in his own suffering patience.
When I suggested to him that the greatest
role that he could take upon himself was
to become an Uncle Tom, this was a
man who was on an upward social mobility.
He was really coming into professional recognition with
a salary of an appropriate kind, his own
home.
And every instinct and every impulse in a
black American who has known any degree and
measure of deprivation because of his race yearns
instinctively to show the other guy who has
clamped him down that he could be his
equal, not only his equal, but play the
game better than he and succeed at it
better than he.
So tell such a man who's already tasting
this success, why don't you forsake that and
take on a deeper call and walk in
the role of an Uncle Tom?
You know what that man did?
He went down on the kitchen floor in
slobbering tears.
He wept like a baby because he knew
that what was coming to him was not
a human suggestion, but a divine call and
he could not receive it.
He cried like a grown man weeping because
the call was greater than anything he could
have conceived.
He would serve God at any level, he'll
be himself a minister, a shepherd, he did
have a small body of souls connected with
him, he was a teacher and he'll do
this, he'll serve, but to forsake this identity
of equality and to voluntarily choose to come
into a submitted relationship of that which was
known in the earliest time of slavery.
And that that somehow will be a convey
the greatest sense of the reality of the
kingdom to a generation who have not known
it.
That's what I'm unwilling.
The end of the story is not long
after he ran off with one of the
young women in the small circle of souls
of which he was the overseer, the entire
fellowship was devastated, the marriage ended in divorce,
the children are devastated, are out of the
faith and only the Lord will know the
consequences of what has taken place.
And I'm not saying that his rejection of
the call led automatically to a sexual transgression
and to the collapse of the fellowship and
marriage and so on, but I wouldn't put
it past God.
I wouldn't say it could not be related,
that when a call comes of an ultimate
kind and you'll not submit yourself and subject
yourself and go down and bow to receive
that, that the arrogance that keeps you from
that acknowledgement and submission will have its consequence
in the other areas and aspects of your
life.
You know something, the way some people see
Uncle Tom is having never read the book
Uncle Tom.
We see Uncle Tom, blacks see Uncle Tom
as people that submit to the white man
in the sense that they tell on others.
In other words, he's sort of a one
that's weak.
He's an Uncle Tom in my view is
one that's weak and he'll, he leans, he
fears the white man.
So he tells and rats on the other
people and not someone that's submitted in a
Christlike view.
So the black view of an Uncle Tom
is totally different from reading the book Uncle
Tom.
I'm glad you said that.
That means that that man, if you would
assume that call knows that he's going to
be abjectly misunderstood.
He'll be understood in the way that the
phrase Uncle Tom has come to be understood
by black people as sellout, as cop out.
And yet willing to do it, knowing that
you're going to be misunderstood would be the
greater submission to God and the greater virtue.
So yes, bowing before God is costly.
Even in the sense that, like you were
saying, John the Baptist said, be content with
your wages.
Don't ask for a raise.
I had an opportunity to do that and
I couldn't raise.
And you had a tape out on slavery,
which was real good.
What's the name of that tape?
I can't remember the name of it.
Simon has it in those.
It's a real good.
Oh, yeah, it goes with this.
Oh, I'm just saying.
Oh, thank you for reminding me.
You know where that message was spoken of
all places in Russia.
I don't know if Oleg was there.
It was the first message when Brother Paul
had collected those ministers.
And I'm before the Lord.
I don't know what to speak.
What do you say to these men in
a place of being ministers in Russia with
the threat of a renaissance of communism again?
What's the word?
So you begin by beginning.
And what was the word?
Paul's word.
I forgot in what book.
It's like a minor note.
I was almost embarrassed to speak it.
I said, this is a little minor.
Paul speaking about widows and slaves.
I said, but that little pinprick of a
hole emits a light of the deepest kind
in the revelation of what it means to
be apostolic.
Paul's attitude about slaves and about widows was
a minuscule view of the macrocosm of what
apostolicity is.
You know what happened after that?
They never came to another meeting.
And so all of the morning meetings for
ministers were nothing.
At night we had public meetings.
They didn't even come to the public meetings,
though they were anointed because of the offense
of that word about Paul and his attitude
toward widows and slaves.
And I think that the thing that turned
them off was this.
They were expecting some really high powered statement
from an American speaker on how to succeed
as ministers.
How do you do it?
You guys are doing it in America.
You've got big churches and great budgets.
And now let us know.
So here comes this jerk talking about Paul
on slavery and widows was a complete disappointment
and disillusionment and a rejection, which indicates that
even though as ministers, they did not respect
the authority of this servant prophetically.
And that in respecting, they would say, we
don't understand why God would have chosen as
esoteric a subject as this that has no
visible relevance to our situation in Russia.
But we have to assume that if you
bear this kind of place in God and
have this kind of calling that what issues
from you is from God and he will
later show us the significance of that.
At any rate, we will not allow our
indignation to have such sway as to cut
you off completely hereafter.
In that they have written, what shall I
say, death sentence on their own ministries.
Certainly it's got to have an implication for
all their future.
Because when you reject the prophetic way, the
prophetic man, it's often God's last provision.
And what follows in the history of Israel
is judgment.
So I don't want to surmise what the
consequence would have been.
Just remembering, maybe Simon can help me here.
When you returned from that trip to Russia,
you brought that word in our living room
that following Sunday, your first Sunday back with
us.
And I remember you concluded the message with
the statement, embrace your chains.
And it was a glorious gush of the
spirit of God.
One of my favorite messages that you spoke
on a regular Sunday with us that it
came out of that Simon, just to commend
that tape to some of these that are
here.
What was the name of that?
Did you call it Widows and Slaves?
The price has just gone up because it's
so richly develops what's only being touched here.
One statement I would like to also suggest
you write down.
I wrote it down and I found Art
using the exact word that I was writing,
which he had not used before.
So because of that and a little bit
of call it superstition on my part, I
was writing the statement, call of an ultimate
kind requires that one bow in costly submission.
At the very moment I was writing the
word costly, Art was saying costly.
And so I would urge that you underline
the word costly.
A call of an ultimate kind requires that
one bow in costly submission.
If it's not costly, you can well question
whether it's submission at all.
It's got to be costly.
It's got to run across the natural grain
of your own life and preference and disposition
or it's not submission.
And the true affecting of that submission is
not something that you can perform out of
well-meaning intention or charismatic religiosity.
It has got to be the grace of
God.
It has got to be the life of
God.
And you know what?
This is the nature of that life.
The nature of the life of God is
to be submitted.
Can you believe that?
The most high God, the creator of the
heavens and the earth has as the most
intrinsic disposition of his own nature submittedness.
He gave himself without spot and blemish as
a sacrifice.
The last act of Jesus is the summation
of all of Jesus and all of Jesus
is the summation of all of God, the
father.
He demonstrated what is the nature of the
father who stands at the door of a
heart and knocks.
So, you cannot perform this without the grace
of God.
The grace of God is the life of
God and the life of God is not
only the enablement, but in the enablement is
the expression of the character of that life.
So, when you submit in true submission with
a quiet and mixed spirit, something is being
expressed of very God himself that that husband,
though he is not submitted to the word,
will nevertheless bow to God without the word
by the demonstration of the chaste and obedient
wife who is without fear.
Isn't that a remarkable statement?
And that's not only a statement for wives,
that's the statement for the church in its
final and eternal identity as the bride of
Christ.
Are we going to be a bride adorned
for this bridegroom whose very nature is submission
when we ourselves shall come with some kind
of residue of self-exaltation and reservation and
indignation and you can't tell me and I...
It's an incompatible match.
So, God has got to deal with us
in this life and fit us in this
life to come to that purity of that
woman, that bride, the heart of which is
expressed in 1 Peter 3.
Okay, just off the top of my head
I'm trying to think what would be the
most galling requirement that God can make of
a church in demonstration of this kind of
willingness to be submitted or subjected to another
than being submitted or subjected to the Jew.
To bow before a spiritual inferior who is
even outside the faith and has not yet
come to the recognition of Jesus and yet
that God would require of us to be
blessed to see that we have a disposition
toward this people of a truly submitted kind,
respecting them because they are the fathers of
our faith who are in present darkness.
Think of that.
Maybe you can think of some greater requirement
but I think for most Christians that would
be galling.
How can I ask this?
Maybe not galling when you consider Jews in
the abstract but when you consider Jews in
their actuality.
It's another story as you can find out
from any person in the Venezuelan community who
waited on my mother here in the year
that she was with us before her death.
It was galling for me and I'm Jewish
and I'm her son but when this 96
-year-old lady is telling me who already
is a senior citizen, she's barking out orders
at me as if I'm some 10-year
-old little snot-nosed kid that can be
bandied about.
Hey, my dignity, my age, my car.
I have to say I felt the chasing.
The Lord let me know that there's a
residue that yet remains with me with my
own Jewish mother as a Jew.
How then will it be for Gentiles with
Jews who are alien to them when they
shall have to bear the same kind of
irritableness that we got from my mother barking
orders and this is not good enough or
how about this or that.
How will they take it?
What will issue from them from their blind
side when they're hit with that kind of
relationship for which they've had no preparation?
What will they exhibit at that moment will
be altogether telling and historically and eternally significant
because the final episode of the whole redemptive
drama of Israel is what they encounter in
the wilderness of their final uprooting and being
casted through the nations when God says in
Ezekiel 20, I will meet with you in
the wilderness of the nations face to face
and there you will come under the rod
of my authority and come into the dimensions
of my covenant.
Something is being scheduled.
The final conclusion to the drama is an
encounter by Jews in their final flight in
the time of Jacob's trouble in the wilderness
when God will meet with them but meet
with them face to face.
They'll not be looking at surly Gentile faces
who are screwing up their countenances.
How long do I have to suffer this?
These people are terrible.
They're mean-spirited and their language is vile.
You hear an old lady 96 cursing who
gives to the B'nai B'rith and
to Hadassah and every kind of Jewish cause.
God has seen to it that we're going
to be severely thoroughly tested and the greatest
test that can come to us to come
to us from the adversary of our faith,
the enemies of the gospel for our sake.
So know that it's coming and that it
cannot be met on any imagined ground but
authenticity itself, which is a synonym for that
which is apostolic to show forth the nature
of God when they shall press us and
test us.
And after we have extended ourselves to them
in kindness and find that it's unappreciated and
that they have mean things to say when
we have expended ourselves at risk, you'll have
every ingredient that will lend itself to justifying
yourself in some explosive rejection.
Well, that's the way you're going to be.
Forget it.
And if we have come to that, we
will have missed a moment.
So you know what, dear saints, it would
not be exaggeration to say you need to
seize every occasion now in preparation for that
one moment.
Because as we said yesterday, there comes sometimes
in a lifetime a single moment.
And in that moment, everything is at stake
and all is revealed.
That was the issue in the moment that
came with Noah's drunkenness and revealed the truth
of his sons.
It's the moment that will come for us
and the moment of Israel's final destitution that
will reveal the truth of us.
And if that truth not be revealed, there'll
be no Jew that will be coming returning
to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads.
It's the issue of their salvation that they
will see their God as he is exhibited
through us in patient forbearance and subjecting ourselves
to them in all of their unmanly and
uncivil behavior when it shall cost us even
to make that demonstration.
Can you follow me?
Okay.
And doesn't the church, the body of Christ
that is the church, give ample opportunity almost
daily for such response?
If you're not experiencing it almost in a
daily way, you're out of the faith.
You're out of the context of the faith.
You're in some kind of glass house euphoria
of unreality that saves you from these humiliating,
embarrassing, and irritating collisions with the saints and
with the authority that's in the body.
We learned this lesson years ago in the
formation of this community where we were so
desperately poor living beneath the government's prescribed poverty
level that if anything came to us in
the mail or by any means, we were
so desperate for food, insulation, housing, pregnant women
with inadequate housing that we trembled over how
any dollar should be spent.
And when you're an elder and announce that,
well, we have just received a gift, but
it's going to be employed for an overseas
trip, it's like hitting someone in the solar
plexus.
What?
I've got a pregnant wife here.
My children are not being adequately fed.
They have dental problems.
They're not rightly clothed.
And you're going to take that money for
an overseas trip?
That's a luxury that we can't enjoy, cats.
And who are you to say so anyway?
We had questions about your eldership.
Have you seen your marriage lately?
Yes, every day.
So you see what I'm saying?
It's the tensions of life together that reveal
the very truth of our condition.
And if that's not happening for you now,
can you have the spiritual audacity to pray
for it?
Lord, lead me out of these safe regions
of conventional Christendom and bring me into that
quality relationship of the kind that you intend
by which your redemptive work can take place.
That when I shall be tested along with
the church in the last days by this
Jewish people in the intemperate condition in which
they will be brought by the suddenness of
their uprooting and their being again cast through
nations, we will not be found wanting.
That they will indeed see in us the
face of God.
And indeed my salvation, if you read Ben
Israel, has everything to do with seeing the
face of God in this Gentile girl whom
I met overseas and brought my whole umbrage
and superior Jewish superiority, intellectual superiority to bear
on this little girl from Kansas who's just
a little believer on vacation having completed high
school.
And kind enough to walk with me in
the path surrounding the city and probing her
motives.
Why are you being kind?
Because though I'd been a Marxist and social
activist, I didn't know what kindness was.
And she answered every question, well, it's the
love of God.
What a pathetic answer.
And she kept saying the love of God,
the love of God as my level scale
of indignation rose.
And finally I thought, she says love of
God one more time, she's going to get
it.
I'm not going to withhold, I'm going to
let go of that same blast that every
Christian has received from me in so-called
witnessing and I've reduced them to dust.
So what is this little girl?
And sure enough she mentions God.
I said, look kid, you're a nice girl,
but I can't stand this God talk.
Answer me a question that no Christian has
ever been able to answer for me.
You're talking about God, how do you know
that he is?
Oh, she said, without hesitation, I know that
he is because he lives in me.
And when she said that, the big hulk
went down in one sagging collapse in the
dust like a felled ox because that word
hit me with power.
I know because, and when I finally recovered,
what hit me, what she said was not
theological, wasn't even intellectual.
What gave it its power?
What gave it its power was that she
had the face to prove it.
And I want to say to you dear
non-Jewish believers, I don't call you Gentiles
because there's been a radical change in that
status.
You're the people of Israel, a non-Jewish
people, you can't change that generic factor, but
there's nothing like seeing the face of God
through a Gentile face for a Jew.
That's all I can tell you.
To see the face of God expressed through
snub-nosed, freckled face, black, is a revelation
of the utmost kind, the uttermost kind, in
keeping with the scripture that this is the
light that lightens the Gentiles and the glory
of the people of Israel.
When we see the glory of the people
of Israel, which we have not known as
the people of Israel, in the light that
lightens the Gentiles, we are saved.
And it's that demonstration which is the capstone
and the conclusion of our age, for which
we need to be in conscious anticipation and
willing preparation.
By letting the Lord turn up the juice
now, tighten the screws now, give us those
difficult situations now, test us now in the
areas of subjection, submission, and that when the
time comes and we have to listen to
some Jew berating us, for whom we have
extended ourselves at the risk of our life,
will not so much as even change our
face, will not so much as lose our
affection and esteem for them, because it's not
predicated on what they are or what they
have attained, because it's the esteem of God
and his love for that people in whatever
their condition, and therefore it cannot be lost
even when they are ungainly.
Can you relate to Christians like that, now,
that you'll still accord to them an esteem
and an affection independent of their track record?
And if they fail you in your expectation
and in your disappointment, there'll be no alteration
of your love and esteem?
So the church is now the fulcrum for
all the future if we but recognize it
and utilize it.
Which brings me to the next subject.
What a man will do when he's entirely
free to do what he wills is what
he in fact is, as we said yesterday.
That opportunity, that testing of Shem and Japheth
to see a helpless naked father, where everything
that is human wells up in you to
take advantage of the weakness of that one
that is now displayed in shame, and even
to elevate yourself at the expense of the
fallen one and say, well, now he's totally
discredited.
I have every right now to come into
my own as the son who has come
of age and he's had his time and
now I will take over and I will
be the object of God's attention and the
vehicle of his use.
That's exactly the temptation that came to the
church with the fall of Israel.
Now we will take over.
They had their chance, now they're naked and
destitute in their weakness and now we will
be for God and we just shunned them
to the side.
That was an historic tragedy and it was
only possible because the church of that hour,
like the church of this hour, was not
Shem-like in its character.
We failed the test and we'll suffer the
consequence of that failure even now until we
identify with those who committed it as being
one with them in that failure and in
that sin.
Time does not alter anything, nor distance, nor
history.
We are with them as Christians in that
rejection of Israel that was not expressed by
Shem with his fallen father.
So there needs to be a release for
us that comes by an acknowledgement that we
stand guilty with the church that still continues
to see itself as the Israel of God,
still continuing the arrogance against which Paul had
warned.
I would not have you to be ignorant
of this mystery, brethren, lest you become wise
in your own conceit.
And all of our inflated charismatic carryings on,
pick up any issue of, what's the magazine?
Charisma.
And just see the advertisements for the conferences
is enough to make you gag.
The advertisements, the loud, bold statements of what
they believe that conference is going to be
with multicolored and the array of ministers who
are now doctors, by the way, if you've
noticed.
Bishops.
Your stomach knots when you turn those pages,
which is the reason I don't turn them.
But it's exactly what Paul warned.
And I think that the root of it
is the reaction of the church to the
fallen Israel.
And we'll continue to suffer this arrogance until
we acknowledge with brokenness that we missed it
at that historic point.
And that we want to be free of
the sins of our fathers.
And acknowledge and give credit to a people
whom God has not cast away, who are
only temporarily set aside.
And maybe not the least reason for which
they have been temporarily set aside was to
test us.
What will you do when you see them
down but not out?
Noah was not out.
He was only down.
But that being down was sufficient occasion to
test the heart of his sons.
And Israel's being down has been sufficient occasion
to test that of the church.
And it tested still.
So the tent of Shem was established in
the moment of entering the tent of another
as one's own.
There's something about being a mediator of intercession,
being identification, that the son identified with the
father in his shame.
He did not turn away from his father,
not gauging on him because of a superior
spirituality that cannot be offended.
Understand what I'm saying?
He wasn't guarding his spirituality that if I
look at my father and see him in
that despicable condition, there'll be some spiritual loss
to me.
No, it was respect not to look upon
him in that condition because he was identified
with him.
There but for grace of God go I.
If my father who is the righteous preacher
of his generation and was faithful to God
through decades of building the absurdity of an
ark and was a preacher to a generation
doomed to destruction because it had given its
over to a total iniquity.
How can I allow this one instance to
discredit the whole faithfulness of a man throughout
his lifetime?
So I have to recognize in that that
however faithful he has been yet being man,
there's a place of vulnerability and weakness to
which I myself also am subject being man.
So my coming into his tent is coming
into his situation.
I'm not just coming for an expediency.
It's a statement of my identification.
I'm one with him in the abject condition
in which he's fallen.
That's why when Noah came out of his
drunken stupor and he prophetically made statements.
It was so out of the heart of
God.
Blessed be the God of Shem because he
recognized that this what his son had done
is more than just politeness.
It's more than just expediency, exigency of something
that a man would do in a moment
out of a kind of religious cleverness.
It was the very act of God himself.
God himself would not have done other than
what Shem did.
And Shem did it by God because his
life is of him, through him and to
him to whom be glory forever.
I don't think it's too exaggerated to say
that the issue of the tent of Shem,
the advent of the tent of Shem came
by Shem's act by entering into his father's
circumstance, his father's shame, his father's humiliation and
to cover him.
If that's true, then what is the point
of entry for the tent of Shem in
the last days and the historical situation to
which we are already moving.
But us, sons and daughters of Shem, entering
the tent not of Noah but of Jewry.
And there down and out last days humiliation.
They will be stretched out and unbelievably exposed.
Those things that civilization and its amenities confer
keep from the exposure of the truth of
our condition.
You're living in a penthouse.
There's something about being rich that covers the
truth of your condition.
You can hedge yourself about by luxury, by
men bowing before you, respecting you for your
great cleverness by which your wealth was obtained.
Your library is impressive and is everywhere about
you.
You own objects of art.
You have antiques.
You have on your wall millions of dollars
worth of paintings that belong in public museums
because you've been a collector and can afford
it.
And you have a certain dignity appropriate to
your wealth, to your station in life.
On top of that, you're Jewish and you
have given millions in charity to the state
of Israel and you've endowed the Jewish theological
seminary so that squirts like me could come
and take a course and so on.
But when that is suddenly stripped, here's the
point, and it will be, what is exposed,
but what had been up to that moment
concealed by the amenities of civilization and wealth?
Can you understand?
We're living in a lie, saints.
The whole world lives in a lie.
And we're kept from the recognition of the
truth of our condition.
And that's why there's got to be the
severest stripping in the last days for the
people of Israel.
For how shall they enter into their priestly
function and be the blessing to all the
families of the earth if they themselves are
yet in the place of deception?
So everything that is contrary to truth has
to be removed and it's going to happen
suddenly.
We're going to find them in a condition
more despicable than what Noah experienced.
They will be exposed and naked and the
object of derision and contempt of all the
Gentile world that is waiting for its opportunity,
for every Gentile that has been chafed at
the expense of a Jew, either in fact
or in imagination, because of their wealth and
because of their success, that moves the natural
man to envy, will finally have his opportunity,
as Canaan and Ham did, to say, Now
you finally got it.
I'm superior to you.
You who have always made me feel inferior.
Now I can look down on your public
and open disgrace for you are proliferated throughout
the world.
You've been uprooted and you've been cast to
all nations and you don't even know what
tomorrow will bring and your fortune is done
in a day.
It brings you nothing.
The exact plight that fell upon German Jews
in the Nazi time, suddenly and overnight, who
found themselves evicted from their professorships, their position
as judges in the courts and publishers of
newspapers, places of eminence in German society, to
find themselves not only out of their professions,
but out of their homes.
I can't remember what city it was, where
there's a monument of the synagogue that existed
in this neighborhood, but you ought to see
the houses that yet remained in that neighborhood,
now occupied by Germans, formerly occupied by Jews,
that had room for their servants.
I mean, they lived well, beautifully, luxuriously, but
overnight it was stripped and removed and the
same ones found themselves with their hair shorn,
their clothing removed, and finally in their death
even their gold fillings removed and all that
they had was a number.
They were deprived even of the dignity of
the identification of a name.
In fact, have experienced since some kind of
inferior status to the Jew to finally have
a vengeance and to enjoy that falling condition.
The only non-Jew who will not share
that global celebration of Jewish fullness will be
the church.
Because like Shem, they will come into that
tent.
Like Shem, they will share an identification with
the fallen one.
Because if we don't, we can't cover them.
Don't think that covering them is some kind
of clinical thing that we can perform by
just draping something.
Covering is a divine act, but it cannot
be performed without an identification with the stricken
one.
All right.
Hal Lindsey in his book, The Road to
Holocaust, asked the question, could the atrocities of
Nancy Europe have ever taken place in a
Europe that had not cultivated that, well, you'll
know it by the name, replacement theology?
That perspective was in a way uncovering Israel,
exposing it to the free access of the
powers of the air that was working through
that German government.
And just quickly, there's a cryptic passage, it's
in Daniel chapter 11, where it uses this
revealing phrase, and it's not even a matter
particularly of context or exegetical meaning, but it
just captures the spirit of this.
It says, and this is the revealing messenger
speaking to Daniel, it says, the robbers of
your people will establish themselves or exalt themselves
to establish the vision.
And, of course, Daniel's vision was the vision
of the kingdom of God, which John, of
course, told us would last for a thousand
years.
Hitler's whole spirit was to restore the Third
Reich that would rule a thousand years.
The people who have exalted themselves to establish
the vision will be seen again in the
last day's siege of Jerusalem when Antichrist will
lead his forces to again occupy the place
of God's rest and usurp that holy hill
from its appointed calling and destiny.
And so there's something deep even in the
church in its uncovering that has permitted this
exposure that has left Israel to the ravages
of the powers of the air without a
prophetic protest even.
And there's something in which the church also
has fulfilled that role of exalting themselves to
establish the vision and also been not in
the same way that the Germans were the
robbers of your people confiscating their goods to
the point of this Arab word they used.
But how about the way in which the
church has exalted itself to establish the vision
when the whole book of Daniel opens with
the promise that this will be given not
to another people.
This is the people that God has appointed
that the vision will be established and it
is a presumption and a usurpation of the
highest order that the church has stumbled into
in their triumphal replacement.
To show that we're not talking out of
our hats or that this is a mere
theorizing or just a perspective that's particularly dear
to us in some subjective way but that
it is altogether grounded in scripture I want
us to examine one text briefly before the
break in Psalm 102.
You can get the tape where I've spoken
on this subject at greater length and read
this text at your own leisure carefully because
the first half of the text sounds like
a psalmist in a concentration camp describing almost
in vivid terms exactly what Jews suffered in
the Nazi time in those camps where your
skin becomes blackened and parched and you can't
eat and you're alone in your destitution where
he says in verse 11 my days are
like a shadow that declines and I'm withered
like grass but thou, O Lord here's where
the whole poem shifts and changes that even
in his broken and destitute condition there's some
kind of a faith of hope that rises
in God at the most abject time when
there's least occasion to believe for it but
thou, O Lord shall endure forever I'm turning
to dust I'm decaying my body is wasting
away I'm nothing I've been stripped of everything
but you, O Lord shall endure forever and
thy remembrance unto all generations thou shalt arise
I always love these the word arise suggestive
of the great theme of resurrection and have
mercy upon Zion for the whole issue of
God at the end of the age with
Israel is the revelation of his mercy for
he will have mercy upon whom he will
have mercy which means totally undeserved attention and
grace from God for the time to favor
her yea, the set time has come now
here's the key point what makes it the
set time that releases God to express mercy
to Jews in a destitute concentration camp condition
in which they are without any hope of
anything but death it's because your servants take
pleasure in her stones and favor the dust
thereof unlimited volumes could be written in commentary
on this one verse it's cryptic, it's poetic
it's laden with meaning but it has to
be drawn out but here's the point to
give you a help in drawing it out
it's not Israel itself who affects the point
at which time God will favor Zion the
destitution depravity unto death is not the turning
point the set time comes because not of
what is revealed in Israel's condition but is
revealed through his servants which is the church
it's a mystical reference to the church because
the word church could not be employed by
the psalmist writing this thousands of years before
Christ but when my servants shall have pleasure
in her stones and favor the dust thereof
because it will be reduced to dust Israel
is going to experience devastation, the great cities
and rising towers of Tel Aviv will come
down it will all crumble, the whole thing
will be a devastation, a place without habitation
the land has become, it says in Isaiah,
our destruction it will be dust but what
is our attitude when Israel will have failed
our expectancy when we had hoped it would
have been this Israel that would have restored
the glory of God, that this Israel would
have been the fulfillment of prophetic expectation and
we had all along sought for it and
we made trips and we planted trees and
we made contributions and we prayed against Arafat
and all those kinds of things and in
the end despite all that it comes down
and it comes down in so abject and
terrible a way that the world gloats at
it and rubs its hand with glee at
what has fallen upon this proud arrogant people
but the servants of God take another attitude
completely they find favor in the stones they're
identified with the judgment, that's what that means
it's not the stones per se this is
not antiquarian, this is not archaeological this is
symbolic the stones if you can identify with
the stones what then is your identification with
the people who once were housed in those
stones, see what I mean if they found
favor because it was the stones of Israel
because an identification with this people all the
more of such a kind that has caught
the attention of God it is so unrealistic
to expect it that while all the world
is gloating at Israel's collapse because you can
understand Israel become increasingly arrogant in defying the
world in its own necessity to preserve itself
that's already an accusation why can't they be
more accommodating why can't they agree to these
terms ok so they're making some concession they've
taken out a few watchtowers from some of
the settlements but will they uproot the settlements
themselves and will they do this in order
to obtain that or will they insist no
this is our land and it's alright and
you guys have got to live I believe
Israel become increasingly intractable they must because their
confidence in being bailed out by the United
States certainly not the United Nations can ever
be a true confidence they will have to
depend upon themselves and in doing so they'll
make themselves less attractive in the world, more
objectionable more difficult, more Jewish more stubborn, more
stiff necked more recalcitrant so that by the
time of their devastation the world that has
had enough of them and have been threatened
by the lack of peace that issues out
of the Middle East crisis will enjoy their
plight but what is the set time to
favor Zion when my servants have found favor
in her stones and pleasure in her stones
and favor the dust thereof you may have
it expressed a little differently in your Bible
it's the issue of identification for the issue
of identification is the issue of intercession it's
the issue of coming into their tent suffering
their shame their identification and in fact if
they're going to be pursued worldwide, the time
will come when Jews will be as hated
globally as they were hated in Europe and
sought out and found that if you had
so much as one great grandfather, 164th Jewish
blood, you were a candidate for the ovens,
if that same kind of anti-Christ demonic
hatred of the Jew will now have full
expression globally, what will be the fate of
those Christians who will identify with them not
just in their minds but with their bodies
their identification will be an act every bit
as much as it was the act of
Shem for his father coming in so Ham
comes out and tells, gives the report to
the two brothers our father is in drunken
condition naked, what they do with that report
is the key to the whole of the
future instead of just commiserating or feeling sorry,
waiting for the guy to sober up or
even joining Canaan and Ham in their delight
over the father's condition they come into the
condition empathy pathos identification mutuality the servants
are Gentiles but they are one with God
in identification with the fallen people this is
beyond sentiment what Shem had for his father
was beyond sentiment, even beyond filial obligation it
was his identification with God of the father,
the heart of the father that cannot bear
to allow one's father to suffer a humiliation
and shame and lay uncovered in his own
tent that's the kind of thing that will
end the history as it began the history
the commencement of Shem has its conclusion with
the church being to Israel what the son
Shem was to his father and the ironic
thing is that I need to find that
identification myself, being born a Jew does not
automatically fit me to be a Jew with
the Jews I could be superior even in
my Jewishness over and against my own people
so it's not a racial ethnic thing it's
a spiritual thing it's the Shem thing and
it's the thing to which we're called and
to which we're moving so we bless you
Lord, what a remarkable mystery, what a majestic
conclusion to the age and that your servants
isn't that remarkable, we're talking about servants find
favor in her stones and empathy compassion with
her dust thank you precious God, and when
you see that the set time has come,
you will arise and deliver Israel from that
predicament, for nothing else will suffice, nothing that
man or religion can perform, certainly that a
Jew can perform in his stricken condition or
any condition, but only that you can perform
when the set time has come, you will
arise let it come soon Lord we pray
and let it come if it's not too
shameful of boasting all the more in degree
and proportion because of these days that we're
enjoying together that what is being spoken, what
is being reviewed here and considered here will
not fall to the ground it will not
just be an enjoyment for those whom you've
gathered, it will find its way in to
the body, those who have no present consciousness
of the Jew at all and in fact
have lingering anti-Semitic dispositions, will be met
by this word, and it will set in
motion that preparation for such a people such
a servant people for which you wait thank
you Lord that we're privileged to be participants
in this, come out of a sick bed
and sit down and you unfold this remarkable
thing, and in fact it seems like a
sick bed and a weakness would be a
necessary requirement for the unfolding and the bringing
forth of it and not any man's expertise
or vain strength so we bless you that
even in the communication of the mystery, the
mystery itself is being propounded and enacted right
before our eyes and that is what a
prophetical school is that's what propheticism itself is,
that's what to be prophetic is and so
we thank you Lord for the event we
bow if you don't give us another word
if I have to go back to the
hospital today and we take another turn and
the school is dismissed it's not what we
had hoped to have in full we would
say we have received full measure thank you
Lord, precious what you've given us is precious
beyond all speaking we almost have to imagine
we're growing up in the hearing of this
there's a maturity that comes in the very
hearing, it compels us to rise up with
such a word, and we thank you Lord
what a history, what a destiny what a
call is the church of Jesus Christ of
the last days toward this people and it
will take millennia to rejoice and to celebrate
the majesty of this so great wisdom and
will that will be perfected and established because
you have said thank you Lord so, receive
our gratitude continue to keep us my God
in the environment, the atmosphere which you have
established by your own presence, the high seriousness
of God, and that even though we take
a break and walk about it will not
be lost and we'll come back to it
my God as readily as we have left
it so, bless us together bring a conclusion
to this morning's time and seal it we
thank you and give you praise for the
privilege of it, in Jesus name, Amen