I'd like to focus on the point of
view of vested interest being Jewish, or to
appeal to the sentimental interest or to the
mystique of Israel, or your sense of guilt
or obligation for what we owe to the
people who have given us the Bible, the
Apostles, and all of that.
But a totally different perspective, which for the
want of a better word I'd like to
call an apostolic perspective of the issue of
Israel, and one that I can freely commend
to you, if indeed we have serious intention
of being an apostolic and prophetic body, which
is to say, to be true church, is
something that needs to be fitted into our
end time perception, and it is the issue
of Israel so central in my opinion to
the final and systematic purposes of God that
will profoundly involve the church.
How's that for an opening statement?
Having said that, I'm going to sit down.
Having said that, hopefully to intrigue you and
to open your heart and understanding for which
we have been praying today, because this is
so enormously important, that the issue of the
Jew and the issue of Israel is in
fact at the end of the age, as
it has been in my opinion throughout the
ages, the issue of the church.
That God has locked these two entities in
to a reciprocal relationship that the one without
the other cannot come to its full fulfillment
in the purposes of God.
I'm just throwing these statements out.
I don't expect that you will be able
to say amen at this point, but just
to make statements and that perhaps by the
end of the message and if you have
reflected upon it, you will then be able
to give a Hadi, yay and amen.
Let's look at Ezekiel chapter 37 as the
basic text of tonight, though I hope to
turn to some other scriptures as well.
The Valley of Dry Bones, familiar to most
of us, and then we'll pray the hands
of the Lord was upon me and carried
me out in the spirit of the Lord
and set me down in the midst of
the valley, which was full of bones and
caused me to pass by them round about
and behold, there were very many in the
open valley and low.
They were very dry and he said unto
me, son of man, can these bones live?
And I answered, Oh Lord God, don't know
it.
And again, he said to me, prophesy upon
these bones and say it to them.
Oh, you dry bones, hear the word of
the Lord.
Let's say if the Lord got into these
bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter
into and you shall live.
I will lay sinners upon you and we'll
bring up flesh upon you and cover you
with skin and put breath in you and
you shall live and you shall know that
I am the Lord.
So I prophesied as I was commanded and
as I prophesied, there was a noise and
behold, a shaking and the bones came together
bone to bone.
And when I beheld low, the sinners and
the flesh came up upon them and the
skin covered them above, but there was no
breath in them.
Then said he unto me, prophesy unto the
wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to
the wind, let's say if the Lord God
come from the four winds or breath and
breathe upon these flames that they may live.
So I prophesied as he commanded me and
the breath came into them and they lived
and stood up upon their feet and exceedingly
great army.
And then he said unto me, son of
man, these bones are the whole house of
Israel.
Behold, they say our bones are dried and
our hope is lost and we are cut
off for our part.
Therefore, prophesy and say unto them, but say
if the Lord God behold all my people,
I will open your grave and court you
to come up out of your graves and
bring you into the land of Israel and
you shall know that I am the Lord.
When I have opened your graves, all my
people and brought you up out of your
graves and shall put my spirit in you
and you shall live and I shall place
you in your own land.
Then you shall know that I, the Lord,
have spoken it and performed it, sayeth the
Lord.
So precious God, we ask a grace of
interpretation by the Holy Spirit.
Your rendering for us whom you have collected,
gathered tonight, grant us some sense of what
this means in your own sight.
Use it to awaken us and bring us
from our grave of indifference and ignorance, even
hostility against Israel.
Bring us to life, my God, in something
that is dear in your own sight and
that should rightly affect every aspect of our
faith.
Help us to be the instruments of your
use, my God, in the effecting of this,
that you might be glorified thereby.
Come and give us the breath of life
in your speaking, hearing and responding that we
might be, my God, this chapter fulfilled in
your time to your eternal praise and glory.
In Jesus name we pray.
Amen.
So two requests.
First, to borrow some water from my dear
interpreting brother down here.
My topic tonight is to interpret Israel's present
calamity.
One that we have not only been aware
of, but one that has caused us who
have been supporters of Israel, no little dismay
and concern.
Israel's conduct has been a disappointment, not only
to us who have hoped that we would
see a nation of a unique kind in
the fulfillment of the prophetic word, but has
been a disappointment to themselves.
It has disappointed Yuri, the world over, and
we are only at the beginning of what
shall begin in disappointment and end in a
much deeper but unnecessary mortification.
And all of this is not mere happenstance.
I believe it is the very hand of
God and necessary for the ultimate and the
true fulfillment of God's intention through a restored,
or shall I say, a resurrected Israel.
How quickly we were to applaud this present
Israel and how disappointed we were that by
its fortieth anniversary, when one could have hoped
that we would have seen the fulfillment of
things hoped for, that indeed these calamities were
already beginning to unfold.
Things that could not have been anticipated that
brought Israel to such a place of confrontation
and distress that in the necessity to defend
itself or even to perpetuate itself, its existence,
it found itself increasingly required to act in
a way that was distinctly un-Jewish.
And if we have celebrated anything as Jews
historically and probably would have continued the luxury
of that celebration, it was the sense that
we had something unique going for us of
a moral and ethical kind.
The kind of thing one endures when one
is not really tested.
But when the test came, we found ourselves
horrifyingly capable of a conduct that we ourselves
would have condemned and have condemned when we
ourselves were the object of that conduct, as
for example, when it was perpetrated upon us
by our enemies and more recently by Germany
in that Nazi period.
We're acting now, ironically, in a way that
is too fearfully close to what we ourselves
experienced, and it's a predicament and a crisis,
a moral one, of which I believe God
himself is the author.
Now, is that to say, then, that this
is a final demonstration and proof that God
is finished with Israel, and that Israel is
showing its true colors and is not what
it hoped to be as a demonstration of
the Jewish nation and the Gentile world and
what we evangelicals had hoped for it to
be, and therefore it's the final and concluding
proof what some critics have all along contended
in an issue that has been raised from
the church since through the time of Paul,
is God finished with Israel?
Is this the conclusive evidence?
And the answer is, of course, God forbid,
no.
That Israel does have a destiny, but it
is not to be revealed in its own
achievement, but lies exclusively in God's faithfulness to
his own election and promise by his own
power.
That if we could but understand Israel in
its failure to be the nation that it
hoped in a generation, what a colossal success
that would have been in 40 years to
resuscitate a dead language, to establish a whole
civilization, to become one of the formidable military
and technological powers in the world, despite the
sparsity of its numbers, and came within a
hair's breadth of succeeding, and had it succeeded,
what would have been celebrated?
Not God, but the ability of this most
unique people, which was never God's intention.
The whole purpose of Israel as a witness
nation is not to celebrate itself, but it's
God, and therefore he could not allow it
to succeed on the basis of its own
prowess or expertise, but allow it to come
teasingly close to that kind of fulfillment, only
to have the bottom abruptly fall out through
calamities of such a kind as no one
could have imagined.
So the fulfillment of God's intention for Israel
waits not upon its demonstration of its virtue,
but the final exhaustion of any capability it
might have had in itself, humanly speaking, to
be the Israel of God.
Israel's failure to establish herself as a righteous
faith, and as an example to the Gentile
nation, is her very witness to this fact.
Of course, she doesn't understand.
She doesn't have our privilege of the illumination
of the Spirit, and being the kind of
secular and non-biblical people that she essentially
is, except for a small minority, does not
take Ezekiel 37 seriously, and has not seen
her present plight in the light of the
prophetic scriptures.
That's a real irony, and a truest statement
of its real condition as a nation.
Utterly secular, and seeking by its own prowess
and ability to extricate itself from its own
predicaments, and will not succeed.
We who love Israel need to brace ourselves
and anticipate an increasingly deepening crisis unto death,
and I don't know how literal that death
will be, but I believe that Ezekiel 37
is something that points to and makes clear
the necessity for that kind of death, that
he might raise them up out of their
graves, that they might know that I am
the Lord.
That is reiterated in this text, in verses
6, and you shall know that I am
the Lord, in verse 13, and you shall
know that I am the Lord when I
have opened your graves for my people and
brought you up out of your graves, and
verse 14, and shall put my Spirit in
you, and you shall live, and I shall
place you in your own land.
Then you shall know that I the Lord
have spoken it and performed it, saith the
Lord.
To know the I am, and to know
the Lord, is to know a God who
performed something because he had spoken it, that
what takes place is not the result of
your endeavor and your ability, but the power
of a God to fulfill his own word
in the very face of your utter and
dismal failure.
And if we don't know God that way,
we don't know God, for he's the God
of resurrection from the dead, preeminently.
That's the way Abraham had to know him
in order to become the father of many
nations.
It's the way in which the church is
required to know him, for we do not
know him at all.
And if we do not know him and
Israel does not know him, how shall he
be made known, as he in fact is?
So you who have clutched your tongues, only
too happy to see the disintegration of the
hope of Israel, or those of us who
have waxed melancholy and unhappy at the sight
of their vexation and crisis that requires them
to display force in a way that is
characteristically un-Jewish and contradicts the very aspiration
of Israel to be a moral example to
the nations, need to understand the deeper significance
of this crisis, again, of which God is
the author.
Our very failure as the church to understand
it, by clutching our tongues or wringing our
fingers, shows that we have not truly understood
God.
That the hope to see the fulfillment of
Israel in 40 years, as the prophetic messianic
state, is really an expression of our own
impatience, our own immaturity, and our own lack
of understanding of the centrality of the cross
and of suffering in the effecting of the
things that are enduring and eternal.
In a word, what we wanted charismatically for
them was what we want for ourselves, a
quick fix.
And the same people who thought that the
charismatic movement was the spirit being poured out
on all flesh and thought that we had
arrived are equally the candidates to believe that
this Zionistic state, largely the work of man,
was itself the fulfillment of the prophetic scriptures.
And that's not to say that there's not
to be such a fulfillment, but it's a
process much more painful, much more excruciating, much
more demanding, much more requiring the supernatural demonstration
of God than we had understood.
Then you shall know when I, the Lord,
have spoken it and performed it, saith the
Lord, and I shall place you in your
own land.
I have a growing suspicion that my own
people have placed themselves.
And if anyone is capable of that, it
is we.
Through our own funding, through our own strengths
and energies and abilities, that's not to say
that God was not present and even giving
an assist, but it was an assist in
order to bring us to a final demonstration
of our own ultimate incapacity to establish our
own state.
That must be demonstrated.
If the Israel of God is to be
established by the power of God in the
knowledge of God, that he might be made
known to the nations in the fulfillment of
their calling spoken of in Romans 11, that
is without repentance, namely to be a nation
of priests and a light unto the world.
A Zionistic Israel that would have succeeded on
the basis of its own merit and its
own strength could not have been that light,
but that it was necessary for them to
experience that failure, that out of the ashes
of that death might come the resurrection of
the true Messianic Israel by the power of
God was a necessary prelude, in my opinion,
because Israel is his witness people.
All the more in their apostasy and undeservedness
that it might demonstrate to the nations that
I am is who I am.
And when he will have mercy upon whom
he will have mercy, he will have mercy
independent of the stinking track record and failure
and apostasy of that people in their undeservedness.
Can you understand what I'm saying, folks?
This is not an anti-Semitic diatribe.
This is an understanding that to be the
true witness nation is to display God in
his essential character, which is his mercy, and
that his mercy can only be mercy when
it is extended in total undeservedness to a
nation that has blasphemed him in every place
where they have been driven.
And even now, in their conduct, required in
their own perpetuation, does not honor God.
And that God will bring mercy to that
people and bring it in such a way
that it is recognized by all nations, that
not only will Israel recognize that I the
Lord have spoken this and have performed it,
but the nations themselves.
So spectacular, so powerful and so supernatural will
be the God who establishes Israel in the
land when he will do it according to
the words that he has spoken.
So this is the issue is not the
glorification of Israel, but of God, a God
who through his own goodness prompts him to
act as he does.
And as the recipients of his undeserved grace
and mercy, they become most profoundly the witness
unto him.
And if anybody has a head screwed on
right tonight and he's hearing this can say,
you know, you might as well be describing
the church.
Exactly.
If we are not the witness of undeserved
mercy, what are we witnessing?
And in fact, it's the failure to deeply
comprehend that that incapacitates us to play the
role that God has designated for us in
bringing Israel from its grave, namely that by
our mercy, they might receive mercy.
I want to say tonight that I have
very little confidence that in our present condition
as the church at large, that we have
such a handle on the mercy of God,
that we are so conscious of being the
recipients of his mercy that we are in
any condition to extend it.
But I want to say that the time
is not far when we're going to come
to an historic moment that if we don't
know that mercy as we should and are
not able to demonstrate it to this people,
it will be a colossal failure of a
schema that God himself has established by which
you could be glorified through Israel in it.
In it through the church in its extending
of mercy to Israel, that it might be
restored.
I think we're going to see death.
In such a form, not only to those
that are in present Israel, but to all
Jews throughout the world, that an increasing global
fury of anti-Semitism will come of such
a kind that Jews will be driven out
of their places of affluence and security and
safety to find themselves again refugees in the
world.
Whether there will be such a death in
Israel itself of a military kind and a
conflict with militant Arab enemies of the kind
that despite their proud boast, never again they
shall find themselves driven again out of the
land and into the nations, I can't say,
but I'm preparing myself for that eventuality.
Whether it's that or not, I expect a
calamity of increasing proportion to come upon this
world where as this text says, they themselves
say, we are cut off.
We are dry bones.
We and this audience tonight, knowledge of my
people presently, if you can tell me a
moment when we have ever nationally acknowledged that
we are without hope.
If anything, we are the perennial optimists, not
in God, but in ourselves.
And if we can come out of the
Holocaust with a tattooed number on our arm
and a shredded shirt and nothing more, and
within a matter of a decade or two,
establish our fortunes in such a way as
to make the Gentiles envious who are round
about us.
What will it take to bring us to
a place where we ourselves acknowledge that we
are cut off and that we are without
hope and that we are as dry bones
because God is waiting for that acknowledgement.
And when he comes, he commands the prophet
to speak that their graves might be open,
that they might come out of their graves
and become an exceeding great army.
So the church, we should have known better
would be less critical of Israel if it
understood about itself that God does not receive
us for any worthiness on our own part.
How much of her disappointment with Israel is
predicated on a false premise and hope of
an idealized Israel that we have been fascinated
by, by the energy of this people and
their ability to raise themselves up in a
generational, which is really a statement of the
projection of our own vain hope and perception
of ourselves, contrary to the whole tenor of
the gospel that rests on the issue of
death and resurrection necessary for Abraham, necessary for
Jesus, but somehow not necessary for Israel or
for ourselves.
That the thing that endures exceedingly and eternally
is what has raised us out of death
by the power of God.
And that there's something about death that even
we who celebrate the doctrine of resurrection don't
want ourselves to taste in our own experience
and therefore did not desire it for Israel
either.
We wanted a glibber, easier, more fast style
success, but God is not accommodating our shallowness.
He must perform what he must perform that
he might be glorified.
Thereby, for nothing demonstrates the glory of God
more than to take something that is abjectly
and totally failed unto death and to resurrect
and to raise that to a newness of
life, not the Israeli that is marked by
its chutzpah, its arrogance and self-assurance, which
would have impressed many of us and has,
but a newness of life that displays the
very character of God and the humility and
brokenness out of which God will raise this
people in the profoundest repentance that has ever
come to any nation on earth.
Consider, for example, an Ezekiel where it says
that when they see him that they shall
mourn, they shall be in bitterness for him
as one is in bitterness for one's firstborn,
every family apart.
It's just a faint stroke of God's brush,
but it suggests a national repentance of such
a kind that we have, that has never
been demonstrated by any nation on earth.
In Ezekiel 36 verse 31, then shall you
remember your own evil ways and your doings
that were not good, and you shall loathe
yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities
and for your abomination.
Zephaniah chapter three, I will also leave in
verse 12 in the midst of the and
afflicted and poor people, and they shall trust
in the name of the Lord.
The remnants of Israel shall not do iniquity
nor speak wise, neither shall a deceitful tongue
be found in their mouth, where they shall
feed and lie down and none shall make
them afraid.
This nation's character is going to be so
transformed by the remarkable dealings of God that
brings them to a death of their own
celebration and raises them up to a new
character of life that the nations themselves will
rejoice for the blessedness that comes to them
through so transformed a people.
At that time I will bring you again
in verse 20, even in the time that
I gather you, for I will make you
a name and a praise among all the
people of the earth when I turn back
your captivity before your eyes, sayeth the Lord.
The verse before it, I will get them
praise and fame in every land where they
have been put to shame.
My people also shall be righteous, it says
in Isaiah 60 verse 21.
They shall inherit the land forever.
The branch of my plant in the work
of my hands that I may be glorified.
A little one shall become as a thousand
in a small and strong nation.
I, the Lord, will hasten it in its
time, whereas thou has been forsaken in verse
15 of that chapter and hated so that
no man went through thee.
I will make thee an eternal excellency, a
joy of many generations.
And we can see that scenario being played
out now.
The increasing distaste of nations for Israel, those
who formerly honored Israel, those who had put
the stickers on their bumpers for Israel and
then took them off at the first oil
crisis.
That something is happening, that Israel that was
once celebrated as a David among Goliath is
increasingly losing its favor among nations and a
growing distemper of agitation and disquiet toward Israel
to the point where a hatred will be
developed in an Israel that will not hesitate
to use any means for its own perpetuation
to the moral dismay of nations who expected
better of her.
This is in fulfillment of the Scripture.
The pity would be that we should find
ourselves among those who hate her in our
disappointment in her failure when we should have
understood that that very failure was needful and
was spoken by God and needs to be
fulfilled.
Now, it's interesting that God himself does not
speak to the dry bones, but he employs
a prophet and commands him to speak.
A prophet whose very prophetic faith is stretched
to the uttermost, nigh unto breaking, when God
himself brings him by the Spirit down into
the valley of dry bones and makes him
walk all around and in a sense rubs
his face into the grim fact of the
utter totality of this death unto dry bones,
the rest of any hope, and then puts
the teasing question to him.
Can these bones live?
If a prophet is known for anything, it's
prophetic faith, it's prophetic confidence, it's prophetic knowledge
of God, and yet it's an extremity of
such a kind that stretches even the prophet
to the breaking that he can only answer
haltingly, Lord, thou knowest.
A prophet and calls him the son of
man.
Isn't that what prophet is?
Aren't you looking at one, hearing one who
is utterly man, who sweats at the pores,
who quakes, who goes through all of the
conniptions that adhere in the flesh like any
man?
He is ultimately man in all defect and
failure, and yet called, chosen to see, to
proclaim the foolish things, and to be half
-jokingly instructed by the pastor before coming out
on the platform.
I hope you're not going to cause a
debacle of such a kind that I'll not
be able to clean up afterwards.
There's something about the prophetic calling that, I
don't know, I don't have a word for
it, because it's a mess, and yet it's
a glory.
Son of man.
They're not little robots punched off the assembly
line, they're flesh and blood and have a
history in God, and must experience the things
that they're required to speak.
Can these bones live, son of man?
Why is God so graphic?
Why are these statements so penetrating?
Because I believe that God is suggesting that
there must come a time at the consummation
of the age, in these last days, where
if Israel is to be restored, because what
shall her restoration be but life from the
dead?
Now if the fall of them be the
riches of the world, and the diminishing of
them the riches of the Gentiles, how much
more their fullness?
For if the casting away of them be
the reconciling of the world, what shall the
receiving of them be but life from the
dead?
Verses 12 and 15 of Romans 11.
And where did Paul get it?
From the same text that we are considering
tonight.
As I shared with your pastor earlier today,
we've been on this subject through the day,
it's an astonishment how prolific the prophetic scriptures
are about the restoration of Israel as a
nation, and the great redemptive purposes of God.
And yet how little conviction and understanding there
is among God's people, how little anticipation.
Which is all the more embarrassing as I
believe that the church is destined by God,
and has a mandate by God, to be
the very factor that brings Israel's restoration to
pass.
That by our mercy they might receive mercy.
Have they stumbled by the age of four?
Paul asks them this chapter, God forbid.
But through their fall, salvation has come to
the Gentiles, so as to move them to
jealousy.
When the fullness of the Gentiles be come
in, then all Israel shall be saved as
it is written.
Wherever we look in this great concluding, ethical
chapter of Romans 9-11, God's sense of
peace in the book of Romans, which is
Paul's definitive theological and apostolic statement of the
grand plan of God, is the issue of
Israel inserted.
And I want to ask the church tonight,
is it inserted centrally in our understanding?
And if it's not, to what degree are
we apostolic?
What shall the receiving of them be but
life from the dead?
We can't begin to understand the impact that
Israel's restoration will have for the nations of
the earth.
It will be the most glorious and global
demonstration of God in his mercy that has
ever been visibly expressed before the nations of
the world.
And this Israel that is presently a threat
to its neighbors, and is a word of
foreboding and dread by nations round about, and
even threatens the security of the nations of
the world that are distant from it, will
be such a blessing, as God spoke to
Abraham, as to bless all the families of
the earth.
A resurrected people coming in the meekness of
the very nature of God himself, who are
formerly known for their belligerence and their arrogance
and their military might, to come to the
very nations whom they threatened and at the
risk of their own life, to make the
mercy of God known to nations that would
otherwise have perished.
It will be as life from the dead.
I personally do not believe that it's the
task of the church to evangelize the nations.
It is to win from the nations a
people for his name from among all nations.
But the task of the nations themselves, I
believe, is Israel as the first of restored
nations to the nations that makes its ministry
a life from the dead.
And yet, how shall it be restored to
fulfill it?
If we fail in our function to be
to it what God calls us to be,
in the extending of our mercy and of
the making of them jealous, though Paul says
in the same book that they are the
enemies of the gospel, for your sake.
What will it take and what kind of
a church will it require to move this
Israel to jealousy that has historically opposed the
gospel to the point where Paul does not
hesitate to call him the enemy of the
gospel?
Whatever it is, I cannot describe it, but
I'll say this.
It is more than that which we have
known and what is charismatic at its best.
Only an ultimate church in its apostolic and
prophetic configuration, in its maturity, in its coherence,
in its true corporality, in its true nature
and intention of God revealing his light and
his glory can conceivably fulfill this mandate.
Now listen to this.
The question is, will we be that church
ever if we do not take that mandate
seriously?
I want to say tonight that God has
given us that mandate not so much only
for Israel's sake, but as much for our
own.
If we did not have this stubborn, obdurate
and resistant people as the ultimate target of
our outreach and the demonstration of the reality
of our God, we would have satisfied ourselves
with much less standard and much less requirement.
We would have measured by ourselves and unto
ourselves.
Did you like the meetings?
How's the Sunday school?
How's the program for the kids?
Did you enjoy the preaching?
How was the worship?
How's the budget?
All of these measures have infinitely to do
with ourselves, but God gives us happily a
measure that requires us to some transcendent place
beyond and outside of ourselves.
And not just any people, but this people
who have historically been the most obdurate resistors
of the gospel in all of their intellectuality,
in all of their stubborn character, in all
of their abilities, they are fearful in their
resistance.
And he says, now move that people to
jealousy.
And we heard prophetically tonight in the early
part of the service that there's a grace
that is available and a great grace that
has not yet been given to the church,
because we have not yet taken this mandate
seriously.
It has been to the detriment of the
Jews and it has been to the detriment
of the church that we have sidestepped this
most demanding of all gospel requirements, that God
even gives as a first priority that this
gospel is the power of God unto salvation
to everyone who believes, to the Jew first
and also to the Greek.
I can't say it as a thus saith
the Lord.
I can only say it as an intuitive,
prophetic conviction that I believe that that is
a requirement of the church in every generation
and in every locality.
And which church at any time historically and
presently could ever say, but there are no
Jews roundabout to whom we can go first?
Hasn't God in his genius who has given
the mandate also given us the potential for
its fulfillment by seeing to it in his
multiple way that in judging Israel and casting
it out among all nations, that there's not
a nation in which the church is where
Jews are not?
Why have we failed to honor the priority
of God?
Why have we failed to take the word
of God seriously?
Because intuitively I think that we're cowards.
Because intuitively I think that we recognize this
is too formidable and too demanding for us.
And indeed it is.
As God is waiting for a witness nation
not to demonstrate its chutzpah or its expertise,
he's waiting for a church not to demonstrate
its ability, but his.
In a word, the ultimacy of the demand
that Israel makes upon the church brings us
to the issue of death and resurrection.
It is only our witness to them from
the place of resurrection that can conceivably move
them to jealousy.
Nothing that is religious, however impressive, or however
charismatic, will do it.
In a word, unless we ourselves are on
the resurrection ground, how shall they be moved
to jealousy?
It's just that we're a people with another
set of religious priorities and vocabulary no more
impressive than anyone else's or their own.
Are you guys following me?
Getting restless?
No?
Okay.
I'm giving you a compressed seminar in one
night that should have at a minimum three
speakings to adequately suggest it.
The issue of Israel I want to contend
tonight is the issue of the church.
And we're going to see that increasingly as
we come to the end of the age.
And I believe that it's the issue of
Israel that will indeed reveal who in fact
the church is.
That in our first speaking in these days
we mentioned a remnant church, a persecuted church,
and a larger religious body who will be
its persecutors, employing the same Christian terminology but
the rest of its power, who cannot tolerate
the existence of that minority of the spirit.
And it may well be that the response
to the hated people that the Jew will
increasingly become in every nation will indeed reveal
who that true church is.
Because I'll tell you what, folks, even before
this emergency comes and Jews are in that
extremity and become yet more hateful and more
despised, it's tough even now to relate to
them as we ought.
There's something about a Jew in the wisdom
of God that kind of has a tendency
to rub a Gentile law.
I don't know why it is, but far
from outmoving them to jealousy, they move us
to envy.
They provoke us by their success.
We're irritated by their ability, their effortless seeming
wonderment in the obtaining of fortunes or sailing
through schools and getting their straight A's while
we break our heads for a B-minus.
I'll tell you what, it's an unusual Gentile
who can witness this and not have in
his deepest soul a little kind of enmity
inculcated.
In a word, what I'm saying is that
nothing from us humanly or religiously will fulfill
the mandate to which we're called with regard
to them.
That in a word, the only church that
will move this people to envy and have
a mercy to extend to them is a
church that is utterly transcendent, heavenly, apostolic, prophetic,
true.
And what I'm saying further is that we
will never obtain that if we do not
take the mandate seriously that compels us to
find, to obtain, and to keep that ground.
In a word, we're locked in with the
Jew in an inescapable symbiotic relationship where the
one without the other cannot obtain to its
fulfillment in God, and God is the author
and the genius of that plan.
Oh, the depth of the riches pour Christ
out, the wisdom and the knowledge of God,
who has been his counselor.
I'll tell you that that ecstatic pain of
praise that concludes the great chapters of Romans
9-11 has got to be a statement
of more than the fact that God intends
to save Jews like myself or Gary to
be added to the body of Christ.
We appreciate that.
We love that.
There's a remnant in every generation that God
will add to the church.
But I'm saying tonight that there's a weight,
a ponderous weight of Scripture throughout all the
prophets from which Paul draws to make his
statement in Romans 9-11 that there's a
destiny for Israel as a nation, a remnant
nation, not the same great numbers that exist
today, a decimated nation passing through a time
of Jacob's trouble through which not all shall
survive, for he shall purge out the rebels
from among them.
And I want you to turn with me
to Ezekiel 20 to show you how close
to home this program of God is going
to come, of which we are principal actors.
And if we fail in the role in
which he has cast us, we cannot hope
for their restoration.
I said I expect a global anti-Semitism,
and I receive publications from the Jewish community
that testify to that.
You need to know it, that there's a
rising crescendo of anti-Jewish hatred growing in
every nation in the world, and the lid
is off in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, and there's not only ethnic hatred surfacing,
but anti-Jewish hatred surfacing.
That the conduct of Israel with the Palestinians
has excited a dislike and a contempt and
a hatred for nations, as I've said, that
formally looked upon Israel in a fond way.
And even many Christians are growing cruel because
of the way Israel is disappointing them.
This is God's program, it's going to increase.
And there'll be no nation in the world
where Jews will be exempt from a bitterness
and a hatred and a fury directed against
them to such an extent that it will
drive them out of their present places of
security, affluence, and comfort, which is necessary to
bring them to a place of confrontation with
God in the wilderness of the nations, which
is God's stratagem for the majority of world
Jewry in the last days.
Listen to this in verse 33 on from
Ezekiel 20.
As I live, says the Lord God, surely
with a mighty hand and with a stretched
out arm and with fury poured out, I
will rule over you.
Remember the last official statement of the Jewish
community?
We will not have this man to rule
over us.
I will rule over you, but it's going
to take because of your stubbornness and your
pride, a fury poured out with a stretched
out arm, and I will bring you out
from the people.
That's what we'll do it, and we'll gather
you out of the countries wherein you are
scattered with a mighty hand, with a stretched
out arm, and with fury poured out.
And I will bring you into the wilderness
of the people, and there will I plead
with you face to face, like as I
pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of
the land of Egypt.
So will I plead with you, saith the
Lord God, and I will cause you to
pass under the rod, and I will bring
you into the bond of the covenant, and
I will purge out from among you the
rebels, and them that transgress against me, and
I will bring them forth out of the
country where they sojourned, but they shall not
enter into the land of Israel, and you
shall know that I am the Lord.
I want to be on record tonight, and
I pray that I'm wrong.
I'd rather be dismissed as a false prophet.
I'd rather be in error that my people
would be spared what I suspect these verses
mean, in a calamity that soon shall come
upon them worldwide, namely a fury poured out
in such a magnitude of which the Nazi
experience was a precursor and a foreshadowing of
what will now become a global phenomenon, even
right here in River City.
You say, but it can never happen in
America.
I mean, we're true blue.
We're apple pie.
We're democratic.
Come on, you simpletons.
If it could happen in the land of
Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, as a network of places
of refuge for Jews in flight in this
very country now.
The Lord's injunction that to avoid the mark
of the beast that we should begin to
ourselves in good sense and wisdom to anticipate
and to prepare and look to the development
of community in an agricultural base is not
only a provision for our survival, but may
likely be theirs.
This is his program.
I didn't make it up there.
I will meet with them in the wilderness
of the nation face to face.
I'll tell you what they they better see
something more than what perhaps I'm looking out
at tonight.
They better see something of the light that
lightens the Gentiles, which is also the glory
of the people of Israel.
You want to know something, folks?
Why I'm here tonight?
Why I'm alive tonight?
Why I'm in God's service tonight?
Because 26 years ago, as a man who
was brought down into the place of death,
functious, hot shot, arrogant, self-sufficient, conceited Jew,
full of opinions, coming to the end of
my own confidence in recognizing the paucity and
the bankruptcy of my empty humanistic slogans, unable
to continue as a teacher, having nothing to
offer my students, but to raise questions that
I could not myself answer, took a year's
leave of absence and put a pack on
my back and began moving around in the
Western world of which we Jews are so
much the architects and the formers, looking for
philosophical answers.
For what else shall an atheistic Jew seek?
Only to find day by day in the
book that is available tonight at the back
of the room called Ben Israel, which is
the journal of that journey, that there was
a God looking for me, picking me up
off the side of the road and bringing
me into an encounter with another race of
people, a new creation who were Gentiles yet
not Gentiles, something transfigured in them, something transcendent
in them, whose faces shone, who had a
word that penetrated my dark and unbelieving heart.
And in the midst of this dealing, in
the city of Zurich, I meet this American
high school girl, just graduated and on tour
as a graduation gift from her family, a
Gentile of the Gentiles, a waspish middle-class
little snippet of a girl who should have
moved me to the kinds of anger and
contempt that such symbols of Protestantism have always
affected in arrogant New York Jews.
But I'll tell you what, there was something
in that little girl that took the steam
out of me.
There was a simplicity and a transparency.
There was a fearlessness.
Somehow we ended up spending the afternoon together
walking the woods surrounding that city, and I
kept pumping her with questions as an ex
-Marxist and ideologue who had taken on causes
and yet can rub my heel into the
face of closest neighbors and family.
How come you've been kind to me?
Oh, she answered, it's the love of God.
How come you're willing to be patient with
me?
It's the love of God.
How come you're willing to spend the time
with the love of God?
If I heard the love of God and
God one more time, I would have shrieked.
And I thought, if this kid mentions God
one more time in this afternoon, she's going
to get it.
My hobby was to engage Christians in debate
and wipe them out.
So what was this little middle-class Protestant
from the Midwest to me?
Sure enough, she mentioned God again.
I said, OK, kid, hold it.
You're sweet and all that, but listen, I
can't stand this God talk.
Answer me one question that no Christian has
ever successfully answered for me.
You've been talking about God all afternoon.
How do you know that he is?
I said, ha-ha, got her.
I'll get my steam engine all revved up,
and I'll crush the life out of her.
I'm waiting for that hesitation, that fluttering and
a choke, and that she'll think of something
clever she learned in Sunday school, and I'll
take it apart.
Without a moment's hesitation, she tilted up this
little Gentile but not Gentile face and said
to me with complete sincerity, I actually said,
I know that God is.
He lives in me.
The man who could not stand cliches, I
went down like a struck ox.
That was not a cliche, so it could
be in the mouth of others.
And when I got to my feet, recovering
from the power of that statement, thinking to
myself, what gave it that power?
It was not theological, let alone intellectual, and
finally realizing that the power of the statement
was its truth, and that he had the
faith to prove it.
I saw the light to lighten the Gentiles,
which is also at the same time the
glory of the people Israel, and I want
to say in the last day, folks, my
Jewish people are not going to see that
glory except in the light of your faces.
And I will meet with them face to
face.
How can it be in so many places
over the world where he's preparing these places
of refuge and flight, except that he has
the people in them who so reflect him,
that to meet them is to meet him,
for there they will come under the rod
of his authority.
There's a real mercy that's going to be
required of us, and we better have it
in a palpable and real way.
You know, there's something about the Jew that
flushes us out.
There's something about the issue of the Jew
that finds us out.
For those of us who subscribe to the
correctness of the doctrine of mercy, how many
of us are living sexually as Pharisees who
believe that what we have received from God
is proportionate to our good works or to
our merit?
Because when I say to you that God
will have mercy upon whom he will have
mercy, your first response to me is, but
they don't deserve it.
I'll tell you what, that says more about
us as the church than it says about
them.
There's a reason why God has placed them
in our path.
We need them as desperately and urgently as
they need us.
We're locked in, and the one without the
other can never succeed in the ultimate intention
of God by which he'll be glorified.
It's the issue of Israel alone that is
most calculated to stretch the church and bring
it to the ultimate faith and obedience and
prophetic stature.
And here's the point with which I want
to end.
Who is that son of man?
Who is that prophetic company whose speaking brings
a nation from death to life if it
is not us, the church, in its final
and ultimate prophetic configuration, whose speaking is more
than a matter of opinion or a medley
of voices, but a single unity and agreement
formed by God that is authoritative and constitutes
an event?
Does your faith balk at this?
Here's what I believe, folks.
We are on a destined course that requires
us to come to such a place in
God that our speaking in agreement in one
mind and one soul and in one spirit
with the full conviction of prophetic faith in
the moment that God requires it as an
act of obedience will be the issue of
the life or the death of this people.
If we choke and stumble and falter, if
we are not in agreement, if we have
people of varying voices and discord and disagreement,
there will not be that singular and authoritative
speaking that can raise the dead.
How do we come to that condition from
where we presently are in the medley of
voices that we presently represent as the collection
of individualities that we presently constitute?
We need to come to a constituency of
things that is corporate, one mind, one voice,
but not by some process by which it's
imposed upon us, or some automation or some
religious processing, but by the precious, sanctifying work
of God that brings us increasingly to the
agreement with Him that is the work of
His Spirit.
That if we took one voice in an
Israel in an agreement in a moment when
the priest blew their trump to give a
shout that brought the wall down, that opened
up the possession of the land, there's going
to be a historic moment or a collection
of moments where that kind of authoritative word
must come from the church, or it will
not come at all.
A word that is more than opinion and
a word that is more than correct.
It's a word that constitutes event.
It's a creative word.
It's a prophetic word that only the people
who have come to that kind of maturity
and unity and agreement can speak.
We need to be on a course right
now that will move us increasingly from where
we presently are as the collection of individuality
to become that prophetic entity in God that
can...