One that Paul speaks about in Romans, in
which he said, I would not have you
to be ignorant of this mystery, lest you
become wise in your own conceit.
There's something about the mystery of Israel that
opens up whole dimensions of things that would
not otherwise have been seen, otherwise have been
required.
And in the absence of that, we flaps
into a kind of defunct Christianity, hardly sufficient
for our own need, let alone have any
capability of touching the world or being to
the Jews in the last days, what we
ought.
Please don't stroke her here while I'm speaking.
Thank you.
We're going to see a great crisis break
forth over all the earth with Jews in
the last days.
You can speak of it as a chastisement,
which it is.
It will also be a penalty for sin
and a judgment, which is right.
It will not be some arbitrary act of
God just performing something because he's malicious.
It will be a God who is just
and righteous and actually displaying his righteousness in
the way that he will call his people
to task and bring upon them the full
penalty of their own rejection of him.
Because every calamity that has come to Jews
in their history has been some attempt by
God through the suffering experienced in calamity, that
it might be recognized as judgment so that
a people might consider and break and turn
repentantly to the God who has inflicted it.
So far, basically, it has not worked.
And we Jews have a wonderful way to
ascribe to men what comes to us from
God.
But in the last days, we're going to
see in this final chastisement a dawning consciousness
that the magnitude of the suffering that will
come upon world Jewry, the uprooting from all
nations, the devastation that will come to the
nation Israel itself, maybe even the demise, do
you know this word, the end, the death
of the political state, will have such a
severity that Jews will be prompted as never
before to perhaps consider that in the magnitude
of what they're experiencing is a revelation of
the magnitude of their sin.
And they'll be helped in this by your
explanation that they're going to be moving through
us in a condition of distress.
And unless there's some mercy extended by the
church in the earth at that time, not
only of a physical kind, but of a
spiritual kind, they will perish.
And their salvation is so critical for the
coming of the Lord and the establishing of
this kingdom.
You know that the air goes out of
me as I say things like that.
I just feel depleted, like I've lost virtue
because the concepts are so awesome.
What?
That that last thing has got to do
with the coming of the Lord and the
coming of his kingdom?
Exactly.
So it's more than just the rescue of
a people in a final distress, but that
a return of a remnant of those who
survive through the mercy of the church brings
the Lord out of a long confinement, because
it says in Acts 3.21, he's confined
in the heavens waiting for the restoration of
all things spoken by the prophets since the
world began.
And that thing that he's waiting for and
that the prophets have spoken of is the
scenario that I'm describing to you, a last
day's time of global suffering for the people
Israel called the time of Jacob's trouble.
And Jacob is the condition of this people,
not only in Israel, but all over the
world and including in South Africa.
So none will be omitted.
None will be absolved.
None will escape the severity of this final
dealing is very close.
It could happen in a moment.
The stage is set.
It begins in Israel through circumstances that are
already working and have been working since the
advent of that state.
And when the violence breaks out, it will
not be confined to Israel, but will pursue
Jews worldwide.
It will trigger and set forth a time
of Jacob's trouble.
You have to look this up for yourself.
There's no way that I could review all
this in any kind of detail.
So if you have a pencil, a pen,
piece of paper, a Bible, or you came
to be entertained.
The classic chapters on the description of the
time of Jacob's trouble, Jeremiah chapter 30 and
31, Daniel from chapter 7 through 12, particularly
the end of the book of Daniel, when
the power of the people is broken.
So you'll see that we're moving toward a
climax that has its inception in Israel when
something is triggered by the very factors that
have been working since the advent of the
state of Israel.
The irritation and the resentment of the neighbors,
the Palestinians, the Arabs, by the rude appropriation,
if I can put it that way, of
the land of Israel under the thought that
it is our land.
Yes, it is, but not at our taking.
It's ours when it is given.
It's ours when we can fulfill the conditions
for remaining and abiding on the land, namely
a covenant faithfulness to God.
The land is not ours to grab at
any occasion.
And so we're going to suffer for some
of the things that have been set in
motion by our own human attempt to fulfill
what I believe only God can perform and
will perform at the very end of this.
So that unbelieving Jews are going to see
God unveiled in a dimension that will beggar
their minds presently.
And not only Jews, but the church itself
will be stunned that God is going to
display himself in judgment in so vivid a
fashion that we will know that we will
know this is not some accident, some arbitrary
thing.
This is evidently a design of God.
And then there are scriptures that talk of
it.
And as you get into the prophets, you'll
see the references to ruined cities, Ezekiel chapter
36, Ezekiel chapter 20, Amos chapter nine.
When you once you start getting into this
prophetic overview, certain words will come up with
a remarkable frequency, captivity, scattered, expelled, cast out,
terror, fear so that the Lord says at
the end of this, you will no longer
again, no terror or fear indicating that the
last experience of Jews in the world is
terror and fear where you'll no longer be
uprooted out or you'll no longer suffer famine
and that blessing will come.
You no longer plant vineyards and others will
drink it.
What does that imply?
That others have appropriated what Jews have established.
They've had not had the opportunity to enjoy
the fruit of their own labor.
So sudden will the upheaval be and the
being cast out again into the nations.
The dispersed of Judah and the cast, how
to say the, not the cast away on
somebody.
Help me of Israel.
We're going to see that.
And it's going to be a shock for
many Christians who have hoped for a happier
scenario, who are aware that the state of
Israel is presently in trouble and in conflict,
but somehow it will be resolved and a
peace will be established and Israel will grow
into the kind of nation that will fulfill
God's hope for it and promise as a,
as the blessing to all nations.
That's not the way that I believe the
scriptures read.
The requirement of God is so great that
you cannot grow into it.
You cannot improve into it.
It's going to require a devastation unto death
and a resurrection.
So that we're going to see at the
end of this, the first national resurrection.
We've seen individual resurrections.
We know that Jesus was raised from the
dead.
The apostle Paul was eminently the man of
the resurrection.
The early church was a resurrection phenomenon.
Unfortunately, the present church is not the present
church only affirms the correctness of the doctrine
of resurrection, but it lives far short of
the reality.
How can you blame it?
Because what is there about our present Christianity
that requires the life of God and the
supernatural power of God and the resurrection reality,
our present Christianity is so tended, so predictable,
so prescribed, we can perform it out of
our own intelligence and well-meaning intention that
will end in the design of God, when
the catastrophe of world Jewry takes place and
we will be called to a line of
conduct and response beyond any ability in ourselves
to perform.
And we will, we will bless God in
that day that in his great mercy, he
has presented us with a crisis of need
that compels us to move from being nearly
evangelical or charismatic into the deepest appropriation of
his life, his mercy, his love, his power,
his authority, lest our own life end in
some lesser place and we fix our eternal
life on that basis.
So let me, let me, uh, let me
run that by again.
You know why I'm, I'm gasping for air
because you're young and I might just as
well have come from Mars or another planet
to bring views that are so, um, unamendable
to your present understanding, because I know that
I know you have no concept of eternity
at all.
I know that you're fixed in your present
mindset in this present life.
The only thing is, is that you don't
know it.
And that the phrase, this present life is
an apostolic phrase coined and employed by both
Paul and Peter.
And why did they say this present?
Because they know that this is temporal passing.
And if you'll excuse my language, ephemeral, it
means transient.
It's going to fade.
You don't know that being young and being
the product of this age and this civilization,
you think that now is the premium or
what will soon be when you graduate school
or when you get married or when you
have your career.
God and his mercy wants to save us
from an eternal embarrassment.
And when he speaks of a wailing and
gnashing of teeth, I don't think that he's
describing the reaction of the unsaved who have
been cast into the fire of hell.
I think he's describing believers who have fallen
short of the glory of God.
And that he says out of darkness, it's
not fire, but a distance from the brightness
of his glory, because most of us will
not have lived in the light as he
is in the light.
And when the day of eternity comes, it
can come tomorrow.
We will not be fitted to that proximity.
Every one of us will have an eternity
fixed in terms of what was the actuality
and the truth of our walk with God
in this present life.
And right now, just as a man, 36
years old in the faith, wildly traveling in
the world, I feel a deep sense of
chagrin and almost pain for the condition of
the church.
So if the day of the eternity would
have come now, there would be a bellowing
of wailings and gnashings of teeth for people
who will find out too late.
They had lived beneath the glory of God
and fixed themselves eternally in a place that
can not be remedied, no altered.
There's a finality about the day of eternity.
There's a finality about the day of the
Lord.
And the early church, very much different than
ourselves, lived in anticipation of that day.
And when I say lived, I mean really
lived.
Because what I'm saying is that if this
has not come into our consciousness, we are
not really living.
We have biological life.
We have a semblance of a Christian life,
but it's not a life that eventuates in
joy.
It's not a life that has a clear
significance.
It's not a life that anticipates a reward
for the works performed, because when Jesus comes,
it says he brings his rewards with him,
giving to every man according to his labor.
I'm sure that that phrase is as novel
to you as other things that I'm speaking.
I'm saying all that to say this, in
the wisdom of God and the mercy of
God, God has put us, the church, in
a relationship with Israel and the Jew that
serves purposes for us that would not otherwise
have been recognized nor obtained.
Israel is going to be brought into a
catastrophic condition and uprooting from their present places
of security and efforts worldwide.
Jesus says if that time were not cut
short, no flesh would survive.
But because it will be cut short for
the elect's sake, there will be some survival.
We cannot visualize it.
You know, I'm something like a man coming
to Germany, say in 1929, 1930, before the
advent of Hitler, who already has a prophetic
anticipation of an enormous program of annihilation that
will issue up out of Germany for the
Jewish people in Europe, and trying to persuade
the German church to be alerted for this
catastrophe.
And I'm sure the man would have been
looked upon as a madman, ranting and saying
things that were unthinkable by people presently in
a state of comfort, in the best of
all worlds, and hope for a future in
political and social changes.
Because of the richness of German civilization, they
could not imagine a view of a kind
that would speak about a Nazi takeover, that
the gutter elements of the most despicable, loathed,
debased, occultic, homosexual scum would actually rise up
out of their cellar beer hall meetings and
take over the whole apparatus of German civilization
and set in motion a world war that
will almost destroy Western civilization, bring down its
own cities and systematically annihilate European Jewry.
Somebody speaking like that in 1929, 1930 would
have been dismissed as mad because the German
church would have thought that unthinkable.
They are our textbook, because I'm saying that
we're going to face a scenario much like
that, but worse, and it will not be
confined to Germany or Europe.
And unless we anticipate it and take it
into our present consideration, we will collapse as
pathetically as the German church did.
It went down like a deck of cards.
Not only the church, but the courts, education,
the universities, all of the apparatus of civilization
that you would have thought had a long
history and would have resisted evil, collapsed in
fear for its own security and for the
preservation of its own life.
There was nothing to resist the horrendous evil
that came with Nazism in any institution of
German society, including the church.
The church collapsed because it was only an
institution.
Had it been an apostolic reality and people
in the spirit who could have discerned and
resisted and contended against the powers that were
prepared to take over their own nation, we
might have seen a different history.
So I'm asking you sympathy for the strange
burden I'm required to bear and to communicate
before the time.
Tonight on the radio program and in the
interview, the question came up more than once
on what is prophetic and the one of
the aspects of what prophetic is that is
such an anguish for the man called to
it is that is required to speak something
in advance of that time.
So as to make vivid and real that
which is not yet to set in motion
by that speaking things that will be prepared
for that eventuality.
Are you following me?
What I'm learning to my astonishment as I'm
traveling around South Africa and now more recently
Zimbabwe and Zambia, how few Christians have ever
even read Romans nine through 11, that when
I begin to speak on that subject, they
blink like they're hearing it for the first
time.
I've heard from pastors that they have admitted
to me on this trip, they have actually
passed it over because it just is a
model of, of things that they can't even
fathom.
I've had one of the most significant men
of our generation earned Baxter for anybody who's
ever heard that name is now passed on.
Tell me that Romans 11 has been a
mystery that he has just never understood and
has passed over.
And yet it's the mystery that Paul tells
us that if we are ignorant of it,
we will suffer a certain consequence.
So I just want to commend these three
chapters to get you into this mystery.
You'll need to pray because mere reading will
not open it.
It's a mystery that requires a revelation by
the spirit.
And if we are not disposed for that
revelation or the implications of it, we will
not receive it.
If we want to continue in this present
world and just be respectful of the respectable
Christians who are Christians too, but also enjoying
this present age and want to see it
continue and do not desire an apocalyptic conclusion
in judgment and in fire, you'll be as
much at a loss at some of the
ministers that I'm meeting.
You have to have an attitude of heart
that when God sees, he opens and reveals.
When you get into it, here's what you'll
recognize that Paul comes back again and again
to the church, he's answering the question from
the Roman church, is God finished with the
Jews?
They had every reason to believe that because
the Jews had slain the prophets that were
sent unto them.
They slew their own Messiah.
They were about to see the destruction of
Jerusalem and being cast out into the nations.
They had every reasonable right to think that
Israel has had its chance, has blown it.
And now the church has become the Israel
of God and would receive the promises of
God and that this people would be eternally
cast away.
So Paul is presented with an enormously significant
question.
And his answer is not only for the
church at Rome, but for the church of
every generation and especially our own.
And he says, God forbid that you should
think that he speaks of their fall as
being temporary, a momentary thing historically.
And why did God allow it?
Not only because it's the consequence of Israel's
apostasy and sin, but because through their fall,
salvation has come to the Gentiles.
But take a look at that.
Turn to Romans 11 from the
very first verse.
I say, then God has not rejected his
people.
Has he?
May it never be.
I'm not a conversant with Greek, but I'm
told and scholars make clear that the language
that Paul uses could not be stronger.
It's not just a thought in passing.
God forbid you should think that or ever
entertain the notion that God is finished with
Israel.
God cannot be finished with Israel because he
has made promises to the patriarchs because he
has given them a call and a gifting
that his own reputation, name and honor at
are at stake.
He cannot be finished.
Even their unbelief, even the rejection of their
Messiah and the prophets that have preceded him
will not be grounds for his rejection.
So God forbid that you should think that.
And then in verse 11, he takes it
up again.
Have they stumbled that they should fall?
May it never be, but by their transgression,
salvation has come to the Gentiles to move
them to jealousy.
I don't know how you have that in
your version, but it's clear that there's something
that has happened to Israel that affects Gentiles,
that salvation would come because of their fall,
but not something for you to enjoy for
yourself as if the sum all and the
be all is the salvation you have obtained
because of their fall, but through their full
salvation has come to the Gentiles so as
to move them to jealousy.
This is one of the most profound insights
of the mystery of the relationship between the
Gentile church and the Jewish nation, that we
are locked into something together that neither they
nor we can come to the fullness of
God's intention unless we see the design and
the mystery that God has allowed a Gentile
church to be birthed out of Israel's transgression,
but to be an instrument to restore Israel
to the salvation that they have lost by
moving them to jealousy.
I always say, would to God do a
footnote at the bottom of the page to
tell us how, but Paul does not give
us an inkling of how it's to be
done.
You think about it.
Think of your own present fellowship, the best
of them.
Can you consider that if a Jew walked
in or knew of it, that that would
move him to jealousy?
Is there anything going on presently in the
church in its best form that would move
present Jews to a jealousy?
What is he talking about?
Not just an emotion of jealousy, but an
envy and a desire to have what they
see demonstrated by you.
That has got to be something more than
good meetings, good services, good worship.
There's some demonstration that God is waiting for
that has to come from a Gentile church,
and that's what's astounding because Jews have no
expectation that you can perform anything that will
move them to jealousy.
They already have it all together.
They are already impressive, and even without the
aid of the Holy Spirit, their services can
easily match or exceed ours.
Their rabbis are intellectual, eloquent.
They have the advantage of Hebrew and ancient
liturgy and melody and all of the kinds
of things in terms of services.
They're not going to be jealous.
What then will do it?
Something that they could never expect would ever
have issued from Gentiles.
Some demonstration of the reality of God that
is so unequivocal and so demonstrable that they
will recognize in a flash that what we're
seeing through you is what would otherwise have
been our reality if we had not forsaken
God and rejected the Messiah, because what issues
from you is so unmistakably the reality of
the God of Israel and the God of
Jacob.
Am I describing the present condition of the
church?
Not at all.
That's why elsewhere in this chapter, Paul says,
when the fullness of the Gentiles become in,
so all Israel shall be saved as it
is written, the deliverer shall come out of
Zion and take transgression from Jacob.
Israel is going to be acted upon, is
going to be delivered by the Lord himself.
The deliverer will come out of Zion.
And I don't think it means a physical
geographical place so much as out of what
the word Zion symbolically represents out of a
reality obtained by a church that when it
comes of age, when the fullness of the
Gentiles become in, when his purpose has been
obtained for the Gentile church and the character
by which he would have it to enter
eternity, he then turns to the Jewish people
and delivers them.
So I'm saying all that to say this,
the issue of Israel's salvation as a nation,
all Israel shall be saved as it is
written, is the issue of a church coming
of age when the fullness of the Gentiles
become in, when the number from all nations
from the mission activity of the church and
its evangelistic activity has been obtained, a people
for his name from among all nations.
But more than that, when a character of
a certain kind has been obtained, God then
moves toward this people and becomes the deliverer.
And so you say big deal.
So what?
Because you're presently indifferent about the fate of
this people and don't realize that their deliverance
is not just their salvation, but the coming
of the king and his kingdom and his
glory forever.
When you read nine through 11, the last
statement that Paul makes is, oh, the depth
of the riches, both of the wisdom and
knowledge of God who has been his counselor
for of him and through him and to
him are all things to whom be glory
forever.
Well, so you dear saints, unless there's a
jealousy for the glory of God, unless there's
an understanding that something takes place at the
conclusion of history that obtains that glory and
it is of such a kind that it
is forever.
We cannot be what we need to be
to release the deliverer to come out of
Zion.
And in a word, the whole conclusion of
the faith rests on the church of the
last days that I'm looking at now.
If you're representative of this church of the
last days, that is the issue of God's
conclusion in history.
Can you follow that?
I don't think.
No, let me let me try it from
the beginning of Romans nine through 11.
Here's where Paul begins his great statement.
I'm telling the truth in Christ, I'm not
lying, my conscience bearing the witness and the
Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and
unceasing grief in my heart, for I could
wish that I myself were a curse separated
from Christ for the sake of my brethren,
my kinsmen, according to the flesh, who are
Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons,
the glory, the covenants, the giving of the
law, temple service, the promises whose are the
fathers and from whom is Christ, according to
the flesh, who is overall God blessed forever.
What a remarkable introduction to three chapters that's
at the heart of the whole book of
Romans and the book of Romans itself is
Paul's finest, classic, most systematic statement of his
whole apostolic view of the reality of the
faith.
And the heart of it is this mystery
that begins with this statement of his own
heart attitude toward his kinsmen, that he has
a deep and continuous grief for their having
fallen away.
And he so desires their salvation.
He would wish himself a curse for his
brethren.
He's willing to exchange his exalted relationship with
God, forfeit that and even his salvation, if
only they could obtain it.
You see how the urgency in his apostolic
heart.
Well, we can read that like, well, that's
OK for Paul and that's because he's Jewish.
But what if this statement is not because
he's Jewish, but because he's apostolic?
What if the grief that he experiences is
not because these are his kinsmen in the
flesh and he has a natural sympathy, but
because he's an apostle that has the heart
of God and the mind of God and
the desire of God?
What's the difference for us?
This, if it's the issue of being a
Jew, identifying with a Jew, that's just a
curiosity we can go on.
But if it's an apostle experiencing a depth
of God's heart for a people that need
urgently to be saved and have had a
tragic history and a glorious conclusion, and he's
feeling that not because he's naturally a Jew,
but because he's an apostle in proximity with
God's own heart, then we also can stand
in a potential of having a heart like
that also.
And we will have it to the degree
that we resemble Paul in our own apostolic
character and make up as the church.
Can you see that?
Why does this these three chapters begin with
Paul's anguish?
Because he's not flaunting the fact that he's
Jewish.
His heart cry comes out of the reality
of what he is in God as an
apostle.
And therefore, there's a challenge and an implication
for the church to come to a like
place of relationship with Jews to the degree
that it also is apostolic.
But it will not happen if we have
no such intention or desire, or if we're
content with things as they presently are, or
the world is too much with us and
we just want a Christianity that serves our
purposes and provides a program or the kinds
of things that add some dimension to our
life.
We have got somehow to come into the
understanding that we're moving toward a conclusion of
an age, that there's a whole salvation history
that goes all the way back to the
beginning that has to do with the election
of God of a nation that has historically
failed him and who have profaned his name
in all nations to which they've been scattered
and that at the end of the age,
God rescues that people or a remnant of
them out of their own belief and their
own activity against God, because Paul says they
are the enemies of the gospel for your
sake.
For God to do that at the end
of the age and to extend mercy to
this people who do not deserve it is
the most profound revelation of God that will
have come in the history of creation.
It is God's final statement of who he
is as God to a world who will
observe this mercy because he will not perform
this in the corner.
The whole world will see Jews not deserving
of God's consideration, Jews suffering a chastisement and
a penalty for their sins that are clear
and being expelled again into the most remote
places so that when I've been in Egypt
and other places in the world and night
onto Ethiopia, I can already say to the
simple believers there, are you willing to take
in Jews who will be expelled into your
locality?
They're astonished that when I'm in Cairo pleading
with the cream of Christian society in a
series of meetings like this that ran for
three, four or five nights and is sensing
their resistance because they're not too happy for
Jews.
They've suffered in wars with Israel and they
don't want to hear that they have a
future relationship with Israel and the Jew because
they are the church and that the church
in every nation has this call.
They want somehow to shuck it off and
so I poured out my soul the way
I'm trying to do tonight, the same sense
of futility and it was not received.
And they went about their tea and their
business and in that moment, very uncommon for
me, I had a vision and I saw
in the, by the eye of the spirit,
men bareheaded, marching, forced marched through the boulevards
of Cairo.
If you've ever been to Egypt, they go
back to the European possession of that part
of the world, broad boulevards and certain people
being forced marched and police lining the sidewalks
and holding back the crowds that are wanting
to break through the police barriers to kick
and spit at these defenseless people, all of
whom are bareheaded.
And then I realized I'm looking at a
defeated Israeli army being triumphantly exhibited by their,
they are the captors, the vanquished, the defeated
by their superiors in shame and humiliation through
the streets and the police can hardly hold
back the outrage mobs that want to kick
and spit.
And I said, Hey, before you end and
leave here and finish your tea, I've just
seen something.
And I believe that what I've seen by
the spirit, you're going to realize it will
happen.
Israel is going to be defeated.
Its armies are going to be vanquished.
Its people are going to be dispelled and
you're going to see defeated Israelis forced march
through your streets.
Will you come through to spit and kick
or will you come through to save and
take in and provide a refuge for some
to whom you will be directed that there
can be a final fulfillment that I've called
my son out of Egypt.
That's how graphic and real it's going to
be in many places that are hostile to
Jews.
So the issue for the church in Egypt
is do we reflect the national mentality against
Israel or are we in a place with
God that we share his heart rather than
the national consensus?
Can you understand what I'm saying?
The church, God is looking for something from
the church and praise God that he's looking
for it and will take every grace to
obtain it.
Lest having failed in that, we will find
ourselves eternally embarrassed for having lived a Christian
life beneath the glory of God's standard and
call.
The issue of Israel will compel the church
of all nations to come to a place
of faith, a place of reality in the
purposes of God that otherwise would have been
not left to us.
It compels us at last to become the
church.
And when I say church, I'm not talking
about congregations of isolated individualities who attend services,
but church as it was known at the
first apostolically as a congregation of people who
were corporate integral and joined because the demand
that Israel will make cannot be borne by
individual believers, however superior they are in their
spirituality.
It's going to take a whole church.
It's going to take the church becoming the
church.
Tonight on this little radio interview that we
had and elsewhere in these days, I quoted
from Psalm 102 and I'll try and end
with that because this is where I believe
Paul gained his insight into the mystery.
The Psalms precede by centuries, if not millennia,
the apostolic church and Paul, who was a
student of the Psalms and the Hebrew Scriptures,
saw things written there and recorded there that
were eschatological.
They had to do with last days things
written by psalmists expressed by the spirit beyond
anything they could have understood.
And Paul gained a key of insight that
we need presently.
Psalm 102, the beginning of that Psalm describes
victims that look like they're in a concentration
camp condition.
And verse two, do not hide your face
from me in the day of my distress.
It's the psalmist crying out, incline your ear
to me, answer me speedily in the day
when I call.
For my days pass away like smoke and
my bones burn like a furnace.
You would think that this was written during
the Nazi Holocaust, but it's written for an
event that was yet future, but will greatly
resemble it.
The only difference will be that magnitude of
Jewish suffering will be greater than what took
place in Europe.
And that this will be the cry of
many whose days will pass away like smoke.
My heart is stricken and withered like grass.
I'm too wasted to eat my bread.
Because of my loud groaning, my bones cling
to my skin.
I'm like an owl of the wilderness, like
a little owl of the waste places.
I'm like a lonely bird on a housetop.
All day long, my enemies taunt me.
These are enemies that not only are successful
in bringing Jews to this condition, but enjoying
the dilemma and the condition that these Jews
are in.
There's a vengeance here.
There's a hatred.
And when we see the present disposition of
Islamic nations toward Israel, it doesn't take much
to see that the psalmist who could not
have known these last days particulars describes what
we are going to actually see take place
in time.
All day long, my enemies taunt me.
Those who deride me use my name for
a curse.
I eat ashes like bread and mingle tears
with my drink.
But the remarkable thing is that there's a
recognition by those who are suffering that that
this is not an accident, that it's not
to be blamed on Hitler or whoever the
figure will be at that time, but that
God himself is the author of that distress.
Because of your indignation, the psalmist is speaking
to God.
And anger, for you have lifted me up
and thrown me aside.
There's no complaint.
There's no implication that God is being unjust.
It's a recognition that God is doing this
and that it's in proportion to our sins
that we're suffering it.
My days are like an evening shadow.
I wither away like grass.
But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever.
Your name endures to all generations.
You're God always.
You're sovereign always.
So even in our suffering, we know that
you're responsible and that it's deserved.
But you will rise up and have compassion
on Zion.
Zion, again, is that beautiful symbolic word of
the people of God that finally come in
to the character of God.
Rise up is a wonderfully a word suggestive
of resurrection.
You will rise up and have compassion on
Zion, for it is time to favor it,
for the appointed time or the set time
has come.
How does the psalmist know that?
That there's a moment in history when Israel
is reduced to the condition that we've just
read, but that it will be changed when
a moment comes for which God waits to
deliver them.
And that's the point now that I want
to stress.
The appointed time has come.
How does the psalmist know?
For your servants hold its stones dear and
have pity on its dust.
Whoever the servants are, they are not Israel
itself, because if Israel were servants, they would
not be suffering this calamity.
It's because they have failed to fulfill the
call of God that they're suffering what they're
suffering.
But there is in the earth at that
same time another people, not called the church
because it's a word yet future, but spoken
obliquely as servants, a people other than Israel
who have a heart for Israel.
And it's symbolically expressed as a compassion on
her stones and a pity on her dust.
There's nothing in the natural that can explain
that.
Why a Gentile church should be identified with
Israel at the hour of her greatest strickenness
and shame, except that they have a heart
like Paul.
One that Paul speaks about in Romans, in
which he said, I would not have you
to be ignorant of this mystery, lest you
become wise in your own conceit.
There's something about the mystery of Israel that
opens up whole dimensions of things that would
not otherwise have been seen, otherwise have been
required.
And in the absence of that, we flaps
into a kind of defunct Christianity, hardly sufficient
for our own need, let alone have any
capability of touching the world or being to
the Jews in the last days what we
ought.
Please don't stroke her here while I'm speaking.
Could you?
Yeah, thank you.
We're going to see a great crisis break
forth over all the earth with Jews in
the last days.
You can speak of it as a chastisement,
which it is.
It will also be a penalty for sin
and a judgment, which is right.
It will not be some arbitrary act of
God just performing something because he's malicious.
It will be a God who is just
and righteous and actually displaying his righteousness in
the way that he will call his people
to task and bring upon them the full
penalty of their own rejection of him.
Because every calamity that has come to Jews
in their history has been some attempt by
God through the suffering experienced in calamity that
it might be recognized as judgment so that
people might consider and break and turn repentantly
to the God who has inflicted it.
So far, basically, it has not worked.
And we Jews have a wonderful way to
ascribe to men what comes to us from
God.
But in the last days, we're going to
see in this final chastisement, a dawning consciousness
that the magnitude of the suffering that will
come upon world Jewry, the uprooting from all
nations, the devastation that will come to the
nation Israel itself, maybe even the demise.
You know this word, the end, the death
of the political state will have such a
severity that Jews will be prompted as never
before to perhaps consider that in the magnitude
of what they're experiencing is a revelation of
the magnitude of their sin.
And they'll be helped in this by your
explanation that they're going to be moving through
us in a condition of distress.
And unless there's some mercy extended by the
church in the earth at that time, not
only of a physical kind, but of a
spiritual kind, they will perish.
And their salvation is so critical for the
coming of the Lord and the establishing of
this kingdom.
You know, that the air goes out of
me as I say things like that.
I just feel depleted, like I've lost virtue
because the concepts are so awesome.
What?
That that last thing has got to do
with the coming of the Lord and the
coming of his kingdom?
Exactly.
So it's more than just the rescue of
a people in a final distress, but that
a return of a remnant of those who
survive through the mercy of the church brings
the Lord out of a long confinement, because
it says in Acts 321, he's confined in
the heavens waiting for the restoration of all
things spoken by the prophets since the world
began.
And that thing that he's waiting for and
that the prophets have spoken of is the
scenario that I'm describing to you, a last
day's time of global suffering for the people
Israel called the time of Jacob's trouble.
And Jacob is the condition of this people,
not only in Israel, but all over the
world and including in South Africa.
So none will be omitted.
None will be absolved.
None will escape the severity of this final
dealing is very close.
It could happen in a moment.
The stage is set.
It begins in Israel through circumstances that are
already working and have been working since the
advent of that state.
And when the violence breaks out, it will
not be confined to Israel, but will pursue
Jews worldwide.
It will trigger and set forth a time
of Jacob's trouble.
You have to look this up for yourself.
There's no way that I could review all
this in any kind of detail.
So if you have a pencil, a pen,
a piece of paper, a Bible, or you
came to be entertained.
The classic chapters on the description of the
time of Jacob's trouble, Jeremiah chapter 30 and
31, Daniel from chapter seven through 12, particularly
the end of the book of Daniel, when
the power of the people is broken.
So you'll see that we're moving toward a
climax that has its inception in Israel when
something is triggered by the very factors that
have been working since the advent of the
state of Israel, the irritation of the resentment
of the neighbors, the Palestinians, the Arabs by
the rude appropriation, if I can put it
that way, of the land of Israel under
the thought that it is our land.
Yes, it is, but not at our taking.
It's ours when it is given.
It's ours when we can fulfill the conditions
for remaining and abiding on the land, namely
a covenant faithfulness to God.
The land is not ours to grab at
any occasion.
And so we're going to suffer for some
of the things that have been set in
motion by our own human attempt to fulfill
what I believe only God can perform and
will perform at the very end of this.
So that unbelieving Jews are going to see
God unveiled in a dimension that will beggar
their minds presently and not only Jews, but
the church itself will be stunned that God
is going to display himself in judgment in
so vivid a fashion that we will know
that we will know this is not some
accident, some arbitrary thing.
This is evidently a design of God.
And then there are scriptures that talk of
it.
And as you get into the prophets, you'll
see the references to ruined cities, Ezekiel, Chapter
36, Ezekiel, Chapter 20, Amos, Chapter 9.
Once you start getting into this prophetic overview,
certain words will come up with a remarkable
frequency, captivity, scattered, expelled, cast out, terror, fear,
so that the Lord says at the end
of this, you will no longer again, no
terror or fear, indicating that the last experience
of Jews in the world is terror and
fear, where you'll no longer be uprooted out,
or you'll no longer suffer famine.
And that blessing will come.
You no longer plant vineyards and others will
drink it.
What does that imply?
That others have appropriated what Jews have established.
They've had not had the opportunity to enjoy
the fruit of their own labor.
So sudden will the upheaval be and the
being cast out again into the nations, the
disperse of Judah and the cast, how to
say the, not the cast away, somebody help
me, of Israel.
We're going to see that and it's going
to be a shock for many Christians who
have hoped for a happier scenario, who are
aware that the state of Israel is presently
in trouble and in conflict, but somehow it
will be resolved and a peace will be
established and Israel will grow into the kind
of nation that will fulfill God's hope for
it and promise as the blessing to all
nations.
That's not the way that I believe the
scriptures read.
The requirement of God is so great that
you cannot grow into it.
You cannot improve into it.
It's going to require a devastation unto death
and a resurrection.
So that we're going to see at the
end of this, the first national resurrection.
We've seen individual resurrections.
We know that Jesus was raised from the
dead.
The apostle Paul was eminently the man of
the resurrection.
The early church was a resurrection phenomenon.
Unfortunately, the present church is not.
The present church only affirms the correctness of
the doctrine of resurrection, but it lives far
short of the reality.
How can you blame it?
Because what is there about our present Christianity
that requires the life of God and the
supernatural power of God and the resurrection reality?
Our present Christianity is so timid, so predictable,
so prescribed, we can perform it out of
our own intelligence and well-meaning intention.
That will end in the design of God
when the catastrophe of world Jewry takes place
and we will be called to a line
of conduct and response beyond any ability in
ourselves to perform.
And we will bless God in that day
that in his great mercy, he has presented
us with a crisis of need that compels
us to move from being merely evangelical or
charismatic into the deepest appropriation of his life,
his mercy, his love, his power, his authority,
lest our own life end in some lesser
place and we fix our eternal life on
that basis.
So let me run that by again.
You know why I'm gasping for air?
Because you're young.
And I might just as well have come
from Mars or another planet to bring views
that are so unamenable to your present understanding.
Because I know that I know you have
no concept of eternity at all.
I know that you're fixed in your present
mindset in this present life.
The only thing is, is that you don't
know it.
And that the phrase, this present life is
an apostolic phrase coined and employed by both
Paul and Peter.
And why do they say this present?
Because they know that this is temporal, passing,
and if you'll excuse my language, ephemeral.
It means transient.
It's going to fade.
You don't know that.
Being young and being the product of this
age and this civilization, you think that now
is the premium or what will soon be
when you graduate school or when you get
married or when you have your career.
God in his mercy wants to save us
from an eternal embarrassment.
When he speaks of a wailing and gnashing
of teeth, I don't think that he's describing
the reaction of the unsaved who are being
cast into the fire of hell.
I think he's describing believers who have fallen
short of the glory of God.
And that he says out of darkness, it's
not fire, but a distance from the brightness
of his glory because most of us will
not have lived in the light as he
is in the light.
And when the day of eternity comes, it
can come tomorrow, we will not be fitted
to that proximity.
Every one of us will have an eternity
fixed in terms of what was the actuality
and the truth of our walk with God
in this present life.
And right now, just as a man 36
years old in the faith, wildly traveling in
the world, I feel a deep sense of
chagrin and almost pain for the condition of
the church.
For if the day of eternity would have
come now, there would be a bellowing of
wailings and gnashings of teeth for people who
will find out too late they had lived
beneath the glory of God and fixed themselves
eternally in a place that cannot be remedied
nor altered.
There's a finality about the day of eternity.
There's a finality about the day of the
Lord.
And the early church, very much different than
ourselves, lived in anticipation of that day.
And when I say lived, I mean really
lived.
Because what I'm saying is that if this
has not come into our consciousness, we are
not really living.
We have biological life.
We have a semblance of a Christian life.
But it's not a life that eventuates in
joy.
It's not a life that has a clear
significance.
It's not a life that anticipates a reward
for the works performed.
Because when Jesus comes, it says he brings
his rewards with him, giving to every man
according to his labor.
I'm sure that that phrase is as novel
to you as other things that I'm speaking.
I'm saying all that to say this.
In the wisdom of God and the mercy
of God, God has put us, the church,
in a relationship with Israel and the Jew
that serves purposes for us that would not
otherwise have been recognized nor obtained.
Israel is going to be brought into a
catastrophic condition, an uprooting from their present places
of security and efforts worldwide.
Jesus says if that time were not cut
short, no flesh would survive.
But because it will be cut short, for
the elect's sake, there will be some survival.
We cannot visualize it.
You know, I'm something like a man coming
to Germany, say, in 1929, 1930, before the
advent of Hitler, who already has a prophetic
anticipation of an enormous program of annihilation that
will issue up out of Germany for the
Jewish people in Europe and trying to persuade
the German church to be alerted for this
catastrophe.
And I'm sure the man would have been
looked upon as a madman, ranting and saying
things that were unthinkable by people presently in
a state of comfort, in the best of
all worlds, in hope for a future in
political and social changes because of the richness
of German civilization.
They could not imagine a view of a
kind that would speak about a Nazi takeover,
that the gutter elements of the most despicable,
loathed, debased, occultic, homosexual scum would actually rise
up out of their cellar beer hall meetings
and take over the whole apparatus of German
civilization and set in motion a world war
that will almost destroy Western civilization, bring down
its own cities and systematically annihilate European Jewry.
Somebody speaking like that in 1929, 1930 would
have been dismissed as mad because the German
church would have thought that unthinkable.
They are our textbook because I'm saying that
we're going to face a scenario much like
that but worse and it will not be
confined to Germany or Europe and unless we
anticipate it and take it into our present
consideration, we will collapse as pathetically as the
German church did.
It went down like a deck of cards.
Not only the church but the courts, education,
the universities, all of the apparatus of civilization
that you would have thought had a long
history and would have resisted evil collapsed in
fear for its own security and for the
preservation of its own life.
There was nothing to resist the horrendous evil
that came with Nazism in any institution of
German society including the church.
The church collapsed because it was only an
institution.
Had it been an apostolic reality and people
in the spirit who could have discerned and
resisted and contended against the powers that were
prepared to take over their own nation, we
might have seen a different history.
So I'm asking your sympathy for the strange
burden I'm required to bear and to communicate
before the time.
Tonight on the radio program and in the
interview, the question came up more than once
on what is prophetic.
One of the aspects of what prophetic is
that is such an anguish for the man
called to it is that he's required to
speak something in advance of that time so
as to make vivid and real that which
is not yet.
To set in motion by that speaking things
that will be prepared for that eventuality.
Are you following me?
What I'm
learning to my astonishment as I'm traveling around
South Africa and now more recently Zimbabwe and
Zambia, how few Christians have ever even read
Romans 9 through 11.
That when I begin to speak on that
subject they blink like they're hearing it for
the first time.
I've heard from pastors that they have admitted
to me on this trip they have actually
passed it over because it just is a
muddle of things that they can't even fathom.
I've had one of the most significant men
of our generation, Ern Baxter, if anybody has
ever heard that name, he's now passed on,
tell me that Romans 11 has been a
mystery that he has just never understood and
has passed over.
And yet it's the mystery that Paul tells
us that if we are ignorant of it
we will suffer a certain consequence.
So I just want to commend these three
chapters to get you into this mystery.
You'll need to pray because mere reading will
not open it.
It's a mystery that requires a revelation by
the Spirit and if we are not disposed
for that revelation or the implications of it
we will not receive it.
If we want to continue in this present
world and just be respectable Christians who are
Christians too but also enjoying this present age
and want to see it continue and do
not desire an apocalyptic conclusion in judgment and
in fire.
You'll be as much at a loss as
some of the ministers that I'm meeting.
You have to have an attitude of heart
that when God sees he opens and reveals.
When you get into it here's what you'll
recognize that Paul comes back again and again
to the church.
He's answering a question from the Roman church.
Is God finished with the Jews?
They had every reason to believe that because
the Jews had slain the prophets that were
sent unto them.
They slew their own Messiah.
They were about to see the destruction of
Jerusalem and being cast out into the nations.
They had every reasonable right to think that
Israel has had its chance, has blown it
and now the church has become the Israel
of God and would receive the promises of
God and that this people would be eternally
cast away.
So Paul is presented with an enormously significant
question and his answer is not only for
the church at Rome but for the church
of every generation and especially our own.
And he says God forbid that you should
think that.
He speaks of their fall as being temporary,
a momentary thing historically and why did God
allow it?
Not only because it's the consequence of Israel's
apostasy and sin but because through their fall
salvation has come to the Gentiles.
But take a look at that.
Turn to Romans 11.
From the very first verse I say then
God has not rejected this people.
Has he?
May it never be.
I'm not conversant with Greek but I'm told
and scholars make clear that the language that
Paul uses could not be stronger.
It's not just a thought in passing.
God forbid you should think that or ever
entertain the notion that God is finished with
Israel.
God cannot be finished with Israel because he
has made promises to the patriarchs, because he
has given them a call and a gifting
that his own reputation, name and honor are
at stake.
He cannot be finished.
Even their unbelief, even their rejection of their
Messiah and the prophets that have preceded him
will not be grounds for his rejection.
So God forbid that you should think that.
And then in verse 11 he takes it
up again.
Have they stumbled that they should fall?
May it never be.
But by their transgression salvation has come to
the Gentiles to move them to jealousy.
I don't know how you have that in
your version but it's clear that something that
has happened to Israel that affects Gentiles that
salvation would come because of their fall but
not something for you to enjoy for yourself
as if the sum all and the be
all is the salvation you have obtained because
of their fall.
But through their fall salvation has come to
the Gentiles so as to move them to
jealousy.
This is one of the most profound insights
of the mystery of the relationship between the
Gentile church and the Jewish nation.
That we are locked into something together.
That neither they nor we can come to
the fullness of God's intention unless we see
the design and the mystery that God has
allowed a Gentile church to be birthed out
of Israel's transgression but to be an instrument
to restore Israel to the salvation that they
have lost by moving them to jealousy.
I always say would to God do a
footnote at the bottom of the page to
tell us how but Paul does not give
us an inkling of how it's to be
done.
You think about it.
Think of your own present fellowship the best
of them.
Can you consider that if a Jew walked
in or knew of it that that would
move him to jealousy?
Is there anything going on presently in the
church in its best form that would move
present Jews to a jealousy?
What is he talking about?
Not just an emotion of jealousy but...