The Universality of the Cross — Art Katz

And the same grace by which we can hear today is the grace by which we shall fulfill tomorrow. For it must be grace if you are to be glorified. And more than these people can know, it's grace, my God, that enables me to share and speak.

Or else I'm as a dead man. Who could approach these subjects and convey them except by the grace of God? Lord, continue that grace now, we pray. The clock is ticking away. We have but few sessions left.

And we desire the full statement of your heart in these days. For we know it will not be given again. So we thank you, Lord. Come, precious God, and be as precious now as you were already this morning.

For how can you be otherwise? You're so consistent, you're faithful in yourself. It's what you are. And we thank and give you praise in Jesus' name. Amen. I understand that in the different films made of Jesus over the years, that oftentimes the actors playing that role are themselves converted.

You can't play the role of Jesus and be unaffected. Something has got to give, something has got to happen. And so what of a nation that is called to play that role, which is exactly what I'm anticipating.

The Cross as the Revelation of God

We need to understand, again, nothing more reveals God than the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate demonstration of who God is in himself. And to miss that is to miss all. And so I'm saying, if nations have not heard, there needs yet to be one more speaking, as it were, one more enactment of that great redemptive drama of Christ crucified, as it will now be exemplified and demonstrated by an entire nation, who in the process of walking out something that they can't even understand but will be required, they themselves will glimpse the Lord through the mutuality of their suffering.

Let me read a little bit from the book God Crucified, which I commend to you highly. I believe the author is an Englishman again. I don't understand why time and time again Spurgeon and Forsyth and Chambers and Whitfield, Wesley, one after another are all great Englishmen, in which this writer says, the sacrificial death of Christ belongs to the divine identity as truly as his enthronement and his parousia, his second coming, and that his divine sovereignty is not fully understood until it is seen to be exercised by the one who witnessed to the truth of God even to the point of death.

They shall, it shall be real to them what they have not seen, what they have not heard, they shall understand. So it's to be exercised in order to be seen. It's not enough just to have the statement about.

The actuality of the event needs again to be seen by ones through whom it is exercised. Now when he wrote this, he has no thought of mine, but I'm bringing to his statement the particular things given to me to form a new synthesis of understanding beyond even the author's intention.

Only as the slaughtered lamb is the Christ of revelation, also the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, once again the inclusion of the earthly Jesus and his death in the identity of God means that the cross reveals who God is.

And how shall Israel be a nation of priests and a light unto the world unless it knows, that it knows, that it knows who God is. And they'll not know it religiously, they'll not know it rabbinically, they'll know it existentially by walking the road to Calvary.

The revelation of the cross will come to them through their own appropriation of that experience in measure. It will not constitute another redemption. It's not their blood, but it will quicken for the world the redemption that is and bring it into the consciousness of the world and to its appropriation where it has lain too long in neglect even with the church.

Follow that? So I'm showing you how to even prophetically read a book and bring what you are and your own experience to it and bring it into a new synthesis, a new measure of understanding. So just as Moses lifted up the serpent and the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.

The Son of Man must be lifted up, but He will be lifted up this time in the suffering of His nation as they walk again the road to Calvary which He trod. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed as we read in Isaiah 40 verse 3 and all flesh shall see it together.

The Universal Proclamation of the Cross

This final enactment or demonstration will be universal and global. That's the word the Lord gave me in this morning's prayer time and I said to this brother, he's written it on his hand, when I start again in the teaching session remind me of the word universal.

The enormity of Christ's sacrifice as the revelation of God as God as well as the atonement of all mankind deserves a universal proclamation or demonstration. It is not to be kept hidden on a hill. It's not just for a locality or for a time.

It has got to be universal and if it had not become that in the enactment of Christ's death, how will it become that before His second coming and His judgment upon the nations? There's got to be a further and universal exposition, demonstration of that single central act by which God is revealed as God and who of all people are called for that demonstration but hapless Israel.

So it's judgment for their own sin as His suffering was judgment. We mustn't forget that. Jesus bore the judgment for sin upon Himself. The Father did not lessen or obviate or minimize the necessary expression of His righteous wrath and judgment against sin for sin is death and it had to be met through death.

It was not in any way lessened. He bore the judgment so much so that there was a point where the Father had to turn His face away from Him. And that was this morning's selection in Spurgeon. Where Spurgeon gets it is remarkable but listen to this.

April 15th, morning selection. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He'll always give a verse and then He'll give a statement. We here behold the Savior in the depth of His sorrows. No other place so well shows the griefs of Christ as Calvary and no other moment at Calvary is so full of agony as that in which His cry rends the air.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? How is it we've not understood that? Why is it that we thought that the greatest anguish that Jesus bore was the physical torment which is not the greater but the lesser.

The greater anguish, the greater agony is the absence of His Father's presence. You know why we didn't understand that? Because that presence is not as dear to us as it is to Him. And because we are much more conscious of our bodily comfort and enjoyment than we are of this issue of God as presence.

At this moment, physical weakness was united with acute mental torture from the shame and ignominy through which He had to pass and to make His grief culminate with emphasis He suffered spiritual agony surpassing all expression resulting from the departure of His Father's presence.

This was the black midnight of His horror. Then it was that He descended the abyss of suffering. No man can enter into the full meaning of these words. Some of us think at times that we could cry My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

There are seasons when the brightness of our Father's smile is eclipsed by clouds and darkness but let us remember that God never does really forsake us. It is only a seeming forsaking with us but in Christ's case it was a real forsaking because He had become sin and a holy Father had no alternative.

He could not look upon it. He had to turn His face away and in turning His face away He removed the presence in which Jesus had lived all eternity long in heaven with Him and it was to Him as natural as breathing.

He could not for a moment consider Himself outside the sense of the presence of God. Now at the cross in the depths of the excruciating torment when that comfort was most required it was most absent and I believe He suffered it for reasons we can't begin to plumb but not the least of the reasons is that we are also on a collision course with a destiny of that kind for ourselves.

We also in the crisis of our service of the greatest requirement in the moment of it we are going not to feel the presence of God but His absence. And you know how I know? Because I am faced with that prospect continually.

Every time, almost without exception when I am called to speak when the message is the issue of life and death time and eternity when I want most the sense of God's presence and comfort it is most absent.

And yet I am still required to act. There is something in the mystery of God. Maybe this is the ultimate definition of what true faith is. The ability to be faithful in the absence of what our soul most craves as encouragement to faithfulness the presence of God.

But to give Him the same quality of faithfulness and service in His absence as we would give Him in His presence is the statement of a son. In fact, maybe the epitome of what it means to be a son. And that is what Jesus bore and exhibited in His suffering and in that cry, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And it is a cry that Israel must yet express. But if Israel will say, My God, my God they are already halfway home. Because when have they last even acknowledged their God? But even to cry out to God in His forsakenness is already a step toward God.

Can you follow that? I've never before seen that. I've never before said that. It's a first. No man can enter into the full meaning of these words. It is only a seeming forsaken with us, in Christ's case, real.

We grieve a little withdrawing of our Father's love but the real meaning, the real turning away of God's face from His Son who shall calculate how deep the agony which it caused Him? Suffering, I don't know what it is.

Suffering central to the whole dynamic of God. Maybe because the whole world is at enmity with God that there's no way to bring forth a redemption against evil in all of its depth except through the necessity of a suffering.

It cannot be a light matter. It has got to be born. Who can calculate how deep the agony? Our cry is often dictated by unbelief. In His case, it was the utterance of a dreadful fact for God had really turned away from Him for a season.

O thou poor distressed soul who once lived in the sunshine of God's face but art now in darkness, remember that He has not really forsaken thee. God in the clouds is as much our God as when He shines forth in the luster of His grace.

But since even the thought that He has forsaken us gives us agony, what must be the woe of the Savior have been when He exclaimed, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? If the thought of forsakenness is already a source of distress, what of the actuality of the actual forsakenness?

That was the dig of Jesus' cup to drink. When He sweated drops of blood in the garden, this is what He knew His suffering would entail. The physical agony He would bear, but the absence of His Father in which He had lived since time immemorial, that was the dreg that He had to drink, which He did.

That we could enjoy the presence of God both in this life and in all the ages to come. The divine identity is revealed in the paradox of Jesus' death. His humiliation, which is in divine reality His exaltation, His shame, which is His honor, the king in humility, who God is, what it means to be God.

God's identity, we say, is not simply revealed, but enacted in the event of salvation for the world. God didn't just give us a prescription of Isaiah 53. If you read it and believe it and call upon the name of the Lord, you're saved.

He gave it in order to foretell the actual enactment and fulfillment. It's the enactment that saves. It's the enactment that reveals. And that enactment is yet future a second time because it has not yet been universally circulated.

And even in those areas where it has in some measure been known, it has become depreciated, sentimentalized, trivialized, distorted, and essentially lost. It wouldn't hurt New Zealand, again, to have a reenactment in its own midst of the mystery and power of the cross demonstrated and enacted before their eyes through the suffering of a nation driven through their land, Israel, that it might come again to the cross, which it has essentially forsaken in the character of its dissolute present Christianity.

Israel, the Church, and the Nations

And that's exactly what I believe will come. A revival must come to the church in New Zealand in order for it to be the people who can say into the wilderness, Your God will come. But in one fell swoop, the judgment of Israel is New Zealand's revival.

The site before them of the enactment of the cross is the renewing of the cross, which is the deepest meaning of revival. So in the economy of God, Israel's judgment is your blessing, and your blessing is their redemption.

Who's sufficient for these things? What a God. And He's not adored for all that. He is exalted above all, only as the one who is also with the lowest of the low. The unique act of God's self-giving in which He demonstrates His deity to the world, accomplishes salvation for the world, Israel's purpose is for the nations and not for itself.

My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations. The Lord shall go forth out of Zion unto the nations. He will turn their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and they, the nations, will study war no more.

For the word of the Lord will go forth out of Jerusalem, and the law of the Lord out of Zion. Israel's restoration is not for itself. It's for the nations. It's salvation for the world. This divine self-giving occurred in full reality.

In this way, the glory of God, whom no one has ever seen, was revealed. And except it be revealed through the cross, it's not revealed at all. We can only approximate. But the deepest revelation of the glory of God...

Remember what Jesus said when He was about to go to the cross? He said, Now I'm going to glorify the Father. How? By dying. So that some dumb-dumb of a centurion at the base of the cross, who had seen any number of men impaled and crucified and shouting and crying out and spitting and being venomous against those who were torturing them, looked at this man, who went as a lamb to the slaughter and spoke not a word in retaliation or expressed anger or indignation or spat at his enemies, but prayed only that God forgive them, for they know not what they do.

When he saw the tranquility of the Son of God, the bearing of suffering with unspeakable magnanimity and grace, though it was suffering indeed, he knew that he was watching and seeing something more than mere men.

And he, dumb-dumb Gentile centurion, who never had a single advantage or ever read Scripture or Isaiah, had the cry issued out of him that he could not contain, Truly, this is the Son of God. To say that and to see that is to be saved.

It took the demonstration of a suffering Christ to expel this acknowledgment, ironically to which the nation Israel could not bring itself to come, a Gentile at the cross came. And now we're going to come full circle.

And now when you will be on the cross, in the paroxysms of your suffering, in the things we acquired of the church in the last days, the Jew will observe in you the Son of God. Truly, this is the Son of God.

This is the revelation of our God, because nothing reveals Him as God but the cross. And to be out there in the wilderness with them and to be able to speak prophetically to them is the very evidence of the cross in your life.

For nothing could have fitted you or prepared you for a final prophetic destiny that is authentic and efficacious and saves than the cross in your life. To be prophetic is to know the cross. It's to be expelled from your property without explanation.

It's to languish in the wilderness for three years until the Lord Himself restores you. And to give up everything, not only the property, the ministry, your marriage, your children, vowing never to return, your wife threatening not only divorce but suicide.

It's down, down, down. It's death and multiple deaths. But in that time and in that interim of death where the Lord sends me to a Lutheran seminary for two years for a master's degree in theology, does He begin to open to me the mystery that I am now expressing.

I receive this in a season of death. And every time I speak it, it's an experience of death. You don't even know, whether we're Singapore or here, how I am assailed after the message or before that you've misdemeanored the Lord.

And this fell and this failed and we're continually buttressed and beaten and bearing an opposition, which is a form of the cross. Because death, the cross, has a power. And so if the Lord was pleased to give the revelation of the mystery of Israel and the last days in a season of death and requires a measure of death in its expression, because Paul says it's death that works in me but life in you, how shall you fulfill your destiny as the church in this mystery except through the process of death and resurrection?

Death, Resurrection, and Apostolic Maturity

So we mustn't shrink from the cross but embrace it. Let the Lord perform His work by which alone we're moved from charismatica to the things that are apostolic and prophetic. And who wants to give up our charismatic good times, fun and good times, and having the kinds of things that we've enjoyed?

But I'll tell you, unless we give it up, unless we forfeit, unless we allow something to be brought into death which has served its purpose and must not be flayed and kept alive and whipped and beaten, how shall we receive the greater?

There's got to be a relinquishing, a letting go, a bringing into death of that which has served its purpose. And for those of us who have had an affinity for Israel but predicated more along sentimental lines than prophetic, that must perish.

And you have a vested interest in maintaining it. It gives you a warm feeling, fuzzies, to be so identified with Israel. But unless you die to that, how shall He give you His greater burden and His greater love?

There's always a process of death and resurrection that should be understandable, familiar to us, and quick to be received. God's identity, we can say, I'm back to the book, is not simply revealed but enacted.

And I would say in view of what I'm suggesting to you, re-enacted. The road to Calvary for Israel is a re-enactment of Calvary itself because they shall have no form, no beauty that any shall desire them, and they will be marred more than any man.

But it's the event of salvation for the world which the self-humiliation of the Son has accomplished and is now made more universally known through this re-enactment. So, the unique act of God's self-giving in which He demonstrates His deity to the world by accomplishing salvation for the world is in the words of John, through Jesus Christ's grace and truth happened.

The divine self-giving occurred in full reality. Or else it's almost lost in a kind of mist. Did it really happen? Was it a Mel Gibson production? Or did it actually in fact take place in history and time?

And what have we learned from history in general but the propensity of men to sweep it under the carpet? History is lost. So, when I came to Germany recently because some students had found us on the website and sent us an email letter, you seem to be the real thing, they said.

And so we inserted three days on our way from Holland to Bad Nauheim for a conference where because I came two-thirds of the audience didn't come and that pastors in Germany sent out circular letters discouraging people from attending if this man was to speak.

And one of the other speakers from Australia said, Art, I've never seen anything like this. I have received a barrage of email letters from Germany and from Israel saying that if I attend this conference and be a speaker with you, I will be cut off.

But I could not allow that to discourage me, I'm here. But I don't understand why. For the first time I have received such an onslaught that if I dare participate with you, you despicable man, in this conference, I will be cut off.

There will be no future invitations. There's got to be a reason for opposition of this magnitude. So that so many were discouraged that the conference was two-thirds empty. And this dear woman, it's always a woman, to be at the inception of something, to take the risk and reach out and believe for God, was stuck with such momentous hotel bills that she's struggling even now.

We need to pray the Lord will requite and give answer. And the one message that was the message in that conference, though there were other speakers from Israel who used to joke about me at the table, not when I was present to my face, but a precious believer whom we know, a Dutch girl married to a Frenchman, was seated at that table.

She just visited me in New York, she said, Art, I was astonished what these men were saying about you behind your back. They were laughing and tittering. Oh, Art, bleh, bleh, bleh. She said, I couldn't believe it.

But the only message that was the message was mine. The message that the Church of Germany has the obligation to proclaim the gospel to the Jew in its midst. That there are now 1 to 300 ,000 Jews in Germany.

This is not an abstract academic question. There is a formidable presence of Jews in Germany. It's ironic. Who could ever expect that after the Holocaust, Germany would be such a place for Jews? Well, why?

They get free housing, they get entitlements, they get benefits, they get financial giftings. Germany is leaning backwards to accommodate Jews, and these Russians know it. It's better than going to Israel, better than going to America.

Go to Germany. Hundreds of thousands now in principal cities in Germany. But what is the Church speaking to those Jews? And what will it take for a German Christian to bring the most offensive message for Jewish consideration to the Jew in their midst in Germany, and say, except you receive this Christ, you shall eternally perish?

Didn't we do enough damage art with the Holocaust? We want now only to placate and make nice. Why do you charge us with this obligation, which we know will be hateful to those who hear it? Because the issue of the gospel is the issue of the Church.

If you fail in this, the Church will suffer its own meaning and its own identity, and there will be in its place a spiritual void, which the powers of darkness will be quick enough to fill now, as they did in the Nazi time.

The issue of the gospel to the Jew is the issue of the Church, it's the issue of Germany. However painful, for you it will be the cross, for you to have the courage and the audacity to tell a Jew that he needs to be saved.

And who's telling him? The engineer and the architect of their recent Holocaust. What a message. Mamma mia. But it was spoken. So on our way to this message, we stopped to see these university students at Bielefeld.

Precious. And I came from Holland by car, crumpled in the back seat, in one of those small little things, and tired and stretched out, having already spent myself in Holland, no time to think, and you know the way you are in that condition, and you've arrived and you're late, and the meeting has already begun, and you're rushed up into the university room, and there they are, 60 or 70 bright, shiny, charismatic Christians, and expecting blessing, and singing their choruses, and I'm sitting waiting to be called on, and with every chorus, my heart sinks more.

While they were having a good time, my heart sinks for their choruses. What a strange man you are. And I got up, and I looked at them, unprepared, and I said, I perceive that you have no sense of tragedy.

I perceive you lack a tragic sense of life. And they went, huh? Reggie, who's with me, went, huh? My interpreter went, huh? I went, huh. Where did that come from? What did that mean? It was the beginning of the Alpha, who is also the Omega.

Three days later, that group of facile charismatics were changed. They just met me at the Frankfurt airport. I hadn't heard from them for those many months, and just before leaving New York, I get an e-mail letter.

They found my e-mail address. Art, when are you coming back? This year? I said, no. Maybe 2006, I don't know. And then it occurred to me, I've got a 12-hour layover in Frankfurt, en route to Singapore, and I wrote them a little note.

If you're able, I'll meet you at the airport. And they came, the two principal brothers, and said, our lives have been transformed by your word. We are now sons of the resurrection, and we're catching it.

Not just from the world, but from Christians. They're offended by our word, our attitude, and what we have become, through what we have received from you. But they're the hope of Germany. And it began with, you lack a tragic sense of life.

And you have all the more reason to have it, being German. And if you don't have it, it's unbelievably tragic that such suffering and such cost of life and Jewish devastation took place through your nation.

And one generation later, you conduct yourself as if it had never occurred, that the history has no value for you, has not permeated your being and your consciousness, has not given your soul a certain disposition of depth, by which everything will be affected, and that you are just as shallow as if you were in New Zealand, or America, or any other place, and had not had the value of your history.

And I'm a former teacher of history, and I know this only too well. There's something in mankind that shovels its history under the carpet. It doesn't want to remember. It wants to bury it. It doesn't want the living remembrance that would affect their present or rob them of their present happiness if the origins of their history are solemn, or sad, or tragic.

It behooves us to receive our history, to be conscious of it, and to live in memory of it. Not only our national history, but our personal histories. Dum-da-dum-dum. Our divorces, our failed marriage, our unhappy this or that, which we want to forget, but there's a value in its remembering.

There is a redemptive value in memory. So, let's not spurn the value of the past, maybe even more valuable if it was unhappy, and yet more valuable if it was tragic. I've never before said these things publicly.

Isaiah 53 and the Suffering Servant

So, something has to occur in full reality, and in this way, the glory of God, whom no one has ever really seen be revealed in this act of final, renewed enactment of the cross, the self-giving of God, in which He is most truly Himself, defines Himself for the world.

Amen. Now, let's look at the thing in itself, Isaiah 53, which has to be read and seen in a new way, which does not one whit take away the value of the Jesus whose sufferings are depicted in these verses, while at the same time serving a secondary but profound purpose in revealing a future suffering of a like kind necessary for the reenactment of the gospel for the salvation of the world universal.

Now I know what those Pentecostal preachers say. Amen? They need to hear an amen. Okay. So, who has believed our report, to whom is the honor of the Lord revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground.

He has no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. That could not be the description of the pre-crucified Christ, because I believe He was beautiful.

I believe that His humanity was handsome. I believe He was a specimen of all specimens, this God-man. So what is being described here is someone who already has suffered the loss of that beauty through being pummeled and beaten.

He has no form, no comeliness. How devastating then must be the abuse that fell upon Him, that when we shall see Him, there's no beauty that we should desire Him. In fact, He's despised and rejected of men.

A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from Him, He was despised, we esteemed Him not. Now, in the context that I'm putting before you of Israel passing through this, we need to read this text in another way.

They are despised and rejected of men. They are a people of sorrow and acquainted with grief, and we, the world, hid our faces from them. They were despised and we esteemed them not. Can you see that?

But surely He hath borne our griefs. Now, who's speaking here? Surely He hath borne our griefs. This is now the nation speaking. Before it was the narrator, it was the prophet. Now the voice has shifted.

Someone else is speaking, and I'm saying that this someone else is future. Israel presently and historically has not seen, has not understood, has not received the sacrifice of its own Messiah. They think Jesus was just a misfit who fell unhappily into the hands of Romans, but of no greater consequence than that.

They need to see because the issue of the crucified Christ is the issue of God, the revelation of God as He is, and He will not be seen in that depth and in that reality in any other way. They've got to see.

So what's being said here? Here's a people coming to this new recognition. Oh, surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. We didn't realize that until we were struck with grief and sorrow, that what He did that we had not considered and buried historically was for our sake.

We're only experiencing a measure of sorrow and grief, but He experienced it in full for our sake. Surely, all you dear saints, what will it take for the nation to come to this recognition? And what can the nation ever be in the purposes of God until it comes exactly to this?

And if that's true, what will it take for them to come to this surely? And I'm saying it's going to take the mutuality of their suffering, that approximation by which when you experience sorrow and grief, all of a sudden a vista is open for the consideration of a much greater sorrow and grief that preceded yours but is in like kind.

Now you're opened. Oh, surely. And what was the purpose of that grief and sorrow? It was not some mindless thing required of the Father. We did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted, but He was wounded for our transgressions.

Why, we didn't even know that we were transgressors until we considered His wounds because sin does not reveal itself as sin. It's the judgment for sin that reveals sin as sin. When we see the wounds, then all of a sudden it opens our thought that for what reason, for our transgressions?

We didn't even know we were transgressors until we saw His wounds. We both recognize the nature of sin and the remedy in one fell swoop by perceiving what fell upon Him who bore our griefs and sorrows.

That's why Jesus is so necessary, why the cross is such a revelation. We do not know we are sinners until we see what it costs God to expiate and propitiate that sin through that suffering. Not to see it there is to diminish the sense of sin, which is to cheat us of the full amplitude of salvation.

We limp along in a kind of quasi-faith, never really seeing our sin, nor really obtaining our atonement. We've got to see sin as sin. That's why I began in Singapore with Psalm 51, the cry of, David, blot out my transgressions.

I can't bear them a moment more. I can't breathe, I can't eat. The thing haunts me. I'm rotting on the inside from my sin and my corruption. And I said to the Chinese, that psalm would be as profound from David and as Davidic in its beauty and power, if he had never committed adultery, if he had never murdered.

The psalm would be equally as appropriate because being man and bearing the Adamic curse, he would be capable of that and any and every sin. And that's what we need to see. And until we see it, we're not saved to the uttermost.

We've not received the benefit of the sacrifice and of the blood. I think I'm going to speak this to these prisoners. Yes, they know that they've met God and he saved them from their penalties, for their crimes, but their crime is only the peak.

It's only the visible and outward manifestation of a much deeper abiding reality of the eternal corruption that is in man by his very nature. That has got to be blotted out. A new heart has got to be created, a spirit renewed.

And that's what David is crying out for. It took his sin to reveal it as the sweet singer of Israel. And the king of Israel was himself capable of the most atrocious sin. Dear saints, we've got to know our sin, our nature.

Even though we have lived palpably, reasonably good lives, that's deceptive. It's just that the occasion has never arisen to reveal to you what is the truth of your reality as man. That's why the Holocaust is as much a gift from God to Germany as it is a judgment of God for Israel, because Germany thinks that it is superior.

Germany, who has given to the world philosophers and poets and Heinrich Heiner, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, great philosophers, great spokesmen, do not recognize the depth of their depravity and the condition of their sin as the Holocaust itself revealed it.

It was not a boo-boo. It was not a mistake. It was not a momentary error. It was the revelation of what they are, not so much only as Germans, but what they are, in fact, as man. Here Israel is being treated to the revelation of the truth of its condition, because being Jewish for 76 years, I know that I know, we Jews lack a sense of sin.