Dvd 11 - the Set Time to Favor Zion — Art Katz

Jeremiah’s Prophecies of Restoration and Judgment

My little devotional book, Praying with the Prophets, Eugene Peterson, ever hear of him? Good stuff. Just so happens that the prophet through whom he's going in these very days is Jeremiah and he's in chapter 30 and every day's installment is so apropos to what we have been discussing.

April 14th, Jeremiah 30, 17, I will restore health to you and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord. Because they have called you an outcast, it is Zion no one cares for her. And his comment is, two great facts about Israel describe us all.

One, no medicine for your wound, no healing for you, nothing devised by physicians or politicians will make us whole. Two, I will restore health to you. God cures the incurable. God uses the act of judgment as a very means of salvation.

April 15th, I am going to restore. Jeremiah 30, 18 through 22, I'm going to restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob and have compassion on his dwellings. The city shall be rebuilt upon its mound and the citadel set on its rightful site.

I remember sharing that particular verse with one of the most esteemed prophetic men in the land, whom I had known for many years, trying to indicate that there's yet a devastation that's future. And I said, the city will be rebuilt upon its mounds, its heaps.

And he said, Art, look out the window. There's the earth movers now, there's the massive equipment. That prophecy is being fulfilled now. I said, but you dear man, read the scriptures carefully. It says it will be rebuilt upon its mounds or upon its heaps as unto the Lord.

And this building is not that building. In fact, this building will constitute the heaps and the mounds and he shall get out of my office. Thank you, Lord. We have to be careful and not miss the scripture that indicates whether something is past, present or future.

So he writes, judgment has ravaged the city, turned the temple to rubble, decimated the population. Often, there's like a double application, both past and future through the same verses. The worst is never the last word, the best is.

And then he says, when was this prophecy fulfilled, hinting that there's yet a future fulfillment that very few dare even to consider. April 16th, Jeremiah 30, 22, 23, 24. The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his mind.

In the latter days, you will understand this. April 17th, grace in the wilderness, Jeremiah 31. At that time, says the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel. They shall be my people. Blessed is the Lord.

The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness. When Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. His comment, Israel delivered from Egyptian slavery. See how he's casting this in the past, found in the wilderness because that's the only wilderness with which he's acquainted.

He doesn't contemplate a future wilderness, that God is all sufficient, that living by faith, put her in touch with the deep realities of God's blessing, deliverance from exile will renew that experience.

Yes, indeed. And his prayer, Lord God in the wilderness, where I used to see only emptiness, I am discovering your fullness. In the place where human achievements are nonexistent, I discover your work in me and know your blessing.

Thank you, God, for grace in the wilderness. Ever been in the wilderness? My wilderness was in Denmark, not Minnesota, where I lived, oh, I don't know, a few months, my wife's country. It was for me a veritable wilderness, an anguish of soul.

For people who had coffee at 4 p .m. every day if the world was coming to the end, and they had three kinds of cake prescribed, and I don't have a word to describe the Danish mentality, the mindset that rubbed me absolutely raw and stretched me every day to breaking so that a comfortable civilization that predicates reality on creature comfort was for me the place of wilderness.

God can do it in your own home and behind your own drawn shades and constitute that as a wilderness, because a wilderness is a place of stretching, a place of emptying, a place of exasperation, of futility, where there doesn't seem to be end or answer.

I think it's imperative, incumbent on every saint to have a wilderness experience and to find God in it, so that when we come to comfort them in the wilderness, we come with a tested word. Okay. Today's text, tonight's text, Psalm 102, and this psalm is eschatological and apocalyptic.

Psalm 102 and the Eschatological Affliction of Israel

These are two words from which you cannot be relieved. Every saint, if they understand only two Greek words, maybe three, exegesis, drawing out from the text, they need to understand eschatological, the things that pertain to the end, eschaton, the end, the meaning of the end, and apocalyptic, much more difficult word.

It actually means revelation, but it means a revelation of things that come at a time of judgment and devastation, so that the view of things that are apocalyptic are charged often with violence, tumult, destruction.

This psalm is both eschatological and apocalyptic. So are you saying, Art, that there are psalms that are ancient, that go back to much earlier times, that speak and are descriptive of that which is yet future and not yet in our experience?

Exactly. That's what this psalm is. It begins with a description of a man in a concentration camp. You'll read, we'll read it in just a moment, and it's not a far-fetched description of what my Jewish kinsmen will be experiencing, because God will bring them out of dungeons and out of prisons and out of chains, out of confinement, out of hopeless situations, dark holes and pits, that they will be cast to in the last days, in the farthermost reaches of the world.

If after all, this will be a greater trouble than any previous trouble, and two-thirds of world Jewry will expire in a much shorter time than the Nazi period required for six million, then something of a systematic kind will be required.

It will be more than just a death here, a death there. There's going to have to be wholesale annihilation, wholesale death camps, wholesale places like of which Auschwitz and Birkenau were the prototype.

So let's look at Psalm 102 and catch the sense of this. And in my Bible, it says in italics under the title 102, a prayer of the afflicted when he is overwhelmed and poureth out his complaint before the Lord.

So the Spirit of God gave to the psalmist this psalm that beggars any description of things in the psalmist's own experience, or even in history, in Israel's present, up to that time history, it's speaking of a future time.

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble, Jacob's trouble. Incline thine ear unto me in the day when I call. Answer me speedily.

Well, so far we're encouraged that because of the trouble, that people who have not been accustomed to calling upon the Lord are constrained to pray. Hear my prayer and my cry, let it come up unto thee.

The distress of this afflicted one compels him to cry out to a God whom he would not otherwise have sought had his life continued to be untroubled, predictable, safe, affluent, and comfortable. That's why troubles come.

Because though that would have been an enjoyable condition, it does not bring one to God. And the whole purpose for life is to be found of God. Tell me a text where that is stated. By the great apostle himself.

Acts 17 and the Purpose of Human Existence

Mars Hill. Mars Hill, Acts 17. Speaking to philosophers who are every day looking for some new thing, who delight to refer to God as the unknown God. It sounds so spiritual, but it's so phony. And the apostle will not let them get away with it.

He whom you worship ignorantly, I declare unto you. The God who made the heavens and the earth and all that is, including Athens, has established why by one blood all nations of men that they might seek after him, if happily they may be found of him.

What he's saying is, you guys can be philosophical all you want, but the purpose for existence, for the nations, for the bounds of the nations, and the blood by which all men are made, is that they might seek after God and be found of him.

That's the purpose of human existence. Kind of narrow view, wouldn't you say? But it's the view of God, and the apostle proclaims it with complete emphatic assurance. And the world has not heard that kind of word since.

The world needs to be told that whatever you think its purpose is, commerce and civilization and trade and science and culture, that's all frill. Here's the purpose, don't be deceived, to be found of God while you yet have breath.

And here's a man coming to this discovery, this realization, only out of trouble and out of distress. You could almost say it's the love of God who would not allow the man to die in the deception that was godless, but brought him trouble to break through the conventional categories by which he was assured he was living rightly.

And for the first time, this Norman Podhoretz is lifting his voice and crying out to God. Hear my cry, oh Lord. This is unprecedented in my experience, but my trouble, my distress, constrains me. For where did you hear the kind of plight that he's in?

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass so that I forget to eat my bread. By reason of the voice of my groaning, my bones cleave to my skin.

This is almost a description of the concentration camp inmates. Bones and skin, and darkened and blackened, not able to eat, smitten. I am like a pelican of the wilderness. I am like an owl of the desert, solitary.

I watch and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop. My enemies reproach me all the day, and they that are mad against me are sworn against me. If that's not a description of Islamic spite and vengeance and vehemence of having a Jew captive and every day baiting him and goading him and bringing him to an anguish of soul, I don't know what it is.

The Nazis were not like that. I mean, there may have been an occasional slight and rough word. But now this man who is in prison has got daily to listen to a people who take a special vicious delight in spiteful taunts and mockings because they know they've got this guy captive and for him there's no hope.

So he's crying out to God. I'm a pelican. I'm an owl. I'm a sparrow on the roof. I'm alone. I'm helpless. My skin clings to my bones. I can't eat. I'm being taunted and mocked every day from those who are mad against me.

What do you have in your Bible? Do you have mad against me? Who has something else? Riled. Riled. Riled? Riled. Insult. Rail. Rail. Okay. Anyone else? Swear an oath against me. Swear an oath. Swear an oath.

All of that, I think, huh? Angry. Angry. Taunt. The best taunt, the best, better is vicious, spiteful, bitter. It's a kind of phenomenon we have not seen in modern times until the rise of Islam because it's inherent and intrinsic to the Islamic demonism and it likes to ventilate itself upon the infidel and of all the infidels, upon the Jew.

So here's a Jew in a plight that if I'm right, my people are going to be experiencing in very great measure at a soon time. But there's a purpose in God, as I have already said. A man who before would never have considered calling on God, that would have been kid stuff, that's medieval, that's play acting, that's nursery stuff, is now doing it.

This urbane Jew, sophisticated, and had it all together, his life has come apart at its seams and he's in a hopeless predicament for which there's only one place to turn and to cry, God. Is that that important, that God will allow that distress to come?

Yes. My enemies reproach me all the day. They that are angry, spiteful, vicious against me are sworn against me for I've eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping. Because of thine indignation and thy wrath, for thou hast lifted me up and cast me down.

Well, praise the Lord. This guy is beginning to see daylight. Not only is he beginning to acknowledge God, he's beginning to acknowledge something that is consonant with that, that what he's suffering is not merely at the hands of men, but that God himself is the author of this condition.

He's beginning to factor in that what we experience is come at the hand of God as judgment. But not only that, it's a judgment justified because he says your indignation has cast me down. It's a depth of awareness of the utter reality that is otherwise concealed in the amenities of life that is the ground of very truth itself.

Suffering, judgment, but deserved judgment. Your indignation has cast me down. So it's not only acknowledgement of God, but that what I'm experiencing is from the hand of God and I deserve what I'm experiencing.

It's not a complaint against God that I'm just a hapless victim without reason. No, I see now in the severity of what I am experiencing that you're not only a God who's existent, but a God who is just and that what I'm experiencing is altogether appropriate to my sin against you for my long discontinuity and my long ignorance and indifference against you, which is the epitome of sin.

This is eschatological. This is describing a condition to which my people have not yet come, but will come because this complainant, this person in the psalm is speaking in behalf of an entire people.

It's not just an individual here, but a people who have come to this condition. My days are like a shadow. Let's go back again. Thine indignation, verse 10, and thy wrath. And this is not God who's just irascible and unreasonable and just blows off steam and gets mad because he's free to have the prerogative of being God.

His wrath is just. His wrath is righteous. His indignation is a justified indignation. And for the first time, this Jewish guy in this predicament is seeing and acknowledging that. He's close to truth.

He's close to salvation. And whatever the predicament that has brought him there, it's worth it because the issue of eternal salvation is worth all of the afflictions that we can suffer in this earthly life, not to carry it into an eternity in which is an anguish of soul and a gnashing of teeth without remedy.

If we don't understand this, we will find complaint with God when we see Jews suffering this and say, where is he? How is he allowing that? How is this the God of justice and love? Because Paul says that one of the phenomena of the last days is a great falling away.

And I want to suggest it will be from faint-hearted saints who are shallow, merely sentimental, and are disappointed in God in the way in which they see he's allowing his people to be treated a second time within a generation in a way more devastating than even the Nazi time.

So that those who had hoped that the state of Israel was the final coming through and a homeland for Jews, and even though there were some troubles, they would come through, they would be settled, they would be hunky-dory, we would be hunky-dory, and all things would be altogether sweet, are utterly disappointed.

They're not being raptured, and Israel is not being established, and Jews are once again being cast into a furnace of affliction that exceeds anything that they had previously known historically, even the Nazi time.

I'll tell you that if you don't prophetically anticipate and understand the reason for the judgment of God in wrath and indignation, you will be offended against God and say that he has failed you, he's not the God that you had expected, his scriptures are not true, Israel is not established, you thought the scriptures indicated that, you will be among those that fall away.

And in falling away, you're going to find yourself in the camp of the oppressors against the oppressed, killing those who yet retain their prophetic and apostolic faith and justify God in his severity and say, and they will kill us and claim they're doing God a service.

Listen, saints, there's a centrifugal thing taking place through the course of time and history by which as we come increasingly to the end, God is sifting the earth, not only Israel, but the church and the nations and those who are faint in their hearts to God and never had occasion to express it will be, find themselves justified in forsaking him and their faith and becoming themselves apostate and persecutors of those who believe and justify God in his severity because they know that God's judgments are not merely punitive but redemptive and that there's an eternal end and an eschatological end and a millennial end by which he shall be glorified and Israel shall be delivered, but not before it's preceded by a time of trouble.

Boy, thank you, Lord, that we had this session just to save individuals from within this present congregation and those watching or hearing the tapes from the prospect of apostasy and falling away that comes out of a disappointment of a God who seems to have failed them because of their inadequate understanding of that God and the necessity for trouble and indignation and wrath so as to bring a victim to a place of understanding and recognition by which he is eternally saved.

God’s Severity, Mercy, and the Deliverance of Israel

How far will God go to save Israel from an utter and final irrevocable damnation? How far must he go to save them for the purposes for which they're called, in which his name and word and honor are at stake, who has given them an irrevocable call to be the nation of priests and light of the world?

He will go this far. Are you offended when God goes that far? How far will you go, Lord? How many times have we said, ouch, it's enough already, Lord. How much must I bear this? I'm at my end. I can't take an iota more.

And instead of being relieved, he turns up the juice, tightens the screws, and brings you yet into deeper convulsions and pain and wracking in which you thought that you had come to your limit. How far will he go?

He goes far because the issues are great and they are eternal. He'll go as far as is needful to attain what he must because in all of his vengeance and wrath and dealings, he is, after all, a God of mercy.

Let every man be a liar. Let God be true. Let us be stupefied and choke and splutter and kick and complain and say, where is he and how dare he, but know that we know that what he is in his nature is unchangeable and true.

He is love. He is mercy. It's not just an attribute. It's not just a little external cosmetic of his personality. It's what he is in himself through and through. So I don't care what he does. I don't care what kind of a trouble comes.

I don't care how much it makes me stagger and be stupefied and unable to explain it. I'm not required to explain him. Who am I to explain him? His ways are past finding out. But this I know. He does all things well.

This I know. He's perfect in all his ways. This I know. He's altogether righteous. He's altogether just. And even his severity is his mercy. When you know that, you know God. You've got to know him or you'll be offended.

And the great test will be his dealings with the Jewish people, whom you love and want to see spared. And instead of being spared, they're going to be clobbered brutally by the most vengeful force in modern history, Islam.

I've never spoken like this. First time. I'm glad I'm hearing it and it's being recorded. But thou, O Lord, my days are like a shadow. Verse 11. That decline. I'm withered like grass. But thou. Beautiful statement.

My days. Me. I was a hot shot in times past, but now I'm withering. I'm nothing. But thou. O dear saints, I am yearning and waiting for my Jewish people to go from my days, me, but thou. I'm waiting for the but thou.

I'm waiting for the shift of emphasis. The true center point. The true basis and pivot of reality. Thou. They've not come to it even when they're orthodox. Even their orthodoxy and their orthopraxy and their minute attention to kosher, kosher kashruth and rules and regulations is not yet the but thou.

This but thou. This new acknowledgement that there's an entity in the world beside me and greater than me. It's God. I'm withered like grass. I'm dust. But thou. Oh. Whatever it takes, Lord, to get your Jewish people to say that out of their deeps is worth everything.

Because until they come to that, what blessing can they bring to the world? What kind of priestliness can they minister until they have come to the but thou? Have we come to the but thou? And when do we come to it?

That is deep. It's when we are withering like grass. When we're drying up. When we're afflicted that however we are reduced, we can still turn to the whole purpose of life and existence. God. But thou.

Lord. But thou. Thou, oh Lord, shalt endure forever. I'm transient. I'm a piece of dust. I'm flim flam. I'm here today, gone tomorrow. My days are a vapor. But thou, oh Lord, shalt endure forever. Wow.

Whatever it took to bring this recognition to a secular, resistant Jew was worth it. But thou, oh Lord, you're timeless. You're eternal. And your remembrance unto all generations. Thou shalt arise. Listen to this cognizance.

This understanding that's deep about God, much deeper than many of us who have been lifetime believers have yet come. Because however short a period of time this represents in this individual's life, the depth of his suffering and his calamity has driven him to an awareness of God deeper in many ways than most of us who had lifetimes of believing that are casual and superficial.

Listen to what he's going to say. Not only do you endure forever, but you shall arise and have mercy upon Zion for the time to favor her, yea, the set time is come. Well, you dear man, how do you know that?

That there is a time with God. However hopeless things may seem, there is a moment of God's choosing in which the most hopeless situation of predicament will be reversed, will be turned around. Its purposes will have been served.

And because you know that, that God's final word is mercy and not judgment, that this experience that I'm suffering is not the last word, there's something to come that must come in God's time. And the word in Greek for the time, the set time, is not chronos, what time is it, but the kairos, the appointed time and the set time.

Have you come to this awareness of God? There's a set time. And you know what, excuse my naivety, these very days for us in this little place here in New Zealand is a set time whose time has come. Will you believe me when I say, 41 years in the Lord, speaking throughout the world, I have never heard myself as I'm hearing myself in these days.

There's something taking place. There's a depth, there's a precision of speech. I don't have a word for it. There's something taking place here whose time has come. Not only for you, yes for you, but through you and beyond you, to the church at large.

Its time has come. A word, a presentation, an understanding, the set time. We need to know that. It's God. He's not, time does not just run on, events do not just take their course. It's moving towards something.

This is a God who's skillful. This is a God who knows the end from the beginning. This is a God who has purposes to be served. And there comes a time when that purpose is served. A set time. And if it were not for that, that we can expect that and look to that and hope for that, we would collapse.

Because one day would be like another. There doesn't simply be any light breaking on the horizon. But we know that we know that there's something already in the elect mind of God and his will. And which, what seems to us to be irreversible, hopeless, will be turned when the set time has come to favor Zion.

Compassion for Zion and the Church’s Identification with Israel

Now wait till you hear, how does this man know that the set time is about to come? What will it take? What is God waiting for that he will recognize that the time has come, the appointed hour, to be Israel's deliverer?

And here it is. It's a remarkable statement. Verse 14, the heart of our message. For thy servants take pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof. Huh? That's the set time? What is that? What is being said here?

In the cryptic, terse, poetic, and prophetic way in which the psalmist speaks and sums up in one verse an enormously profound statement for which God is waiting from his servants. Not from Israel. Israel is the complainant.

Israel is the one whose skin is cleaving to their bones. Someone else is being referred to here. And the word that is used to refer to that other one is servants. My servant people. If Israel were the servants, they would not be in the concentration camps.

It's someone else whom God is addressing. As he addressed in Isaiah 35 in the wilderness, speak to them and say to them. He's not speaking to Israel. He's speaking to someone else who remains unidentified but will have a prophetic power to speak in such a way as to make the lame to leap and the blind to see and water break out of dry ground.

Here again is another cryptic reference. Mysterious. Why doesn't the scripture say the church? Why servants? Because this psalm has existed for centuries. The word church was not even in existence. It would have been confusing.

God in his wisdom had to give a word descriptive of the church and yet one that would not throw readers off. But servants of such a kind. How are they described? As those that have mercy upon Zion. Who take pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof.

He's not talking about antiquity. He's not talking about archaeology. What is he talking about? To take pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof. The stones in my prophetic understanding are the ruins of the cities of Judah.

Present Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. All the cities of Israel shall be crunched. There will be wholesale devastation. They will be left in ruins, the great diamond tower of Tel Aviv and all of the things that Israel has built as if they have everlasting security and this shall not come upon them.

It's going to be a devastation? It has to be. Because the scripture says that it is without inhabitants. The cities are left in ruin and desolate and without inhabitants. Why? Because they are stripped, they're ruined, they're brought down as a judgment of such a kind on a state that presumed to think that it could establish itself independent of God.

And you know what? The world is gloating and taking enjoyment and rubbing their hands in glee. They had it coming. They couldn't find a way to make peace with the Palestinians and with the Arabs and they were contentious and they used force and true enough.

But there will be a strange presence in the earth that will not gloat and enjoy Israel's misfortune. A people who will have mercy and compassion and identification with her ruins. That's a poetic way of saying that this people will be identified and stand with Israel in the judgment that the ruins suggest.

Not just the sympathy from a distance and clucking your tongue and saying, oh, too bad about them. But being with them in their plight. Their plight is the result of their sin as judgment. And yet you freely identify with them in that brokenness, in that mishap, that misfortune is exactly the same kind of act as Jesus being baptized in the Jordan by John.

And John was astonished. I have need to be baptized of you. What are you doing here? This is a place for sinners. This is the water of repentance. You have no need. Jesus said it's needful that all righteousness be fulfilled.

I have got to identify with my people in their sins. I cannot stand on the banks and look down from some superior height. I've got to join them, be with them in their plight, though I myself am innocent without sin.

And when God saw that and Jesus came up out of that water, the heaven opened, and the dove came down, the voice of the Father said, this is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased. Because what he has voluntarily done here, this identification with Israel in its sin is the statement of what I am as God.

I'm compassionate. Yes, I judge, but I identify. I'm with this people. Because though we are not guilty of their sins, of what sins are we guilty? And do we have to wait to cry out, Lord, blot out my transgressions, as I said earlier today, because I've committed adultery and murder?

Or can we cry out, blot out my transgressions, because I'm capable of adultery and murder? Because I was born in iniquity. I was conceived in iniquity. Not because my mother was in a sinful state when that conception took place, but because through and through, in my frame as man, I am sin.

You have every reason to identify with Israel. You don't have to wait to prove the truth of your condition, because you have actually committed this or that. There but for the grace of God go you. And unless we identify in that way, we don't identify.

Got the picture? It's like me on that day 50 years ago or more, coming back from my first visit to Dachau, the German concentration camp near Munich, on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. I didn't go to a synagogue.

I went to the concentration camp. Oh, I knew about those Germans, and I had an anger bristling in my gut toward them. And I made the rounds, and I saw the places of flogging. They were still in place in the early 1950s.

They had not yet cleaned it up. It still had all of the visible accoutrements of a death camp and a place of torture, whipping posts and all the rest. I went right into the gas rooms and saw the signs in German for people to take a shower, not knowing that what would come out of those jets was not going to be water but gas.

And then the furnace, the bones. I got sick in my soul. I thought I knew, but I didn't know as I ought to know. And I remember coming outside and gasping for air. I was overwhelmed. I was so overwhelmed that my little brittle categories of good guy and bad guy had dissipated in the smoke that ascended from Dachau.

That what I was seeing, the magnitude of this evil, unconsciously, though my mind was not yet revealing, was saying in my deeps, this evil is too great merely to be attributed to Germans. This is human evil.

And you cats, you self-righteous prig, you smug, complacent piece of Jewish vanity who think that you're morally superior to those Germans, you're as capable of they as this evil. And until you recognize that.

As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. Good. Perfect.

And there I went staggering onto the train to go back to Munich and found myself in a second-class car with the sliding doors, the European-style trains. There was only one other passenger, a blond man with blue eyes.

My enemy, the Aryan. But without arms and without legs. The guy was a multiple amputee. And we were seated opposite each other. This Jew with his superior morality being smashed to smithereens by the evidence of what men in their evil can perform that is beyond our explanations, beyond our categories.

And here was this piece of the man who had ventilated that upon us, my enemy, and I felt the thing welling up in me, anger, indignation. But the poor sucker was in pain and he was trying with his hooks to adjust his artificial limb and couldn't succeed.

And I had my arms over my chest saying, suffer, you dog. Whatever pain you're experiencing now is minute next to what you have done to my people. But as I watched, something greater than myself welled up in me and I got out of my seat without a word and I went to him and I put my arms, my hands on that loathsome artificial limb and twisted it at his beckoning until he achieved his peace.

And then he beckoned me to sit down, offered me a cigarette, and we looked at each other, Jew and German, face to face. And he was trying to spit out something in German at me, what could I say, something about the Krieg, the war, what he was trying to say, the tragedy of it, that has left me a mutilated stump and has left your people ashes.

Who can account for it? And as I looked upon him, coming out of that experience that day, for the first time, I thought, there but for the grace of God go I. If I had been born German instead of Jewish, if I had grown up in Germany instead of Brooklyn, I would just as readily have put bodies in the ovens as he.

There's no man good, I didn't know the scripture, any scripture, but a truth was being conveyed that ten years later God fingered in order to bring me through to salvation. There's no man good, no not one.

If God is to account, if God is to mark iniquity, who can stand? How dare we distinguish ourselves? How dare we think ourselves superior to anyone? How dare we look with contempt and derision at the Jew in their judgment as if it has not come upon us, we're superior and better, and we can just smugly, condescendingly feel a little sorry for them.

The set time has not come, if that's the depth of what we're capable. The set time only comes when we have love for their stones and mercy for their dust. When we're so compassionately joined with them, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, yes they have deserved what they're necessarily experiencing, but we're one with them in it, even in their sin.

When that comes, and it's a remarkable state of being, it's more than just nice guy feelings, it's union, it's identification. In fact, it's the heart of God. This is God's heart to be identified with his people, because didn't he already so identify with his people that he bore their sin?

And this compassion on their stones and mercy on their dust is but the reiteration of the same heart of God that led the Son of God to the cross to take upon himself the sin of his people and of mankind.

When he has a church like that, he has the church. The set time has come to favor Zion because the purpose through Zion is to bring the church into a place of identity with God himself in his compassion and in his mercy, because God is in his essential identity, mercy.

This is beyond sentiment. This is nothing less, no other than union. This is a people who have, who are not just walking along with God, but God has been, Christ has been formed in them, and they can say with Paul, for me to live is Christ.