'To the Jew first...' — Art Katz

Got sharpened pencils and notebooks and ready to take diligent notes. What a test before you tonight. What a swarm. I need to suck up some faith myself to believe the mystery of the gospel as I look out on you and see how foolish a thing God has cast everything upon.

The Foolishness of the Gospel and God's Purpose for the Jews

Have you realized that? That God has chosen the foolish things? And what a formidable confrontation it is to which we're heading. So I have a subject for you tonight that you're not likely to hear from another and it needs to be a once and for all hearing, which if you hear it, you can be assured your Christian life will be transformed.

And it's got to do with a people as peculiar as yourself, more despised, called the Jew. And I'm not going to speak of them as an ethnic group that deserves our consideration along with every other, but something uniquely important in God's sight and central to us as the church.

To miss this or to omit this is to defraud the church, to rob it of its content, its character, its dynamic, its all. And that, in fact, has been what is historically true. The church tonight is emasculated and defrauded and far beneath its apostolic stature and glory, in my opinion, that among all of the reasons, this the most central, the omission of the consideration of this people that God has set before us as our central mandate, in the avoidance of which not only do they suffer neglect, but every other people in the earth in exact proportion.

For this gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So I'm going to make a lot of sharp statements tonight that you need to chew on and to consider before God.

The Priority of the Jew First

Radical statements that I don't know that I've made to any other, but it's appointed for you and for whoever else will be hearing this tape. Such a statement as, for example, that we are suffering from a diminished gospel worldwide to the exact proportion that we have studiously avoided the priority that God has established in his word for his own wisdom and reason, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

There's no reason why we should find some exegetical way to avoid what those words simply state. It gives every appearance on the rules of grammatical construction of language that God is stating a priority.

To the Jew first, isn't that clear? And also to the Greek. And I want to suggest that God really meant that and that there are reasons for which he has given this priority. And even if there were no reasons, or no reasons given, is not reason for us to be absolved from our obligation to obey the word.

For not to obey the word is not only to miss the importance of that particular statement, but to render all the word diminished. It's to allow a leaven into the entire lump. It's to bring to all the scriptures a diminished respect because we have missed it in this point.

What does the scripture say? That if you miss in one point of the law, you're guilty of all. And what I'm suggesting tonight, to have missed this critical requirement of God is to suffer not only a diminished gospel because it is the power of God unto salvation, but to have set in motion a leaven that corrupts the whole lump in terms of all the word of God.

And to signal to the principalities and the powers of the air that we are an essentially disobedient people who say, Lord, Lord, but do not take his word seriously. Go ye into all the world and preach this gospel to every creature, beginning at Jerusalem and unto Judea and Samaria and then to the uttermost corners of the earth.

You say, Art, if this is true, if God is really explicit and means what he says and says what he means, why have we sidestepped this evident priority and requirement? Who could answer that question? It's written in this room.

Because you're a bunch of sissies. Because you instinctively recognize that we Jews are tough. And not only are we tough, we're the toughest. There's no more severe critic of the gospel or of Christendom in all the world than my Jewish people.

Praise God that there was someone who had the courage 26 years ago to pick me up off the side of the road as a hitchhiking Jew. And I could well understand the greater number of cars who passed me by who were wise not to take the risk of picking up a man so angry, so bitter, so hostile to a world that had failed him and its gods and a special enemy of religion and of all religions, Christendom, for all that we Jews have suffered in the name of Christ historically.

You would do well to avoid that, people. Not only do they have a good historical case against you, but they happen also to be bright and intellectual and formidable. And if ever you want to feel the full extent of your inadequacy, try confronting one.

It's one thing to bring the gospel to some sodden, drunk Gentile in the gutter who went to Sunday school as a kid and knows that he should be saved. But it's another thing to knock on the door of an erstwhile Jew who has two or three university degrees and is an impeccable man morally and ethically as many, if not most Jews are, who has never so much as raised his voice once to his wife and to tell that man that he's as lost as that drunken sod without your Christ in whose name he has been historically persecuted for 2 ,000 years.

Got the picture? Little wonder that Paul says in Romans 11, they are the enemies of the gospel. Any student of church history can confirm that. We Jews have vexed the church from its inception right into the 20th century.

There was no segment of the church that did not suffer the bob of our criticism and our rebuke that you dum-dums think that you could tell us what our Hebrew scriptures mean and give some kind of specious messianic interpretation to Isaiah 53 and a few other proof texts that this naked, itinerant preaching bum who is hanging on the cross is the Holy One of Israel.

Absurd. See what I'm saying? You're trembling even now, and I'm a believer. There's a divine wisdom in all that I'm saying, children, that God who knows our frames and knows that we are as dust, who knows the whole historical situation, who in fact himself has set it in motion, realizes that the only way that we could be obedient to the scripture and actually do it and go to the Jew first is by a courage, a wisdom, a wit, and an ability not our own.

Four spiritual laws won't do it, and neither will five. And if I'm alive in God today, it's because I met such a one at the side of the road in that hitchhiking adventure of 26 years ago who was not doing it according to the numbers, who didn't recite to me a cheap and easy cliché, are you saved, brother, but spoke a word that was so calculated to pierce my heart that no man could have known nor transmitted except one who was in such a proximity and union with God as is not the case in one out of a million Christians.

The Church's Mandate to Reach Jewish People

You've got to take this seriously, because I don't know if you've noticed that wherever the church is, we Jews are. Have you noticed that? Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could say, but there are no Jews where we are.

How can we fulfill this mandate? But I'll tell you, you'll have to search far and wide to find a place where the church is and Jews are not. I have found them in Tokyo with an Israeli pastor. I have found them in Mexico with a Polish refugee from the concentration camps as their rabbi.

I have found them in the streets of Yugoslavia. There's not a place where they are not, because God has seen to it that we should not have any valid reason to disavow what he calls us to consider as a first priority.

I'm not saying this because I'm Jewish. I'm saying this because I'm a lover of the word and of the church, and I know that I know that I know that we have paid a severe historical price for our omission to the mandate to which we are called at the first to this people.

Now you say, why would God say to the Jew first and then also to the Greek? And I can recite from my experience as a high school teacher why he would do that, because any public school teacher knows, not public in the way you English know it, the way we Americans know it, that there's a bully in every class at the commencement of every school year.

There's some big oaf in the back of the room who's not going to so much as lift a finger to attempt to pass that course. He knows right from the first day that he's going to fail, but he's going to enjoy failing and make the teacher's life a misery.

And already he's making a disturbance and a commotion in the back of the room, and where is the teacher who has the courage to confront him? The temptation is to look away from the most serious disturbance and to fix your gaze on the lesser and the secondary disturbance that you feel your authority is equal to control.

But you know what the end of that is? Not only will you not have control over that disturbance, let alone the bully, you'll not have it over the class at all. To the bully first. To the Jew first. Begin at Jerusalem.

Don't begin in the boondocks in some rural district where it's safest to try it out and see if the gospel works, because you've got to know from the very commencement the gospel as power. This gospel is the power of God unto salvation.

It's not a little chintzy formula that will save men by being recited. And if we don't know it as power to the Jew, how do we know it to the Greek? See what I mean? There's a divine wisdom in this order and in this requirement.

And many other things can I say and will I say if you take notes diligently and ponder what's being said. Because your own destiny and life in service for God will be directly affected, and the whole issue of the Church itself and its mission in the world hinges and is taken up with this thing.

The Gospel's Conflict With Pluralism

Like, for example, have you heard of pluralism? The whole modern Western world is pluralistic. That is to say, many paths to God. There's no single truth. The thing that God impaled me on a hook, on the horns of a dilemma, was a revelation in the first reading of the New Testament on that hitchhiking journey, out of a statement out of the mouth of Jesus.

As a Jew who had never picked up the Bible in 34 years, university graduate and teacher of history, I had never ever once opened the Bible, old or new, until I picked up a New Testament that came into my hands in the moment of God's choosing and was confronted by a revelation with a statement out of the mouth of Jesus, who made the remarkable statement, if you see me, you see the Father.

I and the Father are one. And no man comes to the Father except by me. If any man come any other way, that man is a thief and a robber. Do you guys realize what a scandal the Gospel is? Do you realize how abrasive the Gospel is?

Do you realize that God has chosen the foolish thing? That there's nothing about the Gospel that is intellectually credible, that we can express it and maintain our integrity, not our integrity, our prestige, our self-image at the same time?

God has given us something calculatingly foolish compared to the wisdom of the world. The world that is pluralistic and likes to consider many past the truth has got to contend with a Gospel that insists upon itself and the Jesus of that Gospel as the only truth.

It is uncompromising in its insistence. It is absolute in its expression. And the very question of absoluteness and singularity is itself runs right across the whole tenet and grain of the modern world.

Do you understand that? Do you understand how pluralistic the whole mindset of the world is? The many options. I don't know the maybes, the grays, who's to say? And into that whole mucky world of vagaries and choices and grays and nuances comes a one statement out of the heart of God, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

And no man comes to the Father but by me. If I've heard anything from my Jewish kinsmen in any conversation in which I have ever been involved with my people, invariably they bring up, well, what about the other people of the world?

What about Buddhists? What about Muslims? What about Hindus? Don't they have a religion? Isn't it a world faith? Are there redemptive elements in these religions? And you feel a blush coming up to the roots of your being when you have to insist and say no.

These are satanic deceptions and false alternatives that lead unto death. There's only one way to insist on the singularity of the gospel, the absoluteness of it. It is not just an issue of religion, it's hitting the world head on in a confrontation of wisdoms, of moral systems, of mentalities.

Don't you understand that? And the Jew is par excellence the voice and the expression and the consummate perfection of that world mentality and wisdom and spirit honed to its finest edge, ultimate sophistication itself.

And there are you in all your foolishness and weakness, stuttering and insisting that there's only one way. When common, rudimentary common sense and a mere superficial appraisal of the world and its diversity of religions and philosophies will show you that there are many ways and they're all efficacious and all have their advantage and their beauty and their benefit in the eyes of the wisdom of this world.

In a word, to confront a Jew is to confront the spirit of the world in all of its powerful and formidable wisdom head on. The issue of the Jew is not merely the issue of another ethnic group that needs the gospel.

It is the issue of the world in all of its antagonism and hostility against God. Not nakedly expressed as hostility and antagonism, but expressed in the most subtle, honorific and philosophically acceptable terms.

We're on a collision course at the end of the age between two wisdoms and the Jew is at the pivot. To touch the Jew is to touch the world at its heart. Can I say that and not encourage you to anti-Semitism?

And if you want to know that there are powers of darkness, you'll know it then. There's a resonance and an anointing of a particular kind that does not come from God that emanates with and from this people.

And you know that you're head on with ultimate collision and confrontation which brings or requires us to a place of ultimacy, which is exactly God's intention. Because if it were not for this, we would be drifting and coasting and getting by.

But this is ultimate requirement that cannot be met except with the ultimacy which God is in himself as wisdom, power, sanctification and redemption and all that pertains to godliness and to life. Are you guys with me?

Israel, the Gospel, and the Gifts of God

Hmm. They are the enemies of the gospel. Is that the end of the statement? What completes it? Where is that statement made? Where Paul himself, who is the Hebrew of the Hebrews, who knows his people impeccably, acknowledges what history has confirmed again and again.

They are the enemies of the gospel. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein. But Albert Einstein was a physicist. What does he have to do with spiritual, religious or philosophical issues? Didn't he just invent the atom bomb and the theory of relativity?

He sure did. And relativism, that all things are relative and who can say what is truth, is a derivative of his discovery in the world of physics brought to a social application. Relativism is the very posture of the world, it's the very spirit of the world, contrary to the absoluteness of the gospel.

Things that who can say? So they are the enemies even unconsciously. The gifts and callings of God, Paul says in that same chapter of Romans, which chapter is that? 11, are without repentance. They are a gifted people.

And if their gift is not employed for God, it will be employed for another. So our failure to bring them back to the God from whom they had been alienated leaves their gifts available for God's enemy.

And just imagine what history would be in our very generation if Karl Marx had been soundly and profoundly converted instead of only shallowly flirted with some casual expression of the gospel which he disregarded after a minor flirtation.

What would have happened had that man been saved and converted and brought back to the knowledge of the God of his fathers and his great gifts were employed for the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of darkness?

We would not recognize the present world just for that one man. How many lesser Karl Marxists are there of whose names we're not familiar who have been in places of influence in culture and the arts and literature and all of the things that influence opinion whom we have allowed to continue in the exercise of their gifts because they have never been confronted with the gospel by the church.

We have left them alone because we wisely have intuited that they're too tough to handle. They're intimidating and we did not feel that we could adequately meet them. I'm just trying to bring to consciousness what has been unspoken but is true.

The gospel is the power of God into salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek. And what am I saying? To the degree that we have not been diligent to obey the order of God's priority. It's not only the Jew that has suffered but the Greek also because only the confrontation with the Jew in what he represents in his Judaism in his philosophical mindset reveals the sharp and the radical edge of the gospel.

It has got to be a gospel of power or it will never succeed with them. But who's got the courage to trust it and to express it and to believe it in the face of all of the intimidating things to the contrary?

Beginning at Jerusalem and unto Judea and to the uttermost corners of the earth. To the Jew first. And what is God's... Who's to promulgate this gospel? Gentiles. How do Jews look upon them? With disdain.

As being socially and intellectually, culturally and religiously inferior. Can you see how the cards are stacked against us? Formidable. Everything against us. The history of the church toward the Jew.

The Church's Historical Failure Toward the Jews

Luther himself was a violent anti-Semite. During the Crusades, the men with white crosses on their tunics looted and pillaged and destroyed and raped Jewish communities throughout Europe on their way to the Holy Land and financed their expedition by that business.

The very community near where I was stationed in Germany as a GI a quarter of a century ago had a haunting sense of familiarity. A strange thing for a guy born in Brooklyn, New York who couldn't even speak German and yet felt more at home in that little town with its cobblestone streets worn smooth by the passage of feet over centuries than ever I had felt in New York.

And upon my return to America, at the conclusion of my military service, one day accidentally to find in an encyclopedia a reference to that town that there the Jewish community of the Middle Ages during one of the Crusades holed itself up in its own synagogue to avoid the persecution of the crusading knights.

And the synagogue was set aflame and the entire community wiped out in one fell swoop. The whole history of Jewish existence in Europe is punctuated with horrors of this kind. And even a Jew who has never read these things instinctively knows about them because he has taken it up with his mother's milk and it's in the very air that he breathes.

There's a built-in defensiveness, there's a fear of Gentiles, there's a sense that who knows when the bottom will fall out. Yes, we might be enjoying a measure of security and freedom and prosperity now, but who knows when again we'll be expelled or be victims again of persecution or anti-Semitism, which, by the way, is coming and will be true even in this country and is already taking on such proportions as to frighten Jews in London right now.

So on top of every other fear, not only of the fear of their bodily safety, is the fear that we're trying to make Christians out of them and steal from them the last thing that constitutes their identity, namely their Jewishness.

So that I myself have had to hear again and again this accusation when I'm confronting my own people, you're worse than Hitler. Hitler only sought to destroy our bodies, but you want to destroy our souls.

You want to rob from us, you want to take from us our Jewishness and make Christians out of us and therefore defraud us even of our identity. That's how they see it. And so we have that also as a difficulty against us.

The Cost and Radical Nature of Conversion

They are the enemies of the gospel, Paul says, but that's not the end of the statement. What completes that statement in Romans 11? Who knows it? They are the enemies of the gospel for your sakes. Can you figure that one out?

Who needs enemies like that? We do. Do you like ultimate challenges? Do you like to be stretched? Do you like confrontation? Where if God be not God and he be not raised from the dead, you perish? And I don't just mean you become obliterated.

You die a thousand deaths of humiliation and disgrace and failure for which a physical death would have been a relief. Are we willing to take that risk? It's only when we will that we'll know the gospel has power.

The gospel is not some little mechanic. It's not a little chintzy terminology of certain principles. It's a power of God unto salvation, but it's contrary to the world in every point and particular that the world celebrates as wisdom.

It is utter foolishness and it takes an utter foolish one to proclaim it and to believe it for power when he's faced with the most formidable opponent of that gospel, the enemy of the gospel, for your sake.

Why is it for your sake? Because it compels you to find a place in God that you would not otherwise have sought. It brings you to a stature in God and a place in God and the knowledge of him that you never would have sought if it were not for the ultimacy of this requirement and this challenge.

And once you've come to that place with the Jew and have found that place with the Jew and have seen the demonstration of the power of the gospel with the Jew, of what Greek shall you then be intimidated and fearful?

That's the wisdom of God, why he says to the Jew first. I want to quote a distinguished Jewish Christian theologian who's gone on now to be with the Lord, who says this, the radical nature of the gospel remains hidden to a large extent until the church faces Judaism.

Judaism is not just another world religion, it's the embodiment of a wisdom. It's predicated on humanistic principles. It makes certain assumptions about man and his intrinsic virtue. It believes that man is innately good.

It does not subscribe to the scripture, the doctrine that says that there's no man good, no not one. It rests on the premise of human virtue and good works. On the righteousness of man rather than the righteousness of God.

Do you know how powerful that is? It does not subscribe to the scripture, the doctrine that says that there's no man good, no not one. It rests on the premise of human virtue and good works. On the righteousness of man rather than the righteousness of God.

Do you know how powerful that is? I need faith to continue with you guys tonight. So I'm not expecting that you're going to understand my every statement. I'm only expecting that you're going to take notes about it.

Biblical Faith, Supernatural Events, and Humanism

I'm not speaking against Jews. It's not the issue of a Jew. It's the issue of Jewish faith, Jewish world religion, Jewish philosophical understanding, modern Jewish mentality. And what we need to understand also is that what is called Judaism today is not a biblical faith so much as it is a rabbinical faith.

And that with the destruction of the temple when there is no possibility again of continuing in a biblical Judaism with a priest-oriented worship, some kind of substitute had to be found that the Jewish community could have a coherence and a continuation.

And that was provided by the same class that sought to Jesus' execution and became a rabbinical class. And the Judaism that is practiced today has its origin with them. It's more Talmudic than it is biblical.

But underlying all of that, and even with the references to Scripture, is a philosophical premise, is an understanding about man that elevates man in his own righteousness and sees him as perfectible.

We Jews are the ultimate humanists of the world even when we are religious. We are the ultimate secularists even when we are religious. As for example, when I was invited as a missionary to the Jews to come to a Jewish classroom in New York City who wanted to hear about this Jewish for Jesus phenomenon, and I got into a confrontation with the Jewish teacher, Van Dyck Beard and Yarmulke, Kipper, the head covering, and deeply orthodox and religious.

And we went out into the hallway when the period ended, and as we were having our discussion, I all of a sudden squinted my eyes and I said, excuse me a minute, I said, do you believe that God parted the Red Sea and made it as a dry ground that we should go over in safety and closed up the seas and engulfed the pursuing Egyptians?

And he hesitated and choked and spluttered, and finally he said, it was a confluence of tides and began to give me a rational explanation, a natural explanation for a supernatural event. And then I asked, I said, what about the birth of Isaac?

If you can't believe for the birth of Jesus, how about the birth of Isaac? And again, he gave me a rational and natural explanation. So what the Lord was showing me, and I think that it is basically true, is a deep-seated, rational and natural component of Jewish life and thought, which is really the expression of a world itself that is at enmity with God and that has an abhorrence for supernatural explanation, even while it speaks about God and is fastidious in its religious observance about what to eat and how to eat and other kinds of ritual things that are performed.

The Word of God Versus Outward Righteousness

And that's why, it brings me to another point, if we are ruled by the things that are visible, rather than the word of God, we are likely to find ourselves applauding such a people who have an ethical quality of life, an impressive religious quality of life that is historically impressive and has a liturgy that leaves us in the shade and by every natural appearance seems to support what they say, that they are moral, ethical and righteous, whereas we're the ones who are coming apart at the seams.

We're the ones that are struggling to keep our spiritual heads above water and have our marriages somehow to be coherent and are struggling against sin and against temptation and they seem to be walking through the world whistling Dixie.

So there's a choice before us, even there, that's of a very important kind. Are we going to be ruled or be impressed by what we see or by what the word of God says? What we see is an outwardly impressive and impeccable moral and religious people, but what the word of God says is that there's not a righteous man upon the face of the earth who doeth good and sinneth not and if God were to mark iniquity, who can stand?

So it's not just that we ourselves have to come to a decision about what is the basis of the foundation upon which we stand, but will we serve God on that basis? Will we walk right into the lion's den?

Will we insist on that scripture despite every appearance to the contrary? Will we have the courage to confront the man with his sin who gives no evidence of sin while we ourselves are struggling to come to a place that is authentically spiritual?

Can you understand how loaded this is? Everything stacked against us that requires an ultimate faith in the word of God and the God of the word. And that's the reason why we have instinctively and intuitively recoiled and drawn back and have dismissed what is a very clear, literal and specific statement of God in his wisdom that gives us not only a mandate but a priority to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

The Church's Mission and the Loss of Its Jewish Roots

And my thesis tonight is that the church has paid a very great price in its omitting or circumventing the clear word of God toward this people, historically and presently. And if we therefore neglect the Jew, which we have historically done, we were even talking about it over the dinner table, it's not among our highest priorities because after all the people who give at least the appearance of that kind of civility and composure and culture and civilization are not as desperately needy as others to whom we should go.

Is that what was at first a Jewish church, almost exclusively became by the third century a Holy Roman church with the advent of Constantine who was himself an anti-Semite and leaves us good question whether he ever was really converted and who adopted a religion that served the purpose of the state and established the church-state system which prevails to this day in most countries including this one and removed every Jewish element of the faith and inserted instead Roman and pagan observances and practices and so therefore it became increasingly uncomfortable for a Jew to remain in that kind of situation and they were finally alienated out from the church as well as out from their own people.

Another issue that helped to bring down the early Jewish church was the destruction of Jerusalem itself and the concluding wars with the Romans that ran into 130 A .D. the Masada and the final destruction where Jewish believers had to make a decision whether they were going to participate as Jews with their Jewish nation against Roman oppression and take up the sword against it though Jesus himself had prophesied that not one stone would be left standing upon the other and so in their standing with Jesus as against the judgments that were prophesied against Israel as a people they gave every evidence of betraying their own and so many of them were brutally mistreated by the Jewish people themselves because they were looked upon as being disloyal even today a Jewish believer like myself is called a mashamed which is the Hebrew word for traitor.

And one of the greatest tests for me in Jerusalem 26 years ago when the Lord had revealed himself in the trip that I'm describing to you was calling upon the name of the Lord to call on the name of Jesus in whose name my people had suffered such incalculably brutal crimes when there were all kinds of nagging voices to say to me you're turning against your own people.

This will kill your mother. What will your friends say the Jewish community. You're making yourself one with those who have oppressed your people historically. And in all of that chorus of voices to hear one still small voice that said Allah no wise cast out any man who comes unto me.

There's a tremendous tension that a Jew is faced with in the issue of the gospel that comes to him that has everything to do between choosing to identify with his own people with his culture with his history with his tradition with his own family or forfeiting all of that to identify with a despised Jesus and a church that is not in many cases going to make him feel welcome.

Counting the Cost of Following Christ

It's a very searing choice. And you know the thing what I would wish for is that you would have to make a choice equally as searing would to God that every person would recognize the radicalness of the gospel and what it really means to receive the Lord and to walk with him and to serve him means the renunciation of the world.

It means the loss of family and friends. It means disgrace it means scandal and then say yes to God. But when it's cheap when it's easy and the whole gospel has been presented to us as something that will benefit us if only we will accept Jesus.

The whole radical content of the gospel is lost. And that kind of convert always remains in the shadows is always sickly never comes to full faith and full stature because he was never soundly converted from the beginning.

It never was a coming to the cross it never was a death to the world and a separation from it to identify with him who is despised and hated by the world even now would to God the gospel would again become just that.

And what I'm saying tonight is that it's the issue of Judaism and the Jew and the whole mentality which has come into the modern world which the modern world if you can see it is essentially Jewish in its mindset and that the gospel never stands out more distinctly and radically clear as when it is brought to confront that people that mindset and those values.

It's ultimate confrontation and God intended that we do it first still now. So the radical nature of the gospel remains hidden to a large extent. We don't even know the gospel is being radical until the church faces Judaism.

In this encounter the edge of the gospel becomes visible as nowhere else. How many people know about the principalities and the powers of the air. Do you remember. Well it's a whole other subject and it deserves very great attention.

In fact I said to my brothers over the dinner table the two great issues that make or break the church especially in the last days is the knowledge of the mystery of Israel and the church and the mystery of the principalities and the powers of the air.

You major in these two things and you'll be on the road to apostolic faith of a full orbed kind omit them. And you condemn yourself to some kind of lesser and bland.