K-516 a Prophetic Scenario (2 of 2) — Art Katz

Israel’s Witness and the Exhaustion of Human Hope

So, I'm reminding the reader that the issue is not Israel and herself, but Israel as a witness nation, a witness not of herself, of her own virtue, but a witness to God, not based on her own prowess and impressive ability, but exclusively His.

And that finally, as this text indicates, only His spoken word, when all human basis for hope is gone. Remember that in text? When they themselves said, we are cut off, we are without hope, then there's a therefore, now prophesy.

For not to know God is the God who speaks, and by whose word the dead are raised is not to know God, as He essentially is and must be made known. So such a fulfillment waits upon the painful exhaustion, utterly and finally, of any human ability to fulfill her calling.

Personal Exhaustion and Dependence on God

Good thing that's only Israel and not us, right? If you haven't had a sense of this and the experience of this, and how God allows us to spend ourselves thinking to fulfill our calling, and when we've been spent and it has not been fulfilled, and we're totally emptied, then is the beginning of the fulfillment.

No previous experience, however deep in God, prepares you for the next. In a certain sense, you're from square one, the very next time out, as if God had never come to the rescue, as if the whole issue of faith and confidence in Him has to be established for a first time.

There's a trembling, a dependency that your previous experience and His faithfulness does not provide. So there's always a tension, always a trembling, always a being cast upon the Lord, in that sense.

Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones and Israel’s Despair

Okay. Surely the prophetic national acknowledgment in Ezekiel 37 that we are without hope, our bones are dried, our hope is lost, we are cut off for our parts, is such a statement of final and ultimate despair, contrary to the historic, well-known and inveterate optimism and indomitable self-sufficiency which we as Jews have again and again demonstrated to the world and ourselves impressively.

It is on that basis, or is it on that basis, that we are to fulfill our Abrahamic calling, that in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed? Israel's increasing failure, therefore, to establish herself as a righteous state, as an example to the Gentile nations, is a testimony to this fact.

How long, then, for us to condemn her for the very thing she's prophetically required to demonstrate, and that even the Holocaust did not suffice to elicit the cry that we are cut off, we are without hope, and that her own present, proud condition testifies that Israel has not yet come to the acknowledgment that we are without hope, is expressed in her present mentality and mode of conduct, predicated upon a military self-confidence, never again the arm of the flesh, which unhappily invites the severity of things that must yet befall the long-suffering nation.

For us who had hoped for the progressive improvement of present Zionist Israel and the end of such suffering, there is a need to reassess whether such hopes have been humanistic or idealistic, and contrary to what we should perhaps rightly have understood and expected in the light of the whole tenor of the Gospel and the Scriptures that is adverse to man in himself.

This has to be read, pondered, reflected upon. But I'm goading the Church that their own sanguine view, S-A-N-G-U-I-N-E, their own optimistic hope that Israel, though however unhappily is not what we had hoped she would be, would improve and yet become that, is really a projection of ourselves and a lack of full appreciation of what the whole weight of Scripture clearly establishes, that there is nothing to be expected in man, and that the whole statement of God with regard to man is totally adverse.

Remember it says in the Gospel of John, I think chapter, the end of chapter 2, Jesus was in man and would not trust himself or reveal himself unto man. They believed in him for they saw the miracles which he did, but he would not commit himself unto man for he knew what was in man.

There's another A for the day. If you could interpret and explain what that means, that though they believed in him for the miracles which he performed and which they saw, he would not commit himself to them.

He would not make that the basis for their knowledge of him, nor of his salvation, because it was totally predicated on human natural assessment of visible demonstration of miracles, and it was not the revelation that comes from the Father.

Remember when Peter, when Jesus said, who do men say that I am, who do you say that I am? And Peter said, thou art the Christ, blessed art thou, for flesh and blood hath not revealed to some to thee, not even your own flesh and blood, but my Father which is in heaven.

God’s Exclusive Glory and Israel’s Restoration

We need to be as jealous as God in the sole and exclusive prerogative which is God's. He will entrust nothing to man on the basis of man. He has a total disregard for man in himself. Everything must come from above.

Every good and perfect thing comes down from above. It will never emanate up from below. Even the best of our humanity must in the end show its intrinsic defect, which is exactly what is being demonstrated by Israel.

The nation that was persecuted is becoming a persecuting nation. The nation that was ravaged and had been murdered brutally is now itself engaging in what seems to be indiscriminate acts of violence. It must be so.

And that we have not understood that and not seen that and had some other expectation for Israel on the basis of our own virtue is a statement of where we ourselves are. It's an embarrassing statement that we have not understood that Israel cannot succeed on the basis of its own merit, let alone on that basis to bless all the families of the earth.

Something grave and radical must happen. Only that which issues out of resurrection can bless, and nothing else. That we have not recognized that is a statement very revealing, not only about our own understanding, but our own walk.

And therefore we have projected on Israel what we want for ourselves. We also want to succeed without dying. We also want to be approved on the basis of what we do in our merit, rather than what issues from God.

We're more humanistic than we know. Ironically, how much more is Israel his witness people in their apostasy and undeservedness that he might be sanctified through them before the face of all nations when he restores her exclusively on the basis of his own mercy, which is to say, what he is ultimately in himself.

Remember Moses said, show me your glory, and God hid him in the cleft of a rock and allowed his goodness to pass before him, his chesed, C-H-E-S-E-D, his loving kindness, his mercy. God's mercy is God, and that will be revealed in his restoration of that nation by no virtue of herself, but by all virtue in himself.

It is as this God that redeemed Israel must make him known, and this out of their own experience of his power and his faithfulness to his promises by his word and no other, and that word spoken not directly by himself, but by the very church which the Jew has been so long in enmity.

Here is the Lord giving an extra twist. Not only the word that saves them, but a word that does not come from him directly, but the very church which Israel, or Jewry, has historically despised and has been so long in enmity, is God's very saving provision.

The issue then is not the glorification of Israel, but of God. His own goodness prompts him to act as he does. It is as recipients of his undeserved grace and mercy that Israel becomes most powerfully ultimate witness unto him, and is brought to such depths of broken repentance and corresponding character change as the world has never seen, and Jerusalem is made a praise in the earth.

The Church’s Death and Israel’s Resurrection

Can we therefore realize that a then inert Israel can only be called to life prophetically out of our own experience of death and resurrection? Is not this death made necessary by the stubborn depth of intractable human pride convinced of its own intrinsic righteousness?

The issue of Israel's resurrection from the dead becomes our own. It compels us to that transcendent ground by which we are ourselves transformed, and to which we would not otherwise have been brought were it not for her.

Israel compels us to be what we all along should have, but never would have, except by the requirement of her death. This perception of Israel's future is painful, but how much greater, though, would the pained disappointment be for many of an Israel that fails our every expectancy and brings into question even the truth of Scripture as we had naively understood it, and of the God who appears now unable to secure Israel from unexpected calamity?

When I went to Israel three years ago with this message, having been there the year before my first return to Israel, after five years of absence, and I have no word, I spoke nowhere. I came the next year, and I spoke seven times this one message, three times in Jerusalem, some here may have been there, and Haifa, Tel Aviv, Tiberias, principal places, this one message.

And the thing that I left with in my heart when I went is this, that the Lord wanted to save from crushing disappointment and the possible loss of faith those who naively believe that present Israel is already that prophetic fulfillment, and would not be able to handle a devastation of this present nation.

And that they begin to sound a note that would come into their consideration that maybe what they have celebrated is not the final and the ultimate thing, but it's necessary preliminary, and that God must take away the first to bring the second.

Paul says that the end will not come until the first, a great falling away, and not the least of the reasons for it might well be a disappointment in the part of many charismatics and evangelicals of Israel being what they had hoped for.

I mean, after all, didn't the Word say that they would no longer be pushed out of their borders, and that they would remain safe, and no more would they fear, and God would be this, and God... How then can this happen?

That's the danger when you have misread the Scripture. How shall I say it? Resting the Scripture, not to your own destruction, but to fit your own expectation and desire, because you want so much to see the present nation succeed that you're prevented from understanding the Scripture as God intended that it should, because that understanding is too painful to consider, if not unthinkable.

What it means is we're standing above the Word of God and imposing our own subjective meaning that will make it compatible with our own established view, rather letting the Scripture stand by itself and speak for itself without our pre-subjecting it to our own view.

That's costly. So this perception of Israel's future is painful, but if it saves people from that kind of loss of faith, it would be worth it. Could this be at least in part a factor in that last day's great falling away, which Paul warned, better to allow ourselves to be carried out in the spirit of the Lord from evangelical naivety and presumption and be put down in the midst of the valley, the place of depressing truth, and to find ourselves in opposition to or exempted from His purposes with Israel, however well-meaning our intentions?

How much, in fact, must we inquire of our own present Christianity as a desperate keeping alive of what God would make desolate and present Israel for the projection of our own vain hopes? Nothing more calculated to make the Church wake from its own sleep than the deepening intractable and insoluble crisis of Israel.

There's a purpose served in God, even for the Church, as to how far God will go with that nation. And if He'll not hold back calamity, how then will He spare us? And if judgment begins with them, what then for the world?

It's a whole awakening to the apocalyptic conclusion of the age of which Israel is the ringing of that bell. It awakens the Church from its sleep. Or it should. To pray for the elimination of what now vexes and threatens Israel, however much humanly it is to be desired, is to find us perhaps praying ironically against the very design of God to obtain the death of false hope by which alone the prophetic and enduring glory is birthed.

We might find ourselves opposing God, even in our best well-meaning intention, praying for the elimination of things that God Himself has established or has brought to bring Israel to that death. And we talked about this the other day.

Prayer Aligned with God’s Purposes

How then should we pray? There's a radical requirement now of another kind of prayer. We cannot just pray intelligent prayers or kindly prayers. We can only pray God's prayers that are in keeping with His purposes that bewilder us and are contrary to the kind of strategy we would employ.

But how can we know that? And how do you obtain God's prayers? And how do you align yourself with His mind and find yourself in agreement with Him? Because if there's no agreement with earth, there's no release from heaven.

This issue of prayer is more than just religious politeness. It's critical. So what it shows is there requires from us a radical shifting of gears. What has sufficed in times past no longer is sufficient.

We have got to come to a place of identification with God in prayer and that corporately that we would never have sought except for this requirement. And that coming is painful. To go from easy prayer and prayers that just rise up to our mind to actually find the mind of the Lord corporately and to pray those prayers is a requirement radically of another kind.

And for those who didn't hear me the other day, my favorite little maxim that I've made up. The quality of our prayer cannot exceed the quality of our relationship. True corporate prayer rests on true corporate relationship and that requires the cross.

Truth in any form requires dying. And so it's easy just to pray religiously, pray nicely, pray appropriately out of your intelligence. But that very prayer can be opposed to God's attention. So the whole issue of Israel brings a requirement of a radical kind to the church that changes it.

How much is the prayer the statement that where we in fact are with God? You ever think of it that way? Spurgeon says, you can tell where a man is in God simply by hearing him pray publicly. Not the length of his prayer but the weight and the heft of it.

The substance, the feel, the quality of it. This speaks something about that man's relationship with God. So prayer is a remarkably significant thing and is pegged so much to relationship with the Lord and with each other.

And yet God has bound himself and can only be released in proportion to the agreement on earth with himself in heaven. This could be frightening for people who have not moved in that dimension and don't want the cost of it.

So this much at least is sure. The issues are too great to be prompted by sentiment rather than the Spirit. And that travail is effectual that has not its own agenda but is in agreement with heaven however much its own assumptions are crucified.

That's a great statement. Oh, I like that. That must be the Lord. This much at least is sure. The issues are too great to be prompted by sentiment rather than the Spirit. And that travail is effectual or that prayer is effectual that has not its own agenda but is in agreement with heaven however much its own assumptions are crucified.

Lazarus, Prophetic Timing, and Obedience

There's death. Death first for the church before Israel or there'll be no Israel. That's restored. Such was the obedience of the Lord himself when despite his own human desire after hearing of the sickness of his friend Lazarus abode two days still in the same place where he was.

Had he acted prematurely out of his own human compassion to hasten to the bedside of his beloved friend so as to alleviate his suffering he would have nullified the purposes of God, of the Father. This sickness, he said, is not unto death but for the glory of God that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.

How assuredly is a prophetic mouth disqualified when it speaks a false word of comfort however well-meaning or even a true word prematurely. This line between true and false prophet is very thin. And you can lapse from the one over into the other not just by speaking error but speaking truth before the time.

Jesus waited two days longer where he was. That for him, given his love for Lazarus, was a dying to his own humane desire to alleviate the suffering of his friend. May we keep ourselves in prophetic obedience as sons despite the censure, c-e-n-s-u-r-e, the criticism, misunderstanding of others for our, quote, lovelessness.

What will you be accused of if you wait two days longer? Hey, your friend is sick. Don't you have an obligation? You've healed others. Shouldn't you be there? You're loveless. You're concerned only for your own skin.

You don't want to be that close to Jerusalem where your life will be threatened. None of you think the worst of your pure obedience to God. Count on that. It's calculated to be that. Obedience will always be misunderstood and cannot be explained.

Often you'll not understand it yourself. God will not explain it to you. How then shall you explain it to others? You have only to do it. Later the explanation might come, or in some cases, not in this lifetime at all.

And you'll suffer the reproach of it through your entire believing life, as I have to do for certain obediences that I have performed over the course of the years. To this very day, men still think me a maverick, a man doing his own thing, independent, not submitted, because he did this, this, and this, when he clearly got a note to take only 45 minutes to finish that message.

Only they don't know that when I read it, my vision was blurred, and I'm sure it said 45 minutes. And I believe that to this day. But how will I explain that to them? I can't. I have only to suffer the reproach of being seen as a maverick doing his own thing.

Though later on, deeply spiritual people who were there and heard that word said, this was the message of the conference, and I wasn't even a scheduled speaker. So these are the kinds of prophetic obediences to which we'll be called.

And if you have no stomach to bear reproach, and need to be approved of men, you'll not wait two days longer where you are. You'll be quick to do the thing that men expect of you, or your own humanity desires.

Can you live with the tension of unreconciled suffering, knowing that God has a greater purpose than its alleviation, namely, this is for the glory of God, and of the Son of God. That has got to be our abiding motive.

It was His. And that's what it means to be a son. See, every voice is shouting at you. Every logical and humane thing says, go. Why not heal? When you heal Gentiles, how about your friend Lazarus, whom you profess to love?

Those choruses will be deafening. You'll even get the dirty look of your own disciples. And against all of that tumult is the still small voice of God that says, stay. Now, what will we hear and to what will we accede if we are not habituated to an obedience to that still small voice?

That kind of facility is not obtained in a day. It takes a lifetime to train up a prophetic man, a generation, many experiences that God will bring you through to test you on this very thing. What will you hear and what will you speak?

Prophetic Obedience and Bearing Reproach

When every other voice is clamoring for another expression, and you'll be goaded and prompted by the full gospel businessmen to take your cue. Don't you guys know that? There's a certain way that men can kind of prompt you along to be one of the boys.

But somehow, while you fasted and prayed for two days for this full gospel conference in Washington, D .C., before 5 ,000 people, you seemed to sense the Lord was asking you to speak on a eunuch for Christ's sake.

And they wanted your testimony, because it's so exciting, a Jew that was an atheist and a Marxist saved. But somehow this thing about eunuch for Christ's sake, and you looked and fasted, and finally the night came, Saturday night, 5 ,000 people, Catherine Coleman in the wings, all the big shots in Sicarian, and you've been not eating, and there's a meal, and it's lamb, your favorite dish.

And you turn away, and it's a suffering, and seek the Lord yet one more time. And still that inner voice seems to say, eunuch for Christ's sake. And then it's time to speak, and you're obedient to that voice, and you speak, eunuch for Christ's sake.

There are eunuchs that are born eunuchs, biological freaks. There are eunuchs that are made eunuchs by men, but there are those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God's sake, and let them who have ears hear.

And to go on and to develop that, only to find out later, my God, what did you say? You have offended 5 ,000 people. They're going haywire, and men are waiting to stone you. The moment you step down off the platform, and a Jewish man claiming to be a prophet has come up to you and said, God has sent him to tell you, you've misdeminded the Lord, you've done incalculable damage against the body of Christ, and you need immediately to go to the microphone and retract your statement.

What an onslaught in what you thought was a simple obedience. Okay, can one Frenchman be right, and a million's wrong? And you alone have deminded the Lord? And there's Shekerion, and Oral Roberts, and Catherine Coleman, you know.

And what are you, some Jewish pipsqueak who saved about five years, something like that? I'll tell you, it was horrendous. And then that night, I don't think Inga has ever recovered, you're invited as a speaker with the others, because how can they then block you out, to the penthouse apartment of Bema Shekerion, and you walk into that room with all these personalities, and you feel like a turd.

Everyone is turning their shoulder, and oh, here comes that loathsome guy who spoke about eunuch, and oh, how impolite, and you learn how to bear reproach, but your wife hasn't learned it, and she's got to bear that with you, and she's calculated and made by God to be a mercy person that doesn't want to offend anyone, wants to make nice, and she's married to a man who's upsetting the apple cart, and is antagonized to the point of breaking.

In fact, Inga wept through that whole message. So, the School of the Prophets ain't a little two-and-a-half-week picnic. It's a real place of preparation and testing. And there's not a God there at your elbow to say, Don't listen to him, Art, my faithful servant.

God is silent, and allows you to get roasted and skewered and turned over in your kishkas, and you're exiled virtually out of the country, as I was, and went to Denmark and lived there for several months, and never took a meeting, but was licking my wounds for many months, while this same so-called Jewish prophet was sending me telegrams and long-distance phone calls on Jewish holidays, calling for my repentance and my recanting of that message that should now be published in the full Gospel Businessman's Voice magazine.

And for all I knew, he might be right. And where was God? Here's the tension. The tension of having to speak. The hour has struck. The moment has come. You speak what you believe is in your heart by the Spirit, though still and small and contrary to what is expected, but never a final assurance that you were right and that you may have missed it, even for all your fasting.

That is the prophetic tension, and you'll never get over it. You'll carry that till your final day. You'll never speak with a total certitude that there's not some possibility that however much you desire a pure obedience, that you may miss it.

What do you think last night? Would you believe my mind battle while I'm speaking to you, and there was some kind of brokenness and an effect of that word? You know what was going through my mind? You've laid a trip on this people, cats.

That's not God's Word or even God's requirement, but there's an anointing on you in general, and anything you would say would have an effect, but that doesn't make it God's Word. This is your thing. You like this little thing about commanding God, and you've worked it up, but it's not His, and it's affecting this people, but it's not God.

You've laid a trip on them out of the general power of your own personality and your anointing. And I have to walk home after that and say, Lord, was that you? Was that me? Was that you? Was that me? Did I miss it?

Prophetic obedience is dying, and yet, when the enemy whispers, that wasn't God, that was you, you're laying a trip on this people, and you're allowing the force of your personality to impress them with something that is credible enough to be worth hearing.

And I don't know about you, but aren't we susceptible to taking the devil's thoughts into our consideration? Boy, we have conversations with him right and left. Yeah, boy, you're making a point to ask.

That's true. And we have God to say, don't listen. You know that God doesn't. He allows you to suffer the tension. It's a baptism by fire each time. And unless it's a suffering, is it a real Word of God?

Because that suffering is a death, and it's the death that brings the life. It's death that works in me, Paul said, and life in you. Whenever you're performing something from God that does not require a death, it's not going to be a life.

It'll be pleasant. There'll be an enjoyment, but it's not going to be a life-giving, life-changing thing if it does not come out of a death again and again and again and again. Imagine a whole church that is prophetic in this sense, and indeed, until there will be, Israel will remain in her grave.

That's why the death of the church must precede the death and resurrection of Israel. A woman pastor stopped me in a message in California. I was only about 15 minutes into it, and she just had me to step down, and I just moved away, and I stepped down.

There were shrieks and howls, let him continue, let him finish. The Lord had given me that message on my knees that morning in revelation in prayer with a brother from Ben Israel. And to this day, this stink and reproach has never been resolved.

They even accused me of planting Ben Israel people in the audience to cry out, let him continue, let him continue. And then she said, if you knew that, and the board of people with her, if you knew that you were going to be speaking a radical message, why didn't you submit that message in advance for our approval before you spoke it?

I said, but my dear lady, I've never submitted a message in advance. I mean, if you don't have sufficient confidence that I'm with the Lord and sent of Him, don't invite me, but if you invite me, trust that what is going to come is the Word.

Well, you should have prepared it. I said, it's not the message that needs to be approved, it's the man. And if the man has been submitted and his life has been tested and overseen, then we can trust more readily for the message.

So it was a real eye-opener to me, because who can advance? I don't know what I'm going to say in advance. That Word was fresh, right off the anvil of God, given that morning. And I did not know it was radical until I spoke it.

I didn't know that Munich for Christ's sake was going to cause enormous uproar. And people came to me and said, I hated your Word and I want to be a grandparent. They thought that I was literally telling their children to forsake having children and living celibate lives.

It was a spiritual message, but they interpreted it carnally. And it became for them a root of offense. And the Lord allowed me to languish in the whole heat of that opposition and the thought that I might be wrong, that I might have missed the Lord.

After all, I was still relatively young. And there I was in Denmark in a little place upstairs licking my wounds like a dog, saying, Lord, never again. I'm not a preacher. I never asked for it. I don't want it.

Blah, blah, blah. And I went complaining. And finally, I agreed to take a series of meetings in Denmark. And I was reading Watchman Nee's trilogy on the spiritual man, somehow in preparation. And I came to a place where he's speaking about Munich for Christ's sake.

And he's quoting out of Matthew, and he's quoting out of 1 Corinthians 7, and the very same scriptures that I used. And then he says, this is so sensitive, he said, that if you miss this by the Spirit, it's the very heart of offense.

And, boom, the burden lifted. As if I had not breathed for three months. It was a mechaya. But why did the Lord allow the burden to remain for three months that I might have missed the Lord and done incalculable damage to the Body of Christ?

Because if you're going to bear the Word of God, the real Word, you've got to know that it's a great responsibility, and you've got to go through a baptism of fire. You're not playing games, and you're not in the entertainment business.

And God will not entrust His Holy Word to casual speakers or to men who will make profit of it. There's got to be a baptism in fire. There's got to be multiple deaths. There's got to be testings. And they're not cheap, they're not easy, and they're not quick.

And then can God entrust His sacred words? How would you stand up under the accusation of lovelessness that was unloving? Well, your message is hard. I'm hearing that now so frequently. Really, I wasn't aware of that.

Can you take the accusation that you're loveless? That was the very cry that I heard in the congregation in Jerusalem when I spoke the Ezekiel 37 message. You know, you've got to have such foundations in God that no matter what men say of you, that somehow you'll not wither under the blast of it and come unglued and undone, that you somehow need their approval or need to be seen and recognized as being loving.

If that's the way you're going to see me, as being loveless, so let it be. Let God vindicate me. But if that's what I've got to suffer for speaking that word, so be it. Have you come to that place? And what does it take to come to it?

The whole substance of all that we're speaking in these days is simply to come to the place where we allow God the free right to prepare us in such ways, because it's not for everyone. Others can, you cannot.

This is only for those who are called to the ultimate things that pertain to his glory, to the things that are prophetic and apostolically true. And that preparation is the greater, the more demanding, and the more painful.

But he will not inflict it, except that we voluntarily welcome it. So if you want to live a Christian life in a lesser or other place, charismatic and evangelical, for which he'll never fault you, you're quite free to live it at that level, he'll allow you.

This is only for those who say, Lord, whatever it takes. And it takes. Okay. It seems like we're already on the subject of prophets, and I didn't intend that until tomorrow. So however much our non-intervening silence will be construed as lovelessness, ironically, it's only a faith that works by love that will suffice in that once and for all critical moment.

Not the present love, which may be no more than sentiment or symbiotic identification or appeasement for guilt or fascination for the mystique of Israel, but the unconditional love of very God himself.

I think nothing provoked a greater howl than my suggestion in Jerusalem that a lot of you Christians have an identification with Israel that is symbiotic and subtly self-serving. That somehow, you know what symbiotic means?

You're in a relationship by which you expend yourself for another, but only because something is returned to you of a kind that is personally gratifying. That one thing, as I said last night, disqualifies ministry as being priestly.

And if it's not priestly, then neither can it be prophetic. How far must God's death go? How far must the application of the cross reach to touch the most subtle ligaments and sources of subtle satisfaction that come to us through serving or through identifying with the purposes of God or with the people of God?

And until we've come to that, we have not his unconditional love but something lesser and other. But that faith will not work except it works by love. So we are called to a prophetic faith beyond ourselves, a love beyond ourselves, an obedience beyond ourselves, an agreement in unity beyond ourselves, and being required to speak as of one voice.

Israel’s Restoration and the Sons of God

For us to live, then, must be Christ. We wonder that the Lord enjoins Israel, then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and performed it, says the Lord. Indeed, for who is to say where such a son of man ends and the Lord begins?

So complete that fits the bride for the bridegroom when you can't tell where the one ends and where the other begins. So here's the final summary and conclusion. For if he himself, as an utterly devastated son, cut off and out of the land of the living, and could then, as the resurrected and glorified son, enlist the power to birth the church, how shall we expect less or other for Israel, whose glorious restoration is the key to the nations?

If Jesus himself was required as a son to taste death in order to come into a resurrection, an ascendant place, to birth the church and to forward the redemptive purposes of God, how shall we expect less of the son that Israel was called to be and that it should find a means other than what was his?

It too, as the church, must come through the way of death and resurrection. But how is this affected? The prophet is no more spectator but agent. His fidelity, his faithfulness alone, releases the powers which brings new life.

His vision is critical to the fulfillment, all the more because he sees the situation at its worst. Therefore, if he dealt with as severely as Israel itself, for if he is to be as God's mouth, he must first become one with God's heart, for out of the abundance of the heart alone does the mouth speak, and that by a willing obedience consistent with all past obedience and not just a final moment's obligation.

That obedience is itself a death to those final inveterate prejudices and envies, insecurities that would, for many, just as soon leave Israel in its grave than bring the prodigal back from the dead, to bask in the Father's favor.

For only such a death will free the Son of Man company from those final subtleties of pride and prejudice that qualified at last as God's prophetic people. Now the sticks can be joined together so that one king shall be king over them all and David their prince forever.