Amos 9 — Art Katz

Amos 9 and Israel’s Eschatological Restoration

Attention this morning to Amos chapter 9, which is one of our favorite texts here at Ben Israel. I'm glad that Reggie is here, Adam, David, others of John, who are invited to join in and extract the remarkable riches and depth of this chapter.

Israel Judged, Disciplined, and Restored

I always speak of it as the one great comprehensive statement in a single chapter of the whole remarkable eschatological schematic of Israel judged, Israel disciplined, Israel restored right through to millennial blessing.

It's there in one chapter. So Lord, grant us grace to bear it, to understand it, to be participant and witness to it in these last days, and that because we understand the end, we can bear, my God, those things that will pertain to it.

The end is glorious. So open it even in a new way for those who are familiar with the text, and let it not just be a routine exercise of review, but your word is inexhaustible, and if this is on your heart this morning, Lord, let everyone receive benefit, even those of us who share.

So my God, we bless you, we look to you, instruct our understanding, we pray, affect our character, our life, give you praise, glory, honor, in Jesus' holy name, amen. Well chapter 9, in fact, much of the whole book of Amos contains the severest statements of judgment for Israel to be found anywhere, even the commencement of this chapter, where the prophet saw the Lord standing beside the altar, and he said, strike the capitals until the thresholds shake, and shatter them on the heads of all the people, and those who are left I will kill with the sword.

Not one of them shall flee away, not one of them shall escape. Though they dig into Sheol, from there shall my hand take them. Though they climb up to heaven, from there I will bring them down. Though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, from there I will search out and take them.

Though they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the sea serpent, and it shall bite them. And though they go into captivity in front of their enemies, there I will command the sword, and it shall kill them, and I will fix my eyes on them for harm and not for good.

The Lord God of hosts, he who touches the earth and it melts, and all who live in it mourn, and all of it rises like the Nile and sinks again like the Nile of Egypt, who builds his upper chambers in the heavens and founds his vault upon the earth, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name.

There are not many that would want to own a God of that kind, and they must be persuaded that there's some kind of typographical error. How did that slip into Scripture, that God would acknowledge and even boast in the severity of such a judgment, so all-inclusive, that no matter where his people seek to flee, there he will find them, and there they will suffer the full severity of that judgment.

Probably it's because texts of this kind offend us, that we either shrink from them or pass them over, and in doing so, we lose something of the aspect of God that risks the loss of all of the knowledge of God, because if we're unwilling to receive God in his severity, we even cheapen God in his goodness, and unless we understand his judgments and not receive them by holding our nose, having to take castor oil, but rejoice in them, knowing that he's righteous, however severe the language, that we don't know God as we ought, and we're not celebrating him as we ought, and in fact are trivializing him.

So there has been either a conscious or unconscious shrinking from the acknowledgement of God as judge, and where is that judgment more painful than when it's announced and performed upon his own people, the apple of his eye?

Not only painful for us to consider, painful for him to perform. That he will perform it is a statement of what he is in himself. He'll not flinch from a righteous requirement. It's we who hedge and compromise.

The Lord honors his word, maintains the standard of his own righteousness and his own integrity, particularly as it pertains to Israel, well how then is he God, and what standard then of righteousness will exist anywhere if he himself defaults on the kind of judgments that his righteousness requires?

So the issue of Israel, wow, what shall we say? To miss it in any aspect is to miss essentially the faith, is to miss God, and if we have a truncated, inadequate, sentimentalized, trivialized God, it's probably especially for that reason.

We have voided, or have refused to consider, or shrunk from considering, or want always to abide in the New Testament scriptures, and miss what God says of himself in the old, in judgments not yet fulfilled, and that yet await fulfillment.

So this is not passé, this is not the God of the past. These are statements that refer to that which is yet to take place. So he's the same yesterday, today, and forever. I can't think of anything more fallacious than to speak of the God of the New Testament and the God of the old as if they are alternate deities.

The one, consistent, comprehensive, continuing God. Amen. That's right. So, that's the prelude to getting into the portion that's before us this morning. Just to continue in verse 7, are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel, says the Lord, that I don't think that because you're the apple of my eye, and my covenant and chosen people, that you're exempt from anything that the Ethiopians have had to bear from my hand.

You still will be judged, as with all nations, and in fact your judgment will be the greater, because your privilege has been the greater. So don't think you're exempt. One of the things that has been a theme and thread through the tragedy of Israel's history is called by the theologians the inviolability of Israel.

The presumption that because we're chosen, because he has established his presence at Zion and in Jerusalem and in the nation, that somehow we are exempt from and protected from the kinds of calamity that fall upon others.

And so the final outworking of that misconception are men on the roof of the temple at the time of Titus' destruction of Jerusalem, thinking that that's the safest place to be, and went up with the flames that consume the temple itself.

Zion is not inviolable, it is not exempt from the judgments of God, in fact they are all the more susceptible to double judgment, as we read in Isaiah 40, you have suffered double for your sins, because to you has come the great privilege of the revelation of myself, my law and my way, my covenant, and when you desecrate that and violate that despite my sending the prophets rising up early and daily, then upon you will fall a severity of a kind that eclipses that which comes to other nations.

So don't think that you're exempt from what the Ethiopians will experience or have, that I'm not bringing Israel up from the land of Egypt, the Philistines from Kastor, and the Arameans from Keir, and then we begin our text.

The eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and as we even had occasion this morning to review of Inge's sharing with us last night, how sinful is the sinful kingdom becoming. It's mistreatment of men, it's abuses, it's failing to sanctify God by its conduct.

Israel was called to be a witness nation to the nations, that what it would display in its conduct is the unique relationship that it enjoys with its God, and make him known by what it displays in itself.

You shall be witnesses unto me. God's dictum to the church is exactly of the same kind. Where is that? Where is that passage, Arthur, that says, you only have I known? It's in Amos, isn't it? Could be.

But it compliments you. You only have I known. Therefore, I will punish you. What a note of pathos, you only have I known. It breaks my heart to have to lower the boom, you only have I known. What a sacred, holy privilege.

But because of it, and with disregard of so unique a relationship in history, therefore I'm required to judge you yet more severely. There's a pathos in God's heart. This is not some clinical judgment that is performed without emotion.

He says in all your afflictions, I am afflicted. In your judgments, I am also bearing it in the same way that the father bore the crucifixion of the son, not viewing it as from a distance in some kind of dispassionate separation, but in and with the son in that suffering and in that anguish, even in the anguish of my God, my God, why has he forsaken me?

Somehow in the wisdom of God, that intense separation from the father at the time when the presence was most desperately needed was part, maybe the coolest part of the suffering that Jesus had to bear, but he did not bear it alone.

He bore it with the father. I and the father are one. Don't think that God is some kind of distant deity whose passion and pathos and compassion is not touched. He waits for that exact quality in his people.

Interesting, the phrase that we see at the Holocaust memorials, never again, is cited in this text that's before us this morning, but with an entirely different meaning to which Israel must come from the one that celebrates it to the never again that celebrates God.

Well, you can see from what you've cited, how, and from what we shared this morning, how distant and separated this people is from their own calling and from their own knowledge of God, that they can even construe and turn things in such a way that they come out as the victim or the object of pity or as if they're doing God's service.

So failing to be the priest, as we said this morning, by so abusing the people who are the victim of their power without any consideration of the culture, the disposition, the things that are respected, for which Jews have little consideration or even scorn, yet a priestly people would have an obligation to understand the history, the culture, the disposition of those for whom they intercede and witness.

Israel's present conduct is a complete antithesis of that calling, and maybe we had to come to the end and see that and all of its painful implication and then suffer the judgment of whatsoever a man or a nation sows, that too shall it reap.

You've abused their women and you've intimidated their men and mocked them. You're going to suffer exactly that same thing at their very hands. What does it say when Jesus comes? Two thirds are perished and the women are ravished.

Israel is going to pay in full for every mistreatment and every abuse that it is now inflicting upon those that are hapless, for the day will come, and it's not distant, when they also will be hapless and be overrun and be unable to defend themselves.

It says in Isaiah 51, your young men will be like antelope in a net at the head of every street. Helpless. Your IDF, your vaunted military forces will be completely tied in knots and completely incapacitated, as even your generals even now acknowledge that all of our strategy and training is for the battlefield, but we have never been prepared for an internal battle.

And it's one that you'll not know how to fight and one in which you'll be defeated, not only defeated but humiliated, and your women will be ravished. You who scorn the sensibilities of others will yourself be scorned.

You'll hear their shrieks and cries and be helpless to intercede, as was also the consequence for Germany at the end of World War II. As I know from my time in Germany, my first wife coming from Stuttgart, that that part of Germany was captured by the French and they came with their colonial troops, many of them from Africa, and so all day and night the defenseless women were being raped by these black soldiers without mercy, and you could hear a continual shriek and a cry coming out from every house and every alley and every rooftop, and the women were defenseless because their men were either dead or on the Russian battlefield or incapacitated.

You don't hear anything about that now, but anyone who was a GI in Germany in the early fifties as I was know how degraded the German women were, even in accommodating the American soldiers, politeness will not permit me to describe the kinds of practice that were everyday occurrences for us with a people that were so humbled and broken who were the master race.

The ironies of God's judgment are written in history and it behooves us as the church to be able to recognize and read them so that we might proclaim warning that God's hand is not withheld, and though it seems that it's in abeyance, there comes a moment when he will perform and honor his word, whatsoever a man or a nation sows, that too shall it reap.

It will be a terrible, degrading, humiliation, defeat, and brokenness, but it's the kind of brokenness that Israel will carry with it into its millennial destiny and will forever remember the judgments that were the consequence of their sin, and it will temper them with a priestly disposition for all of the days of their life.

And so they'll be going into the same nations where they are now anathema or a curse or a threat to bring the benevolent way of God to the knowledge of Iraqis and Jordanians and Palestinians and Arabs to show the mercy of God on the basis of the mercy which they themselves have received, and they will then fulfill their destiny.

A nation of priests, a light unto the world. Arabs will be hanging on the necks of Jews in gratitude for the knowledge of God communicated to them that will be salvational in the same way that the elders at Ephesus hung onto the neck of Paul when he said, you'll see my face no more.

Jews who are now despised and feared and hated will be loved and revered as God's priests who bring in every place in the world the knowledge of himself in the deeps in which Israel has been required to learn him, not talmudically and even biblically, but experientially, both in the severity of his judgments and in the mercy of their return.

Gentile Identification With Israel

Okay. Yeah. Well, we saw even from the threats that come into this organization that goes to bat for blacks in the South and other places, how they are threatened to be hung from lampposts and not only killed, but tortured.

There's a vile demonic hatred for people standing for simple justice and righteousness. So what shall we expect that when this venom comes upon Jews, shall we be exempt? It will be proportionate to our own identification with them.

And when they're seeing that we're willing to suffer such a risk and such a consequence to take up an identification that is not needful and all other Gentiles are shirking, they'll be moved to jealousy and say, this can't be explained religiously.

This is beyond religious obligation. What you guys are doing and being joined with us and putting your life at risk and your families at risk has got to be God. There's no other way to explain what's coming from you as Gentiles, but certainly you owe us nothing.

And yet you're, you're extending yourself sacrificially, even unto death. Jews have never seen that coming from Gentiles and coming from the church, but the extremity of the last days will display it.

We've got to be to them, a priestly identification to even reveal to them what they're calling us. So it's more than just a religious condescension. It's a jointedness as one with them, which is what Jesus himself performed at the commencement of his ministry.

When he allowed himself to be baptized into the Jordan, which was God provision, God's provision as repentance for the sins of Israel. He did not stand at the bank in detachment as God's anointed called to Israel and looking with pity at those who have to go down into the muddy waters.

He went down into them to say, I'm one with the nation and I share in its sin. We see that in Daniel in chapter nine, that great prophetic cry of Daniel's prayer is a complete identification of the sins of his people.

You can't affect that. That can't be a kind of a religious halo. That's, that's the deepest statement of God himself reflected in a man who has the kind of union whose cry is God's cry. The church is not there yet, but God waits for it.

And when it comes, it's the set time to favor Zion. Okay. Can I get into the text? Okay. The eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom. You know what I love about God? Among the other things that I love about God, not only does he not mince words, he does not avoid truth.

He does not just want to fasten his eyes upon the happy side and neglect seeing the grim. He sees all things. He's a prophet and he's required to see things whole and steady. And so he sees the sinful kingdom and he doesn't mince words about it.

And that kingdom will become increasingly sinful until it itself, as we said this morning, recognizes the truth of its own condition as only its own failure will have revealed it. And that if there were no other reason for the establishment of the state of Israel, then this, this would be reason enough.

Now we Jews, see, I know Jews. I was one long enough. I still am. And we celebrate some supposed sense of moral superiority. I don't know where we got the idea. We think that we have a special ethical and moral sensitivity above the Graham, above the Gentiles, which is of course completely contradicted by scripture.

If God were to mark iniquity, who can stand? When Jesus was sought to be complimented by the rich young ruler and he was called good, he said, why call me good? You're not going to get away with this one.

There's no man good, but God. Israel refuses, Jews historically have, have refused to accede to that truth of God's statement of our condition as men. We think that the doctrine of human depravity is a Christian doctrine when it's rooted in Hebrew scriptures.

So how come we don't see it? Because we ourselves are not rooted in our own word. We are the, uh, the, uh, the ultimate humanists that celebrate man over God. And until that's broken, how can we be for God what we want?

And so it's not too lavish for God to allow the establishment of the state, not that it would be intended to succeed, but be intended to reveal the human depravity that God says is inherent in all men, including Jews.

We've got to see our own conduct, uh, painfully duplicating and coming too dangerously close to what the Germans had visited upon us, that we are now tattooing men and ready to deport Palestinians wholesale out, uh, from Israel, from the West bank to Jordan or some other place.

Who are we to merchandise and men? What are they? Uh, uh, stock items on a grocery shelf that we can move it from one place to another. These are human beings. They're, they're, they're rooted in their culture, in their place with their olive trees, with their families, the family that we know in a booth that Inga was speaking last night, uh, Lily, who was here for several months and worked in the kitchen.

She only moved 35 yards from the house in which she grew up into the house in which she married. They know that village, their life was that village. The people look at the way Inga knows these names.

I'm impatient. I don't have time for detail at that time. We Jews, but Inga loves it. They love it. They know the boobies. They know that the grandmothers, the grandfathers, the uncles, the aunts, the cousin, this one born, that one died.

They're enmeshed in that. And here, here's Israel talking about deporting. Well, we were deported on cattle cars. And now we ourselves are talking about deporting others. We were tattooed. Now we're tattooing others.

And don't think that it's not being shoved in our face, that this is too painfully close to the Nazi mistreatment of ourselves, that we are now somehow out of the requirement for the preservation of the state, are compelled so to act.

We are a sinful nation and that, that sinfulness will increase. So you Christian Zionists will have everything to do to defend Israel until you'll just run out of explanation. And you yourself will be mortified that you come to a place where no defense can be made, where they cannot be justified.

And that we ourselves have to learn the painful truth that as much as we have a heart for these people, we must be as God in recognizing the truth of their condition, or we will fail to what we ought to sentimentalize them now to pamper them, to, to, to give them a comfort before the time is a false comfort.

So I praise God for being God. Thank you, Lord. And if you're going to be that for Israel, be it for us. Don't spare us. Don't baby us. Don't mollify us. Tell it to us as it is. Speak to us as sons and daughters.

Grow us up, my God, in the reality to which everything wants to save us and preserve us. This is my greatest conflict with Inger. God bless her. She's wanting to make nice. Okay. The eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom and I will destroy it from the face of the earth.

Not that Arafat will destroy the PLO of Saddam Hussein. These are only rods of God's judgment. I will destroy it. And when you read Psalm 102, you'll recognize the two things that God is waiting for to conclude the age.

One is the church, my servants coming of age who have compassion on their stones and pity upon the dust. But the other is the acknowledgement of a subdued and broken Israel that we have received these things at your hand.

You have cast us aside. Read that text. That is an acknowledgement that did not come out of the Nazi Holocaust. That's why we can say never again. We think that the Nazi Holocaust was the issue of our defenselessness and the power of those who oppressed us.

We do not see God's hand in our calamity. And until we do, the calamities will continue to come. That's why they are given as calamities that we might see the hand of God in judgment. The first principle is always to ask, where have I sinned?

In what way can what I'm experiencing or seeing be considered a judgment or a chastisement before we give consideration to any other explanation? Usually it's the last of considerations rather than the first.

Well, the weather has changed. This is happening that we have, I say, time-loose-weak mentalities and try to interpret adverse things socially, politically, and so on, rather than divinely. So I'm saying for the church, a first principle of consideration is how is God to be understood in this?

How is this possibly a judgment? Because it's by judgment that we learn sin. Judgment is the revelation of sin. It's Christ on the cross as the judgment of God that opens up the whole question, for what reason did he suffer that death?

So sin does not reveal itself as sin. That's its nature, is to conceal it. And we Jews have been mesmerized and duped in justifying our conduct of the most atrocious kind. It's the judgment that begins to open the question of what the sin is that justified so severe a consequence.

So the first thing in examining any severity is, to what degree is this a judgment? And for what reason might it have been suffered? Had Jews asked that at the end of the Nazi Holocaust, we could even theoretically consider that there would not need to be yet another Holocaust.

But of course the question was not asked, nor was there a church to suggest the question because the church itself quickly accommodated itself to the Jewish community and yielded to the Jewish community's interpretation that the real fault of the Holocaust was not Jewish sin, but the collapse and the failure of Christianity itself, a revelation of the bankruptcy of Christianity.

And so the church bowed and scraped and acceded to that view and completely left Jews off the hook, took the ground out from God and made the whole sacrifice, so to speak, vain. They do not even subscribe to the Adam's fall.

If you read Eric Fromm, who is drawing from Talmudic and mystical Judaism, Zohar and the Kabbalah, you know how they interpret the fall of Adam? It's not a fault that God himself was testing Adam and Eve to see if they would rise above God's own restriction, that if they asserted their humanity to disobey, that's what God was waiting for and wanting, for that was the beginning and the commencement of individuation and self-realization.

What are you going to do with the people who interpret the fall of Adam in that way as to come out smelling like a rose and that God actually wanted it? So they would say that's a Christian premise. They don't realize it as a foundational biblical proof and part of our obligation to them is to show them that what they call Christian is foundationally from the God of Israel and Hebraic, but we have failed in communicating that, but we ourselves have made knights and have not wanted to offend and wanted to be kind.

Few of us have Hamlet's fierce determination with his mother Gertrude to say sometimes one must be cruel in order to be kind. We're unwilling to be cruel because we want to be accepted and here's what I've observed in 38 years as a believer, maybe you can explain to me, why is Jewish acceptance so important for Christians?

They'll fall all over themselves to be accepted by Jews. You probe that, I'm not even going to try and answer it, it goes deep and it has to do with humanistic assumptions itself that somehow Jews are looked upon in such an honorific way into humanity that to receive their benevolent acceptance is a prized and esteemed thing that we don't want to violate by taking the risk of speaking to them in truth.

So this is part of that whole mystery of Israel and the church. You know how the Orthodox will explain why it is that PLO terrorists came aboard in rubber dinghies and commandeered a bus or found a Jewish school and killed about 20 -30 kids because the mezuzah was not hanging at the right angle.

You know the mezuzah on the door that contains the parchment scroll of Deuteronomy 6, it wasn't hanging at the right angle. Even as they analyze Jewish history and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, they do not attribute it to the real causes but to internecine difficulties in the Jewish community itself.

The failure to be brethren one to another, the factions, the zealots versus the Pharisees, as if it's an internal problem rather than recognizing that the eternal problem is only a symptom of a much deeper failure, the failure of God to God himself.

So even the Orthodox, so they acknowledge it wrongly. Listen to this paradoxical statement, my eyes are upon the central kingdom, I will destroy from the face of the earth except, here's mercy coming up out of judgment, except I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob says the Lord.

First the sin of sweeping judgment except. I love the Lord for his exceptions and his untils. Amen. Wonderful, for were not for that we'd all be dead. I had just written that down. For lo, I will command and shake the house of Israel among all the nations.

Not so much as a grain or a pebble shall fall to the ground. How exacting is God's last day sifting of this people because not all Israel is Israel and God has an elect from among them whom we would not ordinarily ourselves recognize and we might even say they're not even a candidate, we don't see a spiritual potentiality.

It might come from the most fierce antagonist of Christ as Saul was to become a Paul, but he has a remnant, he has a people, he'll have a nation, but he must sift the nation among all the nations. As one shakes a sieve, but not so much as a pebble or a grain shall fall to the ground.

Sifting Israel Through the Nations

That's why I can say with on the basis of this verse with complete confidence, whether I'm in New Zealand, Africa, Brazil, I'm trying to think of the most recent places, Chile, it doesn't matter where or what, even in Egypt itself, I have preached this and said, expect Jews to be sifted through your nation.

And if they say, well, we don't have a Jewish population, I said, that doesn't disqualify you. They will yet be brought there by the process of the sifting itself because God's object is not only to sift Israel, but to sift the nations through Israel and to sift the church in the nations in their response to Israel in its final and calamitous condition.

That's on that basis, we can understand Matthew 25 in the now seated King performing his first judgment of separating sheep from goats among the nations on one question only, what did you do with the least of these, my brethren?

The issue of the Jew in his final extremity is the issue of the church. It's the issue of the nations and so critical an issue that the Lord is not loath to pronounce an eternal judgment on those who fail to have recognized and responded to the least of these, his brethren.

They're cast into the lake of fire, prepared for the devil for his angels. This raises so remarkable a depth of question, how could God bring an eternal judgment just for the failure of this one little thing?

Maybe they were nice because they say, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, and in prison? The very use of the word Lord implies that he's sifting and separating those who purport to be Christians using the language of the faith, but they failed at a critical juncture.

And others who did not even recognize what was at stake, not even knowing that they were the least of the brethren of Jesus, could not but help extend mercy, whatever the consequence of themselves. For which reason, Jesus calls them righteous and invites them to enter the kingdom prepared for them.

The reward that we were speaking about yesterday at this time of participation in the rule and reign with Christ. Over one last final issue of sifting, I will sift you through all nations. All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, who say evil shall not overtake or meet us.

Isn't that remarkable of how the Lord defines a sinner is his attitude toward calamity and his inability to recognize that it's coming at God's hand, and to think in his presumption and human pride that there's a way in which he can be saved from it, independent of God.

God calls that an enemy. It's a complete God forsakenness, even in the threat of calamity. If you'll not consider God then, when then will you consider him? And so I'll bring you out of the nations where you have sojourned, but I'll not bring you into the land.

And that's why I'm expecting a great attrition of the 15 million Jews that are in the world today. Likely two thirds of them will not survive this time. So great are the enemies to be found among us to God.

A remnant will return to Zion. The redeemed of the Lord will return to Zion, but they will not be great in number. The great majority will suffer the consequence of this verse. How will we bear that as Christians?

How many of us will have complaint with God and say, where is he? And how can you allow this ruthless extermination a second time within less than a century? Who purports to be the God of Israel and yet lets his people suffer a wholesale devastation and death.

That's why we need to have a preparation in scripture and be in agreement with God. Those things that are now at the door and soon to break. We really need to put the scalpel in and open this up and look at it deeply.

Who say, this shall not come upon us. It's not just whistling in the dark and hoping against hope. It's the statement of deepest assumption about human self-sufficiency. Why will this not come upon us?

We'll see to it that it will not come upon us. What was the thing that initiated my path to conversion? Who was a humanist of this kind. And I believe with absolute confidence that there was no problem that could ever come to me beyond my intellectual ability to solve it.

And my human capacity to understand and to relate to it until God gave me a German wife who had been in the Hitler youth, was schizophrenic. And I had under my roof to act out the whole tragedy of Germany and the Jew, because in the frustration of her own schizophrenic condition, the only way to get at him whom she loved and hated was the one place where I was susceptible in my Jewishness.

And when that happened, you know what I found out? I was not a nice guy. I thought I was a nice guy. I could take anything that comes my way. I could respond coolly and calmly and dispassionately and reasonably until I got zapped in a place that only God himself could have arranged.

And when that collapsed, my reason was not sufficient. My intellect was not. And what I was as a man was not. I had to take a leaf of absence from the teaching profession where I had nothing more to say to my students and put a pack on my back and go to look out for somewhere in the world for philosophy of some answer to the new predicament, which was the predicament of the recognition of my own insufficiency as a man.

Here, these rebels refuse to acknowledge that insufficiency and they think, however great the calamity, their reason, their ability, their influence, their wealth will save them. And God says, when you still believe that you're a rebel, you still refuse to accede to me as God.

And you make yourself your own savior. And you are, in fact, your own God and your own Lord. And this is the height of blasphemy and rebellion against myself. Let me say this, lest we would be encouraged into some kind of anti-Semitic disposition ourselves to see how intractable these Jews are.

And even in their final calamity, what we need to understand is that the issue of the Jew is the issue of humanity, the issue of mankind. This is man writ large. This is what is human. This is in the heart of man.

What we are displaying for the world is God's statement about man. It's the revelation of himself as he is, but it's the revelation of man as he is. And Israel has got to represent that and express that.

So we have to be careful that this is not a description of a particular ethnic people, but the essence of what man is in himself, that Israel is acting out for the benefit of all the world. So we can see that even now with the covenant that they sought to make at Oslo, predicated on total humanistic assumptions, that if you appeal to your enemy and show him the benefit of what would come to him, if they will only put aside their vengeful opposition and share in the prosperity that would come to both of us as Israel and Palestinian in the Middle East, then we can find the basis for peace.