Israel and Church — Art Katz

Good evening, Saints. Well, I have the privilege to expound a mystery tonight, of which Paul says we should not be ignorant. It's the mystery of Israel and the Church. Not to understand Israel as a mystery is not to understand it.

To have a view that's only sentimental or out of obligation or guilt is to miss it greatly. The only way to know it, to apprehend it, is to receive it as mystery. That's the way Paul describes it. That's the way Paul expounds it.

Israel and the Church in Paul's Apostolic Theology

And it's central to Paul's whole apostolic perception of the faith, of reality itself, set forth in his most important book. He's not a systematic theologian, but in the one book of Romans, Paul sets forth his faith more systematically than in any other place.

So chapters 9 through 11, the heart of the book, is devoted to this subject. It's not some addendum, it's not an asterisk that will direct us to the end of the book as a footnote. It's smack dab in the center of Paul's apostolic consideration.

And it needs to be in the same place for ourselves, because if we miss it, we miss our mandate, our calling with regard to that people, but we miss also our own identity. So there's no way for the Church to even understand itself, perceive its own reality and call, independent of the relationship to which we are called with this people, as a Gentile Church.

That's why it's a mystery. It confounds every category. It's unnatural, that is to say, it can only be understood, it can only be fulfilled spiritually. It's the issue of God, it's the issue of the Spirit, it's the issue of His Word, the issue of His covenant, it's the issue.

So Lord, grace. Grace to propound, grace to understand, grace to receive. This mystery is central to our faith, if at any time we are to deserve the appellation, the designation, apostolic. And indeed, if we don't, we're falling short of the glory of God.

Anything less or other than that which is apostolic is incompatible with God's intention. Charismatic is not enough. Evangelical is not enough. Fundamental is not enough. Apostolic only. So may you derive a jealousy for that word because of tonight that you have not before had and it will not let you go.

It will affect every aspect of the faith. So Lord, it's a privilege to be called to share this and it requires grace. Grace to communicate, grace to receive, grace to fulfill. So give us a memorable and a significant night that will affect all the future of this fellowship, the church of this locality and beyond.

We thank and give you praise in Jesus' name. Amen. So let's look at the verse that I've quoted in chapter 11, verse 25. And in my occasional dispute with those who have discounted Israel or feel that the church has replaced it, I find almost invariably they never cite Romans chapter 11 and are often just completely ignorant of its content.

Why? Because it can only be understood as mystery. You cannot obtain this by exercise of intellect. This is not the issue of reason. It's the issue of revelation. So how is it that men who are otherwise competent in many areas of the faith, even impressively, are non-compassmentists when it comes to this subject?

I suspect there's something that's blocking the flow of revelation of the mystery and likely it is some kind of perhaps unrecognized but deep-seated Gentile antipathy against the Jew. There's a latent anti-Semitism that pervades the whole history of the church and is much more common than is recognized.

And until we face that and let the Lord deal with that, we've not yet come to the place of his intention for us. So the whole issue of Israel is indeed the issue of the church, as I hope to indicate to you tonight.

Israel's Election and the Mystery of God's Mercy

Paul is answering the question of the church at Rome, is God finished with the Jew? And they had every reason to ask that question because they knew that we had stoned our prophets and now we have crucified our own Messiah.

So isn't that final testimony that this people have forfeited their calling and the church that has now risen is its replacement? It's a very logical, reasonable question to ask and in fact there are many who subscribe to that view to this day, that the church has replaced Israel because by every natural and human reckoning they're not deserving of any further consideration of God.

They have forfeited their place and their call. But that's exactly the mystery, you dear saints, that God will yet have a destiny for a nation that does not deserve it is not the statement of the nation, it's the statement of God, who will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy and elect whom he will elect and choose whom he will choose.

As if God has gone out of his way to choose a people whom Gentiles would just by the nature of things ordinarily reject because they are the least, because their track record stinks, because they have blasphemed his name in every nation wherein we have been sent and even the nation in which we presently abide.

So by every natural reckoning the church would dismiss Israel that would have any place yet in God's intention. The fact that it does have such a place and must fulfill such a place is not the revelation of the virtue of Israel but the revelation of the virtue of God because he will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy.

Where do we read that? Romans chapter 11. And God's mercy is God. God and his mercy is the revelation of himself in his deepest attribute and aspect because the world, how shall I say it, the world requires merit, the world requires performance, the world requires a basis for acknowledgement or esteem but God does not make that requirement.

It's the world that has this pharisaical propensity yet to be found in the church and that when you begin to take up a subject like this the first thing that is automatically inadvertently expressed is, but they don't deserve it.

Exactly. They don't. But they yet obtain it and that there will be everlasting joy upon their heads and mourning and sighing fleeing away is not the statement of their virtue, it's the statement again of God.

God in such a way as nothing less or other will reveal him than his mercy toward Israel. The issue of God is the issue of Israel and the fulfillment of God's word and promise and covenant toward a nation who is not only undeserving of the consideration but is not even aware that it has such a call and doesn't even desire it and yet he will succeed in it is an ultimate testimony not only to his word but to his power and that he will employ the Gentile church as the agent for that fulfillment is the final staggering aspect of the whole mystery because where should we expect that Gentiles should have any interest in Israel's fulfillment and let alone that they should be participant that if they are not fulfilling that role Israel will not obtain it.

Ezekiel's Dry Bones and Israel's Human Presumption

So for example when we read a text like Ezekiel 37 the Valley of Dry Bones where they are reduced to utter hopelessness to which the nation by the way has not yet come, the Nazi holocaust did not obtain it but there's a future holocaust coming for which the conditions are already fomenting in which the nation will come to the place where it will say we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones.

Why is that so remarkably important? Because we Jews are the epitome of man. The issue of the Jew is an ideological question. We are the picture of human self-sufficiency, human confidence, human ability, man in all of his assumption and who else could have taken an abandoned malarial wasteland and in half a century made it a remarkable high-tech civilization resuscitating a dead liturgical language and having one of the greatest military forces on earth and with atomic arsenal and all the kinds of things that only Jews could perform but will not succeed in performing because the issue of Israel is not to set forth the prowess and ability of Jews but the grace and mercy of God.

We have got to be reduced in our presumption about ourselves as man and we're on a divine course to be brought to that desperation and pitch where we have exhausted every prospect as you can see Israel, the state even now scrambling trying to find every expediency and clever notion to ease its predicament and bringing one successor after another as prime minister all of whom are brilliant and that we would all be desirous of such men in high office in our own nations and yet all are calculated to fail.

So there's a great ideological issue. I'm trying to compress in one statement tonight what ordinary takes at least a three-day seminar to expound but you need to understand this because if you have any affinity for the present state of Israel and a desire to see it succeed you're going to be grossly disappointed.

You're going to be embarrassingly disappointed. You'll be less and less able to defend the nation as it grows more desperate and is required to employ expediencies that contradict its own hope to have been an exemplary Jewish nation and will find itself acting very much like any gentile nation in the world and in fact even acting very much like the gentile nation that has so recently persecuted unto death Nazi Germany.

So brace yourself for a necessary dissolution and collapse of human expectancy in the state of Israel. It's more than I can explain to you in one night. You mean God will allow a state to be raised only that it should fail?

Exactly. And it will be succeeded by his own work when I will restore I will return, I will establish, I will plant. So that for the whole millennial future the restored nation will be able to compare its own pre-millennial Zionist experience attempting by its own ability and prowess to establish a homeland and a state and failing exacerbating its neighbors necessarily and provoking them to such a place where their children become human bombs and their parents of these human sacrifices are proud that their children have done something even by being blown to pieces themselves to destroy the hated enemy.

This is the result of the last analysis of however well-meaning men may be when they seek in the independence of God to establish something as ultimate as a national homeland let alone a prophetic fulfillment of a nation that will bless all the families of the earth.

It is not only bound to fail, but to fail disgracefully. This is hard work. So Paul says in verse 25, I would not brethren that you should be ignorant of this mystery because it's the only way to understand the majesty of the issue of that nation and the purposes of God from the beginning and elect people with a destiny that will affect all the nations of the earth and be the locus of God's theocratic rule.

Zion, Jerusalem, and the Literal Promises of Israel's Restoration

Very few Christians ever consider the subject of Israel in the context of the government of creation and yet we know in Isaiah chapter two that all nations shall come up to the mount of the Lord and God will teach us the ways of the God of Jacob and that the law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of Lord out of Jerusalem.

Believest thou this, you English saints, who have had more difficulty in sharing this view than any other nation? The greatest resistance to this view has come to me in the UK or its affiliates, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia.

There's something residual in the English psyche and the national fabric that is somehow repulsed by and is antithetical to Israel and that Israel should have a destiny that perhaps will even eclipse Great Britain.

I think those nations that have lingering aspirations for empire instinctively and to resist a nation that is called to be central to all nations. The measure of your humility in Christ is your agreement with God in what he has chosen.

Because the law must go forth out of Zion is not a piece of poetry, it's a statement of God's literal intention and if you knew what I know, you would realize that the church has historically been guilty of taking all of the literal statements of Israel's restoration and her centrality to the nations and spiritualizing it.

So that Zion is no longer a geographical location in Jerusalem, it's a condition of uttermost spirituality, which in fact it is, as a second use of the word Zion. But a principle of scriptural interpretation is that the first use must be what is intended by the grammatical context.

So where the grammatical context indicates a literal interpretation, that's our first obligation. After that you can preach it as a spiritual index of spirituality. The church has used its spiritualizing to nullify the very literal promises with regard to the nation.

First because they had not the faith to believe for them and second they had not the desire to desire for them. It's something like the elder brother who is unwilling even to see the profligate return and receive such a welcome from the father as a robe, a ring, and a feast.

You never did this for me and I've always been dutiful and faithful, blah, blah, blah, and refused to enter the celebration. This is no small question. What the attitude of the church is toward Israel and toward the Jew is the whole issue of Israel's redemption because, as I said, Ezekiel 37 shows the nation being reduced in which they themselves say, verse 11, chapter 37, we are cut off, we are without hope, we are dry bones.

Anyone who has studied anything in the history of Israel or contemporary Israel knows that that national acknowledgment has yet to be made and that even the Nazi Holocaust did not obtain it, but a proclamation of another kind, never again.

Can you compare these two statements? Never again and we are cut off, we are without hope. Never again is still man shocked and bewildered by the treatment that he's received in the Holocaust but yet surviving and assured that he'll not again suffer it because before he was hapless and helpless, a ghetto individual, but now with the state of Israel, their prowess, their ability, never again is a statement of human defiance and a confidence in man.

But the statement we are cut off, we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones is a statement of ultimate dejection, of ultimate, what's the word, exasperation, of ultimate acknowledgment that we're finished.

The Son of Man and the Church's Prophetic Responsibility

Then God turns to someone called the Son of Man and commands him to prophesy to those bones that they might live. These are the texts out of which Paul derived his understanding of the mystery and puts it at the heart of his New Testament faith.

So who is the Son of Man? Why doesn't God himself prophesy to the bones? He's the God who brooded over the chaos by the Spirit and said, let there be and there was. Why doesn't he now take the occasion to raise Israel by his own speaking and they'll be eternally indebted to him?

But no, he turns to his Son of Man and commands the Son of Man to prophesy. The moot question is, if the Son of Man is a symbolic statement of the church of the last days and its ultimate prophetic constituency, will it be willing to prophesy?

Does it desire to see those dry bones live? Why not leave them there? Isn't that the fate they deserve? And let us be the sole object of God's intention and glory. See how great this issue is? The issue of attitude, willingness to recognize what those dead bones represent, not only in terms of their own fulfillment, but in terms of his glory.

Because how does this great book end? This great chapter 11 ends with the most remarkable doxology in the whole of biblical writ from verse 33 through 36. If I get carried away tonight, I'll even sing it for you.

Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. Paul, how shall I say it? A sober apostle cannot contain his praise, doxology, his ultimate praise, because he has seen something of the mystery that he cannot contain.

Language itself is stretched to breaking at the remarkable conclusion of these three verses. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How great his judgments are past finding out.

Who has given him shall be given again. For of him and through him and to him are all things. To whom be glory forever. This is not just a little capstone. This is not a little piece of rhetorical flourish.

This is Paul. This is the apostolic mind. This is the apostolic heart. And it's got to come to you. If you're going to fulfill the role toward Israel, it will be a sacrificial demand in which the prospect of martyrdom, let alone peril, will not be out of the question.

Persecution, Jacob's Trouble, and the Coming Crisis for Israel

Jews are going to be globally hated. They're already in process of becoming that. There's a new anti-Semitism pervading the earth. It's already dangerous for a Jew to live in France that had been for them one of the safest places on earth.

And the French government was already telling the Jewish community, we're not in a position to protect you. So it's the largest Jewish community of the continent, 500 ,000, but it's eclipsed by 5 million Muslims who will not be placated with anything less than Jewish annihilation.

And there's a proliferation of this demonic phenomenon called Islam all over the world. So Jews will not be safe in any place, including the United States of America. We will be globally uprooted, globally hunted, globally persecuted, globally in flight.

And Jesus said of that time that there's a trouble coming for the nation such as it has never before known or will again know. He's answering the question, what are the signs of the end of the age and of your coming?

So he's speaking of a last days phenomenon of a trouble for the nation that exceeds any trouble that is previously known or will again know. And if that time not be cut short, no flesh will survive. But for the elect's sake, the time will be cut short.

I believe he's referring to the time of Jacob's trouble and the global persecution of Jews for the conditions for which are already brewing. And you have an obligation to be aware and to know and to anticipate and to prepare for their expulsion and their uprooting in every nation, the majority of which will not survive.

Because if it exceeds all previous trouble, that means it exceeds the Nazi Holocaust. That took six million lives. And if this will be a greater one and yet not again to be repeated, what then will be the number of fatalities?

When Jesus himself comes at the end of the time of Jacob's trouble to oppose the nations that are coming against Jerusalem to destroy it, and his feet come on the Mount of Olives, two-thirds of Jerusalem, which is to say the nation, have perished.

One-third passes through the fire. So if that's the ratio of survival, two-thirds perishing, one-third surviving, not only in the land but in the world, we're talking about the demise of ten million Jews in a period of time shorter than the Nazi Holocaust, three and a half years.

So in other words, it can only be accomplished with a certain vehemence and a bitterness that eclipses even the Nazi determination for Jewish annihilation by the same spirit that has always sought to annihilate Jews.

You need to know what prompts that spirit. It's got everything to do with the law going forth out of Zion, the word of law out of Jerusalem. The powers of the air are the false, usurping governmental rulers over the nations.

They are the rulers of this world's darkness and want to continue to be. Nazi Germany gives us an example of powers of the air not content merely to influence the conduct of a nation but to totally appropriate its whole mechanism, its whole government, its whole strength and to employ that not only to threaten the whole of world civilization but to annihilate Jews.

And in fact, the military historians cannot fathom right to the last days of the war how material and money and manpower was expended in the continuation of the process of annihilation when it should have been employed perhaps for defense, showing there's a demonic press for the destruction of Jews that had captivated that entire nation and its strength.

And that spirit will again be employed in the time to come. Why? Because if Israel can be destroyed, if there should be no remnant returning, if the redeemed of the Lord perish and fail to obtain redemption and to return to Zion, then the powers of the air continue their usurping of false rule over the nations.

The only thing that threatens them is a kingdom come whose rule will issue out of Zion that waits for a restored nation and the redemption of the holy hill of Zion in which God has set his prince, alone qualified to rule from that place as a descendant of David from the throne of David.

Got the idea? You see how literal I am? And the way that I am, I'm suggesting you need to be also. Understanding that the view that I'm propounding is not out of the fact that I'm Jewish. That's just haphazard.

That's accidental. But the fact that I have a role to perform for the church that has to do with Jews, but I'm not favoring them because of my ethnic identification. In fact, I'm harder on them than most.

The Church's Mandate in the Mystery of Israel

Paul is the steward of the mysteries of the faith. We can read in Ephesians chapter 3 and this mystery also. And yet he warns us that if we are ignorant of this mystery, we should be wise in our own conceit.

This is the only mystery for which there's a consequence, a penalty for the failure to obtain it. You will become wise in your own conceit. What are these conceits? We are the Israel of God. We are the replacement.

We are the kingdom. We will bring the kingdom. We don't have to wait for the king. We'll take over the functions of society and various other presumptions that characterize our present day Christianity.

The best of our present day Christianity is afflicted with this kind of conceit because it has failed to grasp the mystery. It's not something mechanical. There's something about the mystery itself that is tempering.

That God intended by it to temper the church because it shows that the church is not some independent entity for its own gratification. It's called into being for the very purpose of Israel's salvation.

Because we read in verse 11 of this chapter, Paul repeating himself from what he says in verse 1, has God cast away his people? This is what the Roman church is asking. And his answer in the most emphatic Greek, I'm told, is God forbid you should say that.

God forbid you should think that. That's the least thing that you should ever consider that he's finished with them. And then he goes on in verse 11 to pick that up again. Have they stumbled that they should fall?

Is God now permanently rejecting them? God forbid. There's that great statement again. But rather through their fall, salvation has come unto the Gentiles. If there was only a period there, we would have been very content.

But leave it to Paul to tack on one additional statement that brings the whole house down. For salvation has come unto the Gentiles through their fall so as or for or in order to provoke them to jealousy.

Have you ever considered that? That there's a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself. And that purpose is with them. With a people with whom you would not otherwise have extended yourself being Gentiles.

But that salvation has been granted to you in a mystery that requires your participation toward them in such a way as to move them to jealousy for the very gospel that they have rejected. Because Paul tells us in the same chapter, they are the enemies of the gospel for your sake.

He's not giving us an easy assignment. He's giving us an ultimate assignment. And I don't know in 42 years in the faith, traveling the world over, even commencing this trip in Malaysia and through most of the countries of Europe.

I'm now coming to the end of a three month journey. I don't know of a church anywhere that has consciously, willfully taken this mandate to its heart and made it a foundational premise of its entire being to move Jews to jealousy.

And until we do, we will be less than God's intention. We may be happy. We may enjoy services. There will be benefit undoubtedly, but we will fall short of apostolic glory. For in moving Jews to jealousy is an ultimate requirement that extends and enlarges and calls for such a depth of faith, such a reality of a kind that Paul does not describe or tell us how.

There's no footnote, there's no asterisk on what we have to do or perform that will move them to jealousy. But that the requirement is given is clear. So just to know that there's a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself is itself redemptive because the cancer of egocentrism, which we practiced in the world carnally, can be brought into the church spiritually so that it's we, us, our denomination, our church, our ministry.

Did you enjoy the service? Did you like the speaker? Everything is predicated from the point of view of the benefit that accrues to us. That is as spiritually dangerous as an egocentrism as to be carnally taken up with questions.

How does God save us from this innate propensity to be centered in ourselves? He gives us a burden and a mandate outside of ourselves and with a people whom we would never have chosen. And not only that, but a people who by their history and nature are adverse and are opponents of the gospel.

They're not just casual rejecters, they are professional rejecters as anyone knows who's had anything to do with Jews as a mission field. And their history alone is so horrible in terms of what Jews have suffered at the hands of Christendom, the church, the name of Christ, that there are Jews who will cross the street rather than have the shadow of a spire of a church fall on them.

Jewish Historical Trauma and the Church's Witness

My mother for 40 years could not understand how I would go to Germany, let alone how I should be a believer, her darling son and her hope, though she was saved 10 days before her death in her 96th year by a dream of hell that terrified her into the kingdom of God and enabled her to call upon his name, which she would not even allow me to mention.

She grew up in London and still remembers, I don't know if they're true stories or not, how she was pushed into a swimming pool by her Gentile teacher and told, sink or swim Jew. So she has a whole history of either true or false episodes that reinforced for her an anger and an enmity against the Goyim, the Gentiles and Christians.

And that name in which Jews have systematically been persecuted, as anyone who knows the history of Jews in Europe and in Germany, Jews locked themselves in their synagogues during the Crusades to be saved from the threat of baptism or death by the knights with their crosses on their tunics who looted the Jewish community or financed their pilgrimage.

And in the end, these synagogues were burned down and the entire community went up in flames long before the fire of the Holocaust, or they committed suicide. There's a phrase in Hebrew, Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying the name is the title given when a father will slit the throats of all of his children, kill his wife, and they either take his own life or allow another to take it.

So when the doors burst open and the Goyim come in, whose threat was baptize or die, they see the Jews already dead before them. This is our history, you dear saints. You need to know this. This is, we take this up with our mother's milk.

It's in the air that we breathe. There's an instinctive resentment of fear that even though you're nice to us periodically, how long can that be trusted? And in nations where we've enjoyed a certain degree of acceptance, the bottom can fall out suddenly as it did in Germany, as it will happen in France, and I believe will happen in England as in every nation.

So they are the enemies of the gospel. It's as if history conspires against our succeeding with them. And yet Paul doesn't say how we ought to move them to jealousy. But what he makes clear is it's not by individual virtuosos, but by the church as the church.

Something that can only be corporately displayed. Something in the relationships of a body that transcends earthly and human categories in a way that is heavenly and altogether supernatural. Look how they love one another.

Remember what was said of the early church. Needs to be said again. Not only how they love one another, but the ultimate test is how do we love them? Because when Jesus comes as king, the first judgment by which he separates the sheep from the goats among the Gentiles in the world and the nations is over one question or one issue.

What did you do for the least of these my brethren? Read Matthew 25, which the scholars say that he's really talking to the church that the brethren have got to be Christians because Jews at that time will be yet apostate and unbelieving.

But the sheep and the goats both say, Lord, when did we see you naked, thirsty, and hungry? They say, Lord. And so I'm biblically exegeting that the least of these his brethren are indeed Jews in their last days and final extremity.

They're his brethren before they're saved. They're his brethren while they're yet in apostasy, while they're yet in flight, while they're yet in extremity. The question is, if that's what they are to him, what are they to us?

Loving Israel Through Sacrificial Mercy

So we're moving toward that conclusion of the age for which the church is not now presently fitted. We will be exasperated by this people and to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy, which is in the conclusion of Romans 11, is an ultimate requirement from people who do not count their lives dear unto themselves and are willing to give their lives, open themselves to risk of suffering for Jews and the condition in which they will be in their last day's flight and not receive gratitude for it and maybe even have to suffer mean-spiritedness and backlash and the kinds of things that Jews will say when they've come undone, remembering that this last day's extremity will be very sudden.

It'll be an uprooting, something like you find yourself in the street. The day before you were professional, you had resources, you had wealth, you had possessions. The next day all you have is what's on your back and you're in flight from terror.

So they're not going to come to us in their best condition. They're going to come to us in their worst condition. And yet Ezekiel 20 verse 33 on says, with a fury poured out, I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations.

The fury is the last day's anti-Semitic persecution and there I will meet with you face to face in the wilderness of the nations. So the kind of face that we show them, if it's the face of only religious obligation, I guess we have to, art said it, it was coming and now it's here.

Well, let's brace ourselves. We will have missed a historic moment. They need to see something more than religious obligation. Certainly they need to see something more than irritation and resentment, which if we are yet in our prescient edition, they will provoke.

The Jews have ever and always historically been the measure and test of the truth of the church. And the greatest of the church's giants have failed that test. The most noteworthy is Luther himself, who became a blatant anti-Semite.

Chrysostom, the golden mouth orator of the early apostolic period, equally anti-Semitic. And so men have been tested and missed it. There's something about a Jew that frays us and provokes and gets under our skin in the way that my Danish wife does for me.

Maybe she's from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I don't know. But just when you're thinking yourself confident in your spirituality, you come home and your wife will say one thing or spot one thing or make a comment or a remark that, boom, she hits the blind spot and something issues from you that is totally embarrassing.

Just when you thought you had come to a place of spiritual maturity, the Jew functions like that. So I'm warning you that we should not be embarrassed in that day because what we exhibit with our faces will either save them or lose them.

A Gentile Witness of God's Indwelling Life

And the fact of the matter is, as a former atheist, ex-Marxist, radical, I was saved in part by that revelation 42 years ago when I left the teaching profession with a pack on my back to travel through Europe and the Middle East looking for philosophical and ideological answers to a disillusioned life.

Instead, I met Christians who picked me up off the side of the road. Born again, I didn't know there was such a distinction. Strangely moved by every one of them. Just the willingness to pick up a man like myself and this little girl who was an American on vacation having graduated high school, half my age, and I'm probing her motives, why are you being kind to me?

I'm an ex-Marxist, a Communist Party member, and I have never seen kindness. I've only seen ideological ferocity, but I've not seen kindness. And here's this Gentile girl beaming, walking with me totally unafraid.

How is it you're not afraid of me? It's the love of God, she said. How is it you're being kind? The love of God. Why are you? The love of God. I thought, this kid mentions God one more time. She's had it.

My hobby is to wipe out Christians. So what's this little girl to me? She mentioned God once more. I said, look, you're a sweet kid. I appreciate your kindness, but I cannot stand this God talk. Answer for me one question that no Christian has ever successfully answered.

What's that, Art? You've been talking about God. How do you know that he is? There'll be a long delay. She'll think of something from Sunday school, and I'll get my steamroller all revved up and crush her.

Without a moment's hesitation, she tilted that little face, snubbed nose, freckled, sandy haired, what we Jews called WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And out of that face, she said, I know that he lives, Art, because he lives in me.

And when she said that, down I went like the struck ox, absolutely devastated. The power of that statement, trying to collect myself. What did she say? It's not theological. It's not even intellectual.

What's the power of that statement? And then realizing that it was true, and she had the face to prove it. That little Gentile face exuded the light of God. And that light is the light that lightens the Gentiles, is equally the glory of the people of Israel.

You see, we're in something together, you dear saints. You're the key to our salvation, and we're the key to your nation, when we shall come into the fulfillment of our calling as a nation of priests and a light unto the world.