K-541 One Church, One Body (2 of 2) — Art Katz

The Invisible Cloud of Witnesses and the Church’s Unseen Reality

So praise God for Carl Barth. This is theological reflection. This is a man pondering. What does the invisible cloud of witnesses mean? Why are they present? Do they constitute something? Are we missing something?

Have we dismissed that too lightly? And we have to say yes. What is invisible has threatened the church that is, that the invisible has threatened those that are so taken up with the visible. It's a little, it's icky because it has been made phantasmal and speculative and eerie and others like the one you mentioned have exploited that realm.

And so the church is kind of drawn back historically and well, let's leave leave the thing alone, you know, to its detriment. We need the ennobling sense of the glory that the church is in both its visible and invisible realms.

And so what what Carl Barth is going to lead us in, now he says if you can see that, now I want you to see this. That in the same way as the invisible church that has gone on before is vitally connected with the present church, so also is Israel vitally connected by the very same means the head.

And I wouldn't say that it's too far-fetched, suggest that we are receiving that benefit right now, this morning. That except that that benefit be exerted, there's no way that this view can even be put forth.

Everything in the world and the flesh and the devil is opposed to it. And unless there were an assistance coming from that realm, however, it's expressed, we could not even come in to the consideration of it.

The One Church Across Death and History

So the church which was and the church which is are very concretely one church, all live unto him. Luke 20 verse 38, not only on that side, but on this, not only on this side, but on that, and because they live to him, they are one community, one church.

For the same reason, now he makes the bridge, for the same reason the people of Israel in its whole history and the Christian Church are two forms and aspects of the same thing, of the one inseparable community.

This is a radical view of the connection between the church and Israel that has been lost to the church's consciousness today. We see ourselves as separate entities. The Lord says that the two shall be made one flesh, and we agree to it doctrinally, but we don't live as if we believe that.

We're separate entities. The wife still wants her distinction and recognition of herself apart from her husband. She doesn't see herself as being one entity with him, so that his distinction, his honor is also hers.

Her gratification for being is in him. So there's a real urgency to shift gears and come into the apprehension of these things and not merely allow them to sit as doctrinal statements in our minds, and when we come into that reality, that's the glory.

I'm waiting to see the first couple who are one, in that sense that they've been made one flesh. The fact that they are spatially separate does not alter the spiritual truth. The spiritual truth needs to become the actual truth by faith, and now he's saying the same thing about Israel and the church.

It's a whole perception that is lost to us for the same reason the people of Israel in its whole history and the Christian Church are two forms and aspects of the one inseparable community. Of course, Israel doesn't know that.

It despises the church. It sees it as something alien to itself. It's goyish. It's Gentile. It's alien. But the church also sees Israel as separate from itself. It does not see it as one inseparable community, which it will be.

One day, one operating from the heavenly realm and the other from the earthly, but one continuum, just as the husband and the wife are separate entities and spatially separate, but are one in God's sight and need to be that in their own sight.

Unity as the World’s Witness to Christ

One inseparable community in which Jesus Christ has his earthly historical form of existence by which he is attested to the whole world. What is Barth saying? That it's only in this connection that the Lord, that God, is attested to the world.

Isn't that something, the echo of that in the prayer of Jesus in John 17? That when we become one as he is one, the world will know that the Father hath sent him. That the revelation of God rests on the demonstration of the visible unity of God's people.

And what Barth is saying is that in the like manner, there's a witness to God that comes from the unity of the church and Israel as one that needs also to be seen and to be demonstrated. It attests to God, though both segments do not recognize each other, but need to.

By which not only does this attest to God to the whole world, but by which the world is summoned to faith in him. It's a witness that has a consequence. It brings the world not only to the acknowledgement, but to the God who is revealed in it.

He himself is the one person, the crucified Messiah of Israel, who as such is the Lord of the church. What's the connection that makes one inseparable community the head? The one whom we call Lord is Israel's crucified Messiah.

They don't understand that, but the reality is not contingent upon their understanding. See what I mean? It's a spiritual truth. It's a reality in God. Whether men have recognized it yet or not does not alter the reality.

But when it is recognized, it becomes powerful. God intends that it should be seen by those who have spiritual sight, namely ourselves. So that changes the whole way in which we're viewing Israel. It's not merely a subject.

It's us. It's the one inseparable community of God's people, though right now they are presently separated and don't recognize themselves as being inseparable. In fact, there's a friction between them and from both segments, even an alienation.

And is that accidental? Satan recognizes this truth more than the church, and so he has actively worked to keep them separate and that they should see each other as not only being in separate, but in opposition.

Rejecting Replacement Theology and Preserving Distinctiveness

So for example in the church today in America, in certain charismatic sectors, the church not only does not recognize Israel as being part of itself, it has replaced it and become it, and sees itself as the Israel of God, and that Israel has no further purpose with God.

It's obsolete. It's cast off. They blew it. They missed it. They crucified Jesus. They're finished. We are it. Thinking they're doing God's service when they're actually cheating God out of his glory.

Very much in the same way as some Christian subscribing to unisex, cheating God out of the glory that is his, when that which is male and female is made one. Not by the loss or the blurring of that distinctiveness, but the coming together in the way of God's intention that reveals his glory.

So he who is the crucified Messiah of Israel, as such is also the Lord of the church, the risen Lord, who as such is the manifested Messiah of Israel. And in this form of a servant was truly the Lord.

He whom we call Lord would not be Lord, except he was also Israel's Messiah. That's what makes him the Lord. He had to be their promised Messiah, but as the crucified and resurrected and ascended one is also our Lord.

On the one hand there is the promise, on the other it's fulfillment. There's Israel, identical as a nation, and the church as a kind of separate entity, but called to the commonwealth of Israel. Remember when Paul said, you who were afar off and without God and hope in the world have been brought nigh by the blood of Jesus into the commonwealth of Israel.

Paul saw the church as this one community, this inseparable community. But with the advent of Catholicism, the schism was made and the entities were split and the anti-semitic thing that came with the Holy Roman Church, because it was not really regenerate, had not really entered the spiritual commonwealth of Israel.

It can only be that by the spirit became an independent Gentile entity called the church and was opposed to and resisted everything that was Israeli, of Israel or Jewish or Hebraic. So that Passover became Easter, which is the name of a pagan goddess, Ishtar, and the thing became so blurred and distinctively different that Jews can no longer recognize it as being part of itself.

And that's the way it has come into modern times. And the Reformation did not heal the breach. It was not a complete Reformation and still kept the separate identity and antagonism between the parts that prevails largely till today.

The Church’s Inheritance in Abraham’s Promises

But Barth sees it as one history, the one covenant which stretches over the whole, and we inherit their promises, because we are them. We are one with them in one community. Their promises are our promises.

We are the children of Abraham as they are and we have an inheritance with them and the things that were promised their fathers. It's therefore essential to the church from the very beginning and it always will be to represent this unity in itself and to exist in it.

This is, I'm reading Barth, this is the way he writes. You have to lean forward. You've got to come into his statement. It's essential that the church from its beginning to see this unity in itself, not only to see it, but to exist in it.

It's not enough merely to mentally acknowledge the mystery of the inseparable community, which has been made separate, but to live in the understanding of that. We'll give you a very different view of what the church is than what we presently hold.

And this is different from the Christians who say, well now I'm a Jew. No, you're not a Jew. You're a Gentile who by the blood of Jesus have been brought nigh and brought into the commonwealth of Israel and its covenants and its promise.

With Abraham and with every saint of old and that's the glory. You're part of the inseparable community of God, the Israel of God, and you need to live in that kind of consciousness. And now he spells out what that will mean.

It has to do with the church in all its fullness for only as such can it attest to the whole world and summon it to faith in him. That this recognition and the act of living in it is the church's most powerful witness to the world and including to Israel herself.

What a witness to Israel that the church does not see itself as some separate entity, but part with it. Because its Lord is their Messiah and that it's their history is our history and their completion and their glory and their consummation is ours.

Mercy Toward Israel and the Judgment of the Nations

Wouldn't that, if that was truly our understanding and we were living and existing in it, what would our witness to Israel be? Totally different. Totally different. And I'm wondering if this has greatly to do with the last day's issue by which Gentiles are judged when the king comes by our failure to recognize the least of these his brethren.

Then be cast out into the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels for the failure to extend mercy to give water, food, clothing, shelter to the least of these my brethren. Because when did we see you hungry or thirsty or in prison and so on?

It's a failure to recognize the Lord in his people. We did not recognize the brethren as our brethren being inseparably connected with them even in their unbelief. We saw ourselves distinct and different and separated and therefore we did not extend to them what we would have extended to each other and therefore we're judged for that because we did not see and we did not give shows we are out of the whole context of God and therefore we're condemned together with the unbelieving.

Christian Antisemitism and the Holocaust

Let me tell you just how tragic it has been historically for the church to recognize what Calabar is speaking. There would not have been a holocaust, there would not have been a history of Christian persecution of Jews and anti-semitism if we had seen ourselves in this continuum with them though yet in their unbelief.

The church in Germany did not see itself as being an inseparable community with the Jews in its midst. Had it seen that it would have transfigured the German Christianity. The whole history of the relationship between the German and the Jew would have been different.

There would have been no room for Hitler ever to have found a place let alone to make as his cardinal ideology the hatred of the Jew that the church that the nation was unified on the basis of an anti-semitism against a people whom they should have recognized as being one with whom they are inseparably joined as the Israel of God.

So we're not talking about some light fiction. The practical consequences of the loss of the view of the connectedness with Israel has been tragic in its consequence both for the Jew and for the church.

The church in Germany was denuded. It was anemic. It made room for every satanic demonic phenomenon that came to be called Nazism because it did not have the vitality that would have been theirs. Had it viewed itself as being inseparably connected with the Israel that was even in its midst and moving together toward a glorious consummation for which it did not need a third Reich and that the thousand-year rule that Hitler spoke about was already their inheritance with them in the scripture.

Are you guys following that? We took their lives. Isn't it the irony that we become the vehicle of their destruction rather than their salvation when we don't see as God intends that we should see? And I know this better than you because I've studied it that the leading Nazi ideologues, the spokesmen for Nazism and all that preceded them in German theology that was anti-semitic flows from a failure to see this.

In fact, they resented it and even hated Paul for bringing in what they called a Judaistic influence and that it was not a Christianity becoming to German nationhood. They wanted a Christianity that that was compatible with with German national aspiration, with supermen, and they despised Paul because he brought to them a Christ crucified in weakness.

They didn't like this emphasis on weakness. They wanted strength and exaltation of men. They lost in the word the Hebraic component and despised it for being that. They wanted a Christianity that was voided of its Jewish influences.

Had they received it as being their faith and would have given to the church a distinctive character, it would not have been the arrogant Germany of modern times that not only in itself almost single-handedly decimated the European Jewish community, but almost destroyed Western civilization itself.

A Prophetic Call to Germany’s Church

We're not talking about a little triviality here. What we have paid for the failure of the church to be the church in the fullness of God's intention is is tragic beyond all speaking. Having seen that tragedy, do we yet recognize what has been lost and have restored it?

This was my message to the church in Germany. Even in the light of the visible tragedy that has taken place, has the church in Germany yet been altered, yet repented, yet made amends, yet been restored to what has been lost that made that tragedy inevitable?

And the answer is no. Some of you know that I wrote a little summary of the last days of that six-week ministry and how I came to the church in Frankfurt symbolic of so much of what had happened. Oppressed and feeling totally out of it and what have I to say, and who am I, what's my qualification, and what a strange message, and no wonder people want to run the other way and stick their fingers in their ears.

To come to the church in that condition and to hear from the pastor, he's already been warned, the rumors have already reached him, that Cass is bringing the church in Germany under condemnation and guilt.

And he said, you need to know, brother Cass, that I don't want that here. I said, well, of course, I don't blame you. I didn't know that that's what I was doing, but I let me off the hook. I don't I don't want to speak.

Well, he said, well, I know that that I don't understand. He says, because I know that God wants you here. So I said, well, I guess we got to go ahead and take the risk, but well, let's pray. And we prayed, and it was really earnest prayer, and I felt the real release after the prayer because I was so discouraged to come in to hear that after being crunched from all of the weeks of activity and spent and and so we and we then we came down to the meeting on a Wednesday night in the basement of a commercial building and there were 400 people there and they're all young and all this now generation and the Pepsi Cola generation and all swingers and the worship and was lively and I felt like a blob.

Now I'm saying this not to exalt me, but to give you a taste of what your calling is. This is the nub of the work of restoration, the prophetic calling. Elijah must first come and it's no picnic. It's the cross every time.

And when I looked out my my I despaired. I said, Lord, no. You bailed me out many times when I thought it was hopeless, but this? No way. This is hope. Look at them, Lord. Listen to that music. Listen to that worship.

It's totally out of keeping with the burden that I'm bearing. They'll look upon me like some anomaly out of the past, some queer duck talking about the past and the Holocaust and failed Christianity that made inevitable that tragedy and and that unless we look into that burning bush, there's no being called by name.

There's no apostolic sending to Pharaoh. There's no releasing of the captives to bring them out that we might bring them in. What a strange word to a people who are not at all related to their German past.

I know their German past as a Jew better than they do. I was in a Germany before they were born. I was there in Munich in 1952 and watched the prostitutes come out from the heaps of ruin of the demolished and bombed city in an unbelievable surrealistic scene that that same heap of rubble today is where they go skiing.

That's called the Teufelbergen, the devil's mountain, and they don't even remember. It's the rubble from the judgment of God that bombed their city to the smithereens. They were born after the time. Now they're zipped up in their ski outfits and got their skis over their shoulders and you're going to tell them what that rubble means?

Forget it. And I'll tell you if there were not an invisible cloud of witnesses giving me some kind of an assist and intercession from saints who have been stirred by the spirit in California without even knowing what's taking place, there's not a hope.

And I began by speaking about the prophetic word and saying, now listen you Germans, I know you're logical. That's that's your bag. That's what you're famous for. But if you're going to try and hear this word through your logical mind, forget it.

This is a mystery. It's got to be intuited and apprehended, not analyzed and critiqued. And then I went on, then I went into the message itself and remarkably, they seemed to be listening. They seemed attentive.

They seemed to be hearing. And when I finished, the pastor got up and went on for 10 minutes, and my interpreter was telling me what he was saying. Celebrating the word and saying, this is God's very word for the church and for the nation.

And he went on like that and he said, let us go down on our knees and receive this call of repentance and turn ourselves to the burning bush and look into it and receive the implications of the past for us, which are still present with us and must be recognized where there's no apostolic future.

And whoom, down they went, 400 now generation kids. And Germany is still the nub of the nations, still the great pivot. As Germany goes, so goes Europe. It's at the heart of that compact federation of nations.

The Church, the Word, and the Direction of Nations

It's the most vital economy, the most powerful and energetic and dynamic people. And the church is the key to which direction that nation will take. Well, what is happening now, these little neo-Nazis, these skinheads, be just a passing aberration?

Or like the Hitler time, though it's a sewer phenomenon from the dregs, will it in short time rise to a place of prominence and acceptance and take over the whole structure of state as happened 50 years ago?

This is a life question and the church, its prayer, its intercession, its witness, is a fact that can be a fact now that it was not then because of the preached word that has come to it. So we started this morning by talking about, Lord, give us a respect for the word.

The exaltation of the word, that by the word you're going to accomplish. And in my 64 years of life and my almost 30 years as a believer, I'm grateful that we are finally coming to an hour where the word of God and the church of God is no more just a Sunday question, but vitally affecting the issue of nations and the destiny of the world itself.

We must come of age. Let me just finish this paragraph except that we see this and live in that reality. Can we rightly be the church in all fullness? For only as such can the church attest to the world and summon the world to faith in him, including summoning Israel.

Maybe Israel will never be moved to jealousy until it begins to see the church not as some alien phenomenon, but as being not only an extension of itself, but more rightly itself than even itself is. It's more truly and more visibly the Israel of God than what Israel is, because it's the spiritual truth of what Israel is.

And it's being demonstrated by Gentiles. You want to know what it is to be Israel? Look at the church. And I'm not talking, I'm not saying by that Messianic shtick luck like banging tambourines and Davidic worship and the we were now stars of David and accoutrements of an external kind.

I'm meaning that without anything external that would indicate us as being Jewishly oriented. There is something so authentically Hebraic. So something so authentically biblically Israel of the Commonwealth that they see in us Gentiles, what they ought to have been if they had not been broken off out of their own tree.

And to produce that is going to take a little bit more than wearing a star of David around your neck. What a call for the church to be the church. And I'm saying it cannot be it until it first sees this.

You can't restore what you don't see. First the vision, then the fulfillment. Write it on the tablets, make it plain that we might run after it. And that's part, if not a great part of what the school is about.

It's not another school of discipleship. It's conveying a vision of the things lost that need to be restored in a way that I don't know is being expressed anywhere. Because when I came back from a previous trip, the Lord said, call Bart and then brought me into these things.

So even not only the world needs to see that what the church attests to, but Israel itself. And had the church in Germany seen that, or will still see that, will affirm that it would revolutionize its perception of itself, radicalize its message, its witness, its power, its glory.

This is the key to the church being the church in Germany. And for the want of that, the skinheads are now coming into view. There's a vacuum again, as it was in the incipient Hitler time, because the church is not the church in its fullness.

And whenever something is not full, it invites something else to occupy that space. You remember what Peter said to Ananias and Sapphira? Why have you allowed Satan to fill your heart with a lie? Because you gave something in part that God intended be whole.

Whenever you only give a measure, you open the door for the enemy to fill it. We must be full of the Spirit. We must be full of truth. Wherever we're partial comes the path to destruction. So therefore to fail them is to show we've not come in, and therefore we're out.

And therefore it's perfectly logical that we should be cast out into a lake of fire. We're outside of God, outside of his purposes, outside of his seeing, outside of his call. That's why this one thing measures everything.

Wholehearted Participation in the Body of Christ

How can he make such an eternal judgment on the fact that we failed in this one thing? Because to fail in that is to fail in all. Can you see then that just to embrace the subject of Israel from the level of sentiment or affinity, because you like Jews, or they're cute, or it's exciting what's going on there, and you want to be part of it, is to miss the whole thing by a million miles.

You're just as much off-target as if you were an anti-Semite. The only one embrace that's the true embrace is this apostolic view. Because it requires all, because it's central, because it's the way that we, God intended, we should see it.

It's transforming. It transfigures us as the church. We cannot be the church except by it. It's that key. So to take it and just to see it sentimentally, or not to see it, is equally to have lost it. And often I'll say, to be sentimental about Israel is as much to oppose God and his purposes for Israel as to be opposed to Israel.

We thought we were this one. We go to the Feast of Tabernacles and we plant trees. What are you talking about? Why? Because to plant a tree and go to a feast does not require, in terms of the cross, what this requires.

This is an ultimate requirement, to come into this perception of the faith. And many would just rather be related on a sentimental basis than on this basis. Because this is real church. This is the real McCoy.

This means we can no longer play with church as attending Sunday services. Or we can take it or leave it or shop around or visit once in a while. This means getting with it. This is earnest. This means coming into the grit of it and being what we ought to be to each other.

And this reality and being identified with the invisible cloud of witnesses and that our careers, our businesses, are secondary things to our calling. And how many people have a stomach for that? It means the end of your independence, your self-will, your leisure, what you're going to do.

Well, I can stay home and watch a telecast or listen to a tape. I don't have to go to a service. As if the issue is services. Are you joined? Are you bonded? Are you integral? Are you related? Are you in the body that is related to the head that you could be related to the church triumphant who is also joined to that head and receive its benefit?

Repentance, Restoration, and Germany’s Future

So, I'm saying that for Germany, that if they could see this and affirm this, it would revolutionize its perception of itself, radicalize its message, its witness, its power. There'd be no room for skinheads.

They'd blow them right out of the saddle. It'd be a vital, powerful church that has the message for the hour for the nation. And bring the nation to a repentance for its past that is more than just paying reparations, which the Germans like to do.

They don't mind some billions of marks, but they do mind breaking in their pride and acknowledging that the horror of the Holocaust is the statement of their failed Christianity, which still continues.

Is it not for the want of this that we languish and grope for panaceas and fads and gimmicks and personalities and renewals? Why we run after so-called prophets and gimmicks and power evangelism and this has come up and that.

We're a church looking for novelty, but we're missing something fundamental and foundational that no little gimmick is going to ever answer. To deny this unity would be to deny Jesus Christ himself, because he is himself the head of it.

As the attestation of the one work and the one revelation of the one God. And then I write myself, isn't this in fact what the church has done? It has denied the Lord. If it has denied this reality, it has not seen itself as being part and central to it.

Prayer for Grace, Truth, and Restoration

So Lord, this little four spice is getting to become the main dish. And I hope we don't gag on it. And we're asking for a mercy and a grace to consider the things that have been lost, that have been absent from the church's consciousness that you've intended as normative.

And we need a grace, Lord. No wonder you came full of grace and truth. Bless these sons and daughters, my God. Bless me. Expand us, Lord, and grant us enablement. Pull up the stakes and lengthen our cords, my God, that we might hear, receive, and be changed.

Bless us as even bearers of this message to the church and the localities from which we come. To be, my God, oracles and the Elijah band that restores what was lost, the ancient ways, paths for men to walk in.

Give us a breather now and a recovery, Lord, and an ability to come back and to hear from your heart yet more. And we thank you that you chose this morning to insert this at this time. Let not a syllable fall to the ground.

In Jesus' name, amen.