This Kind Cometh Not Out — Art Katz

We are looking with great respect at this invitation. You know how large our intention and aspiration is, not just to bless the local saints, however we desire that, but to go in beyond and through them to the larger community, to the region, to the state, to the nation, to the nations.

Lord, if there's such a thing as an apostolic sending yet, if there's such a thing as a prophetic word yet, may the words of these days, from this first speaking to the last, be that. We ask it, my God, momentous, significant, historic penetration.

We're asking largely because we know that the time is short and the issues are great. Bless us, my God, from the very first. Be the alpha and the omega of these days. You know how to begin and you know how to conclude.

So I give you a fresh Lord, this dust that I am, that you've shaped for yourself, even from my 94-year-old mother's Jewish womb. For your purposes in these last days, come now and be the incarnate God in me to speak and do of your good pleasure.

We thank and give you the praise for our privileged time together in Jesus' name. Amen. You wanna turn to Mark chapter nine. We're all familiar with what this chapter contains. Begins on a mountaintop and it ends in a valley.

The Mount of Transfiguration as a Pattern for the Last Days

Begins with spiritual elevation and it ends with morbid confrontation with the powers of darkness. It's as if in this one chapter is encompassed the ultimate degrees of the range of prospect and possibility in the believing life.

And I'll tell you how I'm beginning to read the scriptures these days and especially these episodes in the life of Jesus, which are altogether historical, these are perfect transcriptions of everything that was said and done at that time.

It was a moment in history, but it's a moment beyond that moment. That in some remarkable ability of God, as he affected the course of the walk of Jesus and the things that he spoke and did, many of those things coming upon him with the same degree of surprise and astonishment as things come upon us.

Yet they were divinely determined by his father in heaven that they should convey something for us in the last days of an enormous import and kind. So it's an event in itself. It's historically accurate, which would be interesting to read for that reason alone.

But at the same time, it constitutes a parable for the last days for our instruction. So no accident that it begins with a mountain ends with a valley. Isn't that just like God? And what a mount that is, the Mount of Transfiguration, where six days later we read, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up to a high mountain apart by themselves.

And he was transfigured before them and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses who were talking with Jesus. What a scene.

You know what's astonishing about the scripture? It is terse, T-E-R-S-E. That means very compact, very spare. There's no schmaltz here. God doesn't have to work it up. There's no height. He just gives the simple, straight account like, and they crucified him.

But what is implied and concealed in these simple statements would take an eternity to unfold. Like six days later. Why wasn't it five days later or seven days later? Because six is the number of man and something had to happen to those men who were at the heart of the 12 of Jesus.

These were the three who were the nucleus and he brought them up to a high mountain apart and he was transfigured before them. Someone has wisely said that the unusual thing is not that Jesus should become transfigured but that he should be seen transfigured.

That the remarkable thing is that God the Father concealed his glory and only on this occasion was that veil lifted that they might see the intrinsic beauty and radiance of Jesus that was always and ever with him.

And it's something like that for us. The Lord needs to bring us up to a high mountain apart not to glimpse what is always there but that we have not sufficiently and adequately seen. And if the Lord gives me the grace to bring us all the way through this word tonight you're going to learn that that seeing is not some minor matter of our own satisfaction or delight but the critical point of Israel's own deliverance in the last days.

It begins on the mount but it ends in the valley and the thing that we glimpse on the mount is not something that we should continually enjoy as if we could remain there but somehow bringing down into the place of confrontation where it makes all the difference.

Bringing the Glory Down Into the Valley

And we're going to see how these disciples failed to bring the buoyant image of Jesus and the vision of God, the hearing of the Father speaking out of a cloud. This is my beloved son, hear ye him. What an unparalleled experience but they had hardly gotten down below when the whole of it almost dissipated away.

All the more when what confronted them was the most ugly, brutal picture of demonic activity in taking a young man and throwing him down in convulsion. It didn't, they didn't have enough or they didn't have enough retention to bring the glory of that vision to the place where it was most needed where it is most absent.

And that's our situation also. And he was talking with Elijah and Moses. My, what a vision. How did they know that these were, these two men were Moses and Elijah? Because they know, because there's a revelation when we shall see the great saints of God in their glorified form, we'll know.

You'll know me in heaven and I think I'm gonna look younger and the wrinkles will be out and the gray. What you're going to see is not a man at a certain day and moment in time of his death but the essence of the man where his body is the statement of what he is at the grace of God in the summation of all of that dealings through a life of faith.

We'll recognize each other instantly. That is quintessential art. And that's how they recognize Moses and Elijah conferring with Jesus. But what does Peter say? Always with his foot in his mouth. Always has to say something.

Always has to do something. He's such a picture of the church with its itch that needs to say him do. That has not the capacity to receive something without having to set in motion something religious and ministerial.

The rabbi, see there's his mistake already. Rabbi, he's seen Jesus glorified and transfigured speaking with Moses and Elijah and the title is rabbi? You would think that that revelation would have occasioned a much deeper appreciation of who this Jesus is with whom Peter now has been walking virtually for three years.

But he still lacks something. It's good for us to be here. Let us make three booths, three dwellings. One for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah. And he did not know what he was saying for he was terrified.

Let us make. You know, if we had all kinds of timestamps and I wish we had it to really go over a text word for word, syllable for syllable. We rush through, we're much too hurried. We want to follow the storyline but every word here is enormously significant.

You know what I would underline in this last statement? It is good for us to be here. Let us make. I would underline the word us. You know what Peter's mistake is? He's us oriented. It's good for us to be here.

Let us make. So long as us is at the center of your spiritual frame of understanding you'll end up by making, doing and erring. He still is centered in himself and his gratification. And that's unfortunately the statement of too many of us.

We've got to graduate from us to him. It may be good for us to be here but that's not the reason we're there. It serves some purpose in God beyond what value we can receive from it. And this whole magnificent faith is not established at great cost for our satisfaction or our enjoyment but for the eternal purposes of God.

If we gain some benefit and some delight all well and good but it's not the purpose for which God has given us so precious a call. How we will ever break this powerful egocentrism that held us in its grip in the world.

My car, my savings, my job, my I. And then we come into the kingdom? Well we've changed the object of our attention from carnal things and possessions but now it's my church, my denomination, my ministry.

There's still a power of self-centeredness that continues to be a canker if not a cancer for the church. What's it gonna take? But a seeing of Jesus afresh and anew. Well, that's the moment that the father picked to boom out his voice from heaven.

This is my beloved son. Shut up Peter. Hear ye him. Not your own clatter, not your own necessity to get a word in. Hear ye him. And they went down. They must have been like dead. And when they looked around they saw no man with them anymore but only Jesus.

I think the King James says only Jesus himself alone. I don't think I can take the credit for this but somewhere along the line I've picked up the thought that they saw not only no man only but they did not even see their own seeing.

They came to a place in the power of that vision and the voice of the father where they were beside themselves. They saw no man. They didn't even see themselves. They were not even conscious of their own seeing.

They were not even conscious of their own spirituality. They saw no man but Jesus himself alone. That's blessing saints. Not even to be conscious of our own seeing which is the last cruel deception is spiritual self-consciousness.

My face. I'll just loosen it. My microphone, huh? Hang on. I wanted to stop but I knew I wouldn't stay there. That's in passing. I'm not even getting yet to the principal theme of this word but I couldn't speak these things.

We couldn't get into this text and not acknowledge them in passing. Well, then they came down from the mount. They asked about Elijah. We'll pass that up that Elijah must first come and be mistreated.

Confronting Demonic Power in the Valley

And when they came in verse 14 down to the valley, they came to the disciples. They saw a great crowd around them and some scribes arguing with them. When the whole crowd saw him, Jesus, they were immediately overcome with awe and they ran forward to greet him.

He asked them, what are you arguing about with them? Someone from the crowd answered him, teacher, I brought you my son. He has a spirit that makes him unable to speak and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid.

And I asked your disciples to cast it out but they could not do so. He answered them, you wonder now who the them is. Is he speaking to the one who's describing what is taking place or is he speaking to his disciples?

Maybe both but this is the most severe reprimand that I believe is recorded anywhere in Jesus. You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I suffer you? How much longer must I put up with you?

How do we fathom this irritation, this deep vexation that Jesus expresses because his disciples were unable to cast out a demon spirit that had made this child mute. Bring him to me. And they brought the boy to him.

When the spirit saw him, the spirit that was in the boy saw the Jesus to whom he had been brought. Immediately it convulsed the boy and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth. If there's anything calculated to rob us of our faith, it's a sight like that.

Now we can pray for someone who has a sniffle or some other need where the answer of our faith and prayer doesn't need necessarily now to be seen. But when someone is convulsing and foaming at the mouth and rolling up in a ball at your feet, it's put up or shut up.

It's a faith that has got to be a faith and cannot be deferred for a later time. And maybe that's why these disciples couldn't cut it. This was an ugly, painful demonstration of a supreme reality, the powers of darkness.

And it's calculated to intimidate, to bring fear and to make us feel as if our faith is just ebbing out of us. But every man according to his own faith would begin with a measure of faith, but we're not all in the same place of faith.

As your faith is, so be it unto you. And the issue for us is, are we going from faith to faith? Or are we stalemated, treading water, fixed at a certain plateau, sufficient for our need, sufficient for our church relationship, sufficient for the general configuration of our life?

But is it sufficient for a young man who is convulsed and foaming at the mouth and is desperately the victim of the powers of darkness? Like, for example, the black people today, the Native American, the Indian, the despised minorities of the world who have been chewed up, spit out, victimized, demonized and left for dead.

Who is there that can come in a faith that is not intimidated by the evident power of this darkness and confront it? Bring him to me, Jesus said. The disciples failed. They had succeeded elsewhere. They had succeeded previously.

Remember, they came back with the Golan Report. The demons are subject to us. Maybe it was a honeymoon experience, a first flush of excitement. Maybe it was not a demonic phenomenon in the depth of this kind of depravity and seizure as is being expressed here.

This is ultimate sense. And I'm going to give you my prophetic rendering of what is represented here is more than just a boy convulsing at the mouth who happens to be the object of demonic oppression, but representative of something much deeper, much more significant that affects us in the last days.

Israel as the Son Oppressed by the Powers of Darkness

Jesus asked the father, how long has this been happening to him? And he said, from childhood. It has often cast him into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if you're able to do anything, talk about not recognizing who it is whom he's addressing.

If you're able to do anything, have pity on us and help us. Well, dear saints, this is what triggered my understanding of this text. This has been happening from childhood, from the commencement virtually of this life till this present day, not just to harass, not just to annoy, but to destroy him.

Who is this young man and what does he represent if this event in the life of Jesus is more than an historic moment, but a parable of symbolic meaning for us to be edified in the last days? You know who I would suggest this young man represents?

Israel itself, the nation itself. Since its inception virtually, it has been pursued, harassed by powers of darkness, not content merely to provoke or to harass, but to destroy. And we are coming to the end of the age where this vehement and bitter hatred of that boy, of that nation, of that people is going to be brought to an ultimate boil.

You're going to see it in your generation. It may take stock tomorrow. It's already happening. Anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish hatred already billowing up in places that the Jewish authorities would never have thought to expect it.

University campuses, not just the rednecks, not just the uneducated, not just the poor, not just those who have a social grievance, but at every level, this deepening hatred of the Jew. Why? Well, if you'll stay through every message in these days, you're going to learn why.

Because the Jewish people are chosen and appointed to be at the heart of God's theocratic kingdom. It has everything to do with the rule that must go forth out of their Zion, their Jerusalem, their holy hill.

And the strategy of the enemy, the false rulers of this world. Remember what it says in Psalm 2? Why do the nation's rage and the heathen take thought against the Lord? The rulers, the kings and the rulers take thought against the Lord and against his anointed.

Who are these kings we know, the visible magistrates, who are these rulers? The rulers, the kings and the rulers take thought against God. The kings are the visible magistrates who are presidents and rulers of nations.

But who are these rulers? They are the invisible spirit entities, the fallen angels that comprise the principalities and powers of the air that have been the actual jerkers and manipulators of nations throughout history and right till this day.

Do you know that? Do you really know that? What lies behind the things that are visible? What is really operating in the backwash of the movement of nations and peoples? Genocide, hatred, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Rwanda, genocidal murderous things that where people were hacked to death in their churches.

You can't understand this phenomenon without taking into consideration the powers of the air. They're very real and they're moving toward a last day and they know that their time is short and they're going to be acting with unprecedented fury.

And the greatest fury will be upon the church and the Jewish people themselves. The people of God, whose faith is so nil, so nothing that the father has to say, if you can do anything, if you're able to do anything, have pity on us and help us and save us.

The fact of the matter is, that's exactly what God is going to do. He's going to have pity on us, pity on world Jewry, pity on Israel that's going to be knocked from pillar to post, convulsed and torn like a dog with a rag doll.

He'll have pity and it's his pity and his mercy that will save us. This is so symbolic. This is so rich and multi-meaning. And so I'm bringing you an interpretation from the breadth of understanding that this pleased the Lord to invest in me.

It has often cast him into the fire and the water in order to destroy him. Fire is always a symbol of judgment. Water is a symbol of persecution. It's not out to harass, it's out to destroy. And it's so powerful that the disciples were rendered none involved.

They could not cast this out. And so Jesus said, all things can be done for him who believes. And immediately the father of the child cried out, I believe help my unbelief. When Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked young clean spirit saying to it, you spirit that keeps this son, this child from speaking and hearing.

Israel's Calling to Speak and Hear for the Nations

How long has that been our Jewish condition? That we have been kept from speaking and hearing to the detriment and to the loss of all mankind. Our silence, our inability to hear from God and speak for God has had a terrible consequence for the nations and for mankind.

You know why? We're called to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world. We have a destiny. It's something that it's pleased God to choose, not because we were the greatest, but because we were the least.

But not to function in the calling of God is to leave mankind without priests. And if there are no priests, how do we know the difference between the profane and the sacred? Because it's the priests who are commissioned to teach the nations, the Gentiles, the difference between the holy and the secular, between the profane and the holy.

Our not speaking and our not hearing has been at an enormous cost for all mankind. And that's why Paul says in Romans, what shall the return be but life from the dead? What shall it mean for this son who from the conception of his life from his infancy was a victim of demonic powers and stifled in his call?

What will it be when he should be delivered and raised up and sent out? Something like Lazarus coming out of the tomb. Loose him and let him go. This is not just the deliverance of a single life. This is the deliverance of a people, a nation in the last days by a people who can do what the disciples fail to do, who are able to deliver the son by having the same quality of faith and authority as Jesus himself.

Time out. That's awesome. And because we don't know it and don't know what our own destiny is with regard to them and how supreme and ultimate our call is, we are therefore living beneath it. I hope, I gave a message in Nashville, Tennessee.

What a blockbuster. The Lord gave it to me 3 .30 that morning. I had three pages. You know, I was gonna shut the light and then one more thought came to me. In fact, I had shut the light. I needed my sleep desperately.

And the thought came, well, I'll remember that when I get up. I thought, no, you better turn the light on and write this down while you're, and I turned the light on and that light remained on for an hour or more as the Lord gave me three pages that you might be hearing in these very days of the significance of the issue of the Jew for the church, for the church's own sake, what is represented for us in the mandate to which we are called with regard to them, not because we have chosen them, but because God has.

And he has appointed us as a church to minister to them in the last days that they might receive the pity and the mercy and the deliverance of God. In the same way that Jesus expressed it here, the body of Christ must express it then and not be intimidated by the powers of darkness where the faith you have goes out of you and you are unable to set the captive free.

If you can set this captive free saints, there's no captive after that that will in any way hinder you. That's why it's to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Well, all things are possible to them that believe, but this is a believing beyond credo.

This is a believing beyond doctrinal affirmation. This, our faith is more than the sum of our correct doctrine. This is a believing of an ultimate kind in the reality of God and the power of God, despite every appearance to the contrary.

It's one thing to believe when we're safe, sound, healthy, well-fed, comfortable in the congregation of the saints, but to believe when everything is opposed to faith, when the enemy seems to be in riding high and having all the cards and calling all the shots and you have never felt more feeble, more weakened, more inept, to believe then is real believing.

And except that that faith is obtained on the mount, you're not gonna have it in the valley. Because when the disciples said later, how come we couldn't cast him out? He said, because this kind, this ultimate kind is not your everyday demon.

This is the ultimate expression of the powers of darkness in their severest and mightiest form calculated to destroy from the face of the earth this son and this people whom he represents. This kind is not gonna come out with, I believe in the name of Jesus, like rubbing a genie lamp, I hope, I hope it works.

Charismatic faith will not suffice at that time. This kind cometh not out, but by prayer and fasting. I have never heard anyone but myself seek to understand what that means. And I hope to communicate that tonight in a way that will change your life and make you to be a disciple who will not fail and not disappoint in that ultimate last day when we shall be ultimately confronted.

So Jesus commanded the spirit that keeps this boy, this son, this nation from speaking and hearing Israel's long spiritual blindness, a judgment that gave the enemy a certain right and authority to perform this, but it's not going to be Israel's final condition if their return shall be life from the dead.

I command you come out of him and never enter him again. I've taken my yellow marking pen and I mark never again. The Jewish community is very fond of using that expression when it talks about the Holocaust, the concentration camps, the death camps, never again.

Well, you hotshots, you better tighten your safety belt. There will be an again because it's not in your power to say never again, only in his power. But I want to draw your attention to that. This deliverance is an ultimate deliverance of an ultimate kind and an ultimate authority and an ultimate power.

So ultimate a deliverance, it shall never be required again. Our deliverances, well, six months later, two months later, a year later, we're praying the same thing, asking for the same thing, working through the same problems again and again and again.

This deliverance of Jesus, he saves to the uttermost all who come unto God through him. This is total, it's permanent, and it's enduring. This son representing this nation shall never again after this last day's deliverance affected by you, come again under the bondage and constraints and demonic power of darkness.

This is a final deliverance. And finality always requires something ultimate. Am I getting too fancy? This is basic training for Sunday. Hallelujah, never again enter him. You're finished. This is the once and for all.

You'll never again be able to wreak your filthy design of devastation and death on this son. And there's no question about that. When Jesus said, come out of him and never enter him again, that was it.

That was the supreme authority of very God. And the power, therefore, after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out and the boy was like a corpse so that most of them said, he's dead. This is beginning to take on the appearance of not so much the authority in God to affect the deliverance, but to raise someone from the dead because Israel is moving not just into a final paroxysm of demonic possession of foaming at the mouth, so to speak, but they're moving toward a course in which that nation is going to be, for all effects and purposes, as good as dead.

You see, Jesus said, come out of him, but these powers of darkness are so reluctant, they're so full of spite and mischief and malevolence that though they're under the command to come out, they're gonna come out and take everything that they can take with them on the way out.

And the Lord allowed that. He could have said, come out instantly and don't touch him one centimeter more. No, he allowed, he knew the mind of the filthy powers of darkness, that they're malicious and when they get that rag doll in their teeth like a dog, a mad dog, they'll just wave that thing until the stuffings come out.

It left that boy as good as dead. And in doing so, served the ultimate purposes of God, because now what was required is not just a deliverance, but of being raised up unto resurrection. Talk about the sovereignty of God, the wisdom of God, the purposes of God, that can even employ the devilish malevolence of hell to serve his ultimate purposes.

When you hear this tape, mark how many times I've used the word ultimate. You know what's wrong with us as Christians? We're not living in an ultimate way. We don't understand God ultimately. We're not serving with ultimacy.

We're kind of, you know, get by, makeshift, okay, but we've missed the genius of the faith that is ultimate, transcendent, transfiguring, glorious. And you know what? It's the crisis of this boy that's going to compel us to come on that ground.

It's going to compel us to understand what Jesus meant by this kind cometh not up, but by fasting and prayer, because it's to this kind that we, as the Church of Jesus Christ, are called to deliver and to raise victims from the dead, this kind.

Fasting as Self-Denial Against the World's Wisdom

So what is this kind of prayer and fasting? Well, we know what fasting is. It's self-denial, like, we're not boasting in this. My brother and I have not tasted a crumb of anything today. We wanted to begin these days of meeting with a fast.

No big deal, you're not going to die from it, although you may feel that you're going to die. Headache and ugh, I'm constitutionally not able, and I have a serious physical problem. There's very little fasting, but I tell you, saints, what little I know about it, the thing that makes it so powerful is that it contradicts and confounds the wisdom by which the world lives its life, namely, self-gratification.

Have an extra hamburger. We pass the White Castle hamburgers, a whole sack of 10 for how much, $3 .30? Man, let's eat it up. I've been around 70 years, saints, and I've never seen anything like what is prevailing today in consumerism, in inducements to have, to eat, to enjoy, to wallow, to indulge.

It's a self-gratifying age, and it has been sanctified and sanctioned and endorsed, even by the church. Obesity is a principal problem in the United States of America. By teenagers, let alone adults, one out of every three is grossly overweight.

One brother said, it's got nothing to do with my spirituality. I said, oh yeah, it has everything to do. I'm concerned myself, how easy it is for my gut to hang out, and I'm a preacher. How can I allow my physical profile to contradict what I'm about in God?

We should be statements of self-discipline, not statements of self-gratification. This kind comes not out if you're going to give yourself to indulgence and to enjoy not the things that are sinful or even necessarily carnal.

They might be legitimate, but you deny yourself the legitimate thing because you know that something is going up into the air, the principalities and powers of the air who despise this act of self-sacrifice because it is so contrary to their own ethos, E-T-H-O-S, to their own value system, which is have, rape, loot, enjoy, violence, death, lust.

Self-denial is the antithesis of the wisdom of the powers of this present world. And prayer, this kind comes not out, but by fasting a prayer. Well, Lord, I pray, but I don't have the authority to confront these.

Well, that's because your prayer, however respectful and nice and well-meaning, is fixed at the level of petition only. Dun, da-dun, dum. What do you mean by that, Art? I don't know of any other kind of prayer.

Isn't that when we ask the Lord that we need this, we need that, and Lord, how about this and that? Hey, I'm not knocking that. There's a place for that, but it's not the ultimate place of prayer. You say if petition is not the ultimate place of prayer, what is?

Prayer as Communion With God

If it's not prayer of petition, then what kind of prayer? It's the prayer of communion that is beyond petition where you stop asking and just simply be in the presence of him into whose communion you have come on the mount.

What was for them the mount of transfiguration and a going up, because have you ever known of a mountain that has an elevator or a conveyor belt? A going up is always against the flesh. It's always in opposition to that which is easy and convenient.

But there's something there that is only obtained by the willingness to go up. But the mountain for us is not the mountain of a physical kind. It's the mountain of the prayer chamber, the quiet place, the early morning time in God's presence.

It's a going down on your knees in your BVDs with cold drafts coming up the floor and everything in your body crying out, you fool, what are you doing there? You ought to be back in bed with your cozy wife and enjoying those legitimate things that are rightly yours.

To deny yourself to go down, to seek the Lord in the early morning time, don't you need your sleep? How many of us seek him? And you know what, saints, when you go beyond your petition, I'm seeking the Lord every day like this.

Would to God I had known about this 35 years ago when I became a believer. It's only the last 10, 12 years that the Lord has opened my understanding and made this not just a delight, but the commencement of my day in God.

Something happens when you're finished with your petitions and you still yet linger and remain in the presence of the Most High. Something is communicated if you are in the holiest place of all and not in a closet in Savannah, Georgia or downstairs or behind a staircase or in the living room.

That's where you are physically, but where are you actually and in fact? Because that's what spiritual means. Spiritual is not the icing on the cake, it's the cake. It's not a subterfuge, it's not an appearance, it's not a little gilding thing.

It's the reality. The reality is that you're not in fact in a room. That's only the physical nexus. The real truth and the reality is you're in the holiest place of all before the Shekinah glory of God who waits above the mercy seat and between the wings of the cherubim and there he said, I will meet with you.

But how many of us are meeting with him? Just let me read you from one of my devotional books. I read Oswald Chambers, My Utmost Worst Highest. How many people know that one? How many people are reading that one every day?

You don't want to miss a day. This man was a gift to the church. His insights, I've never seen such a depth of understanding as Oswald Chambers and there's a selection every day. And it's remarkable how often that selection of the day corresponds to the psalm that I'm reading for the day.

So I read the psalms, like what is today's the second of December? Well for me, it's the 132nd psalm because I'm like four months into the psalms. Tomorrow will be the 133rd psalm on the third day of December and in five months I've gone through all the psalms.

But if I say gone through, that is a caricature. It's not like religious obligation you read so many chapters, you've gone through. It's investing yourself. It's dwelling upon every word and turn of phrase.

What does the psalmist mean when he describes God as his refuge and his high tower and he runs into the name of the Lord? Is that hocus pocus? Is that just a play on words? Is that a kind of a biblical rhetoric or is it meaning something of an actual kind that I myself have not yet discovered and need to?

The psalms is God's end time provision for the saints because the psalmists had an exquisite knowledge of God, a relationship with God and intimacy. They had been brought through the grid. They had suffered.

They were unjustly persecuted. How long, Lord, is the frequent cry of the psalmist? How long am I gonna suffer this? How come that the wicked are prospering and your servant who seeks to follow you and faithfully I'm suffering this, that and the other, how come, why?